Read Online The January Dancer by Michael Flynn - Free Book Online Page B

unexplored.
    It was, in the reckoning of Fir Li, the obvious invasion point. No other crossing offered such ready access to so extensive a volume of the ULP. He had said so, and often, to the Ardry of High Tara, Tully King O’Connor, until, tiring of this Jeremiah in his court, the King had ordered Fir Li to take personal command at Sapphire Point.
    So Fir Li had taken his “Pups” and his personal ships, and heighed off to stand the watch. Yet, where his enemies at court saw defeat and exile, Fir Li tallied a triumph. He was a Hound, and Hounds usually get what they want. Since then, captains and men and ships had come, and served their rotations, and gone, but the Hound of Fir Li stayed on—an exile from the court, or a sentry on the wall, depending on one’s point of view.
    Over time, some courtiers had whispered, the sight of the Rift, of such an emptiness in the midst of light, could break a man, and drive him mad.
     
    A Hound of the Ardry could be many things and any thing. Loyal for a certainty. Relentless on the scent. The High King had no more loyal servants than the Hounds. They were resourceful; skilled in all manner of arts, both politic and martial; without pity or remorse when what had to be done had to be done. They could use words the way the Meathmen of New Eireann used claymores—often with the same decapitating results—but they were no strangers to other weapons. A single Hound, dropped at dusk into the Vale of New Eireann, could have stopped the civil war in a night and a day.
    Na Fir Li, in his youth, had not been the least of this company. He had overthrown the Fourth Tyrant of Gladiola with a few well-placed rumors dropped in the bars of Florentz City. He had for five years managed the planet of Valency, where his name is yet revered, ending their awful Interregnum. He had directed the reconstruction on Ugly Man after the earthquakes there. He had assassinated fifteen men and women who had deserved death; and rescued twenty-seven who had not. He had even crossed the Rift, to walk the fabled streets of the Secret City on Dao Chetty, where none but Those of Name may tread.
    Messenger, spy, ambassador, saboteur, assassin, planetary manager—a Hound could be whatever the Grand Seanaid desired when the Ardry spoke “with office” in the name of the ULP, for no one loved the ULP more than the Hounds of “The Particular Service.” It might fairly be said that the League existed as something more than a theory only in the convictions of the Hounds; and if ever there was anything that could drive a man mad, it was not the Sapphire Point Station, but devotion to a thing that was not quite real.
     
    But there is something enervating about a duty in which for the most part nothing happens and where success can be measured by nothing continuing to happen. It was a period of détente, and the border was supposed to be open, so there was a steady, if slow, volume in trade, and this made for an occasional customs inspection, but not often enough or varied enough to counteract the ennui of the long watch. Routine dulls the wits; so the Hound of Fir Li called random security drills and mounted exercises, neither too few to ensure readiness, nor so many as to dull it. It was a fine tuning, like stretching the strings on a harp, seeking the proper pitch without snapping the chords.
    And so most time was spent in relaxation—in sports, in games of skill and chance, in debate, in reading and writing and painting and the creation of music. In romance and in quarrel. In all those things with which, since the Caves of Lascaux, human beings had decked their lives. It fell to Greystroke, Fir Li’s deputy, to manage these things, to arrange the concerts and the bounceball leagues and suchlike—and also to apply discipline when the music became too loud, the debate too physical, or the games of chance too certain; to adjudicate all those frictions that develop when those who have been trained to act on a moment’s