Michael Flynn - On the Razor’s Edge

Gidula spoke. “We thank you with great kindness, Ravn Olafsdottr, for the generosity of your gift. Accept these tokens of our appreciation.” He gestured and a young afflicted man stepped forward with a silver tray. “First, the balm for those stripes you carried.” The servant proffered a cruet of gold and glass. “Secondly, a signet with the comet upon it.” The servant placed the ring on the Shadow’s finger. “And thirdly, a mere trifle of credits to your accounts, the sum total of which need not concern us.”

Ravn bowed again, thanked Gidula, and stepped back. Tears blazed the cheeks of many of the magpies, astonishing Méarana.

The Old One turned smiling to Donovan buigh. “There. You see, Gesh? There was never any need to torture you.”

Donovan faced him, though the rose-on-buff Shadow laid a hand on his arm as if to restrain him. Donovan shook him off. “You turtle’s egg,” he told Gidula, and the accusation carried all the more weight for the lack of volume in Donovan’s voice. “There was no need for this.”

“Will you now,” said Gidula blandly, “tell us what we need to know?”

“Don’t tell him, Father!” Méarana blurted.

The magpie in the goggles tsked and the harper felt a sharp pain in her side. When she glanced at her, the magpie said, “Shh.”

Gidula sighed. “So untrusting, the youth these days. Harper, I have as many reasons for keeping your father alive as there are stars in the heavens. Well, Gesh?”

“I never had intention of holding back. But a certain caution informs me. After twenty years and more, topography may have changed and the image in my memory may not match the reality on the ground. I could describe the scene, but you might not recognize it on sight.”

“But you would.”

“More likely than any other. I will lead you where you need to go. You may trust the word of Geshler Padaborn.”

“Into the Lion’s Mouth?” Gidula framed his chin in one hand, the elbow for which rested on the arm of the chair.

“Even so. I will need close reconnaissance to specify it precisely. You need not detain the harper, but send her on her way home.”

“Ah, Gesh, ever the romantic! You and I are more alike than you would allow. We cannot take her with us whither we fare. The Fates hazard the dice, and collect all bets. She would stand in endless peril. No, best that she remain here, well looked after, until we return—or until her mother arrives to fetch her.” He looked about the room. “And which of my Shadows would remain here to welcome Bridget ban Hound?”

The Shadow beside Méarana stepped forward. “I, my lord.”

Gidula raised his eyebrows. “You, Khembold Darling? How often has Eglay Portion laid you in the dust?”

Khembold’s cheeks flushed and he stood more stiffly. “To fall to Eglay Portion is no man’s shame. Many are those who may conn a slider, but you set forth against the Names and their Protectors. If Eglay is the more puissant of us, he is more needed in the streets of the Secret City than here.”

Gidula laughed. “Adroitly put. Very well; the boon is yours. Two, stay with him and see to administration of the keep. Khembold, you will take care of the harper?”

Khembold bowed. “Of course. As a rose in a summer garden.”

Ravn Olafsdottr laughed. “Take care, Khembold Darling, that you not prick your thumb upon a thorn. She carries a knife or two up her sleeve.”

“A hammer does not make a carpenter,” he said, “or a pile of stone a house.”

Méarana contemplated flinging the dagger into Gidula’s right eye, and had unconsciously flexed her elbow when she felt the press of a muzzle in the small of her back. It was the small, insectile magpie with the flickering data goggles and the numeral 2 on her brassard. “Please,” the magpie whispered. “Try.” And it was a measure of Méarana’s anger that she very nearly did, despite the promise of death.

But prudence—and a small scissoring of Donovan’s finger—forestalled her. There would be other opportunities perhaps in this nest of adders. She had come to rescue Donovan, but it now appeared that he must rescue her, for it was clear that Gidula had exacted her father’s submission by an implied threat to torture her. She was thus leverage over a man Gidula both needed and feared, and he was not inclined to give up such a lever.

As Khembold led her away, past the bleak eyes of her father, Méarana said to Ravn Olafsdottr, “Ravn, how could you?”

But of course it was obvious how she could. Later, it became more obvious still.

Gidula climbed to the crest of the Nose as he did most every Fifthday when he was at the Forks, but this time he went with only the Ravn for company. He had changed his bonnet for a beret and his billowing robe for a more travel-friendly singleton. Ravn drove the quadwheeler and when she had parked it off the road went to stand near the elder Shadow.

The wind through the pinch of the hills that flanked the river tousled the trees and the struggling wildflowers. Gidula removed his headgear and contemplated the river, white flecked and tumbling as it rolled below the Nose. The sound of the waters seemed muted and distant. Quietly Ravn pulled her teaser from its holster and held it loosely by her side. The setting and the solitude were perfect, and artistically satisfying. She rehearsed her moves once more in her mind.

“It almost sounds like voices,” Gidula said without turning. “The river, I mean. I wonder if anyone could decipher them.”

“That would depend on the language, I should think,” Ravn said. She raised the teaser and aimed it at the small of Gidula’s back. Paralyze, then push him over. It was important that he know that he was dead, and why. But it surprised her how heavy the teaser seemed.

Gidula tossed a handful of gravel over the side of the Nose. “My wife went off here,” he said. “But that was before your time. Before anyone’s time, I think.”

It would take only the smallest pressure on the firing stud to set up the neural pulse. Ravn tensed. A command went from the motor neurons down the arm to the finger. She could actually feel it, like a line of fire. But the finger remained frozen. She reminded herself that he deserved to die for torturing her. And perhaps for betraying the Traditions he claimed to love.

But she lowered her arm slowly until the teaser dangled by her side.

Gidula sighed and raised his eyes to the sky. “To die,” he said, “might almost be a blessing.” Then he turned about. “Why did you not tease me?”

Ravn did not ask how he knew. There were a dozen ways he might have discerned her actions. And yet he had stood there waiting for her to act.

“I don’t know,” she answered him. “I have every reason to.”

“Do you? Every reason?”

“Why would death be a blessing?”

Gidula faced the cliff’s edge once more. “You never knew Ielnor. She was a woman to match a man: strong where I was weak; needy where I was strong. Her eyes were coal-black, her mind as clear as diamond. She was not in the Life, but she could have been. She held the Forks for me, and that during a time when the holding wanted wit and fortitude.”

“She fell off the cliff here?”

Gidula nodded. “And the baby.”

Ravn returned her teaser to its holster and secured it. “You must have cared for her very much.”

Gidula said nothing for a moment, then stepped to the edge. “Since that time, I have never loved anything.”

“Surely—”

“No, it is not good for a Shadow to love. Duty is the higher calling, and duty may one day call upon us to traduce our love. You saw how love led the harper into our trap, as by a nose-ring, and how love gives us now a handle on Geshler Padaborn himself. What was love to them but a hobble! And yet, I have grown passing fond of you during these years of struggle.”