“I know his fate because I took him to it.”
It is a rhetorical trick, this abrupt dropping of the hooting accent, but no less effective for that. It freights her pronouncement with greater significance. Méarana starts to say something, but her mother halts her with a show of her hand. “You mean he has resumed the service of the Confederacy?” There is a hardness in her question that she has not shown even to Olafsdottr. One no more despises an enemy than the knife despises the whetstone. But a turncoat—that is another matter.
Olafsdottr smiles. “He foond the leeps of my dazer most eloquently speaking. He soobmitted, and a small droog assured that his secoond thoughts would come too, too late to matter. But interesting…” This, in Manjrin. “That betrayal rather than death first cross your mind.”
“So, he was coming here,” murmurs the harper, and she gives her mother a glance that the Hound chooses to ignore.
“Very well. Ye kidnapped him,” the Hound acknowledges. “But that seems a long risk to run to pluck such meager fruits.”
“Ooh, I think there is a flesh beneath the skin of that oold fruit, however dried and wrinkled he seems; and perhaps a hard noot at the saint-er.”
“Yet, here you are; and he is not.”
“He woonted to coome, boot he was tied oop.” The teeth flash once more.
The door opens and Wladislaw enters with a silver tray balanced on his right hand and a projectile pistol gripped in his left. He pauses in the doorway and assesses the threat level in the room before he steps forward and places the tray on the low table before the sofa. He steps back and speaks to Bridget ban without taking his eyes from the Confederal. “Will there be anything else, Cu?”
“Yes, pour the nectar for us, Mr. Wladislaw. All from the same pitcher.”
The butler fills the goblets one by one with a frosty pear nectar. Olafsdottr ducks her head sidewise to look at him as he bends over.
“Are you truly left-handed?”
Wladislaw glances at his pistol. “Ambidextrous, ma’am.” He sets the pitcher back on the tray and steps away.
“Ooh, I would give my right arm to be ambidextrous!”
A faint smile twitches the butler’s lips. “Will that be all, Cu?”
“Yes, Mr. Wladislaw.”
“Mr. Tenbottles asks that I tender his apologies for allowing this intrusion. No one saw…”
“They were not intended to see. Was anyone hurt?”
“Only their pride, Cu.”
“Then the scab may serve them well.”
After the butler leaves, Ravn Olafsdottr rubs her hands together as she contemplates the four glasses. “All from same pitcher,” she says in Manjrin. “Such gracious assurance drink not tinctured.” She reaches out and takes not the drink directly before her, but the one closest to Méarana. Then she settles back on the sofa. She does not sip the nectar yet.
The Hound smiles briefly and takes the glass in front of Olafsdottr and waits until the others are similarly settled. She too allows the nectar to sit untasted.
“Noo, harper,” says the Confederal. “This will be a tell to tangle your strings, oon my word; but I will give it to you in my oon way and reveal things in their oon time. Life is art, and must be artfully told, in noble deeds and fleshed in colors bold.”
I. Riftward: The First Counterargument
The scarred man awoke muzzy-headed in a dark, close room, confused at where he was, and tangled in wires and tubes. The last clear thing in the jumbled closets of his mind was his buying of a ticket to Dangchao Waypoint, and for a fuddled moment he wondered if he might be within that very ship, already on his way.
But if so, he was grossly cheated, for he had purchased third-class fare on a Hadley liner and, of the many things his present accommodations were not, a third-class cabin on a Hadley liner was one. The room was barely large enough to contain the thin, hard bunk on which he lay and, when that bunk had been stowed into the wall, the room grew paradoxically smaller: a pace and a half one way; two and a half the other. It was the half pace that galled.
It was a room for keeping prisoners.
“Fool,” said the Fudir, once he had removed the catheters and intravenous feeding tubes that spiderlike had webbed him in his cot. “We’ve been shanghaied.”
“How long were we asleep?” Donovan asked.
There is this one thing that you must know about the scarred man; or rather, nine things. It is not his hooked chin, nor his sour humors, nor even the scars that interlace his scalp and leave his preternaturally whitened hair in tufts. It is that he is “a man of parts,” and those parts are the pieces of his mind, shattered like a mirror and rearranged to others’ whims. It is in the nature of the intellect to reflect upon things; and so a mirror is the proper metaphor, but the scarred man’s reflections are more kaleidoscopic than most.
The singular benefit of paraperception is that the paraperceptic can see different objects with each eye, hear independently with each ear, and quite often the right hand knows not what the left is doing. This has advantages; and would have had more had the scarred man’s masters not been ambitious or cruel.
Early in Donovan’s service to the Confederation, the Secret Name had gifted him with a second personality, the Fudir, which enabled him to live masqueraded as a petty thief in the Terran Corner of Jehovah while Donovan ran Particular Errands for Those of Name. But if two heads are better than one, ten heads must be better than two, and the Names had later, after Donovan had displeased Them in some small matter of galactic domination, split his mind still further. They had slivered his intellect and made of him something new: a paraconceptic, able not merely to perceive matters in parallel, but to conceive ideas in parallel. This was the ambition.
It was also the cruelty. They had imprinted each fragment with a complete, if rudimentary, personality, expert in some particular facet of the Espionage Art. The intent had been to create a team of specialists; though the consequence had been instead a quarrelsome committee. For the hand that split his intellect had misstruck; and the blow had split his will as well.
Though perhaps the blow had been true, deliberate, a part of his punishment. Perhaps at the last Those of Name had flinched from the prospect of too great a success. Those had made an art of punishment, and the connoisseurs among Them would often contemplate the intricacies of a punitive masterwork with something close to aesthetic joy. “Kaowèn,” they called it. The scarred man had been conceived initially as a human weapon. But who would build such a weapon without a catch?