Micmac Anne shook her head. “Then he would have been here by now.”
“And the authorities would already have known about New Eireann,” said Greystroke. “That’s what I was starting to say. Maybe he went somewhere else instead.”
“No,” said Anne. “He’d have come here. He’d have come for me—and maybe for Johnny, too. But he’d have come here.”
“Maybe he was delayed,” said the Fudir. “New Eireann was pretty badly wrecked. If some of the food he took on turned out to be bad, he may have had to turn aside at Gessler’s Sun or…”
Anne shook her head. “That old ship is always breaking down. He’ll show up sooner or later, and Hogan will have a big mouthful of excuses. Gessler’s Sun Cut-off is a one-way slide down to the Lower Tier. He’ll be months coming back the long way round. What’s this about New Eireann?”
They told her about the Cynthian raid and the devastation they had left behind. “We’re planning to chase after them,” Hugh said, earning disapprovals from his two companions.
But Anne treated the comment as a joke. “You won’t have far to go,” she said. “Xenophanes, out of Foreganger, came in, day before yesterday,” Anne said. “Her captain told me that a Cynthian fleet was swissed in an ambush off Peacock Junction, oh, a fortnight ago.”
“A fortnight…” Hugh exchanged looks with the others.
“The timing’s right,” the Fudir said.
“And how many Cynthians fleets can there be?” asked Hugh.
“More than you might think,” said Anne. “There’s always a couple of them out cruising; though they don’t normally venture as far as the Grand Trunk.”
After Anne had gone, Greystroke pursed his lips. “We’d have to pass through Peacock Junction anyway.”
The Fudir frowned over his balled fists. “Seems someone else wants the Dancer.”
“Not necessarily,” Greystroke said. “The ambush may have been fortuitous. No one around Peacock would have heard yet about the rieving of New Eireann.”
“Don’t jump to a conclusion, Pup,” the Fudir said, “You know how those people like to brag. Someone could have known of the Molnar’s intentions beforehand. Another Cynthian clan, maybe. They let him do the hard work, then waited on his return path to seize the fruits.”
Greystroke nodded. “In which case, they have the Dancer now. But it’s more likely the Dancer is flotsam out in the Peacock coopers.”
“That’s not even a needle in a haystack,” said Hugh.
An Craic
The scarred man smiles. “What a hopeless search that would have been! Needles and haystacks ain’t in it. And yet they set off with a will.” He holds his bowl out to be filled.
The harper knows some wonder that a man could drink so much yet show so little of its effects. “But of course the scepter was not tumbling about in the Peacock coopers. The ambushers seized it with great deliberation. We already know that.”
“Aye, but they did not.”
“It is too close in here,” she says. “The air grows oppressive. Perhaps we could take a walk outside. I need to see there is still a larger world.”
The scarred man smiles. “But in here we have travelers from every corner of the Spiral Arm and—who knows?—perhaps even from the Central Worlds? And what world could be larger than that painted by our words. In our stories, we span all times, all places, all people. Out there…” And he gestured toward the Great Doors. “Out there, you will find only the prosaic world of shippers and merchants. In here live heroes and adventures. Here, failure can really matter.”
“It always ends in failure. You told me so yourself. An’ if it always ends in failure, how can it matter at all?”
“Because it matters how you fail,” the scarred man says, and in so bleak a voice that the harper cannot answer him. Instead, she plays aimlessly for a time, improvising a lament.
“What happened to January?”
The scarred man shrugs. “Sometimes ships never show up. No one knows why.”
“Everyone else who possessed the Dancer died.”
“Do you really believe in curses?”
“They are easier to believe than coincidences.”
“Then believe in possibilities. January isn’t dead until you open the box and look. An odyssey grows crowded unless you leave some folks behind.”
“Then let’s see what folks are ahead,” she tells him when the music has warmed, a little, the winter in his soul. “It will be on Peacock Junction where the princess of Hounds will meet the exiled prince at last.”
The eyes of the scarred man are hard, and so it is difficult to note them hardening further. “There is a word for a female hound. Why you think her a princess, I cannot fathom. I knew her. And as for exiled princes, she will have three to choose from, for each of the three is exiled in one way or another.”
“It was the one way that I was thinking of. And she will choose him.”
She does not expect a response, for the scarred man has made an art form of avoiding response; and so she is startled when he says, “She chose each of them, and none of them.”
That answer, unlooked for, stills the strings of her harp. “Oh?” she says. And then again, in a smaller voice, “Oh.”
The scarred man allows her the silence. Perhaps he even gloats. But eventually he teases at her. “Is the pattern complete yet? Is it a song? Each time the Dancer changes hands…”
“…it moves closer to the Rift. A curious coincidence.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in those. All things move toward their natural end, but ‘end’ can be spoken of in three ways.”
“What!” cries the harper. “First you tell me a story with too many beginnings? Now it is to have too many ends!”
The scarred man grimaces. “No, these are different kinds of ends. The first, and simplest, is simply the terminus, where action stops, because there is no more potential for further action. ‘The End,’ as we like to say when a story comes to a stop. As if any story ever truly came to a stop. There’s always an ‘ever after,’ isn’t there?”
“I’ve heard it said,” the harper responds dryly. “But it’s life that goes on; the story stops.”
“And so all of life is a dreary sequel once the climax is past?” But the sarcasm dies on his lips and his eyes turn inward. “Why, so it is,” he whispers in surprise. “So it is.”
“And the second way? Surely, your story has not come to a termination!”
But the scarred man does not answer.
Goltraí: Down the Rabid Whole
In the thirteen metric days since her acquisition of the STC records, the scarred man says when he resumes the tale, Bridget ban’s ship had become something of a convent, from which she spurned the enticements of the profane world and within which she had busied herself with conventional duties. There was never a shortage of administrative tasks. Her report on the Delphic was still unfinished and there were one or two other matters of a similar nature. Now and then, she prodded Pulawayo about the STC records, to maintain the pretense that she did not already have them. Still, the stall could not be prolonged forever. What she needed was a plausible reason to abort her search for the phantom fleet, and she sat tight in the hope that something would come up.