The January Dancer (18 page)

“So
that
is how a man dies,” murmured Bridget ban.

Gwillgi grinned. “You have to admire his style.”

“How long before he reaches our position?” Fir Li demanded.

“At that speed, he can’t turn on a dinar,” Traffic said. “He has to shed his tangential velocity. But once he’s normalized, no more than twelve hundred beats. No, he’s accelerating. Make that eight hundred beats.”

Wildbear ordered
Hot Gates
to shift station, but Fir Li countermanded the order. “Belay that,” he told the helmsman. Wildbear spun to confront his commander.

“Are you as mad as they say? We have to jitter. He’s got the gravity gauge on us.”

“Which means, Commodore,” Fir Li explained patiently, “that a small angular adjustment on his part will compensate for even a large shift by us. We must wait as long as we can before jittering.”

“But…the inertia!
Hot Gates
wants time to move herself. We have to start acceleration now!”

“Thank you, Commodore. I was utterly unaware of that. Tracking, how long before impact?”

“Seven hundred, Cu, if he continues to accelerate at the present rate.”

“Traffic, give me a deadline. Cuin,” he addressed his colleagues, “the Molnar may have the gravity gauge, but we have topology. We know his starting position and we know his intended final position; namely, right…here.” With his foot, he sketched an X on the deck. “Therefore, we know the sheaf of coordinates along which all his weapons must track. Shields, see to that. Kinetics will be coming in rather fast, and I’d rather they not swiss my ship.”

Traffic displayed the deadline. “If the Cynthian passes these coordinates,” he said, “we cannot move the ship in time.”

“Aye,” Fir Li answered with a fierce grin. “But if we shift much before he reaches that line, he can simply tap his helm and compensate.”

“An exquisite problem in geometry,” said Bridget ban. “I can see only one solution.”

“Have you ever watched a bullfight on Riftside Andlus?” Fir Li asked her. “There is a maneuver called—”

“A Veronica,” supplied Bridget ban. She stood with arms crossed and legs akimbo. Unlike Grimpen and Gwillgi, she had sought neither seat not handhold.

“You may want to strap in,” Fir Li advised her.

“For such a closing speed? Sure, the straps must be uncommon strong.”

Fir Li quirked a smile. “Weapons,” he said. “Fire caltrops. Give him something to think about.”

“At these speeds,” Grimpen commented, “thinking isn’t even in it.”

“Even if we swiss him,” Wildbear objected, “his ship’s mass will continue on the same trajectory.”

“Grapeshot off,” said Weapons. “But his mag fields are up. He’ll deflect most, and the ceramic ones will just glance off his glacis.”

“Did I ask for an opinion, Weapons? The Molnar may have the faith in his defenses that others place in the gods, but he cannot help being distracted for a moment.”

“A grossbeat,” said Tracking. “Approaching deadline.”

“Time flies,” said Gwillgi, “when you’re having fun.” Fir Li grinned but did not turn to him. The point was to distract and not be distracted.

“Power, set alfvens for two leagues.”

Wildbear reared up. “Alfvens? You
are
mad! We’re too close to the sun!”

“Commodore, you are relieved. Gwillgi, would you indulge me and take custody of Hideo Commodore Wildbear?” The small, wiry Hound did not move, but grinned at Wildbear. The grin was sufficient hold, for the commodore glimpsed his teeth.

“Incoming kinetics,” announced Counter-battery. “Engaged.”
Hot Gates
shuddered as the fields absorbed the impacts and slewed them around the ship. A thud high above the command deck signaled an airtight door closing.

“Breech on E-17,” said Damage Control. A ceramic striking at high-v had pierced the ship like a needle through butter. Muted chimes summoned the damage party to E-deck.

Fir Li said, “Power. At deadline, engage alfvens. Two-league jump, random vector outside the sheaf. Enter.”

“Entered,” said Power; and Ships rang the chimes that announced upcoming alfven yanks: short-long, short-long, over and over.

“If you knew more of Alfven Theory,” Fir Li heard Grimpen tell Bridget ban, “you’d not be so calm.” But he was answered with laughter like breakers on an empty strand.

The visuals had grown insensibly coincident with real-time positions. The “grab hold” chimes sounded and the alfvens snatched whole handfuls of the threaded fabric of space and yanked
Hot Gates
violently aside. Too late to compensate, the Molnar’s corvette was past almost before they saw her coming and she dopplered downward into Sapphire Point itself.

“At that velocity,” Traffic observed, “she can’t vector aside before…”

The command deck fell silent, watching while the Cynthian ship fell toward the sun. She tried to maneuver, but the gravitational field of the blue giant pulled her insistently. For a time, it seemed as if she might make it anyway, perhaps only graze the photosphere. But then something happened—it was not clear what—and all attempts at maneuver ceased.

It was a long fall. Even at near-light speed, it was two more watches before the Cynthian ship had been finally engulfed by the blue giant, and another two before they saw it happen on the screens.

Long before then, Fir Li had left the control center, giving command back to Commodore Wildbear. “I’ll expect damage reports for ship and squadron, and an accounting of the Cynthian ships as well. At least three succeeded in making the Palisades.” As usual, he had been watching everything.

The commodore could not conceal his surprise at being returned to command, but before he could speak, Fir Li had spun on his heel. “Graceful Bintsaif.”

“Yes, Cu.”

“You know what to do.”

“Yes, Cu.”

And with that, Fir Li and his colleagues left the command deck, Gwillgi sparing one last smile for the commodore.

“What does Graceful Bintsaif know what to do?” Grimpen asked when they had returned to Fir Li’s quarters.

Gwillgi answered in Fir Li’s place. “Why, to take command of the ship should Wildbear show further weakness.”

“He was only showing caution,” Bridget ban said.

Gwillgi’s laugh was like broken glass. “That’s what I said.”

Grimpen poured himself a tumbler of channel wine from the pitcher on the sideboard and drank it empty before pouring another. “A hard fate,” he said. The others knew he meant the Molnar and they all glanced at the clock to see how much longer before Shree Newton accepted this new sacrifice.

“He loved it,” said Bridget ban, “the Molnar did; or didn’t you notice. When he turned to give orders to his watch, I saw that he was hugely aroused.”

“He certainly tried to fuck us good,” said Gwillgi.

“And it was a madman’s chance,” said Fir Li, who had entered his quarters last of all. “That’s why I knew he would try it, or something like it.”

“Yes,” said Gwillgi. “I noticed. You brought the alfvens online as soon as you entered the command center. You meant to destroy him from the first.” Gwillgi approved, of course.

“And what you did
wasn’t
mad?” suggested Grimpen. “There’s a reason no one engages the alfvens this far down the gravity well. Can’t you smell the burnt insulation, the tang of overheated ceramics and melted metals and plastics?
Hot Gates
isn’t going anywhere soon.”

Fir Li shrugged. “I hadn’t planned on going anywhere. Damage Control is at work. If needs be,
Justiciar
can order materials and components. I’m sending her off-station for yard repairs, so she can carry any requisitions with her. But I hope our own stores and shops can repair things.”

Gwillgi had drifted to the viewscreen and adjusted the coordinates until Sapphire Point seethed and churned in the center. “I wonder,” he said. “At the speed he was going, he could be out the other side of the star before the temperature and pressure could matter.”

Grimpen shook his massive head. “A star may be nothing but hot gases, but at those speeds, it would be like hitting a stone wall.”

“A stone wall,” murmured Bridget ban, looking upon some childhood memory. With a part of his attention, Fir Li caught that momentary lightening of her features, and would have thought nothing of it, except that she closed up immediately after.

“Radiation will have cooked him long before,” Gwillgi said.

“Well,” said Grimpen, placing his drink on the sideboard. “I’m off to the Old Planets.”

Gwillgi turned from the viewscreen and cocked an eyebrow. “There, you think?”

The man-mountain shrugged. “Perhaps.”

“’Tis tae Peacock Junction, I’ll be going,” Bridget ban announced. “Someone thought enough of this Twister to be taking it from the Molnar; and the Molnar came all the way from the Hadramoo to fetch it off New Eireann. Perhaps I can catch the scent of this black fleet there.”

“Yes,” said Grimpen. “All the way from the Hadramoo.”

He knows something,
Bridget ban concluded.
Or he thinks he does. But we’ll see who gets to the root sooner.
She gave Grimpen a pleasant smile and wondered if the other Hounds even knew the tale of King Stonewall’s Twisting Scepter. They had been raised in the interior, not on Die Bold, as she had been; and stories about “the Folk of Sand and Iron” did not circulate that far into the Spiral Arm.

Fir Li turned to Gwillgi. “Then, that leaves only you to cross into the CCW and learn about the lost ships.”

“Sorry, Dark-hound,” replied the other. “Business on Hanower. Maybe, after. No rush. Ships’ve been disappearing for years, you say.”

Seeing that his plans had come to nothing, Fir Li sighed. “Perhaps Greystroke will learn what I need.”

Bridget ban realized that Fir Li did not understand the possibilities of the Scepter. He was too focused on the Rift, on the long-awaited Confederate invasion, on the mysterious disappearances. The Twister had in effect passed directly across his field of vision without once registering on his consciousness. All the better. There would be much honor at the Ardry’s court to whomever brought the Scepter in. Better that it be Bridget ban than Fir Li.

If one fleet had thought to seize the Scepter, and another fought to take it, it might be something worth the having. If nothing else, it would be a quest out of the ordinary. And if she found the Scepter, and if she could take it from those who had wrecked the Molnar’s fleet, and if it had the powers that legend gave it, possession of it might give the Ardry at last the power to rule. That was a lot of “ifs,” but she was a Hound.

Still, even should the Stonewall Scepter prove as inert as the Ourobouros Circuit, the Ardry would at least have another bauble for the Royal League Museum on High Tara. Tully O’Connor was an art lover, and fancied himself an amateur archaeologist. He would be pleased with whoever brought him such an artifact, and favor at court was not something to be shunned.

But it bothered her that she didn’t know what Grimpen knew, or thought he knew.

“And what is it you know, or think you know?” the scarred man asks, so suddenly that the harper at first does not realize that he had broken the thread once more.

“I am the one come seeking to know,” she temporizes, and teases a tune from her strings. The scarred man watches her fingers dance for a time and waits for a true answer.

“You knew her then, this Bridget ban?” she says.

It is not an answer, but only another question. Yet, the scarred man treats it as an answer. “Of course, I knew her. How do you suppose I learned her part in it? I knew all of them, the gods’ curses that I did; for the knowing of this tale has been a hard burden.” The scarred man plays a little with his bowl, spinning it, and pushing it from hand to hand.

“And what of Bridget ban?” the harper insists.

The scarred man bows his head. “She was a witch-woman. She enchanted men and used them as casually as a workman uses his tools, and as casually puts them aside when the need is past. You could not measure the arrogance in her—nor could you notice it, when she chose that you did not. What you do with those strings, she could do with a glance and a gesture. Give me Gwillgi and his tight, explosive ferocity, or even Grimpen and his implacable persistence. No one will ever love them.”

The harper is surprised to find genuine tears in the old man’s eyes. She hadn’t thought him capable of it. “And did she love as greatly as she was loved?”

“How much do you already know?” the scarred man asks again. “What was your purpose in coming here? She may have loved hugely or not at all. When one can feign love as well as she, who could ever tell the dross from the gold? That was the horror of it.” He bows his head and dabs at his tears. The harper sees him tense, and a shudder like a small earthquake passes through his frame. His hands shoot out and grab the table’s rim.

When he raises his head, she sees the same distant, mocking quality in his eyes as when she first met him. And there are no tears.

“Have you begun to see the pattern yet?” he asks with the old curl back in his lips. If a portion of him mourns the memory of Bridget ban, that portion has retreated out of sight for now. The glimpse of it had pleased the harper. It had proven him capable of feeling.

“I’ve seen that two of the three who possessed the Dancer have died terribly,” she says.

“Is there another way to die? I hadn’t heard. Who can face the endless dark and not feel terror?”

“The Molnar.”

“He never faced it. His madness was his blinders. It was those looking on who saw the face of it—the bright blue eye of Sapphire Point in the broad black face of the Rift.”

“There is another side to the Rift,” she pointed out.

“Take no comfort from flawed analogies. If there is another side of death, none have come back to tell us of it.”

“There are ancient legends that, once, someone did.”

The scarred man laughs like broken glass. “Are you one of
them?”

“If one may believe one ancient legend, of a Twisting Stone, why not another, and more comforting one?”

“Because comfort is a lie.”

“But the Fudir seems to have been a clever man. He would have seen the pattern…Ah. Yes, he knew only of Jumdar’s death, not of the Molnar’s. Only a madman draws
kolam
from a single point.”

“And a man caught up in the immediacy of events may find it hard to step back and appreciate the pattern. That requires a distance that the Fudir did not yet have. Even the cleverest man may be blind.”

The harper plucks a sharp chord from her strings. “But two points make no pattern. Jumdar and the Molnar died for different reasons, not because they had possessed the Dancer. Jumdar may have been the modern, careful sort of soldier and the Molnar the ancient, careless sort, but neither of them could have supposed Death to be a stranger. Besides, January has not died, and he possessed it first.”

The scarred man smiles horribly. “All men die,” he answered. “It is only a matter of when, and how.”