Lucia Thompson, the third woman present, is seated on a stool. She is an ollamh of the clairseach, a master harper, and plays under the name Méarana, which means both “fingers” and, by a shift in accent, “swift.” She is her mother, stamped at an earlier age, though with sharper corners, and with flint in her eyes. She has, it is said, a cutting glance, and she turns that gaze toward the window. “Where is it now?”
“By the maintenance yard. Behind the baler. Continue, Bintsaif.”
The junior Hound stands with arms clasped behind her back and feet slightly spread. She has already loosened the flap on her holster. “The Bartender on Jehovah,” she says, “is convinced that Donovan has left the planet. Furthermore, he believes that Donovan left voluntarily. He had spoken earlier of … coming here.”
Bridget ban turns her head to look at the junior, and then snaps her attention back to the yard outside. But she is too late. The shadow is no longer by the baler. Her eyes search and do not find it. So she sighs and takes a teaser from the drawer in a lamp-table and checks the charge.
“Does this ever grow easier?” asks Graceful Bintsaif, drawing her own weapon.
Bridget ban tosses her head. “No. What else did you learn?”
“The Terran Brotherhood did not expect Donovan’s departure. They had begun negotiations with him over a venture, possibly an illegal one.”
Méarana stifles a laugh. “An illegal venture? In the Terran Corner of Jehovah? I may die of shock.”
Bintsaif glances at her curiously. “Is it wise for you to linger here?”
The harper smiles. “And where might one be safer than between two Hounds?” She herself is no Hound, though her mother has taught her a thing or two.
The junior Hound shrugs and continues her report. “Port Jehovah records show that a petty thief tried to use the ticket Donovan bought, but his identification papers proved to be forgeries. He had killed a man in a burglary gone bad and was anxious to leave the planet. He claims to have found the chit fortuitously, lying by the walkway outside the terminal, and so seized the opportunity for escape.” Bintsaif cocks her head, listens, then moves to stand beside the door from the Hall. “The Jehovan proctors believe he killed Donovan precisely to steal the chit, and Donovan’s body lies now somewhere in the waste tunnels below the city.”
Both Bridget ban and Méarana snort derision, a gesture so alike in mother and daughter as to bring a smile to the otherwise sober lips of Graceful Bintsaif. “Yes,” she says. “The Terran Brotherhood is likewise skeptical. Not that Donovan cannot be killed, but that he cannot be killed by such a quotidian man as the proctors arrested.” Bintsaif shrugs and holds her teaser straight up from the elbow. “I cannot say he impressed me, the one time I met him.” She nods to the harper. “But then I can’t say that you impressed me, either. Not then. In any case, Donovan has thoroughly disappeared from League space.”
Bridget ban turns sideways to the door so as to present the smallest target. “We’ll see what it wants first.” And she aims her teaser directly at the door.
Their hearts beat, their breathing slows.
The door eases open, and the shadow that had crept over the heath slides into the room.
Méarana lifts her arm just so and a throwing knife snaps into her grasp from the harness in her sleeve. It is a different sort of plectrum with which she might pluck the heartstrings. Death is in the room, and ready, but not yet do they slip his leash.
Nearly as thin as Graceful Bintsaif, clad in a black, form-fitting body stocking, and coal-black also in her skin, the intruder is a portion of the night that has come alive, a bit of the darkness that has slipped into the light. Her eyes are twin moons. She holds both hands up, palms out, and says in the hooting accents of Alabaster, “I haff noo waypoons,” this being as big a lie as anyone has ever spoken in Clanthompson Hall.
The white flash of the intruder’s teeth is her most vivid feature. “Boot, you moost admeet, that in the mooment I entered, I coold have keeled … oh, two of you, I think. Yes, Gracefool Bintsaif, even you behind me.”
No one lowers her weapon, and the intruder cocks her head. She shifts to the birdsong twitter of Confederal Manjrin, and there is no hoot in her voice when she does. “You situate very nice. No one in fire line of other. But, if I step, just so…” And she slides with a cat’s grace. “Hounds cannot fire without perhaps hitting each other.”
“My knife’s flight remains unhindered,” Méarana points out.
“Ah. So. But, you throw knife…” A flip of the wrist. “I catch knife. Now, if Bintsaif is finish her most excellent and respectable report, I fill in rest, and tell you fate of man Donovan.” She tugs her hood free, revealing close-cropped, bright yellow hair.
“You’re Ravn Olafsdottr,” says Méarana, pointing. “You were the Shadow agent sent to kill Donovan a case of years ago.” In the dodeka time used in the Old Planets, a case is twenty-four.
“Ooh, noo, noo, noo,” again in Alabastrine. “Nayver to keel him—oonless he fell his dooty. May I seat? If you be nervoos, you strip me naked, tie me oop. Once I helpless be and you oonafraid, you can listen to my tell. Plans have change. All plans have change. There is stroogle in the Lion’s Mouth.”
That a Confederal Shadow, even bound and naked, would be the second-most dangerous person in the room, no one doubts for a moment. But no one doubts either that if assassination had been her object, Ravn Olafsdottr would have acted in the moment when she had stepped between the two lines of fire and both Hounds had for an instant hesitated. That she is not to be trusted goes without saying. But there are degrees of distrust; there are scales to suspicion. It is not yet clear in what way they should mistrust her.
They search the Confederal with consummate care, and she submits to this with cheerful indifference. She had expected as much, and would not have come but that she had resigned herself beforehand to its indignities. They discover scars on her body that evidence harsher searches, more insistent interrogations; and some of those scars are fresh.
Finally, the Hounds are convinced, not so much that Olafsdottr is weaponless, but that short of amputation she cannot be further disarmed. They sit her on a broad sofa of soft brown-and-white Nolan hide, but do not bother to strip and bind her. That offer, they ascribe to a certain whimsy on the Ravn’s part. But the sofa is a subtle thing: one sinks into it, and cannot rise without a struggle, a safeguard against sudden attack by anyone sitting on it. Hounds and harper take seats on three widely spaced chairs surrounding her. Olafsdottr shows her teeth again. “Be not afraid,” she says. “I am a courier, true, but Death is not today my message.” But she knows they are only exercising normal prudence. In its way, it is a compliment to her skills that, outnumbering her three to one, they remain wary of what she yet may do.
Graceful Bintsaif laughs from a seat behind the courier. “I’m not afraid.”
Olafsdottr turns her head. “Then you are a very foolish girl.”
The junior Hound flushes but Bridget ban intervenes. “You’ve been tortured,” she says.
The courier waves a hand. “Soom people, I pay them soo leetle mind, they moost ask more insistently to gain my attentions.” She flashes teeth, relaxes on the sofa, and spreads her arms across the back of it. She looks in turn at each of the three women. It is nicely arranged. To keep any two of them in view, she must turn away from the third. This thought broadens her perpetual smile.
Bridget ban, coming to a decision, lifts her voice slightly. “Mr. Wladislaw? Could you bring some assorted nectars and four glasses to the sitting room, please?” Then she turns her attention to her importunate guest. “Explain, then. How do ye know what happened to the Donovan?”