The January Dancer

An Craic

“A lonely duty,” the harper says and her fingers evoke the loneliness of the Rift, empty, echoing chords that seem to sound from very far away. The scarred man watches her play for a while, then he tosses off the remainder of his drink in one long swallow. His face screws up and his fists clench.

“There’s no pleasure in that draught.”

“Then why drink such slops?”

“Because there’s less pleasure in not drinking it. You need a different mode for that. Something mad. Something off-key.”

The harper introduces a dissonance into the vacancy of the Rift and proceeds in diminished sevenths, inverted. “You think na Fir Li mad?” The strings laugh, but the laughter is a little off.

“Don’t you? He believes in something that doesn’t exist.”

“The threat from the CCW.”

“No, the ULP.”

“Ah. The gap between theory and practice. He’s obsessed, not mad. There’s a difference. It’s the man who cares for nothing who may be mad. The root meaning of ‘care’ is to cry out, to scream; and what sane man is careless?”

The scarred man grunts without humor. “You caught the irony, of course. On the one hand, Fir Li regretted the Molnar’s power to pillage; but on the other, he wished his Ardry had the power to crush him. What is the difference between a pirate chief and a king but the number and quality of the ships at his command?”

“The pirate butchers; the king milks. On the whole, I’d rather be milked. Fir Li knew the difference.”

The scarred man runs a hand through the remnants of his hair. “I hate Fir Li. We hate the very thought of him. He thinks too much.”

“Normally,” the harper answers, “thinking would be accounted a good thing.”

“No, we mean his paraperception, his multitasking, or however your milk-tongue puts it. For a man so single-minded, he’s had too many minds.”

“I don’t know how the encoding works for parallel perception, but…”

“You don’t want to know. Beside, Fir Li doesn’t matter. He wasn’t a player, except on the edges. A fit role for a man on the edge of the sky, and perhaps on the edge of his own sanity. Although being of more than one mind, he might be edgier than most.”

“Who was the player then…? Ah. Greystroke.”

“Yes, the man no one sees. He could be sitting here at this table with us, and you’d not mark him, so well does he blend in.”

The harper laughs. “Surely, an exaggeration!”

The scarred man smiles, and his smiles are not pleasant. “Surely. An exaggeration. But what sort of music would you play to limn a man like that? Music wants to be heard, to call attention to itself, and that is the very opposite of the Grey One.

“I can hide a melody in the chords. It’s not always the top notes that sing, you know.”

“The trick,” the scarred man says, as if to himself, “is for all the notes to sing in concert.”

“January, Little Hugh, and now Greystroke. We’re for Jehovah now?”

The shrunken head dips, the smile turns bitter. “For now. There are a few others who aren’t in it yet. But we have enough to start with.”