The January Dancer

Geantraí: The Stern Chase

“The Corner of Jehovah is a bad place to be,” the scarred man says.

…since one must find his way in and find his way out, and neither is an easy thing to do; although more do manage the first than the second. Without the aid of the Terrans, it is close to impossible. But help need not be voluntary, nor even witting, and to each rule there is an exception.

The exception stepped into the bubbling activities of the Tarako Sarai, that broad open market space where Menstrit curves off shamefacedly toward the reputable parts of town (shedding its name in the process and becoming born again as Glory Road). The monorail, three streets, four winding alleys, and twelve decidedly twisted pedestrian walkways converge there. To the west, Port Jehovah stretches nearly to the horizon, and tall, graceful ships gleam ruddy in the early-morning sun as if wrapped in goldbeater’s foil. In every other direction, the topsy dwellings of the Terran Corner teeter over the edges of the market.

Cubical stalls made of dull composite disguised with bright pastels line three sides of the sarai. Each stall abuts its neighbors, save where walkways from the Corner squeeze between them. The west side facing Menstrit and the Port is open, and there are situated the monorail station and a carpark for ground vehicles. Before the sun has even angled into this plaza, the dukāndar-merchants have, in a rattle of chains and counterweights, heaved up steel stall-front doors, calling to one another and wishing good luck or ill as their competitions dictate. The stalls are open-front, with chairs and benches and racks within arranged as required for the best display of their wares.

Overnight, lighters and bumboats from Port Jehovah off-load the orbiting ships and bear groundside exotic arts and jewels and foodstuffs from far-off worlds. Much of this cornucopia makes its way to the Tarako Sarai, some of it legally; there, to be snatched up by eager, early-rising Jehovans, anxious for a taste of the foreign. Eager enough indeed to dare the very edge of the Corner to get it.

Later, ferry boats drop and off-load the travelers—the sliders, the world-hoppers, the touristas—gawking and pointing and capturing images and pawing through the merchandise for bargains and native handicrafts. They dress wrongly—for the climate, for the world, for the time of day—and their bodies throb off-synch to the tock of shipboard time and not to Jehovah’s sun. As they enter the sarai, the bustle increases, and with it the markup on the goods. Isn’t this cute, couples and triples ask each other. Those booths look like storage sheds or little garages. Is that a magician? How does he do that with the snake? Oh, I didn’t know the human body could bend like that! Is that a legtrikittar they’re playing over there? How strange! How strange!

The market speaks to them. Ah, yes, sahb, this is the True Coriander, known no-but else place! Seven ducat only, and that is that my children go hungry. See, here, come into my stall, when you see ever so fine ’shwari, look good-good on memsahb. Oho, not memsahb? Then, here you find special double-throw silk, made only on J’ovah, think how this feel on her skin…! Hutt! Hutt! No mind his silks. See here my drizzle-jewels, how they sparkle so? Genuine from Arrat Mountains.

In the center of the market, push-carts peddle, performers sing and juggle, and food vendors hawk their smoking barbecues and searing tan-doors. Is hot day, you like kulfi-kone, eye-said krim, most excellent! Pull-pork! Koofta kabob! Hoddawgs! Winnershnizzle! Pukka Terran food, you find him nowhere else!

But you, sahb, I make it five ducat fifty.

A wink, a lowered voice, a proffered discount, and Gladiola Bills and Shanghai ducats waft magically from purse to poke. And if the promise “Product of Jehovah” is no more genuine than the discount, little harm is done. Even in the ricochet ruckus of the starport sarai, some things are never said. Some of the “Jehovan” wares that leave with the tourists on the upbound ferries had arrived but a short while before on the down-bound lighters. Why pay duty for so short a stay?

“Mango kulfi-kone,” one of the thinning horde asked of the sweets vendor, who heaped a waffle-cone with two scoops of the rich iced-milk, holding it out and saying, “Half ducat, sahb.”

“For two such paltry balls? A quarter ducat would be too much.”

The vendor’s eyes lit. This sahb was no “slider” but, by his long, fringed kurta brocaded with yellow and red flowered borders and with the amber prayer beads wrapped round his wrist, a Jehovan merchant from the City. No Terran, to be sure, but he knew his manners. “It grieves me that I cannot offer it for less than forty-three. The fruit alone costs such much, and I must pay the women who cut it.”

“Thou pay’st them too much. See how small they have diced the pieces! Thirty might be generous for such slovenly knife-work.”

“Bakvas, shree merchant! The smaller the pieces, as all men know, the greater the flavor. Forty.” Their voices had risen, as if in argument, and some of the sliders looked at them askance and edged away. You never can tell about those people.

“Thirty-five!”

“Done!” the vendor cried in vehement agreement. He extended the cone with one hand and offered the other.

“There can be no handclasp with only one hand,” his customer recited, and offered the firm grip of a Jehovan, rather than the limper Terran grip. A few coins changed possession, neither man so boorish as to visibly count them. As God is One, a man who cannot count his money by the heft and feel of it should seek another work!

The vendor watched the merchant reenter the crowd, pause at the kabob-maker’s stall, and—and another customer asked for a kulfi-kone, and paid the half ducat without banter—aye, as if the vendor were but a bisti worker—and when the vendor looked again, the Jehovan merchant had vanished.

Each market day, after the sliders have gone and the dukāndars have twice tallied their accounts—once for themselves, and once for the men of the Jehovan Purse—and the shutters have rattled into place and lock-bars dropped home, the collectors of the Terran Brotherhood drift into the market. A man watching could not say at any moment, “They have come,” but suddenly they were there. Men and women, plainly dressed, mingled with the vendors and whispered a few words here and there, and a portion of the ducats and bills and Jehovan shekels were transferred to the coffers of the Terran Welfare and Benevolent Fund. The food vendors donated also such of their goods as remained at the end of the day; and these were carried off immediately to shelters and kitchens in the Corner. What happens to the hard currency no one has ever asked.

One such collector was named Yash. He had entered the market first, using a crack in the back wall of the vacant handi dukān through which a lithe man could slip. Old Nancy Verwalter had made the finest hand-phones in the Corner, but she had died two years before and the back wall of her dukān had been opened with picks and pry bars.

A few loafers squatted about the plaza, and these Yash studied with grave interest. It was not unknown for agents of the Jehovan Purse to audit the market in the hope of squeezing one more shekel from the dukāndars. Their grooming and clothing usually marked them out, but some were more clever and knew how to blend in.

A few men, disinclined to visit the charity kitchens, had begged cuts of meat or a few samosas or a sandwich from the vendors sealing their coolers and boxes and extinguishing their fires. One such man lounged against the wall of the shoe-dukān, where he nibbled on a pita. His kurta was a plain, dingy white, lacking any brocade or fringe. Satisfied that the market was unwatched, Yash spoke a few words over his handi and soon his runners emerged from a variety of waypoints to circulate among the merchants of the Tarako Sarai.

Yash did not leave his post while the runners gathered and brought him the harvest, but continued to monitor the market. At a few quick signals, his people could vanish.

The sliders thinned out, anxious to catch the next ferry up. The bum with the pita must have finished, for when Yash glanced that way again, he was gone. A hand signal: Hutt! Hutt! If the market thinned too much, his collectors would stand out too prominently, should any Pursers be about.

Finally, the take was complete. Yash counted it quickly and inconspicuously, then divided it into four equal parts, giving the other three to Bikram, Hari, and Sandeep. “By different routes,” he reminded them. On the other side of the hole in the back wall of the handi dukān, a wonderful array of options presented itself.

Yash himself took to Jasmine Way, which wound crook-legged past the Mosque of the Third Aspect with its prominent rooftop observatory and where “the Submissives” prayed standing with their faces turned to the sky. There, a bare-chested man squatted in a ragged dhoti and Yash dropped a dinar in his cupped hands, careful to pull it from his own scrip and not from the bundle hidden under his blouse. Dividing the take into four parts ensured that all would not be lost if a courier were robbed or arrested—much of a much, in Yash’s opinion—but it also ensured against a pettier form of thievery: The four parts must still equal one another when they were delivered to the Committee of Seven.

Yash’s path to the Seven was not straightforward, but the starting point and ending point were fixed, and there were certain theorems in topology, unknown to Yash, that could be solved by a man learned in such things. Thus, as he made his way past the Fountain of the Four Maidens, through the narrow colonnade beside Ivan Ngomo’s pastry-dukān, and even up Graf Otto’s Stairs, of which none but those born to the Corner know, Yash did not particularly remark the variety of men he chanced upon: beggars, holy men, idlers gazing in display windows, a customer at a knife-kiosk, a man signaling in vain to an auto-rickshaw, a messenger brushing briskly past him only to turn back sharply at some forgotten task. Yet, a closer inspection might have noted a curious resemblance of feature among some of them.

The Seven—who were now six in number, one having found it safe to emerge from the wind—had expected four knocks upon their door, as each runner arrived. The fifth took them by surprise. Eleven knives slid quietly from their sheaths, Bikram being ambidextrous, and the Memsahb nodded to Sandeep, who was closest to the door.

The heavy wooden portal was thrown open and bounded against the wall and—

There was no one there but an old sweeper garbed in a grimy dhoti tucked up at the waist, and brushing with a hand-jharu at the leaves that littered the outer colonnade. He blinked at the sudden opening of the door and pushed erect. “Ah,” he said easily and with none of the deference expected of custodians. “Those of Name greet the Seven of Jehovah.”

And he smiled with all his teeth.

The Seven were disturbed by this unexpected advent. “It’s been long since the Secret Name has called on us,” said the memsahb chairman. Yash and his crew had been dismissed and only the Committee now sat. The courier looked around the room with studied disinterest. He seemed more at ease than he should have—there were the lime pits by the Dunkle Street ghauts, after all—but those of the Confederation were an arrogant folk and even their servants strutted like masters.

“So long that ye have forgotten your duties?” the courier asked. He styled himself Qing Olafsson, but no one in the room supposed it his true name. Years of silence—and now two had come in as many weeks, each bearing the same office-name. The Memsahb knew some unease over this, as of raindrops quickening before a coming storm.

“Dere gifs no dooty,” one of the Committee said. But the Memsahb placed a hand on his arm and he fell silent. Qing thought her a hard woman, and all the harder for her pale appearance. White hair, white skin—she wore a white chiton, too. Such a hue betokened something soft and gentle, like snow or cream, not this hard-edged ceramic.

“What my colleague means,” she said in a grandmotherly way, “is that our homeworld is your hostage.”

“And thus your obedience more assured,” Qing answered, and he noticed how eyes narrowed and lips pressed. No more than two of them might be willing servants of the CCW, he thought, had willingness any weight.

“But not our love,” said another member.

A shrug did for the old proverb. Let them hate, so long as they fear.

And what was asked was a simple matter, a mere nothing. No betrayals were required; no deaths demanded. “I have an ears-only message for Donovan,” he said. “You need only point me in his direction. A handshake, an introduction, that is all.”

“An’ why air ye needing this Donovan?” asked another council member. “Sure, he swims deep, and does not surface for trifles.”

Qing smiled. “That is a matter between him and the Secret Name. Best if none know what is to pass between us.”

The Memsahb placed her hands in a ball on the table before her and leaned slightly over them. “There is a problem.”

“I am grieved to hear it. Does this problem come with a solution, or must the Secret Name speak with the Dreadful Name?”

Oh, they flinched at that! And some looked to the door. Couriers oft traveled with companions should their messages be ignored. If the servants of the Secret Name were the Confederacy’s eyes and ears, those of the Dreadful Name were its hands and fists.

“Tscha!” said a dark-haired woman who had not spoken previously. “What are we owink to League? We live in corners, like rats. Tell him of Donovan.”

The Memsahb had not turned to look at the speaker, one of those Qing had previously noted as genuinely sympathetic to the Confederacy. Now she said, “Yes. Donovan lives deeply, as I’ve said. His world is tangent to ours at only one point: a petty scrambler. He uses this man to contact us, and we use him. There may be further links in the chain. This man—he calls himself the Fudir—may only know someone who knows someone.” She smiled with a tight horizontal smile. “I understand contact is more secure that way.”

And indeed it was. One cannot betray a man unknown. Qing shrugged. “If it is a tangle of yarn and Donovan is at the other end, thy duty is to hand me the loose strand that leadeth to him. Where may I find this ‘Fudir’?”

“That’s the problem,” the Memsahb told him. “He’s gone off-world. A small misunderstanding between him and the Jehovan rectors. He’s ‘in the wind,’ we say, and set no date on his return.”

“And where might this wind have blown him? Those of Name have little patience. The longer the path to Fudir, the longer the path to Donovan, and the shorter our patience. It is only the end of the skein that matters. Thou art of no account. The Fudir is of no account. Other links are of no account. Thou art nothing; Donovan is everything. The sooner thou sendest me on my way, the sooner I cease to vex thee, and thou may’st return to thy petty thievery and scrambles.”

“If we are servink Names faithfully,” the dark woman said, “they allow us return to Terra?”

Qing waited without speaking.

Finally, the Memsahb bobbed her head. “He’s gone to New Eireann.”

“A small world,” Qing said, “yet big enough. There is no Corner on New Eireann, but a man in hiding finds no shortage of holes.”

“He has gone with another, the former Planetary Manager, overthrown by the ICC.”

Another of the Seven spoke up. “Dey hope to find…”

But the Memsahb cut him off again. “The Fudir always has his plans, but they do not interest shree Qing, here. But however hard the Fudir may be to find, the return of the O’Carroll of Oriel will surely create a storm, and at the epicenter of that storm, you will find what you seek. O’Carroll will lead you to the Fudir; the Fudir will lead you to Donovan—or to the next link leading to him.”

The Memsahb seemed to derive some amusement from this. The courier had heard the ancient and obscure Terran phrase—make him jump through hoops—but there was no help for it. A metric week out and another back; but with no firm date for this Fudir’s return, waiting here would take longer. The Fudir must be sought where he had gone.

Qing decided that the Seven knew no more than they had told him. He rose and bowed over his folded hands, as Terrans were wont to do, though it was a shallow bow to indicate his estimate of their status. “I thank the Memsahb for her assistance in my task and assure her that the Secret Name will learn of her devotion to the Guardians of Terra.”

“Guardians!” said the first man in a voice of contempt.

“You are tellink them of our help,” said the second woman, “and our yearnink.”

Qing said, “The Powerful Name undoubtedly has His reasons for what He does or refrains from doing. Wise men are merely thankful for His wisdom.” He bowed again, this time a sardonic nod of the head, and was out the door.

When the Seven hurried to the door and threw it open, the colonnade was empty. There was no sign of the courier, neither straight ahead, nor to the left, where the portico turned and ran down a flight of covered stairs to another level. Crisp leaves rattled across the paving in the autumnal breeze. A hand-broom stood propped against the balustrade.

“Dat makes two,” said Dieter. “How many more messengers have the Names sent?”

“May he never come again,” said another, who spit on the paving stones.

“Fool,” the dark-haired woman scolded him. “Cooperation is our only hope of beink allowed to return.”

The Memsahb shook her head almost imperceptibly. “No, perhaps the Fudir was right about the Twisting Stone. Longer chances have won the game. Come. Back inside. There are still the accounts to review, and it grows chilly out here.”

Greystroke emerged after they had gone and, brandishing his anycloth, became once again a pilgrim seeking the Mosque of the Third Aspect, to be guided unwittingly out of the Corner by helpful Terrans. As he hurried off down the covered stairs, he wondered what the Memsahb had meant by “the Twisting Stone.” There was something familiar there, a passing phrase, a similar term; but it did not come clear to him.

At Graf Otto’s Stairs, he paused. He was being watched—an odd feeling, one he was unaccustomed to. But the sound of footsteps echoed his own. He bought a kebab from a street vendor, and took the moment to gaze idly about. He did not expect to see anyone, and his expectations were granted.

The Other Olafsson, he thought. The Seven had mentioned a previous visitor. The second courier’s duty was to monitor the first, and if he failed to carry out his mission, execute him and take his place. The servants of the Dreadful Name were quite as skilled as any Hound, and more so perhaps than even a senior Pup. Interesting, he thought. If the Other knew that he was not in fact Olafsson Qing, he might never reach his ship alive.

He quickened his pace, and turned an unexpected corner, reconfiguring his anycloth as he did into a different pattern and cut. He wore once again the brocaded kurta of a prosperous dukāndar-merchant.

Shortly after, he heard the footsteps again.

While Greystroke simultaneously sought one trail while trying to lose another, Little Hugh O’Carroll tried to grasp the Rieving of New Eireann. The physical damage was simple to inventory; the psychic damage, more difficult.

There is a subtle difference between a world that has been ravaged and a world that has been ruined. There are no physical parameters for it; there is nothing that can be measured or tested. It can be seen not in the manner and extent of the devastation, but in the faces of those devastated. The Eireannaughta had gazed once before on a burnt and gutted Council House; but before it had been with grim determination. Now it was with slumped shoulders, and something seemed to have receded from behind their eyes.

Unlike the Rebels and the Loyalists, the Cynthian rievers had come neither to change the world nor to preserve its hallowed institutions nor even to suck the teats of its commerce. Even the ICC owned that much interest in the worlds they managed. One of their corporate maxims was: If the people get rich, you can steal more from them. The Cynthians had come only for “pleasure and treasure.” They took as much of both as they could, and not all the ruins they left behind were buildings.

A surprise attack across Newtonian space has a paradoxical feature: The defenders receive plenty of warning and yet can do little but wait. Once off Electric Avenue, the attackers must brake to co-orbital speeds, and even with the outsized alfvens all warships carry, this requires several days. But the same cruel dictates of Shree Newton limit the defenders’ ability to intercept the incoming fleet. Long before the Cynthians reached New Eireann, Colonel-Manager Jumdar knew there was nothing she could do to stop them.

Not that she contemplated surrender. Her database assured her that among the pleasures the Cynthians sought was the pleasure of combat. They were a folk for whom adjectives like “brutal” and “ruthless” were accounted compliments; and nothing so outraged them as a foe who would not fight. Those who surrendered were treated more harshly than those who were defeated—which is not to say that either was treated very well.

Jumdar’s two ships—troop transports for her rump-regiment—were only lightly armed; and no help could be expected from their home base at the Gladiola Depot, or from Hawthorn Rose, where the remainder of the regiment had gone to complete the original contract. Long before help could arrive from either system, the pirates would be done and gone.

So it would be the Eireannaughta police boats and Jumdar’s two battalions, presently scattered in peacekeeping posts the length of the Vale of Eireann. At her urgent broadcast plea, veteran Loyalists and Rebels stepped forward to defend the Vale and were issued arms from the ICC armory. Handsome Jack was brevetted Major, First Battalion of Volunteers, and given charge of this ragtag group. He immediately advised the colonel to strip the Mid-Vale of troops and to concentrate them in Fermoy and New Down Town. There was little to attract loot-hungry rievers outside the two large cities. They hadn’t come to milk the cows in the Ardow.

“And put your troops under cover,” he added. “These Cynthians will put their own surveillance in orbit and will drop steel rain if they see anything needing it.”

“We must be,” added Voldemar O’Rahilly, who was senior-most of the Loyalist contingent, “as hard to spot from orbit as was the Ghost of Ardow.”

To Jumdar’s surprise, Handsome Jack Garrity had nodded and said, “If only he were with us today.” But he and the O’Rahilly were still thinking in the old tropes, in the old fashion of a wild and wonderful donnybrook. They were still thinking of fighting for a cause. They were not prepared for the utter carelessness of the Cynthians.

After they had left, Jumdar sat at her desk, stroking the Dancer and calling orders to her two battalions—one to gather in Fermoy, the other in New Down Town. Her staff identified map coordinates where each company could take cover, parking garages and groves of trees under which armored cars could hide. (The heavies had gone to Hawthorn Rose.) Units were placed close enough together for mutual support, but not so close that their mobilization would be evident to overhead surveillance. Compliance was swift and unquestioned.

Then, all there was to do was to wait for their doom.

“And so it went,” Tomaltaigh O’Mulloy explained to Little Hugh as they stood before the smoldering skeleton of Council House. Around them clustered the leaders of the Loyalist underground, the remaining Rebel leaders, and Major Chaurasia of the 2nd Battalion, 33rd ICC. The fires had cooled, though there was still a residuum of heat from somewhere deep within the ruined structure that revealed itself in streamers of dull gray smoke. An evil smell shrouded the place, a heavy body of bad air composed in equal parts of metal, wood, plastic, and human flesh.

“I’ve never seen the like,” the ICC major said. “I’ve never seen the like.” He had said this several times already, and Little Hugh wished he would shut up, say something useful, or at least something different. The wind shifted and the thin, foul smoke wound around them. Kerchiefs emerged to cover nose and mouth. Men and women coughed, backed away.

“If only ye’d come back sooner,” O’Mulloy said. He was an old Oriel supervisor who had taken Eireannaughta citizenship before the coup.

Little Hugh didn’t know what possible difference that would have made; but he did not rebuke the man. He did notice that Voldemar O’Rahilly stood a little to the side with his beefy arms crossed over his chest and his golden hair flowing past his shoulders. He had been remarkably cool to the sudden reappearance of the Ghost of Ardow, and Little Hugh remembered what the Fudir had said on Jehovah before their departure.

“Sure,” said Handsome Jack, who stood to Little Hugh’s left. “He waited until it was all over, and now he comes in to pick up the pieces.”

“Here, now,” said the ICC major. “We’ll have none of that.” But the threat was spiritless and he no longer had two hale battalions with which to enforce it. Eventually, that would occur to both Eireannaughta factions.

“The only thing,” Handsome Jack growled at the ICC major. “The only thing you were supposed to be good for was protecting my world—and look what you’ve let happen!” The injustice of the charge showed in the major’s basset-hound gaze, and Hugh quite suddenly desired to take him in his arms for comfort.

“Not quite the triumphal homecoming,” said Voldemar, as if speaking directly to the ruins, as if Hugh were not standing beside him. Hugh remembered how he and Voldemar and Sweeney the Red had spent a long, rainy night in a tumbledown ecologist’s station on the Crooken Moor, where basaltic granite thrust up through the terraforming bogs, and a Rebel death squad had combed the countryside for them. It hadn’t seemed possible then that three men could grow closer than they had that night. Sweeney moaned softly on a cot, his head wrapped in bandages where a sword cut had lopped off half his nose. Voldemar stood by the hut’s door, glaring out over the trackless black waste. They had not dared strike a fire. We’ll make it, Voldemar had said then with fierce conviction. The Glen’s just past the end o’ these bogs.

And so they had. But now…What had happened? Have ye grown too fond o’ the leadership, brother Voldemar? Or had the Fudir’s cynicism wriggled like a worm into his own heart, so that he saw treachery now where there was only anger and despair.

“They split her chest open,” Major Chaurasia said, again speaking as if to ghosts. “Down the breastbone with a cutting laser, and then they pried the rib cage apart and spread the lungs out over them. They looked…I saw her later, after. They looked like wings…”

Two in the knot of people around Little Hugh covered their mouths and ducked quickly aside to retch.

“Called the Blood Eagle,” said the Fudir, who had not been present a moment ago. He had gone off to the field hospital on some purpose of his own. Now he was back.

The ICC major looked at him. “Blood Eagle,” he repeated witlessly. “It’s an art form among the Cynthians. They even have special instruments to perform it.”

“Art.” The idea was incomprehensible. The major shook his head. “Why punish her for defending the world as best she could?”

“It wasn’t punishment,” the Fudir explained. “It was tactical, to take the will out of their enemies.” Looking around at the Eireannaughta, he added, “I’d say it worked.” Then, in a lowered voice, he whispered to Hugh, “I found what she did with the Dancer.”

“They used it more than once,” Handsome Jack murmured. “That…Blood Eagle.” He was a one-eyed man, now, as well as a one-armed one. “Not only on Jumdar…”

Little Hugh turned away from Council House and looked down the slope of Council Hill to the smoldering ruins of New Down Town.

“They set fires,” said O’Mulloy. “Sometimes, they didn’t even loot a house first. They simply torched it. For no reason.”

“They had a reason,” the Fudir told him. “It was fun.”

“But,” said the major, “what profit was there? To come, what, fifty days’ travel from the Hadramoo? And for what?”

“They didn’t come for profit,” the Fudir told him. “They came for honor and glory.”

The major drew himself up. “Honor…” But then he seemed to deflate. “There’s no profit here anymore. That’s a certain thing. The orbitals the Cynthians didn’t smash and loot are being abandoned. O’Carroll, would you take some of the factory personnel back to Jehovah on your ship? I’ve sent a swift-boat to Hawthorn Rose to call back the rest of the regiment, but…”

“It’s not my ship,” O’Carroll told him. “Ask January.” But that sounded too callous, so he added more kindly, “I’m sure he’ll take as many as he has room for.”

Later, Hugh met privately with Handsome Jack. No one was quite sure who held the management contract anymore. The ICC was going to break it—both men had read that in the major’s eyes. There’s no profit here anymore. But did that mean automatic reversion to House Oriel? Or was the contract, as some said, “up for grabs”?

They sat across from one another at a broad table in the old ICC factor’s residence. Cargo House had been looted along with most everything else in the capital. Pale outlines on the walls marked where paintings, watercolors, and digitals had once hung, and Hugh thought he remembered, from an earlier visit in another era, a chemical sculpture in which substances of changing hues and various densities had writhed snakelike in a tank in the corner. But the ICC building had not, withal, been burned, as so many others had. And there were even a few chairs that had not been reduced to splinters and scraps of fabric. The table had once been polished to mirror-finish—it was red gristwood from Nokham’s World—but too many boots had scuffed it in the looting and a twisted, puckered scar ran where a laser had burned a vulgar word in the chief language of the Hadramoo.

This had been the factor’s dining hall, Hugh remembered. Imported Gatmander salmon on plates of Abyalon crystal. Candlelight and sandalwood, and in that corner, a blind Terran pandit had played an evening rag on a santur. There had been no factions then. Or at least the factions had not yet made themselves known.

Earlier that morning, a larger meeting had sat around this table. The United Front for the Restoration of the Vale—a grand name, but no one had wanted to defer to another, and so it had been less full of decisions than of discussions. Hugh had kept silent throughout most of the proceedings. On-planet only a few days, he did not know enough about the current state to say anything useful. That had not impressed the Loyalists at the table, who had expected that their legendary leader would sweep away all problems with a few wise words. And on those few occasions when he did speak up, the Rebel faction had expressed their utter lack of confidence. Major Chaurasia had tried to impose order, but lacked the will to do so effectively.

“One thing I’ll say for the old bitch, Jumdar,” Handsome Jack Garrity said, now that the others had left. “She could lead. People hopped to when she spoke, not from servility, but because she inspired.” He ran his hand through barley-brown hair. “Chaurasia knows how to carry out orders, but damn me if he knows how to give them.”

Little Hugh steepled his fingers. “It will take me a while to get ‘up to speed,’ but…”

“We don’t have the time for your fookin’ learning curve, lad. People are hurting now.”

“I know that! We need to get a clear picture of the As-Is state and a vision of the Should-Be state and imagine the change-path that will get us there. Jack, we heard a report today on milk and grain from County Meath—but how accurate was it? Will there be enough to feed New Down Town? How will we get it here? Has anyone worked out the logistics, mobilized lorries and floaters, set up an Action Plan?”

“Mebd’s teats!” Jack slapped the tabletop, earning a splinter for his pains from the broken wood. He sucked at his palm as he spoke. “This isn’t one of those fookin’ management exercises they taught you at boot camp. There were relief lorries on the High Road out of the Mid-Vale before the rievers had jumped down the Avenue. The rievers didn’t touch the farm counties. They hadn’t come to rape sheep. Or maybe they just didn’t have the time. Maybe the lorries hadn’t been fookin’ mobilized and nose-counted by the fookin’ authorities, but they were on the fookin’ road! What would you do if there weren’t enough of them? Send them back? Pick volunteers to starve? My people will send all they can spare, and a little more—and they didn’t need the Planetary Manager to tell them how much and where. Damn this splinter!” He sucked again on his palm.

Hugh rose and crossed the room, coming to stand by Jack’s side, where he drew a knife. Jack regarded him with quickly suppressed alarm; but Hugh seized his hand and spread it flat, palm side up, and with the point of his knife worried out the splinter. He handed the slice of wood to Handsome Jack. “Now, can we focus on the subject?” He spun the knife one-handed and it slipped neatly into its scabbard.

“Am I supposed to feel all warm and grateful, now that you’ve pulled a splinter from my paw? Thank you, but it doesn’t work that way.”

“I don’t care if you’re grateful or not. We shouldn’t have a disputed leadership when there’s a world needing reconstruction.”

Jack picked up the splinter and studied it. Hugh watched how dexterous he had become with only one arm, and wondered that he didn’t wear a bionic one. Or maybe he did, but preferred to use his infirmity in public. “We didn’t have one,” Jack said judiciously, “until a few days ago.”

“He means before you came back.”

Handsome Jack and Little Hugh turned to face the back of the room, where a bookcase had slid aside to reveal a hidden doorway in which the Fudir stood. Behind him, a flight of stairs spiraled downward.

“Who in Lugh’s name are you?” Jack demanded. “You keep popping up, but…”

“It’s gone,” the Fudir told Hugh.

“He’s a Terran I met on Jehovah,” Hugh said. “He helped smuggle me back here.”

Jack took in the Fudir’s worn, dun-colored clothing, the stoop-shouldered stance. “I’ve you to thank, then.”

The Fudir bowed and tugged his forelock. “I point out, sahb, that zero divided by two is no less than zero divided by one.”

Jack’s face puckered up as he considered that; then he laughed. “You’ve a lot of nerve for a fookin’ Terran.” Then he pointed a finger at Hugh. “Keep in mind what I’ve said. What you and I had, that’s history. It’s all songs now. We don’t need you showing up now to add a discordant note. I liked you better as an enemy than an opportunist. And tell your Terran friend, we shoot looters.”

The Fudir grinned. “Hast thou heard from the Red Sweeney, yet?”

“Sweeney?” Jack said in irritation. “No friend of mine. He’s one of your lot.” With that, he folded his data-slate and stylus, tucked it under his one arm, and marched from the room.

When he was gone, the Fudir grunted. “There’s your answer.”

“Which one? That Jack didn’t send Sweeney, or that he lies so well? I take it that the Dancer is gone. How can you be sure it’s not hidden somewhere?”

The Fudir tossed his head toward the stairwell. “It was. That was the hidey-hole.”

Hugh followed the Terran down the staircase. “You’ve been busy,” he said. “Jack thinks you’re looting.”

“He thinks the Molnar left any loot?”

“It’s not a joke.” But the Fudir had pressed on ahead.

At the base of the stairs lay a broad room lined with shelves and storage racks that had been tumbled about. A contour chair, attached to a post embedded in the cork-soft flooring, had been slashed and the frame bent. It faced a wreath on the farther wall. Debris was everywhere. The walls were made of a spongy material through which ran twisting veins of pallid yellow. Cartons and strongboxes were cut or pried open, their contents vanished or smashed. The vault door at the far end of the room hung twisted on one hinge.

“They were thorough,” Hugh said. Somehow the despoiling of the ICC vaults did not move him as much as had the destruction aboveground, though he knew some wealthy Eireannaughta had kept their valuables stored here rather than in Down Bank and Surety.

“I found Jumdar’s aide-de-camp in the field hospital, the poor beggar,” the Fudir explained. “He said they tortured her until she told them where the Dancer was; then they fashioned the Blood Eagle. They made him watch the whole thing—and burned his eyes out afterward so Jumdar’s body was the last thing he’d ever see. He doesn’t understand why they let him live.” Fudir stepped into the vault and looked around at the empty racks and safe-deposit boxes. “That’s because he doesn’t understand the depths of their cruelty. He said Jumdar brought the Dancer down here personally. That was a mistake. People began to question her orders after that. Not the ICC folk, who were oath-bound; but the Volunteers, who thought their experience with assassination and mob violence gave them an insight on military strategy. Not that Jumdar was a military genius, and not that it mattered. They should be thankful—Voldemar and Jack—that the Cynthians hadn’t come to occupy this world. Your guerilla campaign only worked on the Rebels because there were boundaries neither of you would cross.”

Hugh stepped around a shattered wooden box lined with chesterwood and decorated with enough artistry that it might have been worth something in itself. He lifted a paperboard sheet. A pallet separator, he thought. “I didn’t think there were too many boundaries left, at the end.”

“Did either of you target women and children?”

Hugh looked up sharply, let the separator fall to the floor, dusted his hands. “No.”

“Pull one of your ambushes on a Cynthian, they don’t even try to track you down. The next day, they round up a dozen civilians and kill them. I take that back. They don’t recognize the concept of a civilian. If you try again, it’s two dozen. How long would you have pressed your campaign?”

“You know a lot about them.”

“I looked them up in Fou-chang’s Gazetteer of the Spiral Arm while New Angeles was coming downsystem.”

“Why bother? They’re long gone.”

The Fudir came out of the vault. “Clean as gnawed bone,” he said. “No question Jumdar gave it up. It’s on its way to the Hadramoo.”

Hugh had paused before a large sculpture attached to the wall. A wreath of ceramic composite tendrils that twisted and twined around one another in a complex pattern that his eye could not follow. He turned away and stared at the Fudir. “Oh, no. You’re not thinking of chasing this fable into the Hadramoo, wherever to hell and gone that might be.”

“North-by-spinward of the Old Planets, out near the Palisade,” the Terran replied with a cheerful grin. “Don’t worry. I wasn’t thinking of a frontal attack on Cynthia. And you needn’t come with me.”

“Oh, needn’t I? Thank you. I thought we were hunting the Dancer because it would help me restore the rightful government here.”

The Fudir shrugged. “You never believed that. You told me so yourself.”

“Yes. But I’d wondered if you believed it.”

“By the time I can fetch it back from Cynthia, it’ll be too late to matter much here. Beside,” he added quietly, “there are other worlds needing their rightful governments restored.”

And there always had been. Hugh did not voice the comment; there was no need to. It had always been a mistake to trust the Fudir. He’d never had expectations from this far-fetched scheme, so he ought not feel betrayed.

“The rievers didn’t take everything,” Hugh said, pointing to the wreath on the wall.

The Fudir, who had been standing with his head slightly bowed, looked up, blinked. “Yeah, I noticed it earlier. It’s the Ourobouros Circuit—not the original, a replica. Too much trouble to rip it off the wall, I suppose; though not for lack of trying. You can see the marks from the lasers and the saws. Not worth stealing. Look, if you want to come with me to the Hadramoo, you’re welcome.”

The invitation startled Hugh and he cocked his head. “Why?”

The Fudir shrugged. “It’s a barbarous region, and I could use some civilized company.”