It was not until the shoulders had flattened out that Bridget ban could relax and leave the steering to the intelligence. Hugh helped her relax, though where he had learned the art of massage he did not say. If only intelligences had judgment, she told him; and he recounted the Fudir’s tales of ancient Terran triumphs, the fanciful hyperbole of which amused her.
And so day followed day. A strange road requires close study, and Bridget ban spent more time in the saddle than on more familiar routes. Occasional messages drifted back from Greystroke. Several times, the shoulders flattened out into ramps, but each time the images of the phantom fleet continued past them. What unknown stars lay at the ends of them?
To maintain the charade of affection for the remainder of the transit, neither Hugh nor Bridget ban could plausibly deny a kiss or a casual touch to the other. But there is this strange property of a simulated affection. Continued long enough, it becomes real enough. There were certain sympathies of character that lay between the Ghost and the Hound that eased the transition and made it all but insensible. Bridget ban discovered herself looking forward to his attentions, which were not by any means entirely sexual. He was, she learned, a literate man, widely read and well spoken, and as attentive as only an assassin can be.
There came a day at last, nearly two metric weeks after they had entered the road, when Greystroke warned that the laminas were broadening once more but that this time the images of the phantom fleet had blue-shifted, which meant they were preparing to exit.
She hurried from the pilot’s saddle to tell Hugh and came to the conference room to find him standing hipshot before his “wall of evidence.” He had one arm across his chest with the other nestled elbow-in-palm and with his hand along his cheek. A tight wrinkle marked the forehead above his nose and his lips were pursed and…She came to his side and he absently draped an arm around her, and the comfort she felt at this small gesture disturbed her greatly.
Hounds sometimes took companions. Most did not last the rigors, but Hugh might be one who did, and the Little One Himself would almost surely have given his grace. She might have chosen Hugh, did she not already love another.
“We’ve come off the ramp,” she said, and he nodded.
“Among the Old Planets,” he said.
“Aye, you guessed that part right.”
“I didn’t guess.” He rapped the surface of the holowall with his knuckle, striking Old ’Saken, and Die Bold and Friesing’s World, knocking on the doors to Waius and ’Bandonope and Abyalon. “Which one?” he asked.
“The intelligence has recognized the Lizard and Winking Arnulf. We’ve come out in the coopers of Die Bold.”
He turned to her and smiled. “Welcome home.”
An Craic
“Wait,” cries the harper. “Wait!” Her harp is stilled and she has half risen from her seat. “What do you mean she already loved another? Who was it? Why have I heard nothing of him? She always said that—”
She stops abruptly, but the scarred man seizes upon the caesura. “She always said?” His voice rises from his gravelly whisper to a growl. He is a sleeping predator surprised in his den. His age has not stilled his joints and as fast as a black mamba striking he has seized her wrist and holds her tight against her flight. “How do you know what she ‘always said’?” His eyes pin her as the snake pins a bird, his face as hard as flint.
Until flint cracks into shale and slides.
“Oh, by the gods! Oh, by the gods, you are her daughter! You’ve lied to me this whole time!”
His rising voice has turned a few heads in the broad common room of the Bar. A man in the uniform of a Gladiolan “cop” sees how he holds her restrained by her wrist and, scowling, rises from his seat. The Bartender reaches under the bar and something black and metallic emerges in his fist.
The scarred man sees all this, as he sees everything but the woman before him, with only a part of his attention. He might almost welcome their assault, so ready is he to fight the world over this latest of betrayals. But in the end, and this end takes but a moment to achieve, he releases her.
And she does not run. He has not answered her question.
“I’ve not lied to you,” she tells him.
“Your silence was your lie. Be gone. Go. The story’s ended.”
But she does not move. “There are three sorts of ends, you told me; and this seems like none of them.”
But the scarred man is not to be comforted from his rage. He shoves the table violently aside, toppling goblets, shrieking its legs against the flooring, and he bolts from his niche in the wall. He moves swiftly, half bent over, and he passes like a ghost through the crowded room. The Great Doors swing wide, and he is gone.
The harper hurries after, but when she emerges onto Greaseline Street, there is no sign of him, not northward toward the spaceport, not southward toward the Hostel. Then she turns and looks past the Bar’s rooftop where the ramshackle Corner of Jehovah and its tangled warren of alleys clutter the slopes of Mount Tabor.
An Sos
But a woman who has in her something of the strider does not hesitate at the brink. What chasm can be crossed in two steps? She enters the Corner and immediately it is as if the world has changed. The paving grows irregular, then crumbles, then ceases to exist at all. Streets become alleys and gullies, some too narrow for vehicles, or even for fat Jehovah merchants. Stairs clamber the sides of Mount Tabor. Most of them switch-back to take the bite out of the pitch, but many others are an undaunted climb straight up the slope. The different ways the scarred man might have gone increase like loaves and fishes with every stride she takes.
She comes at last to a sort of plaza—if such a broad and open term does grace for such a constricted space—and here she stops. The plaza is bordered by gloaming buildings, each four or five stories high, some with windows, most presenting blank backs to the outer world. They are the color of sand and dirt, and indeed many of them appear to have been built from that most common of materials—and are now reverting to their original state. It is more like a close room than a public square, and lacks only a roof to complete the illusion. In the center, a fountain gurgles. The water is nearly the same color as the surrounding buildings, and has left brown stains in the stone of the basin. Water drools like venom from a stone cobra’s mouth, lacking the pressure head for any more vigorous jet. The cobra is erect and flaring, and on his coils sleeps a recumbent man cut from the same dull stone.
No less than seven exits cleave the wall of buildings, ranging from pedestrian walkways wide enough for two men to pass each other to narrow cracks between the buildings through which most men might not pass at all. Each path is of rammed earth; each is accented with raddī-piles of rubbish and flat pans of cracked mud where the heat has sucked fetid pools dry. She goes to the mouth of each in turn and finds no sign that the scarred man has passed that way.
In despair, she returns to the fountain. She had let her tongue slip its leash. Now, whatever the scarred man may think, there will be things to her forever unknown.