Michael Flynn - On the Razor’s Edge

Some, he saw, had fallen. The sight took him aback. A banner was cut down only when its Shadow died. He picked one up and saw that it was Egg Mennerhem. Another, it shocked him to notice, was the red swallowtail pennant of Little Jacques. There were a dozen or so, some loyalist, some rebel, rumpled on the ground. Someone, it seemed, was keeping score.

The black silk banner of Prime lay beneath the Judgment Seat, and when he looked up Manlius saw Prime himself sitting in the Seat, as if ruling on all that transpired this night. He flinched under that stern disapproval.

But Prime’s gaze was too far and too fixed and looked now upon another world. Perhaps he had grown too melancholy as he cut down banner after banner, as word came to him that his children slaughtered his children. Perhaps he had willed his heart to stop.

The building shook slightly as somewhere outside a bolt tank fired. Just like boots, he thought with contempt, to use an ax when a scalpel was wanted. He did not think Dawshoo had counted on this, or at least not this soon. The click-link had gone down, and he knew not the current status of the struggle. Who is winning? Big Jacques had clicked just before. It was hard to imagine the Large One as frantic, or to read that into a series of click codes. Who is winning? Manlius looked around the floor, at the crumpled banners. No one, he thought.

Time to withdraw, maybe. He heard the rush of a ground-support craft outside. A window rattled. Yes, time to withdraw. Find a nice quiet planet somewhere. Just one last errand.

“You old fool,” he scolded the corpse of Shadow Prime. It was the duty of the Lion’s Mouth to stay loyal, the old man had said. But loyal to whom? To the self-appointed Committee of Names Renewed? Or to the truly anointed Names? “Old fool,” he said again, and he heard the whisper of his own words and knew the world had come to an end. He had called his father a fool. He paused one moment more to savor the pang of sorrow at memories forever lost, at brotherhood irreparably broken; then he cantered on cat’s feet up the maintenance ladder of the drop-well into the transient apartments.

He found Epri Gunjinshow in the apartment of Kelly Stapellaufer, as he had known all along he would. An hour’s wait in a closet was the only cost to his revenge. He watched them through the crack in the door. Somehow, all the fire had gone out of the hate and it had become just another wearisome task to finish before he could quit for the day. He was simply tired of eating erect. Seeing her drawn and haggard face, he wondered that he had ever found Stapellaufer attractive and thought that he had clung to her only because the skalds would expect him to.

He knew that in a sense this woman and he and Epri had been the proximate cause of the conflagration now raging outside. He was not so foolish as to believe they had been the real cause, and he was not so foolish as to suppose this would somehow set everything right.

That both Epri and Kelly bore burns and scars pleased him in some indefinable fashion. He would have detested the thought that they had ridden out the turmoil here in her bower, the one thrusting repeatedly between the thighs of the other. But they had retreated here, perhaps to rest and clean up before returning to their fates.

But their proper fate was not to die anonymously in the confusion of the Secret City. The troubadours would not like that. The Beautiful Life demanded that Epri Gunjinshow die in singular combat with Manlius Metataxis while Kelly Stapellaufer looked on with coupled sorrow and love. Life must be corralled and tamed to the strictures of drama. And so he waited in the darkened closet until they had disarmed and were half-undressed, when they were at the awkward state in which swift action is difficult. Perhaps they did have some thrusting in mind. Then he stepped forward and shoved the door closed.

“Prime!” shouted Epri, then saw his mistake, though he did not yet realize that it was the penultimate mistake of his life. “Ah.” And his eyes instantly inventoried the weaponry within his reach.

But Kelly Stapellaufer stepped between the two men. She held both hands clenched into fists. “Stop!” she said.

“I mean to end it,” said Manlius. Then, to Epri, he said, “Prime is dead. He killed himself.” He didn’t know why he told Epri that, only that he thought Epri should know.

“And so you have destroyed the Lion’s Mouth rather than submit to the ruling of the Courts d’Umbrae?” Epri demanded.

He made it sound like Manlius was in the wrong. Manlius shook his head. “None of it matters anymore.”

Epri stepped behind Kelly and laid both hands on her shoulders. This would prove the last mistake of his life. Manlius wondered if Epri thought he would not shoot him through Kelly’s body. And then Manlius wondered if he could actually bear to do so.

“Did you ever ask yourself, Epri Gunjinshow,” Kelly asked without turning, “whether I welcomed your attentions?” And with that she thrust backward with her right fist.

In her fist she had held the hilt of a variable knife. The blade snapped out and pierced Epri’s abdomen. The shock froze him and she stepped to the side, ripping horizontally, then down. His body opened up and his bowels dumped forth onto the floor. Epri lived long enough to contemplate this sight before he collapsed atop it.

Manlius Metataxis watched in astonishment and not a little gratification. So, Kelly had loved him all along. She opened her arms and Manlius stepped into her embrace.

“Or yours,” she murmured, and Manlius learned that the hilt had two extensions. Kelly Stapellaufer thrust forward and the second blade launched itself into his body. The pain messages had not even time to reach his brain before his mind shut down.

Kelly Stapellaufer, whose charms had pretexted the Shadow War, stood naked between the two corpses that had once been her lovers. “Oh, the Abattoir!” she cried. “Oh, the Lion’s Mouth!”

There was only one other target left in the room, and so Kelly used her knife one final time.

They kept the lights low lest attention be drawn to the Official Quarter, and through the windows of the Gayshot Bo watched the Secret City burn. The flames rolled across the skyline like the waves of a molten ocean and provided the only light from the now otherwise darkened Residencies. Suppressor drones hovered in the air, bright yellow, blinkers flashing, drenching the hopeless structures with foam and water. By strange and tacit agreement, no one had targeted the fire wardens, whether from residual respect for civic order or because the wardens’ activities were futile in any case.

“We should be out there fighting with the others,” said Magpie Three Padaborn.

“It’s what we trained for,” Four explained.

Domino Tight had been sitting at table with Eglay Portion pursuing a desultory game of Aches and Pains on a play deck. The room was a sort of conference lounge, with tables, chairs, racks of reference media, a holostage. In the corner, well away from the windows, Méarana sat with curled fingers playing imaginary harp strings, conjuring a grand goltraí from the depths of her being. She had always thought the Confederation irremediably evil; but there was ever a yin within the yang, and the tears on magpie cheeks were genuine.