“The rievers didn’t take everything,” Hugh said, pointing to the wreath on the wall.
The Fudir, who had been standing with his head slightly bowed, looked up, blinked. “Yeah, I noticed it earlier. It’s the Ourobouros Circuit—not the original, a replica. Too much trouble to rip it off the wall, I suppose; though not for lack of trying. You can see the marks from the lasers and the saws. Not worth stealing. Look, if you want to come with me to the Hadramoo, you’re welcome.”
The invitation startled Hugh and he cocked his head. “Why?”
The Fudir shrugged. “It’s a barbarous region, and I could use some civilized company.”
An Craic
The harp thunders savage chords and the men and women in the Bar of Jehovah sing and roar with it. The harper has abandoned her table with the scarred man and resumed her place in the corner. Fists pound tables; voices join in chorus. She stops, and voices boil in protest. One more! Just one more! The Bartender watches with approval. This is more like it! Geantraí. Something glorious and triumphant to lift the spirits!
But, instead, she gentles them with suantraí for a horse ridden hard must be cooled afterward by a hot-walker. Peaceful strains soothe excited nerves; tones of bliss bless dreamy joy. These, too, the Bartender regards with favor, so the harper improvises a transient motif from the goltraí solely to wipe his smile away with a finger’s brush of loss and desolation. But it is a trick sorrow, not the real thing. The Bartender sees that it is a joke, and grins across the room. They understand each other. She closes with a rollicking march and once more the spacers in the Bar respond with stamping feet. But it is lagniappe and she has gentled them and now when she rises from her stool, they let her go.
The scarred man is waiting in his alcove with a smile she had not thought his face capable of making. “You know how to work them, darlin’,” he says with admiration. “There is something of the Dancer in you, I think. You command, and they respond. Is that why you play? For the sense of power?”
“You confuse consequence with intention. My talent lets me pluck their hearts with my own nails, but I don’t play to play with their hearts.”
“I should hope not,” says the scarred man. “Nails leave scars.”
The harper turns and makes a sign to the Bartender. “I’ll play once more before I go.”
“Yes. It’s hard to put the scepter down.” He smiles as if at a secret joke: his lips stretch and his eyes turn inward.
The harper thinks suddenly that her companion might have been a handsome man in his youth, before what had happened happened, and that within this sour old man had once lived a sour young one. (Sweetness was something she would not credit.) Almost, she asks what tragedy had reduced his body to such ruin; and she forbears only because prowling old ruins can be dangerous. They are full of deadfalls and uneasy masonry; and wild things have crept inside.
“So the Fudir did believe in the Dancer, after all,” she said.
“Why suppose he believed in anything?”
“No one chases off to the Hadramoo on speculation. I confess, I thought at first he wanted only high-level access on New Eireann for some criminal plan—a ‘scramble,’ they call it—and Hugh was his tool to gain it.”
“And the legend was his tool to gain Hugh? No, the Fudir was as twisted as the Dancer, but in those days there were still a few things he believed in. If one belief was a mad fancy, what of it? Tell me you’ve no mad fancies. Tell me you’d no other motive in coming here than to pick the tale of the Dancer off my teeth.”
The harper does not answer for a while and she brushes her strings gently with the back of her nails and they sigh in glissando. “And what of January,” she says. “Surely, he had more right to the Dancer than the Fudir.”
But the scarred man shakes his head. “What has right to do with any of it? If only they’d wondered about the chair; or if Hugh hadn’t had, as the Terrans like to say, ‘a big mouth.’”
“What chair?”
The scarred man signals the bartender for another bowl. The harper is paying, so why not? “One player is nearer his goal, at least,” he says when the drink has been delivered.
The harper cocks his head. “You mean Little Hugh?”
The scarred man laughs.
Suantraí: Dog Days
You may recall, the scarred man says, taking up the tale once more, that Fir Li had called to Hounds…
…with the thought of penetrating the Confederacy, to confirm on that end what he had sent Greystroke to confirm on the other. But Hounds are few and space is large and travel through the creases sufficiently slow that in the three and a half metric weeks since he had sent the call only three Hounds had proven near enough to respond.
The first to arrive was Grimpen, who by chance had been passing through Peacock Junction when the swift-boat sang its summons. He was a large, rough-hewn man who resembled nothing so much as a nickel-iron asteroid garbed in colorful tunic and pantaloons. Yet he had remarkably soft and gentle lips and an easy way about him. His colleagues regarded him as “slow and ponderous,” although he preferred the term “methodical.” If Fir Li was a fleet wolfhound straining at the leash, Grimpen was more the St. Bernard: careful, helpful, resourceful, intelligent. Not the sort on whom to bet in a race—unless the race were one of endurance.
A few days later, Francine Thompson arrived from Wiedermeier’s Chit, where she had just resolved a string of serial murders by a man calling himself “the Delphic.” Breezy, and confident to the point of arrogance, she used the office-name of Bridget ban, and she strode the gangways of Hot Gates like the queen of High Tara. Her hair was red and her skin was gold and she was living proof that deadliness could decorate. She had a voice like the bursting sea—rushing and crashing and with just a taste of salt.
A week after that, Gwillgi passed through Sapphire Point on his way to the Lesser Hanse and, intercepting Fir Li’s broadcast, decided to lay over and consider the matter. The problem that awaited him on Hanower was important, but not urgent, and might already be settled by financial auditors before Gwillgi arrived with Plan B. In either case, the suspect would be brought to accounts. Gwillgi was a banty man sporting a thin moustache, and seemed somehow to be wound from razor wire. He did not grow hair so much as bristles, and his eyes were a deadly topaz in color.
Fir Li did not think that any others would appear soon enough to matter, and so he called a pack meeting shortly after Gwillgi’s arrival, sweetening the affair with a fine board of wines and fruits and dates and a main course featuring a roasted haunch of satin tiger, prepared after the fashion of Valency with a chutney of mangoes and chilies. The crew of Hot Gates gave the Hound’s quarters wide berth, for much of what transpired within was not for outsiders to know.
In theory, they were a band of brothers, anatomy notwithstanding, but neither competency nor collegiality can entirely overcome ambition and human nature. The four Hounds who gathered in Fir Li’s private suite after the meal respected one another and worked with one another, but they did not always like one another, and kept one eye focused always on their own advantage. They were reluctant to accept orders from a peer; so, Fir Li fell back on logic and reason.