The January Dancer (32 page)

“And what did they tell you?”

“‘If you have to ask, you’ll never be.’ I don’t think they really knew and were just brushing me off. So I insisted they send an inquiry to High Tara.” She smiled in self-deprecation. “Obstacles harden my whims. Well, I didn’t think much about it afterward, but a couple of doozydays later, when I was sitting under the great fir tree in the university Green, a shadow fell across my textbook—and there stood Zorba de la Susa, the greatest Hound of them all. He had come personally to evaluate me. Yes, of course I recognized him. He could have become the Little One Himself, had he wanted the post, but he preferred the field. ‘The Spiral Arm’s a more spacious office,’ he used to say, ‘than the Little One’s palace suite.’ He examined me, ran me through a battery of tests, and must have seen some hope, because he made a place for me at the Kennel School.”

“‘He must have seen some hope,’” Hugh repeated, as if to himself.

“I was nineteen, local. I didn’t know if I could ever measure up to the likes of de la Susa or na Fir Li.”

Hugh laughed. “And now you’re almost single-handedly chasing an entire battle fleet down an uncharted hole because of a fanciful legend.”

She had made sure that they exercised together in the fitness room, running in tandem on the slidewalk, spotting for each other on the mass machines, and afterward sitting side by side on the floor mats. The day before they were to enter the uncharted road, he asked her what her most difficult case had been.

“I can tell you what the most frightening one was. I’ve never been tasked with governing a planet or with disaster relief like Black Shuck carried out on Kamerand. Those would be frightening, but in a different way.” She described her escape from Pulawayo’s house, her discovery of the monstrous exhibits in the
remonstratorium,
and the artful disguise she had used to elude the guards at the maglev station.

“So there I was,” she said, laughing, “striding proud as ye please along Uasladonto Street with my breasts stuck out for everyone to see.”

Hugh could not help but drop a glance toward those now-concealed treasures and said, “I wish I could have seen that.” He laughed a bit to show he had meant it as the sort of light double entendre that was almost mandatory after a story like that. She laughed back at him and laid her hand
for just a moment
on his and said carelessly that she wished he could have seen it, too.

That evening, she left the door to her quarters ajar just a wee bit and waited until she heard Hugh’s footsteps in the hallway before she began disrobing for sleep. The footsteps halted and she knew he had noticed her reflection in the mirror, visible through the crack in the door. How could he not? She had aligned everything with the utmost care. She paused awhile after removing the blouse, as if in thought, and then stepped out of his view.

She wondered if he would barge into her quarters after that. It was not unheard of for men of his age to lose all control of themselves under such circumstances. But the Ghost of Ardow had not survived as long as he had by losing control under any circumstance. There was no doubt in her mind that he would “seize the moment,” but he was, to use a term lauded on some worlds but derided on others, a man of honor. She found, in spite of herself, a certain admiration for him.

That was the problem with using affection as a weapon. Like a knife, it cut two ways.

She had orchestrated the finale for the very day they entered Electric Avenue.

They had fooled Peacock STC for a while, sending swifties down the Sapphire Point ramp as if they were hailing drones. In fact, they were reports to na Fir Li informing him of what they had found and what they intended, as well as more routine reports to be forwarded to the Kennel archives on High Tara.

But Traffic Control had been screeching at them for three days running that they were approaching local-c far off the proper bearing for the Silk Road. Bridget ban did not think that any secret could be kept by a large number of people, and so most of the pleas directed at them were genuine concern and panic. The Border Patrol cutter that altered course to intercept them clearly had a more malign intent. If no one else, those who had dispatched it certainly knew by then where the two Kennel ships were actually headed. They could project a course as well as anyone.

Cutters were fast, but Kennel ships were faster, and it could not catch them before they reached the ramp. If they missed the entrance, however, and braked before they blinked, the cutter would make sure they had no second try.

Now, Bridget ban had never been as nervous about the attempt as she had led Hugh to believe—that had been intended to trigger his protective reflex—but there was always the possibility that measurement error really had mislaid their trajectories. So when they entered the ramp successfully and slid into the Krasnikov tube it was with a sense of genuine relief and when she emerged from the pilot’s saddle, she and Hugh embraced in delight.

And then, as sudden as the shift to superluminal, they delighted in the embrace.

There is a certain jadedness that comes with the considered use of one’s affections. It is not that they lose their edge, but the edge cannot help growing a little dull. She had been prepping him for days during the crawl up to the coopers. With carefully chosen stories, with carefully calculated touches and glimpses, she had readied him, body and mind, for this precise moment. Yet she found his caresses welcome; and later, considering how long he had been celibate, she found him gentle and unhurried. Even so, while they played with each other, she could sense him straining at the leash. But the Glens of Ardow had taught him control.

(But the Glens had taught the Ghost of Ardow many more things than patience and control. He had been schooled in realism, too. He knew when he was being stalked, and could recognize the signs of a well-laid ambush. He was not such a fool as to expect a Hound of the Ardry to kick up her heels for a chance-met stranger; but he tolerated the ambush for the sake of being well laid. Don’t look so shocked, harper. Her actions were calculated; but the Ghost as well knew how to add two and two.)

The two ships proceeded down the road at a moderate pace so that Greystroke’s instruments could tease out fossil images from the shoulders and track the phantom fleet. The shoulders grew narrow along one stretch. Skewing out of the main channel would not put them into the mud; it would smash them against the cliffs! Bridget ban spent many hours in the pilot’s saddle taking bearings, and pricking off the qualities of local space on her charts. Greystroke was undoubtedly doing likewise; but better there be two such charts. Just in case.

The cliffs, however, explained why the road had not been discovered early on. Who knew how many ships had entered it, only to smash upon those steep gradients? And when success finally came, Peacock had seen more safety in secrecy. Too many roads in their system and the ’Cockers would become a target for every planet and pirate in the region.

It was not until the shoulders had flattened out that Bridget ban could relax and leave the steering to the intelligence. Hugh helped her relax, though where he had learned the art of massage he did not say. If only intelligences had
judgment,
she told him; and he recounted the Fudir’s tales of ancient Terran triumphs, the fanciful hyperbole of which amused her.

And so day followed day. A strange road requires close study, and Bridget ban spent more time in the saddle than on more familiar routes. Occasional messages drifted back from Greystroke. Several times, the shoulders flattened out into ramps, but each time the images of the phantom fleet continued past them. What unknown stars lay at the ends of them?

To maintain the charade of affection for the remainder of the transit, neither Hugh nor Bridget ban could plausibly deny a kiss or a casual touch to the other. But there is this strange property of a simulated affection. Continued long enough, it becomes real enough. There were certain sympathies of character that lay between the Ghost and the Hound that eased the transition and made it all but insensible. Bridget ban discovered herself looking forward to his attentions, which were not by any means entirely sexual. He was, she learned, a literate man, widely read and well spoken, and as attentive as only an assassin can be.

There came a day at last, nearly two metric weeks after they had entered the road, when Greystroke warned that the laminas were broadening once more but that this time the images of the phantom fleet had blue-shifted, which meant they were preparing to exit.

She hurried from the pilot’s saddle to tell Hugh and came to the conference room to find him standing hipshot before his “wall of evidence.” He had one arm across his chest with the other nestled elbow-in-palm and with his hand along his cheek. A tight wrinkle marked the forehead above his nose and his lips were pursed and…She came to his side and he absently draped an arm around her, and the comfort she felt at this small gesture disturbed her greatly.

Hounds sometimes took companions. Most did not last the rigors, but Hugh might be one who did, and the Little One Himself would almost surely have given his grace. She might have chosen Hugh, did she not already love another.

“We’ve come off the ramp,” she said, and he nodded.

“Among the Old Planets,” he said.

“Aye, you guessed that part right.”

“I didn’t guess.” He rapped the surface of the holowall with his knuckle, striking Old ’Saken, and Die Bold and Friesing’s World, knocking on the doors to Waius and ’Bandonope and Abyalon. “Which one?” he asked.

“The intelligence has recognized the Lizard and Winking Arnulf. We’ve come out in the coopers of Die Bold.”

He turned to her and smiled. “Welcome home.”

“Wait,” cries the harper. “Wait!” Her harp is stilled and she has half risen from her seat. “What do you mean she already loved another? Who was it? Why have I heard nothing of him? She always said that—”

She stops abruptly, but the scarred man seizes upon the caesura.
“She always said?”
His voice rises from his gravelly whisper to a growl. He is a sleeping predator surprised in his den. His age has not stilled his joints and
as fast as a black mamba striking
he has seized her wrist and holds her tight against her flight. “How do you know what
she
‘always said’?” His eyes pin her as the snake pins a bird, his face as hard as flint.

Until flint cracks into shale and slides.

“Oh, by the gods! Oh, by the gods, you are
her
daughter! You’ve lied to me this whole time!”

His rising voice has turned a few heads in the broad common room of the Bar. A man in the uniform of a Gladiolan “cop” sees how he holds her restrained by her wrist and, scowling, rises from his seat. The Bartender reaches under the bar and something black and metallic emerges in his fist.

The scarred man sees all this, as he sees everything but the woman before him, with only a part of his attention. He might almost welcome their assault, so ready is he to fight the world over this latest of betrayals. But in the end, and this end takes but a moment to achieve, he releases her.

And she does not run. He has not answered her question.

“I’ve not lied to you,” she tells him.

“Your silence was your lie. Be gone. Go. The story’s ended.”

But she does not move. “There are three sorts of ends, you told me; and this seems like none of them.”

But the scarred man is not to be comforted from his rage. He shoves the table violently aside, toppling goblets, shrieking its legs against the flooring, and he bolts from his niche in the wall. He moves swiftly, half bent over, and he passes like a ghost through the crowded room. The Great Doors swing wide, and he is gone.

The harper hurries after, but when she emerges onto Greaseline Street, there is no sign of him, not northward toward the spaceport, not southward toward the Hostel. Then she turns and looks past the Bar’s rooftop where the ramshackle Corner of Jehovah and its tangled warren of alleys clutter the slopes of Mount Tabor.