In the Lion's Mouth

by Michael Flynn

  Donovan said nothing. He was not especially fond of his skin, which stretched sallow and drumhead tight across his bones. He still owned that gaunt and hollowed-out look that long years in the Bar of Jehovah had given him. He wondered if he might have always looked that way, even in the flush and vigor of his youth. Assuming he had had a youth, or that it had been flushed with vigor.

  We’ll remember someday, Pollyanna assured him.

  Donovan was less sure. Sometimes matters were lost past all retrieval; and maybe happily so. Some memories might best remain covered than recovered. “I liked it better when you had all fallen silent,” he said, and wondered if the drug that Olafsdottr had given him had also upset the delicate truce he had reached with himself the previous year.

  “Smuggling,” snapped the Fudir, distracted from his inspection of the lock. “Smuggling and bonded courier work. All right? Now quiet down and let me work.”

  Bonded couriers. Precisely. There is a popular show on Dubonnet’s World called Samples and Secrets, in which the unnamed pilot of a monoship brings each episode some package—a secret, a visitor, a treasure—that changes the recipient’s life for good or ill.

  It’s why they’re sometimes called “schlepships,” the Sleuth said.

  The Fudir pulled his special tool from the hidden cache in his sandal and set to work on the lock mechanism. The Pedant had been right. These were not high-security locks. The door opened onto the main hallway.

  Ravn Olafsdottr was waiting outside. “Really, Donovan, where do you expect to go?”

  The Fudir grinned. “Admit it, Ravn. You would have been disappointed if I hadn’t come out. If you wanted me to stay put, you would have had better locks installed.”

  “I was in a hurry. But I may do so, if you do not behave yourself. You were not supposed to awake so soon. Annoy me too greatly and I will soospend you once more.”

  “And forego the pleasure of our company?” He looked up and down the corridor. “You have Eyes all through the ship, don’t you?”

  The Confederal shrugged a little, as if not to belabor the obvious. “And motion sensors for your restlessness. You move about, I hear the ping of your processions.”

  “Then what does it matter if I stay in one room or not?”

  Olafsdottr scratched the bright yellow stubble of her hair. “Who can say? Perhaps you sneak up behind, garrote me, have your wicked way, and take ship back to Jehovah.” A foolish notion, her smile said. “We will be good friends sometime, you and I; but that time is not yet.”

  “Don’t be so sure I would want my way with you,” the scarred man grumbled. “I’ve been with more toothsome wenches than you in my time.”

  “Ooh! Boot do they bite so wail with those tooths?” She gnashed the dentition in question and switched to Manjrin. “You stay ward room now. We past Dangchao. Be on Tightrope soon. Not jog pilot’s elbow on such road.”

  Inner Child chirped with alarm, but Donovan maintained the scarred man’s composure. “The Tightrope,” he said casually. “No wonder you snatched a monoship. Anything bigger couldn’t take that road.”

  “A narrow way, but correspondingly swift,” his kidnapper said in Gaelactic, “as Shree Bernoulli commanded. And speed is of the essence. Urgent matters await us on Henrietta, and the game is worth the candle.”

  Donovan cocked his head attentively, but Olafsdottr did not elaborate on the nature of the candle. The Pedant volunteered that Henrietta was the sector capital of Qien-tuq, in the Confederal borderlands. Once in the Confederation, escape would become problematical.

  “I’ve heard it said,” Donovan suggested, “that the speed of space on the Tightrope is so great that one can cross the Rift standing still.”

  “Ooh, that is exaggeration, I am thinking! But the walls are close and the subluminal mud encroaches on the channel. It is a bad way and a treacherous one. But one unpatrolled by League corvettes.”

  “Sounds like a good reason to seize control of the ship before you get us on it.”

  “Ooh,” said Olafsdottr, “you are a foony man, for sure. Should I kill you now and save myself soospense?”

  Donovan grinned. “You won’t do that. You went to all that trouble to sneak into the League, nab me, and commandeer a handy ship when you could have injected me with something fatal and been done with it. That means you plan to keep me alive, and that means you’re taking me somewhere. I’m a valuable cargo.”

  “Valuable,” Olafsdottr admitted, “but not priceless. Don’t make your inventory cost greater than you be worth.”

  * * *

  That evening, before he turned the lights out, the scarred man removed a particular hologram from his scrip and studied on it.

  Four figures sat at an outdoor café table on the sunlit cobbles of the Place of the Chooser, the great public square in Èlfiuji, in the Kingdom on Die Bold. Bridget ban sat in the middle turned at three-quarters but with her head fully facing the imager. Her smile, broad; her eyes seducing the viewer; her red hair captured in midflight, as if she had just then tossed her head to look at the artist. Her left arm draped Little Hugh’s shoulders; her right hand covered the Fudir’s on the table. Greystroke’s hand rested on her shoulder.

  A fellowship, and a good one. He missed them all terribly. The four of them back then had been in search of the Twisting Stone, and the singular tragedy was that they had found it.

  “She’s not expecting us on Dangchao, you know,” Donovan told himselves after restoring the image to his scrip and speaking the lights out. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to visit her. She won’t know it when we don’t show up.”

  Oh, the harper will know, said the girl in the chiton. She knew we were coming before we did.

  “It was going to be a surprise,” the Fudir whispered.

  No surprise now. No expectation of the harper’s broad and welcoming smile. No possibility that the daughter’s smile would infect the mother. The fellowship in his hologram had been broken, and broken by his own actions. He had abandoned them, had abandoned Bridget ban, with no word and no explanation. One such desertion might be reparable; two would never be, and even the harper could lose her smile.

  Unless he could take the ship from Ravn Olafsdottr.

  * * *

  Snug in his bunk, neatly boxed into the wall, Donovan discovered that the bed was not especially user-friendly. Between the thin pad and the short length, he turned and twisted in pursuit of an elusive relaxation. Perhaps a thicker pad would have settled him; perhaps not. But one of the twists—or one of the turns—brought him against the panel that formed the inner side of the bunk; and the pressure must have been just right, for something went snick or click and the panel slid aside, and Donovan fell off the bunk on a side that he hadn’t known it had.

  He found himself in a narrow passageway between the wall of the ward room and the wall of the utility room next to it. There were pipes, ducts, and cable runs, as one normally finds in walls; but there was also crawl space and, here and there, shelves and bins. Inner Child glanced quickly fore and aft, saw nothing in the darkness, but kept watch—for seeing nothing in the dark was hardly a comfort to him.

  Oho, said the Sleuth. The Rightful Owner was a smuggler. There are probably caches, passages, and hidey-holes like this all through the ship. Tyrants and democrats had escaped the people’s wrath cocooned in such ships. Secret treaties and covert agreements had traveled secure in their bosoms. Prototypes and patents had been hustled to subsidiaries—or competitors—on sundry worlds.

  After this fortuitous discovery, the scarred man took to wandering the monoship at odd hours, investigating its nooks and crannies. He wondered how long the ship had been in Olafsdottr’s possession. She might know of the nooks, but perhaps not of the crannies.

  Using the secret passages, he could make an end-run around Olafsdottr’s security and come upon her from an unexpected direction. Her reflexes could not be markedly inferior to his own, nor her mastery of the arts mortal. His main advantage was that s
he did not wish to damage him, and this might cause her to hold back if it came to that.

  But not every imagined possibility is a real one. The two places where Olafsdottr spent most of her time were the two places where the passages did not run. First was the pilot room, which was in any case too small and cramped for a struggle that included a survivor. The second was her sleeping quarters, where she was most vulnerable, but which was inaccessible from the hidey-holes that otherwise swiss-cheesed the ship. Not all the caches connected. To approach her sleeping quarters meant crossing the spinal corridor, and that was alarmed by her ad hoc security system. It was not an impossible task to circumvent the system, but it would require deactivating several sensors; and that deactivation would in itself constitute an alarm.

  It irritated Donovan considerably that such a wonderful discovery could not be put to immediate use.

  * * *

  Olafsdottr continued to be wary in his presence, and when they ate together, it was at arm’s length. In exasperation at the blandness of her cooking, Donovan one day programmed a dinner of Chicken Joe Freezing that had a bit of a bite to it, but Olafsdottr would not taste of it.

  “Who knows what wicked spices you have rubbed into that poor hen?” she asked. And never mind that the meat from the protein vats had never gone through the formality of actually having once been a hen.

  But even when he had divided his own serving in two and offered her the choice of halves, she demurred, and he wondered if it was not the spiciness itself rather than the possibility of being drugged that put her off.

  “I am wounded,” he said, “that you do not trust me.” Later, he vomited the poison in the ward room’s lavatory. Taking the antidote beforehand was risky in any case, and he resolved to find another tactic.

  * * *

  Olafsdottr allowed him some limited exercise time. “Idle hands, devil’s tools,” she explained, and led him to a fitness room equipped with a variety of machines. Donovan expressed his amazement and gratitude and did not hint that he had already seen the room. The mirror on the back wall was one-way and provided anyone in the passage behind it with an excellent view.

  Olafsdottr stood as usual in the doorway, and made helpful suggestions for his exercise regimen. The Brute especially enjoyed the activity; and the Silky Voice used it to work on her enzyme control. But at the conclusion, as he was toweling off, he noticed a handled insert used as a shim for changing clearances on the machine beside him. Save that it was not sharpened, it would make a fine knife. He pulled it out as if to change the forces on the pulley, and found that it had good hand-balance.

  Without turning, he threw it at Olafsdottr. The Confederal twisted sideways and snatched it out of the air. She examined the slug of steel in her hands, then looked at Donovan and grinned. “You like play catch?” She slung it back at him on a flat trajectory aimed at his face. “More fun with knives,” she added.

  The Brute dropped into a crouch and, thrusting his hand up, grabbed the handle as it passed overhead. Careful, he said. Ya don’t want ya should break the mirror. That’s bad luck.

  As he rose, he sent the shim spinning back to Ravn. The courier spun to her left and somehow directed the pinwheeling slug back toward Donovan with barely a twitch to its motion.

  Inner Child heard a sound behind them and stepped aside, so that the Brute very nearly missed catching the projectile. He tossed the shim up, caught it by the flat of the blade as it fell, and threw it on a long, lazy turn-and-a-half toward his captor.

  “Oh, excellent move,” the Confederal applauded. She had to sidestep and reach behind, since the shim was coming at her blade-first. She returned the shim the same way. “But ‘crouching-ape’ catch better.”

  On the next round, though, as the shim hurtled toward her, an alarm tripped and a series of sharp chimes sounded through the ship. The Ravn jerked her head around, remembered in time the deadly projectile, and dropped “boneless” to the floor, striking with the flats of her hand to reduce the impact. The shim shot through the space her skull had occupied and rang against the wall across the hall from the doorway.

  She had rolled on falling, of course—the body has reasons the mind stops not to ponder—and she came out of the roll into a crouch onto the balls of her feet just as Donovan reached her. Her teaser halted the scarred man an arm’s reach away.

  “Ooh, that was very clayver, sweet. You play me friendly game of threw-the-knife and betray me at crucial mooment. You play me, and not shim.”

  Donovan held his hands where she could see them. “What betrayal? I ran over to see if you were all right.”

  “Not even scratch, my sweet. How you kick oof mootion sensor from here?”

  Donovan shook his head. “Must have been a malfunction. Your whole system is jury-rigged. I’m surprised you haven’t had false positives before now.”

  By the guarded look on Olafsdottr’s face, he judged that there had been previous false positives, perhaps while he had been in suspension. He said nothing, preferring that any doubts about system reliability be spread by her own mind.

  The Confederal waved her weapon. “You go before me. Left at refectory.”

  The scarred man did as was told. Idea, the Sleuth said.

  I hope it’s better than playing catch with a blunt instrument.

  Quiet, Silky. The Ravn’s got a “no-not-me.” It damps the motion sensors in her vicinity. If we can steal it, or the Fudir can duplicate it, we can sneak up on her when she’s asleep; not set off the alarms.

  Oh sure, thought the Fudir, Olafsdottr will give me the run of the machine shop.

  They had reached the T-intersection. The long stem of the T ran past the ward room and the closet in which he had first awakened all the way to the exterior air locks. The cross-bar led to the refectory and, beyond that, the pilot’s saddle. Olafsdottr looked down each corridor, pursing her lips.

  The alarm came from here, the Sleuth concluded. There must be a location code in the alarm pattern. The long and short beeps.

  Dissatisfied, Olafsdottr marched Donovan back to the ward room. “You be a good buoy,” she said, “and stay in room.” And she closed and uselessly locked the door.

  * * *

  Travel time between stars was long—weeks, sometimes even months, depending on the local speed of space—and there was little to engage the attention save when entering and leaving the Roads. Consequently, the ward room was well stocked with what the great ’Saken philosopher Akobundu had called “the grand continuum of culture”—literature, music, art, travel, the enjoyment of nature, sports, fashion, social vanities, and the intoxication of the senses—though the Rightful Owner’s tastes seemed to have run more to the lower strata of that continuum. There were seven cardinal sins, Bridget ban had once told him—and the entertainment center catered to no less than five of them.

  More entertaining by far, the Fudir was able to use the play deck to hack into the ship’s navigational system, from which he learned that they would be a fortnight on the Newtonian crawl through the high coopers of Abyalon. Olafsdottr would not resume the pilot’s saddle for a while. What better time for taking the ship?

  Of course, if he realized that, so did his adversary. She would be more alert than ever during the next week and a half.

  And so, Donovan set himself to learn about the Rightful Owner. He had no guarantee that such an education would gain him an advantage; but there was a chance that the monoship Sèan Beta had additional capabilities of which Olafsdottr was as yet unaware. A weapons cache, perhaps. As far as he knew, Olafsdottr’s teaser was the only formal weapon on board.

  Of informal weapons, there were of course a plenty.

  Time was growing short. After Abyalon, came the Megranome crawl. And after Megranome, the Tightrope branched off and it would be too late to turn back. There was no exit off the Tightrope until it debouched onto Confederal space at Henrietta.

  * * *

  The evening after the Fudir had ferreted out the name of the Rightful Owner
—Rigardo-ji Edelwasser of Dumthwaite, Friesing’s World—and the refreshingly honest name of his company—Bonded Smugglers, LLC—Donovan won the game of waiting.

  “It does not grow, does it?” Olafsdottr said from her usual cautious post at the door between the refectory and the pilot’s saddle. She had of course eaten earlier, and stood by now while Donovan did the same.

  The scarred man had programmed a meal of tikka and naan, and ate noisily and sloppily, using the naan as mittens to pick up the chicken pieces. He looked up at her. “What doesn’t?”

  “Your hair. It never grows.”

  Donovan scowled and ran his hand along the tufts that spotted his scalp. “Oh, yes, missy,” he said in the Terran patois. “Names very budmash fella, but save him this-fella planti on haircuts.”

  Olafsdottr nodded gravely. “I have heard this tell. You have soofered great harm.” She reached forward, almost as if to tousle the scars in Donovan’s hair; but he pulled back, and she was not so foolish as to lean closer.

  “Great harm,” she continued in doleful tones, “and I speak as one expert in great harm. You are not the only Shadow to feel the nettles of their whims. It is a poor master who beats his dogs. Beat them too much and they will turn on him, as some of us now have. There is a struggle in the Lion’s Mouth.”

  Donovan grunted and applied himself to his naan.

  “Do you understand what I have said?” Olafsdottr said.

  He looked up, his mouth dripping. “And what is Hecuba to me, or I to Hecuba?”

  His captor seemed uncertain of the Terran reference. “Do you know the Lion’s Mouth? I have been told that your memory is … uncertain.”

  “You mean ‘wiped.’ It’s your version of the Kennel where the Hounds train; except you breed rabid dogs.”

  Olafsdottr crossed her hands over her breast. “You wound me, Donovan-san. Am I a mad dog? Well, perhaps so.” She spoke more intently. “Some of us are mad enough to challenge the Names. There is civil war among us.”

  Donovan returned his attention to his meal. “Good luck then to the both of you. Let me know how it turns out.”