“Yes, that’s the one. At Côndefer Park. Another’ Loonie attack, apparently. Like what nearly happened to that poor Chins devil. They scrawled irredentist slogans on the shop walls. The Marshal of Preeshdad said there had been a string of incidents recently. I’m sorry.” He offered her a small kerchief from his sleeve. “I didn’t know you felt so about her.”
“No, it’s not that,” Méarana cried. “We only spoke a few minutes; but the woman was so terribly cheerful and friendly.” Hound’s business? Enwii had said. That’s a magnet for trouble. I don’t want to be involved.
Violence was common in Preeshdad, and jewelry shops were tempting targets… Maybe it was inevitable that one of the places they had visited should be attacked. But Méarana shrank from Greystroke, suddenly wary of who he was and what he might do in pursuit of a prize for the Ardry. She did not believe in coincidence.
And neither did Donovan when she told him about it.
He went immediately to the’ face in Méarana’s stateroom and found the Preeshdad marshal’s report readily accessible. “The prick,” he said. “He wants us to know about it.”
“Why? Was it a warning? Did he and Little Hugh…?” “What? No. Greystroke can be guilty of a great many foul deeds. Terrifying you counts as one. But he’ll never wear the Badge of Night.”
Méarana sat and leaned over her folded hands. “None of you want me to find Mother. You keep throwing obstacles at me. You keep trying to discourage me. You, Greystroke, Little Hugh. They spread doubts about you. You spread doubts about them. You keep secrets from me.” “What secrets have I kept from you?” “Ōram,” the harper said distinctly. “Eḥku. Enjrun.” Donovan closed his eyes. Greystroke really can sneak up on you. “That caracan,” he said. “That son of a whore.”
“I guess I wasn’t supposed to hear about those places.” Donovan looked around the room. “Should we invite Greystroke and Hugh to sit in personally, or is it enough that they can listen when the mood strikes them?”
“At least Greystroke…”
“If the Gray One were really interested in finding Bridget ban, he’d be out looking himself, not trying to find out what we know. By the gods, I hope he did hear that!” He struck the table hard with both fists. The ’face jumped and a Friesing’s World death hoot fell off its hook on the wall and clattered to the floor.
Billy Chins came scurrying in from the common room, his face creased in anxiety. “Why such shout-shout? Is master want Billy?”
The scarred man rubbed his face and for a moment all was silence. Then he pushed to his feet and walked over by the door, where he picked up the fallen instrument. He played a few notes in the horrid and unnatural intervals of the Qelq-Barr Mountains, then placed the hoot once more on its hooks, but it fell again to the floor. This time Billy Chins rushed to retrieve it and held it defensively in his hands.
The Fudir turned to Méarana. “Greystroke had a reason for trying to frighten you. No, stay, Billy. You deserve to hear this.” He returned to his seat and tapped the screen.
“The Preeshdad Marshal said this Tottenheim woman was savagely beaten. But I saw the morgue photos on the upload, and there was nothing of the savage in it. It was a careful and methodological beating, designed to extract the maximum of information. Kaowèn, it’s called.”
“Kaowèn? Maximum information? Enwii didn’t know anything! She had a—”
Donovan put a finger to her lips. “And now Those know she didn’t know anything.”
“Those?”
Donovan seemed to withdraw into himself. “Something is following us.”
VI A SNAKE IN THE GRASS
The great’ Saken philospher Chester Demidov, known as’ Akobundu,” once described the United League as “raisins in a bowl of porridge.” This struck many of his readers as just another of his obscurities; but people who put raisins in their porridge—and there were some—understood what he had meant. The best philosophy begins in sense experience, and a bowl of porridge is as sensible as it gets.
The raisins are the great clumps of civilized planets: the Old Planets, the Jen-Jen, Foreganger-Ramage-Valency, and elsewhere. Within these clumps, great and powerful worlds lie mere days apart, with war and commerce bustling between them, with cities large and impressive, and with those activities that make of life something more than being alive. It is here you find Akobundu’s “grand continuum of culture”: great literature, music, high art, travel, the enjoyment of nature, sports, fashion, social vanities, and the intoxication of the senses. The nature of a civilization could be gauged, he had said, by the point along this continuum where its people draw the line and say, “Below this lies the merely vulgar.”
Everything else is the porridge. These comprise the more widely-scattered solitaries, like Peacock Junction or Ugly Man, the barbarous regions like the Cynthian Hadramoo. These may boast great accomplishments, but they are not where the action is.
The Greater Hanse is one of the raisins, and a juicy one at that. There, fortunes are made—and many a second sib arrives in the dewy-eyed hope of making one. The Hanse chews them up and spits them out. It grinds them like polishing grit, and the result is a gleaming money-making machine—once the grit is washed off.
On Akobundu’s continuum, the Hansards set great store by the social vanities, pursuing their rivalries not only in board rooms and markets and entrepôts, but in balls and cotillions, in fashion, in clubs and organizations, at dinner parties, and in orders of nobility. But they draw the line at the intoxication of the senses. “Drink dissolves profit,” they say; “and dreams go up in smoke.” A man obsessed with pleasure seldom thinks clearly, and women are consequently a sort of weapon to intoxicate one’s rivals. They do not launch missiles at one another, so much as mistresses. Befuddle a rival with perfumes and tender caresses and you can diddle him in every way that she does not.
Dancing Vrouw had been settled initially from Agadar and Gladiola, and it is said that when the first ship had set down, after a harrowing voyage through then-uncharted roads, the landing party officer had stripped herself naked and, from a sheer and undiluted joy, whirled through the thigh-high spindle-grass of the landing field. Consequently, the blazon of tawny a nude danseuse all proper appeared in the flags of every state but one on the Vrouw, and was quartered in the arms of most of the Merchant Houses.
There is an addendum to the legend that involves an Ursini’s viper and the inadvisability of stepping on one, even while dancing, but it is a complication seldom mentioned by the tour guides and myth-mongers. The bite proved nonfatal, though chastening, and both it and the dance have provided fodder for local proverbs ever since and a warning against excessive exuberance. The one contrary state that eschews the danseuse emblazons a snake on its flag with the motto, “Don’t Tread on Me.”
A counter-legend holds that the landing officer had simply been a native of “Dancing,” said to be a city on Old Earth that had anciently been a member of the original Hanse. But what sort of romance can you spin off that? Naked women and serpents in the garden of a fresh new world were by far more fascinating.
__________
The Steelyard was more than a spaceport. It was also the chief Counting House of the Vrouw. Thus, although located in the capital of the Eastern Cape Circle, it had extraterritorial status, and merchant princes from every Circle, and even from other Hansard planets, stationed factors there.
Groundside customs was more thorough than on Harpaloon. The Toll-Clerk, as he was called, studied their Kennel passes with great intensity, even employing a loupe to verify the watermarking of their papers, and required a retinal scan of each of them. Billy Chins proved a problem. A chumar, the lowest caste of Terran worker, he had little in the way of papers; and no one had ever thought his retinas worth scanning.
Rules meant much in the Greater Hanse, and their functionaries did not accept bribes to overlook them. However, everything was for sale, including entry visas, so the distinction was a fine one and not always apparent to out-world
ers. There were regulations on how to bypass the regulations. These required three oath-helpers to swear to Billy Chins’s good character, and a native of the Vrouw to purchase the contract. The Clerk summoned a Trader from the Floor, and shortly a wide-bodied man in a marten-rimmed, sleeveless coat and wearing a silver medal on a neck-chain stepped off the lift.
“What is then all this?” he asked the Clerk and, the situation being explained, he turned to Billy Chins. “You-fella Terry? Good-good. We process, jildy Khitmutgar, you? Oho! Who thy master? This one?” A skeptical eye was cast over Donovan, but swift handshakes proved both members of the Brotherhood. The Trader switched to the Tongue. “This shalt proceed swiftly, my brother, and at a nominal fee. I hight Hendrik ten Muqtar, senior trader of the House of Coldperk. I will ask of thee no more than but a single marek, for honor’s sake.” He made a complex gesture with his hands. “But as for the Purse of the Steelyard, they will accept no-but less than one hundred mareks, however middling our contract.”
“Pliss, pliss,” said Billy Chins. “Me-fella blong this-man, Donovan. No blong you-fella.” To Donovan, he added, “I go long you. No go long him. Plis no send Billy Chins away!”
Donovan fluttered his fingers and addressed ten Muqtar. “Forgive him his intemperance.”
“It makes naught. Here. Behold the standard contract. Thou shalt enter names here, and here. Aye, the light pen, so that it may scan. Oho! A Kennel chit! Had I but known of him, thy fee would have soared. Deep pockets hath the Kennel.”
When all was completed to the jot and tittle of Hansard Commercial Regulation §189.3, Part V, paragraph 6.2 (a), Billy Chins tugged on ten Muqtar’s coat and said with something like awe, “Ally-all Terry here got plenty somtaing, laik you-fella?”
Ten Muqtar flashed them a quick sad smile and spoke to Donovan. “Tell your boy that the Hanse placeth no bars to those willing to work, and that many of the Original Folk have become here wealthy. But thou wilt have noticed that when the Clerk required a Trader to buy a Terran’s contract, he sent for a Terran. We prosper here and enjoy great liberties, but the doors of society are closed to us.”
“As oppressions go,” said Donovan, “that doth pale beside a Harpaloon lynch mob.”
“It is much of a such,” ten Muqtar said with a shrug. “Here, much business is done at dinner parties and on the courses of golf. Where a man’s expectations are greater, smaller slights grate the more.”
The skywalks ran above the Trading Floor and Méarana and her party paused while crossing to gaze over the banisters at the activity below.
A mob of Harpaloon drunks did not shout and mill as wildly as did the press on the Floor. They cried out or sent messages over headsets, buttonholed and bargained, waved fingers in the air in an arcane code. A display board at the far end listed cargos and vessels arriving in orbit and the Traders, who sat like lords around the periphery of the Floor, sent their Runners to ask and offer prices, the two hunting up and down the scale until they met and cleared the cargo. This was for the most part accomplished while the vessel was on the crawl, and a ship’s contents might be sold and sold again before ever it reached High Dancing Orbit.
The throng of arrivals followed the walkway to a broad outdoor plaza at third-storey level. It was come on to winter in that quarter of Dancing Vrouw and the wind drove light flurries of snow across the paving stones and into the sleeves and shoes of inaptly-dressed out-worlders. Incomers scattered, hailing skycabs or huddling in the tramline station or scurrying across the plaza to the Roaming Qaysar Hotel.
This hotel, a stolid, seven-storey building of dark ironwood timbers and light masonry, was said to be the largest primarily wooden building in the Spiral Arm. Flanking it on either side were Factor Houses from around the Vrouw: from nautical Giniksper to tropical Dangerminda to Kalmshdad in the Northern Waste. Farther off, stood the more modest entrepôts of other Hanse worlds—Yubeq, Hanower, Rigger, and elsewhere; so that overall the prospect before them was of a solid wall of buildings, diverse in size and style and color. Parti-colored House arms flashed in light-signage, in holo-projections, or in cloth flags.
Greystroke had booked them rooms on the seventh floor of the Roaming Qaysar and, having stowed their belongings, they foregathered in the suite’s common room before a wall-spanning window. Below, lay the city of Pròwenshwai: a faery jumble set along crooked streets, bisected by broad, straight avenues, interrupted by white plazas and green parks. Stairways twisted up bluffs where streets dared not go. Here and there, clocktowers, minarets, and kokoshniki pierced the skyline.
It was a city that delighted in wood and its possibilities. On the buildings below, cornice, tympanum, spandrel, gable, jamb, and shutters had been set into parquet or carved into basilisks, wyverns, griffins, distlefinks, gargoyles; into flowers and leaves and lacework. Statues emerged from the walls of the greater buildings.
“Is look strange-strange,” said Billy Chins. “Never off Harpaloon, me.”
“‘Tis broader spread than any city I’ve played,” Méarana said. “Even Èlfiuji is more compact.”
“You should see it when night falls,” Greystroke added. “They call it the Carpet of Lights. And at midwinter, when the snow covers all, they put candles in every window, and in small bags lining every walkway. Over that way,” he pointed, “is the Tower of the Snake. Remind me to tell you that story. You can recite it for drinks, Donovan, when you return to Jehovah.”
Donovan did not rise to the jibe. “Where’s the Toll Gate?” he said.
“Right behind the hotel. You can’t see it from this angle. It’s one of only two entries from the international enclave into Eastern Cape Circle itself.”
Donovan cocked his head. “Where’s the other?”
“You can scale the outside wall of the Hotel,” said Little Hugh, leaning close to the window and pointing off to the left. “There are stretchers and dog’s-teeth in the masonry. Then—see there?—you can jump from that ledge over onto the roof of that storage building and shinny down the rain pipe.”
Méarana shot him a glance to see if he was joking, but with the Ghost of Ardow it was hard to tell. He could get into and out of the most unlikely places. “We’ll take the easy way,” she said.
Hugh exchanged a glance with Greystroke. “Sometimes that is the easy way.”
“Enough said of that,” the Hound cautioned him. He turned to the harper. “I don’t know what you expect to find here that Gwillgi failed to find. According to the Hotel’s records and the Toll-for-One, Bridget ban stayed here only two days. She never even entered East Cape.”
Donovan grunted. “Makes you wonder why she came down at all.”
Hugh glanced at him. “We’ve all worried at that. If we knew why she came down… Thank you, Billy.” The khitmutgar had found the suite’s bar and had assembled a tray of drinks. As any good servant might, he had, on the flight from Harpaloon, identified everyone’s preference. They moved toward the center of the room. “If we knew why she paused here, we might know where she went afterward. But if this was just a stopover…”
“Why come planet-side for a mere rest stop,” said Méarana.
Hugh pursed his lips. “Sometimes you just need to get outside of a ship.”
“Maybe she was expecting to meet someone,” Donovan suggested. He had remained at the window, where he gazed down at the roof of the storage shed.
“Gwillgi thought so,” said Hugh, “but she met no one of whom the hotel staff was aware.” Both Donovan and Greystroke snorted. “Right,” Hugh added. “But Gwillgi checked into everyone staying in the hotel and…”
Donovan turned from the window. “Everyone?”
Hugh nodded. “Staff and guests. Gwillgi may not be as persistent as Grimpen, but he does dot all his t’s.”
“So, you may be right,” said Greystroke, who had materialized by Donovan’s side and nodded toward the perilous route into East Cape. “There’s only one flaw: no trace of her anywhere in Pròwenshwai.”
There’s always
a trace, murmured the Sleuth.
“Greystroke,” Donovan said in a low voice, and moved the Hound a little apart from Hugh and Méarana, who were sampling a plate of hors d’oeuvres that Billy had prepared. “You and I both know that the jawharry at Côndefer Park…”
“…was killed by a Confederate courier. Elementary. Who else combines stealth and cruelty in such exquisite balance? Has it convinced her?”
“To give up the search? Not yet.”
“It might have been a coincidence, but…”
“It wasn’t.”
“Agreed. And you can’t go forward assuming it was. The question is: What is the courier’s mission? Is he hunting what Bridget ban was hunting? Or is he hunting you?”
“Me!” Donovan could not stop Inner Child from looking around in alarm. “No,” he said, turning back in time to glimpse Greystroke’s pity. “No,” he said again. “If he was hunting me, why torture the jawharry?”
“‘Following the hare,’” Greystroke quoted, “‘the hunter starts a deer.’ Sometimes one path crosses another. That’s all chance is, you know. The Friendly Ones weave causal threads. Sometimes they cross, and we call that chance. Once you crossed the courier’s line of vision, he may have wondered what you were up to.”
“You suppose he recognized me.”
Greystroke nodded. His eyes rose toward Donovan’s scalp. “You bear certain distinguishing marks.”
But Donovan shook his head. “No. I’ve haunted the Bar on Jehovah for a great many years. If They had wanted to find me…”
“They may have wanted only to find you there. As long as you stayed in place, swilling whiskey, what did They care? Donovan-the-sot is no threat to them. Donovan-on-the-roads may be a different matter.”
The scarred man said nothing. He looked out over the whittled city.
“If you went back to Jehovah,” Greystroke said, “they’d likely lose interest again.”
Donovan felt turmoil within.
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