On the Razor’s Edge

VIII. One Man with a Dream, at Pleasure

Prizga sits on a long, narrow hill whose blunt end overlooks the gorge of the rushing Qornja River. To the east lies a bowl valley rich with farms. To the west the river snakes across a broad scrubland toward a delta twelve miles distant. Lazarus species roam this plain: go-beeshon and go-camels and the like. A long, graceful bridge spans the gorge. Supported entirely by gravity grids, it hangs faerielike in the air.

Prizga ATC tells Donovan that the local weather is cool today, but from cruising altitude Donovan spies the white of the northlands. In the future, it seems, Prizga will grow cooler still.

After departing the ice cap, Donovan had crossed first a thin, tall-grass prairie and then a polar desert before entering the defiles of immense mountain ranges, dressed in fir and spruce but punctuated also with the quaking golden leaves of aspen. After that, he had headed due west over a temperate semidesert until he struck the coast and turned north into the traffic corridors for Prizga.

In all that time, he had not seen another city.

There had been towns scattered on the grasslands, cheerful lights glowing in the night beneath him. But mountain and desert had been devoid of all signs of human habitation. Glacial pockets in the high mountains had caught the starlight and twinkled false images of house lamps, creating faux cities on the ice fields. Now and then, his general receiver had caught snatches of music, so he supposed that villages or mining towns snuggled unseen in the black crevasses, but never anything even as large as Ketchell until he entered the airspace over the Southwestern Desert.

He passed over great circles of greenery, crops conjured from the arid soil by the constant drip-drip of spidery irrigators that spread like steel webs from the morning-flushed towns at their centers. But the first such installation he had seen after leaving the mountains had been rusting in the fields and the town at its heart abandoned and clatterdown.

It was hard to imagine that this world had once ruled the stars.

But Prizga proved a bustling, friendly city, larger than Ketchell, and, unlike her east coast counterpart, she still squatted upon an anciently urban site. Beneath the modern city lay the broken plasteel and metaloceramic of earlier settlements, and beneath those, fragments of concrete block, broken marble, and the rusty stains of iron rebar. And beneath even that, pieces of wood that scholars felt had once been cut and shaped into boards.

The latter claim was still controversial, and the scholars were limited in their exhumations. Save where happy excavation revealed the bones of the city, the layered ground of Prizga was paved over. To most of the inhabitants, the rubble beneath their feet was a “jinko nuisance,” and much of it had long disappeared into ballast, recycle, or scrap sales. The major exception was the ruins poking like iron trees from the soil of the agricultural basin. These were simply too massive to remove, and the farming co-ops had programmed their autoplows to wind around them. The spars and girders were still known by their ancient Murkanglais name: the elfwendevaxii and the basin as a whole was called the vaxi’prizga.

Donovan rented a hotel room using the name on one of several ID cards he had prepared for the trip, and spent his first day in town visiting the ruins. Afterward, he took a leisurely dinner on a terrace restaurant overlooking the Qornja gorge. The sound of the rushing water, muted by the mist that rose out of it, soothed him insensibly into sleep.

He hurries down a darkened stairwell. Quietly, because the enemy may have already infiltrated the building. He passes dim and empty offices, long looted of anything of use, littered with casings and sabots and exhausted battery packs, and here and there too the corpses of those who came to seize the offices and those who had defended them.

He pauses at the broadcast studio to beckon to Issa Dzhwanson, the silver-throated actress, idol of millions, who has been for these past few days the clarion voice of their futility. But she shakes her head and like the men and women left behind on the rooftop will not leave her post. “I will maintain the illusion,” she tells him. “I will tell the world that reinforcements have come, not that the remnants have left. I will sow doubts in the mind of the Protector.”

“I cannot tell you where I’m going,” he says. “Any lips can be brought to speak.”

“They’ll not take me.” She laughs. “Go, and go quickly. If you do not escape, it will not matter that we ever fought.”

There is not time even for a last kiss. He makes his way into the subbasement, where he scrounges in the maintenance shops for something that can hack and dig and chop. The blocks are ceramic and hard to break, but once through the surface facing progress is easier. He wonders how thick the wall is. Will the Protector’s men enter the building to seize it or simply stand back and bring it down, as they brought down the Chancellory? Seventeen stories tower above him. There would be time to realize that it was all coming down to crush him.

Then he is through the wall.

He pulls out the ceramic block and attaches a piton and line to the back side. He wriggles feetfirst through the space thus opened and hunts with his boots for a step or platform. Finding one, he drops the short distance to it and then pulls the block back into the space he had chipped it from.

Only then does he turn and using his black lamp and goggles view the space into which he has crawled.

Donovan gasped awake at his dining table. “The steam tunnels!” he cried.

A waiter appeared by his side. “Is something wrong, snor?”

“No,” Donovan said. “No. Do you have food served on steam tables?”

“Oh, yes, snor. We have steamed perch and sturgeon.”

“I’ll have some of that.”

The waiter hurried off to do as bid, and Donovan rose and approached the rails along the lip of the gorge. The old steam tunnels, once used to heat the buildings in the center city. He remembered now. They had been abandoned in place centuries earlier, when microwave-beamed power had been rediscovered and ancient technologies had replaced technologies more ancient still. No one knew they were there—except the Pedant, who knew everything.

Thanks, Donovan. But I didn’t know I knew.

“The memories were suppressed.”

You can’t delete memories. You can only erase the markers that flag them. But memories are holographic and eventually can be recalled “sideways.”

Oh, wonderful, said the Sleuth. Another lecture on how Pedant’s mind works. Or in this case did not.

Don’t be harsh with him, said the young man in the chlamys.

Besides, added the young girl in the chiton, it was better for us that we did not remember earlier.

“We haven’t remembered enough, anyway,” the Fudir pointed out. “The idea is not how to get out, but how to get in. We need to remember where those tunnels exited.”

Somewhere along the river, obviously.

Sure, Sleuthy, but where? We can’t have our little expedition poking around up and down the riverfront. Might have some impact on the surprise factor.

I have a question. Who suppressed those memories?

The Names?

Not the Names. Had they known to do so, they would have already known the way out. And if the Names knew, Gidula would have known—and then what point the secret to inveigle.

Silky! said the Sleuth. You’re becoming logical. The answer is as logical as the question. We did it to ourselves!

“We…,” said Donovan. “Which ‘we’ would that be?”

His mind fell silent. There had once been a tenth Donovan, but he had gone insane and the others had combined to extinguish him. From time to time, he wondered which aspect of the espionage art that particular persona had been. Ruthlessness, perhaps. An agent needed ruthlessness to kill for expediency, or commit suicide when cornered. It had been the part of man that craved death.

The waiter pushed the steam table over and Donovan selected some choice slices, thanked the waiter, and watched him go. “That was you, Inner Child, wasn’t it? Calling for the steam table.”

«Someone may have heard us say “steam tunnels,” so I sowed doubts with a plausible locution.»

Do you really think someone might be listening?

Ahh, the Kid always thinks someone might be listening.

“I hate fish,” grumbled Donovan.

The Archives of Zãddigah were housed in a building called the Miwellion, dedicated by a minor descendant to a major ancestor who in his day had brought the entire Northern Mark under his sway. Built in a style known locally as Late Imperial and elsewhere not at all, it sported great fluted columns and floating roofs. The live attendant—an old monkey-faced fellow wearing something much like a bathrobe over a plain tunic—blinked astonishment when Donovan strode into the building and confronted him at the desk in the foyer.

The foyer was both narrow and tall, a cylinder, and featured a hemi-dome decorated with holomurals of the great men and women of ancient Terra. The three-dimensional quality of the mural made the dome seem to float in the farthest recesses of the sky. Embedded in the depths of the whirling figures, on the very bottom layer of the hologram, an elderly man with unruly white hair extended his finger to bring all of space and time into being. Evidently, the god Einstein. Across the dome from him, the dark god Maxwell hurled lightning bolts that roiled space and time into superluminal tubes. Overtop of these primeval acts floated more mundane heroes: slaughtering big game, building the first fire, pushing a crude canoe into the sea … There were mud-brick cities, marble temples and palaces, and steel laboratories, explorers setting foot on strange shores and on stranger worlds. The whole was in constant motion so that images deeper in the mural could be glimpsed through the parting clouds of later ones overlain atop them.

Donovan wondered why the lobby was not full of people, come for no other reason than to crane their necks at this wonder. But the attendant only shrugged when asked. “Guess everyone seen ’em already.” He continued to regard his visitor with tight, beady eyes.

“I’ve come here to do some research,” Donovan told him—and he could feel the warm glow of the Pedant rubbing his hands.

“Research,” the attendant said in a voice indicating the novelty of the concept. “You can look at most our holdings on the mong, y’know.”

Donovan resisted sarcasm. “I don’t wish to look at most of your holdings, but at the rest. I have already searched the jandak mong, and those searches led me here—to examine items not remotely available.”

There is no sigh more lingering and heartfelt than that of a man required to do his job. The wizened creature seemed to shrug within his robe. “And what subjects are those, snor?” he asked. “Be aware. There are some that require Nominal permission to view, and these inquiries are noted, logged, and reported.”

Donovan already knew from the public mong that the interdict included pretty much everything dealing with Commonwealth times. “I am but a poor zhingo shun from Old Eighty-two. I search-again through old materials in hope of finding a new understanding.”

Eyebrows arched. “Meaning no disrespect, snor, but what could you possibly learn from them that hasn’t already been learned? The great ’uns of the past…” A vague gesture took in the dome above. “… have already said everything so perfectly there’s nothing more left for the likes of you.”

Maybe so, said the Pedant, but there are ofttimes benefits from saying the same thing in a different way, just as one may better appreciate the sight of the Go-Gates by viewing them from different angles.

The attendant remained unconvinced but escorted him to a room that bore sigils in the ancient Murkanglais proclaiming it a “research room.” This amused the Fudir no end, but he did not translate it into “search-again” for the skeptical attendant.

That worthy unlocked a drawer in the wall and handed him a pair of gloves, showed him the commands to copy or scribe selected images or documents, then, with an air of having exhausted himself, withdrew to resume his guardianship of the entrance.

The Pedant was in his milieu. He spent an hour scanning the indicia for anything that seemed relevant to his curiosity and discovered almost immediately that, while there were hundreds of files under the now-expired time lock of the Gran Publicamericana and seven still sequestered under the Audorithadesh Ympriales, there was nothing in the off-line Archive flagged with the Seal of the Great Names.

Yet a wealth of files, documents, and images dated from the time of the Commonwealth’s fall, material that on the mong was forbidden. There could be but one reason for the oversight.

The Names do not know these files exist! The off-line Archives were visible only to those who came physically to this building, and, to judge by the attendant’s reaction, those did not comprise a thundering herd.

The old Ympriale files predated even the Commonwealth, and so were of little interest. Yet they were the only files still under time lock. They were titled Vyutha 1 through Vyutha 7, with no hint of their content. So whatever they were, even the Commonwealth had been unable to read them. Vyutha, the Pedant’s memory told him, seemed related to the old Murkanglais viuda, which had meant variously “widow, relict, et cetera.”

Both the Fudir and the Sleuth expressed curiosity—if only to learn whether they could pick the lock—so Donovan copied the files on to one of the threads he had brought. Perhaps at further leisure he could break the locks.

As the Pedant became accustomed to the gloves and the various hand motions, he began to wave up information more quickly on the holowall, sweeping documents into piles with a flick of the wrist, opening stacks with the jab of a finger. Embeds linked to other files, shelves, and sections. The Fudir filled several strings with old Commonwealth files for later perusal. Pictures flashed, diaries scrolled, dense mathematical texts unfolded. Pedant soaked it all up at the fastest blink-rate he could manage—even when not one of him could understand what was written. To the slower eye, the infowall grew blurred and smudged.

An agent need not understand the documents he purloins, Donovan thought while he watched the others work. But an eidetic memory was a priceless asset.

The oldest files on the Great Ice bore titles like “An Analysis of Ice Core Data on the Saskatchewan Glacier.” Later years contained titles like “Speculations on the Wisconsin Ice.” Later documents still: “A Reconsideration of Chathuri’s Thesis on the Origin of the El Lenoi Ice.” And so they had gone from analysis to speculation to reconsideration. A fossilization of the mind seemed to have set in, the end point of which was the attendant sitting out front, convinced that the great ones of the past had said all that was worth saying.

To Donovan’s astonishment, he uncovered ancient documents written in a variant of Brythonic, which discussed other ice ages at the very dawn of human prehistory! Most of the files from that far back were unreadable. They had been recorded in protocols or on media that could no longer be deciphered. Sometime in the ancient past—as media decayed and the instruments to read them were breaking down—some poor tech had been faced with the choice of migrating these documents or those on to fresh media, and decided those were not worth his time. A Dark Age had descended, due less to the ravages of Kgonzdan the Oppressed or the Scything of the Beanstalks than to the inevitable decay of substrates over time. There never would have been enough of a budget or enough scribes or enough time to migrate every “disk” before it had passed below the horizon of readability. It was not that people who lived back then had suddenly turned stupid, but that their learning had become a blank slate, an inert disk, a broken thread.

Deep in the Stasis Vault beneath the Miwellion, he learned, there were physical objects: a “tape,” a “thumb drive,” an ancient book. Only the book could still be read—by a special emorái camera that scanned page images at various depths into what otherwise was a solidly fused block of paper.

Pedant found an image of a barren shoreline recognizably that of the Bay of Ketchell, but without a city embracing it. A party of fifteen, bundled in parkas, faced the imager. A few of them were waving. One was pointing northward, as if to indicate their destination. The image bore a partly legible caption in the old Taņţamiž: Capt.(?) Hitchkorn-pandit and his par ior to setting out f . 1* Jun* . The Fudir wondered where they had been heading to, and whether any had ever come back.

Donovan used the image as a search term and soon unearthed a dozen similar scenes captured over the centuries from the same angle. The oldest were flat or, more likely, their 3-D extensions had corrupted. The more recent were holograms. The Sleuth rotated the holograms to match as nearly as possible the viewpoint of the fixed images.

Viewing them in sequence, he could watch the land on which Ketchell was built emerge from the sea. The shoreline receded; harbors became lakes, then farmlands. And Ketchell grew brick by brick. The oldest image of all looked across a broad mudflat on which was cradled a once-sunken ship now careened drunkenly on her side. In the middle distance, beyond the forest that had grown between them and the sea, Donovan could make out the sky-scraping spires of an older city from whose docks and harbors the ocean had retreated.

From the estimated dates of the images, the Sleuth calculated a time lapse of no more than two hundred years from the barren mudflats to the beginnings of Ketchell. Now, according to its residents, Ketchell had “always” been there.

A Farewell to Manitoba, by Henri Sanchez Patel, was the diary of someone purporting to be the last resident of that otherwise-unknown realm before it vanished beneath the ice. He wrote movingly of the empty houses, the silent roadways, the deserted cemeteries, most of all the memories, and how one year the snow that fell in winter failed to melt in the following summer. Even at the speed of Pedant’s reading, the lingering love of Patel for his native land came through and reduced the Silky Voice to tears.

But there was one curious passage that caught Donovan’s attention.

Word came today on the net that the great Kenya Beanstalk has come down at last. It was long expected, but perhaps it would have been wiser to let nature take its course. Its upper reaches were detached and, being at orbital velocity, High Nairobi flew off into deep space. But that was the only part that went according to plan. Tragedy was foredoomed. If the world is too poor to maintain those grand old structures, then certainly she is too poor to deconstruct them safely. Different parts of the stalk, they said, had different eastward velocities, and the debris field scattered much farther than officials had so confidently predicted. Tala and Kituni had been wisely evacuated, but the whole structure twisted north and sections separated and screeched over the horizon to fall like flaming shrapnel on Kisimaayo and even as far as Muqdisho. These are places I never heard of before, and now no one will ever hear of them again.

But that could not be right. The Twelve Gates had been scythed down by Dao Chetty in their rebellious attack on Terra during the overthrow of the Commonwealth. The Dao Chettians themselves said so. He wondered if one of them—this “Kenya Beanstalk”—had been brought down earlier for some other reason and the demolition had been tragically mishandled.

«Hush!» said Inner Child. «Someone coming.»

The attendant? asked the Silky Voice.

No, the Pedant told himselves. The attendant walks with a shuffle. These are soft, and stealthy.

How could They have traced us here? the Sleuth asked. We had the niplips removed.

“Unless Foo-lin lied,” muttered the Fudir.

«But who has found us? Gidula and his people? Or Ekadrina and hers?»

The Brute pulled a teaser from the folds of his garment and in two swift bounds slipped beside the open door. He pressed back against the wall, out of sight from the corridor.

«Close the door!»

No. Then he’d know we heard him.

The faint footfalls approached the entry, and stopped.

There was time for two breaths, then a voice said, “Knock, knock.”

Dumbfounded, the scarred man made no reply, and the voice said with some asperity, “You’re supposed to say ‘Who’s there?,’ Donovan.”

Donovan did not recognize the voice. He shifted his grip on the teaser. “Who’s there?”

“Gwillgi.”

Donovan did not ask, Gwillgi who?

Gwillgi Hound carried a dazer, which more than trumped Donovan’s teaser. The scarred man put his weapon away without being asked. Gwillgi did not and was not asked.

The Hound gave the impression of a great deal of energy packed into a small space, like a spring compressed. He was short, dark visaged, and bore a pencil-thin mustache on his lip. His cheeks and chin were a bed of short, sharp bristles. When he smiled, his teeth showed, but not to any comforting effect.

He studied Donovan from topaz eyes that resembled aperture crystals for a laser. “I don’t believe we’ve formally met, Donovan. Or should I say, ‘Geshler Padaborn’?”

Donovan retreated to the egg-chair that hung before the holowall and lowered himself into it. He had met his share of Hounds—Bridget ban, Greystroke, Cerberus, and others—but none had inspired the feeling of utter dread as did Gwillgi. If the little man was a compressed spring, he was a spring wound of razor wire.

The Hound gestured and a second egg-chair descended from a recess in the ceiling and hung before the holowall. Gwillgi captured the wall in a glance while he seated himself.

“Did you come here to kill me?” Donovan asked.

Gwillgi’s smile showed canines. “If I had, you’d ne’er have asked that question. Death is best served briskly. Anyone who makes it a play is a fool.”

The Fudir relaxed just a little, although he could think of three reasons why Gwillgi might delay an assassination. “I’m on vacation,” he said, resurrecting a portion of his bravado. “Come back when I’m on the clock again.”

“On the clock…?” Gwillgi considered the phrase, deduced its meaning. “Let’s say you’re on call, why don’t we? I’ve got some questions. You can answer them, or you will answer them.”

“Do I have to choose?”

Gwillgi barked. It might have been a laugh. “I can see what she meant. Now, let’s start at the top, why don’t we. Are you Geshler Padaborn?”

“I … don’t know.” Donovan tensed unwillingly.

The human dynamite pursed his lips. “Well. There goes my script. I expected one of three responses, but that wasn’t one of them. How could you not know…? Ah.”

“Yes, you must have read the report I gave Zorba three years back.”

The Hound nodded. “How many are you, inside that cantaloupe?”

“Nine—that we know of.” He grinned nervously. “We’ve got you outnumbered.”

Gwillgi grunted. “Sure. But you’re sitting all bunched up. Is Padaborn one of your nine?”

“Might, or might not be. We … destroyed one a couple years ago that was, well, dysfunctional.”

Gwillgi raised an eyebrow. “Interesting. I’ve never spoken with the survivor of a successful suicide attempt.”

Donovan shrugged. “It might have been Padaborn, but…”

“But you don’t think so.”

“I’m starting to remember things that Padaborn might remember.”

“You think there might be more personas awakening?”

Donovan turned wistful. “Ten was such a nice round number.”

“So’s twelve. More divisors. Could mean you’re still two short.”

“Present company planty nuff, sahb.”

Gwillgi nodded. “Padaborn or no, how high up in the revolutionary cabal are you?” When Donovan hesitated, Gwillgi cocked his head, and the cocking of Gwillgi’s head was enough to elicit words from any man.

Donovan took a deep breath. “The Revolution plans to crack me open and suck me dry. They think I know something they want to know. That’s why I’m on vacation.”

Gwillgi pursed his lips, tilted his head. “That’s forthright.”

The Fudir spread his hands. “Have I ever lied to you?”

“On Yuts’ga you engaged in battle on the rebel side and fought Sèanmazy to a draw. That was impressive.”

“How did you know—”

“I’d been following Domino Tight. He was a coming man among them and bore watching. Then he was killed in a back alley in Cambertown and I switched to my number two target: a loyalist named Pendragon Jones.”

“Killed? But he…”

“Yes. Tight proved remarkably chipper for being so recently and thoroughly deceased. And then, the lagniappe: an unexpected guest appearance by Bridget ban’s old lover. Well, one of them. And in the role of the storied Padaborn, no less.”

“You were watching—”

“Of course. I arrived late because of an assassination in downtown Cambertown. The mums hit the lyres all over Yuts’ga and the Confederation cashed out short a minor official. The rebels are trying to maneuver their own people into key offices, aren’t they?”

“I’d rather not betray anyone.”

Gwillgi waved a hand. His nails were almost like claws. “That would be a neat trick, and I wouldn’t mind watching you try. But let me suggest my own name at the top of the list of those you’d not betray. Which side are you working for?”

“I’m working for Donovan buigh.”

Gwillgi ran a fingernail along the barrel of his dazer. “Don’t try for ‘cute,’ Donovan buigh. You haven’t the dimples for it.”

Donovan flapped his arm. “I was out of the Long Game. Out of it! All I wanted was to visit my daughter on Dangchao Waypoint and mend some fences with her mother. That’s all. I was kidnapped and brought here against my will.” He started to say more but decided not to add any further complications. “I have some debts and obligations now.”

“So your promise is suddenly worth something?”

“You’re here as the Kennel’s observer,” countered Donovan.

“It’s a big Spiral Arm. We don’t want the Confederation to fall unless we know which way it will topple. And that means we need to know what the sides are, who is on which, and how the victory of either would affect the League.”

“And now I’m your focus.”

“My interests are varied. I still want to know who put Humpty Domino back together again. But why and how you got not only into it but apparently into a leadership position does pique my curiosity somewhat. Old man Gidula picked you up. He’s a clever sod. He wins every battle by being late and picking up the pieces. I knew he’d bring you to Terra, so—”

“So you watched the Forks from remote viewers up atop Kojj Hill.”

Gwillgi wagged the dazer at him. “I’m impressed.”

“You left a footprint.”

“Mmm, well. Can’t get them all.”

“And your lander’s skid pressed into the ground when you concealed it in a hidden meadow.”

“And from that you knew it was me?”

“I knew it was someone. No offense, I was hoping it would be someone else.”

Gwillgi finally made his weapon disappear. “Kidnapped, you say. I could smuggle you back into the League. You could brief Black Shuck personally, then go to Dangchao and learn if Bridget ban will shoot you or not.”

“Well…”

“Well?”

“It’s gotten complicated.”

“Oh, good.” Gwillgi swung a leg over his knee and clasped his hands over it. “I was afraid it was all too simple. Tell me more.”

So Donovan told him more. He just didn’t tell him all.

Later, they dined at a restaurant overlooking the Go-Gates from Mount Morn on the northern cliff. The mist from the falls of the Qornja where it passed between the two cliffs created rainbows over the gorge, and it seemed as of the faerie bridge above them were supported on an arch of light.

Donovan noted that as the sun moved lower in the west and cast the cliffs into sharp relief a human figure emerged faintly from the ancient rocks of the southern cliff: a bearded man wearing an expression of unutterable weariness and holding at ease a shoulder-fired weapon of indeterminate type. The outline was much eroded from the water and the stiff wind that scoured the Gates, but Donovan thought it looked sandblasted as well. He wondered how many generations had separated the fulgent praise that had shaped the figure from the obloquy that had sought to obliterate it.

Gwillgi expressed no curiosity about the image; but it wasn’t his planet, after all. The headwaiter, when the robot server had summoned him, was equally uninformative.

“We call it the Moment, snor, which means ‘The Face of Evening.’ There is another, a different face, on the cliff below us, but only the finest of lighting calls it from the rock. That is why it is best to patronize this poor place, which snor does not forget is called Dinner in the Mist. The view from Prizga is not so fine as from here.”

By this the Fudir understood that the two restaurants were rivals. Perhaps there would be something about the cliff faces in the files he had copied at the Miwellion. He wasn’t sure why it mattered, or even that it did; but deprived of the Mount of Many Faces, he would settle for the Cliffs of Two Faces.

“I fancy myself a good judge of character,” Gwillgi said. “I’ve seldom been wrong, and never wrong twice. I don’t see you working for the Names. Otherwise, you’d be in that gorge, not gazing at it. As for the Revolution … Are you certain about those apparitions? The ones who appeared from nowhere at the warehouse fight?”

Donovan stroked his chin. His bowl held a steaming heap of vermicelli and rice pilaf, seasoned with a variety of spices, from which he took a forkful. “I can’t be entirely certain,” he said after he had swallowed. “They may have been lurking somewhere nearby. But Oschous was monitoring the battle through the sensor array, and swore that they simply appeared on his screens.”

“I was too late for that part. You think they were Names.”

“Oschous wouldn’t speak of them directly. That’s a common behavior pattern over here.”

“Some rebel. And there were a total of … How many? Four?”

“I counted four. Two on the rooftop: a woman of surpassing beauty and, after Domino Tight had wounded her, a man enough alike to be her brother. A second man appeared in the old truck apron—he was a walking arsenal—and took out quite a few of our fighters just as we were on the verge of victory. Then, another woman—her beauty was more the hard-as-nails kind—appeared with Domino Tight and Ravn Olafsdottr and helped them take out the rambo.”

“Which means, if they were Names, the Names are fighting on both sides. Which means the Revolution has sparked a civil war among the rulers themselves.”

“It’s not unusual,” Donovan said, “to find revolutionaries among the rulers. Those who think they can surf the waves of change.”

Gwillgi wrinkled his brow. “Surf?”

“Never mind. There’s a second interpretation of events.”

“No fact explains itself,” Gwillgi agreed. “It can always be seen from other angles. I think I see where you’re heading.”

“The whole Revolution is a sham. The Names have not taken sides in the rebellion. The Names were already at each other’s throats—and the Revolution is something they have conjured up to carry on their fight by proxy.”

Gwillgi showed his teeth again. “I don’t know which would be more discomfited by that, the loyalists or the rebels. Do you think they know?”

Donovan shook his head. “I think Gidula suspects. That may be why he’s chosen his own road. I can’t answer for the loyalists.”

“And you don’t know how Domino Tight was resurrected.”

“I didn’t even know he was dead. When the mums ambushed the lyre, they nearly wiped out his cadre. The survivors who trickled into the warehouse knew only that they had lost contact with their master and his staff. We feared the worst, but when he showed up, we figured he had eluded the trap.”

Gwillgi shook his head. “I was there. I saw him. I even waved the knife for him.” He blinked, then explained. “‘Wave the knife’ is what we say in Public Vorhayn, Friesing’s World, when we ritually dispatch companions to accompany the dead.”

“Umm.”

“Don’t worry, Donovan. Only for murders. To accompany their victims.”

“I never had a chance to talk with Domino Tight,” Donovan said. “He teamed up with Ravn Olafsdottr and the two of them attacked Ekadrina Sèanmazy together. That was … when I joined the fight.”

The eyes of Gwillgi narrowed and his brow grew thoughtful. “When Olafsdottr was killed.”

“She wasn’t killed. I found that out later. Gidula had her cared for, then dropped her off on Delpaff. If you can track her down…”

Gwillgi rose. “It’s not good to stay too long in one place. You know what you have to do, right?”

Donovan was not certain he “had” to do anything, let alone the bidding of this spring-loaded ball of razor wire. “I have an idea.”

“You’ll have to let Gidula find you.”

Donovan shrugged. “How do I get in touch with you?”

“You don’t. I get in touch with you. But don’t expect it too soon or too often. I’ve been getting calling cards—drone packets entering systems where I’ve been—but not from anyone I’ve entrusted with my call-code. I don’t know that my network’s been compromised, but I won’t risk it by answering. Just in case, I’ve shifted my pattern.” He extended a hand, which Donovan found to be rough and calloused. “So think about what you’ve told me, and where you’ve used pronouns like ‘we,’ ‘us,’ and ‘our.’ And make sure you’re on the right side.”

“I told you. I’m on my side; and that’s always the right side.”

Gwillgi smiled. “I like you, Donovan. I don’t like many people, but I like you. That would make it particularly hard if I have to kill you. Betrayal by someone I like is especially galling.”