He looks back the way he has swum and marvels that he had the reserves to cross the river. Flames light the sky over the Secret City, and the hissing of the fires blends with the murmur of the river’s current, the creaking of insects. He hears the distant crackle of bolt tanks and thud of buildings.
Not much left of the Revolution, he thinks.
But whatever you rescue from a burning house is a gain.
Motion through the riverside growth! He recedes into the shadows and slips a knife from his belt. A voice whispers his name.
His true name.
It has been years, a lifetime, since he has heard it. And he recognizes the voice.
In relief, he rises from the shadows and whispers urgently, “Over here.” He waits to see if he has made one last mistake but recognizes the other when he steps forth. “You made it out of the Chancellery, then.”
The other rebel steps forward and embraces him. “Glad to see you got free, chief. Are there any more with you?”
“No. I … I thought for a while there were, but…”
“I understand.” He kisses him once on each cheek. “I hope you do, too.”
And with that the Protector’s Special Security forces close in and pin his arms to his side and take the knife from his hands. They are not gentle. The goggles are yanked from his head. One of them punches him in the belly and he doubles over. Looking up, he catches the eye of the man who had been his friend, and asks him, “Why?”
And that man shrugs and will not look at him. “Close fits my shirt,” he answers, “but closer far my skin.”
Donovan gasped and sat bolt upright in his seat in the theater. The Keener turned to him in solicitude. “Are you all right?”
“Yes. No.” He rose and hurried up the aisle to the exit. The dancers did not falter at his apparent rudeness. Their rhythmic clacking followed him until cut off by the theater doors. In the lobby, Donovan bent over, hands on knees, huffing.
The Keener of Blades had followed behind him. “You are ill,” he said. “I would take you to the doctor, but he’s in there.” He waggled a thumb at the theater.
Donovan sucked in a deep breath and stood upright. “Is the bartender in there, too?”
Nowhere in the official accounts Donovan had read or resimulated on Oschous’s Black Horse or Gidula’s White Comet had there been any mention of the internal organization of the Rising. But he remembered now. Padaborn had had four section chiefs for the assault on the Secret City. Rajasekaran had died in the first rush. Lai Showan had been lost trying to hold the Security Police Center. O’Farrell had gone down with the Chancellery Building. And from the ruins of the Education Ministry—from the Lion’s Mouth itself—the fourth chief had escaped unseen: Tomas Krishna Murphy.
Only to be betrayed on the far side of the river by Geshler Padaborn himself, who, having been captured earlier, had broken under duxing kaoda.
He was a great man, said the Sleuth. But it is not given even to great men to endure the third degree of torture.
He seemed hale enough when last we saw him, the Pedant retorted
“Not all scars show,” said Donovan.
“What?” said the Keener, who had accompanied him to the tavern.
The scarred man shook his head. He thought that Padaborn had buckled under the Threat and not the Tools. Before the Shadows of the Names employed the Tools, they would first tell you in great detail about them. Then the Shadows would show them to you. Then they would demonstrate the Tools on another prisoner. It often saved considerable time.
I wonder what became of him?
Who cares? He turned traitor!
Consider what Those did to us, said the young man, and he was the greater threat. He had the charism that O’Farrell and we lacked. He could inspire men to die. He may have been harvested, or pithed, or—
“Or they did to him what they did to us.”
That might explain why the rebel Shadows confused the two of us. The simulations and reports named no other rebels but Padaborn. Part of a deliberate strategy, Donovan supposed, to minimize the Rising by minimizing the participants.
“Something still does not feel right.”
“I knew it,” said the Keener. “You stay here. Take care of our guest, Khenrik Jal, and I will fetch the Dispenser of Efficacious Medicines.” The Keener then ran off, leaving Donovan in the tavern.
Donovan turned to the bartender. “You heard him. Give me some of that ‘efficacious medicine.’”
And so, following a night of sleepless turmoil, Tomas Krishna Murphy came at last to the last site of alclass="underline" Iracatanam Antapakirantamthe, the Capital of All the Worlds. If the Commonwealth had had a center, if it could have been said to be in any one place, that place was here, in this great sprawling metropolis, in the Hall of Suns.
“She’s a creeping place,” the earnest Terrans of New Bramburg had warned him before he had departed. “There are ghosts among the ruins.”
From the air, the site of Antapak had shown clearly. As the rain forest had dried out and withered, it had stripped the cloak from the Capital of All the Worlds and exposed her bones to the eyes of strangers. Donovan parked his rented hopper in a broad plaza near the center of town. Perhaps it had once been an outdoor theater, or a sporting venue, or perhaps it had actually been a hopper-park. Now, it was simply an open space littered with a spill of white blocks.
More remained of Antapak than of any of the other sites he had visited, but that is not to say that very much remained. Layered upon the neglect and decay of years was evidence of more deliberate destruction. Those portions of the capital that had sat on the shoreline bluffs had been tumbled into the waters below, where the proud towers of other days could yet be spied gleaming through the crystalline sea. The Names of Dao Chetty had vented a certain measure of spleen on this place, Donovan decided, because it was a reminder to them that they had merely built on the bones of others. Yet by reducing Antapak to ruins they may only have underscored that very fact.
Perhaps they had given up. Some parts of the sprawling city seemed untouched. The old Commonwealth had built for the ages; and, though an age had come and gone, a portion of their work remained. Donovan remembered how parts of the Commonwealth Ark that he and Méarana had found scant years before had remained in working condition.
After an hour or so of wandering, Donovan stopped for a drink of water and a bit of a mustard-and-cheese combination known locally as “music.” He sat upon one of the overturned blocks that had once foundationed a building, and tried to imagine what the street before him had been like when this had been a lively capital and crowds of people had thronged its busy avenues.
In the silence, though, he heard a faint sound—a skritch-skratch, a chattering as if by gravel upon stone. He turned and looked behind him and saw nothing. An insect? But it was like no insect-sound he had ever heard before.