In the Lion’s Mouth

VIII. Yuts’ga: Jacques, in a Box

Domino Tight was neither so clever as Oschous, nor so powerful as Big Jacques. He was neither so agile as Little Jacques, nor so wise as Gidula. What he was, was charming. He could charm, it was said, the skin off a snake. He had, all unwittingly, charmed the Technical Name.

“Unwitting,” because had he known Tina Zhi’s true nature, he would have run very fast in another direction, in any other direction. The loves of the Names were like their other passions: too vast and too intense for any lesser vessel to contain. It would burn him out, use him up.

Though it is not clear whether, however fast and far he ran, he could have escaped, because it may have been less his charm than her choice. Charm, after all, depends a great deal on a willingness on the other part to be charmed. Perhaps she saw him one day and was struck by the curl of his hair, where it lay across his brow. Perhaps she simply wondered what life was like outside the Secret City. Or perhaps mere cold calculation moved her. With a Name, you could never tell, and all three might be one. But however it befell, his charm was no less real, and no less effective.

When Domino Tight came to his senses once more, he found himself in a downy bed set upon a flag-stoned patio in a bower of oak and laurel. Birds sang intricate and unfamiliar songs and a dull orange sun was approaching his zenith in an amethyst sky. The breeze was cool and comforting and brought with it a scent of lily and hyacinth. The sheets that draped his naked body were warm, despite their diaphanous weave. Domino Tight considered his body, counted the scars that ornamented it, and found more than his wont.

He raised himself on an elbow and looked out through a gap in the trees down a rolling valley of pleasant green and yellow grasses to a meandering stream bordered by towering plane trees. The landscape had been artfully arranged to appear natural: shapes and contours led the eye, colors complemented, sounds soothed and roused.

The bed conformed itself to his movements, becoming a divan. The songs of the birds changed, became more resolute. He saw one sitting on a perch in a camouflaged cage. It was called a “king löyingmu” in the Confederal tongue. A “lovebird.”

Domino Tight might not equal Gidula for insight, but that a lovebird’s song greeted his first stirring he thought a message of sorts. As too, the artfully disguised cage in which the bird sat.

He had not yet figured it out, but he had begun to realize that there was something to figure out. Thus are always the first stirrings of wisdom. Tina Zhi was obviously not as she had represented herself, a minor functionary in the regulation of technology. But he had not yet chased that fox to its burrow.

Sitting, he examined his shattered leg. He detected no breaks, evoked no pain. He wriggled his toes and was gratified to find those members responding with enthusiasm.

Tina Zhi entered the patio through doors that had replicated the bower and so had appeared a part of it. Domino Tight glimpsed the interior of a house in black and silver and red: comfortable chairs, a carpet, a ramp curling upward. Then the doors closed and there was nothing but the trees and the yellow lilies and blue hyacinths that bordered the patio. He looked up, but saw no sign of a second floor to which the interior ramp might have led.

She wore white, translucent robes with billowing sleeves and silver borders. A silver cincture girded her waist. A necklace, also of silver but with turquoise highlights, encircled her throat, and seemed in constant motion. Her short-cropped hair had been silvered as well. Her skin was dusky, her nose long, her cheekbones high. Her body was softened by the fat of youth, yet her eyes seemed immeasurably old.

“Ah, my Domino,” she said as she swept toward him and gathered him to lay his head in her lap. “You are awake at last.”

Domino Tight had never seen the point of telling someone what he already knew. “How long was I in a coma?” he asked, thinking it might be a very long time indeed if his leg were so completely healed.

“Oh, a day, two days. Who can say when we flit from world to world?” Her hands fluttered, her voice trilled. But the flightiness that he had once found so endearing now seemed too contrived. The robes, when they billowed, were solidly opaque; but where they draped, they may as well have been spun glass. As she moved, parts of her body made brief cameos before ducking coyly behind the curtains. Her hair dye, he saw from his vantage point, overlooked no patch; and the complementary nail colors extended to her decorative nipple caps.

“How did you happen to be on Yuts’ga?” he asked. “How did you find me so quickly?”

“Oh, love.” She brushed his lips with her own, stroked his forehead, brushing back his curls. “I am never far from you. Love entangles us.”

“That sun,” he said, nodding toward the great orange disk now nearly atop the sky. “It’s not the Yutsgar sun, and no world lies but two days sliding from her.”

“An age before an age ago,” she told him in a singsong voice, “the god Aspect decreed that two hearts that had beat as one would beat always together, however far apart they wandered. And this same is true of patches of space.

“For this reason, it is called a ‘quondam state,’ from an ancient word that meant ‘in the past,’ ‘in the future,’ and ‘sometimes’ all at once, because what was one in the past will be one in the future. Do you understand?”

Domino Tight bobbed his head. “No.”

“It is Technical, with many prayers in the hailipzimou, and so understanding is not given to all. Thus the mystery must be tightly guarded by those of us in the Gayshot Bo. But the consequence is this: that by entering the quondam state at one place, you may exit from it at another. I entangled with you when first we met and so I can be at your side quondam.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing!” And he thought, Should Padaborn and the others possess this techne, the Revolution is won!

She kissed him gently once more. “And neither would you have, save that your life wanted saving. There are vestiges, the Seven Wonders, and the world must be guarded from them. Yet necessity—and the Fates—rule us all. I could not let you die.”

“And I thank you. My life is yours, now and forever.” He pulled her head down to meet his, and kissed her deeply. But more deeply inside him there was that hard nut where no Shadow ever allowed Love’s entry, and affections were wedded always to craft. Seven Wonders? Kept from the world? Another of the Wonders was undoubtedly what had healed him so swiftly and seamlessly. What were the other five?

“Vestiges,” he said. “That means ‘remains, leftovers, widows.’ Remains of what? The Commonwealth? The prehumans?” His hand found an opening in her robes and ran lightly up her back

Tina Zhi laughed like wind chimes. “Oh, the storied Commonwealth! Everything wonderful is given to it. But it fell from pride and arrogance, and its pride came from its techne. We use techne judiciously, with what wisdom we can muster—because every change in technique means a change in culture; and when a culture has been perfected, as ours has, any change would lessen that perfection. That is why the Vestigial Virgins guard them from impious use.”

Domino Tight laughed and drew her to him once more. “You are no virgin!”

“Oh,” she touched a finger to his lips to silence him, “it is just a name.”

Was there something in the way she said “name”? Domino Tight shivered, and not entirely from her strokes. “Tell me about these techniques,” he said. “I want to know all about them.”

She disengaged and stretched out beside him on the divan. She searched him out and held him. The blankets were lighter even than silk; they may as well have been air. “I can make you strong,” she said. “I can make you fast.”

“I’m already strong and fast.” He laughed.

“Not like this. And I can let you … see things.”

He squeezed her gently. “I’m already seeing things.”

“No. I will give you special lenses that you wear directly on your eyes. With them, you can see my colleagues when we wear our Cloaks.”

“What cloaks are those?”

“These.” And Tina Zhi whirled her robes about her, and disappeared.

For a moment, Domino Tight lay amazed and unmoving on the divan. Then he grew aware of her warmth next to him, the sough of her breath on his neck. He reached and found that which he desired, and heard again the wind chime of her laughter.

“Yes,” she said. “I am still here. This too, is one of the Seven Vestiges.”

“But … How is it possible?”

Tina Zhi hesitated, then said,

“Light flows like a river

Through the channels of the fabric

Around the obstructing one.

The eye sees straight

While the light bends.”

Then, dismissively, “It is Technical. It can be imitated, but not understood. The ancient god Fengtzu wove it on his loom in the age before the age.”

Domino Tight, who believed in the gods only inasmuch as he scorned them, translated that to mean that long ago there had been a man who actually did understand. “And your special lenses will enable me to see those who wear such Cloaks?”

He was no longer certain that he wanted the ability to see the Cloak-wearers, for he now understood who Those must be.

“Yes,” his lover told him, throwing her clothing aside and appearing once more very much in the flesh. “But none of them may you hurt … save this one.” Her voice hardened again at the last and her eyes grew very old. She flipped her hand, palm up, and it was as if her palm were a holostage—for a tiny figure appeared in the space above it.

It was a woman of deep chocolate brown and hair bound up in a complex weave that left neck and shoulders bare. She had the solid, muscular grace of a swimmer and in the image was emerging naked from the ocean. The image captured not an instant, but a moment: The figurine stepped toward Domino Tight as she unbound her hair, and it fell cascading to her waist.

Domino Tight was more charming than wise, but he was wise enough not to voice his thoughts to his lover. By the Fates, he thought, that is the most desirable woman I have ever seen! It would be a sin punishable by the fire to mar that perfect skin. “Why?” he asked, and then asked again with a steadier voice, “Why do you wish her dead?”

“Not dead.” Tina Zhi laughed. “But if she were hurt … If she bore a scar on her face … That would be fit punishment. Jimjim Shot abetted a foul in one of your pasdarms. You will hear of it from Oschous when I return you to Yuts’ga. That act violated … certain rules that had been laid upon her. Her punishment has been willed.”

“Willed. By whom?”

“Are you certain, Domino Tight, that you wish to know the answer to that question?”

There was something in her voice, a loss of flightiness. It no longer soared. And her eyes had grown hard. There was love in them still, but there was something else beside. Looking back, much later, he thought that was the moment when certainty had him.

She looked into his eyes for a long and lingering moment. “Ah,” she said sadly. “You have guessed. Well, fear not, my Deadly One. No harm will come to you. My loins ache for you; my heart longs for you. Together, we will foil this one’s plans.” And she closed her hand into a fist and extinguished the glowing figurine.

When Domino Tight was returned to Yuts’ga, he was half machine. Limbs of titanium enfolded him, multiplied his motions, responded to his thoughts and desires. Wearing this exoskeleton, he could race with the wind; he could strike like a hammer. His eyes could pierce the Cloaks that shrouded Those of Name. He wore such a Cloak himself. “I am become like one of the gods of old,” he told himself as he sprinted unseen through the streets of Cambertown.

“Lyre,” he said over his link, but received no response. The link was dead. High overhead, he knew, his personal satellites had been sanded out of orbit, probably the very night of his ambush. He sampled one of Big Jacques’s channels—and found himself shunted to Oschous’s network.

What he heard was gibberish, but that was because he had not Oschous’s codes. He waited for what he hoped must come. Further gibberish directed to Big Jacques’s network, then instructions directed to the lyre! Those messages he could read, and without breaking stride, he flipped down the goggles on his shenmat and studied the map thus presented. An old warehouse on the edge of town. Pale green dots showed the movements of friendlies. Red dots showed foes. He studied the dance for a time, then asked his belt node to find the best route and set off on it.

As nearly as he could determine, Big Jacques was under siege by Pendragon’s men, who had been taken in the rear by Oschous, who had in turn been surprised by Ekadrina in a classic double envelopment. He flipped over to the frequency used by the city police and with trifling decryption learned that the Riff of Yuts’ga had ordered them to stay clear of the brawl. The Riff was not overtly taking sides.

The heads-up told him that but five of his own magpies lived, Four being senior. Domino Tight thought of pinging him, but decided that if everyone thought him dead in the tavern ambush, he may as well make use of that. So he studied the map, searching out where the pressure was greatest on Oschous and Jacques. He would undermine those attacks; relieve some of the pressure.

He was on the edge of the battle space when he remembered. Tina Zhi had been hidden from his sight, but not from his touch. (Oh, by the gods! Not from his touch.) And that meant that a ramjet round that augured his body by wildest chance would kill him just as dead as one that had been properly aimed.

But in for a minim, he told himself, in for the credit. The Cloak gave him an edge; it did not grant invulnerability.

The first body he encountered was that of a magpie wearing a golden chrysanthemum. One of Pendragon’s boys. Domino Tight analyzed the forensics—the placement of the charring and the angle of the fall—and turned to a nearby building set upon a small elevation, long overgrown with saw grass. Domino climbed this until he stood just below the window. One of Big Jacque Delamond’s boys dangling there. Number Six, he saw on the brassard.

A sniper’s nest to cover the operation center, it provided an excellent field of covering fire, and he gave Magpie Six Delamond kudos for choosing the site. From below came the buzz-snap of teasers, the whine of dazers, and the louder reports of slug throwers. For sheer stopping power, there was nothing like a high velocity slug of metal plowing through the target and transferring its momentum. Now and then, he heard the bang-and-whoosh of ramjet rounds. He saw nothing, of course. Shadows did not act in order to be seen. It may as well have been a pleasant summer’s day, the whines no more than the buzzing of insects.

To the right, on the north side, was a large block of a building: the warehouse proper. A lower extension ran southward, where sealed doorways marked one-time loading docks. Embraced between these two arms, the foreground lay open. It had once been a car park and staging yard, through the plast-seal of which tufts of triumphant grasses had broken. Not even a shadow could cross that expanse unseen and the defenders by the loading docks and inside the main building had it well quartered.

A knot of defenders clustered behind derelict containers and jenny-trucks barring the attackers from reaching the docks. Among them Domino recognized Ravn Olafsdottr. On the farther left, at the south end of the lot, stood a smaller building that had evidently once been a guard shack for security inspections of incoming jenny-trucks. If there had ever been a pad for ballistic shipments, it lay outside the security perimeter.

The besieging shadows had an advantage over Oschous’s boys. The black horses were trying to fall back on the warehouse where Jacques was holed up, and so from time to time they had to show themselves and run; at which point either Ekadrina or Pendragon would try to pot them. Domino Tight studied the pattern, deduced from it whence the shots came, and set himself to observe.

Patience was rewarded. A tuft of grass moved in a way that the wind wound not. The setting sun rolled out a shadow for which there was no evident caster. An incautious shift by a magpie chanced a glimpse of shenmat. Domino Tight marked his targets, grinned fiercely, and after some self-consultation, pulled a mace from his belt.

Then he ran down the little hill—Oh! How he flew! The exoskeleton amplified his motions; the gyros maintained his balance. He swung the mace as he closed behind the first magpie, who crouched on his left knee. Brains spattered, the man fell prone without a word. Simultaneously, and with his other hand, Domino fired an EMP burst across the empty lot, to strike a Sèanmazy magpie lying behind the cover of a composite block. The pulse was weak at the distance, but it would have seemed to the taijis that it had come from Pendragon’s ranks.

In swinging the club and firing his dazer, Domino Tight had shown himself briefly. He closed the Cloak once more, but he knew better than to linger for anyone’s second look. Three more magpies to his left wriggled forward through the tall grass in a triad support formation, infiltrating closer to the warehouse compound. Domino exchanged mace for variable-knife and telescoped the blade to arm’s length. Then he ran across the line of magpies, swinging upstroke-downstroke-up, leaving three throats laughing behind him.

But the grass rippling in the wake of his progress drew fire from black horses pinned down by the old loading docks. It was called “friendly fire,” but Domino Tight saw nothing companionable in it. He changed course to avoid the grass.

His potshots across the lot into the taijis had begun to annoy the latter, and more than a few were wondering if the mums had switched sides. It was not unheard of. Someone shouted an insult and one of the mums, not yet realizing what was happening on his right flank hollered back. A slug from the black horses entered his open mouth and exited the back of his head.

“Nicely shot,” said Domino Tight over Oschous’s link.

(“Who said that?” demanded Oschous’s voice. “Who’s on my links?”)

Domino resumed link silence, for he had seen the object of his desires. He had deduced from the survival of only five of his fifteen magpies that the ambush behind the Mountain Dragon had been but one in a set of coordinated strikes. And there stood Pendragon Jones, who had orchestrated it. He was behind the guardhouse, shielded from the fighting, but directing his flock over his link.

A Shadow uses his emotions, Domino remembered his one-time master, Delator Landry, saying. He does not let them use him.

Domino Tight withdrew his blade to nub position. He took great calming breaths; grew cold inside. The key to creating a future, my magpies, the Landry had said, is to have a clear vision of it. What you imagine, you can achieve. And so Domino imagined Pendragon dying; as in fact having already died. His fate accomplished, his body lies on the ground, bleeding out. Yes, and he must know before that end whose hand it had been that had launched him on the unreturning journey. That knowledge must be the last thing to fade from those eyes on the blood-soaked ground.

Next, he envisioned a change-path from his present state to the imagined future state, though this took less time to complete than to describe: penultimately, he must do thus; antipenultimately, this. And before that, so. Mentally, he worked his way backward from Pendragon’s cold, dead body to the present.

Domino Tight had always been fast and ferocious. With his exoskeleton assisting, he moved swiftly, avoiding the grass, dancing from construction block to tumbled construction block, moving ever closer to Pendragon’s position, remaining outside the man’s line of sight by sheer habit. When he landed on the ground two arm’s lengths from his target, he stepped on a strew of crispies.

At the crunch, Domino did not hesitate, but leapt high and to the side. But Pendragon did not fire at the sound. Instead, he squinted about—and fixed on Domino. “There you are,” he said with a touch of petulance, “and about time. Yes, yes, I can see the quiver in the air. I told you those things weren’t perfect. Your darling Epri is pinned down on that rooftop…” He pointed to the edge of the warehouse extension. “The Trident preplaced submunitions and booby traps up there. If Epri can reach the main roof, he can drop cluster bombs through the ventilation shafts into the warehouse where the rest are cowering.”

Domino Tight did not think that anyone was cowering. The return fire was too crafty, too focused. He followed the pointing arm. Yes, there was Epri on the rooftop, sheltering behind an air regenerator with three of his own magpies. A remote-controlled fire center had him neatly interdicted. He could neither advance nor withdraw.

“I entreat you, Lady,” said Pendragon, more politely if a bit peremptorily, “to act posthaste.”

Domino Tight stepped forward, closing the distance between himself and Pendragon. When he was within arm’s reach, he pulled the Cloak away and pressed the nub of his knife against the man’s belly. “So I shall,” he said, and extended the blade to maximum.

Dispersal armor was well and good against energy weapons, and its thixotropic properties made it useful against moderate velocity projectiles. But for bladed weapons, the Shadows liked to say, you may as well wear cotton.

The blade squeezed between the threads of the armor and shot through Pendragon. He spasmed, arched backward. The blade exited high from his back, and Domino saw the incredulity in his eyes. “But … you’re dead,” he heard the dead man say. Then he nubbed the blade and Pendragon Jones crumpled to the ground.

“Those reports,” Domino told the corpse, “were greatly exaggerated.”

He had seized the man’s link from his hand as he fell and now spoke into it, modulating his speaker to imitate Pendragon’s voice. “Mums! Fall back!” he said. “We are betrayed!”

At this, the right flank of the assault began to dissolve, as the magpies there in swift obedience to their master’s voice began to withdraw. But Domino Tight saw one of the fighters with Ravn fall and he aimed a bolt at Epri on the roof. Epri, caught from an unguarded quarter, spun and fell.

Domino Tight saw a shimmering in the air on the rooftop, like a heat ghost.

Ah, that is what Pendragon had meant! He blinked his eyes as Tina Zhi had taught him and the whole vista faded to gray scale in which one solitary figure stood out. It was the woman that Tina had shown him, Jimjim Shot, and she was bending to tend to the wound that Epri had sustained. With her left hand, she maintained an inaccurate harassing fire on Olafsdottr’s squad.

The woman was bilateral, then, but not a trained fighter. The Mayshot Bo, Tina had told him, dealt with control of the arts, as the Gayshot Bo dealt with the control of technology. He took aim at her.

He did not fool himself. He knew he was about to fire on a Name. But then, what was this rebellion about if not overthrowing the Names? Why quail at this? Was it only long conditioning that held Those persons sacrosanct?

No, it was a sin to mar such perfect beauty. The lenses by which he saw through her Cloak revealed all. There was not a blemish upon her.

Automatically, he calculated distance and adjusted the power on his dazer so that it would burn, but not kill.

“Do it,” he heard Tina Zhi’s voice say. Disconcertingly, that voice came through his own lips. “Before she can take the quondam route.”

Domino Tight sucked in his breath. His arm wavered, then steadied.

And then Jimjim Shot stood up and away from Epri and stared directly at him, and her eyes were the red of flame. She saw him and saw his lust and saw his hesitation, and her lip curled in contempt, and she raised a weapon that Domino Tight did not recognize.

And Domino Tight shot her in the face.

The scream unnerved the battlefield, for it seemed to come from nowhere. It was a scream of surprise and anger and pain; and both sides in the firefight hesitated, creating for a moment a simulacrum of truce.

Inside the warehouse, where Oschous Dee Karnatika directed the defense, the fox-faced Shadow took a report from Ravn, who was outside and under desperate straits. “Oschous,” she said, “the mums are withdrawing. There is confusion on their right. I thought I saw someone fall from behind the guardhouse. Could have been Pendragon. And three or four of his boys that I had marked, they haven’t moved in a while.”

“That might be tactical,” Oschous warned her.

“Might be, but I think one of ours is out there behind their lines. Someone took a couple shots at Epri up on the roof, and it wasn’t us. Do you think one of the boys in the sniper’s nest survived?”

“I don’t think,” Oschous told her. “I count the dead. But … The iron’s hot, however the fire was blown.” He switched links to Big Jacques’s channel. “Jacques? It’s time.”

Domino Tight watched the Beautiful Name scream and clutch at her face, and he wept that her beauty had been destroyed, for it was more a desecration than an honorable blow. Over the mum link, he heard Magpie Two Pendragon rallying the remainder of his flock. They would learn the deception soon enough. Number One Pendragon was undoubtedly making his way to the guardhouse to verify in person the order to withdraw from the fight. That made this a place not to be.

Below the rooftop where Epri had crouched, some taijis had noticed the disruption and had glimpsed Domino Tight when he had opened his Cloak to stab Pendragon. Two were directing speculative fire at his position, so he shifted to the other side of the guardhouse and went to ground. If he played it right, he might get the taijis to fire on Chrysanthemum One when he arrived.

Domino Tight was still using the special lenses, and so saw a second cloaked figure appear on the rooftop, one who in appearance might have been a male version of Jimjim Shot. Perhaps a fraternal twin; or an identical twin altered in the womb. He rushed to aid the Beautiful Name, and Epri himself scrambled back from the rage in his eyes. Yes, thought Domino Tight. Take her away from this. It is not mete that she should be here.

The newcomer seemed altogether more accustomed to a battle and bore the instruments of valor on his belt. He knelt by Jimjim, touched her gently, and then glared across the battle space with the pitiless gaze of a raptor.

And his eyes found Domino Tight. His mouth set into a grim line and he spoke into his balled fist. Then with calm deliberation, he lifted a hand weapon of unfamiliar design. Death was no more than Domino Tight deserved for marring the perfect beauty of Jimjim Shot, but long years of training in the Abattoir had given his body a will of its own and he raised his own dazer and fired first.

Perhaps it was surprise that he saw in the face of the man of golden bronze, as if he had not expected so defiant an act. If so, it was followed closely by the rage it had momentarily displaced. Domino’s bolt had no apparent effect on him, and he continued to aim.

Domino Tight cloaked himself and ran in a random direction, knowing that he was surely visible to the man of the roof. He changed directions like a rabbit, using the random number generator in his shenmat. Then something hit him hard and he flew aside as if swatted by a great open hand.

It might have been a fatal swat, had his gyros not stabilized his flight and brought him down on crouching feet directly beside Ravn Olafsdottr and three of Oschous’s magpies. He staggered, blocking two of their shots and taking a third on his dispersal armor before he could identify himself.

“Well, well,” said the Ravn, who alone had not fired. “You are quite spry, Domino Tight, for a dead man.”

Big Jacques and most of his magpies had waited in his main headquarters until he had been certain that Sèanmazy had committed herself to attacking the decoy. As soon as he had learned that Pendragon had taken down Domino Tight and most of his boys in one fell swoop, he had sent two more magpies to the decoy site with orders to simulate greater activity, had shut down the link to the main site, and had folded up shop.

Oschous Dee Karnatika had discovered the fighting and had rallied his own flock to its support, attacking the mums in the rear. Big Jacques had not planned on that, but it added a greater touch of authenticity to the defense of the decoy and not incidentally had saved Big Jacques’s considerable butt. Sèanmazy had waited for likely rescuers before closing in with her taijis. Had Oschous Dee not triggered the trap, it would have been Jacques caught in the pincer.

Now, Jacques would add a final touch of irony to the entire engagement, ambushing Ekadrina in turn. Unless there were still another Shadow on-world to attack him in turn. He laughed.

“Ever play jenga?” he asked his team. A few nodded; the rest looked puzzled. “It’s a game where you stack a bunch of wooden blocks, and the players take turns pulling out one block at a time—until the tower collapses. Whoever collapses the tower loses the game.”

“All shut down, chief,” said Number One, as he buckled his weapons harness. “Best we be a-getting over there.” His accent revealed roots on Broad South Continent, on Brannon’s World.

Jacques sighed and pushed to his feet. “Twenty, you shepherd the jennies to the spaceport. Don’t balk, kid. You ain’t got the seasoning yet. Contact Seven and tell him to bring the ship down from Elfour and be ready for a full catch. Make sure our boat’s prepped and ready.”

He sent outriders ahead on scooters and the rest of his flock followed in a ground-bus they had commandeered earlier. A mile from the battle space, his tridents disembarked and made their way on foot through a wooded park across the roadway from the battle space. There, they waited Oschous’s call. Jacques dispatched Three and Nine to reconnoiter the loyalist positions, and they vanished without a sound. Then he unrolled a holomap on the ground and a glowing miniature of the surrounding terrain rose from its surface. His flock clustered about. “Second Section,” he told them, pointing. “The black horses chewed up the mums pretty good in the original ambush before the taijis drove them into the warehouse. But don’t discount them. Suss ’em out, locate them, then strike hard and fast on my click. First section. Ekadrina is mine, but her flock is tough and ain’t been through the grinder like Pendragon’s boys. Oschous Dee tells me she’s reinforced by Epri Gunjinshow and a couple of lilies. We’ll get support from the black horses and the rest of our boys what took refuge inside the warehouse. So don’t shoot long if you can help it. There’s a white comet over there, too. A free lance named Olafsdottr who took Gidula’s service. And, boys, Padaborn’s with them.”

The name ran like fire across the lips of his magpies. Padaborn. Padaborn’s back.

Big Jacques, and his senior magpies, said nothing. Twenty-four years ago, Geshler Padaborn had been a traitor, an experiment gone bad. And Jacques himself had been in the team that assaulted the Education Ministry. They had killed Issa Dzhwanson, the actress who had been the voice of the Rising during that mad, tumultuous week. Her last words, broadcast to all Dao Chetty, had been: They shall not silence us. But of course they had. On the rooftop, he had found a mixed squad of magpies and commoners who could not even be dignified as walking wounded, left behind as a rear-guard. The magpies had died fighting, of course; but Padaborn himself had somehow escaped the net.

“Yeah, Padaborn is directing the defense,” he told his flock. He doubted it was true. Any direction was Oschous’s doing. Way he heard it, Padaborn was not up to snuff. But if it fired up the boys, the lie would serve.

Nine slipped back into the caucus. “Mums in confusion. Some withdrawing. Mum Two trying to rally. Pendragon out of link. Saw three, maybe four mums throats cut. Fresh kills. Nice precision close-in work. Black horse sortie?”

“No. They’re bottled up pretty tight. Prick your spots on the map here.”

While Nine was detailing the mum positions and movements, Three slipped back with the intel on the taijis. “I saw a couple take pots at the mums. Someone over there was firing into Ekadrina’s people, and wounded Epri up on the roof, so some of them think the mums flipped. Something happened on the roof, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Didn’t want to get closer and risk blowing the play, so I folded up my parabolic and came back.”

Big Jacques considered that, and the positions pricked on the map. “Okay, change of plan. One, you take half of Second Section—even numbers—against the mums. Someone out there done half your work already. Don’t let ’im show you up. Odd numbers, you’re with me and First Section against the taijis. Upload the map, boys and girls. Same rules as before. Locate, mark—two apiece, I think—click when ready and in position. When you hear my click, strike hard and fast. That should give us near simultaneous kills and take out at half the loyalists before they even know we’re behind them. Understood?” He gathered their nods. “Great plan, right? Expect it to go wrong. Remember, an estimate of what the enemy will probably do is important, but don’t be surprised when he does something else. Combat is always complicated by the presence of the other side.”

That earned him some chuckles. Nineteen swallowed hard and looked to One for assurance. The kid had promise, and Jacques hoped he would last the night. He touched his earwig. “Right. Just got the word from Oschous. Shift.”

And hardly did the words leave his lips than the clearing was empty. A fern trembled where Nineteen had inadvertently brushed against it. Then it was still. Jacques smiled. They were good boys. Then, he too, stepped into the woods and vanished.

Ravn Olafsdottr had never seen a man as rattled as Domino Tight. Even for one so recently resurrected, he seemed unnerved. He crouched behind the old shippers and rasped, “They’ve come. They’re here.” But who had come and who was here he did not clarify.

“That was good work you did behind their lines,” she told him. “I assume it was you that scattered the mums and got the taijis potting them.”

One of the defenders behind the shipper was a lyre. “Good to see you quick, boss,” he said, but the Shadow hardly reacted.

This was not the Domino Tight that Ravn remembered from the disaster relief work on Nanq’ress. That had been a man quick-witted and cool.

So why not assume he remained quick-witted? “Who is here?” she asked him. “Has another Shadow joined the play? The Riff? Surely not Gidula! He is too oold to play at these games.”

His answer, if any answer had been forthcoming, was forestalled by Ekadrina Sèanmazy, who tossed an incendiary onto the rooftop of the south extension. The fire nests failed to interdict it and the resulting explosion wiped out four of the remote guns that Ravn had planted up there. The screens went dark and she could no longer see through their eyes or fire their weapons. The others nests, being farther back, had escaped, and she switched rapport to them, expecting Epri to launch an assault behind the explosion. “He better be right quick aboot it,” she murmured, “for the roof is to catch fire.” Then she toggled Oschous. “Black Horse, two taijis have entered the south annex ground floor at the far end. That zone is no longer interdicted.”

“So noted,” said the Fox.

“Has our mutual friend decided yet whether the fight is his to wage?”

“He is a remarkably stubborn man.”

Ravn made a face. What game was Donovan playing? It seemed sheer lunacy to her. If they lost this fight, no one would pause to ask him if he were neutral. Perhaps Gidula had been right all along …

At that point, the trident struck the attackers from the rear. It seemed to Ravn that a third or more of the attacking force fell silent, and the mums ceased to exist as a coherent force. Epri’s boys on the roof had begun aiming fire to their rear; and Ekadrina, on the verge of following her magpies into the annex, whirled about.

“Oh, well struck, Jacques!” cried Oschous over the link. “Let’s close the trap.”

Ravn acknowledged and told her task force to move forward, enfilading to the left to take advantage of the mums’ collapse. There were trenches—employed perhaps by mechanics to work on the undercarriage impellers of old ground trucks—and the magpies slipped into them, one by one. Ravn switched her fire nests to remote so she could work them while she shifted location. She shook Domino Tight. “Let’s finish this.”

“He—he’s on the roof!”

A glance showed Epri being evacuated by his boys and the roof of the annex beginning to smolder with thick black billows. “There’s no one on the roof.” Ravn switched her fire nests to automatic so they would take down anyone who moved toward them. Unlikely, now that the roof was igniting, but other fights won had been lost at the last because something unlikely had been tried.

“No! He is on the roof.”

Ekadrina Sèanmazy was at the far end of the annex, firing toward her rear. Ravn swung a long arm strapped to her back and aimed through the scope. A long shot, but not impossible. Her finger trembled on the trigger, stroking it, then withdrawing. Big Jacques had claimed Ekadrina for his own, and honor required that she refrain; yet, honor was not all that kept her finger from the trigger. She rather liked the Long Tall One and she grieved over the state to which the Lion’s Mouth had fallen. It was one thing to play the game by maneuver, shifting the sheep, seizing positions and offices. Quite another to betray one another. After the issue was settled, would Prime ever be able to reassemble the Lion’s Mouth? Would there be a Purge, as in the far old days? Would there be years of ambush and murder by die-hards of the losing side?

If the Revolution succeeded, there might not even be a Lion’s Mouth afterward. And what would it be like to be an orphan?

Ekadrina Sèanmazy spun three-quarters about and fell to the ground. But in the fall, she rolled, and moved into a shadow—and was gone. Moments later, Big Jacques appeared; but he was not so foolish as to appear completely. Ravn saw him only because she expected to see him and knew where to look.

But of course Ekadrina expected the same, and Big Jacques recoiled from a bolt that flashed across his dispersal armor; and he too, vanished.

Tridents began to appear in the spaces previously occupied by mums, and had linked up with the mixed bag of magpies Ravn had sent out. The taijis were backed up against the burning annex, safe from the rear only in that their rear was become an inferno.

“Another one!” cried Domino Tight.

Irritated beyond measure, Ravn Olafsdottr started to reprimand him, but bit her words short.

A man stood in the angle between the two annexes. Hard muscled and hard eyed, wearing body armor of a strange and ornate kind that seemed to glow in a sullen ruddy color, enclosed by sparkling lights, he turned slowly and surveyed the battle space with a studied contempt. His eyes seemed to pick out each combatant individually.

Fire in the battle space had died off while taijis and tridents, black horses and yellow lilies, assessed this new arrival and wondered who it was and what he portended. No one fired at him, for it was not clear which side he intended, and something about his appearance, so suddenly and so indifferently in the very midst of the battle space, indicated a level of power not lightly to be aggrieved.

Then he laughed, and his laugh was like the booming of a cannon, and he lifted to his shoulder a tube. And he turned and fired into the tridents who had taken the mums’ positions.

An eye-searing flash blossomed and spread linearly to left and right, followed moments later by the sharp clap of an explosion. Simultaneously, a casing flew from the tube.

A missile of some sort. “Foul!” she heard Oschous say. “The chapters forbid the use of military-grade weapons.”

The man in the marshaling yard must have heard, because he laughed, and his voice boomed over the links. “How can there be rules when men murder men?” And he pulled another missile from his belt—it was about a forearm long—and fed it into the tube and fired again: this time toward the guardhouse.

But the tridents there had wasted no time. The fates of their brothers near the auxiliary building had been all the warning they required, and they had already melted into the brush beyond. The rearguard and the black horses in the main warehouse directed fire on the newcomer from their own weapons and from the prepositioned remotes and submunitions. But the golden cage of fireflies that enclosed the man simply flickered more brightly and neither bolt nor pellet penetrated to wound him.

Ekadrina Sèanmazy appeared once more, bloody and with one arm dangling. She raised a long knife in her other fist and gave the ululation of the taijis. At this, the taijis set in pursuit of the tridents.

And the man in the yard turned to the warehouse and pulled a third missile from his belt.

Ravn took careful aim with a pellet rifle, but with no hope that her bullet would penetrate where others had failed. And a hand stilled her arm.

It was a stranger’s hand: a woman dressed in silver armor similar to that of the man with the missile tube. Her close-cropped silver hair was bound in a metallic band that was almost a crown. “Do not draw Ari Zin’s attention, yet,” she said. And she turned to Domino Tight and handed him a curious two-barreled weapon. “Hold this horizontally so that the sights bracket him. That will ‘short’ his armor. You, black-woman, when his armor snaps off, shoot him. But aim well, for armored or no, he is a fighting man. Quickly now, before he reloads.”

“Who…” said Domino Tight.

“The Woqfun Bo is angry because you shot his wife. Her brother summoned him. Now fire, each of you, for it is your lives to hesitate.”

Domino Tight steadied the U-shaped weapon in both hands so that one barrel was left and the other right of Ari Zin. The firing stud rested under his thumb. He exhaled and, at the nadir of his breath, gently pressed the stud.

Ravn had followed his rhythm and his breath with her own and, an instant after Domino Tight had fired, her own weapon barked, one-two-three.

The protective glow winked out, but the first shot glanced off his ruddy armor. The second bullet penetrated. The third struck him in the hand. He howled and clapped the hand to his chest, smearing the golden bands with blood. Whirling, he saw Tina Zhi with the defenders, raised a hand and wagged a finger at her, once, twice; but if he meant to say anything, it was cut short by his abrupt disappearance.

Bullets cut the space he had occupied, too late to slay him.

“Domino Tight,” said Ravn Olafsdottr, “when we have the leisure, you will explain. And you…” She turned to their silver-clad savior to find that she too, had vanished.

“She said,” said Domino Tight, “that they had all been recalled.” He stared at the smoke-embroiled roof of the annex and what he saw there—or did not see there—must have comforted him, for he relaxed for the first time since sailing through the air to land at her side. “Now we have only Ekadrina to worry about.”

“Only!” said Ravn Olafsdottr, who, but moments before, would have named her the deadliest individual in the battle space. “Where have you been, sweet Domino? You have made new friends.”

“There is no time now,” he said. “But, here … In case…” And Domino Tight aimed his interface at her and downloaded what she supposed must be an accounting of his suit record. She would review it later; if there was a later.

The taijis still had the tridents on the defensive. They would pick them off at retail. Ravn closed her eyes and thought; but she did not think long. Finally, she sighed. “What banner,” she asked Oschous over the link, “did Padaborn fight under?”

“Forest-green,” he answered, “under sky-blue. Why?”

But Ravn Olafsdottr was reprogramming her shenmat so that her waist and legs were green and her blouse and sleeves were sky-blue.

“What are you doing?” Domino Tight asked.

“Forgive me, Gidula,” she said. Then she pulled the white comet from her arm, set aside the long arms, and hung her belt with close weapons, checking the loads or the edges as the case might be.

“We must rally them,” she said, “before Ekadrina can drive home the counterattack that Ari Zin creature opened up.”

Domino Tight peered around the edge of the shipper. “Where is Big Jacques? The tridents have fallen back onto the woods across the roadway. The taijis are closing in; but a few are still watching the warehouse against a sortie.”

Ravn nodded. She thought about Gidula, about Oschous, about Donovan. She remembered long nights with Domino Tight. She turned her grin on him. “Follow me.”

She backed away into the loading docks, then turned and ran through the building, ran through the main warehouse, crying “Padaborn! Padaborn is back!” She did not look to see if Domino Tight followed. Jacques’s magpies, those that had been inside the warehouse, saw her colors, cheered, and leapt up to join her. “Padaborn!” Half of Oschous’s magpies did the same, though surely they knew that Donovan was supposed to be Padaborn. Perhaps they thought now that Donovan had been a diversion, and that Padaborn had traveled with them sub rosa.

She had a moment to glimpse Donovan’s astonishment and Oschous’s widened eyes, then she was past them, into the burning annex.

“Through the fire?” she heard Domino Tight ask, though when she turned her head she did not see him.

“From which corner are we least expected; from which stage might we more dramatically enter the fray?” Ahead, framing had caught fire and the paneling was peeling and dripping into the main gangway. “Explosive rounds!” she called to the magpies following her. The truck door at the end of the hall must be weakened from the flames. “Plant your munitions around the frame, by the numbers. Call out!”

The boys behind her hollered, “One, Two, Three…” and she noted that half of them, even the black horses, had altered on the fly the colors of their shenmats, so that they too sported the colors of Geshler Padaborn. Gidula had been right about the inspirational power of his name, though wrong about so much else.

“Someday you must tell me, Domino Tight,” she said conversationally, “how it is that you have become invisible.”

“Don’t be too sure you want to know,” a voice beside her said.

The heat in the annex was intense, the flames a tunnel through which they sped. A portion of the ceiling came down in a shower of sparks. The runners scattered and danced around the debris, shaking off the fiery fragments. She heard one of the boys holler, loud and shrill, and Ravn thought the girl had been burned on the face. Breathing, even through the filters, was becoming difficult; and the heat was approaching the top of the shenmat’s rating. “Standard breakout, seventh modulation!” she called to the others above the sound of the crackling and snapping joists.

“Padaborn!” they shouted in return.

And there was the metal door ahead of them. It was the sort that rolled up into an overhead bin. On the floor, consumed in flames, lay the two taijis who had entered earlier, felled by the fire nests that Oschous had emplaced, dead well before being offered as a holocaust. Ravn measured the paces to the door.

“On my call, fires explosives. After breakout, fire as opportune to relieve the tridents. Ready, three, two, one, fire!”

Fire, indeed! A dozen guns let loose, each aimed at a different point around the door, and the rounds bored into the putty-soft walls and exploded as nearly simultaneous as made no difference. The door shuddered loose from the structure even as Ravn’s combat team hit it, feet first, and it toppled like a loading ramp onto the ground beyond. They poured out across the door, breaking in all directions, still shouting, “Padaborn!”—and three taijis too slow to realize that they were dead, fell with their backs still turned.

Ekadrina Sèanmazy turned a scarred and bloody face toward the newcomers who had burst so unexpectedly out of the inferno of the annex. She whipped a flying star in a single fluid motion even as she dove for cover and summoned the rest of her flock over her link. The star struck someone in the attack team, pierced the cords of his armor, but did not bring a cry to his lips as he fell. “Padaborn!” they shouted. Padaborn? She saw a green and blue apparition bear down upon her and she fired her dazer.

She did not wait to see its effect, but whirled in a three-point tumble to come down behind an old truck barrier, where she rolled to the side and brought a pellet gun to bear. The dazer should have jangled Padaborn, slowing him, allowing the bullets opportunity to pierce the armor.

But never be surprised when the enemy does something else. Padaborn had sidestepped just before the dazer pulse and was nowhere to be seen. Ekadrina quickly ducked back behind the barrier, disappointing several bullets eager to meet her.

Save for the crackling and collapsing annex, silence lay over the battle space. Of the combat team that had burst from the annex there was no sign; of her own taijis not a trace. This was not going well. Or rather, it was seesawing too wildly for the orderly tastes of Ekadrina Sèanmazy. First, the unexpected presence of the black horses, when it should have been the tridents caught in her pincers. Then the attack from the rear by tridents who should have been bottled up in the warehouse. The fight with Big Jacques from which they had both withdrawn bloody by mutual and unspoken consent. Then the intervention that Epri had so grandly promised succeeded brilliantly, only to unexpectedly collapse. Now Padaborn had returned from the living dead.

She lay still for a moment before, in a controlled, economical gesture, she strewed crispies to the other side of the old truck barrier, so no one could approach from that quarter without a betrayal. Then she flipped her wrist and extended a see-me-more fiber scope that she slaved to her goggles and extended above the lip of the barrier.

Nothing. Discreet pops and snaps from across the roadway told her that the fight with the tridents continued. “Odd numbers,” she whispered over the link, “disengage from trident. Padaborn had a troop lying in reserve. Some will try to relieve da tridents.”

“Padaborn!” said her Number One, and the way he said it made her wish she had not mentioned the name.

“He’s a sick old man,” she told Number One. “I have dat on best authority. Dis is a desperation play.” That the play had her pinned down behind a plasteel barrier did not make it any less desperate.

“Taiji,” her Number One said, “the flock is down fifty percent. Perhaps we should disengage.”

“I have never departed a kill space in defeat.”

“No, ma’am. But no one leaves here unharmed. Pendragon is slain and most of the chrysanthemums. Domino Tight is slain along with the lyre. The black horses were mauled. Big Jacques is badly wounded and the tridents as battered as we. You are badly wounded. And … Others were wounded. Perhaps that is sufficient for the day.”

Ekadrina’s left eye had spotted motion through her fiber periscope. She logged the coordinates into a smart gun and launched a pinwheel bomb. The explosion came as a flat slapping sound but the truck barrier kept the blast from reaching her.

If she withdrew now, the one sure winner would be Oschous who, so far as she knew had sat untouched in the warehouse directing the battle like a spider in the center of her web—and Padaborn, whose unexpected entry into the battle space would be seen by all as the tipping point.

No, she must first harm Padaborn. Only then could she withdraw with face.

She paused a moment to curse Epri and what he had brought into the fight. The ruddy man had to have been the Woqfun Bo, a man who should have been supreme on any field, but who had by his use of shoulder-launched missiles introduced a further escalation in the Shadow War, but who, far worse, had shown himself fallible.

“Are these the men that we protect?” she asked, half-aloud.

She heard the distinctive crinkle of crispies stepped upon, grinned and rolled to her knees, and aimed …

And there was no one there.

A lesser Shadow might have paused and gaped; but Ekadrina Sèanmazy had not reached seniority through being lesser in any respect. The only reason for making a sound in front of her was to approach behind her. She whirled.

And there was Padaborn only two strides away, already raising a pellet gun for a fatal armor-piercing shot.

Ekadrina, who had already chambered her gun to fire on the crispies, fired on this new threat.

The bullet caught Padaborn on the chest and the transferred momentum knocked him backward, even as the recoil pushed Ekadrina back.

Oh, fortunate recoil! A flying star scissored through the space her body had occupied, and Ekadrina executed a dancing pirouette and laid down fire toward the location where no one stood. The shot caught something, however, for the air rippled and brightred blood seemed to blossom unsupported. Then that something leapt away, higher and faster than a man might leap.

A clever play, whatever it had been. Epri had possessed such a Cloak, but it was apparent now that Others had been equally generous with the opposing side. She did not like the implications of that, but filed it for later consideration. Now was not the time for introspection.

She walked over to where Padaborn lay on his back, spread-eagled to the sky, and stared into the face.

The black face of a Groomsbritch, and a woman’s face at that. She smiled up at Ekadrina. “This hurts moore than I thoot it wood.”

“You are not Padaborn!” Ekadrina said. An accusation, an outrage, an affront.

“No,” said a new voice. “I am.”

And there at the gaping entry to the burning building stood the hook-chinned old man she remembered, wearing the green-and-blue shenmat and a belt of weapons and bandoliers.