Take No Prisoners by John Grant Page B

aim for rebellion, whatever its appeal – that kind of death, bathed in the chants of starlight, must surely be better than the life we were leading, but we had no wish to die. Besides, there were weans and other innocents among the Ironfolk families who had been brought on board; did we want their metal blood on our hands?
    But, if we could have found a way of leaving, we'd have taken it. Or if we'd known how to wrest control of the Ten Per Cent Extra Free from its officers, then we'd have done that, too.
    Scheming is as good as a log fire for keeping the body warm; that's really why we plotted such a lot.
    I had a secret which I talked about to none, not even the flass who then shared my bunk and my hopes – and whose name I have written out of my memories. She would never consciously have let the knowledge of my secret color her thoughts, but others might have detected it nevertheless; and then I might have been surrounded by hotheads, demanding that I lead them in a doomed revolt against our oppressors.
    Buried in my meager baggage was a tiny five-stringed harp. It had been crafted worlds away from where I had settled myself to live; its wood was of a mustard yellow unlike any I had elsewhere seen (although there are copses of it here on this world of mine). My mother had given it to me at one of the times I had wedded a flass, and had lied to me, as mothers do, that it was once her own grandmother's, even though it was patently new-made. The strings on it were not to my liking – the first thing that I did after my wedding was replace them with good twisted fishgut – but the frame was well enough constructed to sound a fine note. The whole instrument was barely bigger than my flattened pair of hands, and it could sustain only the simplest of melodies – certainly nothing of the complexity of even a Changing-spell – yet it made a pretty noise, a merry tinkle, like the sound early-morning mist makes on glass, which you can hear only if you listen carefully enough.
    Why the Ironfolk guards should have let me keep it, I have no idea. They had searched through the few belongings they'd allowed us to bring with us – not once but twice or three times, hurling anything that looked in the slightest like it could make music into one of their cruel shredding machines. (The tale was told that sometimes, for the sport of hearing screams, they did this also to Finefolk weans, but this I never saw myself, and I believe it to have been only a story.) Perhaps they had never seen a harp so small, so that when they came across it in their rootling they thought it was something else. Maybe the Ironfolk have objects of quite different purpose that look like that. I have no knowledge. Whatever the truth was, I was not going to give them the instrument if they were too stupid to see it when it was in front of their eyes.
    Not, I repeat, that it was in itself much good for anything. Even had it been a full clarsach – the most alive of all instruments – it would have been unable to play any living music in that vessel, surrounded as it was by crafted metal. It was a toy, and had never been anything more; here on the Ten Per Cent Extra Free it was just a way of reminding myself of the music I had once played, when I had been free to walk on worlds. There is a pleasure to be found in painful nostalgia; sometimes, when all slept but me, I plinked a lifeless note or two and tormented myself ecstatically. So softly did I pluck its fishgut strings that even the flass slenderly snoring beside me was unwakened.
    But once an Ironfolk warder heard.
    I have no inkling of why I didn't know that he was coming. Normally we Finefolk could tell where they were even as far as a league away, with their iron-nailed boots clanging echoes out of the loathed steel walkways. Or the guards would come to an aluminum door which would slide back from them into its aluminum niche, the scrape of the two aluminums together sounding out an alarm that struck