“Bready,” he said. “Uh’d dye voryuh.”
But the harper did not know what he meant.
When she led him back into the suite, she found the other three in the common room and in a state of consternation over their absence. They unleashed a cacophony of demand, worry, and rebuke.
“There you are!” “Where were you?” “Oh! Master no bandon Billy!”
Billy threw himself at the Brute’s feet and grabbed hold of his ankles. That woke the scarred man and Méarana could see the Brute cast one last glance in her direction before he sank beneath the sand of Donovan’s awareness. The scarred man looked around the room in anger. “What the devil is going on?”
“That would be my question,” said Greystroke.
Hugh took both the harper’s hands in his. “We were worried about you. In case… You know.”
“So you didn’t run out this time, Donovan?” Greystroke said to the scarred man.
“In case we were followed here from Harpaloon?” Méarana said to Hugh. “Not likely.”
“Nor impossible. There are fossil images in the berms of the Roads. A clever man can follow a ship, and from the blue-shift know where she had exited. So…”
“So,” said Greystroke to both the harper and the scarred man, “isn’t it time you told us everything and handed the job back to the professionals?”
“Before the Confederate catches up with you?” added Hugh.
Donovan swatted Billy Chins on the side of the head. “Stop that now, or I really will set you free! A life spent groveling is not worth living.”
Billy Chins released Donovan’s ankles and scrambled to his feet. “So sorry, master. I no serve you good? I still serve you?”
“Serve me, if you must. But do it on your feet! What am I doing out here?”
“You were sleepwalking,” Méarana told him.
“Well,” said Greystroke, “what’s your answer?”
Donovan nodded to Méarana. “It’s her answer to give.” To the harper, he added, “It’s the smart move. I’ve told you that from the beginning.”
“I know. But… The ‘professionals’ searched for two years and gave up the hunt.”
Little Hugh stuck his chin out. “Greystroke and I have not. And we never will until we know where and how she…” He paused, and finished in a different voice. “Until we know.”
“Then you ought to understand. I can’t sit on Dangchao and simply wait.”
“Remember the jawharry on Harpaloon,” said Hugh.
“I do. And that’s one of the reasons I can’t quit. I owe her something more than quitting.”
Hugh suppressed a smile. “Scared you on instead of off?”
Donovan shook his head. “We’re all tired. It’s the middle of the night—and nights on the Vrouw are uncommonly long. Let’s sleep on it and in the morning…” He left unsaid what the morning would bring.
Everyone returned to their rooms. When Donovan turned to close his door, he found Greystroke in the room with him. He bobbed a finger. “Heel-and-toe, right?”
“I walk in your footsteps.”
“You know it. So, get this over with.”
The Hound walked to the work desk by the wall and sank into its chair. He waved Donovan to the reading chair in the corner.
“She doesn’t understand,” Greystroke said when they were both settled. “She doesn’t know how dangerous it is.”
“‘It is the young who catch the gliding snake.’”
Greystroke cocked his head. “Stop being the inscrutable Terran.”
“A Terran proverb. The young do dangerous things in innocence.”
“So, what’s our excuse? Never mind. This is no longer just nosing around Lafrontera. It’s not just taking ordinary chances on raw settlement worlds or staying in posh hotels like this one at Kennel expense. It’s not a bleeding lark!”
“She knows that.”
“Does she? There’s an agent of Those of Name nosing around. That’s not a mob of’ Loonie simpletons. That’s… Fates take it! She’s her daughter!”
“Then maybe you understand why she won’t give up.”
Greystroke opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it, and crossed his arms. “When I remember twenty years ago…” His eyes lit briefly on the hologram on the vanity mirror. “Ah, well…” He fell silent for a time. “You’ll stay with her?”
“I promised Zorba.”
“No, he promised you. I know how he operates. But I don’t want you in this only because your personal skin is threatened. A man like that is too likely to disappear once he thinks he safely can. And where would that leave hen”
“There are other men,” Donovan observed, “who cannot abandon her because they have not stepped forward in the first place.”
Anger flashed briefly on the Hound’s bland countenance. “She came to you,” he pointed out. And Donovan wondered whether the anger was over his jibe or her choice.
“Don’t worry it, Hound,” Donovan said. “It all lies in how the gods decide.”
“The gods,” said Greystroke, “are merely despotic. But behind the gods sit the Fates, and they are deadly.”
“How could she go to you or to the Ghost for help? She needed someone… unencumbered.”
Greystroke snorted and looked inward for a time before he pulled a brain from a pocket and tossed it to Donovan.
The scarred man caught it on the fly, looked at it, looked at Donovan.
“It’s one of my private codes,” the Hound explained. “If you ever need me, encrypt it with that and send a message to the Kennel. They’ll forward it over the Circuit to wherever I am. Rinty and I will come as quickly as we can.”
Donovan said nothing, but looked at the Hound.
Greystroke colored and looked away. “We have to be on Yubeq shortly. On assignment.”
“That wasn’t a ruse?”
“No. We really were going your way.”
Donovan studied the pocket brain, turning it over and over in his fingers. Then, abruptly, he clenched his hand around it. “Why?”
“Why do you think?” He nodded toward the hologram. “Twenty years ago, the four of us were partners. I don’t like you; and you don’t like me. (Please. Spare me the wheedling Terran excuses.) But among the four of us, you and Rinty had a bond; and now he and I have one. And we were all bound to her, of course. But between you and me is the missing link. Just answer me one thing. Tell me you will not abandon her.”
Now it was Donovan’s turn to anger. “Do you think I would do that?”
Greystroke’s silence was eloquent.
Finally, Donovan waved a hand, and the Fudir answered, “No, sahb. I do no such a thing.”
“Because if you do…”
“Yes, I know. You’ll defend Méarana to the last drop of my blood. My beard is on fire, and you come to warm your hands at the blaze.”
Greystroke put his hands on his knees and pushed to his feet. He looked away. “I used to think that perhaps I… But no, I needed but one look at her.” His glance was iron. “You and I agree on one thing, at least. We both wish it were someone else going with her.”
Donovan temporized. “What more risk can there be than what we saw on Harpaloon? Bangtop, Siggy O’Hara, and the other places… I am as capable as the next man of booking passage on throughliners and rooms in hotels. And once we reach the Chit and the trail peters out, perhaps then she will give it up.”
Greystroke seemed about to speak; but shrugged and turned away.
After the door had closed, Donovan continued to sit in the reading chair, looking nowhere in particular, and turning Greystroke’s pocket brain over and over in his hand. He glanced at the hologram, noted that it was out of place and wondered if it had been Greystroke or Hugh who had fingered it. “I am become cane in the sugar-mill,” he said, reciting a proverb of his people, “and a bit of straw in the waves of the sea.”
In the morning, Greystroke and Little Hugh were gone, and their rooms as if n
o one had ever slept there. Méarana found herself oddly distraught by their absence. In their company, she had not felt so alone in her quest. Billy hardly counted at all, and Donovan had proven less than she had expected—although in another sense, he was more. Yet, a man can accomplish very little if he is of two minds about it, and Donovan was seven—or ten, if she had understood the Brute correctly. The Hound and his Pup had given her briefly the illusion that she had more allies in her quest, and indeed the greater illusion that they would lift the burden of her quest from her.
Did that desire make her a bad daughter? Or did it mean only that she was afraid she might fail? Sometimes she remembered that she had but twenty years metric in her crios. Despair is the one unforgivable sin, her mother used to tell her, for it is the only one that never seeks forgiveness. Yet Méarana could not but feel the beat of its wings nearby.
Mother had first told her that maxim when a very young Lucia had thrown her child’s harp from her in frustration over its intransigent strings. There had been tears, and strong encouragement. She had persevered and gained eventually a small degree of fame in and around the Old Planets. She would persevere in this task, too.
She had no memory of ever having met Greystroke before—and what sadder fate than that could be told of any man? But she did remember Hugh from her childhood and remembered how Mother had brightened at his visits. She had formed certain conclusions from that, conclusions that she now saw were utterly fantastic, and now recalled that Hugh had always borne a sad and winsome countenance on his sojourns. After a time, he had no longer visited.
Now, inexplicably, he had abandoned her again. Duty had called, Donovan explained, but duty was a cold lover and false in the bargain.
“Is that so?” Donovan told her when she had said so. “Wherefore, dost thou seek thy mother?”
“That is love, not duty,” she explained.
“Love,” said Donovan, “is a duty, and a hard one.”
They had gathered around the breakfast table in the common room and Billy Chins provided from the hotel’s larder plates of egg and bangers, tomato juice, daal and beans—and a concoction of his own which he called fool. He brewed qalwah, which tasted much like ordinary Vrouwish kaff, save that it was bitter and muddy. “Billy savvy duty,” the khitmutgar said, taking the seat his master had ordained him. “Duty, me, to sahb Donovan.”
“You may wish otherwise,” Donovan said. “Let’s talk plans. No, Billy, you stay here. You may as well hear what you’re getting into. You may decide it’s more efficient to kill yourself now.”
“He doesn’t mean that, Billy.”
Donovan tore a piece of naan in two. “Don’t I? There’s a Confederate courier somewhere on our backtrail. That is not certain, but has more certainty than it ought to. We can’t afford to assume he will stay back there. If he knows we left Harpaloon with Greystroke, he may learn through other contacts that the Hound was bound for Yubeq. So he’ll follow down the Spiral Staircase to Dancing Vrouw. At that point, if he’s tracking the fossil images in the berms, he’ll see the blue shift and know that we stopped here. Tracking is slower going, so we have perhaps another day before we can expect him here. He may be in the coopers already and crawling down-system. So, let’s finish up and—to use a Terran phrase—‘haul ass.’ If we leave here before he shows, he’ll not know where we’re going next, and we’ll lose him.”
Billy Chins nodded vigorously. “Hutt, hutt; go jildy! Bungim paus, me.” He started to rise, but Donovan held him back.
“Some matters must be checked out before we go. Tomorrow, we go.”
“Oh, Fudir,” said the harper. “We spent weeks investigating on Harpaloon.”
“Then,” said Donovan, tossing his napkin to the table, “there’s not a moment to lose. Billy. This big-deal samting. We go, mistress harp and me, but come back no long time. No ansa him the door, less this knock.” He rapped his knuckles on the table in a tattoo. “You hear that, you answer back this…” Another, different tattoo. “…but only if alla pukka. If alla dhik, no knock-back. Savvy, you?” He ran Billy through the sign and countersign several times before he was satisfied. “No special knock, no ansa door. No ‘room service,’ no maid. No for nogat nothing.”
“I with you, me,” said Billy. “You see. I go with you wokabout. Out to Rim? I go. Out to Rift? I go. You wokabout place nogut, Billy Chins there. I good man, you see.”
Unaccountably touched, Donovan extended his hand, equal to equal, and Billy, after a moment’s hesitation, took it.
They took the easy way in.
“There were only two reasons why the Kennel never got a sniff of her,” Donovan explained to the harper after the Toll had franked their visas and issued them their green cards against their deposit of funds. “Either she entered East Cape in secret—in which case, we’ve no hope of picking up any trail—or she used a name they never thought to check. Normally, on official business, she would have used her office name—Bridget ban—and on personal business, she would have used her base name.”
“So Gwillgi only checked to see if ‘Bridget ban’ had entered East Cape, and she went in as Francine…”
Donovan steered her down a corridor of the Toll-for-One building.
The walls were tiled in pale masonry with a frieze at head level relieved into wreaths and tendrils. “Gwillgi is not stupid. He checked both names. We know she was on Harpaloon as Francine Thompson.”
“Then what…?”
“Bridget ban was not name-lacking. Gwillgi checked all the Kennel knew of.”
“Then…”
“The Kennel may not have known all of them. You told me once that your mother believed in the Four Strengths. Courage…”
“Courage, prudence, justice, and moderation.”
Donovan nodded. “If one is to believe in gods, those beat Greystroke’s Friendly Ones.”
“Yes, four to three.”
Donovan shot her a surprised glance. “You seem more cheery than earlier.”
“The sun is up. It’s easier to be cheery in the sunlight.”
“Even winter sunlight? Never mind. Prudence. The witch had the courage to take risks, no doubt of that. Otherwise, she’d have come home by now. But she would have been prudent enough to leave… breadcrumbs.”
“Breadcrumbs?”
“Old Terran fable. A trail of clues. The Sleuth deduced that. And I had to get him drunk to get that out of him. That helps sometimes, if we all get cheery-drunk together. Then the Pedant quit and we all forgot… Aaah, you don’t want to hear all that. Listen, and mallum bat. Your mother did not expect problems. She told you she’d be back soon. But she coppered her bets. She kept the Kennel updated on her whereabouts, if not on her whyabouts. She wasn’t ready to tell them what she was looking for. If it was a wild goose, she’d look foolish, and—you had some taste of Kennel politics—no Hound wants that. And if it was the goose that laid the golden eggs, she wanted first dibs.”
“Goose?” said Méarana. “Dibs?”
“Here we are.”
They entered an office which, like most such offices throughout the Spiral Arm, bustled with earnest activity. Clerks filed, frowned at screens, read hardcopies, entered data by voice, key, and touch. “If only they had the artificial intelligences of Olde Earth,” he told Méarana, who only laughed.
He flashed his Kennel chit and the Vrouw must have been more accustomed to dealing with League agents than either Thistlewaite or Harpaloon because the reception clerk merely glanced at it, handed them a set of forms, and directed them to a nearby table to fill them out. “So much for the Kennel mystique,” Donovan muttered.
“By the time we fill these out,” Méarana said, “the Confederate will catch up.”
The forms were “smart-forms” or “gloogardies” in the dialect of the Eastern Cape. They were laminas several hairs thick sandwiching a processor. The embedded logics were standard “spreadsheet” and it was only a matter of scribing the right data into the right entry fields, after wh
ich they propagated automatically. At the table, Donovan tried three light pens before finding one that worked; then hunted through the paperwork to find the forms he really needed, league request for unnatural alien identification and league request for alien identification card usage log. There was even a space for entering the Kennel chit number.
“Unnatural?” said Méarana.
“Not naturalized.” Donovan poised his pen, then hesitated.
“What’s wrong? Did you forget the chit reference number?”
“It’s in the back of my mind,” Donovan complained. “But the Pedant is still in a snit, so he’s not letting it out.” He pulled the lanyard by which the chit hung under his blouse, and read the glowing number off the back side.
When he turned the forms in, the Clerk said, “You haven’t entered an Alien Identification Card Number for the Usage Log Request.”
“I can’t enter the Card Number until you process the Identification Request.”
The Clerk gave him a patient look and handed back the second form. Then, taking the first form, he went to a form reader and inserted it in the scanner.
“What name did you ask after?” the harper asked him.
“Julienne Lady Melisonde. That was the name she used when she and I were scouting the Dalhousie Estates on Old ‘Saken. It’s a shot in the dark. If it works…”
It did. A Julienne Lady Melisonde “of the Banry’s Court” had entered East Cape Circle with High Taran papers nearly three metric years before, exited later that same day. Alien Identification Card Number, thus and so. Donovan copied that onto the second form and handed that one again to the Clerk, who slid it through the reader.
“How did you know…?” Méarana asked.
“‘The whisper of a beautiful woman can be heard farther than the roar of a lion.’ But it was the only other name of hers I knew. And it was one that Gwillgi might not have known of. She used it for just that one scramble. Ah, here come the payoff…” He wagged his green card. “Unnatural Aliens have to deposit funds with a Hansard bank to prove they will not become a burden on the public purse during their stay. Then they use the cards for purchases, hotels, meals, entry swipes to public buildings… This list…” Which he took from the Clerk’s hand. “…should tell us where she went, who she contacted… Here we go… Ah! She went to two places. The Gross Schmuggery—that’s the jewelers’ bourse—and the Planetary Tissue Bank.”
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