On the Razor’s Edge

VI. One of the Pleasantest Things in Life

Gidula’s compound—the Forks—was a quiet campus consisting of a hundred buildings clustered on the flat space in the fork of the rivers. These included private dwellings, barracks, commercial buildings, an athletic complex, administrative offices, as well as koi ponds and water-channels and tree-shaded garden-parks. The buildings wore soft autumnal shades that blended with the terrain. Once every twelveday, trucks with fresh produce choppered down from the villages on the surrounding heights to a farmers’ market. Anything not provided locally came from Ketchell, the nearest city. While not entirely self-sufficient, the compound did produce most of her own basics. Maintenance sheds, machine shops, a forming shop for plastics and another for ceramics, and various other workshops lined the small creek that wound through the gap between Summary and Kojj Hills to empty into the Tware upstream of the Lye. All of this was carried out by a remarkably small staff, nominally directed by Eglay Portion.

Gidula gave Donovan the liberties of the Forks, and the scarred man spent the better part of two months in nature hikes, faux hunting, and research in the Administration building library before he made his move.

The Old One, for his part, caught up on his correspondences, and couriers exchanged cryptic messages with Oschous and Big Jacques at Old Eighty-two, with Manlius and Dawshoo in the Century Suns, and with Domino Tight in a safe house in San Jösing. The worlds of the Triangles were close spaced, no more than a few days apart by superluminal tube, so it was practical for messengers to speed back and forth among them.

The other conspirators were under deep cover, yet Gidula lounged openly at his main stronghold. The Fudir wondered about that for a while, until Eglay told him that Gidula’s reputation was one of meddlesome neutrality. Even at the Battle of the Warehouse, he had acted to break up the fight, not to support either side. Ekadrina could testify that he had rescued her as well as Padaborn. Past his fighting prime, he gave quiet advice to the Revolution, but this was not known to anyone save the inner circle who had met at Henrietta. Even so, his magpies kept wary watch—on approaching air traffic, on ground-cars, and on peddlars and others who arrived by shank’s mare. There was a surprising amount of traffic, but it was a lonely outpost, Eglay said, and traveling companies of players and other entertainers were always welcome. As were deliveries of simulations and other games. To guard against “system twisters,” nothing was ever sipped off the stream but must be delivered and tested in cartridge form.

There was a continual round of exercises, both physical and mental, by which the Deadly Ones maintained their acumen. Donovan discovered that he could manage his fights in such a way as to make his opponents look good. He even contrived to lose a bout or two on occasions when he thought he might do so in safety. He also nurtured his relationships with the staff. The Fudir could be an engaging personality when he turned on the charm, and both the Silky Voice and the young man could empathize with cooks and gardeners every bit as well as with magpies, couriers, and Shadows.

The scarred man sought to win magpies and others in key positions, changing black stones for white, surrounding Gidula with his own people. He was not so foolish as to suppose that, should a break come with Gidula, most of his newfound friends would go anywhere than with their first loyalties, but some of them he judged as fairly won over, and he knew that Gidula must worry on it some. Pyati was his for a certainty, and so also Seventeen and several others.

By the same token, Two would never be his, never be anyone’s but Gidula’s. And Two, he had begun to think, was the single most dangerous magpie on Gidula’s staff, with the possible exception of the still-absent Number One. Possibly more dangerous than Eglay and Khembold, who were full-ranked Shadows. Donovan sometimes watched the others work out, and had sat in the bleachers of the pleshra while Two had defeated four midranked magpies in rapid order, including two in a single bout. And the whole time, Inner Child knew, a part of Two’s multifacted attention had been kept on him, where he sat in an upper tier. He began to wonder if there was more to Number Two than simple paraperception. He had gotten hints last year from Oschous that there were others who had undergone the operation that had formed his inner multitude.

She might be one of us, the Sleuth hazarded.

“For some values of the term ‘us,’” Donovan responded.

The weather was brisk: frosty in the morning, but warming up toward the afternoon. On several occasions, Gidula took him out on faux hunts on the reserve atop the northern heights. They were driven in a quadwheeler up Kojj Hill to the Nose and then over the Outer Ridge. From there, the hunting reserve rolled flat to the distant blue ridge that marked the northern marge of a great valley. Here and there, coppices of spruce and larch and bushy thickets along the streams broke the monotony. The game was primarily beeshun and elk on the plain, and moose in the thickets.

At the crest of the Nose, Gidula halted the hunting party and, while his magpies stood about pointedly looking elsewhere for imaginary threats, he stumped heavily to where the hill fell off abruptly to the waters of the Tware. Gidula removed his hunting cap and held it in both hands while he gazed northward up the mist-shrouded river and the wind through the funnel of the gap whipped his clothing. After a few moments of this, he made a hidden sign with his right hand, knelt, and, gathering up a bit of gravel from the ground, tossed it chattering over the side.

Gidula returned to the vehicle and, closing the door, tapped the driver on the shoulder, and they continued over the Outer Ridge. Gidula did not explain why they had stopped and by this signal Donovan knew better than to ask.

Soon enough, the outriders located a moose, and Gidula, as host, graciously deferred to his guest. The scarred man passed on an offer to implant a niplip, a locator beacon, in the creature. What was the point of hunting if you did not actually have to hunt? Instead, he gave the Sleuth his head and let him cut for sign while the Pedant compared footprints and scat with sundry memories of catalogs, lists, and databases. They followed the moose into a stand of tall, cathedral trees, through whose needle leaves the sunlight was sifted like flour. The floor was clear of underbrush and the morning birds scolded his approach. Moss and tiny yellow and violet flowers carpeted the rocks, and a chill mist hugged the ground. Every outline seemed softened by the morn.

He came across a human footprint and studied it for some seconds before scuffing it out with his boot. Later, he reached a break in the trees and found a meadow of short, dark grasses and large, mossy boulders enclosed by spruce on three sides. Overhead, branches wove a canopy. A stream trickled through the meadow, accumulating in small pools that promised, when the spring rains came, to soak the meadow into swamp. He saw the ski-marks of a lander in the mud near one of the pools and filed the information away.

He spied the moose near the opening at the farther end of the meadow and crept closer, going to his belly and wriggling behind a deadfall of trees. He tested the wind (he was downwind) and raised himself up to the edge of the fallen trunk and painted the moose with his spot rifle and—

—and he peers above the parapet of a ruined building, his hands choking his spot rifle. Stone lion heads gape from the cornices beside him. Bolt tanks flank the triton fountain in the rubble-littered plaza below. Bullets sing off the plasteel and he ducks back down. The assault has failed. The Protector’s flag still flies over Coronation House.

He rolls to another position, estimates where the closest tank must be, then pops up and “paints” the tank with his spot rifle and ducks back down before the chatterguns walk in on him. He waits, but nothing happens.

“The Protectors must have sanded the satellite,” he says. “Our submunitions didn’t lock on to the painter!”

There is no answer. He looks around. The parapet is empty save for the dead.

The sky turns white and the building shudders. He feels a tingling even through the insulation of his shenmat. The bolt tank has fired. It will be several minutes while it recharges. But of course there are four tanks, one at each intersection, and they will take turns. Across the plaza the Chancellery flashes and the walls fall in upon themselves as the building comes down. Another post lost. How much longer can he hold the Education Ministry?

A young woman touches him on the shoulder. She is young, hardly more than a girl, unarmored, uninsulated, barefoot amidst the broken glass and masonry that litter the rooftop. She wears a Doric chiton and seems too delicate even to live on this world, let alone in the hell it has become.

There is a way out of this, she tells him, and her voice is like a melody.

Donovan rolled back panting behind the fallen tree trunk.

A memory, said the Sleuth. But when and where?

“And whose?” the Fudir added.

“Pollyanna?” Donovan said. “You were there, on the rooftop. What was that?”

I don’t know, the girl in the chiton answered. It was muscle memory. It was the heft of the rifle, the motions of our body, that evoked it. Ask the Brute.

But the Brute only shrugged.

“A genuine memory?” Donovan proposed. “Or a false one, implanted by suggestion after all those interrogations, the recordings played while we slept?”

When the people around you continually tell you things about yourself, you eventually begin to “remember” them.

And thank you for that tidbit, Pedant. I think the memory was real. We were in the Secret City during Padaborn’s Rising.

“But false memory or real,” demanded the Fudir, “which of us had it?”

Who cares? said the Brute, and he whipped his spot rifle over the deadfall, ran his sights up the middle of the foreleg, and painted the moose just about one-third of the way into the body. The anatomist watching remotely through the sights ruled both shoulders broken, with a high probability that the heart had been pierced as well. The moose would have buckled and fallen.

“Good shot, sir,” Pyati told Donovan over the link. “Those beasts like to go die in hard places. Always best to drop them where they stand.”

Donovan reflected that that was good advice for more than moose.

He and Gidula painted five “kills” between them that day, according to the anatomist and the armorer. Gidula announced the sixth a kill-in-fact and brought down what he called a lazarus elk, bearing an enormous spread of antlers. Apparently, the creature had once been extinct and the science-wallahs of the Old Commonwealth had somehow rebooted it. The beast wanted three high-velocity rounds to topple, and Gidula erected a cairn on the spot and burned thereon the offal as an offering to Jana Wogawi, the Goddess of the Hunt. The remainder of the carcass they field-dressed and sent back to the Forks by airtruck, to be butchered and sold at the twelveday market. The head and rack Gidula kept, as a trophy for the Gun Room.

Betweentimes, Donovan endured multiple interrogations with Gidula. The Old One tried all the same tactics that Oschous had tried, and with all the same results. Yet he must have known those methods had proven futile. So why the Kabuki?

He can’t simply pith us, the Sleuth said. If the memories are truly inaccessible, he will not find them by drilling. And afterward, all hope of obtaining them would be lost.

Beside which, the young man in the chlamys said, you’ve made too many friends. Oschous—and by now Dawshoo—knows Gidula has you, and he’s not ready for an open break with the other two triumvirs. Some of his own people might now turn against him if he pressed kaowèn on “the great Geshler Padaborn.” I could name the magpies that would flock to your side in such a division.

But there were others who hated the Names deeply enough that they would tolerate any means, including kaowèn, to obtain the key to the Secret City. This struck Donovan as odd, even ironic. What was the point of revolution if matters did not revolve and men just as cruel seized the reins?

The question arose obliquely one afternoon when he and Pyati had been sparring in the pleshra. “I don’t mind at the helm a strong arm,” the magpie said while they showered off the grime of combat, “or in the saddle a keen pilot. But when authoritarianism is with decadence tainted, our liberties fade.”

“Can there be liberties under authoritarianism,” said Donovan, “however undecadent they might be?”

Pyati paused while soaping up. “Of course. When the leash is slackly held, and tugged only now and then and for good cause.”

“I’m inclined,” the Fudir replied, “to regard the existence of the leash as sufficient irritant.”

The other nodded, considering the words. “You saw in the League the anarchy that follows when there are no leashes. The Old One names two oppressions of sheep. The first, when power is arbitrary; the second, when there is no power at all. When no man holds the leash, all men hold leashes, and tyranny is petty and irksome and everywhere. Instead of the great laws, we have the niggling nettles of many small laws. The leash is always there, master. What matters is who holds it.”

Donovan rinsed off, ducking his head under the cascade. “Then why,” he said when he emerged, “have you joined the Revolution?”

Pyati seemed surprised by the question. “Why? Because my master has told me. Because wise managers have become petty tyrants. Because they push and prod, but do not lead. Because they have trampled our traditions and have dropped the leash. Revolution is coming, whether we Shadows lead it or not. Better us than chaos.”

Donovan studied his own naked body in the mirror, considered how frail he seemed. He did not attempt to count the scars, for chaos seemed embodied in their very number and placement. One day, he knew, there would be no autoclinic handy to knit them up afterward.

A Shadow was expected to use his mind as well as his hands, feet, and happenstance bric-a-brac. And so the scarred man’s exercises were more than merely physical. There were simulations, puzzles, scenarios, war games—in which the race went not to the fleet, but to deceit.

And so he had learned—or relearned—a number of plays. Some he had never forgotten. He had used The Little Birdie in the Terran Corner on Jehovah, igniting a rumor-storm with a series of well-placed and well-timed whispers that had culminated in the dismissal of the Jehovan Inspector of the Starport market. Other plays had the quality of the newly remembered. When he finally made his move, he chose The Missing Man, which required the cooperation of several collaborators and the subversion of the compound’s information system.

The essence of The Missing Man was to create the illusion of a presence from the fact of an absence. Donovan knew people who could appear to be absent even when present. Greystroke Hound was a past master of that art. But the real trick was to appear to be present even when not. To accomplish that feat, Donovan chose Pyati and Eglay Portion.

As Magpie One Padaborn, Pyati had to be in on it. He controlled Donovan’s calendar, could cancel appointments, tell people that they “just missed” the boss, and give Donovan’s residence the appearance of being lived in. Beds would be mussed. Meals would be cooked (and consumed). Spools and bubbles would be left about. Eglay Portion was seneschal of the Forks and could game the system in ways that Pyati could not. He could set up exercises, bouts, exits from and reentries to the compound, and create evidence that Padaborn had been in this or that building. That would be tricky because Magpie Two Gidula monitored the system and she was remorselessly attentive.

Donovan could not expect to fool Gidula for very long. At some point, Two would compare visual surveillance data to the building entry logs. But the scarred man did not desire a long tomfoolery. It need only be long enough for him to drop out of sight. The Fudir had chummed the understaff and crossed certain palms with silver. This had secured him a great deal of useful information on places to go in Ketchell.

“I need to get away,” Donovan told his coconspirators by the koi pond. “I need to be by myself, relax, see the sights. If I can get my mind off everything that has happened these past few months, maybe I can remember what the Revolution needs me to remember.” He needed, of course, to give them a reason they could agree with.

Pyati nodded. “A fight with Ekadrina would fuddle any man.”

And it had killed Ravn, Donovan recalled. He remembered his quondam kidnapper capering past him through Oschous’s command post, running out through the burning warehouse to her doom at the hands of the loyalist champion. Suddenly weak in his legs, Donovan lowered himself to the bench. Fish, attracted by his shade, clustered for the expected treats.

“What is it?” Eglay asked him.

“I was thinking on poor Ravn,” the scarred man told him.

Eglay nodded. “A bold colleague,” he agreed.

“You miss her,” said Pyati, sitting beside him.

“I never thought I would. My first thought after she snatched me was how I might slay her and escape. But she died for my sake.”

“I’m sure that was not her plan,” said Eglay.

“Is no big deal, dying,” said Pyati. “It’s something we all do, at least once.”

Donovan grimaced. “At least,” he said.

“Well, you did, no? Technically, you were in the tank for one, two days dead. And here are you, good as new. And Ravn, when we dropped her at Delpaff, was hearty as a kitten.”

Donovan grabbed the magpie’s sleeve. “What? She’s alive?”

Pyati disengaged from the clutching hand. “When last I saw her. Why? Did Gidula say otherwise?”

“That son of a…” But the Pedant recalled that Gidula had said only, Alas, the Ravn is no longer with us and when Donovan had mentioned Ravn’s death the Old One had not corrected him. Oh, Gidula was an exquisite liar! He could spin a fantasy by telling the stone-cold truth.

Eglay too was surprised. “Ravn’s not dead? Gidula has said nothing.”

Pyati shrugged. “She offended him over some matter, and he is not speaking her name until she brings him a present.”

Donovan knew what the offense must have been. When she had rushed forth wearing Padaborn’s colors, Ravn had joined the Revolution wholeheartedly—and Gidula was inside the Revolution in order to subvert it.

“Well,” Donovan said, placing a hand on each knee and pushing himself erect. “Perhaps I will have a present for him, too.”

The three of them departed by aircar the next day, ostensibly to show Donovan the wonders of Ketchell. Pyati assured him that these wonders were not so numerous as to require the entire day, and the fact proved as true as the word. Ketchell was a crescent of low buildings, none more than ten stories high, around a circular harbor formed, according to local folklore by a stone dropped by the god who built the sky-vault. Donovan supposed it a remnant of the Cleansing and spent long moments on the quayside watching the waters break along its rim.

“What was Ketchell called before it was Ketchell?” he asked his companions.

Eglay Portion shrugged. “As far as I know, it was always Ketchell. There are traces of buried ruins farther inland, though, where the shoreline used to be before the ice sucked up all the water. There are supposed to be layers of successive cities there going back to ancient times.”

Donovan wanted very much to visit those ruins, which he took to be those of Ũāvajorque, but he could not spare the time for it now. He and Eglay and Pyati retired to a quayside restaurant where they huddled with other diners around a radiant fireplace and consumed large steaks of a fatty meat and root vegetables cooked nearly to sludge. “City’s not noted for its chefs,” Eglay commented superfluously.

Donovan looked around the dim-lit room. It reminded him a little of Gatmander: cold and lonesome, and despair coating everything like a fine dusting of grit. “This must be some happening place during the winter,” he said.

Eglay shrugged. “We usually bunker up at the Forks. And there isn’t much that is more cheerful than evergreen boughs and hot-rod wine and a roaring fire come Midwinter Eve and a visit from Sĩgyawn Yowshã. But I hear down here in the city the suicide rate always spikes that time of year.”

Donovan wondered that they had not used everyone up by now.

Pyati shrugged. “Usually off-planet, me.”

“They say the ice came on sudden,” Eglay volunteered. He raised a fatty slice of beeshun to his lips and chewed thoughtfully. “Something like,” he said, then swallowed. “Something like the ice caps—you’d think they’d always been there. But the locals tell me it was only a century or two from a nice, pleasant, temperate world to … a wall of white along the north.”

Pyati said, “When did it happen?”

Eglay waved his now-empty fork in spirals and intoned, “‘In the time before my grandfather’s grandfather.’”

Donovan grunted. “Back then, was it? Surely there are records in archives somewhere. This world was civilized longer than any other in the Spiral Arm.”

“Sure, but only the mountains last forever. There’s a town over the other side of the world has a clay brick with writing on it that goes back to prehistoric times. I seen it myself, but it looks like chicken tracks to me, and no one knows how to read it. But there was war and fire and mice and all what have you. There was a long Dark Age when almost nothing was recorded.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Gidula told me that things had been ‘written in the sand.’ He said that meant ‘in silicon.’ It was all digital bits and you needed special machines to read them, and—”

“I can guess the rest,” Donovan said. “New technology. New machines. Pretty soon they couldn’t read the old storage devices, and the media eventually decayed.”

“Crazy people. The sign by the Iron Bridge is about the only thing left from that era. We got the better idea: something works, don’t change it.”

“And if it doesn’t work?”

Eglay Portion laughed. “Don’t change that, either. Might get worse.”

After dinner, Eglay and Pyati flew back to the Forks where, using this stratagem or that, they would create the illusion that Donovan had returned with them. Donovan for his part shook the dust from his feet and went off in search of a foo-doctor whose name he had extracted from the Assistant Undercook of the Common Mess. (He had been surprised at the extent to which the kitchen staff emulated the manners of the Shadows. The Chief of the Cuisine cooked nothing himself but sat in a great chair much like a throne set in the center of the kitchen while others in strict hierarchy cooked, baked, washed, and served—and brought things to him for taste and approval.)

The search took Donovan to a part of town that the touristas would have shunned, had there been any tourists desperate enough to visit Ketchell. Construction standards across the Confederation were unimaginative but solid, yet even plasteel and metaloceramic could take on a decrepit appearance when too little attention was paid to their upkeep. Façades became darker from grime and neglect. Here and there, a splash of color around some doorframe or window or a brightly polished god only served to heighten the general drabness.

The people with whom he mingled were a close and solitary lot, each intent on his or her own personal mission, lifting no eye for a passing stranger but giving the Fudir as if by instinct a wider berth. Not even the body over which they stepped engaged their attentions.

In a few places, the buildings were coming down. A couple were demolition sites with large machines idling on rubble-strewn lots, but most were a more spontaneous and involuntary dismemberment. Where the foundations were exposed, Donovan noted older foundations buried deeper in the ground.

This was a city with a long past, he thought, but a short future.

He found the promised daforni—what he would have called a “pub”—along the northeast end of the waterfront, where the ground-car wires ended and only walkways penetrated the warren of tumbledown shanties. It was called “The Severed Arm” and above its entrance a well-muscled arm, clench fisted and flexed, extended toward the street. It had once been painted in lifelike colors, something between bronze and tan, but the years of dirt and sea-brine had tarnished it and it seemed now as if gangrene had set in.

When Donovan entered, all activity within ceased and eyes turned toward him. No one came to The Severed Arm by happenstance, and the patrons paused to assess his significance. After allowing time for a sufficient appraisal, Donovan stepped up to the bar, taking a position from which he could watch the entire room. The bartender ignored Donovan until he slapped a five-bayzho coin on the bar. This was a part of Ketchell that preferred its transactions manual and untraceable.

“Ẽgrizhdahl o’uizhgy, borva.” He employed the Late Murkan dialect still used in parts of the Northern Mark continent. The “please” seemed to amuse the bartender, but he feigned a lack of understanding, so the Fudir ordered the whiskey in Manjrin. “In clean glass,” he added.

The bartender set a tumbler down, and the amber fluid sloshed over the rim and spattered the bar top. “It’s alcohol,” he said. “Sanitizes the glass.”

The Fudir lifted the glass and, as he sipped, mentioned a name.

The bartender shook his head. “Never heard ’f him.”

Before he could turn away, the Fudir said, in the accents and rhythms of Old Eighty-two, “He should be grieved to hear so.”

It was an unlooked-for retort and surprise stayed the bartender’s motion. “How so?”

“The thing that he does, he must do. Else they will come here on the seek, to this very place, disturbing the peace of mind of many.”

The bartender laid a thick forearm on the table and leaned upon it. “And if he does do it?”

“Then those whom they will seek will be gone from this place, never to brighten its precincts again, never to trouble you the more.”

“That end may be reached,” the bartender suggested, “with less effort and greater profit.” He smiled, but his teeth were like the line of northern ice astride the far horizon.

No, said the Brute, it could not.

The bartender looked into his eyes for a moment, then shrugged. “Ah. The Terran Foo-lin! Him I may know.”

“There are many Foo-lins,” the Fudir allowed. “A man might not know them all.”

The bartender reached under the bar. “Art thou a Terran, also?” he asked in the Tongue.

The Fudir might have happily assented to this, but Inner Child seized control. «I don’t understand.»

The bartender relaxed infinitesimally. “I asked if you was a Terran.”

“This is Terra, no? Are not all here Terrans?”

“This world is called Zãddigah.”

“That only means ‘New Earth’ in the old Cant.”

“If it does, then new it is. I will explain because you are an Eighty-second and so, ignorant. The Old Terrans left this world to wander off among the stars. Our ancestors came from worlds nearby, and we inherited the earth. A remnant of the Terrans also remained who preserved old ways—as if they were still the lords of all creation—until they learned their new place on the New Earth. Across the Rift are some who style themselves Terrans, and they would come here if they could and seize our homes, save that our faithful boots prevent them.” He reached into a pocket and produced a flat, dull metallic disk. “Here. This sigil will direct you to the man called Foo-lin. But go wary of him.”

“He is a Terran, you say.”

“He is. He worships the vanished Commonwealth like all his tribe, but he at least knows it has vanished. Go now, before you draw your pursuers to this place.”

The disk lighted with an arrow that directed Donovan toward the storied Foo-lin. Much of the scarred man followed it, while his remainder kept watch on shadows and alleys. The expected ambush came less than five blocks from The Severed Arm.

Three men whom Inner Child had noticed earlier slipping out the rear of the daforni leapt dagger drawn upon him. Surely, a man who sought the service of Foo-lin would carry much portable money on his person, for Foo-lin was among those who shunned the traceable sort.

But the Brute had been waiting for the moment and at the first squeak from Inner Child—as a shadow moved within a shadow—he swung into a kick, disarming the first and breaking his arm. The second man he dispatched with a backhand fist and the third by driving his bunched knuckles into the man’s solar plexus.

It was the work of a moment, and the three were lying on the brickwork adding their vomit to the dried blood of past attacks. Donovan bent over them.

“Tell your master that he gave you too much time with his story of Old Earth, and that you grew restless in your concealment, thus betraying your position. Tell him that those who will betime notice my absence are not mere policemen, but Shadows of the Names. They will know I passed through The Severed Arm. It may be a matter of some few days before they come, but come they will. Tell the taverner to take what measures he sees fit.”

The moans of his three attackers increased in pitch and Donovan left them there. He did not know if any of them would return to warn The Severed Arm, nor did he care.

He followed the sigil deeper into the warren, but at a certain shop, a late-night daga, he heard men speaking in the Tongue. He paused and dropped the name of Foo-lin in their ears and received in return flat-faced stares and, from one man, a slight nod toward the right.

Outside the shop, armed now with a warmed peach pastry, he checked the sigil. It too directed him to the right. He shrugged. Perhaps the directions were genuine after all. Undoubtedly, the bartender received a portion of Foo-lin’s fee and, while deprived of the whole of Donovan’s purse by the failure of his cutthroats, he would at least garner his commission. Wise is the man who profits from either side of a wager.

Foo-lin was located in the basement of an abandoned apartment house. Perhaps it had once held supplies or boilers or comm.junctions. What it held now was the equipment that Foo-lin required to practice his trade: scalpels, anesthetics, stitchers, a white ring that was no longer quite white.

“What you want?” was his friendly greeting.

“I seek that for which thou art justly famed,” the scarred man answered in the Tongue.

That did not elicit the response the Fudir had looked for. The wizened old black man scowled. “You accent funny. Where you from?”

“I hight a Terran, seeking help of Terra. By the Taj and the Wall and the Mount of—”

“Ayii! Thou art a Peripheral Terran! Go ’way! You bring trouble.” He made fending motions with his hands but continued in the Tongue. “This be Holy Terra. Profane her not!”

“What I seek is simplicity itself: the removal of niplips—locators—from my body.”

“Ayii. That be against the fiqh of the Northern Mark. Shall I place my head on the block merely because thine ancestors once lived here?”

“No,” said the Fudir. “Because I have coin to give.” He handed over the sigil he had been given.

Foo-lin laughed. “If thou comest from The Severed Arm, few are the coins remaining thee.”

“Yet fewer still are the patrons remaining to The Arm.”

The foo-doctor paused and looked at the scarred man, as if for the first time. “Where are these coins of which thou braggest?”

He handed Foo-lin a leather bag the size of his palm. The other glanced within and hefted its weight. “And the brothers of these few lonely orphans?”

“Safely concealed. But when thou hast finished thy work, the remainder shallt be thine.”

“Thou art a man of care. Remove thy clothing, then, down unto thy skivvies. And please to be lying on this table where I will perform the ritual called ‘the scanning of the cat.’”

Donovan stripped, and the scars on his body gave the doctor pause. Then the old man shrugged. “I must cut thee open to remove any niplips my cat may find. But what would mean another scar among so many? I see that thou art not a man of such care as to avoid injury.”

“I fought a Shadow.”

The foo-doctor scoffed. “Who can walk away from such a fight, save only a…”

He fell silent as answers suggested themselves. “There are rumors,” he ventured, not looking directly at the scarred man.

“Believe them all. They may not be true, but they make thy life more interesting.”

Donovan expected the ritual to involve the sacrifice of a cat, but there was no more involved than his passage through the white ring. The foo-doctor uttered certain prayers and incantations while he did so. “Step one,” he recited in the ancient Murkanglais. “Turn the red power switch to ready…”

Foo-lin located two niplips. They had been implanted, Donovan was certain, during his long sleep in the autoclinic aboard White Comet. Once they were found, it was the work of a few moments to remove them, requiring little beside a local anesthetic and some deep cuts. So far as pain went, it was the sort that the Silky Voice could easily handle.

“Those who would track thee,” Foo-lin said, handing over the niplips, “will know when and where they are destroyed.”

“I know this thing, and for thy sake and the sake of all our common ancestors I will not destroy them here. But those who would track me will know the path these traveled and will follow their spoor to this place. Thou needst not know who they be.”

“Though one may hazard guesses.” He spat on the floor. “This place…” The foo-doctor looked about the dilapidated basement. “I spread my tents where I wist. This keller will be empty when they come.”

“Thou hast no love for the Names.”

“It is Terra of Old that I love alone. To the Names, I am indifferent. They are now; one day they are not. But Earth alone abideth.”

“And yet thou scornest the Terrans of the Diaspora.”

“They have fallen from the Faith, even as they have fled from the Earth. They would erect a secular Terra on the soil of the holy Commonwealth. ‘What’s done is done and what’s gone is gone, and what’s lost is lost and gone forever.’ What might they hope to revive but a corpse—a zombie Commonwealth, with Men of Brass aping the deeds of the Men of Gold. Beside which, it would arouse my neighbors against all Terrans and bring the boots upon our faces.”

The Fudir made a sign with his right hand. “Dream thy dreams of old, O venerable one. No such ill shall come of my visit. I am but a lonely fugitive.”

“May thy heels be swift, thy breaths drawn sweet, and thine end swift and painless. Now, about my fee…”

The Fudir laughed. “Know that there is ever a place for you in the Corner of Jehovah. Mention to the Seven the name of the Fudir, and if they do not slit thy throat from mere exasperation at the reminder they will welcome thee. The remainder of thy fee sits ‘on deposit.’ There is a loose brick on the face of this very building, in the cavity behind which I placed the coins. I will touch the brick casually—so—as I depart. Thou mayest then, at thy leisure, collect the remainder of thy fee.”

“Few are the men I would trust on such a promise.”

The Fudir wondered how much was trust and how much prudence in the face of a man who had beaten the thugs of The Severed Arm and (putatively) a Shadow. “I crave one further boon of thee. It is on me to make the hajj. I am given to understand that the Mount of Many Faces is close by this place.”

The foo-doctor laughed. “Aye, if by ‘close’ thou meanest ‘on the selfsame continent’! What drollery! Thou wishest coordinates for your flier? It is but the labor of a moment.” The old man busied himself at his console and shortly returned with a small disk. “Insert this in thy navigation system and straightaway thou shallt be taken to the legendary Mount.” He smiled as if at some secret joke.

Donovan understood the foo-doctor’s wit early the next morning when the flier he had rented under the name Tjoslina Tuk went into a tight circle above the specified coordinates.

The land below him was capped under milk-white ice a mile thick.

The wind howled unobstructed across the northern ice-plains, buffeting the small craft and challenging its autopilot to impressive feats of stability. Tiny ice particles rattled off the windshield.

The Fudir sighed. So much for the legendary heads: for Washington and Abe; for Jeff and Teddy; for Miwel II and Kgonzdan the Oppressed. They were not even buried, he thought—or the Sleuth thought. They were ground to powder by unimaginable pressure against the mortar of the earth.

It comes on suddenly, the Fudir remembered. A century or two from grassy plains to ice desert. But it wants thousands of years to melt.

It’s the albedo. Once the land whitens, it reflects more sunlight.

Donovan sighed. He had planned to tuck the two niplips up the nostril of Miwel II, whose copious nasal passages were said to have led into vast and secret chambers, full of pre-Commonwealth treasure. A suitable place for Donovan to search out; a reasonable place to have become trapped.

Instead, he tossed the two devices from his flier and let them fall to the ice, to be buried by the drifting powder. Then he turned his vehicle to the west and sought the fabled city of Prizga.