Bridget ban sighed and spoke to him, this time in the Yellow Code. “He of Fir Li and I are not rivals. He seeks no place at the court; and the God Alone knows I seek no place by the Rift. And even were we rivals, our interests converge the now on this strange scepter. Ye serve him better by joining me.”
He smiled. “You are even more attractive than the stories pretend.”
“And you, even more drab. Shall we pass over my beauty for more weighty matters?”
But Greystroke shook his head. “I never said you were beautiful.” He poured a cup of tea and, placing a lump of honey-sugar between his teeth, drank the hot liquid. “Shall we continue this conversation in your office?” he said when he had set his cup on its saucer. “I’ve asked my deputies to join us there.”
“Deputies! A geggie I said, and a geggie, I mean. Next, an’ it mought be stray cats yer takin’ in. I’ll be speaking tae each of them before I agree tae travel wi’ ’em. Send them to my office. Then go and see about the supplies we’ll be needing.”
Bridget ban called her ship Endeavour and unlike Greystroke’s wildly exuberant interior, it was a model of form and function, the one following the other in orderly fashion. There were no beasts on her control knobs, thank you very much, nor even much in the way of adornment, although the few pieces that were displayed might have been revealing to anyone perceptive enough to read them. She had a custom of keeping some memento of each case that she worked.
She had donned a dinner jacket of pure white in which to conduct the interviews. On it, she wore beside the insignia of the Particular Service only the Badge of Night. It pleased her that Greystroke was taken aback by the sight of it, and by what it said about her and what she was prepared to do when necessity had won the field.
Someday, she thought at him, you may earn this badge yourself, and wish you hadn’t.
Little Hugh O’Carroll proved a well-built young man: self-confident, and with an easy smile. He had been forced upon Greystroke at Eireannsport, but the Pup had kept him on when he could have left him on Jehovah. The Pup was much given to whimsy, and one never knew what would catch his fancy. Bridget ban had supposed that it was only because O’Carroll had become Sheol to the Fudir’s Jehovah—a satellite carried along by its primary. The Pup was not about to let the Terran go until he had been led to Donovan, and that meant keeping O’Carroll, too.
But Hugh was certainly a potential asset to the team. His skills in the deadly arts were useful, but his tactical sense and his ability to marshal and organize resources could prove invaluable. No one rises to assistant planetary manager without considerable talent in those fields.
His air of patient competence reminded her of a jaguar lounging on a tree limb. He was not a schemer, to arrange circumstances to his own advantage, but he was ever aware of what those circumstances were, and could spring quickly and unexpectedly when an opportunity appeared among them.
“What do you think we should do with the Dancer?” she asked him at the conclusion of their interview.
“Me?” he said. “Frankly, I never believed the old legend. The Fudir was only a way to get back to New Eireann. Now…?” He shrugged. “If the Dancer is just a funny brick, then this whole expedition is a fool’s errand. But if it is what the legends say…I didn’t like the idea of the Cynthians having it. Still less, whoever had the stones to take it from them.”
“You don’t want the Dancer yourself, then, to regain control of New Eireann?”
O’Carroll threw his head back and laughed. “No.”
He said it far too easily, given that he had waged a guerilla for just that purpose. “You’ve kept your office-name,” she pointed out.
“It was the name the Fudir met me under, and Greystroke, too. Why go back to my base-name?”
“Because it’s your true name?”
He looked away a moment. “That, it is not.”
At first, the Hound had thought to use O’Carroll’s friendship with the Fudir as the handle to control him; but she had seen in certain glances he had sent her way during the interview that there was an older and far more reliable handle for that.
It would be only a matter of providing the right opportunity for him to seize.
The Fudir was in many ways the more intriguing of the two. In her private bestiary, she labeled him a “fox.” She suspected from his conversation that he was a clever man. From his silences, she knew he was. Indeed, she thought he might be the cleverest one on the team. Certainly, he thought so, and that could be used against him, should the need arise.
“So,” she said. “’Twas yourself who started all this.”
The Fudir sat at ease, with a small tight smile lightening his otherwise morose face. His eyes had fallen on her badge, and she saw in the briefest of flickers that he had recognized it for what it was and that, in some fashion, he approved. “I wouldn’t say I started it,” he said. “Maybe King Stonewall started it millennia since. But the quadrille was already spinning before I heard tell of it. January had consigned it to Jumdar, and the Cynthians had seized it from her before I even reached New Eireann. So I arranged for Greystroke to take me off New Eireann—”
She interrupted. “That’s not the way he tells it.”
Again, that taut smile. “He has his perspective and I have mine. Greystroke is good, but I’m glad you’re leading this team and not him.”
“You think him deficient as a leader?”
“It’s not that. Men can’t follow a man if they lose track of him too often.”
Bridget ban could not prevent the laugh.
“To lead,” the Fudir volunteered, “a man must inspire, and to inspire requires a certain vividness, wouldn’t you say? Now, yourself…Well, vivid is too pale a word. Men would follow you into the coldest parts of Hel.” His smile broadened and his expression lost some of its habitual furtiveness. “You’d warm the place up nicely.”
“Awa’ wi’ ye,” she said, reverting to her native accents. “Ye’ll turn my head.”
“And why not turn it? Your profile is a fine one.”
Bridget ban continued to smile, but no longer laughed. “Don’t be too clever. The blarney will nae get ye snuggled wi’ me…”
“Why, thanks for the offer, but there are women a-plenty in every port of the League, and their price isn’t near as high as the one you’d extract.”
Bridget ban, who had been about to put him off as a first step to reel him in, was slightly nettled by this preemptive refusal. “So, ye’ll follow me, but nae too closely? Is that it?”
“Cu, you listen to what people say. That’s a rare gift, and it more than compensates for the nose.”
Her hand had started involuntarily toward that member before her training stayed it. Instead, she drummed her nails on the desktop. “You think a great deal of yourself.”
“And everyone else thinks little; so, it averages out.”
“Yes, and that works to your advantage, doesn’t it?”
The Terran smiled mockingly and spread his hands palm up. “In my work, it pays to be underestimated.”
Bridget ban leaned forward over the desk. “That is not a mistake I will make. Tell me. What do you propose we do with the Dancer, once we’ve obtained it?”
The Fudir chuckled and wagged a finger. “That’s another thing I like about you. You don’t use that awful word.”
“What word…?”
“‘If.’ Let me turn the question ulta-pulta. I suppose your plan is to give it to the Ardry. Tell me why.”
“You saw New Eireann. And you must know of the Valencian Interregnum or the awful line of Tyrants on Gladiola. There was a terrible rieving two years back on Tin Cup, not by pirates, but by the People’s Navy in a dispute over an uninhabited system that lay between them. If the Ardry had the Twisting Stone, he could put an end to that.”