Michael Flynn - In the Lion’s Mouth

Somewhere along the way, they lost the worms.

Yuts’ga was now a moderately prosperous world, dimly aware that she had once been important. But importance was gathered now into the Secret City like pretty baubles into a raven’s nest, and the Yutsgars hunkered down and did as they were told. Now and then, the plates trembled and the sea floor turned over and the night breezes brought the stench of the ooze onto the land. “Worm weather,” the Yutsgars called it, though no one remembered why.

Cambertown was the largest city in the Arwadhy District and the site of Number Three Spaceport, and several Confederation Sector Offices. The people there spoke a dialect that was a mixture of the old Taņţamiž lingua franca and the cant of the Zhõgwó, who had held the Mandate of the Heavens before the Vraddy. Consequently, they spoke Manjrin in an antique manner that otherworlders found alternately charming and exasperating. Definite articles were nowhere to be found; “is” and “have” lurked in elliptical constructions; and parts of speech oft jammed together into a single word. They would serve you up a word, and then start decorating it like a Festal Tree, adding markers for voice, tense, aspect, person, and sometimes just for the hell of it, negation, so that after you thought you had grasped the gist of it after all, it was turned at the very end all topsy-turvy on you. “Of course, you help ing do will I— not ” was a favorite punch line on scores of nearby worlds.

The Mountain Dragon Inn stood on Fishbound Street in the Seventh District of Cambertown, just off the Ring Road. There were no mountains in the surrounding countryside; and even dragons were more rumored than seen, so where the name came from no one knew. It was justly famed for its own brew: Bartholomew Black.

Domino Tight was a small man, well formed of countenance. His hair curled in tight, black ringlets; his lips curled in perpetual good humor. A good man to drink with; a good man to sport with. During one assassination, he had reduced his target to helpless laughter while in the very act of killing him. “Screams of laughter,” he liked to say when he told the story on himself, which was often enough that it had grown tedious.

He had settled himself into a companionable silence in a booth near the inn’s rear exit with a schooner of Bartholomew Black. But a Shadow like Domino Tight does not wait for no purpose. He waits for signs and portents. He was on Yuts’ga to move the Talker of the Yutsgar Nexus. Once that unfortunate was cleared away, the Third Undersecretary for Information could take charge of the Interstellar Comm Clearance Center, and message packets entering the Sector on their way to Dao Chetty would thereafter be inspected, censored, and cleared by the Revolution. But while the Talker was a dead man walking, he was under the protection of the loyalist Shadow, Pendragon Jones; and so he might yet walk a little farther.

It was a matter of insertion between Pendragon Jones and the Talker. Domino Tight had narrowed the search to Cambertown and had scattered his magpies to scour the city for signs.

From time to time, young men and women garbed in the current fashions of the Arwadhy drifted into the Mountain Dragon, some for a “pint o’ th’ Black,” others for the free lunch, but still others to drop a word or two in the ear of Domino Tight. Pendragon’s magpies had been spotted here, there, moving thus. The Shadow collected these words and pricked them off on a chart he kept on his pocket screen. The screen pondered vectors and applied algorithms of the mathematical art, searching for the barycenter of the motions, for at that centroid would, like mistress spider, lurk Pendragon Jones.

Among those lifting “pints” in the Dragon were three of Domino Tight’s magpies—Two, Five, and Fourteen—forming a cordon. There was also a man at the bar who reminded Domino Tight of steel wool. He did not grow hair so much as bristles, and the eyes above the thin mustache were a deadly topaz. Domino Tight wondered if he might be in the Life and crooked a finger at Two, who shook her head at the question.

“Not one of Pendragon’s men,” she murmured when called to his side. “We’ve pegged them all. A courier for someone else, maybe, just passing through.”

Or a local thug—a mover, a scrambler, or whatever they called their petty criminals in Cambertown. He sat on a bar stool and drank his Black and seemed to pay no mind to the comings and goings of magpies, by which Domino Tight knew he was paying very keen attention indeed.

The rear door to the Mountain Dragon creaked open and Domino Tight released the safety catch on the teaser he held unholstered in his lap. A bilaterian, like many Shadows, his left hand oft worked independently of his right.

The light from the wall lamps blotted out and the entry to the booth was eclipsed by a presence. Domino Tight reengaged the safety catch. “G’day, Jacques. When did you blow in?”

“Since three days,” said Big Jacques, finding a bench to sit upon, which he angled to take in the room. “You be a hard man to track down, Domino Tight.”

“I should be an impossible man to track down,” he answered. “What brings you?”

Big Jacques rumbled. One always knew when he was about to essay a joke, for he laughed peremptorily at his own wit. “Why, my ship done brought me.” Then, unable to contain himself, he slapped the table, causing the accouterments to dance. Domino Tight snatched his schooner up before it could topple, and returned a smile as broad as the humor.

There is a stereotype held in the minds of most, even of those moderately keen, of an inverse relationship between the size of the body and the size of the mind. Big Jacques knew that and played to the stereotype. The duller his opponents believed him, the greater the edge he had in playing them.

“We missed you at the facemeet on Henrietta,” Jacques added. “You shoulda seen it. Dawshoo told us the Cause was lost and we should just give up. I think he said that so we’d all cry up nay. You shoulda seen old Gidula’s face! And Dawshoo’s too, when half the room started to walk out.”

“Hunh. Dawshoo’s a galah.” Domino Tight took a pull from his schooner while Jacques signaled to the tavern-keeper for a drink of his own. “I’m going to guess,” Tight said when he put the schooner down, “that Oschous rallied the troops.”

“Oh, he did, for sure. That face of his would have gone white if it hadn’t been all covered with red fuzz. Dawshoo oughta watch his back. There may be some discussion on who should lead us, once the Names are ousted. My money’s on Oschous.”

“Gidula, I think. Oschous actually believes in the Cause. That’s not good for a revolutionary.”

Jacques rumbled once more. “Near as I can figure, I’m doing pretty much the same crap I was doing before. Just a different target list, is all.”

“So, why one and not the other?” Domino Tight asked from genuine curiosity. He had never decided whether Big Jacques had hidden depths or no depth at all.

“Oh, the quality o’ the targets, of course. Takes more skill, more practice, more craft. ‘The knife grows dull when the target is soft.’ You move your man here yet?”

“Not yet. Pendragon’s on-world protecting him.”

“The hell, you say! How did he know we were going to move the Talker?”

Domino Tight shrugged. “‘Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.’ Just makes it a bigger challenge. The target’s night soil; just a matter of time.”