On the Razor's Edge

by Michael Flynn

  “I was too late for that part. You think they were Names.”

  “Oschous wouldn’t speak of them directly. That’s a common behavior pattern over here.”

  “Some rebel. And there were a total of … How many? Four?”

  “I counted four. Two on the rooftop: a woman of surpassing beauty and, after Domino Tight had wounded her, a man enough alike to be her brother. A second man appeared in the old truck apron—he was a walking arsenal—and took out quite a few of our fighters just as we were on the verge of victory. Then, another woman—her beauty was more the hard-as-nails kind—appeared with Domino Tight and Ravn Olafsdottr and helped them take out the rambo.”

  “Which means, if they were Names, the Names are fighting on both sides. Which means the Revolution has sparked a civil war among the rulers themselves.”

  “It’s not unusual,” Donovan said, “to find revolutionaries among the rulers. Those who think they can surf the waves of change.”

  Gwillgi wrinkled his brow. “Surf?”

  “Never mind. There’s a second interpretation of events.”

  “No fact explains itself,” Gwillgi agreed. “It can always be seen from other angles. I think I see where you’re heading.”

  “The whole Revolution is a sham. The Names have not taken sides in the rebellion. The Names were already at each other’s throats—and the Revolution is something they have conjured up to carry on their fight by proxy.”

  Gwillgi showed his teeth again. “I don’t know which would be more discomfited by that, the loyalists or the rebels. Do you think they know?”

  Donovan shook his head. “I think Gidula suspects. That may be why he’s chosen his own road. I can’t answer for the loyalists.”

  “And you don’t know how Domino Tight was resurrected.”

  “I didn’t even know he was dead. When the mums ambushed the lyre, they nearly wiped out his cadre. The survivors who trickled into the warehouse knew only that they had lost contact with their master and his staff. We feared the worst, but when he showed up, we figured he had eluded the trap.”

  Gwillgi shook his head. “I was there. I saw him. I even waved the knife for him.” He blinked, then explained. “‘Wave the knife’ is what we say in Public Vorhayn, Friesing’s World, when we ritually dispatch companions to accompany the dead.”

  “Umm.”

  “Don’t worry, Donovan. Only for murders. To accompany their victims.”

  “I never had a chance to talk with Domino Tight,” Donovan said. “He teamed up with Ravn Olafsdottr and the two of them attacked Ekadrina Sèanmazy together. That was … when I joined the fight.”

  The eyes of Gwillgi narrowed and his brow grew thoughtful. “When Olafsdottr was killed.”

  “She wasn’t killed. I found that out later. Gidula had her cared for, then dropped her off on Delpaff. If you can track her down…”

  Gwillgi rose. “It’s not good to stay too long in one place. You know what you have to do, right?”

  Donovan was not certain he “had” to do anything, let alone the bidding of this spring-loaded ball of razor wire. “I have an idea.”

  “You’ll have to let Gidula find you.”

  Donovan shrugged. “How do I get in touch with you?”

  “You don’t. I get in touch with you. But don’t expect it too soon or too often. I’ve been getting calling cards—drone packets entering systems where I’ve been—but not from anyone I’ve entrusted with my call-code. I don’t know that my network’s been compromised, but I won’t risk it by answering. Just in case, I’ve shifted my pattern.” He extended a hand, which Donovan found to be rough and calloused. “So think about what you’ve told me, and where you’ve used pronouns like ‘we,’ ‘us,’ and ‘our.’ And make sure you’re on the right side.”

  “I told you. I’m on my side; and that’s always the right side.”

  Gwillgi smiled. “I like you, Donovan. I don’t like many people, but I like you. That would make it particularly hard if I have to kill you. Betrayal by someone I like is especially galling.”

  IX. NEVER DO WHAT YOU SAID YOU’D DO

  What ploys, o harper, do the Fates dispose

  Our timely plans so to disconcert,

  Planting their confusions and perplexities

  To wriggle wormlike through our minds?

  Be we the authors of our own acts?

  Belike but froth upon great Ocean’s foam,

  Teased by winds while darker currents

  Down below direct our course.

  Our destination’s purposed by the breeze

  Howe’er we set our sails. Fair dawning brings

  What e’er the Fates do weave, until Fate cuts the strings.

  That evening, as the sun-lamps dimmed in Sector Seventeen, Ravn escorted Méarana to a nearby restaurant called, in that cozy Confederal fashion, Restaurant No 17-04. It was also known, unofficially, as Demvrouq’s Place. That it was called this, and called this unofficially, was a flower blossoming through the duroplast of Confederal culture.

  It stood a short distance across the concourse from the hotel, but to gain its entrance meant breasting the madding, elsewhere-bent transient streams. The shuttle-fresh starward bound clashed, mixed, and eddied with inbounders intent on the capital. Gray suits, saffron turbans, embroidered gowns, gold and red and black, willowy women, head-scarfed men, skipping children—that last the only spot of humanity not yet humbled and broken.

  The harper scanned the faces—masked, veiled, open, wimpled—as she and Ravn swam through them cross-current, thinking she might notice the woman Gwen once more. With rather less anticipation, her eyes also sought out shadows and patches of darkness left by the boulevard-lamps, waiting for one that might come to life and speak.

  She thought now that the sweet smell she had perceived in the hotel room had been a gas vented into the air system. She herself knew two ways to accomplish this, which her mother in a fit of whimsy had once taught her. But knowing how the hallucination might have been induced gave her no desire to experience a second time the voice that spoke in the night.

  * * *

  “What are you looking for?” Ravn asked her when once they had installed themselves in the restaurant.

  “Oh, I like to study faces. Sometimes I see a song in them.”

  The Shadow leaned across the table. “Well, stop doing it. No one stares directly at another person here, unless they have superior rank. Eyes downcast, please. Draw no attention to self.”

  Ordinary citizens here were called “the sheep,” Méarana remembered. But she had also seen in covert glances that sheep might harbor bitter resentments. “I saw another Shadow the other day,” she commented while inspecting the menu, “the first day we were here.”

  “What!” Ravn seized the harper’s wrist and the menu fell to the floor. “Who? Why did you say nothing!”

  Méarana tried to pull back, failed. “How would I know who? She was tall, dark skinned—darker than I, but not quite so dark as you—and she carried a thick staff.”

  “A staff. What mon did she wear?”

  “Mon?”

  “Her logo, her sign. What was it?”

  “Umm … Oh! The yin-yang. The taiji.”

  Ravn hissed. “Ekadrina Sèanmazy! Did she notice you?”

  “Why would she notice me? She wouldn’t…” Then, under Ravn’s insistent gaze, “No. She didn’t even turn in my direction.”

  Ravn shook her head. “That is what you must expect should Ekadrina notice you. She knows what Bridget ban looks like, and you resemble your mother passing well.”

  “She was heading toward the Dao Chetty drop-ports. Probably returning to the Lion’s Mouth from some mission.”

  “I’m sure she was. How many magpies accompanied her?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t count them.” But Ravn squeezed her wrist tighter, and Méarana closed her eyes and tried to conjure the scene in her mind. “One. Two … Seven. I think.”

  Ravn released her. “She
should have had eight.”

  “Maybe I just didn’t notice. Or she lost one on her mission, or…”

  “Or she left one here to watch us. Kumbe! I thought I sensed a nearby presence.”

  Méarana almost said, Don’t worry; it’s only a pair of Hounds. But to a Shadow that would hardly be a comfort. “I’m sure she didn’t notice me, let alone mistake me for my mother, or she would have…” She fell silent as she considered all the things a Shadow “would have” done if she thought a Hound sat alone on a hotel patio.

  “An such a wan sees me wi’ ye—”

  Ravn’s finger touched Méarana’s lips. “Hoosh, hoosh, my sweet. Coome with me to the women’s comfort station…” They rose from the table and wound calmly through the potted shrubbery to the back of the restaurant. “Let no dialect of Gaelactic twist your tongue,” Ravn cautioned her. “Search earwig. Become one with it. Empty mind and let Confederal dialect fill it, lest moment of stress betray you. Try dialects of Heller Connat. There is one that resembles Gaelactic—no, out side door—but your kind, the golden-skinned gingers, are found on … on Miniforster, Bhaitry, and Wing Bahlo, not on Heller Connat.” She looked both ways up the service corridor, then allowed Méarana to follow. “Never do,” she whispered, “what you say you will do when your speech may be overheard.”

  “But Ravn,” the harper said in realistic tones. “The likelihood that a detached magpie has been watching us and overheard—”

  “Is not zero, and few are the Shadows who have died from an excess of caution.” Ravn reached into her shoulder pouch and pulled out something about the size and shape of a dinner napkin. This she pounded several times with her fist and then pressed against her face. It hissed, and steam rose.

  “Ravn!” Méarana exclaimed—but in a whisper.

  Ravn gasped and pulled the towel from her face, and the harper was shocked to see the Shadow’s features sagging like a wax candle. Quick massages raised cheekbones, shortened nose, shaped ears. A close examination in a pocket mirror led to some last-moment touch-ups before her face had once more hardened.

  “Ayiyi,” she said in a voice Méarana had never heard her use before, “dat hoits like da beaches.” She pulled a knife from her sleeve and said to the harper, “Yer mop’s too long.” A few swipes of the blade sufficed to correct it. “Ah, I missed my vocation, me. Shoulda been a beautician.” Then she reached once more into her pouch and from a tube squeezed a dollop of gel, which she rubbed vigorously between her palms. She worked it first into her own bright yellow hair, turning it a dull brown, then into Méarana’s now-shortened red hair, turning it dark auburn.

  “Now the piece of resistance. A few fasteners pulled loose an’ refastened carelessly. A rumplin’ o’ da clothin’. Wait—while I smear yer lip dye.” Before the harper could react, Ravn took Méarana’s face in her two hands and kissed her hard on the lips. “Dere,” she said, stepping back with satisfaction, “jus’ two friends, is all, who stepped up a service corridor fer a quickie.”

  Ravn put her arm around Méarana’s waist and led her out to the plaza. Ravn became another person. She slouched, her eyes searched the walkway, she made way for anyone more colorfully dressed. Méarana perforce did likewise.

  The harper thought their dishevelment would attract everyone’s attention, but only a few heads turned. A business traveler grinned at them. Beneath one of the boulevard-lamps, a black-clad night-walker in a girdle-skirt and lacquered hair that fit her head like a helmet scowled as if at potential competition. A short man stirring his drink idly at a café table barely glanced at them. Méarana wanted to see whether anyone was watching the restaurant, but Ravn, by body pressure, steered her away onto Corridor 1716-M-2, which led to the Sixteenth Sector.

  “I don’t know,” Méarana said when they were out of the public square and in a narrow walkway lined with anonymous doors. “This may be a lot of trouble for nothing.” She pulled away from the Shadow. “How did you do that with your face?” She studied her companion’s features closely. “It wouldn’t long fool those who know you.”

  The Ravn took quick glances over her shoulder. “Don’t hafta. Jus’ enough to get through a tight spot. Wouldn’ta fooled Ekadrina herself for a Bhaitry minute. Kumbe, does my face hurt! Subcutaneous implants,” she added in a more normal tone. “The hot pad softens them up so I can mold them, but there’s a limit to how far I can push and pinch, and after a while it reverts to normal.”

  An escalator led to the Upper Deck, Level Four, and they backtracked through Seventeen Upper to Sector Eighteen, where they found a seedy residence hotel called Mamma Kitten’s. “Mamma,” as it developed, was a bewhiskered man who massed at least twenty-one accelerated stones, and his name really was Kitten. He ran everything by word and hand and nothing of his crossed the threshold of Tungshen’s information net. His was, in a sense, a hole in the habitat.

  Ravn departed for a time, returning later with some fresh clothing and other items that she had secured from an autovendor.

  “You leavin’ anythin’ at th’ Kings?” she asked.

  Méarana’s harp was aboard Sèan Beta. “No.”

  “Good, ’cause I ain’t goin’ back there.”

  What Méarana very much feared she had left behind—along with Sèanmazy’s hypothetical magpie—were Gwen and the voice that spoke in the night. For a moment, Méarana wondered if Ravn’s maneuver had been intended to throw the two Hounds off the scent. But Ravn couldn’t know about them. She was not that clever. Was she?

  * * *

  Ravn Olafsdottr had known when she had thrown in with the Revolution-within-the-Revolution that she must forswear any vestige of heartfelt comradeship. Every hand might at some time be raised against her, and she could count upon no friends among her friends, and but a handful among her enemies. She had entered the Abattoir in her youth, a gift to the Lion’s Mouth from parents forever unknown. Her entire life, she had done the Mouth’s bidding, silencing those whose silence was required, aware always of the knife at her back if she failed, until one day she had graduated to second and held the knife herself. She had grown to respect the skill and the craft with which her colleagues maintained the order of the Confederation, but never once did she question the order they maintained. The means were noble, and the means justified the ends.

  And now her colleagues stood arrayed against one another for reasons she could barely credit, with herself and too few others standing between them. She could conjure many motives for bringing the Names down, and as many for holding them up. Because Those had laid too heavy a hand upon the sheep. Because Those had saved the Confederation from the chaos that plagued the Periphery. She could understand men who fought for loyalty, for tradition, for justice, or even for raw ambition. But to fight for Kelly Stapellaufer?

  The quarrel between Epri Gunjinshow and Manlius Metatxis for the charms of their colleague had provided the trigger. Ekadrina had sided with Epri and Dawshoo with Manlius, and everything followed from that. But she knew that was only the excuse, not the reason. One may as well fight for Jenkins’s ear as for Kelly’s jade gates. The fault lines had already underlain matters, fracturing the Lion’s Mouth into factions before even the factions themselves were aware of it. The rending awaited only some petty conflict to open up.

  On the evening of the morning on which the Shadow War had been announced, Ravn Olafsdottr and Domino Tight and two others whose names she must never more remember held a dinner of great beauty and state. The wines had been exquisite; the fare more than fair. Their four banners had hung over the banquet hall in comradeship. One of them—she must not think his name—had made a long, tear-driven speech declaring that when all was over this best foursome would one day reconvene. At the end of it, all were weeping—Shadows, magpies, even the servants and the banquet-hall staff—and they had embraced and kissed one another and cast many a vow aloft.

  And the next morning, Domino Tight had gone to join the rebels and the other two to stand by the loyalists. And now, that “best f
oursome” could never meet as more than three, and the tally was not yet final.

  She had attached herself to Gidula because he had seemed the one steady rock in the tumbling chaos. He could reform the excesses of the decadent Names while providing a brake on the wilder ambitions of Oschous Dee.

  But even Dawshoo had known the way was forward, not back into a storybook past.

  To what extent, she sometimes now wondered, had her own loyalties been formed by those storybooks, by tales of brightly caparisoned Shadows flying forth to fight and die for duty and honor? Tales in which noble words were spoken in noble company, and in which even an execution could be conducted with pomp and rite. In days of yore, the scaffold erected on Edakass for Mengwa Chertahanseon had been draped with cloth-of-tears and the condemned had been given a red velvet blindfold (which he had of course refused), and his executioner had been his own particular friend, Paphlaq bin Underwood. There had been mournful songs beforehand and playing of such instruments as befitted Mengwa’s rank, and no one had touched Paphlaq’s right hand afterward for nine and ninety days.

  When Shadow Prime—not the present Prime, but an earlier one—had been honored for his services during the Discontentment of the Oatland Sheep at a banquet hosted by the Dreadful Name himself, he had stubbornly refused to wash his hands in the same basin as the Name. The Abattoir had spoken of nothing else for days, and the senior Shadows debated the propriety of the gesture. No one doubted that the gesture was meaningful and beautiful and edifying, and it had now become the custom at any banquet for the guest of honor to three times refuse the basin of his host. The basins themselves had become progressively more ornate.

  When the current Prime was a young man, he had received the undershift of Lady Ielnor as prelude to a pasdarm held on Old Eighty-two. He had cradled the garment in his arms the night before, even—so it was said—kissing it, and appeared at the pasdarm the next morning wearing only the shift over his shenmat, no dispersal armor. In consequence of this, he had emerged from the fighting bloody and cut up and with a serious wound in his side. Ah, but what a gesture! It won him the prize despite his scoring only third on points. He had sent the bloody shift back to Lady Ielnor, and she had kissed it and worn it over her gown at the banquet afterward. Ravn Olafsdottr knew that it was all smoke, now wafting away in the new-risen wind, if indeed it had ever been anything more. But she resented that loss and wondered if her determination to go down with the heroic dream of the beautiful life would itself one day be marked as the last in a long line of beautiful, doomed gestures—to bring hot tears to Gidula’s eyes and mockery to the lips of Oschous Dee.