“No.” And her earlier Lament turns twisted and jangled, and she sets the harp down at last and balls her hands on the table. “But I had thought he was a better man. Not an assassin, not a murderer.” She seems much affected. There are, it appears, emotions whose music is silence.
The scarred man laughs hideously. “But give him this much: at least he excelled. We suppose there is a difference between killing a particular man quickly and efficiently, and killing many men wholesale on a battlefield. Maybe you can explain the difference to us.”
“The heroic man,” she says quietly, “conquers himself.”
At this, the scarred man falls silent for a while. Then he takes his uisce bowl and spins it toward the far side of the table, where the harper snatches it before it falls off. “That’s a struggle,” he suggests darkly, “in which some of us find ourselves outnumbered.” He looks at the bowl and then at the harper.
The message is clear. She signals to the Bartender, and shortly, the “water-of-life” has been replenished. The harper receives unasked a bowl of her own, and she raises it to her lips. It is an awful, numbing liquor with the one obvious purpose of numbing something awful.
“Do you know what’s funny?” the scarred man asks her. But he doesn’t wait for an answer. “Hugh O’Carroll was a schoolteacher by vocation. That was why he was in the Southern Vale when it all broke out. All he ever wanted to do was teach children.”
“Where did he go?” the harper asks. “Where did his men address the crate?”
The scarred man grins like a skull. “Where does any such residuum wash up?”
“Ah.” The harper turns and looks out at the Barroom and studies the men in it. “Not a very glorious end for a legend.”
“Who says that was the end? It wasn’t the end of the man, nor even of the legend, though legends are always harder to end. We spoke, he and I, at that table there by the window”—a bony finger points—“and we got the whole story out of him.”
The harper reaches for her instrument. “So, then it’s to Jehovah next.”
“No. There is one more beginning.”
Suantraí: Breaking on the Peripheral Shore
It began near the Rift, the scarred man says…
…a region where despair has become a feature of the sky. A place where some ancient god had drawn a knife across the galaxy’s throat and left a black gaping flow of blood. In this void there are no suns—or no living suns, an emptiness made all the less bearable by the surrounding shores of light.
On the farther shore of this hole in the sky gleam distant suns with magic names—Dao Chetty, Tsol, the Century Suns—stars whose worlds are storied in antiquity: strange worlds, ancient worlds, decadent worlds, worlds of peculiar and exotic customs. From the hither shore, they appear as they once had been: antique light hundreds of years on the journey, the lamps of the Old Commonwealth before it crumbled. A telescope subtle enough might still glimpse those halcyon days in the tardy images just now breaking on the Peripheral shore.
A happier time, the stories said; a time before the Great Cleansing. Now the Confederacy of Central Worlds—tightly ruled, patiently waiting, watching the Periphery with hungry eyes—squats upon that distant shore across the gap of stars.
Thankfully few roads cross the Rift, for the electric currents that crease space into superluminal folds depend on the plasmas of roaring suns, and there are no suns in the Rift. Those that do cross are as tenuous as rope suspension bridges across a gaping canyon, their end points snubbed to stubborn blue giants. The crossing points have been carefully mapped by the fleets of High Tara, the Greater Hanse, and the Hatchley Commonwealth. Their survey ships have pricked each on their charts and noted the speed of space—the local-c—and other such qualities of space-time; and by each such crossing they have positioned a squadron of cruisers and swift-boats. These check the bona fides of the trade ships that venture out and of those that venture in; and await the day when Confederate corsairs pour across the Rift in a wave of conquest. Then they will die—for what is a squadron against a fleet?—but the swift-boats will stream out and spread posthumous warnings to all the nearby suns.
The High Taran squadron commanded by the Cu na Fir Li guards the crossing known as St. Gothard’s Pass. This current curls in from a frontier province of the Confederacy and, on the Peripheral side of the Rift, entangles a blue giant called the Sapphire Point Interchange. From there, short Newtonian crawls reach the Palisades Parkway, which skirts the edge of the Rift toward the Old Planets, and the Silk Road, which winds its way around two dozen stars before reaching the great interchange at Jehovah, whence to Gladiola, and Ugly Man; to New Chennai and Hawthorn Rose; to Alabaster, and far Gatmander. A third current flies off from Sapphire Point to the Galactic East, whose worlds are as yet unsettled and unexplored.
It was, in the reckoning of Fir Li, the obvious invasion point. No other crossing offered such ready access to so extensive a volume of the ULP. He had said so, and often, to the Ardry of High Tara, Tully King O’Connor, until, tiring of this Jeremiah in his court, the King had ordered Fir Li to take personal command at Sapphire Point.
So Fir Li had taken his “Pups” and his personal ships, and heighed off to stand the watch. Yet, where his enemies at court saw defeat and exile, Fir Li tallied a triumph. He was a Hound, and Hounds usually get what they want. Since then, captains and men and ships had come, and served their rotations, and gone, but the Hound of Fir Li stayed on—an exile from the court, or a sentry on the wall, depending on one’s point of view.
Over time, some courtiers had whispered, the sight of the Rift, of such an emptiness in the midst of light, could break a man, and drive him mad.
A Hound of the Ardry could be many things and any thing. Loyal for a certainty. Relentless on the scent. The High King had no more loyal servants than the Hounds. They were resourceful; skilled in all manner of arts, both politic and martial; without pity or remorse when what had to be done had to be done. They could use words the way the Meathmen of New Eireann used claymores—often with the same decapitating results—but they were no strangers to other weapons. A single Hound, dropped at dusk into the Vale of New Eireann, could have stopped the civil war in a night and a day.
Na Fir Li, in his youth, had not been the least of this company. He had overthrown the Fourth Tyrant of Gladiola with a few well-placed rumors dropped in the bars of Florentz City. He had for five years managed the planet of Valency, where his name is yet revered, ending their awful Interregnum. He had directed the reconstruction on Ugly Man after the earthquakes there. He had assassinated fifteen men and women who had deserved death; and rescued twenty-seven who had not. He had even crossed the Rift, to walk the fabled streets of the Secret City on Dao Chetty, where none but Those of Name may tread.
Messenger, spy, ambassador, saboteur, assassin, planetary manager—a Hound could be whatever the Grand Seanaid desired when the Ardry spoke “with office” in the name of the ULP, for no one loved the ULP more than the Hounds of “The Particular Service.” It might fairly be said that the League existed as something more than a theory only in the convictions of the Hounds; and if ever there was anything that could drive a man mad, it was not the Sapphire Point Station, but devotion to a thing that was not quite real.