In the Lion's Mouth Read online

  Donovan pursed his lips. “Is deep affection then among Their qualities?”

  “Epri is a loyalist,” one of the magpies suggested.

  “Where the Names are concerned,” said Donovan, “loyalty runs but one direction.”

  “Then Epri’s salvation,” Oschous concluded, “was the means, and not the end. The Name did not intervene to save Epri, but saved Epri to…?”

  “… to intervene,” said Donovan. “What was actually accomplished by the deed?”

  “I was almost killed,” said Manlius. “If not for Ravn’s timely deed…” He raised a pine-liquor to his savior and drank the implied toast.

  But Oschous shook his head. “Had your death been intended, the meal before you would now languish unenjoyed. What Name having taken pains to place a sniper would take no pains to ensure that sniper’s success?”

  “Some neutrals were outraged by the foul,” Ravn suggested, “and have joined the rebellion. Some honorable loyalists may have drifted toward neutrality.”

  But again, the Fox dismissed the idea. “Beyond those actually present, few will believe Epri’s fell deed. Propaganda, they’ll call it. Faith overcomes all rumors of fact.”

  “So,” said Donovan, “what is left but the one sure, concrete result of the act? Your war will go on. There was a danger of peace breaking out; and your Name’s intervention—the very manner of that intervention—ensured that it would not.”

  “Yes,” said Manlius, tasting the possibility. “Prime had pledged to bring the rest of the Lion’s Mouth over to the rebellion once I had defeated Epri. The Names could not risk that.”

  “Then why not simply ensure your death?” Oschous asked. “Dawshoo was pledged to end the rebellion if you lost.” His brow furrowed at that and for a moment he resembled wolf more than fox. “Instead, matters muddle as before.”

  “Those have always liked to ‘stir the pot,’” Donovan said. “Perhaps your twenty-year war amuses them.”

  “Ngok!” cried Manlius as a magpie set a platter on the table directly before him. “What are these slops, Oschous Dee!”

  “Hmm? Oh, a bit of thaklam rasam,” the Fox told him. “It’s a tomato soup I’m fond of. Those are hoddawgs with zorgrot. And that plate is banana-flower curry.”

  Manlius grunted. “Smells Terran to me. Who knew bananas had flowers!” He indicated to his chief magpie that he should dish out the more familiar foods: a stew of snakes, snails, chicken feet, and duck tongues in a ginger sauce, and small plates of taro puffs in spiderweb pastry.

  “Oh, the Terrans may be venal and untrustworthy,” Oschous said, “but that doesn’t mean they can’t cook.” He ladled out a bowl of the rasam and, with a cautionary frown, passed it across the table to Donovan, who sniffed it.

  “Ha!” said Manlius. “Smell bothers you, too? Don’t blame you.”

  The Pedant stirred the scarred man’s memories. What is it, Silky? I’m no good at sensory memories, but there’s something familiar in the stink.

  The coriander! the Silky Voice exclaimed.

  “Grows no place else but Terra,” the Fudir muttered.

  I knew it was familiar. But it grows also atop the Oorah Mesa on Enjrun.

  But, the Sleuth added, Oschous has no access to Enjrun. So unless it grows on other Confederal worlds …

  “The spice in this soup came from Terra herself.” He sniffed again the aroma, this time more deeply, trying to imagine fields of waving coriander bushes, although he was none too sure if coriander grew on bushes. It was a spice that had grown legendary by its absence among the Terrans of the Diaspora.

  warned Inner Child.

  “Yes,” agreed Donovan. “But what?”

  This inner conversation, punctuated by a few comments sotto voce, took no more than moments; but moments were enough to draw Manlius’s attention.

  The wounded man regarded Donovan with a profound uncertainty, then cocked his head at Oschous. “So this is the great Geshler Padaborn. His name in the struggle is worth a hundred ordinary shenmats. It will rally a great many waverers to our cause. Or it was supposed to.” He again glanced doubtfully at Donovan, plucked a “phoenix talon” from the stew and sucked the meat off it.

  “You know,” he told the table, “I never made it to that final battle. My section got orders to join the forces besieging Padaborn, but the orders came too late, and there were delays assembling … Foot-dragging by our section-leader, some said. Perhaps he favored Padaborn. We never knew, and he disappeared afterward. If we all had had that Circuit thing the Peripherals have nowadays, the word would’ve come in time and … I don’t know. Back then, I thought Padaborn was a black traitor and a disgrace to the Lion’s Mouth. Now … I don’t know. Maybe he was just ‘ahead of the curve.’” He turned once more to Donovan. “If my brothers and I had been there, you’d’ve never escaped.”

  Donovan shrugged. “I don’t even know if I was there.”

  Manlius sat back in his chair and sucked on his teeth. “I was going to say, Oschous, that Padaborn’s banner would tip the balance. But that was Padaborn-that-was. This ramshackle wreck…” A cock of his head toward the wreck. “You can hear the broken gears grinding against one another. I fear you’ve brought us damaged goods. Does Ekadrina know he’s back? I’m not sure I’d put this thing up against her. His mind is broken.”

  The scarred man cackled. “Who is Ekadrina?”

  Oschous smiled. “The one who broke it.”

  That elicited a short silence, but one wide enough for the scarred man’s thoughts to fall into it. Inner Child trembled; the Brute growled revenge. The Sleuth pointed out that Ekadrina might know the identity of others like himself. cried the Child.

  But a young man in a chlamys stood beside him. The ancient garment was open up the right side, showing him naked underneath. His face was Donovan’s, but as Donovan had been in the blush of his youth. He placed a hand on the scarred man’s shoulder. For brotherhood, he said.

  Or seemed to. The sundered parts of Donovan’s mind wondered why this young man—and the young girl in the chiton—were the only shards that manifested as visual hallucinations.

  “Let’s not forget,” the Fudir muttered, “that we were going to Dangchao Waypoint. There’s business there that wants doing.”

  “Does he always talk to himself?” Manlius asked his host.

  “Gidula has hopes for him,” said Ravn.

  Manlius turned to her. “It was Gidula, your master, who told Dawshoo this war would take ten years,” he pointed out.

  “And so it has,” said Oschous. “Twice.”

  Manlius blinked, then threw his head back in a great guffaw, and slapped the table with his left hand. “Oh, that’s a good ’un, Oschous. Have you told the Old One?”

  “Gidula cracks his own jests,” Dee Karnatika said. “He doesn’t need mine.”

  “Yeah. I’d watch myself around him, too. He may be old, but who knows the plays better?”

  “It is because he is master of plays,” Ravn pointed out, “that he succeeds in growing old.”

  Manlius grunted. “I take nothing from him. His exploits are legendary. I studied them when I was schooled. Our common goal makes allies of us all.”

  “Well said,” Oschous told him. He raised a flagon of wine and the others at the table did as well. After a moment, Donovan aped them. “The Downfall of the Names!” Oschous said, and the others murmured concurrence; but Donovan noticed variation in the enthusiasms with which they did so. There were a few faint hearts among Manlius’s magpies.

  And neither Oschous nor Ravn regards Manlius highly, the young man said. Surely, you have noticed. It is in their bodies and in their voices. They are “Hail, Comrade” aloud; but it is only necessity that has driven them together. They hold his actions with Kelly to be contemptible.

  “I don’t know,” the Fudir temporized. “I rather like the idea of Shadows in love.”

  While Donov
an was thus distracted, Manlius pressed him on how he would lead them all into the Secret City.

  “I don’t know,” he snapped. “I haven’t said I’d join you!”

  “What would it take to convince you?” Oschous asked mildly.

  “If I get steamed up enough!”

  Manlius frowned. “‘Steamed up’…?”

  “A Terran expression,” Donovan told him.

  “That’s not important,” Oschous said. “Gesh is simply unsure that in his present state he can be of any use to us.”

  That was not precisely the source of Donovan’s reservations, but it would do for use among his present companions. Getting tangled in the secret war among the Confederal Shadows was a ticket to the knacker’s block, in his opinion.

  Privately, he wondered more whether the others would be of any use to him, either in staying alive or in gaining home. It was a tribute to their skills that the rebellion had lasted twenty years, for based on what he had seen so far, he would not have given them twenty weeks. They were an unlikely band of brothers. Manlius had fallen into rebellion because he had fallen into love, and while that might ring brightly in song, it dulled on closer inspection. A man driven by desire might be driven in whichever direction his member pointed. Ravn, on the other hand, showed genuine distress over the state to which the Lion’s Mouth had fallen, but remained a reluctant rebel obedient to Gidula’s orders. Remove Gidula from the equation and in which direction would she turn? And Oschous and Manlius both harbored doubts over Gidula on account of his age. He had not gotten a “read” on Dawshoo yet, but noted that he had been conspicuously absent from the conversation of his fellows.

  Inner Child shivered. He was alone, and deep within the Confederation, without friends and uncertain of his allies, and every day farther from his daughter and Bridget ban.

  * * *

  After dinner, Oschous dismissed his staff, sending two magpies to relieve the watch, granting the others liberty. Manlius returned to the autoclinic for another healing session and his own magpies went with him or back to this own ship, Fell Swoop. Ravn Olafsdottr lingered, but Oschous waited her out and, after an uneasy glance at her charge, she too departed.

  The scarred man cackled across the dinner table. “Alone at last.” And he essayed a Terran expression. “The bull’s in your court, Oschous Dee. Start waving your cape.”

  If the idiom confused Karnatika, he gave no sign of it. Instead his lips quirked in a brief and frosty smile, and he retrieved a bottle of spirits from the sideboard. “My people will want to clear the dishes,” he said, “and I do hate getting in their way. You’ll be coming to my room directly. There’s something I want to show you. But first, a question. Neither appeals to revenge nor appeals to vanity have moved you to join us.”

  Inner Child came alert.

  Donovan chose his words with care. “Those who wiped my memory and broke my mind did a very professional job. Without memory, vengeance is a theory; without memory, past glories are tales told in books. Neither the great deeds you claim I wrought, nor the tortures I once suffered live within me. It is like a numbed tooth. There is nothing there.” He accepted a glass of the liqueur, waited until Oschous had poured and sipped from the same bottle, then tasted the drink and found it to smack of apples. “But Oschous Dee … that I am disinclined to join this feckless rebellion does not mark a lack of sympathy. I would disclose the secret way if I could remember it, even if I don’t crawl down there with you myself. But in practice, pride and glory really mean death and gore.”

  Oschous finished his drink in a swift toss. But he did not set his glass down, turning it instead in his hand. “You object to death and gore?”

  “Well, to death and gore and losing. Winning makes it easier to turn over the memorial glass.”

  “Death may be preferable betimes to life itself,” Oschous said, looking off a little to the side.

  “I’ll believe that when I hear it from someone with firsthand experience of both.”

  “A life spent cringing on your knees is no life at all.”

  “Finely spoken, Oschous Dee. But how long did you serve the Names before you finally stood upright?”

  The Shadow rose from the table. “Bring your glass.” He had his own and the bottle in his hands. “Don’t be too harsh on us, Gesh,” he said as they proceeded down the hallway toward his suite. “Before he would risk all, a man must see some small hope of success. The revolution comes when the iron grip has just relaxed. When it is tightly held, none dare.”

  “There’s a lesson in that…”

  “Know when to strike?”

  “No. Never relax your grip.”

  Oschous glanced over his shoulder. “Windhook Keopisenichok attacked and burned a district governor’s station on Basilònway fifty standard years ago. It was one of those small local rebellions that people sing about in pubs and wine-stoops when the nights grow long and the fire turns to embers and they don’t know too many of the details. Bold Windhook drew a line and cried ‘Nay more!’ It really is a rousing song, but the line was drawn less from a love of justice than in the hope of liquidating his debts. Madness and desperation drove him. The ashes of the station were still hot when the boots leveled the entire township. Most of the townies hadn’t been in on it. In fact, most of them had opposed Windhook, called him a lunatic. But it didn’t matter. They all died. And Windhook wasn’t even in the township at the time. It’s funny. The over-governor could imagine arson and rebellion, but he could not imagine that a man might leave his licensed township.”

  “I’m sure the townies found it hilarious. Is there a point to the story?”

  “Only this: Many a heart may yearn for justice, or retribution, or simple relief, but still play the obedient servant because the price of failure is too great. A man might put up with much if the alternative is putting up with worse. That’s the secret of government, my friend: To know how far into the mud you can grind people before they find rebellion worth the play. The over-governor and his cronies misjudged this, and the Names sent their Shadows to discipline them. What fool torments the cow he means to milk? It only sours the cream. Here we are.”

  They had arrived at a portal at the end of a long corridor. Oschous spoke some private words to the doorway, and it slid open to admit them to his quarters. This proved to be a set of rooms sparely done and set at three-quarters standard gravity. Objets d’art stood about the main room on pedestals and in niches, lit to best effect by concealed lamps. Most were relics of Confederal worlds, but the Pedant recognized some pieces originating in the Periphery: a steinwurf dating from the Dark Age on Friesing’s World; an ancient circuit board, burnt and smashed, under a glassine bell jar; a transparent hand made of thin cellulose wrappings and raised in a defiant gesture. By the Die Bold sculptress Boosie ban Petra, the Pedant said. Part of her series Manual Labor.

  “And worth a decorous ducat, that,” the Fudir added.

  Oschous heard and cocked his head at the circuit board. “That, too. It’s Valencian work. Came from the wreck of the Grand Fleet in the Second Valency-Ramage War. It was touched by greatness.”

  Donovan said nothing. If greatness had lain anywhere, it had lain with the Ramagers, who had destroyed the fleet. But perhaps that was what Oschous had meant by “touched” by greatness.

  Souvenirs, the Sleuth decided. A memento of each world where he has performed feats.

  But not mementoes of the feats themselves, the Silky Voice added. Interesting.

  The floor was laid of hardwood and tile and dressed in carpets woven into intricate geometric patterns. Reading chairs with screens, game tables with projection stages, workstations with racks of bubbles and sticks. The arrangement seemed at first haphazard, the room somehow both too open and too cluttered. But on closer inspection, the furnishings proved less the obstacle course they seemed. Pathways were always clear and straight; frequently used objects, always within arm’s reach.

  Donovan considered what
this said about the man whose unwilling guest he was. A man subtle and disciplined. A careful man.

  “Very nice,” he murmured, since some comment seemed expected of him.

  “It pleases,” the Shadow remarked.

  “Whatever happened to him?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Windhook Keopisenichok. He was out of town when the boots retaliated.”

  “Oh. He’d fled into the Fetch-a-bun Hills right after burning the governor’s station. He was a madman, but not so mad as to stick around. The townies would’ve lynched him if nothing else, poor devils. They knew the penalty for illegal rebellion. He’d recruited a few likeminded folk—the desperate and feckless—and remained at large for the next five years, mostly raiding and robbing from the very people he was supposedly bent on liberating.”

  “If you are trying to recruit me with inspirational tales,” Donovan said, “I’d suggest you build a better repertoire. ‘Illegal rebellion…’ Is there another sort?”

  Oschous nodded. “Surely. Bring your glass with you.” He led him to the rear of the suite. “Windhook’s mistake,” he said as Donovan followed, “was that he struck too low and too openly from too narrow a base. A district governor? A station house? Pfaugh! What did he imagine he would accomplish by smashing a giant’s little toe?”

  “And what was Geshler’s mistake?”

  Oschous glanced over his shoulder. “Pretty much the same, though he did strike higher. He was too impatient. He should’ve worked sub rosa, built a wider network of supporters; and he should not have struck openly. Seizing the public buildings in the capital made him a sitting duck.”

  “Better a duck on the wing? But it might be that like the sacral kings of old, he hoped the gesture would inspire others to action.”

  “A foolish hope.”

  “Was it? Nearly half the Lion’s Mouth have now risen up. Perhaps Padaborn was more successful than you credit. Not every seed germinates overnight.”

  They had stopped before a blank wall and, because Donovan did not suppose this a particularly final destination, he was not surprised when Oschous spoke and a secret door opened on a small chamber paneled in sweetwood.