Michael Flynn - On the Razor’s Edge

“Is justice now one of your watchwords?”

Ekadrina shrugged. “I always t’ought it one of yours.”

“I doubt there be muckle useful even in full-spectrum scans. But if she took any records, you will have them. Call it a gesture of amity for this day.”

Donovan had been so preternaturally silent that Bridget ban glanced in his direction. “Why not round up the Vestigial Virgins for a cup of coffee? Even some of the office sheep may know something.”

Ekadrina tilted her head back. “You t’ink any of dem are coming back after dis? Dey will vanish into de sheep pens. Too many records destroyed dis day. We will search for de Virgins; but I t’ink Tina Zhi will pluck dem to her personal planet long before we find dem, and what man knows where dat is?”

“It’s a big Spiral Arm,” agreed Donovan buigh.

In the third place, they gathered in Grimpen’s ship. The cutter had been left in Dao Chetty orbit in charge of Obligado, marked with suitably official-looking Confederal identifiers. Matilda of the Night had been using a small two-man craft expropriated somewhere in the Confederation. They left it behind, taking from it only its medical supplies, food stock, and the body of Cŵn Annwn. The old Sèan Beta still lay under Mount Lefn.

The ship was more crowded than she was wont, but Little Hugh, Graceful Bintsaif, and Matilda of the Night took up very little room. They occupied three of the four autoclinics. Gwillgi and Three Padaborn, less seriously wounded, took turns in the fourth.

The scarred man went to the clinic and sat with Little Hugh for a while, carrying on a one-sided conversation. “You didn’t have to stay,” he told the comatose man. “You could have taken Méarana forcibly and departed before Gidula entered the building.” He remembered how he had cold-conked Hugh on the front stoop of a Chel’veckistad tenement and run off alone to secure January’s Dancer. “I’m sorry I got you into any of this.” He hesitated. “Do you remember when you told me of your childhood, and I never answered?” Little Hugh said nothing and the machine continued to breathe for him. “I wasn’t being secretive. I had no memories of it, none at all. But now that I remember my name, other scraps may follow.”

Tomas Krishna Murphy. It was the name of a stranger; but it was a Terran name, so that much was true. Donovan had been a code name, assigned by the Lion’s Mouth.

So, you are no more the “original” than any of the rest of us, said the Sleuth.

He did not know Graceful Bintsaif so well, but he stopped at her tank and paid his respects. She had given her life—or at least nine-tenths of it—to buy Méarana a little time. For that he would always love her.

Matilda of the Night he did not know at all. He didn’t think anyone did. What is your secret? he asked her sleeping form. There was something odd about her, like a jigsaw piece that did not fit anywhere in the scene.

When Donovan visited with Three, he brought Pyati and One with him, and he told both magpies that he would give them names for their services rendered in the defense of the Gayshot Bo. “Choose your own names, and tell me, and we’ll have the baptism.” This reduced One and Three to tears, which in Three’s case upset the autoclinic until he calmed down. Pyati said, “And our brothers, Two, Four, and Five?”

Donovan agreed to a posthumous naming and thereby unleashed another torrent of weeping and profligate thanks and praise. The easy and extravagant emotions to which the Shadows were subject continued to amaze him. Yet they could hate as easily as love, and torture with the same intensity as caress, all the while believing they could bind such things with rules and rituals.

Despite the crowding on Grimpen’s ship, the scarred man contrived to be alone. There was a bubble he grew around himself, a sealed-off sphere of space and time within which, whatever crowds hubbubbed about outside, loneliness was the sole resident. Patrons of the Bar of Jehovah knew it well. One would not think a mind that was nine could ever be alone, but there was a certain degree of introspection such a condition imposed, and in a certain sense he could and did turn his back on the world.

It was especially so when matters had drawn to a close, when he had accomplished whatever he had accomplished, and it seemed that there was nothing more left to do. He had felt this after he had consigned the Twisting Stone to the subspatial void, after he had watched the sun dawn inside A. K. Prabhakaran, and on a dozen lesser occasions before he and Bridget ban had ever crossed paths.

Grimpen spoke to him briefly and some of the scarred man must have answered, for he went away. Gwillgi sat across the mess table from him, but while most men took keen interest when Gwillgi sat down by them, the scarred man devoted only a portion of his attention to the now-healed Hound. Inner Child, of course, heard the Alfven warning—short-long, short-long—and the Brute braced for the moment of physical discomfort when they leapt the bar; but the rest of the scarred man was astonished to realize later that they were already in the tubes and headed toward Sapphire Point.

The young man in the chlamys was as good at reading himselves as at reading others, and so he knew that he had once admired Geshler Padaborn above all men and it distressed him seven times seven to see what Gesh had become.

Had the Leader seriously believed that he was continuing the Rising by stealth from within the ranks of the Names? Had that been his goal, he would have led the Committee of Names Renewed, not conducted the resistance against it. Unless the last thing a revolutionary wants is another man’s revolution. He drank an imaginary toast to the Padaborn-that-was, and a second to his brothers who had also been multiplexed.

Ravn Olafsdottr sat for a time just outside the scarred man’s bubble and talked at him. If at any time in his life he had wondered what it would be like to have a sociopath for a friend, his hypothetical curiosities had been answered. They had saved each other’s life, which made them closer than any two people could be. She had saved his daughter’s life—twice. But she had also dragged his daughter into a place where the saving became necessary. Méarana could take care of herself in a wide range of circumstances; but the Shadow War had been beyond that range, and even Hounds and Pups had not come out whole. Ravn was the sort who would rid a dog of fleas by throwing it into the fire—on the calmly rational grounds that fleas could not survive elevated temperatures.

It had all been because of him. Méarana’s kidnapping, her near death. The death of Cŵn Annwn, the terrible injuries to Little Hugh, who had been a friend before the scarred man had known he could have friends. He hadn’t asked for them to come; he hadn’t counted on them coming. But they had come nonetheless, and if they had not come precisely for him, they had stayed and fought precisely for him.

She had come for him. The harper, who had urged him out of his niche in the Bar of Jehovah. The mere thought of the kitten braving a fight among tigers brought tears to his eyes. He had never done anything to deserve such loyalty.

As Bridget ban could easily attest.

The people aboard Great Moor had taken to sleeping in shifts, and were calling one another the night hawks and the morning larks. Bridget ban, of course, had contrived to place herself at the opposite time of the day to the scarred man. Perhaps this was a sign that he should not have bought the ticket to Dangchao Waypoint in the first place. But what foiled her of this intention was that the scarred man knew no night or day and he in his own self could split his shifts. A part of him was always awake; and Inner Child, of all of him, never slept.