Bridget ban and Graceful Bintsaif follow them to the rest room just outside the sitting room and, the other two women entering engaged deep in discussion of poetic forms, they take stations just outside the door.
“You don’t fear that she will take her hostage, do you?” Graceful Bintsaif asks with a nod at the closed door.
“No, Méarana has more sense than to try that.” Then she laughs at the junior Hound’s look. “To what end would she do so? We’ve promised to release her.”
“Aye, when we’ve wrung her dry. Do you think she trusts that promise?”
“Shadows are not like Hounds. They have a peculiar code of brotherhood, a convoluted notion of honor.”
“Peculiar, I would say! They send them out in pairs, with the second tasked to kill the first should he fail in his assignment. What sort of brotherhood is that?”
“A close one, I would think. Their lives are ever in each other’s hands. And their sense of honor leads them to acts that we would regard as rank foolishness.”
“Such as a single-handed assault on Gidula’s fortress?”
“Very much like that. What are they talking about in there?”
Graceful Bintsaif listens at the door. “The Dark One says that the style is called the Old Northern Saga.”
“Northern? North of what?”
“The Ravn does not know. Oh, now Méarana is singing something. I cannot make it out. Your daughter really has a fine voice. Wait, I recognize it. It is a passage from her Dancer Cycle. ‘The Call to Hounds.’ That was the meeting my old master called on Hot Gates. You came, and Gwillgi, and Grimpen. I was na Fir Li’s second Pup, but he had sent Greystroke off on a mission. Oh, those bass notes capture Grimpen very well.”
“Bass notes…” Bridget ban steps into the hallway and calls, “Mr. Wladislaw, is Méarana’s harp still in the sitting room?”
“No, mum.”
“Please alert Mr. Tenbottles. Graceful Bintsaif, would you open the door, please?”
The junior Hound tries the hoígh plate, but the door does not respond. “It’s locked, Cu.”
“Did I ask ye whether it be locked or nae; or did I tell ye to open it?”
“Cu!” Graceful Bintsaif pulls a device from her belt pouch and places it against the door plate. The light on it turns from red to green and the door slides open in its accustomed manner.
The lavatory is empty, of course. On the vanity a voice synthesizer cracks on about abstruse modalities in poetry and song. Bridget ban picks it up and studies it, finds a button, and silences the faux voices. How, she wonders, did Olafsdottr smuggle the device in with her? Surely, they had searched her every cavity! But then she remembers that the intruder had taken a little longer than needful to make her way from the yards to the sitting room. She had paused to stage this here. Oh, that was coolly done, and argued that she had always foreseen the need to employ it.
“They escaped through the ventilation,” Graceful Bintsaif says, and she points to higher on the wall, where a cover screen dangles from a single fastener.
“How clichéd of our Ravn,” murmurs the Red Hound. “I would have thought better of her.” Then she curses. “No, the ventilator is where she hid her devices and weapons before she entered the sitting room. She brought a Cloak with her. Two Cloaks. And when we walked in, they walked out, as cool as you please.”
“Then … your daughter went with her willingly?”
“I don’t doubt she broached the whole notion. Or that she thought it wholly her own. But that scheming skald of a Shadow led her to it by her pert little nose. Presenting herself as a poet and storyteller; claiming a love for Donovan buigh. The lying little…”
“What! Was none of it true what she told us?”
“Oh, all of it was true. That is the best kind of lie.”
“What now?” The junior Hound spreads her hands helplessly.
Bridget ban nods to the voice synthesizer. “Olafsdottr came to fetch me, not my fool of a daughter. And since I would not go and help her free Donovan, she took Méarana.”
“But what sort of aid could a harper provide…? Aah. But, Cu, all of the reasons you gave for not going to Donovan’s rescue apply to…”
“Graceful Bintsaif, probabilities do not matter in this case. No, we will do as Méarana asked.” She nods deference to the voice synthesizer. “We will call to Hounds.”
Notes for the Curious
It’s a big Spiral Arm and the technology of thousands of years from now is about as imaginable as airliners would be to Assyrians. It helps that there were intervening dark ages, lost technologies, and deliberate suppression of innovation. That lets us get away with over-the-horizon science and technology of here and now. Take some stuff that we maybe almost know how to do, and then suppose that we can do it really well. The list below can be thought of as the acorns from which the oaks of some Spiral Arm technology have grown.
1. “Subway tunnels” through space. Just a gleam in the physicists’ eyes, for now: http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw86.html
2. Meat vats.
Dr. Vladimir Mironov of the Medical University of South Carolina, as well as researchers in the Netherlands, are presently working on the growth of “in-vitro” or cultured meat: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110130/sc_nm/us_food_meat_laboratory_feature
3. Gravity grids.
Depend on antigravity. Recent citings found here: http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw83.html
4. Domino Tight’s exoskeleton.
We’re already making their precursors: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=2174
5. Invisibility cloaks.
We can’t make them yet, but see here: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/11/16/space.time.cloak/index.html?hpt=T2
6. Self-assembly and self-repair of shenmats, equipment, and systems.
Self-healing polymer mixtures from Oak Ridge National Lab and the University of Tennessee: http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/v42_3_09/article15.shtml
Nanoparticles assembling into complex arrays at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/press-releases/2009/10/22/new-route-to-nano-self-assembly/
A University of Illinois polymer with self-sensing properties that can react to mechanical stress: http://news.illinois.edu/news/09/0506polymers.html
Raytheon HEALICS Technology incorporates self-healing into a complex system-on-chip (SoC) design, providing the capability for the chip to sense undesired circuit behaviors and correct them automatically: http://raytheon.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=1410&pagetemplate=release
7. Teasers and dazers.
At Old Dominion University, nanosecond long, high-voltage pulses that punch holes in cell membranes could be used for a Taser-like weapon that stuns targets because the pulse temporarily disables human muscles: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16706-shocking-cancer-treatment-may-also-yield-weapon.html
8. I-ball.
Thrown cameras with image stabilization have been developed in the United Kingdom: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13639_3-10101293-42.html
Shadow culture is based loosely on the decadent Franco-Burgundian knighthood of the fifteenth century, the main source for which is Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages