Michael Flynn - On the Razor’s Edge

“No. I … I thought for a while there were, but…”

“I understand.” He kisses him once on each cheek. “I hope you do, too.”

And with that the Protector’s Special Security forces close in and pin his arms to his side and take the knife from his hands. They are not gentle. The goggles are yanked from his head. One of them punches him in the belly and he doubles over. Looking up, he catches the eye of the man who had been his friend, and asks him, “Why?”

And that man shrugs and will not look at him. “Close fits my shirt,” he answers, “but closer far my skin.”

Donovan gasped and sat bolt upright in his seat in the theater. The Keener turned to him in solicitude. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. No.” He rose and hurried up the aisle to the exit. The dancers did not falter at his apparent rudeness. Their rhythmic clacking followed him until cut off by the theater doors. In the lobby, Donovan bent over, hands on knees, huffing.

The Keener of Blades had followed behind him. “You are ill,” he said. “I would take you to the doctor, but he’s in there.” He waggled a thumb at the theater.

Donovan sucked in a deep breath and stood upright. “Is the bartender in there, too?”

Nowhere in the official accounts Donovan had read or resimulated on Oschous’s Black Horse or Gidula’s White Comet had there been any mention of the internal organization of the Rising. But he remembered now. Padaborn had had four section chiefs for the assault on the Secret City. Rajasekaran had died in the first rush. Lai Showan had been lost trying to hold the Security Police Center. O’Farrell had gone down with the Chancellery Building. And from the ruins of the Education Ministry—from the Lion’s Mouth itself—the fourth chief had escaped unseen: Tomas Krishna Murphy.

Only to be betrayed on the far side of the river by Geshler Padaborn himself, who, having been captured earlier, had broken under duxing kaoda.

He was a great man, said the Sleuth. But it is not given even to great men to endure the third degree of torture.

He seemed hale enough when last we saw him,the Pedant retorted

“Not all scars show,” said Donovan.

“What?” said the Keener, who had accompanied him to the tavern.

The scarred man shook his head. He thought that Padaborn had buckled under the Threat and not the Tools. Before the Shadows of the Names employed the Tools, they would first tell you in great detail about them. Then the Shadows would show them to you. Then they would demonstrate the Tools on another prisoner. It often saved considerable time.

I wonder what became of him?

Who cares? He turned traitor!

Consider what Those did to us, said the young man, and he was the greater threat. He had the charism that O’Farrell and we lacked. He could inspire men to die. He may have been harvested, or pithed, or—

“Or they did to him what they did to us.”

That might explain why the rebel Shadows confused the two of us. The simulations and reports named no other rebels but Padaborn. Part of a deliberate strategy, Donovan supposed, to minimize the Rising by minimizing the participants.

“Something still does not feel right.”

“I knew it,” said the Keener. “You stay here. Take care of our guest, Khenrik Jal, and I will fetch the Dispenser of Efficacious Medicines.” The Keener then ran off, leaving Donovan in the tavern.

Donovan turned to the bartender. “You heard him. Give me some of that ‘efficacious medicine.’”

And so, following a night of sleepless turmoil, Tomas Krishna Murphy came at last to the last site of all: Iracatanam Antapakirantamthe, the Capital of All the Worlds. If the Commonwealth had had a center, if it could have been said to be in any one place, that place was here, in this great sprawling metropolis, in the Hall of Suns.

“She’s a creeping place,” the earnest Terrans of New Bramburg had warned him before he had departed. “There are ghosts among the ruins.”

From the air, the site of Antapak had shown clearly. As the rain forest had dried out and withered, it had stripped the cloak from the Capital of All the Worlds and exposed her bones to the eyes of strangers. Donovan parked his rented hopper in a broad plaza near the center of town. Perhaps it had once been an outdoor theater, or a sporting venue, or perhaps it had actually been a hopper-park. Now, it was simply an open space littered with a spill of white blocks.

More remained of Antapak than of any of the other sites he had visited, but that is not to say that very much remained. Layered upon the neglect and decay of years was evidence of more deliberate destruction. Those portions of the capital that had sat on the shoreline bluffs had been tumbled into the waters below, where the proud towers of other days could yet be spied gleaming through the crystalline sea. The Names of Dao Chetty had vented a certain measure of spleen on this place, Donovan decided, because it was a reminder to them that they had merely built on the bones of others. Yet by reducing Antapak to ruins they may only have underscored that very fact.

Perhaps they had given up. Some parts of the sprawling city seemed untouched. The old Commonwealth had built for the ages; and, though an age had come and gone, a portion of their work remained. Donovan remembered how parts of the Commonwealth Ark that he and Méarana had found scant years before had remained in working condition.

After an hour or so of wandering, Donovan stopped for a drink of water and a bit of a mustard-and-cheese combination known locally as “music.” He sat upon one of the overturned blocks that had once foundationed a building, and tried to imagine what the street before him had been like when this had been a lively capital and crowds of people had thronged its busy avenues.

In the silence, though, he heard a faint sound—a skritch-skratch, a chattering as if by gravel upon stone. He turned and looked behind him and saw nothing. An insect? But it was like no insect-sound he had ever heard before.

The block was uncomfortable. A crack as wide as his little finger ran diagonally across its top surface. He stood and wrapped the remainder of his snack in a kerchief, stuffed it in his scrip. Inner Child had a sudden desire to run from this place. «Something is following us.»

The Brute sniffed the air, listened, took both eyes and searched carefully in all directions. The onetime streets were choked with grass and formed yellow-green rivers around the islands of broken buildings. Bundles of tumbleweed rolled along them. He watched for ripples that disobeyed the wind, a sign that something moved through the grass. Nuthin’,he decided. But …

But you feel it, too…, said the Silky Voice.

«Pedant, do you know where we left the hopper?»

“I came here,” said the Fudir, “to find the Hall of Suns, and I will not leave until I have set my eyes upon it.”

The natural sound of his footfalls and his own breathing covered the faint cracklings, and so he began to walk more briskly. He pushed his way through the grass, hunting for one of the five broad avenues that tradition claimed led to the Hall. From the air, he had marked three likely locations; but landscapes looked different on the weed-grown ground.

He had expected the crackling to fade behind him, but he soon learned that they whispered from all directions. «They’re surrounding us.»

“Who is?” demanded the Fudir. “There is nothing out there. Step up to any vantage point and you can see for leagues across the savannahs.”