“Hey, I’m not the only guy who kills people.”
“Nobody said you’re the only one, Hari. That’s not the point.”
“I’ll tell you what the point is. The point is: that’s how I became a star. The point is: that’s how I pay for this house, and the cars, and get us a table at Por L’Oeil. That’s how I pay for everything!”
“It’s not you who pays for it, Hari. It’s Toa-Phelathon. His wife. His daughters. Thousands of wives, husbands, parents, children. They’re the ones who pay for it.”
“HIS NAME IS, ah, Ma’elKoth,” said Administrator Kollberg. He licked his thick, colorless lips and went on. “We, ah, believe this to be a pseudonym.”
Hari stood stiffly before the Chairman’s massive desk. Inside his head he snarled, Of course it’s a pseud, you moron. Out loud, he said, “ ‘elKoth’ is a word in Paquli that means ‘huge,’or ‘limitless,’ and the Ma prefix stands for the nominative case of to be. It’s not a name, it’s a boast.”—and if you weren’t a fucking idiot you’d know it.
None of his commentary showed on his face; years of practice kept his expression attentively blank.
The wide, rectangular Sony repeater behind the Chairman’s desk showed a view that roughly corresponded to what a window would have shown—the late-autumn sun sinking toward the bay—had this vaultlike office not been buried deeply beneath the Studio complex.
This inner office was a sanctum that few ever saw; in the eleven years that Kollberg had been Chairman, even Hari—San Francisco’s number one star and perennial member of the Studio Top Ten in earnings worldwide—had been in here only once before. It was small, with curving walls and ceiling, and no sharp corners; climate control kept it nearly cool and dry enough that Kollberg wouldn’t sweat—but not quite.
The Chairman of the San Francisco Studio was short and sloppy, not fat so much as soft and thick. Pale grey strands of hair strung themselves across a scalp pitted with the scars of failed transplants, and his watery eyes were surrounded by rolls of flesh the color and consistency of spoiled bread dough.
Hari had seen flesh like that once before, when Caine had liberated some human slaves of an ogrillo tribe in the Gods’ Teeth. The ogrilloi had been breeding them as cattle, underground in their stinking lair; there were teenage boys there who had never seen the sun—and they’d been gelded to keep their meat juicy and sweet. Their skin had looked very much indeed like Kollberg’s.
If Hari let himself think about it too much, it could give him a serious case of the shudders.
Kollberg’s star had risen along with Caine’s; he’d gotten behind Hari when Hari had pitched the Adventure that later became known as Last Stand at Ceraeno. That was Caine’s big break, and Kollberg’s—with Last Stand, Caine cracked the Top Ten, and Kollberg was the Chairman who had put him there. Since that time, Kollberg’s almost preternatural sense for the rhythms of public taste had driven San Francisco to its current world prominence; he was popularly considered to be the heir apparent to Businessman Westfield Turner, the Studio President and CEO. Kollberg, more than any person save only Hari himself, was responsible for Caine’s success.
Hari despised him with the sort of personal loathing most people reserve for cockroaches in their breakfast cereal.
Kollberg had been babbling on about this Ma’elKoth, who called himself the Ankhanan Emperor. “You might pay a little attention to this, Michaelson,” Kollberg was saying. “After all, you put him on the throne.”
This was vintage Kollberg: the clammy bastard might waste an hour building up to the real reason he’d summoned Hari. On his way in, Hari had tried the usual downcaste whispering gallery, casually questioning doormen, security, secretaries—even that smug worm Gayle Keller. Nobody knew anything about Shanna; whatever had happened, the Studio lid was screwed down tight. Kollberg hadn’t so much as mentioned her name. Hari’s palms burned with a suicidal lust to beat it out of him.
“First,” he said tightly, “I didn’t put Ma’elKoth on the throne. He did that for himself.”
“After you murdered his predecessor.”
Hari shrugged; he’d had his fill of that subject already this week. “And second, I don’t do assassinations anymore.”
Kollberg blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“I. Don’t. Do. Assassinations. Anymore.” Hari articulated every word slowly and clearly, skating on the dangerous brink of caste-violating insolence. “I’ll only do straight Adventures, like Retreat from the Boedecken.”
Those heavy lips pressed together. “You’ll do this one.”
“Are you a betting man, ’Strator?”
Kollberg’s chuckle was as moist as his watery eyes. “Quite, ah, impressive, this Ma’elKoth is—military sorcerer, fine general. Here, look at this.”
The repeater behind his desk flickered and relit with a computer-stabilized view through some anonymous Actor’s eyes. Hari knew the scene: it was the travertine-faced address deck, three stories up the sheer wall of the Temple of Prorithun, shining in the rich yellow glare of the Ankhanan sun. The Actor who’d viewed this had stood with his back to the Fountain—from the angle, he must have been practically leaning on the statue of Toa-Phelathon—and it was clear from the lower fringe of the view that the Court of the Gods was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with folk of all description.
The man who stood on that deck and exhorted the crowd dwarfed the Household Knights who flanked him; he was as tall as their blood-colored halberds. The fist he shook in anger could have crushed coal to diamonds.
He wore some sort of armor that gleamed with the black semi-translucency of obsidian, and to his shoulders was fixed a cape of pure and gleaming white that spread behind him like the wings of an eagle. Hair the color of burled maple curled across his shoulders and rippled in some unfelt breeze, and a beard shot through with bars of iron grey and shimmering with oil framed a face wide-browed and clear-eyed, a face of obvious honesty and translucent nobility.
Even without the sound, Hari couldn’t look away. When Ma’elKoth’s brow clouded in anger, it seemed that the sky did as well; when he looked down with love upon his subjects, his face brought light to them like the first dawn of spring.
Someone there was subtly manipulating the sunlight, Hari realized; a good illusionist can do it, even over a substantial area like this, but making it look as natural as this did—
Hari grunted, impressed despite himself. “He’s good at this.”
“Oh, yes,” Kollberg said. “Yes, indeed he is. He’s also, ah, rather frighteningly brilliant.”
“It seems, well . . .” Kollberg coughed into his hand. “It seems that he’s independently rediscovered the police state.”
“Good for him,” Hari murmured absently, still watching. He’d glimpsed Ma’elKoth once or twice before, on victory parades after the stunning campaign that had won the Plains War, but he’d never seen the man in action. There was something vaguely familiar about him now, though, about the way he moved, the way he gestured. This would bug him until he worked it out, a little finger poking at the back of his mind.
Where had he seen these mannerisms before?
“. . . an internal enemy,” Kollberg was saying. “The Nazis had the Jews; the Communists used the ‘counterrevolutionaries’ we have the HRVP virus. Ma’elKoth has hit upon, ah, a rather novel internal enemy. When he needs an excuse to eliminate political enemies, he, ah, well, he accuses them of being ‘of the Aktiri.’ ”
Aktiri was a Westerling word having a number of pejorative meanings: insane, evil, homicidal, alien baby-eater, and endless variations on that theme. Aktiri are evil demons who take the form of men and women to deceive honest folk into trusting them so that they can rape and steal and murder with mad abandon; when slain they vanish in a burst of shimmering colors.
The word was a linguistic borrowing from English. The early Actors, making the transfers to Overworld in the cruder, more direct Studio style of thirty years ago, had left a lasting impression on the culture.
“Aktir-tokar,” Kollberg corrected. “An Actor hunt.”
“Not bad,” Hari said. He touched the spot on his skull, just above and in front of his left ear, over his brain’s language center. “The only way to prove you’re innocent is to let them dig around in your brain until they decide they won’t find a thoughtmitter. By that time you’re dead anyway. Then if your corpse doesn’t slip out of phase, I guess they apologize.” He shrugged. “Old news. The Studio’s put out a couple circulars on updated Ankhanan protocols. I’m still not going to kill him for you.”
“Michaelson—Hari, please understand. It’s not only that he’s actually caught some Actors—no one very successful, at least not yet—but that he’s using the Aktir-tokar in a rather decidedly cynical fashion, to eliminate his political opposition, folk that he knows quite well are entirely . . . ah, well, innocent.”
“You’re talking to the wrong Michaelson,” Hari said. “You want my wife.”
Kollberg put a chubby finger to his lips. “Ah, well, your wife, . . . mm, in her capacity as Pallas Ril, she’s already taken a certain interest in this problem.”
Just hearing her name finally come out of Kollberg’s mouth felt like someone had slipped a needle into the back of his neck. “Yeah, I heard,” he said softly, through his teeth. “She’s been doing her Scarlet Pimpernel act.”
“I feel I must make this entirely clear, Hari. Here at the Studio, we must look to the long term. This Aktir-tokar business will blow over soon enough, and the Ankhanan Empire will be safe for Actors once again. Entirely too safe, if you see my meaning. If the Empire were to become truly organized, they would certainly put down the ogrilloi and the human bandits, and kill the dragons and trolls and griffins, possibly the elves and dwarves and all the other things that make Adventuring entertaining in the first place. Do you see? If Ma’elKoth is successful, the Empire will be essentially lost to us as an Adventuring environment. Already, Ankhana itself is hardly more exotic than, say, New York. This, ah, trend cannot be allowed to continue. The Studio System—and this Studio in particular—has far too much invested in the Ankhanan Empire. Fortunately, this Ma’elKoth has gathered most of the reins of power to himself; you could call it a classic cult-of-personality thing. If he is eliminated, the Empire should balkanize in a very satisfactory way.”
“Shanna’s heated up about this; why don’t you have her do it?”
“Oh, come now,” Kollberg murmured. “She’s a save-the-innocents type; you said so yourself. You know very well that Pallas Ril doesn’t do assassinations.”
“Neither does Caine. Not anymore.”
“If you have a problem with that,” Hari said heavily, “you can take it up with Biz’man Vilo.”
The mention of Hari’s powerful Patron didn’t make Kollberg so much as blink. In fact, it brought a faint smile to his rubbery lips. “I don’t believe that will be necessary.”
“Believe what you want, Administrator,” Hari said. “And you still haven’t explained what this has to do with my wife.”
“Haven’t I?” He rose and clapped his hands together, rubbing them against each other with a mock-regretful sigh. “Perhaps you’d better come with me.”
THE 270-DEGREE FLOOR-TO-CEILING screen that faced the simichair in the Chairman’s private box showed only a uniform grey when Kollberg led Hari inside. Another first, Hari thought, scuffing his sandals across the burgundy cashmere of the deep-pile carpet.
The Chairman’s simichair was done in walnut and kidskin, filled with bodyform gel and more comfortable than your mother’s arms. Reach-around swingarms held a bewildering variety of refreshments—from beluga on toast points to Roderer Cristal on tap—for those occasions when the Adventure feed was directed to the screen, rather than the induction helmet that hung over the back like the cap on an electric chair.
Kollberg directed Hari to the chair with a butler’s one-hand sweep and said, “Don’t bother with the comfort hookups; this cube only runs twelve minutes. And there’ll be no hypnotics. I, ah, assume that you can tolerate direct induction without any chemical suppression?”
Hari shrugged. “I’ve done it before.”
“Fine, then. Please be seated.”
“Are you gonna tell me what this is about?”
“This cube is, ah, self-explanatory,” Kollberg said, his mouth twitching as though he tried to suppress a smirk. “Please,” he repeated, and it was not a request.
Hari lowered himself into the simichair in the grip of a dizzying sense of unreality. He’d never even seen the Chairman’s private box before; now he was sitting in the Chairman’s personal simichair. This was tantamount to putting on the man’s underwear.
He reached behind his head to grasp the helmet and found that it was already moving into place. The shields covered his eyes, and he snugged the regulator over his nose and mouth, breathing deeply of its tasteless, neutral air supply.
He brushed the arms of the chair with his palms, searching for the tuning switches, but the Chairman’s simichair already had begun the process. Light flared inside his closed eyes as the induction helmet stimulated his brain’s vision center; the shapeless blurs within the light slowly resolved into simple shapes: lines, squares, circles, gradually gaining depth and solidity as the helmet’s feedback circuits monitored the flow-patterns of his brain activity and adjusted the inducers to fit his individual characteristics.
Similarly, the simple bell tone that began faintly in his ears split into chiming melodies that gradually developed into Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. The melodies expanded into shimmering chords, added instruments and voices, became the chorale of Beethoven’s Ninth; before his eyes was the late-summer view from atop Copper Mountain in the Rockies. He felt the crisp breeze on his skin, felt the rough texture of a hemp rope coiled over his shoulder and the pressure of boots, smelled the scent of the tiny yellow and white wildflowers and the faint musk of the marmots that live in homes on the mountain.
At the same time, he was aware of the kinesthesia of being seated in Kollberg’s simichair. While adjusting the induction feed, an ordinary chair would have also been dripping chemical suppressors into his bloodstream, hypnotic medications that would have dampened his sense of self and opened his mind to pure experience, unfiltered by his own consciousness. The Chairman’s chair was not equipped with a hypnotics feed; he couldn’t afford the luxury of being someone else so completely that his own responsibilities were forgotten.
The Rocky Mountains faded into a slow cross-dissolve with a scene already in progress.
Sight came first, a room flooded with sunlight that is warmer and yellower than the sun of Earth. Coarse wool blankets over palliasses prickly with straw, and huddled on them a man and a woman who cling to each other, two young girls beside them, all four wearing what look like beekeeper’s nets of some dull-gleaming metal.
Scents and sounds followed; smells of distant horseshit baking in the sun and bodies sweating under armor, the shouts of drovers in tangled traffic and the splash of nearby water, voices—
“. . . why? I cannot understand, I have always been loyal,” the man was saying in Westerling, the predominant tongue of the Empire. “You must understand how frightened we all are.”
The simichair was connected to the Studio mainframe, which ran an AI translation protocol on it so that the sense of the words registered in English. Hari didn’t need it; he spoke fluent Westerling, as well as Paquli and Lipkan and smatterings of several other tongues, and the AI’s translation differed just enough from his automatic comprehension to be distracting.
He ground his teeth and concentrated on the kinesthetics of the Actor he rode.
Slim, not muscular, but very fit; body armor of light, flexible leather, cape, bracers, boots; perfect and constant awareness of body position, like that of a dancer or an acrobat—no codpiece on the armor, nor need of one, none of the male’s instinctive and permanent consciousness of external genitals.
Hari thought, It’s a woman, even as he became aware of the pressure on his/her breasts, tightly constrained by the armor.
And the package came together: his awareness of the precise curve from breast to hip, the slight tilt of the head to shift the hair away from the eyes, the rotation of one shoulder in her unmistakable shrug. Before she ever spoke, before he heard her voice through her own ears, he knew.
“We’re all frightened. But I swear that we can save you, if you’ll help.”
“OF COURSE I’LL help,” he snaps. “Think you I want my wife and daughters given to the Cats?” His wife flinches; the two girls don’t, but they’re probably not old enough to understand what that means.
“Not at all,” I tell him through my best smile. It’s a good one; he’s already softening. “Konnos, there’s no need for you to explain anything if you don’t wish to, but I’m wondering how you got this far. You were denounced four days ago; how have you avoided capture? Anything you feel you can tell me might help me save others. Do you see?”
I fold my legs beneath me to sit on the splintery floor. Konnos casts nervous glances at the others in the room, and I follow his eyes. “You trust me—you’ve trusted me enough to send for me; I trust these men. The Twins”—a matched pair of brawny youths, golden haired, with eyes much older than their faces, stolidly sharpening identical broadswords—“escaped from the gladiatorial pens; you can believe they have no love for Imperials. Talann, here”—a woman, legs folded in lotus on the floor, muscular under loose linen tunic and pants, her eyes a manic violet glitter within a ragged halo of platinum hair—“there’s an Imperial price of a hundred royals on her head. As for Lamorak there by the window, well, you’ve probably heard of him already.”
Lamorak? Hari thought with an uncomfortable twinge of surprise. Lamorak was an Actor. Son of a bitch! I knew Karl and Shanna were friends, but . . . Jesus. How deep does this go?
Lamorak mutters a short phrase under his breath, and I feel the pull of his magick as a small flame springs from the palm of his hand; he draws it up to the rith-leaf cigarette between his lips, and soon the sharp scent of burning herb drifts over from the window.
*He’s showing off,* Shanna’s subvocalized Soliloquy runs, *he should know better than to do a magick here, even a tiny one that probably can’t be felt outside this room.*
The Soliloquy—the tiny motions of tongue and throat that the translation protocol transformed into quasi-thoughtlike internal monologue—would ordinarily fade behind the screen of hypnotics that would drip into the bloodstream of a first-hander until it became indistinguishable from actual thought; without the hypnotics, the Soliloquy was nearly as distracting as the AI’s imperfect translation of Westerling. Pallas’—Shanna’s—voice whispered constantly in his ears. Hari shifted in the chair, gritted his teeth, and reminded himself that this cube only ran twelve minutes. For that long, he could stand anything.
Lamorak winks and turns back to watch the street, one hand on the leather-wrapped hand-and-a-half hilt of his sword Kosall. Sun-glow backlights his perfect profile with a golden halo, and as usual I can’t quite get mad at him; it’s an effort to turn my attention back to Konnos.
“I’m not political,” Konnos says, pulling the netting away from his face so that he can mop his mouth with the back of his hand. “I never have been. I’m a scientist, that’s all. I’ve spent my life in research into the fundamental nature of magick—the nature of reality, because, y’know, they’re the same thing. This netting? Silver, you see? Silver is a nearly perfect channel for magickal force—gold is better, but I’m only a poor researcher; whatever gold which found its way to my purse always went to feed my family. But, you see, nearly all charged amulets, floating needles, pendulary indicators—all that run of seeking items—detect a characteristic pattern of essence that emanates from their targets: the Shell you adepts like to talk about. These items are charged, after all, by contact with our homes or personal items that would resonate in our own unique pattern. This silver net turns our patterns in upon themselves, making us effectively invisible to items of this sort, and it also serves as an admirable defense against compulsions. In fact, if one can connect the net itself to a Flow source, such as a griffinstone . . .”
He keeps babbling, but his words fade behind my admiration for the elegance of his defense. *He’s invented a variant of a Faraday cage; that means he’s been doing some pretty basic scientific-method-style research. Natives aren’t supposed to be able to look deeper than the immediate magickal surface of an effect. Our social scientists have been saying for years that the operation of magick stunts the “scientific sense.” By that theory, he should only be able to think of blocking a spell with another spell, instead of taking advantage of a general principle underlying a whole branch of magick. Hah. I’m impressed.
*And I’m going to get myself a few of those silver nets.*
“. . . of course without the griffinstone they’re hardly proof against a determined effort by a powerful thaumaturge,” Konnos continues, “but for that eventuality I have this little friend, right here.” He pats the knob of a polished ivory scroll case that pokes out from a pouch on his belt. “I wrote it myself; I call it the Eternal Forgetting. It’s the most powerful nondetection spell ever devised, but very much a last-resort kind of thing—”
“Let’s hope you don’t need it,” I cut him off. We might not have time for another lengthy explanation. “Now, I must ask you to remove the netting. Only temporarily,” I add hastily, when he gasps a wordless protest. “The King’s Eyes try to send spies to us from time to time—”
“I am no spy! Would a spy bring wife and daughters with him to do his work?”
“No, no, no. You don’t understand. I know that you are a good and honest man,” I lie gracefully. “That’s not the issue. But there are enchantments that can be put on a man to make him betray himself against his will, and there are others that may call out to a searching mind to reveal a place of hiding. I must examine you now, to ensure that none of these have been laid upon you without your knowledge. Others, who are hunted just as you are, also wait where I am taking you, in a place that I have made proof against all kinds of seeking magick. It is they that I protect by examining you, as well as ourselves.”
Konnos looks at his wife, she looks back at him fearfully, and before either can speak Lamorak says from the window, “Trouble.”
I’m at his side in an instant; behind me come faint rustlings as Talann and the Twins rise and prepare themselves.
The sun-washed street outside looks utterly normal, crowded with ramshackle tenements, its center still churned mud from the rains two days ago. Traffic is light, mostly on foot, day laborers picking across the rotting boardwalks toward a chance of work in the Industrial Park across Rogues’ Way.
I frown; what’s wrong with this picture? I’m about to ask Lamorak what he sees when I realize that it’s what he doesn’t see that alarms him: our stooges are missing.
The alley mouth half a block down that should have sheltered a sleepy drunk yawns emptily; the stoop where a ragged leper should have been sunning himself sports a wetly gleaming splotch of blood.
My heart stutters. This is bad.
“How?” I say numbly. “How is this possible? How could they get so close?”
No need to say who they are; we both know it’s the Grey Cats.
Lamorak shakes his head and mutters, “Some kind of spell; I don’t know. I didn’t see a damned thing.”
“But I should have felt a current in the Flow . . .”
“We knew this could happen someday,” he says, taking my shoulders and gently turning me toward him. He looks down into my eyes with that glorious crooked smile. “We knew when we took this job that we couldn’t beat the odds forever. Maybe I can lead them away, give you a chance to get Konnos and his family out.”
“No arguments,” he says, and stops my mouth with his lips.
The kiss stabbed Hari like a knife in the balls—not just that Pallas let him kiss her, not just that she liked it. She wasn’t surprised, and she wasn’t tentative, and this wasn’t even nearly the first time.
Hari thought in sudden toneless blankness, Lamorak’s been fucking my wife.
Shanna’s audience—all her first-handers, every person who would ever rent the secondhand cube—they’d all know it. They’d all experience it.
Hari’s heart smoked within his chest.
I push him away gently; his reflexive heroism catches at my breath, even though it’s futile—I’m not ready to sacrifice him uselessly. We’ll save heroism for a last resort. I turn to the others.
“It’s the Cats,” I tell them shortly, brutally. Konnos and his wife clutch each other, and one of the girls begins to cry; she sees how frightened her parents are, and she doesn’t need to know more than that. “They’ve taken our stooges. That means we’re already surrounded and they’re closing in for the kill. I’m open to any brilliant ideas.”
The Twins exchange an identically grim glance; they shrug and one of them—probably Dak, he does most of the talking—says, “We can hold the room—fight them off until the Subjects of Cant can mass against them.”
I shake my head. “The Subjects aren’t ready to come open. And with the stooges gone, they don’t even know we’re in here. Talann?”
She stretches like a cat and pops the knuckles of both hands in swift succession. Her eyes spark with an uneasily familiar fire. “What would Caine do?”
I wince. “He wouldn’t ask stupid questions,” I snap.
Talann the groupie—at least half the reason she’s with me is she hopes she’ll meet Caine someday. Somehow his shadow still darkens my life. Now I know why I recognize that spark in her eye—it’s the look Caine used to get when we were cornered, when the thread of our lives spun through our fingers. It’s the closest he ever came to being happy.
On the other hand, I do know what Caine would do: attack. Crash their line, somewhere in tight quarters where they couldn’t use their crossbows. Smash through and run like hell—but that would be almost certain death for Konnos and his family, and protecting them would slow us until we couldn’t protect ourselves. I glance at Lamorak, at the noble resolution on his face as he waits for my answer. Sure as death, Caine wouldn’t sacrifice himself in a gesture like Lamorak proposed—but Caine also wouldn’t stand there and wait for me to give him permission.
They’re all looking at me. For an empty second I wish that someone else would make this decision.
“All right,” I say heavily. “The Twins and I can hold this room. Lamorak, head east.”
I shake my head. “Through the tenements. Kosall can cut through. Talann, go south into the river. If you get clear, either of you, head for the Brass Stadium and tell the—”
“Oh, crap,” Lamorak breathes. He’s looking out the window again. “I think . . . Gods, that could be Berne.”
“Count Berne?” Talann says, her eyes on fire. “Himself?”
I crowd close to Lamorak and follow his gaze and there he is, leaning insolently against a grey-weathered wall across the street, holding a flame to a hand-rolled cigarette.
The recorded chill that Hari felt shooting down Pallas’ back at the sight vanished in the surging fury that blazed up his own spine. Berne. His hands knotted into convulsive fists, and he cracked his wrist painfully against the simichair’s swingarm. Berne, you vicious shit-sack bastard, if I was there . . . Oh gods, oh gods, why can’t I be there?
It’s Berne, all right; I recognize him instantly. He’s not wearing his Court rags, the slashed-velvet blouse and leggings he’s made fashionable again. Instead, he’s in scuffed and faded heavy serge that once was scarlet but now has the patchy strawberry-cream shade of a half-washed bloodstain. His slender, gently curved sword hangs in its scabbard from a handsbreadth leather belt. The planes of his face are so sharp they should gleam like metal in the sun, and now his toothy grin cracks them like a mirror.
My heart plummets; I know him too well. Worse: he knows me.
It’s wrong, I shouldn’t feel this way . . . but right now I really wish that Caine were here.
“Change of plan,” I say quickly, turning back toward my friends, the faces that ride the lives for which I am responsible. “Lamorak, you and Talann take the Konnosi—” I point at the south wall of the tiny apartment. “—that way, and down. Stay off the stairs and out of the corridors. The Twins and I will rearguard the retreat.”
He still hesitates for one naked second, and his eyes speak poetry to mine.
Then he draws Kosall, grasping it by its quillions and clearing the blade from its scabbard before activating its magick by taking the hilt, and the enchanted blade comes to life, its high buzzing whine making my teeth ache. Its edges waver like heatshimmer off a sunbaked sidewalk, and I can feel its pull on the currents of Flow.
Lamorak stands at the south wall and puts Kosall’s point to the wall at head height; he leans on the pommel, and Kosall slides smoothly through the planks, its whine dulled to a hum. He draws the blade downward in an arc, not sawing, just pressing it through the wood as though the wall were soft cheese. With this sword he can cut his way through the tenements all the way to the river, if need be; Kosall can cut stone, or even steel, given enough time.
Time is what I have to provide.
Men in the dove grey leather jerkins and breeches of the Cats stream from alleys and sprint toward our tenement.
I take a deep breath, let it trickle out from my lips, and take another; my hands flit over my clothing of their own will, from pocket to pouch, from scabbard to sheath, checking all of my graven gems and intricately worked knots of precious metals, my wands and my wires, bits of glass and packets of powders, while my breath-control technique shifts my vision to mindview.
In mindview, Berne’s Shell—the shimmering aura of life power that surrounds him—is as large and eyeburning-bright as an arch-mage’s, and I fight down a rising panic that would throw me out of mindview.
This isn’t possible; Berne’s a warrior, not an adept, he’s a Monastic-trained swordsman—he has no magick. He never did! But now—
Now, through the tangled ribbons of multicolored light that represent Flow in my mindview, I see another ribbon, a shaft of power bigger in diameter than my doubled fists. It neither twists nor tangles as do those of the raw Flow, and its color is the pure crimson of hot steel in a forge. It bathes Berne’s Shell, and it runs straight as a spear from him to the southwest. It vanishes into a tenement there, but mere brick and wood is no impediment to Flow, and I know what’s in that direction. That shaft of power aims toward Old Town, the island in the Great Chambaygen that is the heart of Ankhana.
That shaft of power springs from the Colhari Palace.
This son of a bitch is channeling. Never mind that it’s impossible—he’s channeling from bloody Ma’elKoth! That explains the magickal Cloak that let him invisibly take our stooges without my feeling the pull of the spell: the power for the spell comes from a mile away, and it doesn’t draw local Flow at all. As all this runs through my mind I fail to notice Berne stretch his hands up toward my window until it’s almost too late.
I throw myself back from the window. The entire wall explodes with a splintering roar and a wash of fire. Even as I sprawl on the floor and cover my eyes against the flames, my other hand seeks out the miniature shield modeled of faceted quartz in my breast pocket. My hand tingles with the charge it carries, and mindview shows me the lattice of glowing lines enchanted onto its surface. I force that image into my consciousness, visualize it so powerfully that I can actually see it filling the yawning gap that was once the wall.
Sunlight streams through the ragged hole, and flames lick its edges; the ceiling sags, cracking now that the wall’s support is gone, and on the rooftop across the street, ten Cats swing cocked crossbows up over the lip of the roof and fire on me.
Their quarrels sing across the street and stop where the wall once was, quivering as though they’d struck wood, though the only thing that holds them hanging suspended is my imaginary Shield, which fills the hole. Four Cats swing down on ropes from the roof of the building—it’s a beautifully executed maneuver that would have brought them gracefully through the hole into the apartment. Instead they hit my Shield and bounce, though their impact feeds back enough to make me grunt like I’ve been gut-punched.
The Shield looks in mindview like a decimeter-thick matrix of golden force; to them it’s a wall of semisubstantial glass with the texture of vulcanized rubber. Flow streams through the quartz model. There’s plenty of power here, and I can hold this Shield as long as I can keep the visualization going. The Cats hanging from their ropes outside kick off the Shield to hit it again, and again it hurts.
At least Berne can’t channel another of those firebolts without frying the Cats outside; I take my time getting to my feet, concentrating on holding the Shield.
Over my shoulder, through the arch Lamorak cut in the wall, I can see Talann lowering the younger of Konnos’daughters through a similar hole in the floor. She clenches her fist in the catspaw “We’re okay” sign and beckons for us to follow, then leaps lightly down through the hole.
The Twins have been using the planks Lamorak cut from the wall to angle-brace the hallway door—a dagger pounded into the floor foots the planks, and the tops are wedged beneath the handle. This might slow the Cats for a few seconds, but no more. “Come on, move it move it move it!” I yell. I’m going to have to give up the room, retreat through the cut, and shift the Shield from the outer wall breach to the cutaway arch, because I can’t hold the breach and the door at the same time.
As the Twins pound the last plank into place, the door and the wall around it explode into smoking splinters and blow them sprawling across the room. The room fills with choking sulphurous gas, and through the hole, from the corridor beyond, pour the Cats.
The jerkins they wear are reinforced with wire, but that is their only armor; their acrobatic mobility and stunning speed are their defenses. They’re at their best in small groups on open ground; that’s why I’ve chosen our battlefield in the most constricted quarters I could find. It may not be enough.
Berne’s bell-toned tenor comes from the corridor outside. “Get the adept! I want him alive!”
Both Twins are bleeding as they struggle to get up. The lead Cat dives at them and pays for it—Jak has his broadsword out, and he spears the Cat through the throat. The Cat’s impact lays Jak on his back again, and Dak has to cover him from one knee. Then I see no more because I have problems of my own.
A pair of Cats spring for me. I drop the Shield—four more won’t matter, in this crush—and draw the finger-length boltwand from my left wrist sheath. I barely have time to trigger it with a caress of my Shell before they’re on me. A lance of light springs from the end and spears through a knee of one of the leaping Cats. He goes down in a heap, but the other hits me like a charging bull and slams me against the wall.
He slaps the wand out of my hand with the flat of his blade and gives me the pommel hard upside the head. I roll with it enough to escape a skull fracture, but fireworks shower across my eyes. He pins me against the wall with his off shoulder and holds the point of his blade against my throat and snarls, “Now, y’cunt traitor, whatter y’gonna do?”
He’s justified in his confidence; most adepts are helpless in hand-to-hand range, and I’m a small, slender woman who clearly is no physical threat. On the other hand, when you’ve spent a couple years married to the man who’s popularly considered to be the best infighter alive, you pick up a bit here and there.
I bite my tongue, and saliva floods my mouth. I take a deep breath, and spit in his eyes.
He blinks, that’s all—but it’s enough. In that bare instant while his eyes close and open again, I lift a foot, put the edge of my boot on top of his kneecap, and stomp down. Ligaments tear as the kneecap shifts. The pain is stunning, and while he’s deciding whether to scream first and then stab me or the other way around, I twist out from under his shoulder and dart away; he won’t be able to follow.
The Twins are up and back-to-back; they’re breathing hard and bleeding, but five Cats lie draining their lives onto the floor around them. Dak and Jak grew up in the gladiatorial pens, they’ve been fighting as a team since they were six years old: in this kind of crushing close-quarters fight they’re unbeatable.
But now the Cats are backing away from the breach in the outer wall, leaving the Twins exposed to the crossbowmen across the street—and now the Cats notice that their companion doesn’t hold me anymore.
It’s a second’s work to return to mindview; their Shells shimmer around them, and the drifting lace of Flow fills the room. My hands find a tiny pinwheel, only the size of a copper coin, in a pouch that hangs from my belt; it’s layered of platinum and gold, and the sigils I enchanted onto it glow with the green of new leaves. The pattern fills my consciousness as I bring the pinwheel to my lips and blow.
The pattern expands outward from my eyes to layer my Shell, then it reaches to the shattered planks and splinters that litter the floor, their tiny faded Shells reflecting the life that once flowed through them. It takes me only a second to link the pinwheel’s forcepattern to the faded Shells of the planks, to forge a sympathetic identity between them and the pinwheel’s vanes. The planks lift off the floor, and when I blow on the pinwheel again, the planks spin.
They spin like propellers, like buzzsaws; I wave the pinwheel through the air, keeping it spinning faster and faster, and the planks match its speed. The link to the pinwheel will keep them spinning; now I can use my own Shell control to direct their flight.
I send them whirling into the Cats. The whining roar of the wood mingles with the Cats’ cries of pain and dismay; the larger planks hammer with crushing force, and even the tiniest splinters draw blood.
“Retreat, you idiots! Fall back!” Berne barks from the safety of the corridor. The Cats scramble for the gaping hole where the door once was, and I send half the wood roaring after them. The other half I send whirling toward the opposite roof, to cover the Twins’ retreat from the crossbowmen, and for half a wild, exhilarated second I start to believe we might actually get away.
The crossbows’ flat whacks are barely audible through the roar of the spinning wood. Only two quarrels make it through the cloud of wood into the apartment—but one of them slams into Dak’s shin. These quarrels mass roughly two hundred-fifty grams of solid forged steel, and they hit like a sledgehammer; Dak’s shin shatters, and he goes down with a cry, clawing at his brother’s shoulders. Jak turns to take his arm and carry him, and that’s when Berne dives into the room like a bloodstained thunderbolt.
His dive becomes an acrobatic roll, and he comes to his feet with his sword in his hands. I frantically reverse the direction of the flying wood, but long before I can bring it back into play, Berne spins and his blade opens a gaping wound across the nape of Dak’s neck before the wounded Twin even knows Berne’s in the room. Dak’s head flops forward, spraying blood across his brother’s face, and Jak howls like a damned thing, trying to drop his brother and bring up his sword at the same time. Berne’s already reversed his blade for an over-the-elbow backstrike, and he drives its chisel point through Jak’s open mouth and out the back of his head.
In just over a second, he’s killed two of the best swordsmen in the Empire.
As my roaring wood finally spins into him, a globe of semisub-stantial glass has already surrounded him. The wood batters uselessly against it.
“You’ll have to do better than that,” he says. Within the globe, he whips his blade in a short arc that sprays blood, and smiles.
I don’t answer; instead I send the wood flying out into the corridor among the Cats, then I smash the pinwheel into the wall at my side, exploding the planks into what I hope is a blinding cloud of splinters and sawdust. Outside, the Cats respond with a satisfying chorus of shouts.
Berne looks at me, frowning, then his face clears. “Pallas!” he says with a broad grin of recognition. “It is you! Pallas Ril, fuck me if it isn’t! Does this mean that Caine’s with you? No, no, I don’t need to ask. If he was, he’d be at your side like a loyal puppy.”
I back away, through the cut into the next room, as he paces toward me.
“Does this mean you’re on your own? Is it . . . is it you? You’re Simon Jester? You? The Infamous Simon Jester, the Elusive Thorn in the Paw of the Ankhanan Lion, is Pallas fucking Ril. Fuck me like a goat.”
He licks his lips. “I’ve dreamed,” he says, his voice becoming thick and wet, “of meeting you again. I have plans for you, Pallas. Who knows? You might even like them. If you like them enough, you might live through them.”
I hold my tongue and keep backing slowly away; the longer Berne talks here, the farther away get Lamorak, Talann, and the Konnosi.
His grin spreads even more. “It might actually be fun to keep you alive. That way you can tell Caine all about what I did to you.”
I shake my head. “That’s pretty weak, Berne. Caine and I—we had a parting of the ways. He doesn’t care what happens to me.”
He nods judiciously. “All right. I’ll just please myself, then.”
“After you catch me.” I follow the words with breath control, shifting back to mindview as my fingers fumble for the drawstring of a pouch at my belt.
He snorts. “I’ve caught you already.”
The polished buckeye that comes into my hand starts to trail smoke and pulls a huge swirling cloud of Flow as my patterned concentration triggers the enchantment. Berne sees the smoke and gives me a pitying look. “You don’t have to be smart to be a pretty good thaumaturge, but I can’t believe you’re stupid enough to think you can hurt me. This Shield is powered by Ma’elKoth, you stupid cunt. Nothing you’ve got can get through it.”
By way of answer, I flick the buckeye at his feet as though I’m shooting a marble. I can’t resist a cheesy line, Caine style, because my adrenaline’s high and I still don’t quite believe that I will die here.
“See you in the fall,” I tell him, and then jump down through the hole at my back as the buckeye erupts into a ball of fire that shatters the floor and blows Berne, Shield and all, out through the breach in the wall.
We’re only on the third floor; it won’t kill him, but the three-story drop to the street might break a bone or two and shake him up some. And the hole in the floor should slow the Cats a little. I hope.
I land in the apartment below, and pause just long enough to catch a whimper coming from under a bed in the corner. Some poor guy got awakened out of a sound sleep by fire and explosions and people cutting through his roof. I shrug; he’s as safe under his bed as anywhere else in this building.
Following through three cutaway walls, it takes only seconds to catch up with the others. Lamorak’s working on the brick wall that adjoins this tenement to the next one south, but it’s slow going; sweat darkens the end of his ponytail. Talann, covering their backs, nods to me. “Where are the Twins?”
“Dead.” I turn back toward the hole I came through and pull another carved shield of quartz out of a pocket.
“Dead?” Talann sounds stunned. “Both of them?”
I don’t answer her until I have another Shield in place to seal this hole; even as the Shield resolves into existence the Cats are dropping through the ceiling in the farthest room and pelting toward us with swords in hand.
“Yes,” I tell her. “They bought us this time. Let’s not waste it.”
Both of Konnos’daughters cling to their mother and sob soundlessly. Konnos shakes his head, stricken. “I should have given myself up. I should have surrendered. I’ve brought this upon all of us.”
“Shut up,” I tell him. “We’re still alive, and we’re going to get you out of this. All of you. Lamorak—how long?”
Cords bulge in his neck as he forces Kosall through the brick to the bottom of one side of the arc. “Thirty seconds,” he says, hoarse with strain.
“Make it fifteen. This is my last Shield, and I don’t know if I can hold it against Berne.”
Cats pound booted feet and blades against my Shield, and feedback makes me dizzy. A splintering crash comes from the outer room of this apartment: the Cats have found the hall door.
Talann draws a pair of long knives and salutes me, wearing a manic grin. “I believe they’re calling my name.”
“Talann—” I begin, but she’s already gone into the outer room. It’s not for nothing that she idolizes Caine: in battle she becomes a berserk chainsaw of feet and fists and blades, and the shouts of alarm and pain from the room beyond confirm that the Cats weren’t ready for her. I find myself praying that she kills a lot of them before they bring her down.
Lamorak pulls Kosall out of the bricks and kicks the center of the arc. It falls away into a cloud of dust, and he helps the Konnosi through the gap. He takes my arm and pulls me close. “No more cutting—you can run straight down the corridor, through to the alley that curves to the river. Go.”
He shrugs. “It’s me, or it’s you. You can get the Konnosi away by yourself. I might not.” He taps the cut brick with Kosall. “And this is a gap I can hold for a long, long time. If you get to the Subjects, send a rescue.”
As I start to protest, a blazing wash of flame punches through my Shield, and pain scatters ragged patches of black across my vision.
My knees buckle, and Lamorak pushes me through the gap. He says, “Please believe that I never wanted it to turn out this way. I’m sorry, Pallas. And this is where I pay for it.”
But his back is to me, and his shoulders fill the cutaway arch, and Kosall sings as it shears through steel and bone. “Go!”
Konnos and his wife—I’m struck by a sudden absurd embarrassment that I don’t even know her name—wait for me to lead them. “Pick up the girls,” I say. “Now we have to run.”
They each gather up one of their daughters and fall in behind me as I race through the apartment and out into the mercifully empty hallway. It’s long and straight and lined with doors. The window at the end gleams with golden sunlight like the promise of salvation. We run like hell.
From the window, I look down into the alley below.
There must be ten of them at least, two groups of five closing off the visible ends of the alley. Ten Cats, and I don’t have anyone left to fight them with.
Konnos catches the look on my face. “What? What is it? They’re out there, oh great gods, they are.”
“Not dead yet.” I reach into a pocket on the inside of my tunic and pull out a silver key. It takes only a second to summon mindview and pattern my mind to the glowing sigils. I stick the key into the lock of the nearest door, and the lock snaps open sharply. I pull everyone inside.
It’s a two-room, and it’s empty, thank all gods.
“All right,” I say. “We’ve got a few seconds to figure out what to do next. As long as I do no magick, no one will detect us in here; they’ll have to open every door.”
“Can’t you . . . can’t you,” Konnos’wife stammers, speaking for the first time. “Can’t you turn us all invisible, or something?”
“Don’t be a ninny,” Konnos says severely. “A Cloak cannot work when there’s no other magic being done around it. Any device and quite a few people can feel its pull on the Flow.”
“But maybe,” I say, “maybe a Cloak in conjunction with a powerful nondetection. . .”
“Give me that scroll of yours.”
Booted feet batter the floor of the hallway outside. That means Lamorak has already fallen. The realization stops my breath, and tears begin to well up in my eyes; the burning knife that this drives into my chest hurts so much that I can’t think.
I shake the tears violently off my face. I’ll have time to cry for him later, if I live long enough.
I reach out and tangle my hand in Konnos’tunic and jerk his face close to mine. “Give it.”
Without waiting for his answer, I yank the scroll case from his belt. I give him a shove, and he stumbles back while I unscrew the bone knob and shake the scroll out into my hand.
“You have a better idea?” I unroll the buttery lambskin of the scroll; the markings on it are painted in ink of gold, and they instantly burn their way into my brain. I barely have time to summon mindview and open my Shell before the eldritch chanting begins to spill automatically from my lips. The words ring in the air, and then there was no more light, no more sound, no more Pallas; there was only Hari Michaelson sitting in Chairman Kollberg’s simichair with sweat pouring from his hairline. The eye shield was blank before his staring, and all he could hear was the harsh rasp of his breathing and the trip-hammer slam of his heart against his ribs.
IT SEEMED LIKE minutes that he sat rigid and sweating, convulsively digging his fingers into the leather of the simichair’s arms. He couldn’t think, he couldn’t make himself move to shift the eye shield, he couldn’t swallow past the giant hand that squeezed the breath from his chest.
“That’s, mm, all we have.” Kollberg’s voice came from somewhere outside Hari’s universe.
This must be what panic feels like, Hari thought disconnectedly. Yeah, that’s it: this is panic.
The induction helmet lifted away, and Hari had nothing to look at in front of him except Kollberg’s moonface with its rubber-lipped smirk.
“It’s, um, pretty, pretty intense, isn’t it?”
Hari let his eyes drift closed. The longer he looked at that smug bastard’s face, the closer he came to felony forcible contact. Kollberg was an Administrator; while forcible contact with an upcaste man was no longer a capital crime, it still carried a mandatory downcaste to Labor and five years’ commitment to a public camp. When he was sure he had control of his voice, he said, “Is she alive?”
“No one knows. The end of that cube marks our last contact. We have no telemetry, nor do we detect her transponder signature. We, mm, we believe that this scroll, the spell on it, severed the thought-mitter link.”
Hari pressed his fingertips against his eyelids and watched the phosphenes explode showers of sparks across his vision. “How long does she have?”
Kollberg’s voice became chilly. “Don’t interrupt me, Michaelson. Mind your place.”
Hari opened his eyes and leaned forward in the chair. Kollberg stood before him and waited. The invisible hand that crushed Hari’s chest tightened its grip until it nearly strangled his voice. “I apologize, Administrator.”
Kollberg sniffed. “All right, then. So: this sequence, that you have just second-handed, this occurred near ten hundred Ankhanan time this morning. The energy cell in her thoughtmitter carries sufficient charge to maintain amplitude match for one hundred seventy hours, give or take ten. At the very least, she has one hundred fifty-seven hours remaining. If she presents herself at a fixed transfer point before then, well and good. Otherwise . . .” He let his voice trail away.
Hari sat motionless, his mind flooded by horrific visions. Amplitude decay is every Actor’s nightmare. Young Actors in training at the Studio Conservatory are shown a series of holos of what is left of Actors who slip out of phase with Overworld; usually all that returns is a bubbling mass of undifferentiated protoplasm, or a twisted array of half-crystalline splinters, or something entirely indescribable—and those are the good ones, the easy ones, the ones that don’t hurt you to remember.
Once in a while, you can recognize one as having once been human.
Hari asked quietly, “Does she even know she’s off-line?”
Kollberg’s rounded shoulders lifted in an eloquent shrug. “Frankly, Michaelson, she’s most likely dead.”
“Get me there. I know that city. I can find her.” Or her body. Hari forced the thought away by promising himself that if her body was what he found, he would also find Berne. Let’s see you channel, you fuck. Let’s see you channel with my fingers jammed through your eye sockets.
“I beg your pardon?” Kollberg’s eyebrows twitched upward, and his whiny schoolyard-hectoring tone brought Hari back from his bloody fantasy. “I, ah, don’t think I heard you correctly. And I think you should get up from my seat, now.”
Hari lowered his head and reminded himself that Kollberg held Shanna’s life in those soft corpse-pale hands. He slowly pushed himself up out of the Chairman’s simichair and stood, head still lowered with eyes downcast. He put as much sincerity into his voice as he could shove past the fire in his chest.
“Please, Administrator. Can we make some deal? Please send me to Ankhana.”
“That’s better. That’s, ah, that’s what I’ve been hoping you’d say. Come with me to the Contract Center.”
HARI AND KOLLBERG nearly filled the soundproof plexi cubicle in the middle of the Contract Center. Seated outside on tall stools were a pair of Studio Attorneys who were also registered witnesses. Kollberg fidgeted and played with his notepad while Hari slowly scrolled through the contract. In other cubicles scattered through the room, lesser Actors scanned standard contracts in the company of other lawyers.
The contract spelled out Caine’s obligations in the euphemistic terms of “colorfully and suspensefully attempt to remove the current Ankhanan Emperor from power.” Even in its most privileged and secret documents, the Studio never openly ordered an Actor to kill.
Hari looked up from the screen. “This doesn’t say anything about Shanna at all.”
“Of course not,” Kollberg said easily. “You want to go to Ankhana. We want Ma’elKoth eliminated; I’ve already explained why. It’s a very straightforward proposition.”
“If you’re so hot to have him killed, why don’t you just transfer six guys with assault rifles into the Colhari Palace?”
“We, er . . .” Kollberg coughed wetly into his fist. “We tried that; except it was eight, not six. We, ah, still don’t know precisely what happened.”
Hari looked at him, blinked, blinked again, then said, “Oh,” and turned back to the contract.
“Yes, well, after that incident, Ma’elKoth has, mm, done something to the palace. We don’t know what, exactly, but it seems to prevent our scans. Within the palace grounds, we’re completely blind and deaf. Any Actors who get past the gate are cut off until they leave.”
“I see.” Hari leaned his elbows on the desk and lowered his face into his hands. “Before I sign this, I want more information.”
“Certainly everything pertinent will be in your faxpack.”
“I mean, for example, what happened to Lamorak? Is Karl dead?”
Kollberg lifted his notepad and tapped a query onto its screen. He read its response with pursed lips and said, “We’re not sure. On the basis of Pallas’cube, we assume he was killed.”
“How can you not be sure? Did that fucking spell cut him off too? Can it do that?”
“As to the effects of this spell,” Kollberg said, “there’s no way to know. I’ve queried Archives, and they have no record of a spell with this effect. That, ah, Konnos fellow, his claim of having originated that spell must be accepted as genuine. We don’t know the operation of this spell; all we can really say is that it seems to be, ah, singularly powerful. But, mm, that’s nothing to do with Lamorak. He was never on-line.”
“It’s a, ah, pilot program of my own devising. I call it the Long Form. Lamorak is on freemod.”
Kollberg rose and began to pace the two steps back and forth he could take within the cubicle. “Lamorak—Entertainer Shanks—his career hasn’t developed to the satisfaction of his Patron. He volunteered for this Long Form program. Instead of having first-handers coexperiencing his Adventures in real time, and thus restricting his Adventure to the usual ten-day average, he’s had a prototype thoughtmitter implanted that contains a microcube and a graver; it will record his experiences for up to two months, at which time he’ll transfer back to Earth. The cube will then be edited into a standard second-hander format. This will allow for a much more extended story-arc, and—”
“This is insane,” Hari said. “You’re telling me that nobody knows whether either one of them is even alive? Good Christ, Administrator!”
Kollberg nodded agreement. “Yes, I know, it’s terrible. The real pity is that Pallas’Adventures have been relatively dull lately—her Simon Jester operation, smuggling fugitives out of the Empire, has been entirely too easy. As soon as it starts to become interesting, this happens. Terrible.”
“Simon Jester,” Hari murmured. A pounding headache built between his temples. Simon Jester was an imaginary revolutionary in a banned twentieth-century novel. Hari had secret copies of a number of banned books, and he’d introduced Shanna to the guilty pleasures of reading the works of unpersons like Heinlein. Those books were banned for a damned good reason—shit, for all he knew, it might have been Heinlein’s libertarian propaganda that started Shanna on this antiauthority fling. If he’d never given her The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, would she still have set herself against the Imperial Government?
Cut it out, he told himself. Things were bad enough already; he didn’t need to invent ways to make it all his fault.
He pressed his knuckles against his throbbing temples and said, “So, we know nothing. There’s nothing you can tell me.”
“I can tell you this,” Kollberg said, standing over him. “If you want to find out anything, if you want to help your wife, if you want to go to Ankhana at all, you’ll have to contract to eliminate Ma’elKoth.”
“What makes you think I even can? Administrator, a special ops team with assault rifles couldn’t handle him; what am I supposed to do?” Hari said desperately.
“I have infinite faith in your, ah, resourcefulness.”
“This isn’t like going after Toa-Phelathon—have you seen the cube you just showed me? The kind of power Ma’elKoth must have . . . I mean, all I can really do is hit people. How am I supposed to counter that kind of magick?”
“But you do have power,” Kollberg replied smugly. “Star power.”
He sounded like he actually believed Caine could do anything, as long as he stayed in the Top Ten.
“Administrator—” Hari fought for words that wouldn’t come out hot, for a tone that wouldn’t trigger Kollberg’s petty casteism. “Why? Why can’t I contract to find Pallas and Lamorak and bring them out? Why can’t I go for Ma’elKoth after she’s safe?” The plaintive weakness in his voice nauseated him, but there was no help for it.
“For one,” Kollberg said mildly, “I don’t think you would go after him, once they are safe. But more than that, don’t you see the kind of story this makes? Do you have any idea of the kind of audience you’ll command, going to Ankhana without knowing if your beloved is alive or dead, but sworn to slay her enemies or die trying? Do you have enough romance in your soul to understand how this will play?”
“My beloved?” Hari shook his head. “You haven’t been keeping up with the netleads on my personal life.”
“None of that matters, don’t you see?” Tiny white flecks of foam showed at the corners of the Chairman’s lips, and his hands clutched words from the air; there was a vibrancy in his voice that Hari had never heard before.
“You don’t understand what your life looks like from the outside. Street-raised Labor boy from the Frisco slums, rising to the pinnacle of the Studio . . . you’re a vicious and hardened killer whose heart is finally softened by a refined Tradesfolk debutante with a spine of steel. It’s perfection; I couldn’t pray for a better story. Whatever problems you two have are only obstacles, from the public’s view. Everyone knows you’ll live happily ever after.”
“If she’s not already dead,” Hari muttered. The words came out effortlessly; it was remarkably easy to twist the knife in his own belly.
“That would be, mm—” Kollberg pursed his lips and chose the word with precision “—tragedy. But it wouldn’t hurt the story. My god, Hari, this could be bigger than Retreat from the Boedecken—love, murder, politics . . . and Berne.”
Kollberg leaned close and lowered his voice to a reverential hush. “Hari, this may be bigger than Last Stand at Ceraeno. . .”
Hari looked into Kollberg’s moist, bulging eyes and knew that there was nothing he could say, nothing he could do, no leverage he could use except to appeal to whatever stunted sense of decency the Chairman had left.
“If I do this,” he said slowly, “if I commit to taking Ma’elKoth, I want a commitment from the Studio, from you personally, that the Studio will flood Ankhana with Actors. That you’ll use every resource to find her and bring her out. Please, Administrator?”
Kollberg appeared to think it over. He stretched his mouth downward and mopped sweat from his upper lip with two fingers, then shook his head. “No. No, I don’t like it. It’s a better story if everything depends on you.”
“No. It’s final. Sign the contract or go home. Your choice.”
Blood hammered at Hari’s headache. His vision misted red, and his hand trembled as he brought the pen to the screen. What choice is there? Even if he’d wanted to refuse, he couldn’t; Pallas’ voice kept repeating in his head:
“He doesn’t care what happens to me.”
Did she believe that? Could she? He kept thinking of Lamorak holding the gap in the wall with steel and guts. He wanted to believe that he would have done the same, or better—that he would have gotten her to safety without sacrificing himself. But it wouldn’t have been the same: put his life, and Shanna’s, at risk for some native family he didn’t even know? Not fucking likely.
Caine would have thrown the Konnosi to the Cats without one second’s thought.
But when I thumbprint this contract, I’ll be stepping into that doorway right beside Lamorak.
Kill Ma’elKoth or die trying; the third outcome—to fail and live, or not really to try—would be a contract violation that could have consequences Hari couldn’t even bear to think about.
I knew what kind of ride this was before I sat down, he thought, and: Will she hurt as much for me as she did for him?
He signed his name on the winking line and held his thumb against the DNA scanner.
“Ah, good,” Kollberg said with deep satisfaction. “The net releases are already prepared, and you’ll be the lead story on Adventure Update tonight. Visit Media on your way out and pick up your interview kit; we’ll put you on DragonTales with LeShaun Kinnison, and you’d best be prepared. Plan on transfer at oh eight hundred tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? But—” But that’s eighteen hours, he thought. Eighteen out of Shanna’s precious reserve. Almost a whole day lost.
“Of course tomorrow,” Kollberg said briskly. “Even with the worldwide publicity blitz we’re preparing, it’ll take at least that long to pull enough audience to cover expenses. And you are expected to attend the reception for the subscribers. No need to be on time; let some anticipation build. Shall we say twenty-one thirty tonight? In the Diamond Ballroom, of course.”
Hari held himself motionless. If I lose her . . . If I lose her because of this, because of you, you will be entered on a short list.
A very short list. Right under Berne.
He said quietly, “Yes, Administrator. I’ll be there.”
THE SOBBING MOANS from beyond the double door slanted up into shrieks of agony with the relentless regularity of the waves of an incoming tide.
His Grace the Honorable Toa-Sytell, Imperial Duke of Public Order, sat forward on the edge of a comfortable chair across the anteroom, elbows on knees and fingers laced together, and looked at the newly created Count Berne with bland contempt. He tried to ignore the screams that came from the room beyond; had he not found a scapegoat, those screams could well have been his own.
Toa-Sytell examined Berne, from his thick brush of platinum hair to the bloodstained leather of his soft calf-high boots, and tried to imagine what he must be thinking now, as the pair of them waited outside the Iron Room for the judgment of Ma’elKoth. Count Berne stood at the beautifully glazed window that filled the wall of the anteroom and chewed at his thumbnail as he stared out over Ankhana.
The Duke had an intensely detailed and vivid imagination, but of a very literal sort; he had trained himself not to indulge in fantasy. He could imagine very clearly what Berne saw out that window.
From this vantage point high in the Dusk Tower of the Colhari Palace, the financial district on the western tip of the island of Old Town would lie spread below like one of Ma’elKoth’s models—baroque and decorative, backlit blazing red by the setting sun. Nearing twilight, the sun would now strike fire from the slow boil of the Great Chambaygen, hiding the garbage and filth of human waste that Ankhana poured into it, and would gild the immense antiship nets of heavy chain that stretched from the northwest and southwest garrisons across the channels of the river to Onetower at the westernmost tip of the island. Bonfires on the Commons’Beach south of Alientown would be flickering like stars on a clear night, welcoming the throngs of subhuman and semihuman workmen and beggars and street vendors that would be crowding across Knights’ Bridge to beat the curfew. Only purebloods were allowed on the central island after sundown.
Toa-Sytell suspected that Berne’s thoughts tended toward the east, where a similar flood crossed Fools’ Bridge onto Rogues’ Way between the Warrens and the Industrial Park. Those with money would be turning left to their grimy tenements nestled between the manufactories; those without would be turning right to take their chances on the streets of the Warrens.
It was in the Warrens that Simon Jester had once again slipped through their fingers, and neither of them yet understood how.
Muscles bulged at the corners of Berne’s jaw, and he clutched the scabbard of his sword until his knuckles popped. Toa-Sytell hadn’t seen Berne wear this particular sword before. It was longer than Berne’s usual style, and broader as well, and he wore it across his back with its hilt jutting above his left shoulder. Berne’s usual quality of boneless relaxation was conspicuously absent; Toa-Sytell guessed that the Count was actually frightened. This was unsurprising, and Toa-Sytell didn’t fault him for it. They both had sufficient reason for fear.
Berne still wore the bloodstained clothes he’d worn all day, through this dusty and exhausting and finally futile search. The blood that had dried in a ragged splotch across his chest belonged mostly to that gladiator brat whose neck he’d sliced in the tenement, although some of it had leaked from wounds his Cats had suffered.
None of it was his own, more’s the pity.
“I don’t like to be stared at.” Berne had never turned from the window, and his normally petulant tone held a thin edge of danger.
Toa-Sytell shrugged. “Sorry,” he said tonelessly.
“Keep your eyes to yourself, if you want to keep them in your face.”
Toa-Sytell smiled thinly. “I’ve apologized already.”
Berne now came away from the window, and his pale eyes burned. “You apologize too easily, you spineless cocksucker.”
“You’re ahead of yourself,” Toa-Sytell murmured. His eyes held Berne’s, while his fingers unobtrusively caressed the hilt of the poisoned stiletto that he wore in a sheath strapped to his wrist beneath his sleeve. “Perhaps if Ma’elKoth judges against me, he’ll give me to you. Until then, have a care with your words, catamite.”
His colorless tone, as much as the words themselves, brought rising purple to Berne’s face. Toa-Sytell was fairly sure that he couldn’t survive an attack from the Count; before his ennoblement a few months ago, Berne had been a notorious freebooter whose swordsmanship was legendary. On the other hand, with his fingers on the stiletto, he was fairly sure that Berne wouldn’t survive it either.
Some of this assurance must have shown on his face, for Berne chose not to pursue the discussion. He spat on the pale limestone floor at the Duke’s feet and stalked back to the window.
Toa-Sytell shrugged, and continued to stare.
The screams built toward a climax.
Toa-Sytell was a man of average size and average appearance, with one of those blandly regular faces that one forgets a moment after looking away; only the keen brain behind his forgettable eyes was extraordinary. He had been in service to the King’s Eyes for twenty-three years, in that time rising from an apprentice shadow-pad to the apex of the organization. Born with the common name Sytell, he had been privileged to take the prefix after he was ennobled by the late Prince-Regent Toa-Phelathon. In the yearlong chaos of civil war that followed the murders of the Prince-Regent and the Child Queen, he had survived by making himself equally indispensable to all sides, never seeking power himself but gathering resources and men into the agency he led.
He alone of the Council of Dukes had survived Ma’elKoth’s coup with life and power intact; the new Emperor had been already well aware of Toa-Sytell’s value. It was, in fact, at Toa-Sytell’s advice that Ma’elKoth had taken the title Emperor: the restless and quarrelsome nobility would never have tolerated a King who bore no trace of royal blood, but an Emperor was a different matter. Perhaps Emperors were always commoners who ruled by fiat, backed by a loyal military; who could say different? Ankhana had no Imperial traditions—the nation had, after all, become an empire largely through Ma’elKoth’s astonishing successes as Toa-Phelathon’s most trusted general.
This transparent rationalization could be used by the nobles to satisfy their liegemen. They didn’t have to believe it themselves; their own cooperation was ensured by the diligence of the King’s Eyes.
Under Toa-Sytell’s leadership, the King’s Eyes had grown from a simple gang of spies and informers to a full-fledged secret police with nearly unlimited discretionary powers. Rare was the Duke, Count, or even provincial Baron who would dare to whisper treason, even to his own wife in the privacy of their bedchamber; the King’s Eyes could see, so it was said, even through the thickest stone.
But the mere knowledge of treason was never sufficient to quash it. The nobility had traditionally woven tangled nets of alliances and blood bonds to protect themselves from the power of the Oaken Throne; to attack any single one would invite full-scale civil war. These alliances had made the nobles untouchable until Ma’elKoth devised his most brilliant stratagem: the Aktir-tokar.
A Baron who whispered against the Imperial Government now might well find himself denounced as an Aktir. Certainly, the unfortunate fellow’s allies would know that the charge was fraudulent, but that knowledge bought them nothing. The Empirewide Aktir-tokar had spawned such a frenzy of suspicion and fear that any noble who openly supported a denounced man would face sudden hot rebellion from his peasants, and not a few of his arms-bearing liegemen. One by one, the nobles fell, slowly, in a carefully calculated progression; soon, only those nobles who supported Ma’elKoth would remain, along with the dregs of their fellows, too cowed to give the Emperor so much as a sidelong look.
Toa-Sytell was not concerned only with the upper reaches of Ankhanan society; he also directed the Imperial Constabulary and was on his way to running the criminal elements of the Empire as well. He had already unobtrusively assumed control of the most powerful of the Warrengangs and had his men busily infiltrating the rest. The King’s Eyes were spread throughout the Empire; they reported only to Toa-Sytell and took only his orders. He could almost certainly have controlled the Empire himself, in secret; he did not. His ambitions did not tend in that direction.
The bloody sun sank into the horizon, smearing crimson across Berne’s too-pretty face.
The screams within the Iron Room faded with the light; as the giant brass bell in the Temple of Prorithun tolled the curfew, the sobbing from behind the door was buried under a new voice, a dark and savage throbbing that Toa-Sytell could feel vibrating in his guts; the words meant nothing, but the mere depth of the tone was like a finger that jabbed into the notch of his collarbone. Toa-Sytell shuddered and made no attempt to listen.
There was only one man alive that Toa-Sytell feared; but the beings that Ma’elKoth trafficked with, behind that door, were not men. Nor were they, strictly, alive.
That voice became difficult to ignore in the silence of the antechamber. Toa-Sytell rubbed his forearms, to make the hairs on them lie down once again, and spoke mainly from a desire to fill the quiet. “One of the prisoners—Lamorak—he’s been asking for you,” he said.
Berne snorted. “I should think so.”
“Oh?” Toa-Sytell said mildly. “Why is that?” Berne suddenly coughed into his fist and turned his face away from the Duke. Toa-Sytell waited for him to elaborate, watching him with the unblinking patience of a snake coiled at the mouth of a rabbit hole.
The silence, underscored by the voices from the adjoining room, stretched thin. Berne coughed again. “Well, I have his sword, don’t I?”
Berne drew the blade smoothly over his shoulder. Its edges shimmered in the crimson twilight, and a whining hum came clearly to Toa-Sytell’s ears. “The enchanted blade Kosall—you’ve heard of it?”
“Well, it is. Enchanted, I mean. It’s packed to the eyeballs with magick.” He held it slanted at garde to admire it in the fading light. “Cuts through anything. Huh, he nearly killed me with it. He dropped two of my boys, and when I came against him myself his first stroke sheared my blade in two, a handbreadth above the guard.”
“I grabbed this blade with both hands, and held it while I kicked his lamps out.” Berne smiled with adolescent smugness and flexed his fists before him like a stretching cat. He opened his unmarked palms and turned them toward Toa-Sytell as though to say, See? It cuts through everything—except me. “Being Ma’elKoth’s favorite comes with bonuses.”
“But this is no answer,” Toa-Sytell said. “I questioned him, and the other, for hours. Why would he insist that he will speak only to you?”
“Maybe it’s because I beat him,” Berne suggested with a shrug. “A point of honor, between men. You wouldn’t understand.”
“I see,” Toa-Sytell said blandly. “It’s clear enough that there is certainly something here that I do not understand. Yet.”
Berne only smirked and whirled the enchanted blade through a complex arc that ended with it once again within its scabbard. He went back to the window.
The distant-thunder rumbling of the savage voice faded after a time, and there came an explosive pop, like a giant’s handclap. Ma’elKoth’s negotiations were complete.
Berne came hesitantly to the inner door, a great black slab of cold-worked iron. On that door hung a massive ring forged in the ancient symbol of the serpent devouring its tail. To lift and drop it would be a simple thing, a second’s work that would produce a resonant clang, but Berne’s hand, reaching for it, trembled like an old man’s. He swiftly shot a glance over his shoulder, to see if Toa-Sytell had noticed.
Toa-Sytell allowed himself another smile.
A swirling wind came from the center of the closed anteroom as though someone had opened the window where Berne had stood, as though the calm night outside had become a gale. The wind pushed the great door smoothly open with a hollow rushing sound like a distant waterfall.
The Emperor’s voice was richer and more resonant than the temple bell that had recently rung the curfew. Toa-Sytell never thought to wonder how Ma’elKoth had known they were out here: Ma’elKoth always knew.
Toa-Sytell exchanged a glance with the Count he despised—a sudden kinship of apprehension between them—then together they crossed the threshold.
The Iron Room, in which they now stood, had been built more than a century before, early in the reign of Til-Menelethis the Golden, the last Ankhanan king to dabble in sorcery. The windowless interior of the room was plated with interleaved sheets of hammered black iron, the joints worked with binding runes of silver. Silver runes ringed the doorway and the only two places where the palace’s stonework was exposed: the matching mystic circles, one at the center of the floor and the other on the ceiling above.
The room had been sealed by order of the Council of Dukes in regency for Til-Menelethis’heir after that unfortunate experimenter descended into wailing madness; the Wards had been set by the legendary Manawythann Greyeyes, and had stood inviolate against all attempts until broken by Ma’elKoth himself.
In the northern quadrant of the mystic circle, the naked body of a middle-aged man lay across the altar of native limestone, now greyed with soot and crusted with ancient brown blood. Toa-Sytell knew this man, knew him well, had eaten with this man’s wife and had patted his children’s heads; he didn’t allow himself to think of his name.
An intricate web of wetly pulsing ropes stretched upward above the man’s torso to hang suspended from a treelike metal rack, the arms of which ended in silver hooks that were driven through the ropes . . . But the ropes, they weren’t ropes: ropes aren’t slick with blood, and they don’t twitch with the rhythm of a slowly beating heart.
In a single dizzying instant, Toa-Sytell’s vision seemed to come finally into focus as he understood what he saw: these ropes were the still-living guts of the man on the altar, withdrawn through a gaping slice below his navel and hung from these silver hooks like chitterlings in a smokehouse. Toa-Sytell’s stomach twisted, and he risked a sidelong glance to see Berne’s reaction.
Berne had leaned forward and to the side, craning his neck for a better view.
The Emperor stood within the mystic circle, bare to the waist like a wrestler, his hands dripping blood to the elbow. Ma’elKoth’s eyes were as black as a clouded sky at midnight, and they glittered with indifferent perfection, neither warmth nor chill. He nodded toward the low sofa against one wall, and his voice seemed to rumble from the roots of mountains. “Sit, while I cleanse my hands.”
They did, and they both watched as the Emperor went to one of the lazily smoking braziers that provided both reddish light and a juniper-oil scent that nearly covered the sulphurous fecal tang that always hung in the air within this room. Ma’elKoth stared at the brazier, without word or gesture, and yellow flame now leaped crackling from it to the height of his head. He thrust his hands within it, and the flame turned brilliant green around them; the blood on his hands caked, charred, and flaked away.
The Emperor Ma’elKoth, Shield of Prorithun, Lord of Ankhana, Protector of Kirisch-Nar, Lion of the Northern Waste and a host of other titles, was the largest man Toa-Sytell had ever seen. Even Berne, tall by ordinary standards, barely reached Ma’elKoth’s stiffly waxed beard. His spreading curls of chestnut hair gleamed rich red in the light of the flame before him and draped across shoulders like the rock of the Shattered Cliffs.
The Emperor worked his hands within the flame. His biceps bulged like barrels, and the massive swelling muscles across his chest might have been carved of individual stones and joined together like a puzzle. His growing grin showed perfect teeth as the blood crackled from his fingers. The flames faded away from his hands, and he brushed them together briskly, scraping away the last of the burned blood. When he looked down upon his seated nobles, his eyes now shone with the deep blue of a late-summer sky.
The Emperor was the one man that Toa-Sytell feared.
“Do not trouble to report,” Ma’elKoth said. “I have tasks for you both.”
“You, ah . . .” Berne said, straightening, coughing harshly to clear his throat. “We’re not going to be punished?”
His brows drew together. “Should you be punished? How have you betrayed Me?”
“I, I ah.” He coughed again. “I haven’t, but—”
“But Simon Jester once again escaped,” Ma’elKoth said equably. He stepped out of the mystic circle and over to the sofa, where he crouched before Berne and put a hand on his shoulder like a father gently correcting his young son.
“Berne, do you know Me so poorly? Am I a maniac, to punish men for My own failure? Was I not with you at every moment? I do not yet know what this Simon Jester did, what magick it is that still dances within us all. If I can neither break nor avoid this power, how should I punish you for that same inability?”
Berne looked up, and Toa-Sytell was astonished to see on his face an almost pathetic eagerness to please. “I only . . . I didn’t want to disappoint you.”
“And that is why you are My favorite Child,” Ma’elKoth said warmly. “Here, scoot, both of you. Let Me sit between you.”
Toa-Sytell hastily shifted to the end of the sofa. This was part of why he feared Ma’elKoth: the man was as changeable as a summer storm. One moment he could terrify you with a mere glance from the mountaintop of his regal majesty; in the next he might sit familiarly beside you like a boyhood friend on the stoop of your house.
“It is My lust that has undone Me,” Ma’elKoth said, leaning forward onto his knees. “I have made this Colhari Palace proof against all magicks that are not of My own making. In the crucible of My desire to capture Simon Jester, I forged the knife that now trembles within my belly. It was the channel that joined us, Berne, that was the fatal chink through which Simon Jester’s dart has stabbed Me. The Power that I summoned this eve—to ask what can be done to break this magick—laughed. It laughed at Me! It said the magick is easily broken, once I lay hands upon its caster.”
Ma’elKoth shook his head slowly, with an inward-looking smile as though deeply amused at this irony. “Can you feel it? Berne, you met Simon Jester face-to-face—what did he look like?”
Berne shook his head miserably. “I don’t remember. I have tried . . . I think I may have even recognized him.”
“I know you did,” Ma’elKoth rumbled. “Since this morn I have worked to deduce who Simon Jester must be, based on what I know of whom you know. It cannot be done; each time an inkling comes, I feel the pull of that cursed magick and the inkling is driven off. I have even tried to use the spell against itself, working through the alphabet for initials, for names at random, and waiting to see which trigger the pull—and I find myself, again and again, staring at a sheet full of letters with no memory of which pulled and which did not. Were I a man given to fury, I would find it infuriating.”
“But you seem, Imperial Majesty,” Toa-Sytell said delicately, “almost pleased.”
The smile that Ma’elKoth turned on him held an irresistible heat; despite the Duke’s apprehension, the smile warmed him to his core. “But I am! This is new, Toa-Sytell. And a challenge. Do you have any conception how rare it is for Me to be surprised? To be frustrated? This Simon Jester is the most interesting opponent I have faced since the Plains War. He’s outfoxed my entire pack of hounds; the solution to such a problem is, of course, to find a better hound.”
“Better?” Berne said, frowning.
Ma’elKoth smiled and engulfed Berne’s shoulders with a titanic arm. “Do not take the metaphor personally, dear boy. I apologize for the misspeech; I should have said, one more suited for this particular task.”
“And that would be?” Berne said sullenly.
Ma’elKoth rose and entered the mystic circle. Toa-Sytell joined him instantly, but Berne hesitated, looking at the man who lay stretched across the altar. “He, uh, he looks familiar.”
Ma’elKoth said, “He is. Duke Toa-Sytell, you may explain.”
Toa-Sytell took a deep breath and looked away. “His name is Jaybie. I think you’ve met him once or twice. He was a captain in the Eyes.” Toa-Sytell studiously avoided looking at Jaybie’s slow rise and fall of breath, at the heartbeat that could be seen in the woven net of his intestines. “He is the man who tipped the artificer, Konnos, that he’d been denounced.”
“Indeed,” Ma’elKoth murmured indulgently. “And so I turned his treachery to a useful purpose: the Outside Powers with which I deal usually arrive hungry. I should be a poor host if I did not offer at least a . . . snack, shall we say?”
Berne nodded his understanding. “He’s still alive?”
“Only his body,” Ma’elKoth rumbled. “Now come.”
Once Berne joined them within the circle, Ma’elKoth laid a hand on each man’s shoulder and lifted his eyes to the bare limestone of the ceiling. In no more time than it takes to draw a breath and release it again, the solidity of the stone misted and faded to a ghost of itself. Through the stone itself Toa-Sytell could see the roll of oncoming clouds and the first strengthening stars of night.
An instant later, the floor fell away beneath his feet and the three of them rose in effortless silence through the ceiling. The stone beneath them regained its substance, and the three men now stood on the very parapet of the Dusk Tower.
This was another reason that Toa-Sytell feared Ma’elKoth; it was not only the stunning range of his power, but that he could summon it without a word, without a gesture, with no more than a thought. Toa-Sytell knew enough of magick to appreciate the level of concentration required for the simplest operation; even the finest adept could do only one spell at a time. Most depend on enchanted items to supplement their abilities. Not so Ma’elKoth; on him there seemed to be no limit.
It was not the cool of the night breeze that made Toa-Sytell shiver.
Ankhana lay spread below them like a carpet of jewels, from tiny diamond chips of lamps to blazing ruby bonfires. The freshening breeze carried snatches of song from alehouses and cries of newspages as they trailed back to their offices for evening accounting, the savor of meat stewing with onion and garlic, and the wild clean scent of the grassland that stretched to the sea.
Clouds built in the west and rolled majestically toward the city as the moon breasted the Gods’Teeth range far to the east.
Ma’elKoth spread his arms wide and threw back his head. He lifted his voice above the rising wind. “I asked of the Power to show Me who can pluck this thorn from My flesh, to show Me the man who can rid the Empire of this seditious Simon Jester. It dug its answer from the depths of My own mind—I had known this, without knowing that I knew. Now we ask the wind, and see it written on the clouds!”
He pointed at the wall of approaching thunderheads. “Look there, and see the face of My hound!”
Toa-Sytell followed the Emperor’s finger with his eyes, anticipating an image to appear on the cloud where Ma’elKoth pointed, like a drawing on parchment. The thunderheads rolled and boiled, swelling and pulsing as though they themselves lived, as though they were slaves cringing under the lash, and again Toa-Sytell felt that disorienting blur in his vision, that dizzying alteration of perspective as he realized that there would be no image on the cloud.
The cloud was itself the image.
Under the relentless knife of the Emperor’s will, the thunderhead that towered above the rest writhed and carved itself into the face of a man—a face larger than a mountain, framed with a fringe of beard and short-cropped hair. Its mouth was contorted into a snarl of fury, and lightning flickered within its eyes.
Berne breathed, “Fuck me like a virgin goat . . .”
Toa-Sytell coughed and said in a thin voice, “You couldn’t have drawn a picture?”
Ma’elKoth laughed like a drunken god. “Power unused is not power, Toa-Sytell. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“It’s, ah, yes,” Toa-Sytell said. “It’s beautiful.” He could only stare in awe.
Berne said harshly, “It’s Caine.”
“Oh, yes,” Ma’elKoth rumbled with bone-deep satisfaction. “Oh yes, it is indeed. He shall be in Ankhana tomorrow morning.”
“Caine the assassin?” Toa-Sytell said, both awe and fear vanishing behind sudden interest. “The Caine who murdered Toa-Phelathon?”
He studied the cloud face more intently, now; he had seen crude drawings of Caine in the past, but this modeling was so lifelike that he felt he might know the man on sight. Even as he looked, the face dissolved and became once again an approaching thunderstorm.
“Mmm, yes,” Ma’elKoth sighed. “That is another service he has done Me, though not at My direction. Your task, Toa-Sytell, and that of the King’s Eyes, is to find this man and bring him here to Me. Bend every resource to the task, and know that he may not wish to be found. He has both contacts and friends here. Perhaps some one or more of them will come to you, if they know—what would make an enticing sum, without being excessive?—if they know that, let us say, two hundred golden royals await their word. Also, set the Constabulary on collecting citizens for the Ritual of Rebirth—we may catch him by accident, where design might fail. I want him within the palace gates by sundown tomorrow.”
“Two hundred royals reward,” Toa-Sytell repeated, nodding. “Is he in the city already?”
“No. I do not know where he may be. But he will be here by two hours after sunrise tomorrow.”
Ma’elKoth smiled. “Magick. I shall Draw him as a goat draws a panther, and he will come.”
“But—” Toa-Sytell frowned. “—if he is a thousand leagues away tonight—”
“It would not matter if he were a million,” Ma’elKoth said. “It would not matter if he were beyond the walls of Death. You, Toa-Sytell, are a blind man thrust stumbling along the narrow corridor of Time; I am a god who holds Time within his hand like a child’s rag ball. Reality orders itself to My convenience. If Caine were a thousand leagues away, months ago he would have begun his journey to answer My call. Should I choose, tonight, not to Draw him . . . then months ago, he chose to stay where he was. Do you understand?”
“Well, actually, no,” Toa-Sytell said. “If you, mm, Draw him so powerfully, why must we search for him like a thief? Won’t he come to you of his own will?”
Ma’elKoth’s smile became indulgent. “He may. It may also be that he must be dragged; that is why I have ordered your task. Either way, he will come; the call will be answered. The mechanism is irrelevant.”
Toa-Sytell frowned. “If this magick is so potent, why can you not simply Draw Simon Jester himself?”
“That is,” Ma’elKoth said, “precisely what I am doing. The less I know of a man—the less of him I can image within My mind—the longer and more complex becomes the Drawing. Caine is only the component, the focus, like a bit of crystal or a handful of sulphur. Once I have Caine, I will Draw Simon Jester into My grasp like a woodcock on a string.”
Through all this, Berne had stood with arms folded, staring off out over the city, lips pressed into the down-curved line of a sulking child’s. Now he finally burst out, “And what am I supposed to do?”
Ma’elKoth turned to his Count, and his smile faded. “Take the day off.”
“What?” Veins pulsed in Berne’s forehead, and his mouth worked as though he couldn’t decide whether to burst into tears or leap at the Emperor’s throat.
“Berne, you must,” Ma’elKoth said, his tone soothing but never suggesting the possibility of argument. “I know too well the history between you and Caine; I was the cause of some of it. I know too well that your next meeting may be fatal for one of you. Take the day, relax, enjoy the sun. Go to Alientown; gamble, drink, and whore. Stay out of the Warrens; he has friends among the Subjects of Cant, and he’ll likely surface there. Forget Simon Jester, forget the Grey Cats, the cares of state. Forget Caine. If the two of you meet while Caine is in My service, you will treat him with the courtesy due another Beloved Child of Ma’elKoth.”
“Once Simon Jester is in My hands, Caine’s fate is of little interest to Me.”
“All right,” Berne said, breathing deeply but quickly. “All right. I’m sorry, Ma’elKoth, but you know . . . you know what he did to me.”
“I know what you did to each other.”
“Why Caine? I mean, what’s so special about him?”
Now Toa-Sytell recognized the tone in Berne’s voice, deeper than the petulance that usually colored it. He thought in wonder, Why, the man’s jealous! Although he kept his face carefully blank, he graved a note on his mental tablet to investigate the possibility of a deeper personal relationship between Ma’elKoth and his favorite count.
“I am not sure,” Ma’elKoth said. “He’s had a spectacular career, certainly.”
He shrugged massively and laid his huge hand upon Berne’s shoulder. “Perhaps his peculiar quality can be summed in this way: he’s the only man ever to face you in single combat, Berne, and escape with his life.”
A smile flickered onto Berne’s thin lips. “Only because he can run like a bastard jackrabbit.”
Ma’elKoth took Berne’s other shoulder as well, and looked searchingly down into the Count’s face. “I tell you this: you are not that same man. With the Gifts that I have given you, he will not escape you again.”
Berne reached up to stroke the hilt of Kosall; it answered his touch with a dangerous buzz, muffled within its scabbard. “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”
Ma’elKoth turned his head only far enough to fix eyes grey as steel upon Toa-Sytell. “You have much work ahead, My Duke. Fare you well.”
Before Toa-Sytell could answer, his feet sank through the stone beneath them. The tower’s stone was still solid beneath Ma’elKoth and Berne; expressionless, they watched him sink. He let out a startled yelp as he went down, and the last he saw, before the stone closed over his eyes, was Ma’elKoth gathering Berne’s head to his bare chest.
Whatever force it was that supported him let him down gently into the center of the mystic ring of the Iron Room. He brushed himself off, slapping imaginary grit from his sleeves while he looked up at the blank stone overhead.
He grunted once, softly, and shook his head. He went silently to the altar and looked down upon Jaybie, the man he’d—in effect—put there. He stared for a long time, watching him breathe; watching the pulse of his heartbeat in the tangled net of his guts; watching it stutter, race, then slow near to stopping.
Jaybie had been his friend—a good friend, a loyal friend. Loyal to a fault: Jaybie had been a friend to Konnos, too. He had chosen friendship over duty. The choice of a good man.
His loyalty had cost him more than his life. Toa-Sytell could still hear the echoes of his screams, the agony and terror that had baited the Outside Power, that had brought it close for Ma’elKoth’s binding. He wondered if whatever might be left of Jaybie lay here, within this dying body, or if it howled in uncomprehending pain in whatever unimaginable hell to which the Power had returned.
Whatever the truth was, this breathing corpse had served Ma’elKoth’s purpose; the Emperor had no further need of it. Toa-Sytell was not, himself, as good a man as the one who lay before him, but he was still a man; there was one mercy he could give his friend. The end was near, anyway, but he could hasten it this much.
Gently and very precisely, he pinched Jaybie’s nose shut while his other hand covered Jaybie’s mouth.
Jaybie didn’t even struggle. His chest heaved once, and again, and shortly he expired without a sound.
Toa-Sytell wiped his hands on his breeches and sighed. He had a great deal of work to do.
Before he left the room, he glanced again at the bare stone of the mystic ring on the ceiling and once more grunted softly.
He’d survived the last Lord of Ankhana. He wasn’t at all sure he’d survive this one.
THE COMMON FOLK in the great city of Ankhana, capital of the Empire, rarely look at the sky, especially after dark. On the north bank of the Great Chambaygen in the Warrens they are, as a rule, too concerned with who or what might be lurking within the next shadowed doorway or the mouth of a nearby alley. In Alientown, the wretched subhumans are too drunk or drugged, or too deep within their particular hustle upon whatever slumming purebloods might be spending the night. In the Industrial Park that separates the two, the manufactories belch smoke and flame that swallow the stars.
On the island of Old Town, honest folk are indoors after sundown, unless they’re on the Watch. Constables patrol the streets with lamps that are mainly used to light the cobbles, so that they don’t step in the occasional mound of horseshit that some lazy mucking-crew missed before curfew.
On the South Bank, where the houses of the wealthy and the noble surround the ducal estates, the servants are too occupied with their tasks, and their masters sleep the sleep of the just.
But here and there, folk do look up. A sailor, on a barge moored alongside the steelworks, smells the oncoming rain and glances at the sky. An elvish whore in Alientown wraps her shawl more tightly around her thin, translucently pale shoulders, and snarls a human obscenity at the approaching clouds. Two brothers, teenage sons of the Baron of Tinnara, hoist their pants after the casual rape of a kitchen girl they caught behind the garden of their father’s city home, and stretch their arms in satisfaction over the bleeding girl. One sees the cloud and nudges the other.
These and the others like them, who glimpse the snarling face carved upon the thunderhead, shudder once, briefly, at the omen. An instant later the cloud is just a cloud again, and they shake their heads and smile at their own superstitious imaginations.
THE CAB GLEAMED in the last of the sunlight, then winked out as it dove into earthshadow and swooped to a landing at the gate on the edge of the Abbey’s airspace. Hari was already there, waiting for it.
The door slid open, and Hari stepped in. He took a seat next to the minibar and tried to ignore the widened eyes and slack mouth of the driver within his armorglass compartment.
The driver’s voice sounded faintly metallic through the speaker. “Holy Christ, it’s you! I mean, you’re Caine!”
Hari nodded. “Yeah. You know where the Buchanan Camp is?”
“The prison? Sure, Caine. Jesus Christ, I mean, when I got the call, y’know, to the Abbey, but no name, I thought maybe, but I din’t wanna get my hopes up. With no name on the call, maybe you coulda been one a your girlfriends, like, or just a friend or something, but, holy cock, Caine—wait’ll I tell my kids!”
“Well, um . . . sure, Caine, whatever, you’re tired. I understand, no problem. But couldja sign my book, though?”
Hari squeezed his eyes shut. “Didn’t you hear me?”
“Come on, just sign the book. It’d mean a lot to my kids, y’know, they’ll never believe I really metcha if you don’t sign it, y’know?”
“If I sign it, will you leave me alone?”
“Sure, Caine, anything. It’s under the top of the bar, it folds up like the cover of a notepad.”
The cab lifted smoothly into the air while Hari located and signed the cabbie’s faded little autograph book. Hari grunted. It was real paper—must have cost a stack.
“So, ah, what’re you goin’to the Buke for?”
Hari swallowed anger; to lose his temper here would be humiliating. “Listen. I don’t want to talk with you. I’ve signed your book, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d just be quiet.”
“Sure, whatever.” The cabbie turned his head away from the glass, but Hari could still hear him mutter, “Yeah, what the hole, a fellow gets to be Professional, he forgets where he come from—”
Hari stared out the window at the sun setting behind the Pacific horizon. Not me, he thought. I never forget. No one ever lets me forget.
Storm clouds built themselves to the southwest. The cab lurched a little on insertion into the slavelanes, and the cabbie leaned back in his chair and stretched. “Hope you don’t mind if I watcha little screen, huh?”
Hari didn’t answer. The cabbie touched a sensor plate, and the windscreen of the cab lit with a closeup of LeShaun Kinnison’s oversharp face on heads-up display. Hari winced—this would be DragonTales. The cabbie pressed his seat back to half-recline and tucked his hands behind his neck.
Kinnison’s bullshit nodding slopped over with played-for-the-camera sympathy. She was saying: “. . . could explain for my viewers what ammod really is, and why Pallas Ril is in so much danger?”
Hari closed his eyes again as the shot cut to his own face. It was bad enough to have to say the fatuous crap that the Studio forced on him; it was a level of magnitude worse to have to watch himself say it.
“Whoa, Caine! That’s you, there! Hole, right there with LeShaun. She’s a honey, huh? A honey.”
“She’s a fucking crocodile. After the show, I almost had to break her fingers to pry her damn hand off my crotch.”
“No, come on, really? Right there at the show? LeShaun Kinnison grabbed your dick?”
“. . . people in the world who really understand the physics of it, and you might guess I’m not one of them.”
“But I can explain it to you—and your viewers—the same way it was explained to me. You see, Earth and Overworld are the same planet in different universes. Each universe, the whole thing, sort of vibrates in its own way—what they call the Universal Constant of Resonance. Now, it doesn’t really vibrate, that’s just the easiest way to think about it. We go from one to the other by changing our Constant of Resonance to match the other universe. Is everybody confused yet?”
Now, on the screen, the shot would show him pulling an antique pocket watch from inside his vest; he couldn’t stand to look. Hari’s face burned with humiliation, and he ground his teeth together.
He could see it in memory: he held the pocket watch by the end of its chain, its bottom rim touching the palm of his other hand.
“Pallas Ril is like the watch, here. My bottom hand represents Earth. See, when the watch is at rest, it’s stable right here on Earth. Now, let’s say that Overworld is a different height, see, a higher level of reality—say halfway between my hands. So, if we want to raise the watch to that level, without moving my hands, there’s two ways we can go about it. One is to shorten the chain, like this. Simple, isn’t it? This is kind of like freemod—that’s short for ‘frequency modification,’ which isn’t even the right term for it, but anyway . . . This is what we do for trainees who go to Overworld for a long time, sometimes years, to finish their training and develop the personas that they hope will make them stars someday. When they decide to come home, they go to one of our fixed transfer points, and the equipment there lengthens the chain again. Just like this, see? They’re back on Earth. But there’s a problem with this. When you’re on freemod, you’re just like a native. You’re completely a part of the Overworld universe, and you’re completely cut off from the Studio. No first-handers, not even a recording for second-hand cubes. You wouldn’t like that a whole lot, would you? We get all the fun, and you can’t share it.”
“Now, ammod—amplitude modification, which isn’t the right term either, but there you go—that’s a little more complicated. It’s what happened to Pallas, what happens to me and every other Actor you ever enjoy.”
Here his wrist snapped in a little arc, and the pocket watch whirled in a circle as centripetal force drove it up and out to midlevel.
“See, it’s a whole different way of getting to Overworld. To keep the watch up here, I have to keep spinning it. That’s the same as adding energy, you see? That’s what we do through the thought-mitter link. The same link that carries our experiences back here to Earth for you to enjoy, carries energy from the Studio reactor to us, to keep us on Overworld.”
Hari, eyes closed, remembered the veneer of concern on Kinnison’s face as she leaned toward him, and he remembered his urge to slap her.
“And so,” she asked, “can you tell us what happens if the link gets broken?”
Hari had held his hand still then, and he, Kinnison, and the entire audience watched in silence as the pocket watch spiraled down to his other palm.
“So, she slides back to Earth.”
Hari had followed the script flawlessly; this was the spot for him to turn grave.
“It’s a lot more serious than that. See, Overworld isn’t what you’d call adjacent to Earth’s universe. Just the opposite; it’s so similar to Earth because, you might say, it’s a harmonic of Earth, like an octave. There are any number of different universes that lie at energy levels between ours and Overworld’s, and most all of them are so unlike our own that I can’t even describe them. They’re all hostile to life as we know it. In some, for example, the element carbon, the element that makes up pretty much your whole body, can’t even exist there, by the physical laws. When an Actor slips out of phase with Overworld, it’s death. It’s the most hideous death imaginable. Most of them are never seen again. Some eventually slip into phase with Earth, and it’s, well . . . gruesome. I don’t even want to describe it.”
“And this is what will happen to Pallas Ril if you don’t find her?”
His best hardguy voice: “It might’ve happened already.”
The sick twist in Hari’s stomach forced his eyes open to see his own face staring back at him from the heads-up on the cab’s windscreen.
The cab lurched from one slavelane to another, swinging, so that for an instant his projected face overlay the building storm clouds out on the Pacific.
“I know that when you slip that helmet over your heads, you are me. You feel what I feel. I know that you love her, too. And I swear to you, that if anything has happened to her, no power in any universe will save the men responsible. I will make Berne pray for death; Ma’elKoth will curse the day his parents met. No one whose hand was in this will escape me. I swear it.”
It was all scripted, all written by the pros from Studio Hype, but at the end it hadn’t mattered. That oath was as honest as any words he’d ever spoken.
“Hoo, mama,” the cabbie chuckled. “Sure wouldn’t want you mad at me.”
THE ATTENDANT HELD the door respectfully, to allow Hari to pass. As he entered the tiny room, Hari shook the attendant’s hand; this bit of upcaste-to-down contact, though unusual, was not unheard of, and it served to cover the passing of a small packet of pure cocaine from Hari’s hand to the attendant’s. All flows of credit were electronically monitored, but cocaine and other stimulants could be purchased legally by anyone of Professional caste or above; it and other drugs had become the preferred medium of black-market exchange and were absolutely de rigueur for unobtrusive bribes. Hari always brought a substantial supply on his visits to the Buchanan Social Camp; a steadily descending series of bribes—from the Director on down to the Laborers who oversaw the surgically deafened cyborg Workers that attended the internees—was the only way Hari could buy a chance to speak with his father.
The attendant pointed silently to the touchpad on the wall, where Hari would press to signal that he wished to leave, and then spread his hands, fingers up and out.
Hari nodded, and the attendant closed the door; it locked with a heavy mechanical chunk.
“Dad?” he said, coming to the edge of the bed. “Dad, how are you feeling?”
Duncan Michaelson lay twisted beneath sheets of sweat-soaked synthetics, his eyes rolling like misshapen marbles. Veins writhed across his hairless skull; his wasted arms strained spastically against padded straps, and the soft mumbling moan that bubbled from his lips echoed his perpetual nightmare.
Dammit, he’d been promised Duncan would be awake.
Hari shook his head angrily and almost went to the touchpad to signal the attendant, then shrugged and went to the small window instead. He was paying a lot for this window—a 20 percent surcharge to his monthly debit. He might as well get some use out of it.
That monthly debit, which supported the expense of maintaining Duncan in the Buke, was all that stood between Hari’s father and a cyborg’s yoke; that yoke, and the Worker’s life that went with it, would have killed Duncan in months even years ago, when he’d been vastly stronger than he was now.
Hari had been paying to keep him in prison for more than ten years.
Rain streaked the window, blurring and dimming the grey world outside. A stroke of lightning shattered a small tree into glowing flinders only a few meters away; the crackle of energy and the splintering crash of thunder triggered Hari’s reflexes, and he dove for the floor with a startled shout. He rolled into a crouch next to a small desk, shaking his head and disgustedly waiting for his pulse to normalize.
On the bed above him, Duncan Michaelson opened his eyes. “Hari?” His voice was thin and querulous, barely above a whisper. “That you, Killer?”
Hari steadied himself with a hand on the bedrail and stood. “Yeah, Dad.”
“God, you’re getting big, Killer. How’s school?”
“Dad, I . . .” He pressed his hand to his forehead. “Fine, Dad. Just fine.”
“Your head hurt? I tolja t’stay away from those Artisan kids. Hoods, all of them. I’m a Pr’fesh’nal, goddammit. Better get y’mom t’stitch that up.”
Hari shifted his hand so that his fingers brushed the ancient ridged scar that twisted just above his hairline. When he was ten years old, he’d fought a whole gang of older Artisan boys; six of them had been pushing him and singing one of those tuneless songs that boys can make up on the spur of the moment. This one, they called “The Crazyman’s Kid.”
A brief smile flickered over Hari’s face at the memory—one boy rolling on the ground cupping his crushed testicles, another howling as he pressed his hand to his face, trying to stem the blood that spurted from the ragged mess Hari’s teeth had made of his nose. For a moment, he wished he was ten again; he wished he’d gotten a couple more of them before their leader—Nielson, something Nielson—had ended the brawl with a brick.
But nostalgic reflection had never been Hari’s habit, and this passed swiftly away. His mother had not stitched the gash Nielson’s brick had left in his scalp; by that time, she’d been dead for three years.
And Duncan had been completely fucking bugnuts for two of them.
“That’s good . . .” Duncan’s strengthless hand scratched at the straps. “Can you loosen me up? Gotta terrible itch.”
Hari loosened the straps, and Duncan scratched himself around the edges of the nutrient patches on his chest. “Oh, that’s good. You’re a good kid, Hari . . . a good son. I wish I hadn’t . . . I just, y’know, could have . . . I . . .” Duncan’s eyes rolled up under their flickering lids, and his voice slurred back into throaty, incoherent muttering.
“Dad?” Hari reached out to his father, to shake him gently. His hand closed over Duncan’s shoulder. He could feel every tendon, every detail of bone and joint; Caine’s training rose from his subconscious and whispered the exact simple twist that would dislocate that shoulder, separate bone and ligament.
Hari yanked his hand back as though his father’s flesh were hot iron. He stared at his palm for one long second, as though expecting to see a burn.
He pushed himself away from the bed and turned again to the window, to rest his forehead against the chill smooth glass.
Nearly everyone on Earth knew the approved version of Hari’s life, the classic Studio success story of the tough kid from the Labor ghettos of San Francisco. Only very few knew that Hari hadn’t been born a Laborer. His father, Duncan Michaelson, had been a Professor of social anthropology at Berkeley, and was in fact the principal author of the standard texts on Westerling and the cultural mores of Overworld. Hari’s mother, Davia Khapur, had met Duncan when she took his Principles of Linguistic Drift seminar for her masters in philology. The union of two traditionally Professional families had been too good to resist, and Hari’s earliest memories were happy ones.
Hari now knew what had triggered his father’s breakdown. After Hari had clawed his way up to stardom, he’d finally been able to afford the medical tests that pinpointed Duncan’s progressive neural degeneration. Duncan Michaelson had an autoimmune disorder that ate away at his synaptic chemical receptors, essentially causing random short-circuiting throughout his central nervous system. As one meditech had brutally put it, “Your father’s brain has spent the past twenty years gradually turning to pudding.”
But when it had begun, all those years ago, Hari’d had no idea his father was sick. He’d barely noticed Duncan’s increasing moodiness and brooding, lost as he was in the bright world of learning that a six-year-old Professional child had open to him. He remembered the first beating—the backhanded slap that had buffeted him across the carpet in his father’s study, the hands that had crushed his shoulders and shook him until his eyes filled with shooting stars.
He remembered the screaming, back and forth between his parents—shouting filled with names he didn’t know, names that Duncan had been using in his seminars and lectures, names that frightened his mother until her teeth chattered. Many years would pass before Hari could afford to purchase the black-market banned books that told him who these names belonged to, names like Jefferson and Lincoln, Voltaire and John Locke. At the time, all he knew was that his father wouldn’t stop talking about these men, and it was going to get him in trouble.
He remembered the brisk, businesslike manner of the silver-masked Social Police when they arrested Duncan. Six-year-old Hari had been long abed, but Duncan’s snarl had awakened him; Hari had watched through the barest crack of his bedroom door.
Duncan must have been either too proud or already too crazy to lie; after he’d been gone for a week, more soapies came and moved Hari and his mother into a two-room apartment in the Mission District Labor ghetto.
For years Hari had tried to believe that the reason his mother hadn’t divorced his father was that she loved him too much to leave him, even when his madness carried them all downcaste to a Temp slum. In other families, a divorce would have protected the innocent spouse’s caste status. It wasn’t until Hari was a teenager, many years after his mother’s death, that he’d realized a divorce wouldn’t have protected her. She hadn’t turned Duncan in for sedition; as far as Soapy was concerned, that made her his accomplice.
His father was allowed to join them only a month later. Their assets had been confiscated, as Laborers can neither possess nor receive income from Professional work. Neither Duncan nor Davia had Labor skills; the best they could do was Temp at unskilled jobs. And Duncan grew worse, more erratic, more violent, more prone to bellowed declamations of the “rights of man.”
Hari didn’t know what had killed his mother. He’d always sort of figured that Duncan had beaten her a little too hard one day, and that some Labor Clinic medical aide had been too zoned on Demerol to give her proper treatment. Hari’s strongest memory of his mother was of her lying on her bed in their tiny apartment, soaked in sweat, her palsied hand gripping his without strength. “Take care of your father,” she’d said, “because he’s the only father you’ll ever have. He’s sick, Hari. He can’t help himself.”
A few days later she died in that bed, while Hari played stickball a few blocks away. He had been seven years old.
Duncan’s hold on reality was intermittent. On his lucid days, he was almost pathetically kind to his son, struggling with all his might to be the good parent that he knew in his heart he wasn’t. He did his best to educate Hari, teaching him to read, to write, and to do simple arithmetic. He managed to scrape together enough cocaine to not only purchase a screener but to bribe a local tech into illegally hooking it into the library net; Duncan and Hari spent many hours together before that screen, reading. But those were the good days.
On the bad ones, Hari swiftly learned that he was safer among the dregs of the Mission District than he was with his father. Hari became almost preternaturally sensitive and adaptable; he was able to scent a shift in his father’s sanity from upwind and over a hill, and he could instantly fall in line and play along with the delusion of the day—could make himself see the world the way that Duncan saw it. He’d been taught early and often that any denial of—or deviation from—his father’s private reality was a short road to a savage beating.
And he learned to fight back. By the age of ten or so, he’d discovered that the beatings would be just as bad whether he fought back or not. Fighting gave him the chance to escape.
When he could escape, the only place a Labor kid could go was the street. His intelligence and adaptability let him survive out among the whores and the thieves and the addicts, the upcaste perverts and the prowling sexual predators. His unhesitating willingness to fight anyone, anytime, any odds, earned him a reputation for being as crazy as his father, and from time to time it saved his life.
By the time he was fifteen, he’d had the world pretty well figured out. His father went crazy, he’d decided, because he kept trying to fool himself. His father’d read books by these guys that he kept ranting about. They told him that the world was one way, and he wanted to believe them, and so when the world showed him that it was something else he couldn’t handle it. He’d pretended so hard that he could no longer separate pretense from reality.
Hari swore a private oath he’d never do that. He’d keep his mental balance by looking the world straight in the eye, for exactly what it is; he’d never pretend it was different.
A childhood on the streets of the Mission District had pretty well shattered any illusions he might have inherited about the sanctity of human life, or the fundamental goodness of people. By fifteen, he’d already killed two men and had been supporting himself and his father for five years as a petty thief and a courier for the local black-market dealers.
It was less than a month after his sixteenth birthday that Hari had contrived to catch the attention of Marc Vilo; two weeks after that, he’d packed his few possessions and moved out. On Hari’s last day under his father’s roof, Duncan tried to open his skull with a pipe wrench.
Vilo prided himself on the care he took of his undercastes. Unknown to Hari, Vilo saw to it that Duncan was provided for throughout the next six years as Hari grew, entered the Studio Conservatory, and spent three years in freemod training on Overworld. When Hari returned to take up his Acting career, Duncan had been in specialized care for several years. With continuing drug therapy, he was consistently lucid.
His only remaining problem was that he’d never learned to shut up.
Stripped of his Professional privileges, he could no longer legally teach. Instead, he’d gathered a following of young Labor men and women who met in secret in his apartment for discussions on banned philosophies culled from Duncan’s prodigious memory; they in turn disseminated these antisocial ideas among their own acquaintances. The soapies had known about this, almost certainly, but in those days they were somewhat more tolerant. It wasn’t until the crackdown that followed the Caste Riots that Duncan was convicted of sedition and placed under a standing sentence: either permanent restraint in a Mute Facility like the Buchanan’s or the cyborg yoke and life as a Worker.
In the Buke, nothing Duncan could say or write would ever reach the outside world. The only human contact he could have was with a surgically deafened Worker who tended his personal needs. He was allowed full net access, but incoming only. Any personal requests were submitted to the Director by E-mail on a closed-circuit system designed specifically for that purpose; not only could Duncan not communicate with the outside world, he could never even converse with the other Buchanan campers.
These rules, though, like all rules, could be bent—or broken—for the right price.
And these rules made Duncan the safest man on Earth for Hari to talk to. When the winds that howled through the holes in Hari’s life became too bitter, he’d come here for a moment of stillness, for a moment of peace.
The chill glass of the window had grown warm with the heat from Hari’s forehead. “They’ve really got me this time, Dad,” he said softly. “They have really got me by the balls.”
Duncan’s mumbling had faded away; the only sound Hari could hear above his own breathing was the pittering raindrops on the window.
“They’re making me kill another Ankhanan king. I barely survived Toa-Phelathon—I shouldn’t have, really. I should have died in that alley. If Kollberg hadn’t pushed through the emergency transfer . . . And this guy, this Ma’elKoth, he’s . . . he’s so . . . I don’t know. I have a bad feeling about this. I don’t think I’m gonna make it, this time.”
It was easier to say when he knew no one was listening. “I think they’re finally gonna get me.”
Hari pressed his palms against the glass and stared out at the smoldering embers of the tree. “It’s not like I didn’t know what I was getting into. I mean, even at the Conservatory they tell you straight: Your function in society is to risk your life in interesting ways. But the Adventures, they just keep getting worse and worse; they’re trying to kill me, Dad—each one is a little tougher, the stakes a little higher, the odds a little worse. From their point of view . . . I don’t know, I guess they have to; I mean, who’d bother first-handing an Adventure they think’ll be easy for me?”
“Quit, then. Retire.” The voice was ragged and thin but unquestionably present; at least for the moment, Duncan’s mind was here. Hari turned from the window and met his father’s milky stare.
He coughed into his hand, suddenly embarrassed. “I, ah, didn’t know you were awake.”
“At least you’ll be alive, Hari.” Duncan’s voice was barely above a whisper. “That counts for something.”
“I, ah . . . I can’t do it, Dad. I’ve already contracted.”
Hari shook his head. “I can’t. It’s, ah, it’s Shanna, Dad. My wife.”
“I remember . . . I see her with you on the nets, sometimes. Been married . . . what, a year?”
Hari shook his head silently and examined his knotted fingers.
He said, “She’s there, in Ankhana.” His breath caught in his throat—why was this so hard to talk about? “They, ah . . .” He coughed harshly, turning his face back toward the window. “She’s lost on Overworld, and they’re gonna let her die there if I don’t try for Ma’elKoth.”
For a moment, the only sound was the thin whistle of Duncan trying to inhale.
“I get it. I caught some of . . . DragonTales. . .” Duncan seemed to struggle for breath, for the strength to put conviction into his voice. “Bread and circuses, Hari. Bread and circuses.”
It was one of Duncan’s catchphrases; Hari understood it only abstractly, but he nodded.
“Your problem,” Duncan went on with difficulty, “isn’t Overworld, or this Emperor. Your problem . . . you’re a slave.”
Hari shrugged irritably; he’d heard this many times before. To Duncan’s hazy eyes, everybody looked like a slave. “I’ve got just about as much freedom as I can handle.”
“Hah. You’ve . . . more than you think. You’ll win.” Duncan sank back into his pillow, exhausted.
“Don’t . . . humor me, Hari, dammit . . .” He spent a few seconds only breathing. “Listen. Tell you how you beat ’em . . . Tell you?”
“All right, Dad.” Hari came close to the bed and bent over his father. “All right, I’m listening. You tell me how I can beat them.”
“Forget . . . Forget rules. . .”
Hari fought to keep his rising exasperation off his face and out of his voice. “What do you mean?”
“Listen . . . they think, they think they own you. They think they own all of you, and you have to do what they say.”
“They’re damn close to right.”
“No . . . no, listen. . . your wife, you love her. You love her.”
Hari couldn’t answer, couldn’t push words past the constriction in his throat.
“That’s their hold . . . their grip. But it’s their only one . . . and they don’t know it . . . they think they’re safe . . .”
Hari stiffened and scowled, but said nothing.
“Hari, listen,” Duncan whispered, his eyes fluttering closed. “The smartest . . . the smartest man in the world once said, ‘Anything that is done out of love takes place beyond good and evil.’ You get that? You understand? Beyond.”
Hari sighed. What had he been thinking? That his crazy father might really have advice for him? He shook his head disgustedly and said, “Sure, Dad. Beyond. I got it.”
“Tired now. Hrr, sleepy. Mm, Hari?”
“You ever . . . you ever tell her . . . about me?”
The truth is the truth, Hari thought. Look the world in the eye. He said, “No. I’ve never told her about you.”
Duncan nodded, eyes closed, his freed hands blindly seeking their usual tie-down positions. “I wish . . . I’d like to, after you save her, I’d like to meet her. Just once. On the nets, she seems so nice.”
“Yeah,” Hari said, suddenly hoarse. “Yeah, she is.”
THE DIAMOND BALLROOM on the Studio’s twentieth floor glittered and shone with scintillant color, flashing prismatic splinters of light across the faces of Caine’s subscribers. Most of them were Leisure faces, some here with their loyal Investors; few in Business could wield either the cash or the clout to walk among the elect. Caine commanded the highest subscription rate of any Actor in North America: one thousand upcaste subscribers paid a round hundred thousand marks each for a year’s rental of a luxury box, with seven Adventures guaranteed—barring the unexpected death or maiming of the star, of course.
This was an elite club; the Studio collected a thousand marks per year from ten thousand hopefuls, merely for the privilege of staying on the waiting list. One of the privileges of subscribing was meeting the star at pre-Adventure receptions like this one.
This reception, like so many of them, was done up as a costume ball; the theme this time was “The Enemies of Caine.”
Hari circulated through the crowd wearing a costume mock-up of Caine’s black leathers, playing at being Caine, growling hard-assed responses to the wet-eyed well-wishers and backslapping advice offerers.
Playing at being Caine made this almost tolerable; at least he didn’t have to smile.
Kollberg bustled up to him and took his arm. The Administrator wore the maroon and gold of Ankhanan royal livery; it took Hari a moment to realize that Kollberg was supposed to be Jemson Thal, Toa-Phelathon’s master steward. Hari had a fleeting impulse to kick him in the throat.
“You have your speech?” Kollberg asked.
“Did you look it over? It’s not quite the, ah, usual.” Kollberg sweated with his night-before nerves; something about being among all these upcasters always made him edgy. Hari figured it was because Kollberg was the only Administrator present; no Administrator would ever be privileged to rent a box for a Caine Adventure. Everyone in the place was upcaste of him, far upcaste.
Hari looked down at the Administrator’s hand, which still held his elbow. If only he really were Caine right now—Caine would break this fat fuck’s arm. He said, “Yes, Administrator. I have it, all right?” He looked pointedly down at Kollberg’s moist hand. “No offense, Administrator—but people are staring.”
Kollberg let go of Hari’s arm like he’d been stung. He licked his lips as he straightened his tunic. “Well, we’re going to be sitting down to eat in about fifteen minutes, and you’ve barely been on the north side of the room at all.”
He threaded through a clot of Investors all dressed like the Bear Guard of the Khulan Horde; the two Leisuremen to whom they were attached both wore the skins and winged helmet of Khulan G’thar himself. He accepted a handshake from some Leisureman under about five kilos of putty; this idiot had spent probably sixty marks to look like an ogrillo chieftain Caine had killed in the Adventure called Retreat from the Boedecken—more money than most Labor families get in a week. Hari dodged around any number of pudgy, slack-muscled Bernes, ducked one creative soul who’d costumed himself as one of the mantislike Krrx warriors from Race for the Crown of Dal’kannith, and found himself face-to-face with Marc Vilo.
The little Businessman had done better than most: He wore gleaming platemail modeled of lightweight plastic, lacking only the helmet. He’d sprayed his hair platinum blond. He had a gruesomely realistic prosthetic that made him look as though his left cheekbone and eye socket were freshly shattered: bone splinters stuck through the skin and dripped gleaming blood; a half-deflated eye dangled by the optic nerve.
Hari admired it with a low whistle. “Marc, that’s beautiful. Purthin Khlaylock, right?”
“Bet your ass, son,” Vilo said with a broad grin. “Picked him because he’s about the only one who’s still alive, and I don’t have the figure for Berne. Not that it stopped any of them.” He snorted as he gave a nod that included the entire room. “What’s the matter, kid? You look like you’re not having a good time.”
“I, ah, guess I’m a little tense, Marc.”
He nodded, absently understanding. “Listen, I got a special guest here I want you to meet. Come on and . . . Wait, listen, before we go—that little talk you and I had the other week, about you getting back together with Shanna?”
“Yeah . . . ?” Hari said warily.
“Well, I just wanted to say that this is great. This is better than I hoped for.”
A knot tied itself into Hari’s stomach. “It’s not like I planned it this way.”
“Oh, shit, I know, I know. But this is absofreakinglutely spectacular—I can’t lose, y’know?”
Hari understood exactly what he meant: he’d heroically save Shanna, heroically avenge her death, or heroically die in either attempt. No matter what the outcome, it would reflect admirably on his Patron. “Yeah,” he said thickly, “I guess things look pretty good for you.”
“Bet your ass. Here, come on.”
Vilo led him over to where a fiftyish, fleshy Leisurewoman stood amidst a gaggle of admirers. She wore brown suede chest armor over her steel grey tunic and breeches, and a flowing cape of blue completed the costume: she was dressed as Pallas Ril.
Vilo cleared his throat importantly. “Caine, I’d like to introduce you to Shermaya Dole. Leisurema’am Dole, this is Caine.”
Her eyes lit as she turned, though of course she didn’t offer her hand. “Oh, yes, Marc. We’ve met.”
“The Leisurema’am,” Hari said with a slightly stiff bow, “honored Shanna and myself by attending our wedding.”
“Yes indeed,” she said. “If you’d been there, Marc, you’d remember.” Vilo’s ears turned red. Dole went on, “Entertainer Michaelson, how are you?”
“As well as can be expected, ma’am, thank you. And yourself?”
“Oh, well, you know, I’m terribly distressed about Shanna,” she said, one palm pressed against her ample chest. “Marc was so kind, to invite me to share his box. I so hope that you can find her.”
“And please, Entertainer, please forgive my choice of costume. Marc told me the theme this evening, and I know,” she said, leaning close with a self-conscious giggle, “that Pallas Ril isn’t Caine’s enemy; please, how well I know that! But I want to remind everyone what’s really important here—what’s really at stake. You’re not upset?”
Hari was astonished at the sudden rush of warmth he felt toward this woman. “Leisurema’am Dole,” he said seriously, “you are maybe the most gracious person I’ve ever met; it’s impossible that your concern would upset me. I couldn’t agree with you more.”
“I only wish that I could do something to actually help you,” she sighed. “Please know that I’ll be with you the whole time; I’ll be first-handing in Marc’s box, and my prayers will be with you and Shanna. God be with you, Entertainer.”
She turned away, dismissing him, and spoke over her shoulder to Vilo. “He’s so polite, Marc. I can’t thank you enough. Really, very well behaved.”
Vilo allowed her to take his arm and lead him away. As he went, he shot a look back to Hari, his eyes alight and his lips silently forming the words I’m in.
Hari forced a smile and a nod, and then the crowd closed in around him again.
In only minutes it was time for his speech, a brief predinner address. After dinner would come the nearly endless speeches from Marc Vilo, as his Patron; Arturo Kollberg, as Studio Chairman; and whatever broken-down retired Actor they’d roped in for this. Hari pulled his notepad out of his front pocket and tapped open the cover. Its screen lit up with the text of his speech. He made his way to the west end of the ballroom, where the huge curving staircase provided the dais.
He mounted the steps and turned to face the ballroom. The lighting subtly changed to get everyone’s attention and to bring a golden glow around him, and concealed shotgun mikes aimed at his face from across the room. He coughed, and the cough’s amplified reproduction sounded like distant thunder.
A thousand faces and more turned toward him in anticipation. Hari looked out over them, his stomach roiling: more than a thousand men and women dressed as his enemies. There was only one missing: among them all, no one had costumed himself as Ma’elKoth. Hari gave his head a little shake. The Ankhanan Emperor was too recent; no one thought of him as an enemy yet.
He cleared his throat again, and began.
“They tell me this evening’s theme is ‘The Enemies of Caine.’ I’m looking out at you now, though, and I’m thinking that a better name would have been ‘The Victims of Caine.’ I don’t think there’s ever been a room with so many dead people in it outside of Hell.”
As called for in the script, he paused for his audience’s appreciative laughter and scattered applause.
Hari felt sweat trickle from his hairline down the back of his neck.
“I know that some of you have first-handed Pallas Ril’s Adventures, that some of you feel like it might even be you over there, lost and frightened in Ankhana . . .”
Shanna, lost and frightened? Who writes this crap? His heart began to boil within his rib cage.
“. . . but I swear to you, I’ll find her. I’ll find you. And I’ll bring you both safely back to Earth.”
The words on the screen blurred. Hari pretended to cough, and he wiped his eyes, squinting at the screen. “Y’see, these guys in Ankhana, they don’t really know what they’re messing with. They don’t really know what kind of trouble they’re in . . .”
Singing wires stretched themselves tight up the back of his neck.
I’ve got just about as much freedom as I can handle.
Something took over Hari’s hands: they snapped shut the cover of his notepad and dropped it to the stairs. His feet got into the act: before he completely understood what he was doing, his heel came sharply down on the notepad and cracked the cover.
A ripple of murmurs passed over the surface of the crowd.
He said, “All night long, I’ve been pretending to be Caine. You know, walk around, give you the eye, give you a line or two, a little thrill. It’s all a fucking act.”
He let a little of Caine’s blood-hunger leak into his flat-eyed grin. “You want to know what Caine would really be saying to you, here tonight? You want to?”
Hari picked out Kollberg’s face, pasty and goggle-eyed with panic, shaking frantic negatives. He saw Vilo, looking dubious, and Dole, squinting as though she couldn’t quite see him. Most of the rest of the faces wore looks of anticipation so intense they might have been lust.
“He’d say: She’s my woman and this is my fight. He’d say: You flock of shit-eating vultures should get lives of your fucking own.”
He walked down off the stairs and stopped at the edge of the crowd—a mob of the most powerful men and women on Earth. “Get out of my way.”
He walked to the door, and left.
His boot heels clicked on the marble of the anteroom, and before he could reach the outer door, applause began within the Diamond Ballroom like the surf of an incoming tide.
Kollberg slammed through the outer doors while Hari waited for the elevator. “Michaelson!” he barked, a little thinly from shortness of breath. “Don’t you move!”
Hari didn’t look at him. He just watched the baroque indicator arrow of filigreed bronze creep toward the number of the floor.
“That was not acceptable!” Kollberg said. His eyes bulged, and his face shone with sweat over strawberry mottling. “I covered you—just barely!—and most of them think this was part of the schtick. But you’re going to march your butt right back in there and pretend it was all a joke, you understand me?”
“You know what?” Hari said softly, still looking up at the arrow. “We’re alone here, Artie. No guards, no security cameras. No witnesses.”
He now met Kollberg’s gaze, and Caine looked out from behind his eyes. “I said we’re alone here, you fat fuck, and I know three different ways to kill you that won’t leave a mark.”
Kollberg’s mouth opened, and a sound came out like air escaping from a balloon. He took a step back, then another. “You can’t speak to me this way!”
The elevator doors opened, and Hari stepped on board. “Tell you what,” he said flatly. “If I live through this, I’ll apologize.”
Kollberg gaped, his hands trembling from the adrenaline that makes rage and terror so much alike. The doors closed between them, and the elevator carried Hari down to ground level.
I’ll pay for that tomorrow, Hari thought as he paced toward the outside door. He put a hand on the armorglass, and looked up at the storm clouds that glowed sickly orange from the streetlights below.