Michael Flynn - In the Lion’s Mouth

Only when she has stilled her strings does Méarana Swiftfingers look her mother in the eye. “Really, Mother, what did you want them to do? Ravn had to tell him something Oschous could not hear, but without making it obvious that she was doing so. Tell me you have never used similar ploys yourself.”

This last, she adds with a touch of heat that surprises mother and daughter alike, for Bridget ban had once been notorious for such wiles. The silence between them is broken finally by Graceful Bintsaif, who says self-consciously, “There is another mystery here.”

“Again,” laughs the Shadow, “oonly one.”

“What was Gw…” She stops at Bridget ban’s gesture.

But Ravn completes her sentence. “What was Gwillgi Hound doing on Yuts’ga? Ooh, my sweet Doominoo may not knoow him, but thoose toopaz eyes I have seen before, to my great displeasure. It was sweet, what he did, and I can only pray the Fates keep the two of them from facing off in the pasdarm of life. Meanwhile, I cannot suppose that the Kennel has had no hint of our struggle, or that they have not sent observers to sniff around its edges.”

“He was only observing, then,” says Graceful Bintsaif. It is the dream of every young Hound that she will be sent one day on that most dangerous of quests. Few indeed have made that crossing; fewer still have returned.

“Ooh, what family engrossed in quarrel welcomes a neighbor’s peep at window?”

“There’s a deeper mystery,” says Méarana—and she wonders momentarily if Olafsdottr had described her intimacies with such detail in order to distract Bridget ban from it. “That Hounds may spy within the Confederation is no great secret, but that your saga should brook bad art is.”

“Yes,” says Ravn Olafsdottr with a congratulating smile to the harper, “it is very troubling.”

“What is?” asks Bridget ban, irritated beyond measure by her guest-prisoner, her daughter, and even her protégé. She has been diverted by her own thoughts, but now reviews what has been said and nods. “Oh. Of course.”

Olafsdottr’s smile is grim. “Aye. Domino Tight has a lover in the Gayshot Bo on Dao Chetty, and this lover just happens to be in a back alley in Cambertown when he is wounded? Ah, my sweets, that begs too much of chance. The Fates are ne’er inclined to aid romance.”

Domino Tight was neither so clever as Oschous, nor so powerful as Big Jacques. He was neither so agile as Little Jacques, nor so wise as Gidula. What he was, was charming. He could charm, it was said, the skin off a snake. He had, all unwittingly, charmed the Technical Name.

“Unwitting,” because had he known Tina Zhi’s true nature, he would have run very fast in another direction, in any other direction. The loves of the Names were like their other passions: too vast and too intense for any lesser vessel to contain. It would burn him out, use him up.

Though it is not clear whether, however fast and far he ran, he could have escaped, because it may have been less his charm than her choice. Charm, after all, depends a great deal on a willingness on the other part to be charmed. Perhaps she saw him one day and was struck by the curl of his hair, where it lay across his brow. Perhaps she simply wondered what life was like outside the Secret City. Or perhaps mere cold calculation moved her. With a Name, you could never tell, and all three might be one. But however it befell, his charm was no less real, and no less effective.

When Domino Tight came to his senses once more, he found himself in a downy bed set upon a flag-stoned patio in a bower of oak and laurel. Birds sang intricate and unfamiliar songs and a dull orange sun was approaching his zenith in an amethyst sky. The breeze was cool and comforting and brought with it a scent of lily and hyacinth. The sheets that draped his naked body were warm, despite their diaphanous weave. Domino Tight considered his body, counted the scars that ornamented it, and found more than his wont.

He raised himself on an elbow and looked out through a gap in the trees down a rolling valley of pleasant green and yellow grasses to a meandering stream bordered by towering plane trees. The landscape had been artfully arranged to appear natural: shapes and contours led the eye, colors complemented, sounds soothed and roused.

The bed conformed itself to his movements, becoming a divan. The songs of the birds changed, became more resolute. He saw one sitting on a perch in a camouflaged cage. It was called a “king löyingmu” in the Confederal tongue. A “lovebird.”

Domino Tight might not equal Gidula for insight, but that a lovebird’s song greeted his first stirring he thought a message of sorts. As too, the artfully disguised cage in which the bird sat.

He had not yet figured it out, but he had begun to realize that there was something to figure out. Thus are always the first stirrings of wisdom. Tina Zhi was obviously not as she had represented herself, a minor functionary in the regulation of technology. But he had not yet chased that fox to its burrow.

Sitting, he examined his shattered leg. He detected no breaks, evoked no pain. He wriggled his toes and was gratified to find those members responding with enthusiasm.

Tina Zhi entered the patio through doors that had replicated the bower and so had appeared a part of it. Domino Tight glimpsed the interior of a house in black and silver and red: comfortable chairs, a carpet, a ramp curling upward. Then the doors closed and there was nothing but the trees and the yellow lilies and blue hyacinths that bordered the patio. He looked up, but saw no sign of a second floor to which the interior ramp might have led.

She wore white, translucent robes with billowing sleeves and silver borders. A silver cincture girded her waist. A necklace, also of silver but with turquoise highlights, encircled her throat, and seemed in constant motion. Her short-cropped hair had been silvered as well. Her skin was dusky, her nose long, her cheekbones high. Her body was softened by the fat of youth, yet her eyes seemed immeasurably old.

“Ah, my Domino,” she said as she swept toward him and gathered him to lay his head in her lap. “You are awake at last.”

Domino Tight had never seen the point of telling someone what he already knew. “How long was I in a coma?” he asked, thinking it might be a very long time indeed if his leg were so completely healed.

“Oh, a day, two days. Who can say when we flit from world to world?” Her hands fluttered, her voice trilled. But the flightiness that he had once found so endearing now seemed too contrived. The robes, when they billowed, were solidly opaque; but where they draped, they may as well have been spun glass. As she moved, parts of her body made brief cameos before ducking coyly behind the curtains. Her hair dye, he saw from his vantage point, overlooked no patch; and the complementary nail colors extended to her decorative nipple caps.

“How did you happen to be on Yuts’ga?” he asked. “How did you find me so quickly?”

“Oh, love.” She brushed his lips with her own, stroked his forehead, brushing back his curls. “I am never far from you. Love entangles us.”

“That sun,” he said, nodding toward the great orange disk now nearly atop the sky. “It’s not the Yutsgar sun, and no world lies but two days sliding from her.”

“An age before an age ago,” she told him in a singsong voice, “the god Aspect decreed that two hearts that had beat as one would beat always together, however far apart they wandered. And this same is true of patches of space.