“What’s wrong with you? You never even get angry! Even a shout would be better than this, than this, this calm . . . nothingness.”
“Come on, Shanna, Jesus Christ. What would shouting prove—who has the loudest voice?”
“Maybe I’d just like to be able to believe that you have a passion for something besides violence. Maybe sometimes, I wish I were as important to you as killing people—”
“Fair? You want fair? Let me quote you: ‘I believe in justice, as long as I’m holding a knife at the throat of the judge.’ ”
“What does that have to do with—”
“Everything. It’s all part of the same thing. I suppose I shouldn’t expect you to understand.”
A TOO-YOUNG, TOO-PRETTY man with artfully curled hair stares earnestly out from the main screens of homes all over the world.
“For those of you just joining us, this is Adventure Update, your only Worldwide Twenty-four-hour Source for Studio News. I’m Bronson Underwood.
“Our top story this morning: in less than one hour, the legendary Caine will make the transfer into the City of Life, the capital of the Ankhanan Empire, on the northwest continent of Overworld. His real-life wife, the well-known Pallas Ril, is lost somewhere within the city. The graphic that you see in the lower left corner of your screens is our best estimate of the number of hours remaining until Pallas Ril’s amplitude match fails and she slips out of phase with Overworld. As you can see, if Caine cannot save her, Pallas Ril will die, hideously, in one hundred thirty-one hours—only a little more than five and a half days.
“Adventure Update will run this graphic twenty-four hours a day, as long as we have any hope remaining, and we will offer hourly updates on Caine’s progress in his desperate search.
“In our next hour, we’ll have the tape of LeShaun Kinnison’s interview with Caine himself, and let me tell you, it’s really something. But now, we go to our chief analyst for Ankhanan affairs, Jed Clearlake.”
“Jed, what can you tell our viewers of the current situation there in Ankhana? How much do we actually know?”
“Well, Bronson, more than you might think. First of all, the one hundred thirty-one hours is only an estimate; a number of factors can affect the phase-locking capability of . . .”
And this is barely the beginning.
THE MOUNTAIN OF stone and steel that was the San Francisco Studio towered above the broad plain of landing pads and carports. The eagles that circled the mountaintop were the limousines and flying coupes of the Leisurefolk and Investors, soaring through endless loops of holding patterns.
The weather had broken overnight. The rising sun painted the polished Gothic arches of the windows and glittered in the eyes of gargoyles that crouched among the arms of massive flying buttresses. High granite walls—the first line of defense against under-caste intrusion—ringed the entire compound.
Outside the iron-toothed mouth of the enormous gate, the hordes of undercastes—the Laborers and Artisans and even some Professionals who were not too proud to mingle—shifted and stamped and flowed toward the wide road, restrained by the linked arms of the red-suited Studio Security force who lined the curbs.
Within the hour, Caine himself would pass through these gates.
In the Cavea, the great hall of five thousand firsthand berths, a battalion of ushers fiddled and fitted and plugged the wealthy clients into their simichairs.
In the subscription boxes, the Leisurefolk and their guests enjoyed the delicacies and exotic wines that each box’s waiter had to offer and talked about Caine’s extraordinary performance at the Subscriber’s Ball. Opinion was divided: most believed that it was a particularly inspired piece of Studio theatrics, but a stubborn minority maintained that what they’d seen was entirely unplanned—that something real had happened.
All agreed, however, that it had powerfully captured their interest. Many had passed a sleepless night in anticipation, and of those who had slept, many had dreamed of being Caine.
In the techbooth that overlooked the ebony ziggurat of the Cavea’s transfer platform, Arturo Kollberg snapped useless orders and fumed and brooded on his humiliation the night before, on the brink of his greatest triumph. It was intolerable, and something had to be done.
Something would be done, and he would certainly do it.
This wasn’t personal, he assured himself. It wasn’t some fit of pique, a need to salve his wounded vanity. Kollberg thought of himself as a bigger man than that; he’d always understood that his personal needs must be subordinated to the necessities of his position, and he’d always done so. The humiliation he’d suffered, the insult to his person, the threat, was irrelevant; he could let it pass unrequited, if he chose. That was a matter between Michaelson the man and Kollberg the man; it was personal, and it could be forgotten.
The insult to his position was another matter entirely.
That was between Michaelson the Professional and Kollberg the Administrator. To ignore it would begin to unravel the very fabric of civilization.
Administrators the world over have two mottoes, two simple principles to guide them in their lives: Deference to Those Above, Respect from Those Below, and: Service.
All Administrator children learn early that they are the guardians of society, that they are, in fact, the axis upon which turns the world. Ranked below them are the Professionals, Artisans, and Laborers; ranked above are the Businessfolk, the Investors, and the Leisure-folk. Administrators are the center, the fulcrum, the balance point, and their role is nothing less than the maintenance of civilization. Administrators take the directions of the upcastes and translate them to reality by their direction of the downcastes. Administrators allocate the distribution of Earth’s dwindling resources. Administrators manage the enterprises; Administrators promulgate the regulations; Administrators create the wealth that is the engine of the Earth.
Administrators carry the world upon their backs and ask for nothing in return.
One of the most basic skills of the Administrator, an essential element of his education, is the maintenance of the dignity of his position. The moral authority of an effective Administrator is so powerful that undercastes—and even lesser Administrators—follow his directives without question; great Administrators have undercastes that actually compete against each other in the performance of their functions, for no other reward than an approving glance and a firm Good job.
But when errors and weakness erode the authority of the Administrators, undercastes become surly and shiftless—sometimes goldbricking and malingering to the point of sabotage, to where it actually harms the corporation. This was no myth, no ghost story to frighten Administrator children; Arturo Kollberg had seen it in action.
Kollberg was the product of a mixed marriage. His father—a competent if unexceptional Administrator of a Midwestern hospital—had married below himself, had taken to wife one of the Professionals he supervised. Kollberg’s mother had been only a thoracic Surgeon, and the other Administrator pups, cruel as children are the world over, had never let him forget it.
Kollberg’s childhood had been spent watching helplessly while the parents of his schoolmates had risen in status and position, had been transferred away to challenging and glamorous posts all over the world. Kollberg’s father, in his foolish weakness, had condemned himself to the obscurity of his provincial hospital, largely because he never understood how to keep his undercastes in their proper place. He’d even allowed Kollberg’s mother to continue to work—but as long as she did Professional work, she could not upcaste to Administration; to come from reduced circumstances was no shame, but to prefer those circumstances was criminally selfish. She’d gone on performing her surgery, heedless of the damage this did to the career of her husband and the life of her only son.
But the blame couldn’t be laid entirely on her head. His father had never understood the importance of dignity, of Administrative image. Fundamentally weak-spirited and easygoing, he’d preferred to be liked more than respected. He’d never insisted on proper deference; even now, Kollberg could raise a burning blush of shame when he remembered how his father would let his mother speak to him in public without use of his courtesy title, how he would let her touch him in front of other undercastes.
Kollberg had defined his life in opposition to his father’s. He’d never married, had no interest in family—in fact, he never intended to marry. A wife would take up too much of his attention, would interfere with his ascetic devotion to the performance of his duties. He insisted upon—and got—precisely proper deference from those below him, and he offered precisely proper respect to those above. He knew exactly where his place was in the hierarchy of reality, and he knew exactly the vector of his life.
Upward. Slowly, perhaps, but ever upward.
Through devotion and skill he’d risen throughout his career, from an assistant departmental supervisor in his father’s hospital to his father’s own job. One of the proudest moments of Arturo Kollberg’s life, one of his most cherished memories, was the day he had entered his father’s office to personally hand-deliver the Notice of Forced Retirement. He’d proven what could be accomplished by a skilled Administrator, and he’d proven that he had every one of those skills, despite his miscegenetic birth.
But conquering his father hadn’t been enough for him. There was only so far an ambitious man could rise in the health-care system. Now, twenty years later, he was among an elite of which the average Administrator could only dream. He’d outstripped every one of his schoolmates, their parents, every Administrator he’d ever met: he was not only a Studio Chairman, but Chairman of the Studio, San Francisco, the one that had started it all, the one where the first Winston Transfer equipment had been built by the hands of Jonah Winston himself. This Studio had transformed not only the nature of entertainment, but the structure of society itself.
It had been crumbling when he took it in hand, practically a derelict, a joke, a backwater final resting place of Peter-Principled incompetents. His peers had shaken their heads gravely when they’d heard of his transfer there, and they’d clucked solemnly about the self-destruction of a promising career.
San Francisco was now the jeweled diadem of the whole Studio system, the flagship operation, the prestige market; San Francisco took in fifty million marks a year from the mere waiting lists it maintained for hopeful subscribers to its top ten stars.
And when one speaks of the top ten stars of San Francisco, when one speaks of the top ten stars of all time, one inevitably comes around to Caine.
Say what you will about Burchardt, about Story and Zhian and Mkembe, bring up any name you want; there was only one Caine. Never been anyone like him, probably never will be again; often imitated, never duplicated. There were any number of conflicting theories about Caine’s continuing popularity, giving the credit variously to his eloquence, to his curious combination of ruthlessness and passion, to his peculiar quirks of honor; Kollberg knew all these to be empty rationalization.
There were two reasons that Caine continued to dominate both the firsthand and secondhand markets. The first was his snarling bare-knuckle brawling.
Throwing spells is one thing—feeling the power of magick surge through your body. Hacking into an enemy with a steel blade is something else—something more intimate, more brutal. But even that can’t compare with the erotic power of the snap of bone beneath your bare hands, the smack of flesh on flesh and the sudden, delirious surge that takes you when your enemy gives that faint sigh—that gasp of the consciousness of defeat—when his face goes slack and he sees his death in your eyes. It’s the fighting itself that Caine’s fans live for, and Caine throws himself into combat with the abandon of a cliff diver: he springs out into space, to live or die, just for the rush.
The second reason was Kollberg himself.
Kollberg had made Caine, had managed his career with the sort of personal attention that most men reserve for their sons. Anyplace on Overworld where a situation was reported that would make a thrilling backdrop for a Caine story, Caine went. Kollberg had even sent him to places where other Actors were at work—even when it meant dropping him into their story lines and having him take them over. Kollberg had been criticized for this favoritism, and he’d been criticized for pandering to the public, for damaging the stories of the other Actors and destroying their artistic validity.
He had answered every charge with a gesture, a chubby finger pointed straight at the Studio’s bottom line. Even the lesser Actors gave up grumbling; after all, the chance that Caine could show up unexpectedly in their Adventures boosted the subscription rates for every single Actor in San Francisco.
But this matter of Caine setting himself against Kollberg, defying him to his face, even threatening him—this could not be allowed to pass. Michaelson shouldn’t even really be considered a Professional—this current fad for pandering to the egos of Actors had gone too far. Professionals, indeed. If anything, Actors should be Artisans, at most; their trade was a simple exchange of handiwork for money. A true Professional is a member of an elite society with a self-enforced ethical code; a true Professional is accountable for the results of his work.
Kollberg smiled grimly to himself. Now that would be amusing—if someone held Caine accountable for his actions, if he ever really had to face the consequences of things he’d done. It was a happy fantasy, but one he couldn’t afford to indulge. Caine was too valuable.
And really, he reminded himself, it wasn’t Caine who had threatened him: it was Michaelson. Caine was the one who brought all this wealth into the Studio; it was Caine who was Kollberg’s greatest success.
It was Michaelson he’d find a way to punish.
HARI FINISHED HIS workout with a series of spin kicks against the head-sized holographic target that danced in the electrostatic mist at one end of the Abbey’s gym. Back-spins to both sides, hooking kicks, side kicks, crescents: Hari spun until sweat sprayed out horizontally from his hair.
He shook his head and made a mental note to be cautious about his left lead; some change in the weather had stiffened the old sword cut on his right thigh, slowing him enough that he was only landing about three in five of his back kicks on the bobbing target. This was a bad trend: he wasn’t a kid anymore, and experience compensates for speed only up to a point.
He went straight to the screen without bothering to shower. He toweled away most of his drying sweat while he spent a few minutes with his lawyer, making sure that his affairs were in order, and especially that the annuity he’d arranged for his father’s upkeep was unbreakable. That done, he clicked off. There was no one else he had to talk to.
He draped the towel across his shoulders and headed for the vault. The Studio limo would be landing in fifteen minutes.
The vault in the Abbey’s basement drew enough power to light a small town. This vault maintained an Overworld-normal field that allowed him to store Caine’s outfit and weapons so he’d never have to change at the Studio vault with lesser Actors.
It was only the size of a small closet: exactly twice as big as he needed.
With the door open, the empty left side of the vault stared back at him. Occasionally he entertained masochistic fantasies of buying duplicates of Pallas’costume, just so there’d be something there, in place of this mocking emptiness. Sad dreams of a desperate man—he could never hang his own costume there, just as he still slept to one side of his king-sized bed.
The black leather tunic was faded and cracked—white salt rings of ancient sweat circling the armpits, rawhide laces stretched and stiff. He put it on the immaculate upholstery of the dressing room couch, next to the soft black breeches that were covered with slices and tears crudely sewn; the coarse brown thread showed like old bloodstains against the leather. On the floor he set the pair of supple boots, cut low to the size of the high-top tennis shoes of a different era.
He stood naked before the full-length mirror on the outside of the vault door. The flat muscles of his chest, the ridges of his abdomen, the bunched cords of his thighs and arms, all stood out like they’d been cut into stone. He turned slightly and narrowed his eyes, regarding the slight thickening just below his waist with critical distaste. Maybe this was an inevitable consequence of pushing forty—or maybe he’d been slacking. Only the faintest twinge of vanity colored his disapproval; nearly all of it was caused by the certain knowledge that four or five extra pounds could slow him fatally at the critical cusp between victory and death.
He had the build of a middleweight boxer, somewhat tall for his weight. His skin was a swarthy map of crisscross scars on which could be traced the high points of Caine’s career. Here was the puckered circle of the crossbow quarrel he’d taken at Ceraeno; here was the diamond scar of the sword thrust through his liver outside Toa-Phelathon’s bedchamber. Up at his collarbone was the jagged axe cut where Ghular Freehammer had nearly decapitated him; there on his back were parallel scars given him by a puma in the cat pits of Kirisch-Nar. He had a story for every major scar and not a few of the minor ones; now in the mirror he touched each scar and let each story flood his mind, reminding himself once again who he was.
The big scar, from his right hip down his thigh, the one that slowed those kicks—that one he’d gotten from Berne.
He shook off that memory and slipped into his supporter—a leather jockstrap padding a steel cup sewn within. He pulled on the leather breeches and drew the pair of throwing knives from his thigh sheaths to test their razor edges against his forearms. He stepped into the boots, and checked the small leafblade daggers in the ankle sheaths. Inside the tunic were sewn the sheaths for three more knives—two long ones below the armpits for fighting, and another throwing knife between the shoulder blades. He laced the tunic up to his sternum and belted it with a supple garroting-rope cored with steel cable.
Now again he looked in the mirror, and the image that returned his glare was Caine.
I am strong. I am relentless. I am inescapable.
The knots of worry that had tied themselves into his guts slowly uncoiled and fell away; pain and resentment eased down from his shoulders and rolled off his back. He grunted a grim chuckle at the cold freedom he now felt. Hari Michaelson’s problems, his weaknesses and insecurities, his whole claustrophobic life, would be left behind here on Earth.
He let Shanna’s image boil to the surface of his consciousness. If she was alive, he would save her. If she was not, he would avenge her. Life is simple. Life is good.
I am invincible. I am the Blade of Tyshalle.
IN THE TECHBOOTH, Arturo Kollberg licked his lips and rubbed his hands together. Not only was every first-hander berth filled, he had already fielded overnight requests from the Studios in New York, London, Seoul, and New Delhi for satellite simulcasts.
This Adventure had taken on a life of its own, before Caine could even enter the Studio. This would be bigger than he’d dreamed. While techs throughout the Studio ran down their flat-voiced checklists, Kollberg hummed to himself and imagined the titles he might attach to this. Against the Empire? No, too common. Perhaps Seven Days in Ankhana—but that would only work if Pallas lived that long. For Love of Pallas Ril—now that, that had a nice ring to it, in an old-fashioned, slightly overripe sort of way.
The smile this brought was still on his lips as a tech’s colorless monotone reported that the satellite links checked out perfectly. He pushed himself to his feet and headed for the green room.
IN HIS PRIVATE box, Businessman Marc Vilo gave one last sidelong glance at Shermaya Dole—of the Leisure Doles of Kauai, the phrase rolled warmly inside his head—at her torso, at least. Her head was already concealed beneath the induction helmet, and her hips were covered by the privacy shield of the simichair’s comfort hookups. He’d decided she was really very attractive, in a fleshy sort of way, and he figured on tearing off a piece of that before the two of them left his box. He’d gotten a tremendous amount of ass in this room; it almost never failed—first-handing Caine always made them horny. A little jazz, a little jizz, and she just might sponsor him on an upcaste to Leisure. He smiled as he pulled down his own induction helmet.
OUTSIDE, THE MURMUR of the undercaste mob was joined by the low-voiced growl of the long black ground-effect limo that swung up the curving drive. The murmur rose, peaking toward orgasm as Security pressed the mob back from the gate, clearing a path. The limo settled, and the crowd sighed. Actors almost always flew directly in to the Studio’s landing pad; they almost always dodged the crowds and hurried directly from the landing pad to the Studio’s green room; almost all of them did.
Every person in the crowd knew his story, the story of the street kid from the Mission District. He was one of them—they believed—and he never forgot where he came from, he never forgot his people, as the Studio marketing flacks relentlessly reminded them. The Studio chauffeur sprang from the front, but the passenger door of the limo opened before he could get his hand there; Laborers open their own doors. The crowd held its breath as Caine climbed into view.
He stood beside the limousine, his back to the gate, surveying the crowd in its sudden silence. They saw what they believed to be lines of worry in his face; many of them nudged each other to point out what seemed to be added grey in his hair and beard.
His stillness held them, and the moment stretched until even the coupes of the last arriving Leisurefolk seemed to pause in their swooping flight. Then his back straightened and his eyes flashed; his teeth gleamed through a smile that held neither joy nor humor.
He slowly raised his knotted fist to them in a gesture older than the Colosseum of Rome.
CAINE STRODE INTO the gaping maw of the gate, and its iron jaws clanged shut behind him.
God’s bloody balls, he thought as he walked toward the main doors. I hate that shit.
At the Overworld-normal vault, similar to but vastly larger than the one at the Abbey, he was issued the six silver coins that were Caine’s cash reserve.
Kollberg met him in the green room. Two red-suited secmen stood at attention by the door. “Nice, ah, timing on the crowd out there.”
“About our, hmm, little disagreement last night—I understand that you’re under a great deal of stress. As far as the subscribers, well, we’ll wait and see, shall we? If it doesn’t turn out to be a, mm, problem, we can forget all about it.”
Caine looked at the pair of secmen, their faces masked by the smoked shields of their helmets. “Yeah. I can see that you’ve forgotten already.”
Kollberg harrumphed nervously. “Just a last-minute note or two. Feel free to investigate Pallas’ disappearance a little before you go after Ma’elKoth, to make it look good. No one is to know your actual mission. And, ah—” He coughed into his hand. “—about Lamorak. If he’s not dead—if, for example, he was captured—you are under no circumstances to attempt a rescue.”
“I’m sure Karl appreciates your concern.”
“Think about it from our point of view. You are a vastly more bankable star; it would be frankly, ah, silly to endanger yourself for the sake of a man whose audiences have been dropping for three years, and they were never large to begin with. However, if you have an opportunity to recover his thoughtmitter without, ah, undue risk, go ahead. We’re all interested to find out how the Long Form works, and you’d be in line for a percentage of its cube rentals.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” He pointed at the clock. “Five minutes.”
“Oh, yes, well, mm, break a leg.”
He nodded. “Probably several.”
IN THE CAVEA, the lights dimmed and the mountain scene of the helmet test pattern faded from the techs’ screens. A soundless shadow passed through the ranks of reclining firsthand berths, the figures they held made faceless by the blank ceramic shields of the induction helmets. The shadow mounted the steps of the ziggurat transfer platform and crossed to its geometric center. The massive overhead bank of the stage lights known as sunbeams flared to life, perfectly framed to the platform’s edge.
Caine stood, motionless, in the stark white glare.
ONCE AGAIN IN the techbooth, Arturo Kollberg moistened his already-wet lips. My masterpiece, he thought. “Engage thought-mitter.”
A tech stroked a sensor, and the wide, domed screen at one end of the techbooth flickered on, showing the rising rows of firsthand berths through Caine’s eyes.
Another tech frowned at his monitor and reported an unusually high number of adrenal reactions to the sensory-deprivation sequence. Kollberg himself adjusted the neurochem feed and then thumbed the microphone sensor.
“Leisurefolk and Investors,” he intoned, his words echoing through the Cavea and into the aural sensors of induction helmets around the world, “Businessfolk, Ladies and Gentlemen. I am Administrator Arturo Kollberg, Chairman of the San Francisco Studio. On behalf of the entire Studio System, I welcome you to the birth of this extraordinary Adventure. And now—brought to you by Vilo Intercontinental, We Carry the World for You—I give you the Blade of Tyshalle, the Right Hand of Death Himself . . .”
With his own hand, Kollberg stabbed the switch that fed the holoview from the Cavea into thousands of induction helmets. The sigh that went up was like the first breath of a hurricane. Kollberg flicked the mike to inactive.
Beneath the Studio the powerplant hummed. Techs glared at readouts with total concentration. “Established. We’ve got an alley in the Warrens. Clear.”
“Good. Whenever he’s ready, then.” Kollberg patted the tech on the shoulder and left the booth, heading for his own box.
ON THE TRANSFER platform, Caine stood with the focused stillness that implies the capacity for instant violence. He held this stillness for a long breath before he spoke.
“I don’t have any high words for you,” he said slowly. “She’s my wife, that’s all. I’m going to hunt down any bastard who even thought about doing her harm, and I’m gonna hurt him till he dies like a dog in the street. I hope you have fun.”
His hands folded into fists of stone. “I know I will.”
He lifted his eyes to the glass panel that fronted the techbooth high above.
ARTURO KOLLBERG SNUGGED his head against the gelpack in his simichair. The helmet automatically covered his head, and the preset adjustment instantly matched his field patterns. He breathed out a long sigh of perfect contentment.
He honestly believed he was going to enjoy this.
AN ALLEY TAKES shape around me. Daylight. Smells—heavy spice, curry and green chilies, water-soaked charcoal, dung, rotting flesh . . . To my left there’s a weather-bleached wooden bin against the wall, piled high with body parts that are mostly human, some ogrillo or troll: rat-chewed legs, arms with fingerless hands, sections of rib or pelvis: leftover scraps from the business alongside, the Zombie Rent-to-Own. I know this alley; I’m in the Warrens, near the Kingdom of Cant’s border with the Face.
I should say, near where the border was, the last time I was in town, almost two years ago. The politics of territory in the Warrens are fluid, to say the least; in the absence of any outright turf wars between the various and several Warrengangs, borders are even more imaginary here than they are in the wider world. Borders in the Warrens are mainly an expression of where, street to street and house to house, members of a particular Warrengang can do business without getting themselves killed by the neighboring gang.
Which isn’t so different, really, from the wider world with its nations and principalities, treaties and surveyors. We’re honest about it, here; that’s all.
An enormous slack-jawed dog, filthy brown coat patched with mange, creeps tentatively toward me, keeping to the morning shadows along the wall. I step politely back to let it pass; damn Warrendogs carry diseases I haven’t even heard of. It looks me over with its one good eye—the other’s webbed with milky cataract—while it considers its options.
My fingers tingle with adrenaline as I raise my fists.
This is the best thing about being Caine, by far the best: this almost sexual rush of perfect confidence, the conviction that I’m the toughest kid on the block. On any block.
“You want a piece of this, pooch?” I say, showing my teeth. “Come and get it, you wormy sack of shit.”
I speak in Westerling without hesitation; the Studio-conditioned blocks on my voice wouldn’t let me speak English even if I wanted to.
The dog decides I’m too much trouble and passes me by for the easier meal at the used-parts bin. Big damn dog, shoulder as high as my ribcage. The severed arms and legs in the bin squirm and press themselves blindly away in their imitation of life as the dog roots into them. A low moaning comes from deep within the pile; some lazy mucker must have left a head attached to a torso. Or maybe there’s a live one in there—a bum snuggled in for the warmth of the decaying flesh around him, or a victim of one of the Warrens’ countless daily muggings. I chuckle, and shrug.
I stroll out of the alley toward the heart of the Kingdom of Cant, into the bazaar that surrounds the ancient, crumbling hulk of the Brass Stadium. The sun is brighter here—a richer yellow—and the sky is more deeply blue; the clouds are more full and whiter, and the breeze that pushes them carries a faint undernote of green and growing things. It’s a beautiful day; I can barely whiff the shit trodden into the well-churned muck that passes for a street, and the flies, swarming in blue-shimmering thunderheads over the heaps of random trash, sparkle like gemstones.
I weave between the pushcarts and the tentstalls, smilingly refusing steaming chunks of river trout and nets of fruit cunningly displayed to hide the wormtracks and blotches of mold, ignoring vendors of charms and amulets, avoiding rug dealers and pot sellers. This is my ground; I worked this city and the surrounding provinces for the first ten years of my career.
On walls, here and there, I see the Simon Jester graffito, very much as it was described in the book Shanna stole it from: an oval for a face, a stylized pair of devil’s horns, and a simple curved line to make his crooked grin.
None of the beggars look familiar, and I don’t see any Knights; where the fuck is everybody? I stop at a stall half-shadowed by the towering, smoke-etched limestone curve of the stadium wall.
The sweating vendor bends over the handle of a spit that holds legs of mutton over a bed of red-black coals. “Leg of lamb, hot mutton,” he calls dispiritedly. “Fresh this morning, worm free. Leg of lamb—”
“Hey, Lum,” I say. “You look a little down this morning. Something wrong?”
He looks at me, and the heatflush drains out of his face. A second or two later he remembers to try to smile, but it doesn’t last.
“Caine?” His voice squeaks a little. “I don’t know nothin’ about it, Caine. Swear on my balls, I don’t!”
I reach into the stall and casually hook one of the cooling shanks that hang from the guy ropes. “You don’t know nothin’about what?”
He leans toward me and lowers his voice. “Don’t play with me, here, Caine . . . My woman’s got the fever, y’know, and my boy—Terl, you remember?—he’s off with the Dungers, could be dead, I don’t know.” He’s trembling now, casting furtive glances at my expressionless eyes. “I can’t take any more trouble right now, all right? I don’t know you, I haven’t seen you, all right? Just walk.”
“Well,” I say flatly. “Aren’t you friendly?”
“Please, Caine, I swear—” He flicks sweaty glances at the oblivious crowd around us. “If you get taken, I don’t want you thinkin’it was me turned you in.”
“Taken,” I murmur. Well, well, well. I bite a chunk out of the mutton. It’s tough as an old boot. I chew on it to give myself time to think this over, and before I can swallow it I feel someone coming up too close behind my left shoulder.
“Trouble, Lum?” the someone says. “This guy giving you hard times?”
Lum shakes his head, wide-eyed. I’ve got the newcomer in my peripheral vision now: black scuffed boots, red cotton breeches, the bottom edge of a knee-length chain shirt painted black, and a scarred but young-looking hand resting on the hilt of a scabbarded broadsword. One of the Knights of Cant. Finally. He’ll have a partner nearby—they always travel in pairs.
I tongue the mutton into my cheek and say, “Just passing time. Don’t get pissy.”
The Knight grunts a laugh. “That’s a kinda fresh answer, there, dinky. I’m gonna have to levy an insolence tax. Five nobles. Pay up.”
I wink at Lum, then spin like I’m delivering a backfist. The mutton shank catches the Knight behind the ear and bends him over. I forehand the meat into his nose; blood spurts, and he goes straight and then over backward to measure his length in the mud. Lum gasps and disappears behind his grill, and the thick traffic of passersby transforms into a curious crowd.
I take another bite of mutton while the Knight shakes his head and tries to get up. His blood improves the flavor.
“Here’s a hint, big fella,” I tell him in a friendly way. “Don’t charge what you can’t collect. Makes you look bad. You lose the respect of the crowd.”
His partner charges toward us through the chattering press. I smile and wave to him, and he scabbards his sword.
“Sorry, Caine. New kid. You understand.”
“Not a problem. Tommie, isn’t it? Yeah, from the Underground Tap. How’s business?”
He grins, pleased that I remember him. “Yeah, shit, I’m all right. You know you’re hot?”
“I’m hearing that word. What price?”
I swallow the second chunk of mutton with difficulty. “A lot of money.”
The kid finally gets himself to his feet and is trying to draw. Tommie clouts him on that same swelling ear. “Stop it, y’fool. This here is Caine, all right? He’s an honorary Baron of Cant. Even if you live through drawing on him, which you won’t, His Majesty’d have your balls for lunch.”
The kid decides he’s got better things to do with his hands.
“Speaking of that,” I say, “I need to talk to the King.”
Tommie looks at me, his eyes suddenly clouded. “He’s busy right now.”
He stares into the distance while he imagines various reactions, weighing the King’s anger at being interrupted against the debt the King might still feel he owes me. A bruptly he makes up his mind.
“Hey, Lum? It’s all over,” I say. He pokes his head up from behind the grill, and I toss him one of my silver nobles. I’m not a thief. “Your mutton’s shit, by the way. Keep the change.”
He blinks. “Uh, thanks . . . I guess.”
Tommie leads me off around the curve of the stadium. The kid follows, pinching his nose shut with a crusted handkerchief. We stroll out of the bazaar and into the narrow winding alleyways that give the Warrens its name. I can get only the most occasional glimpse of the sun, but I don’t need it to know what direction we’re going: toward the triple border of the Kingdom, the Face, and the Rathole.
The real business in the Warrens takes place in the heart of each gang’s turf; the borders are too vulnerable, too susceptible to suddenly lethal accidents and casual arson. Each border comprises at least a couple of blocks of no-man’s-land, sometimes five or six, whose unfortunate residents are usually forced to pay off both sides. The triple borders—there are four of them; the Kingdom of Cant holds the center of the Warrens, around the stadium—are the poorest patches of bottom-feeding scum in the poorest part of Ankhana. Often the only shelter is the shell of a burned-out tenement. Many of the residents sleep on the street.
I like it here. It reminds me of home.
Tommie stops four paces from the sun-washed mouth of the alley we’ve been following for a few minutes now. “This is as far as I can go.” He nods out toward the border, then indicates his chainmail, painted black with the silvered borders of the Knights of Cant. “The kid and me, we’re in colors. His Majesty’s running a game out there today, and we’d blunt the hook.”
I nod my understanding. “Where is he?”
“You can’t see him from here. You know the alley between the Working Dead and where Fader’s Whores used to be?”
“Used to?” A twinge of nostalgia—I’ve spent some happy hours at Fader’s. “What happened to Fader?”
“She was entertaining too many Rats,” Tommie says with a shrug. “She had a fire.”
Life in the big city. “All right,” I say. “I’ll tell His Majesty you took good care of me.”
“You’re straight, Baron. Thanks.” Tommie nudges his kid partner with a sharp elbow and gives him a Get with it, idiot look.
The kid snorts blood and mumbles, “Thanks, uh, for not killing me, Cai—uh, Baron.”
I leave them there and walk out into the sunlight.
The buildings that were once in the midst of this border have burned to low-sloping mounds of rubble, leaving a wide-open area of breeze and sun. A couple of places around the plazalike clearing hold lounging Rats in their colors of shit: brown and yellow. That’s not unusual—this is their border, after all. A few of the shuffling street-people might be Rats as well, covert.
There’s a considerable traffic through here: men with sharp prods driving roped-together strings of zombies from the Working Dead, which is the only thriving business for blocks around. I guess the owners want to be close to their source of supply. The zombies don’t bother me, with their grey-leather skin and filmed-over eyes. Our Workers are worse, really; with the zombies, you can’t see the buried spark of life—intelligence, will, whatever—that makes Workers so tragically creepy.
No sign of any Subjects, although you can never really tell. Any of these loafers who are taking the sun, any of these winos in this alley or the sleepy-faced rith smokers on that stoop, any could be Subjects of Cant. I can’t count on recognizing them—I’ve been out of Ankhana for a while.
The alley Tommie directed me to is full of garbage—food scraps, rotting clothes, bits of broken furniture—and rats, the four-legged kind. There’s a leper lying on a makeshift bed of rags, bloody pus draining from open sores into his ragged patches of yellowed grey beard. I squint at him.
He says, “For fuck’s sake, Caine, get off the street, you stick out like a fucking boil on my ass.”
“Hey, Majesty,” I say as I drift casually into the alley. “How’s business?”
The King of Cant’s ravaged face splits open into a grin of unalloyed joy, and mine answers him. He’s just about my best friend on Overworld. On any world. “Caine, you son of a bitch! How’d you find me?”
I dig down behind his pile of rags and settle in, my back against the wall. “Your boy Tommie sent me over. He’s a good man. Hey, those are some killer sores.”
“You like ’em? They’re yours. Lamp oil with candle wax and bread dough, chicken blood half curdled with willow bark to keep it from clotting, and some pine gum to hold them on. Look nice, but they stink like a bastard. What brings you to Ankhana, you shit? Who are you killing?”
I shake my head and give him a serious look. “It’s personal, this time. I’m looking for—”
“You know there’s an Imperial warrant on you?”
“Yeah yeah yeah, I heard. Listen, I need to find Pallas Ril.”
He frowns. “Pallas?” he says slowly, then he suddenly brightens. “Hey, look there, the boot’s about to drop.” He waves a rag-wrapped hand toward the plaza.
“Majesty, this is important,” I begin, but my eyes follow his gesture in time to see a loose zombie shuffle up to one of the lounging Rats on the far side of the plaza. The Rat gets up to kick the zombie away, and the zombie suddenly moves a lot faster than zombies can really move.
It grabs the Rat and pulls him close, then steps into a shadowed alley mouth like a trick with his favorite whore; when it lets him go the Rat has a bloodstain spreading below his solar plexus. He drops to his knees and then pitches forward onto his face.
A very professional job: if you can rip the heart good on your first stab, you don’t get the messy spray, and the gut-punch that accompanies the stab drives air out of the lungs. He’s dead before he can draw enough breath to shout. As the zombie shuffles off, another man in Rat colors steps out into the dead Rat’s place.
“Smooth, eh?” Majesty chuckles and cups a hand to his ear. “I don’t hear any alarum. Got ’em all.”
He smiles. “I got a tip that Thervin Backbiter is meeting a certain captain of the King’s Eyes in that tenement across the way.”
“You taking him?” Thervin Backbiter is King Rat, the leader of the northwestern rival of the Kingdom of Cant. I know him. I don’t like him. “Hey, long as I’m here, maybe I could do him for you?”
“Thanks,” Majesty says with a grin, “but not this time. I don’t want war with Rats right now—and besides, you’d have to kill the Eye captain too, and nobody needs that kind of trouble. But, y’know, I also don’t want Thervin to climb into bed with the Eyes; the Rats’ve been entirely too frisky lately as it is—if they line up some Imperial backing they’ll be out of control. So instead of killing him, I’m sending a friendly message—all three of his stooges.”
Three dead men equals a friendly message. That’s the kind of math I understand.
“Best part is,” Majesty goes on, “he won’t even know anything’s happened until he comes out of the meeting. That’s when my fake Rats out there’ll give him my regards. He’ll hear the word. ‘If there’s a next time,’y’know?”
“So who gave you the tip? You got an ear in the Eyes, or in the Rats?”
His grin turns smug. “Trade secret, buddy-o. Let’s say times are good in the Kingdom, and leave it at that.”
Huh. If times are all that good, he wouldn’t be hanging his ass out here for on-site supervision, but I let it go. Why waste breath arguing?
“Pallas Ril,” I remind him. “Where is she?”
His eyes go vague on me again. “I hear she’s in town,” he offers.
“I hear that too. That’s why I’m here talking to you. I also hear she’s running a game and some Subjects are playing.”
“I don’t think so. I’d know about it. Pallas and me, maybe we’re not close, exactly, but she would come to me straight for that kind of help, wouldn’t she?”
He gives me a long look, and his voice cools. “You think I wouldn’t tell you?”
“Caine, I’m telling you now, all I know is she’s in town. I seem to recall some report of contact—she talked to one of the boys, or something—but nothing serious.”
“The guy who’s smuggling these poor mopes that Ma’elKoth thinks are Aktiri? How should I know?”
“You lost at least two of your boys about this time yesterday morning, down in Dunger territory by the river. What were they doing there?”
“That’s twice you asked the same stupid question. They were stooging for Simon Jester, and you fucking well know it.”
He sits up suddenly and gives me a hard look. “You’re working, aren’t you? Who’s paying? The Monasteries or the Imperials?”
“Majesty, I swear to you, my only interest in this is finding Pallas Ril.”
“Is that your business? Where is she?”
“But—” He shakes his head and looks honestly confused. “—what does Pallas Ril have to do with Simon Jester? Is she working for him?”
I squint at him without answering. He takes it for a long time, then lowers his face and scratches his head. “All right, shit. I’ve been supporting Simon Jester a little. Those boys, yeah, they were stooging. I mean, what’s the harm? A little jab in Ma’elKoth’s ass, that’s all. But I guess the Cats took them; I don’t think any lived.”
“What’s the next leg on the trip out?”
“When’s the next time Simon Jester should make contact?”
“I don’t know.” His frown deepens. “I should know this.”
“All right, listen.” I scratch my head in furious exasperation, rub my eyes, and ask, “How’d you get into this in the first place? Did you meet, ah, Simon Jester . . . in person? Who came to you?”
Slowly, very slowly, he shakes his head, and his frown clears into something like awe. “I don’t remember . . .”
His expression instantly congeals into stony belligerence. “Don’t try and make it my problem, Caine. I’ve got too many guys on this street, you’ll never—”
“Relax.” At least I’m starting to get a handle on how that damned spell works. Funny that it doesn’t seem to work on me. “I believe you.”
Majesty now looks honestly disturbed, and more than a little frightened. “Are you ever gonna tell me what’s going on? I mean shit, Caine, this is creepy! Am I losing it? I should know this shit.
It’s some kind of magick, isn’t it—somebody fucking hexed me, is what happened, I’m thinking.”
“I’m hexed? That’s what you’re telling me? I’ll fucking kill them.”
“You say. Nobody puts magick on me, Caine. Nobody. Don’t they know I’ll kill them? Do these fumbledicks have any clue who they’re fucking, here? I’ve got Abbal Paslava the freaking Spellbinder—he’ll do these bastards till their dicks stick up their own assholes and they fuck themselves with every step!”
I hold up a hand to cut him off. “How’s our politics with the Faces, these days?”
“Not so good,” he says, subsiding. “Why?”
“Hamman’s got the best connections into the palace. I have to talk to him.”
“You’ll need a damn loud voice. He’s been dead a year.”
“You’re kidding! Fat Hamman? I thought he was indestructible.”
“Yeah, so did he. Nobody knows who took him, but the smart money’s on the new leader of the Faces—that elf bitch from the Exotic Love in Alientown. Kierendal.”
“Yeah, it’s bad enough to have to deal with a lapper, but a sub? Running a Warrengang? She’s bringing in all kinds of subs—elves, dwarves, sprites, the works. The Faces practically own Alientown, now. She moved all the fittings from Hamman’s old place, the Happy Miser, over into Exotic Love; it’s the top casino in the Empire, now. Calls it Alien Games. And she is no one to screw with, no pun intended. Word is, she’s got her hooks on Hamman’s spellbook, and you know what elves are like—they fucking invented magick. Hey, is she mixed in this? Is that mothersucking dyke the one who put magick on me?”
He shrugs. “Good as Hamman’s, maybe better. He only got the gamblers, mostly. She gets the gamblers, the addicts, and the perverts who like to wet their wicks in a subhole. Hey, you wouldn’t want to kill her for me, would you? I’d make it worth your trouble.”
I shake my head. “Not today. Listen, I gotta go. I’ll be in touch.”
“What, already? It’s been two years—you can’t catch up a little?”
“Sorry. I’m on a deadline. And, hey, if I’m as hot as all that—you got a spare cloak, or a cowled robe or something? Something that’ll get me as far as Alientown without being tagged?”
He points with his thumb. “Take mine. It’s behind that broken cabinet. Y’know, it’d help a lot if you’d just shave. Without that beard, you’d be a different man.”
“That’s just it. Sometimes I need to be me.”
He shrugs. I get the robe and shrug into it, and pull the cowl up to shade my face.
Majesty extends his hand; I take it. He says, “You know my house is open to you. Come by after the Miracle, any night. You can stay with me.”
I stroll off, whistling like a malingering Laborer until I’m out of the game field; then my face sets and I start to move with some serious speed. So this is going to be a little tougher than I’d thought; so what? Here in Ankhana, it’s impossible to be depressed.
The soft west wind blows the smoke and stench of the Warrens off behind me as I head out of the borderlands toward the Face, and the sun warms the light cloth over the leather on my back. Whores and beggars look me over as I trot past, maybe sizing me for a lift or a strongarm, but I’m moving too fast; I’m gone before they can make up their minds. I ignore them.
The fire-gutted rubble of a building provides a shortcut into the Face, the section of the Warrens that borders Ankhana proper and was once the home ground of Hamman and his Faces; a filthy man dressed in scorched rags snarls at me from under a tarpaulin stretched between beams that are tumbled like cornstalks after harvest. Farther back in the shadow behind him a dull-eyed woman cradles a silent infant at her sagging, empty breast. I smile and shrug an apology for intruding in their home and move on.
I’m comfortable here, more easy in my heart than any place I’ve been since I was eight years old. Maybe after I find Pallas, I’ll have a couple of days to enjoy it.
The warming sun raises a slight prickle of sweat. I itch all over. I smell like a goat.
KIERENDAL THE FIRST Face looked up briefly from her book at the coded knock on her apartment’s outer door. Tup’s tiny doll-sized hands continued to dig into the cords of her shoulders and neck. “Don’t get up,” Tup’s whistling voice fluted in her ear. “Zakke will get it.”
“That will be Pischu,” Kierendal sighed. He’d never intrude, lacking an emergency.
“Tell him to go away.” Tup now added lips to fingers on the nape of Kierendal’s neck and drew warm shivers up from the base of her spine.
“Mm, stop.” Kierendal reached back over her shoulder and drew the lovely little treetopper forward; Tup rode the palm of Kierendal’s hand as though bareback on a horse. Though only twenty inches tall, Tup was a marvel of feminine perfection; perfect breasts that need never fear the pull of gravity, flawless skin, golden hair that seemed to shine with a light of its own. She might have been a beautiful human, were it not for her height, and the large translucent wings that were folded behind her, and the back-folding thumb of each foot that enabled her race to perch. And charming, too, as well as incredibly responsive; her nipples hardened as Kierendal watched. She squirmed in a deeply suggestive way and wrapped her trim and lovely ankles around Kierendal’s forearm.
“No time to play now, sweetling. Business calls. Fly along—and get dressed. Pischu likes his women tiny, and we don’t want to put ideas in his head.”
“Oh, you’re terrible.” Tup giggled. She spread her wings and flew into the gloom of an inner chamber, silent as an owl.
Pischu coughed from the doorway. “Janner’s cheating again.”
Kierendal slowly and lovingly stroked shut the manskin cover of her massive book, and only then lifted her steel-colored eyes to meet the gaze of the daytime floor boss of Alien Games. The pupils in those eyes slitted vertically: nighthunter eyes.
Pischu coughed again and suddenly looked away; Kierendal, as was her habit when studying, reclined nude on a vast expanse of piled silken cushions. Pischu was one of only three Faces who were allowed within her chambers, but this privilege didn’t ease the man’s discomfort. Kierendal enjoyed it; that discomfort lent an attractive lemony tint to the otherwise bland earth-tones of Pischu’s Shell. Like all of her people, the First Folk, she never needed to concentrate to summon mindview; it was simply another sense, like smell or taste.
With heavy brocade curtains drawn closed over the wide windows, her chambers were lit only by artfully placed lamps that painted rose highlights into her spun-silver hair, and across her lead-white skin.
She was tall even for a female of the First Folk, who commonly outgrew their males, and so lean that the articulation of her hip joint could be seen through the swell of her ass as she stretched her endless legs behind her. She lifted herself up on one elbow to expose the nipples of her nearly absent breasts; she’d painted her nipples silver this morning to match her intricately coiled hair. The money-colored flash caught Pischu’s eyes, and his face reddened while the lemon shade in his Shell deepened sharply.
“How bad today?” she asked in a voice husky and languid enough to make Pischu wince.
“Worse than usual. He’s gumming the dice, and he’s so damned clumsy! Two of our . . . guests . . . have already tipped, and I had to toss them to stop a fight.”
“No. Both losers, but low rent. They’re no loss, but Berne just came in.”
“Berne?” Her thin lips, the color of calf liver, drew back enough to expose her overlong and oversharp canines. If that maniac caught Janner gumming . . .
Berne liked the dice and was a bad loser from the first roll. If he found someone to blame for it, Janner’s head would be rolling across the floor in the fraction of a second it took Berne to draw. And Janner was the proprietor of Ankhanan Muckers and Manure, one of Kierendal’s more profitable partnerships.
“I’ll deal with it. Is Berne in the pit yet?”
“Not yet, but it won’t be long. He’s at the Crystal Bar, chatting on Gala. He still thinks one of these days he’ll get her for free.”
“If he does, he’ll be disappointed.” Kierendal rose and stretched, arching her back. “Actual passion interferes with her technique. Zakke?”
Her stonebender houseboy instantly appeared in the doorway, all broad shoulders and neatly shaved weak chin; he’d been eavesdropping, as usual—it was part of his job. “Yes, Kierendal?”
“Tell the kitchen I’ll be wanting brunch. Whatever they have that’s alive—oysters will do. And a fresh comb of honey—Tup will be joining me, I think.” As she spoke, a mist swirled and coalesced around her, draping like cloth from her bony arms.
Zakke nodded and ticked his fingers, making mental notes. He was a sweet boy, really, if not too bright. And he was very strong and loyal; Kierendal decided impulsively on the spot to finally let him grow in his traditional stonebender beard to cover that unfortunate chin.
Now she stood motionless and built her image; it was a simple process, especially now—the page of Hamman’s book she’d studied that very morning had provided an interesting twist in substantiating a Fantasy. She opened her Shell to the Flow and drew it around her as a lesser woman might draw silk. It wrapped her lovingly, gently concealing, enveloping, coloring the air in which she stood with sheer and translucent pastel.
While her hands pulled the mist into the apparent solidity of cloth, they also stroked her body into the shape she desired. As she did this, her coiled metallic hair seemed to unbind itself and flow in beautiful curls—now definitely golden—about shoulders that had a touch of human color to them now, and a soft roundness that matched the breasts she had massaged into a swelling feminine curve.
When the process was complete, she still appeared exotic—still obviously of the First Folk, unquestionably primal, with the slant of her now violet eyes and the pronounced points at the tips of her ears—but there was a gentle quality of innocence in the fullness of her lips, a softer texture to her gold-touched cheeks, a sweet arc to her hip that would catch at the heart of any man. She now hid behind a face that had never been touched by the frown of thought.
She smiled as she altered the drape of her illusionary clothing with a twist of her mind and a hand that followed it. It would amuse her to walk naked among her unsuspecting staff and clientele. And it would amuse her even more that Pischu would have to follow her, knowing she was naked.
“Well. Let us see if we can convince Lucky Janner that this is not his lucky day.”
Zakke opened the door; Pischu stepped respectfully aside. After only a short walk down two flights of stairs and along a guarded corridor, Kierendal entered her kingdom.
Alien Games was a fairyland of vice. Rails of gleaming brass surrounded the gaming pits that dimpled the floor. Three wide steps of glistening purple-veined marble circled each pit like a bull’s-eye. Swivel-hipped girls and flat-bellied boys—all in scant clothing revealing their astonishing grace and beauty—ferried trays of cocktails and various other intoxicants over carpets of crushed red velvet. These servers, human and primal, were no less intoxicating than the contents of their trays, and no less available—and in some cases, substantially less expensive. Five huge crystal chandeliers held no candles but radiated a soothing amber light that seemed to have no definite source. Even now, well before noon, the gaming pits were largely filled with crowds of sweating men and women watching the tumble of dice or flip of cards with the bloodshot concentration of hungover hawks.
Those clients not engaged in gambling, or in drinking themselves blind at one of the seven bars, all watched the show. Up on the narrow thrust stage that projected above the gaming floor, an apparently human female with a glorious spray of raven hair took well-acted pleasure from a pair of male treetoppers. Nearing the end of this particular performance, she was already nude and bathed in sweat, trembling with feigned passion, while the treetoppers swirled around her on the blurs of their diaphanous wings like oversize hummingbirds. They carried silken cords and trailed them across her body—binding and unbinding her, slithering knotted silk over the translucent purity of her flesh.
This “girl” was one of Kierendal’s best performers; even now, men and women both were rising from their seats to take the hands of nearby whores. Kierendal watched the show for a moment, smiling to herself and shaking her head; if only those guests who’d become so aroused in watching her knew that she was actually a fifty-year-old ogrillo bitch with flaccid dugs and finger-sized warts all over her body.
Similarly, the purple-veined marble was in truth splintered pine, weathered to the color of dirt; the gleaming brass was actually rusty cast iron, and the service staff were pox-raddled and dull eyed, most of them broken-down ex-whores.
All this illusion stirred the Flow into fantastic whirls of energy, but did not deplete it; it all was powered by a single shiny black griffinstone no larger than the first joint of Kierendal’s thumb—which, she reminded herself, she’d need to replace later this month.
Kierendal paused in the doorway long enough to be joined by her three overt guards—massive ogres with unfiled tusks, wearing light chainmail painted with the scarlet and brass motif of the house and carrying wickedly spiked morningstars slung at their waists. All of Alien Games’overt security staff were ogres, or their nocturnal cousins, trolls; they were uniformly stupid, but huge and terrifically strong—and the sure knowledge that troublemakers would not only be killed but eaten helped Kierendal maintain an orderly business. She had never been robbed.
The overwhelming menace of the ogres also allowed her to let her guests go armed, as disagreements rarely became fatal before the ogres could break them up. And letting men keep their swords improved the whoring; men are universally friskier when they have their steel penises belted at their sides.
She extended her Shell and twitched the Flow in currents toward three of her coverts—two humans and one fey who were flawlessly impersonating innocent guests. The fey and one human looked up at what they perceived as her whisper in their ear. At the Crystal Bar, she sent. The one in the slashed-velvet doublet and shoulder-draw sword is Berne. Get close and stick there. She sent the other human to stand behind Lucky Janner in the bones pit.
Even as her coverts approached, Berne pushed himself away from the bar, giving up on Gala for now; he strode toward the bones pit, the diagonally shoulder-slung scabbard that held a long straight blade slapping at his back. The coverts were too experienced to announce themselves by a sudden change of direction, and so Kierendal hurried to reach the pit first, ogres stomping at her heels.
Janner, the deep, slanting scar across his nose glowing white against a face flushed with victory, grinned fiercely at Kierendal as she approached.
“I’b habing a gread day, Kier! Gread! Can’d belieb id!” Due to the hatchet wound that had destroyed his sinuses, Lucky Janner perpetually sounded like a man with a severe head cold.
Kierendal modulated her voice into the aristocratic tones she used for guest contact. “Of course we are very pleased at your success, Janner. Today, your nickname is well deserved. Can I perhaps tear you away from the table for a minute? Business of mutual interest . . . ?”
“Innda minnid. I’b onnda roll.”
Kierendal watched Janner’s clumsy gumming of the dice with distaste. What in the world was he using? Snot?
Berne glided down the steps into the pit just as Janner made his point. A cold ball gathered in Kierendal’s stomach; Berne walked with the loose-limbed dangerous grace of a puma, and his pale eyes had the fixed reptilian stare of a reflexive killer. His Shell flickered scarlet and white with barely repressed violence.
He’d been created Count only a few months before, but Kierendal’s sources informed her that he was one of the new Emperor’s closest confidants—some reports claimed he was Ma’elKoth’s personal assassin—and he was known to command the Grey Cats. Every time she looked at him, Kierendal well believed the tale that Berne had received Monastic training—his instinctive weight-forward balance and perfect kinesthetic awareness were both convincing and unsettling. His swordplay was already legendary: he never wore armor in battle or duel, depending solely on his blade-skills for defense.
Whatever the truth about him might be, he was unquestionably one of the most dangerous men in the Empire. It was widely said that no one had ever lived to cross him twice.
He nodded expressionlessly to Kierendal as he slid into a place at the table; he didn’t spare the ogres even a glance. He laid a stack of royals against Janner’s next throw.
“Play or pass, buttface. Let’s go.”
“Buddface . . . ?” The color that rose up Janner’s neck was a deeper scarlet than the flush of victory.
“Has a crack in it, no?” Berne laughed. He was always his own best audience. “Tell you, though, if my butt was that ugly I’d never get laid again—be ashamed to take my pants off.” Now the two coverts were finally coming down the steps behind him, much to Kierendal’s relief.
“Oh, comb ond,” Janner said, a wild look in his eyes, “if your boyfriend realdy loved you, he’d make allowances . . .”
Other men around the table snickered into their hands, none of them foolish enough to laugh openly. Berne’s face froze. He stepped back from the table, his left hand drifting up toward the hand-and-a-half sword hilt above his right shoulder. Janner squared off, grasping the hilt of the shortsword at his belt. Berne’s Shell had gone crimson—Janner might be dead in a heartbeat.
“Gentlemen.” Kierendal gestured and stepped smoothly between them. Only the barest flicker of Berne’s eyes betrayed the fact that the two coverts at his back each now held the point of a dagger against his kidneys.
“Berne, Lucky Janner is an honored guest, as well as a personal friend. You will not kill him within my establishment.” Berne’s only reply was to rake the illusionary curves of her body with his eyes, from knees to neck, with slow and deliberate insult. Mm, she thought. So that’s how it is. All right. She turned to Janner.
“As for you,” she said in her most scathing tone, “if you must give your life simply to score a point off this man, at least be witty enough that I’ll get a laugh when I repeat it in your eulogy.”
Janner began to protest; Kierendal ignored him. A sudden clatter near the street door drew her eyes. One of the new Faces, a stone-bender female she’d recruited since taking over and moving operations to Alientown, had come sprinting up to the fey who worked in the coat check. With no more than a thought, Kierendal extended a tendril of her Shell to touch his, drawing only enough Flow to power the effect, and shifted her consciousness to his body so she could see and hear the stonebender. He expressionlessly acknowledged her presence with a welcoming swirl of Flow.
The stonebender’s mouth was painted with rich crimson blood that still trickled from her nose, which looked broken. Her neatly trimmed goatee was caked with clots. Her Westerling was thick with the accent of the Gods’ Teeth. “. . . askink me which were Kierendal’s chamber, which door, which winder. He wanted se knock codes . . . he t’ought I was unconscious, so he left and I ran, I ran . . .”
“All right, it’s all right,” the fey said soothingly, his slim hands on her powerful shoulders. “Who was he? Can you describe him?”
Here the Faces’ training paid off; she had memorized her attacker’s appearance even while she was being interrogated and beaten. “Half again a foot taller san me. Straight black hair, shot grey at temples. Dark skin, black eyes, mustache and jawline beard. Broken nose, wis a slantwise scar. And fast. Faster san I’ve ever seen. He had knives, but he used his fists.”
Kierendal thought, that sounds like Caine, and slowly it dawned on her that it could be Caine. She’d heard about the sudden Imperial bounty on his head, had suspected that he must have been in town—and only then did she connect the thoughts that swirled around her.
With a gasp she found herself back within her own head; her knees were weak and her bowels loose. Panic-thoughts yammered a stunning babble: Who could have hired him? The Imperials? No, they would have sent the Cats for her. The Monasteries, Caine usually worked for the Monasteries, but she had done nothing to attract their lethal disfavor—had she? No, it must be—ah, it was the King of fucking Cant! That bastard! Wasn’t Caine supposed to be hooked into the Subjects? But why? Why now? Or was it the Monasteries after all? Had she told one too many truths about Ma’elKoth?
Stern mental discipline swiftly mastered her panic; she had more immediate issues with which to deal. First things first.
Kierendal prided herself on her ability to think and act in an organized fashion in the midst of a crisis. In only the time it took to breathe deeply in and slowly out again, she had sketched out the rudiments of a plan of defense. She once again reached into the Flow and established contact with the fey in coat check.
In minutes Alien Games would be surrounded, outside, by an invisible army of Faces in teams of three, one member of each three either primal or treetopper for swiftness of communication. The pissoir in the street outside would be covered inside and out, as well as the shaft that sank below it into the limestone caves that underlay the city. The roofs of the surrounding buildings would be scattered with Faces either present or in clear line-of-fire with loaded crossbows. Every combat-capable staff member within the casino would be alerted, and pairs of guards would be placed in every corridor in plain sight of each other. She’d already rejected the idea of calling the Constabulary; worth more than the two-hundred-royal reward would be the knowledge of who wanted her dead badly enough to hire Caine. The coat-check fey met her eyes across the room and nodded his acknowledgment.
She sent: “Use her story for the current description. Pass it through the ranks. Keep me informed. I’ll be in my apartment; use the five-code when you knock. Now move!”
He moved. She let the link dissipate and returned her attention to the immediate events here in the bones pit.
Janner was still talking. She had no idea what he’d said, and less interest. She flicked a finger at the ogre who stood near her right shoulder, and he clamped his massively taloned hands around Janner’s arms and lifted the struggling little man off the floor. “Hey! Hey—!”
“You’re done for the day. Get him out of the pit.”
The ogre hoisted Janner and ponderously carried him up the steps onto the main floor. Kierendal paced beside him.
“I don’t have time to handjob your wounded feelings,” she said, low enough that Berne wouldn’t overhear. “Have a drink at the bar. Grab a bite in the dining room. My treat. Just watch your mouth and stay away from Berne.”
“No, you can’t. Shut up.” She reached up, took his chin in her surprisingly strong hand, and dug her fingernails into his cheeks. “And stay away from the dice pit until you learn to cheat properly, you stupid shit.” She waved a hand, and the ogre let Janner go with a shove that sent him stumbling off toward the Silver Bar.
Berne leaned motionless on the edge of the knucklebones field, wearing his mocking smile. The pair of coverts were still at his back, daggers still pricking his kidneys. “Can I move now, Kierie? Do I stand here all day?”
She made a sound in her throat that was almost a whine of frustration. “Apologies, Count Berne,” she said. With a wave of a hand she instructed the coverts to release him.
He shrugged once, like he was shaking tension out of his shoulders, and then he paced toward her with that hungry-puma walk of his.
“I have to kill him, y’know,” he said easily. “He insulted me, and I’m obliged to pay him out. It’s the, ahh, honor of the nobility. You understand.”
This, at least, she knew precisely how to handle. She took a step to meet him and looked up meltingly into his eyes. “Please, my lord,” she said with her hands resting on his heavily muscled chest, “I would take it as a personal favor if you could let this pass, forgotten.”
His mocking smile took on a twist of contempt as his arms slid around her slim back and he forced his lips down onto hers. His tongue pushed into her mouth, probing with slimy insistence, and she knew well how to pant and squirm as his hand cupped her illusionary breast.
This was insult deeper than the last, but she had once been as good at her former profession as Berne was at his current one; he never suspected how revolting she found him. When his hand slid roughly down between her legs, she released the tactile part of her illusion of clothing. He found his hand pressed directly to the lips of her vagina, while his other felt the smooth and flawless skin of her back.
He stiffened, then lifted his head and stared down at her with moist surprise. The contempt in his eyes now mingled with sudden lust—contempt and lust that seemed to feed on each other so that both grew together.
“You know what?” he said thickly. “I think I like you after all. I’ll do you that favor, this time. Just remember what you owe me.”
She demurely lowered her head to his shoulder. “Oh, you know us elves—” Using the human slur name for her people gave her not the faintest twinge. “—we have long memories. Allow me to sponsor your morning’s recreation. Tallin, five hundred for the Count.”
The click of the tiles as the croupier pushed them across the field drew Berne’s eyes, but then he looked back down into hers. “A difficult choice,” he murmured.
“You’re very gallant,” she said. “Please, enjoy yourself.”
He shrugged. “Another time, then.”
She turned crisply and headed for the service door as Berne returned to the pit and warmed the dice. She felt a certain sense of accomplishment: a bit of quick, efficient lick’n’flick to keep Berne happy and Janner alive? Cheap at twice the price.
But she had no time to enjoy minor victories.
Her ogres were close on her heels in a liquid rustle of chainmail; subtle gestures summoned four coverts and the pair of treetopper showboys, who were now on a break. She stopped in the doorway and spoke in the clipped, decisive tone of a feya accustomed to obedience, repeating the orders she’d sent to the fey in coat check.
“What is it, though?” one of the coverts asked. “Are the Rats coming against us? The Serpents?”
“Worse.” She swallowed through a painfully dry throat. “I think it’s Caine. Now move.”
She rubbed her hands together and found that her palms were damp and her fingers slightly tremulous. A drink, she decided.
That’s what she needed, a drink to steady her nerves and smooth her roiled consciousness, then more time spent in study of the book. She strode upward toward her apartment, taking steps three at a time, wondering urgently if she had time to charge a Shield.
She reached the door of her apartments and knocked lightly, twice and then once again, and waited for Zakke to open the door.
She knocked again: two, one. The intricately silver-inlaid door had no external keyhole, and she herself had laid the wards that prevented it from being magically opened. The lazy shit was probably asleep, and she had no time to waste. She hammered the door with her clenched fist.
“Zakke, you worthless prick!” Her shout resounded in the empty hallway. “If this door isn’t open in ten seconds you are one dead dwarf!”
Finally she heard the rasp of the bolt being drawn. When the door cracked open she stiff-armed it back with a thump and strode into the room, heading straight for her private dry bar next to the huge stone fireplace. The heavy brocade curtains were tightly drawn, and every lamp was dark; the pungent odor of smoldering wicks hung heavily in the gloom. “You were sleeping, you shit! I’ll skin you for this!”
The closing door cut off the last of the dim light from the corridor. Kierendal, nearly blind until her eyes could adjust, slammed her shin into an errant footstool hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. She hopped about on one leg, cursing and trying to keep her balance while holding her throbbing shin with both hands. “And get some light in here!”
The only response was the dry, rasping click of the door bolt locking home.
She stopped. She put her foot down gingerly, testing her weight. There was another smell underlying the thick smolder and the tang of lampblack: old sweat—a sharp, goaty odor of unwashed human.
Kierendal stood motionless, not daring to breathe.
The voice was flat and lethal.
Every joint in her body turned to water.
Kierendal, like any primal, had exceptional night vision and could move as silently as a ghost, and she was in her lair. If this had been anyone but Caine, she might have made a try for him—but he’d been in here who knew how long, he was dark-adapted and probably ready for anything she could do. And from the sound of his voice, he was no more than a long stride away from her.
“Don’t take a deep breath,” he said softly. “If you do, I’ll think you’re about to yell. I might kill you before I realize my mistake.”
“I . . .” she said thinly, breathing only from the top of her chest, “. . . ah, you could have killed me when I came through the door.”
She could see his outline now, a blacker shadow against the black-shadowed wall. Still she could not see his Shell—and this absence terrified her. How was she to know what he intended if she couldn’t read his Shell?
Slowly the glittering points that were his eyes came clear.
She said, “I’ve . . . I know I’ve said some things about Ma’elKoth, but, but I’ve done nothing—nothing that the Monastic Council would want me dead for! Have I? Tell me, you have to tell me! I know the Council supports Ma’elKoth, but, but, they don’t have to kill me . . .”
His response was a dry, hollow chuckle, then: “I can neither confirm nor deny the presence or absence of any policy or viewpoint of the Council of Brothers, or the several and individual members thereof.”
“Then it’s the King of Cant, isn’t it? I know you’re hooked into the Subjects—”
“You have a nice place, here. A lot of knickknacks. Mementos.” From the darkness came a slow scrrt of steel on flint; an amber flame grew from a shoulder-high fist, red-shading a high-cheekboned face that might have been carved from ice. The flame touched the end of a thin cigar—stolen from her desktop humidor, like the lighter.
Now she could see his Shell: it was black, smoke-dark, without any color she could read.
“Caine . . .” Kierendal’s hoarse whisper sounded to her ears uncomfortably like a plea for mercy.
“It was a gift,” she replied, a little stronger now, “from Prince-Regent Toa-Phelathon.”
“I know. Says so right on the side, here.” He touched the flame to the wick of a lamp on a small side table, then turned the lamp down to a bloody emberous glow. “We both know what happened to him, don’t we?”
He pinched the lighter’s wick between his thumb and forefinger, and the flame extinguished with a fading hiss.
She had never given a lot of credence to the rumors that Caine had been involved in Toa-Phelathon’s assassination; it had smelled of an in-palace affair. Now she believed without question. In his presence, it was impossible to doubt.
He pointed to a chair. “Sit down.”
She tucked her hands beneath her thighs. “If you’re not here for me, what do you want?”
He stepped around the sofa, only an arm’s length from her. He crouched before her and stared into her eyes. The silence stretched until she had to consciously restrain herself from babbling just to break it.
She forced herself to silently return his regard; she studied him with the profoundly detailed attention that came of staking her life on her ability to observe.
She found herself comparing him inevitably with Berne: each had made his name and fortune spilling blood for pay. Caine was much smaller, less heavily muscled, and carried an array of knives instead of a sword—but the differences went far deeper than that. Berne had a feral quality, a wildness of lust and dangerous unpredictability that went with the loose and relaxed jointless way he walked and held himself; he was potently, almost fiercely, alive at all times. Caine, too, had a quality of relaxation, but there was nothing loose about it; instead it was stillness, a meditative readiness that seemed to flow out from him and fill the room with capacity for action, as though all around him ghosts of imaginary Caines performed every movement that was possible within the space: every attack, every defense, every leap or flip or roll.
He watched her watch him with concentration that equaled hers, and he was as full of potential violence as a shining blade fresh from the forge. There was the difference, in a nutshell: Berne was a wildcat.
“You done?” he asked quietly. “Don’t let me interrupt.”
Her eyes flicked up to meet his, and she found no humor there.
He said, “I’m looking for Simon Jester.”
The relief that flooded through her unstrung her nearly as much as had her earlier panic; she had to struggle not to laugh out loud.
“You and the King’s Eyes. Not to mention the Grey Cats and the entire Constabulary. What makes you think I know anything?”
He went on as though he hadn’t heard her. “Just about this time yesterday, the Grey Cats ran a game in the Warrens. How’d it come out?”
She licked her lips. “Really, Caine, you can’t imagine that I have sources within the Cats themselves—”
“I ask you again. I’m not a patient man, Kierendal.”
There came the barest whisper of wings, and Caine moved.
He gave no warning of any kind, no hitch of breath, no preparatory tensing of muscle, not even a shift of his eyes. Kierendal had been watching for those signals with seamless concentration, those indicators that any creature gives before violent action. In one instant, he was perfectly motionless; in the next he spun and his hands blurred and a silvery flash sped through the gloom and struck wood with a humming chunnk.
Tup gave a fluting cry of pain and despair—she hung from the lintel of the doorway, Caine’s throwing knife pinned through one wing. A yard-long birdlance of needle-pointed steel slipped from her hands and chimed faintly as it bounced on the parquet threshold.
Kierendal surged to her feet with a cry that was instantly stifled by Caine’s hand on her throat. The thin cigar clamped in his teeth came perilously close to her eye as he yanked her toward him. She couldn’t see what he was doing with his other hand, but she assumed it was something potentially lethal.
And his Shell still pulsed a smoky, seamless black.
“You might have difficulty believing this,” he said through his teeth, “but I don’t want to hurt you. Or your little friend, there. All I want is to hear what you know about Simon Jester. That’s the easy way to get me out of your living room and out of your life.”
He let go of her throat and the unseen other hand poked her just below the navel, gently but firmly, not hard enough to hurt but exactly the right amount of pressure to fold her in the middle and sit her back down in the chair.
“All right,” she said thinly. She couldn’t even look at him; her eyes were consumed by struggling, weeping Tup pinned to the lintel. “All right, but please, first, please get her down from there. She’ll shred her wing—please, you’ll cripple her!”
She hastily tucked her hands once more beneath her thighs. Caine gave her a long look, his lips faintly compressed; then he breathed a sigh out through his nose and turned to free Tup.
“Touch me and I’ll kill you, you bastard,” the little treetopper shrilled. “I’ll cut out your eyes!”
“Yeah, whatever,” Caine said. He took her head and shoulders in one hand, her neck between his first and second fingers; his hand wrapped around to pin her arms but avoided her delicate wings. He carefully, even gently, worked the knife loose; Kierendal shuddered at the faint squeal of metal in wood as the blade came free. Tup kicked at his forearm again and again, but he didn’t seem to notice. Pale rose-colored blood leaked from the gash in her wing.
“One hand,” he said, holding the treetopper toward her. “Keep her under control.”
It wasn’t until she actually had Tup’s firm warmth within her hand that she really believed Caine was doing this: that it wasn’t some sort of cruel trick, that he wasn’t pulling the knife from Tup’s wing so that he could snap her neck, or something even worse, something unimaginable.
She gathered Tup to her breast, and the treetopper bent her head and moistened Kierendal’s nipple with crystalline teardrops. “I’m sorry, Kier, I’m so sorry.” She gulped sobs back into her throat. “He, he came through the window—and Zakke, he killed Zakke . . .”
“Hush now,” Kierendal told her softly. “Hush, everything’s well.” She looked at Caine, and her eyes asked him to make this true.
He shrugged irritably. “If she’s talking about your dwarf, he ought to be just fine, once he wakes up. He might have a headache for a couple days, but he’s alive.”
She met his cold, flat stare with dawning wonderment; perhaps those eyes were neither as cold nor as flat as they appeared. Perhaps they were only veiled . . .
She said, “You’re different than I thought you’d be. The stories, they make you sound so . . . well, rather—”
“Simon Jester,” he reminded her.
“Yes.” She stroked Tup’s curly hair. “That game in the Warrens was expensive: six Cats killed, and a lot more wounded. I don’t know how many of Simon Jester’s men might have been killed, but the Cats captured two of his followers.”
“Two?” Something kindled in his expression, some emotion that Kierendal couldn’t name for sure, because it made no sense; it looked like the wild hope-against-hope of a prisoner expecting a rescue on his walk to the gallows. “Their names. Who are they? Is one of them—”
He said something, finished the sentence, but she couldn’t quite make it out—a sudden current in the Flow distracted her. She snapped back to herself. “I’m sorry—I’m sorry, I missed that. Could you repeat it?”
She frowned. Pallas Ril? Wasn’t Pallas Ril some human thaumaturge? What did she have to do with . . . whatever they’d been talking about? That current in the Flow was back again, swirling around her, and she found she couldn’t quite remember what the subject had been.
“I, I guess, I think I heard that she’s in town. Is she important?”
His reply was as solid and definite as a word carved in a slab of granite. “Yes.” He leaned closer. “Is she one of the prisoners?”
Caine sighed in a way that hinted he might be struggling to keep his temper, and Kierendal’s throat closed with swift new fear. What if she didn’t have the information he wanted? What would he do then?
He said something else, and again she missed it.
“What?” she asked thinly, flinching against an imagined blow.
“Those two prisoners the Cats took in the Warrens yesterday, Simon Jester’s followers—was one of them Simon Jester himself?”
She shook her head, praying he’d be satisfied with her half ignorance. “I don’t know; all I’ve heard is that it’s a man and a woman. Perhaps they’re not quite sure themselves who it is they’ve captured; there’s been no announcement from the pages.”
His voice tightened. “Where are they held? The palace?”
“I think—in the Donjon, below the courthouse.”
She goggled at him, leaning back away from the flame that seemed to light his face from within. “What?”
“Come on, Kierendal. Bloody Hamman got me into the damned palace; if you’re not better at shit than he was, the Faces would never follow you. Get me in there.”
“I can’t,” she said. “The palace—that was a long time ago. Things are different, now. And the Donjon—Caine, it’s carved into solid rock. If you have a few hundred royals to spread around in bribes, we might be able to get you in within a week or two. It’s the best I can do.”
His eyes smoldered. “Maybe you can do better with the right kind of encouragement.”
She struggled to keep herself calm. “It cannot be done, Caine. No one has ever been broken out of that place; the only way is to bribe a judge or suborn the guards. That takes time, and money.”
She let him search her face; she was telling the truth, and soon enough he saw it.
He looked away from her. His disappointment was so palpable that she almost felt sorry for him. In some subtle way their relationship had shifted. She found, with surprise, that she was now much less frightened, and more than a little interested.
He said, “I don’t want to be your enemy, Kierendal. I might need your help, sometime soon. You should realize that I can repay any favors fivefold.”
“All I want from you, Caine, is the assurance that you’ll never trouble me again.”
“I could make that promise,” he said with a shrug. “But it would be meaningless, and we both know it. Let me instead offer you a piece of information: somebody high up in the Subjects of Cant is an informer for the Eyes.”
The lift of her eyebrows was sufficient to feign surprise. “Oh?”
“Yeah. Here’s another: the Subjects are supporting Simon Jester.”
This time the surprise wasn’t feigned. “Now,” she said, “that I didn’t know . . .”
“I think it was the informer in the Subjects who fingered Simon Jester for the Cats. If you can find out who it is, I’ll more than make it worth your trouble.”
She snorted. “Why don’t you ask His Majesty the King?”
He stared at her, unmoving, unspeaking, as expressionless as a death mask.
Now it was her turn to look away. She clutched Tup’s trembling form more tightly to her chest.
“I don’t have evidence. I don’t even really have rumor. All I know is that the Eyes are looking hard at me, at the Rats and the Dungers and the Serpents, but they seem utterly blind to the Subjects of Cant. Maybe His Majesty will explain to you why that is.”
“Yeah,” Caine said, low and harsh. “Yeah, maybe he will.” He said nothing more for a long moment, then he shook his head with the manner of a man deliberately turning his mind aside from unpleasant contemplation. He nodded toward the waist-high bronze statue and the darkened votive candles in the shrine corner of the room. “What’s the story with that?”
Kierendal shrugged. “It’s a shrine to Ma’elKoth. What of it?
“You worship him? Like a god?”
“Me, personally? Be serious, Caine.”
He nodded distantly. “Mm, yeah. I’m surprised you’d have one in your house, though. I hear he’s a little down on the subs.”
Subs, indeed—if it weren’t for us, you humans would still dress in skins and bay at the moon, she thought, but she let it pass. She spread her hands and shrugged again. “There’s a proverb, perhaps you’ve heard it: to get along, you go along.”
His eyes went farther away. “Yeah,” he murmured, and said no more.
Kierendal finally broke the silence. “If you truly wish to make peace between us, you might start by telling me how you got in here.”
“That’s no mystery. Your boy—Zakke, that his name?—he’ll tell you all about it when he wakes up. A third-floor window isn’t secure when the alley it opens onto is narrow enough to jump across. You should have bars put in.”
“I have two men in the opposite apartment.” She realized what she’d said, and her eyes widened. “Maybe I should say, I had.”
Caine shook his head. “They’re all right. The alarm you put out drew them out of the apartment. I didn’t touch them. They never even saw me.”
She became curiously aware of her own breathing. “Then,” she said softly, “you let the stonebender girl go on purpose—you planned the confusion, to cover you . . .”
His answering smile looked as cold as the others, but now Kierendal began to suspect how much heat the furnace doors of his control held shuttered within. She said, “And you haven’t killed anyone . . .”
“Not today. Although the only reason your sprite friend’s still alive is that I’m a little rusty with the knives.”
“You leave a lot to chance, Caine.”
“It is better to be rash than timid,” he said, his smile becoming oddly distant, “for Fortune is a woman, and the man who wants to hold her down must beat and bully her.” From his tone, he was quoting someone, although Kierendal had no idea whom.
“Why, Caine,” she said, faux-coy, sensing an opening, “are you making a pass at me?”
His reply was a derisive snort. “One last question—”
“I know my reputation,” Kierendal said, looking up at him from under her impossibly long lashes, “but I’m not really homosexual. It’s just that I don’t enjoy having foreign objects jabbed into my body; I’m sure you can understand that.” She arched her back to give him a good look at her inflated breasts; maybe he’d be as easy to manage as Berne was, in the end. “This doesn’t mean we can’t have fun together.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t. But there are plenty of other things that do. Last question: that warrant on me—you’ve heard about it. What do they want me for? And how did they know I’d be in town?”
“This is a mystery. The word went out on the street at sundown yesterday, that’s all I know. And that they want you alive.”
She shrugged and offered him a cynical half smile. “Hey, if you’re that desperate, Count Berne’s on the floor right now playing knucklebones. Maybe you could ask him,” she said pointedly.
Kierendal’s growing insouciance vanished like smoke before a gale; the black and lethal fury that flooded Caine’s face when he spoke that name terrified her more than had his earlier threats. It was as though all of those ghost-Caines that had filled the imaginary air suddenly turned and whipped faster than thought back within his body, to make him so ferociously present that he seemed to burn with a scarlet flame.
He slowly lifted his hands up before his face and stared at his fingers as they curled into fists, his eyes burning red in the lamplight.
“Yeah, maybe I will ask him. Maybe I will do exactly that.”
And again without the faintest shift of shade in his Shell, without any hint of anticipatory breath, he moved: he was gone from the room, an inhumanly swift rush of absence like the darkness that closes in around a snuffed candle. A briefest flicker of brighter, yellower lamplight—the door opened and closed with the speed of a single blink.
Kierendal sat quite still for a long moment, as she tried to catch her breath and stroke away Tup’s trembling.
“I hate him,” the treetopper said, her voice muffled against Kierendal’s breast. “I hope Berne kills him!”
“They could kill each other,” Kierendal said softly, “and I don’t think the world would be any less for their passing.”
She gently touched the pink-rimmed rent in Tup’s wing. “Can you fly?”
Tup lifted her tearstained face and rubbed at her cheek with a tiny fist. “I think so. I think I can, Kier, but it will hurt.”
“Fly, then. Go to Chal. He will tend your wing. Have three of your folk fly with the word that Caine is here: one to the garrison, one to the constable post, and one to Count Berne’s townhouse, for the Cats.”
“You’re turning him in? I thought . . .” She snuffled back more tears. “I was thinking you sort of liked him.”
Kierendal smiled distantly. “I do. But he’s about to reveal himself in my casino, and we can’t have the King’s Eyes thinking we’d shelter a fugitive. And the world is dangerous enough already, without men like Caine in it. Once he’s dead, we’ll all sleep easier.”
She looked around the room. “Besides, the sonofawhore stole my lighter.”
ARTURO KOLLBERG SQUIRMED wetly in his simichair. At last, some action, he thought, as he/Caine skidded down the two flights of stairs and sprinted past the startled guards in the corridor. He/Caine had gotten enough details from that dwarf whore to know which turns to make, and he was at the service door before anyone could possibly know he was coming.
Kollberg’s heart pounded with anticipation. Only four hours into the Adventure, and already Caine was about to confront Berne. It might make up some for the plodding dullness of this first day so far; Studio-sponsored focus groups had determined that an average of 1.6 lethal combats per day was optimum for a Caine Adventure, and Caine had barely thrown a punch, yet. Dropping the houseboy, knifing the pixie, big deal. Beating up a whore had a certain old-fashioned charm, but it hardly qualified as actual combat. Confronting Berne, on the other hand . . .
He licked his already moist lips and smiled into the face shield.
Live or die, this was going to be great.
I PULL THE service door closed behind me and lean against it. No one on the crowded casino floor seems to be paying any attention to me, yet. One of the little leafblades from an ankle sheath should serve to slow down the guards who are coming after me along the service corridor. I lean casually on the door, gazing blankly out into the casino, while I work the leafblade into the crack between door and jamb alongside my thigh; I pound the knife in tight with the heel of my hand. The muffled thudding this makes is barely audible, even to me, over the music and babble that fills the seething room.
Damn good business she does here: it’s only noon.
The bones pit, that’s what she said. The knucklebones . . .
And there he is, warming dice with his breath, his brush-cut hair shimmering above his classic profile. That’s a new sword he’s got—Berne never favored the shoulder-draw before; it’s slow and desperately clumsy. And what’s with the clothes? A slashed-velvet doublet and magenta hose, for shit’s sake.
The scenarios spin out of my subconscious:
I walk deliberately, grim as death, across the room; a hush falls as heads silently turn. Scuttling crablike, gambler’s hands scrape coins off tables. Whores slowly take cover behind the bars.
Berne knows something’s happening—the floor goes too quiet too fast—but he’s too cool to look. He pretends that his attention is on his pass of the dice.
I stop, ten feet away. “Berne. Long time. I’ve been looking for you.” He doesn’t turn, doesn’t even blink; of course he knows my voice.
“I’ve been waiting for you to find me, Caine. Time for one last roll.” He tosses the dice: snake-eyes.
He shrugs and draws his sword as my fists come up . . .
He doesn’t even know I’m there until he feels my arm go around his throat for the choke. He freezes, knowing I can kill him before he can move. I whisper in his ear: “Funny how shit works out sometimes, isn’t it? Now, tell me what I want to know, and this won’t hurt.” And he pretends he doesn’t know what I’m talking about as his hand creeps toward the dagger in his boot . . .
Or: . . . anything I want . . .
These sweaty macho fantasies take almost no time: this isn’t something my mind creates, these are scenes that live there, permanently circling just below the surface like curious sharks, waiting only for features to be painted on the blank faces and names to be wedged into the dialogue. I could stand here all day, stretching time by enjoying the endless play of ROM scripts patterned into my brain by too many books, too many films and plays and Adventures and DragonTales teasers—but now a huge shadow darkens the wall at my right, and I look up into a pair of protuberant yellow eyes that are each the size of my fist.
It’s an ogre, maybe nine feet of one, and he’s got shoulders about equal to my elbow-to-elbow wingspan. He’s wearing some expensive chainmail, a nicely painted hauberk that makes only an autumnal rustle like dry leaves as he comes up—too close to me. The morningstar in his hand has spikes that are as long as my little finger and not much sharper.
He rumbles, deep in his throat, “I’m sorry sir. This area is staff only. You have to move on.”
His breath smells of old meat.
“All right, I’m going. Don’t push.” The floor trembles faintly beneath my boots—those guards must be running right up to the door. The ogre squints at me like he’s suddenly remembered my face, and a breastplate-sized hand lowers like a drawbridge toward my shoulder.
Guards hammer on the other side of the service door behind me, and their shouts come thinly through it. This draws the ogre’s eyes for the fractional second I need to duck aside from his hand and run like hell.
I could make the street door—sunlight shines its golden freedom only twenty meters to my right—
But, on the other hand, Berne has his back to me.
I’m nimble enough, even at a flat sprint, to dodge around the bigger men on the floor, and I’m strong enough to flatten and overrun the smaller. I trail a spreading wake of shouts and confusion, but I’ve gone hypersonic, as it were: I outrun the noise of my passing.
Berne has warning enough only to barely begin the turning of his head before I reach the brass rail around the bones pit and launch myself over it like a javelin.
I stiffen my neck in the air and spear him, the top of my head to the side of his jaw. My arms tangle in his, and we tumble over the bones field scattering gold and dice in all directions. The other players scatter, shouting incoherent surprise, and the table goes down in splinters. By the time we skid off what’s left of it to hit marble steps on the other side, I can hear the pit boss’silver whistle piping a shrill alarm that’ll bring the ogres at a run.
I don’t care: I landed on top.
The edges of the steps crashing against his spine had to hurt like a bitch, and his muscles loosen into stunned slackness. I lock up his legs with mine and get a forearm under his chin to force his head back and cut off his wind. His eyes go from glaze to focus almost instantly, and he mouths: You, and the half-buried flicker of fear that passes over his face calls to something elemental inside me, a volcanic surge up from the base of my spine that thunders in my ears and shades my vision scarlet.
“You bet your fucking ass it’s me.”
I create additional emphasis with a hammer-hand that crushes and spreads his perfect nose wide across his cheekbones. Blood sprays; it’s on my fist, all over his face, it’s on my lips, I can smell it and taste it and I no longer care if I die in the next breath so long as I go to my grave with my teeth in his throat.
He struggles beneath me, but I’ve got him now and there’s no way I’m gonna let him go. I slam his head into the curving step, and again, and again and again; the purple-veined marble is now artistically spattered with the crimson of Berne’s blood.
But he’s still conscious, and now he’s smiling up at me with those smeary lips and reddened teeth, and I have to choose between continuing to beat on him or just cutting his throat because those ogres will haul me off him in about ten seconds, and having to make that choice brings me back to something resembling rationality.
At about this time I realize he’s been pounding the side of my head with his doubled elbow. He can’t get any force behind it, lying down like that; he’s doing it mostly to distract me from his other hand, which is sliding up my neck to hook a thumb toward my eye.
As he swings again I rear back out of his elbow’s path and grab his upper arm, twisting him on around so his back’s to me now, pinning his scabbarded sword with my chest. The hair on the back of his head is matted with blood from a single cut where his scalp split against the edge of the step. I lock my legs around his again and roll us both over faceup just in time—the pair of ogres, who were winding up for free shots at my back, lower their morningstars uncertainly.
My left arm snakes around Berne’s face, over his eyes, to pull his head back while my right hand draws one of the long fighting knives from its sheath along my ribs. I put its point against his external jugular; it’ll take a single second to drive it straight in the side of his neck and slice out though the front, parting carotids, external and internal jugular, and windpipe. He has no chance to survive, and he knows it.
I whisper in his ear, “Tell them to back off.”
“Back off,” he croaks. He coughs a wad of blood out of his throat, and his voice gets stronger and more confident. “Caine’s an old friend of mine. We’re not really fighting—this is just how we say hello.”
I murmur: “You got a nice sense of humor, for a dying man.” The shoulder-twitch of his shrug feels careless against my chest. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
He extends his hands blindly in front of him and wiggles his fingers. “Pretty, aren’t they?”
“What happened to Pallas Ril?”
“Your bitch? How should I know? I’ve been busy with this Simon Jester asshole.”
“Berne, Berne, Berne,” I whisper in his ear like a chiding lover.
“There’s no reason to lie: Think of this as a deathbed confession.”
He chuckles. “Then there’s also no reason to tell the truth. But I am, anyway. You’re not worth lying to.”
I believe him, even though I have Pallas’ memory of their confrontation. I’ve been figuring that the outripple of that spell she did—the information threshold that spread outward at whatever-the-hell the propagation speed of magickal energy is—sort of randomized everyone’s most recent memories of Pallas, or something like that. But Berne and the Cats must have had some contact with her after the spell was cast—they had surrounded her, after all. If he still can’t remember, the spell must still be operating somehow. And if the spell is still operating . . .
Pallas is still alive. She might be one of the captives in the Donjon, after all; but for now, at least, she’s alive.
This certain knowledge spreads such warm and fuzzy feelings from my heart out into the whole world that for almost half a second I’m tempted to let him live.
“Last question: What am I wanted for? And who tipped the Eyes that I was coming to town?”
His tone is mocking. “That’s two questions.”
I don’t really need to know these answers badly enough to make listening to his shit worth my time, so I jam the knife into his neck.
The knife’s point skids off his skin as though his flesh has become tool-grade steel.
Stupidly I try to stick him again in the same place—I just can’t believe it didn’t work—and when it skids off again I waste a full second staring like an idiot at this blade that has betrayed me.
I begin to understand why he’s not scared.
Berne says in a voice bright but silky soft, “And now, for my next trick . . .”
He reaches back and takes my left shoulder with one hand in a grip so crushing it doesn’t even hurt: my whole arm goes numb. Then he peels me off him with irresistible strength—no art involved, just a long, smooth yank—and he comes to his feet and holds me dangling in the air.
“I always was better than you,” he says. “But now I’m the favorite of Ma’elKoth. He’s made me faster, vastly stronger—and invulnerable. Ma’elKoth created the spell just for me; he calls it Berne’s Buckler. You like it?”
I kick him in the face, a short Thai-jab that smacks the ball of my foot into his broken nose, and he laughs at me. He catches my crotch with his free hand and lifts me flailing up high.
And he throws me over the heads of the crowd.
Up, out of the bones pit, arcing high—he must be stronger than the ogres that stand staring dumbly at my flight. I tumble through the air while people try to duck out of my path.
My body can sort out the landing on its own; my full attention is consumed with how I’m going to beat him.
By the time I crash into a knot of gamblers and we all go down to a surprisingly soft landing, I’ve come to a couple conclusions.
One, strength alone won’t help him for shit against my knives, and—
Two, if this invulnerability of his was all he’d like me to think it is, I wouldn’t have been able to break his nose.
I can still beat him; I just have to alter my tactics to meet a changed situation. I have a hypothesis about this magick that protects him—and like any good scientist, I have an experiment in mind to turn this hypothesis into a theory.
The people I’ve landed on thrash away from me in a tangle of limbs, knocking me around a little, so I’m still fighting to gain my feet as the crowd parts and Berne vaults the rail of the bones pit. He wipes his bloody lips with the back of his hand and stalks toward me.
“You’re a lucky man, Caine,” he says. “I made a promise—”
The best time to catch a man off guard is while he’s talking—too much of his attention is on what he’s going to say next. Still on my knees, I cross-draw my throwing knives from the sheaths on my thighs and flip them both spinning backhand.
There’s no force behind this kind of throw, but force isn’t what I need. The one from my numbed and weakened left goes high, toward his face, and he slaps the whirling blade irritably aside—but it doesn’t cut his hand because that’s where he’s instinctively focused this defense of his. The other knife, that’s the one that warms my homicidal heart: it hits his leg an inch above the knee, slices his magenta hose, and cuts the skin beneath.
It’s only a little cut, a thin line of swelling crimson droplets, a hardly noticeable scratch—but he looks down at it, and I look at him, and when his eyes come back up I see the faintest perceptible twitch of uncertainty at their corners.
That unlocks a rushing within my mind, a waterfall of wind like God sucking in an endless breath, as the entire universe narrows down to Berne, me, and the three meters of open floor between us.
I draw my one remaining fighting knife.
“He that lives by the sword shall die by my knife,” I tell him. “That’s prophecy, if you like.”
And I can see something else in his eyes now: the frenzy. He’s gone blood simple.
It’s like looking into a mirror.
He says, inexplicably, “Fuck Ma’elKoth.”
He springs at me, and I leap to meet him.
He makes the over-the-shoulder draw so fast his hands are barely a flicker of motion. No subtlety here: he’s slicing at the joining of my neck and shoulder. My knife meets his sword in a two-handed rising parry that forces the arc of his blade over my head. The knife buzzes in my hand, sending unsettling shock through my arm and shoulder to my teeth.
I backhand the knife with my right to rake the point across his eyes, and miss by a handbreadth. I continue the motion into a diving side roll, and Berne comes after me, slashing, the air singing a tooth-grinding whine as his blade cuts through the carpet and into the floor beside my head as though the planks are soft cheese. I hook his ankle with my toe and kick his knee; he bends his leg to take it so the joint doesn’t break, but it brings him to the floor.
I kip to my feet and now I understand why my backhanded slash missed his eyes—my knife is about five inches too short, its blade sheared off three fingers above the guard, bright new steel gleaming like chrome along the cut edge.
His sword—sweet shivering fuck, that’s Kosall. . .
The realization freezes me for a scant second, long enough for him to reach his feet. A smooth croisé brings me into range and I chamber my leg for a side kick to knock him down again—
And a huge, blunt-clawed hand grabs my arm from behind and yanks me back and up into the air.
I drop the useless stub of knife and flail desperately—I was so consumed with Berne, I never even saw the ogre who now holds me—but Berne has the same problem: two of them hold him. One has both huge hands on his sword arm, and the other holds him tight around the waist.
And I feel like I’m swimming up to the surface of a dream. What in all gods’ names was I thinking? Wasting my time here with Berne, maybe throwing away my life—I must have been crazy—
Somehow I got sucked down into that feral blood lust again. Shit, that’s part of why Pallas left me, this mindless thirst for death. Master Cyrre, the Abbot of Garthan Hold—almost twenty years ago, he used to tell me I think with my fists.
And the sonofabitch is still right.
Now Kierendal is coming toward us across the room, the perfect image of icy command. “That’s about enough of that,” she says. “Now I think we’ll all wait quietly for the constables to arrive.”
Berne’s eyes meet mine. He’s not struggling anymore, and his sardonic grin briefly contracts as he blows me a kiss and mouths Next time.
The ogre lifts me higher and gives me a little shake. My feet dangle an arm’s length from the floor, and the ligaments that hold my shoulder together start to hurt. My head’s straight now, though, and everything’s clear—if I get taken by the Constabulary, it won’t matter what they want me for. By the time I can get shit sorted out, I’ll be too late for Pallas.
The ogre gives me another shake, a not-so-gentle warning. “Don’t get ideasss,” it rumbles wetly, slobbering around its tusks. “You s’ould know I won’t mind hurting you.”
“Yeah,” I say softly. “Likewise.”
I jack my knees up in front of my chest and then buck like a wild horse, a whip-crack arch of my back that sends my feet backward into the ogre’s midsection. It’s like stomping on a stone floor. The ogre barely grunts, but this wasn’t the part that was supposed to hurt.
I kick off its chest and swing up around the pivot of my shoulder joint like a footballer doing a wheel kick, up and over; I wrap my legs around its head with a wrestler’s ankle lock. The ogre snarls and instinctively turns its head to rip the inside of my thigh with those wicked tusks. One punches through the leather and into my flesh.
This is the part that is supposed to hurt.
I twist and drive a handspear past my butt, right into the tearduct at the corner of its eye. Ogre’s eyes are hard-shelled, kind of like a snake’s, but they pop out just as easy as a man’s. I drive my hand in there and blood sprays; I scoop its baseball-sized eye right out of its head with a wet ripping sound as the muscles around it give way. It dangles from its long ropy optic nerve onto the leathery cheek, and the ogre screams into my thigh, releasing my arm to clap its hands to its face. I untwist my legs and buck again, and the ogre’s tusk tears free of my leg.
I land clumsily but keep my feet. The swiftness with which scalding wetness spreads down my leg tells me the ogre nailed me good. It’s almost funny—I come through fighting Berne without a scratch and get the shit ripped out of me by the fucking bouncer.
The ogre screams like an air horn while it tries to fit its eye back into its socket. The people in the casino flinch away from me, covering their ears. Berne is struggling now, furiously twisting and snarling grim threats, but the two ogres holding him show no signs of letting go.
I shoot a glance toward Kierendal, who looks like she’s thinking seriously about casting a spell. I draw my last throwing knife from between my shoulder blades and show it to her, and she changes her mind.
In the brief silence that comes when the ogre stops for breath, I say loudly, “I’m leaving. The first three creatures—man, woman, or sub—that get in my way, they die. Right here on the floor. Die.”
They believe me. A path clears to the door, and I take it at a dead sprint, out into the sunlight and the smells of the city.
Berne’s screams of frustrated rage fade into city-sounds behind me.
Sometimes, y’know, that passion for violence serves me well.
A squad of constables pounds toward me, far away along Moriandar Street. I go the other way. I’m going to need somewhere to go to ground until I can get this wound properly dressed. The Subjects are out, at least for a while, until I can learn whether Kierendal’s right about Majesty and the Eyes. Majesty’s my friend, but that doesn’t mean I trust him.
The answer’s obvious. There’s still one place in Ankhana where I can claim Right of Sanctuary. I just have to live long enough to get there.
Three paces within a convenient alley, I lean against a clapboard wall to pull the tear in my breeches closed over the wound and tie a couple loops of my belt around it. This’ll do until I can get stitches and a real bandage. The leg is swelling already, and starting to throb, and I know I’d better keep moving, get out of Alientown before it stiffens. Looking back along my trail of left-foot prints outlined in blood, it’s clear that I’m losing a dangerous amount, and I’m limping enough to guess that the tusk tore deeply into muscle.
On through the alley and along one of its branches to another curving street. Away northwest along the curve there’s another constable squad. This one has fanned out in teams of four, knocking on doors and entering shops. Only now does it become clear that Kierendal gave me up as soon as I left her chamber. I should have known. I don’t hold it against her—I would have done the same—but it’s gonna make getting out of Alientown kind of a problem.
I fade back into the alley and take a different branch, picking around piles of garbage. I find a reasonably sheltered place near the alley mouth where I can watch the street, and I scan the passersby for humans or elves close to my size, looking for someone I can persuade to donate their clothes to a hunted man.
ARTURO KOLLBERG SLAPPED his face shield up, away from his eyes. As the induction helmet automatically retracted, he rummaged through the swingarm pharmacopoeia for a trank and an antacid. His nerves thrummed like overwound guitar strings. Caine still hadn’t killed anyone, though this hunted-fugitive-in-Alientown business was promising.
Caine apparently didn’t understand how important it was to make this Adventure a success. Good God, there were live feeds going out to Studios all over the world! If he continued to lay back like this, he’d ruin Kollberg’s reputation, and with it his chances of upcasteing to Business and eventually succeeding Westfield Turner as Studio President.
Didn’t Caine realize that Kollberg’s whole career rode on this? Didn’t he care?
At the very least, he could have done that ogre. Christ, he’d already maimed the poor creature; how much more trouble would it have been to kill it? People—Leisurefolk—around the world had spent millions of marks to be him while he took some lives; what in the name of God was holding him back?
Kollberg heaved himself up out of the chair and mopped sweat from his brow. He peered briefly at the picked-over leavings of the snack foods on the other swingarm, made a face, and decided that he should eat a real lunch while he had the chance. He keyed the wait service and ordered a cart of whatever they had that was hot and fresh and could arrive in his private box within five minutes.
Then he paced heavily around the tiny room while he dictated the next Adventure Update release. Though he couldn’t control Caine’s actions, he certainly could control what the public thought of them.
THAT EARNEST FACE on the world’s wallscreens says:
“Well, by the numbers on the Adventure Update Pallas Ril Lifeclock, it’s time to get a report on Caine’s progress in Ankhana. Once again, Jed Clearlake.”
“Thank you, Bronson. There’s been some action since our last update, in fact. I’ve received reports of an inconclusive fight with—can you believe?—Berne!”
“That would be the swordsman who murdered two of Caine’s partners in Race for the Crown of Dal’kannith.”
“That’s correct. This is a blood-feud that’s been running for quite a while. We caught up with Caine only hours before his transfer into Ankhana, and we asked him about Berne . . .”
A shimmering white line crosses the screen in a diagonal wipe to reveal Caine as a talking head against a neutral smoke-dark background. “Berne?” His recorded voice has an odd combination of cynicism and husky emotion. “Yeah, we have history.” A sense of shifting in his chair, a deep breath to organize potent memory, a hesitation before opening a painful subject—all combine to make a truly pregnant pause: Caine’s a pro, and he does interviews as well as anyone in the business.
“Laying hands on the crown of Dal’kannith turned out to be a lot harder than anyone expected. My team—it included Marade and Tizarre, the only two other survivors of Retreat from the Boedecken, as well as Pallas Ril—we were turned back twice, with nothing to show for it but wounds and exposure. Berne, well, he had a team of his own, and they decided that the easiest way to get the crown would be to take it away from us.
“I came back from a two-day scout in the mountains, not in a good mood—I’d had to bury a partner up there. I was carrying a pair of barbed ogrillo quarrels that I’d had to dig out of my shoulder and thigh with a knife. I was exhausted, I was frostbitten, and I found my camp empty except for a semiliterate letter from Berne. He wanted me to turn over the crown to his boyfriend t’Gall; each day I made him wait he was going to torture one of my partners to death.
“Problem was, I didn’t have the damned crown.
“I knew Berne’s reputation. I didn’t waste any time with the truth.
“I got my hands on t’Gall and spent a couple hours persuading him to tell me where Berne was holding my friends. T’Gall didn’t survive the experience. I hit Berne’s camp hard and fast enough to free Pallas, and between the two of us we fought our way out.
“I didn’t get there in time for Marade and Tizarre.
“Anybody wants the details, he can rent Race for the Crown of Dal’kannith. It was ugly.
“Berne is a disease that sickens the world; his breath poisons the air. If I get the chance, I’m going to do the world a big favor. He’s a cancer. I’m a knife.”
The screen cross-fades to Jed Clearlake’s earnest gravity. “And Berne is now, as you may recall, Bronson, a Count of the Empire and the de facto commander of the Grey Cats, the elite Imperial special-operations division.”
“That sounds like quite a fight, Jed.”
“Well, Bronson, we have a clip—”
. . . and through Caine’s eyes the knife skids off skin, and again . . . The twisting disorientation of being lifted and thrown . . . and Berne vaults the brass rail and wipes blood from his mouth below his broken nose . . . Caine’s Soliloquy: * . . . like any good scientist . . .* The cut on Berne’s thigh . . . *He’s gone blood simple.*
“He that lives by the sword shall die by my knife. That’s prophecy, if you like.”
The image freezes for an extended discussion of magickally enhanced strength and reflexes, and the curious “Berne’s Buckler” effect, and joking references to Caine’s either astonishing daring or extraordinary foolishness in facing an obviously superior opponent.
“And our latest report indicates that Caine is wounded and on the run in Alientown, the subhuman ghetto that comprises the red-light district of Ankhana. Studio analysts predict that he’ll try to cross Knight’s Bridge into Old Town, and take refuge at the Monastic Embassy.”
“That’s an interesting choice, Jed.”
“Well, Bronson, Caine can claim Right of Sanctuary there, seeing as how he’s still technically a Monastic citizen, though he’s no longer a sworn friar.”
“But can they actually protect him against the Empire?”
“A lot depends on just how much pressure the Ankhanans are willing to bring; as you know, Caine still hasn’t managed to discover why they’ve issued a warrant and a reward for his capture. But I should certainly say that the Ankhanans will under no circumstances use force to settle a dispute with the Monasteries. Whenever this has been tried in the past, the results have been shortterm success, shortly followed by appalling disaster. As Caine fans will remember, several of his earliest Adventures involved the Monasteries’ complex revenge against those who foolishly violated their sovereignty on one pretext or another; their standard policy in such matters is to appear to give way, and later inflict the harshest of punishments. In an area such as the Ankhanan Empire, where the Monasteries have been well established for hundreds of years, this lesson has been learned the hard way. I don’t think that anyone in the Imperial Government will make that sort of mistake.”
A polished, professional chuckle. “So the Monastics are not quite like, say, Franciscan friars, tending gardens and healing the sick?”
“No, Bronson, that’s true.” An answering chuckle. “While the Monasteries do comprise a ‘nation without borders’ not unlike the Catholic Church in the Europe of a thousand years ago, they’re not actually a religious organization. Monastery is the word we use for the Westerling Khrasthikhanolyir, which translates roughly as Fortress of Human Future. The Monasteries are centers of learning, primarily, and serve as schools for the children of nobility and such of the common folk as can pay their fees. They attempt to spread a familiar philosophy of the brotherhood of man, and that kind of thing. This all sounds very peaceful, you might think, but remember: they preach the brotherhood of man, in a world where there are no less than seven sentient humanoid species and more than a dozen species of sentient nonhumanoids. They also teach a number of very advanced fighting arts, and several Monasteries are well known for their schools of magick. The Monasteries are aggressively political, and are certainly not above toppling a government that they perceive as being dangerous to their long-term goal, which is nothing less than the survival and dominance of the human race on Overworld. You might recall Caine’s adventure of two or three years ago, A Servant of the Empire, when at the instigation of the Council of Brothers, Caine assassinated Prince-Regent Toa-Phelathon . . .”
I REFUSE THE offered wheelchair, even though dodging the garrison soldiers’ crossbow quarrels on that dash across Knight’s Bridge reopened my thigh, and with each step my left boot squishes blood out like a sponge. It’s an irrational prejudice, I guess, but I’d rather limp exhausted along behind the puzzled novice who leads me to the infirmary than sit on my ass and leave my progress in someone else’s hands.
I walk with my palm brushing the rich paneling of the corridor wall—this gives me support against the occasional waves of dizziness that seem to be coming with increasing frequency, and it also keeps me close enough to the wall that my blood won’t stain the exquisite Ch’rannthian runner that decorates the floor.
Friars, novices, and students all glance at me as we pass, most of them trailing toward the dining hall for supper. The embassy in Ankhana does a brisk hospital business; there’s nothing unusual enough about a blood-soaked man limping along their halls to draw undue attention. I wonder how many of them suspect who I am . . .
Down in the vaulted bedlam of the infirmary, the Healing Brother’s eyes widen when I identify myself: “Caine of Garthan Hold.”
“Oh, my,” he says, lips pursed with prim dismay. “Oh, oh, my. The Ambassador must be—”
“I claim Sanctuary. I am a Citizen of Humanity and Servant of the Future. I have broken neither oath nor law. By law and custom, Sanctuary is mine by right.”
The Healing Brother looks decidedly cross. “I’m not sure that I—”
“Horseshit. You know who I am. What are you waiting for, the goddamn secret handshake?”
I can read his face like a billboard: he doesn’t want to do anything without the Ambassador’s approval, and he’d really much prefer that I have a stroke and die right here before he has to answer me. But I gave him the formula, and he knows the Law: he doesn’t have any choice at all.
“You are welcome, Caine of Garthan Hold,” he says sourly. “The arms of your Brothers enfold you, and you need fear no prince of the world. You have found safe Sanctuary.”
“Swell. Now who’s on call that can sew up this damn leg?”
“Combat. Hey,” I say, brightening, “does that mean you’ve got a Khryllian here today?”
He nods, his lips going even thinner. “He’s donating his services for three days as a minor penance. Cell three. Await him in meditation.”
I limp through the infirmary, enduring glares from the sick and broken people who line the bare wooden benches waiting their turns; their resentment stings my flesh nearly as much as, oh, say, the pittering raindrops of a summer shower.
I pause at the candlerest near the mouth of the corridor and pick out a fresh one, fitting it into a brass holder with an adjustable oval breeze-shield. The lamp nearby provides flame, and I move off into the unlit corridor.
The halls and cells of the Monasteries across the world have no lamps of their own, and often not even windows. A friar must carry his own illumination, you see, never depend on the efforts of others to push back the darkness. Symbols, always symbols, to remind us of our Sacred Mission.
There may be, I guess, a few idealists and other gullible types who still believe that the Monasteries are devoted to the Future of Mankind; the rest of us know that their true function is to acquire and wield power: naked force, political and otherwise.
Down through the years, the otherwise has been, occasionally, me. And I’m far from the only one, nor am I the best or most successful—I’m only the most famous.
Cell three is a rectangular box, two meters by three and maybe two and a half high. I shut the door behind me and lean against the wall, slowly sliding down it to lower myself to the chill limestone flags of the floor without having my leg buckle under me. I set the candle on the floor next to me and look up at the beautifully detailed low relief that’s carved into the cell’s end wall.
Brought to life by the slowly wavering flame of the candle, the limestone eyes of Jhantho, Our Founder, gaze sadly down at me. His cupped hands cradle the world between them like a thin-shelled egg of a dragon—something infinitely precious and astonishingly fragile.
“There was a time you had me suckered, too, you sonofabitch,” I say softly. “I remember what it felt like to believe.”
And in the corner of the cell stands a small bronze of an impressively muscled man with flowing hair and piercing eyes; the statue’s feet are surrounded by offering plates and stubs of candles. Another shrine to Ma’elKoth, just like Kierendal’s, but this one’s seen some use.
This shrine shit is starting to creep me out.
It’s not long before the priest of Khryl shows up. He’s probably having a slow day; Khryllian healing works only on wounds sustained in battle. He clanks in through the door in his full armor—I think they even sleep that way—and the steel of his breastplate is so incredibly polished that it reflects the candle flame like chrome. We exchange only enough words for him to understand the wound. Although I detect a brightening of his eyes when I tell him it came from an ogre’s tusk, this brightening darkens again when he learns the ogre survived the encounter.
He stands tall and stretches his arms wide to pray; the last time a priest of Khryl ever kneels is when he receives his Order of Knighthood. His chant rings in the tiny cell, on and on.
It would be easy to envy him his faith, but I don’t; that’d be a prejudice left over from my other life. He doesn’t have faith, he has certain knowledge: he feels the power of his god every time he prays. I hold the torn leather of my breeches wide, for him to lay hands upon my wound.
The ragged flaps of skin, lipped with yellow globules of fat and strung through with torn muscle, slowly draw together. Khryl is a god of war, and his healing is intended for use on the battlefield; it is fast and certain, but savagely uncomfortable. A wound this deep would take a couple of months to heal fully, and in the meantime it would throb, and itch, and shoot the occasional stinging stitch up the leg. Khryl’s healing takes every scrap of the discomfort of those months and compresses it into five eternal minutes of agony.
My vision fades under the onslaught. My ears ring, and I taste blood; it feels like he’s poured sulphuric acid down my crotch and it’s eating the flesh through to the bone.
I probably pass out at least once, maybe twice; it’s hard to tell—it never seems to end—I’m greying in and out, and every time I come back it’s still going on.
When I get back full consciousness, I’m alone in the cell, and I have hazy memories of the priest taking his leave. There’s a jagged V-shape of new pink and puckered scar tissue on the inside of my thigh. A deep ache in the muscle sharpens instantly when I try to put weight on it, but I get up anyway and start to stretch it out.
Fatigue sinks steel hooks into every muscle and drags them toward the floor. I feel like I’ve been lost in the desert without food or water for a year or so. What I really need is a side of beef, a gallon of whiskey, and a bed for about three days; but I lost the whole afternoon dodging the damned constables and Shanna has maybe five days left to live.
The constables might have already presented themselves at the gate and been turned back—I can’t have been difficult to track. They’ll be watching, but there are ways out of this embassy that the Constabulary doesn’t know about. If I move fast, I should be able to be off the island and back in the Warrens before the bridges go up at curfew.
I push on the door, and it barely rattles.
I push harder. It shifts just enough to let me know it’s barred from the outside.
“Hey!” I shout, hammering on the door with both fists. “Open this fucking thing!”
“Er, Caine?” The boy outside sounds a little nervous, with good reason. If I could somehow get into the corridor right now I’d beat him to death on my way out. “I have to keep you here, for just a few minutes. The Ambassador wants to see you—he, uh, he wanted to make sure you don’t leave before he has a chance to talk with you.”
And there’s no point in arguing. The word Ambassador doesn’t suggest the full range of his powers; in matters concerning Ankhana, he’s kind of a minor pope. This kid out there could no more disobey the Ambassador than fly to the frigging moon. The cell is now a cell in the other sense as well.
I sigh and lean my forehead into the cool oak of the door. “He could have asked . . .”
“Uh, well . . . I’m sorry . . .”
What would Dartheln want with me? It’s not likely to be a friendly chat—we weren’t on the best of terms, last time we met. He’d opposed the Council of Brothers’decision on Toa-Phelathon; the Prince-Regent had been something of a personal friend.
Dartheln’s a man of principle, though. Despite his personal feelings and principled objections, his Oath of Obedience had taken precedence: he’d bowed to the Council’s orders and given me the full support of the embassy’s resources. I couldn’t have succeeded without him. I have a great deal of respect for him, even though he’s never bothered to conceal that the feeling isn’t mutual.
They don’t keep me waiting long. When the door swings out, four friars stand outside, and they’re all armed. The short, shoulder-high staves they carry are ideal close-combat weapons, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that each of these guys is my equal in a fight, or close to it. They relieve me of my last two knives—the thrower from my back and the little leafblade from my boot. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
They lead me along the corridor away from the light, so that we won’t pass through the common room of the infirmary. We go up a couple twisting flights of stairs and along another hallway so underused that we leave footprints behind us in the dust—but only briefly, as the nervous and bemused novice trails us with a broom.
They open a small service door for me and bracket me into the room: two ahead and two behind. The novice closes the door behind us, and before him—he stays out in the hallway.
I recognize the room, even though the decor has changed: this is the private office, just off the Ambassador’s chambers. Instead of the massive dark wood furniture of the sort produced by the friars at Jhanthogen Bluff, this room’s full of the light, curving, graceful sort of thing produced by the best Ankhanan craftsmen; every piece gleams, rich veneer layered with transparent varnish.
And in one corner, candle flames wavering at its ankles and offering plates piled high, is another shrine to Ma’elKoth.
The only piece of furniture I recognize is the bulky, scarred old writing table of the sort Exoterics use for drafting and copying manuscripts. And the man sitting at it with his back to the five of us, though he’s wearing the Ambassadorial robes, isn’t Dartheln—Dartheln is a hefty man who’d be nearing seventy, and is as bald as an egg. This guy’s skinny enough that he’d blow away in a high wind, and his head’s full of curly brown hair. He glances back over his shoulder, nods to himself, and lays down his pen.
“Caine. I’ve been hoping you’d come here first.” His face is familiar—those cheekbones that look sharp enough to cut cheese—but it’s the voice that triggers my memory, even though I haven’t heard it in maybe eighteen years.
He nods and flicks his wrist toward one of the chairs. “Good to see you. Sit.”
I take the offered chair, more than a little amazed. Creele was a couple years behind me at Garthan Hold. I tutored him in Applied Legendry and Small-Group Tactics. Now he’s the Ambassador to the Empire.
“How in the name of Jhantho’s Fist did you get a post like this at your age?”
He smiles thinly. “The Council appoints by merit, not age.”
That doesn’t answer the question—or maybe it does. The Creele I recall from school was a natural politician, a master of telling you what you wanted to hear, even then. A manipulative little skunk, but good company, intelligent and witty; I can remember many hours spent laughing over wine filched from the hold’s cellars.
It’s hard to look at him; my brain keeps trying to see him the way he looked at eighteen. We don’t spend much time in small talk. He knows most of my career already, and I don’t have much interest in his—the unspoken details would be depressingly familiar, the kind of backstabbing politics that drove me away from the Vows in the first place. And the four staff-armed friars are still here; they’re standing at parade rest in a short arc behind me, which puts a damper on chatty conversation.
Shortly he gets to the nub. He twists the ring with the Seal of Mastery around his finger to its proper place, and he puts on his Important Business voice.
“I don’t know by whom you’ve been hired, and I don’t need to know. But you should know that the Council of Brothers won’t tolerate any action against Ma’elKoth, or against the Empire generally.”
“Against Ma’elKoth?” I say, frowning. How does he know? “I’m not working. This is personal business.”
“Caine, you might remember I’m not an idiot. We know that Ma’elKoth is not popular with some rogue elements within the nobility. I know that the Eyes have been anticipating that you’ll surface in Ankhana, and they’ve issued a warrant for your arrest on unspecified charges. This reads like your employer is compromised, and they know what you’re up to. And here you are. Don’t bother to pretend.”
He looks like he’s expecting me to continue. I stare at him blandly. He gives his head an irritated little shake and works his lips like there’s a bad taste in his mouth.
“You should understand that we support Ma’elKoth; we couldn’t have handpicked a better successor to Toa-Phelathon. He’s brought the common folk together like no ruler since Dil-Phinnarthin himself, and he’s solidified the Empire into a stable nation. He’s holding the subs at bay on the borders and controlling the ones within; he’s reached an understanding with Lipke that may bring the two empires together within our lifetime.”
As he speaks, his eyes keep flicking past me toward the shrine in the corner, his gaze drawn there like a moth to a candle. “Ma’elKoth may be the most important man alive—he may be the man who will ensure the ultimate survival of our species, can you understand that? He may be able to bring together all the human lands; if we can stop fighting among ourselves, the subs will never stand against us. We think he can do it. He’s the horse we’re riding, and we won’t let you cut him out from under us.”
“The Council of Brothers. The whole Council.”
I give him a derisive snort. The Council of Brothers, as a whole, can’t decide what day it is. “I tell you again. My business in Ankhana is personal.”
“If you could only meet the man, you’d understand,” he says. His eyes spark with messianic fire—he’s a believer. He pushes his hands toward the shrine as though offering worship. “His presence alone is overwhelming, and the power of his intellect—! The way he’s taken the entire Empire into his hand—”
“By murdering his political enemies,” I murmur, and an expression of fleeting satisfaction crosses his face, as though I’ve confessed to something.
Or maybe I’m just contrary, but I can’t help it. His tone of uncritical awe makes needling him irresistible.
“Enemies of Ma’elKoth are enemies of the Empire,” he insists. “They’re enemies of humanity. Should he deal gently with traitors? Would that make him a better Emperor, or worse?”
I give him a thin smile and quote, “ ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.’ ”
He rocks back in his chair. “I thought that might be your attitude. Dartheln said almost the same thing, only in different words.”
“Yeah, well, he’s pretty smart,” I tell him. “And he’s a better man than you’ll ever be.”
Creele waves a weary hand. “He’s a fossil. He doesn’t see that Ma’elKoth is our chance at the bold stroke, the final success. He thought we should stick with our tried-and-true methods; now he’s applying his tried-and-true methods to growing corn at Jhanthogen Bluff.”
I’m becoming acutely conscious of how much time this is wasting. I lean forward and put my elbows on my knees and give him a pretty fair Earnest Look.
“Creele, listen. I’m happy for you, getting this post, and I understand your concerns for Ma’elKoth. But, really, if everything I hear about him is true, he wouldn’t be in much danger even if he were my target. The truth is, I’ve heard that my old girl is in town here, and she’s in trouble, and I’m trying to find her. That’s my real interest here.”
“You’ll give me your word that you will take no action against Ma’elKoth, nor against anyone in his government?”
“Your word.” He’s learned the command voice well; his tone makes it clear there’s no room to wiggle.
You have my word—it’s a simple phrase, and easy on the lips; my word is nothing more than what I am, and it’s broken as easily as men are.
But it’s also nothing less than what I am, and it has the same lust for survival that I do. I spread my hands in a disparaging shrug. “What would my word mean?” A rhetorical question. “It would place no chains upon my arms that could prevent the raising of my fist.”
“I suppose that’s true.” He looks tired, as though the Ambassadorial robes drag on his shoulders like anchors on his spirit. The zealotry that smoldered in his eyes has faded, and his mouth takes on a cynical twist. “I suppose I would have had to do this, anyway. You’re only making it a little easier.”
He rises like an old man, and goes to the chamber door; with a brief glance of something like regret over his shoulder at me, he shoots the bolt and swings the door open. “Thank you for waiting, Your Grace. Caine is here.”
Six men in the blue and gold tunics of the King’s Eyes’ dress-livery file into the room, shortswords slung at their waists along with identical daggers. As they come in, they crank back the crowsfoot mechanism on small, compact crossbows and load steel quarrels into the bolts. The seventh is an ordinary-looking man with mouse-brown hair who wears a stylish burgundy velvet blouse with a baldric of gleaming white silk. He offers the corner shrine a cursory nod as he clears the door. The slim jeweled sword that depends from his baldric appears purely ceremonial, and from his hand dangles a bulging drawstring purse of black velvet—my head-price, no doubt.
“Creele,” I say, “I’ve said some bad things about you in my time, and thought worse, but I’d have never believed you’d give me up.”
He doesn’t even have the grace to be embarrassed. “I told you,” he says, “we’re going to help Ma’elKoth every way we can.”
The man in velvet steps forward. “I am Toa-Sytell, the Duke of Public Order, and you, Caine, are my prisoner.”
I get out of my chair quickly enough to make the friars behind me heft their staves, and the King’s Eyes close into a defensive screen before their Duke.
Toa-Sytell says blandly, “Your time is mine. I’m pledged to deliver you to Ma’elKoth, and I will do it.”
I spare him not so much as a glance; my eyes are only for Creele. I step over to him, close enough to see the soot-clogged pores of his nose, to see the black squid ink caked in the Seal of Mastery.
“Y’know, there’s nothing more dangerous than an intellectual with power,” I say in a light and conversational tone, as though we were back arguing over a jug of wine at Garthan Hold. “He can rationalize any crime, and he’s certainly not going to let abstractions like justice, loyalty, or honor get in his way.”
Creele flushes, just a little. “Oh, grow up, will you? You knew this could happen; we can’t let you endanger Ma’elKoth.”
“Fuck Ma’elKoth,” I say mildly, quoting Berne with a tiny disbelieving smile. “This is between you and me.”
“You have violated Sanctuary, Creele. I am Sanctuaried here, and you have delivered me into the hands of my enemies. You know the penalty. Did you really think I wouldn’t kill you for this?”
He sighs, almost contemptuously, his eyes flicking toward the four friars and the six King’s Eyes. “I hardly think I’m in much danger, Caine, if you know what I—”
The edge of my hand cuts off the rest of his sentence, a forehand chop across the bridge of his nose. The sudden stunning shock unstrings his limbs and slackens the muscles in his neck. I get my hands on his head, a sharp twist: his cervical vertebrae separate with a wet driftwood squelch and slice into his spinal cord. Before anyone else in the room can move, he flops kicking and convulsing to the floor.
I say into the blank silence, “And here I thought I’d get through the whole day without killing anyone.”
With a shout the friars’ paralysis breaks. They spring toward me, staves raised—and stop before the dully gleaming pyramidal heads of the Eyes’ crossbow quarrels that are suddenly pointed at them, rather than me.
Duke Toa-Sytell says, “This man is my prisoner, and I am pledged to deliver him to Ma’elKoth.” His colorless voice leaves no doubt that he’d give the order to fire. “Stand back. A cocked crossbow is a delicate mechanism; if my men become nervy, one may fire by accident.”
One of the friars, older than the others, maybe even my age, extends his staff horizontally, like a barrier. “Let us waste no time. You, go to the Healing Brother. The Khryllian may be able to save the Ambassador’s life.”
The younger friar bolts through the hall door, and his footfalls fade away.
The older friar meets my eyes, and shrugs.
We all stand there for a minute or two and watch Creele die.
In some of my old books, I’ve read about certain blows that are supposed to cause instant death—especially one to the nose that’s supposed to drive bone splinters from the fragile sinus into the brain through one of the strongest bones in the human body, the frontal bone of the skull. This is a puerile fantasy, but sometimes I wish it were true.
In reality there’s no such thing as instant death; different parts of the body shut down at different rates, in different ways, shuddering and jittering, spasming, or simply relaxing into lifelessness. If you’re unfortunate enough to be conscious, it’s got to be a pretty hideous experience.
He can’t speak, because his larynx shattered when I broke his neck and his lungs are filling with blood, but he’s looking up at me. There’s raw terror in his eyes; he’s begging me to tell him this isn’t happening, not to him, not now, as he feels himself bounce and shudder, smells his bowels and bladder releasing. But it’s too late, and I wouldn’t take it back if I could.
Sometimes dying men ask, either with words or only with their eyes: Why? Why me? Creele doesn’t ask; he knows the answer.
It’s because I’m an old-fashioned guy.
Toa-Sytell says musingly, “You are an extraordinarily lethal man. Don’t bother to hope that you’ll catch me within arm’s length.”
I meet his eyes, and we measure each other.
His lips show the barest ghost of a smile, and he glances down at Creele’s stilling body. “It’s so rare as to be almost unique, to meet a man who lives up to his reputation. Which do you think is more dangerous: the intellectual—” His gaze flicks up to match mine once again. “—or the idealist?”
“Mm.” He nods. “We’ll be going, then.”
One of the younger friars speaks, his voice level and inplacable. “You’ll never be safe, Caine of Garthan Hold. There is nowhere you can hide from Monastic vengeance.”
I meet the eyes of the older friar. “He violated Sanctuary. You saw.”
He nods again. “I would not dishonor myself by lying for such a man.”
Toa-Sytell drops the black velvet purse on the floor beside Creele’s body. One gold royal bounces jingling from the purse’s neck and rolls in a slow and lazy circle around Creele’s head to pass the feet of the friars. All eyes follow it expressionlessly, and for a moment no one moves as it chimes to rest.
Toa-Sytell says in that colorless voice of his, “At least he can afford a sumptuous wake . . .”
He gestures, and the King’s Eyes swing their crossbows to point just above my head, where they won’t kill me if one triggers by accident, and as we leave I can hear the growing clatter of the approach of the Healing Brother and the Khryllian priest, far too late.
With Creele dead, no one has the authority to order that a Duke of the Empire and his men be detained, and so we walk right out of the front gate of the embassy without incident.
Just outside, they very professionally lay me down in the street to put shackles on my arms and a pair of bilboes on my ankles. The cobblestones are cold and shining wet. I don’t bother to resist. It’s pretty clear that none of them would mind putting a quarrel into my knee if I try anything foolish. Toa-Sytell himself helps me to my feet, and we set off.
We walk slowly along Gods’ Way toward the Colhari Palace. The moon is rising, casting an oyster-shell glow over the misty drizzle that nightfall has brought to the streets, polishing the cobblestones and painting cool moisture across my brow. It’s awkward, walking with the bar of the bilboes scraping between my ankles, and Toa-Sytell holds the chain attached to their end tight in his fist. Nobody seems to have anything to say.
I figure it’s about fifty-fifty, whether the Council of Brothers will order my death in retaliation for Creele’s. Shit, they should give me a medal. The oaths of Sanctuary are among the most sacred vows a friar ever takes, and the penalties for violating them usually include death.
But I’m only rationalizing, inventing defenses before an imaginary Monastic judge.
The truth is, I would have killed him anyway: for betraying me, for keeping me from Shanna, for letting the headsman’s axe swing closer to her neck.
No one, no one will do that and live.
And the glittering arch of the Dil-Phinnarthin Gate looms, gleaming silver through the mist, the awesome tower of the Colhari Palace rising behind it. Toa-Sytell gives the recognition to an expectant captain. The gate swings wide, and we walk toward the arch.
Huh. Well, at least I don’t have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to get myself into the Palace. Maybe I can take this—
“ ’STRATOR? MM, ’STRATOR Kollberg?” The voice of Arturo Kollberg’s personal Secretary came over the screenlink as a hushed, almost reverent whisper.
Kollberg swallowed—he well knew what that tone probably meant. He swiftly swept his desk clear of the crumbs of his supper, rubbed a napkin furiously across his mouth, and wiped his hands as thoroughly as he could. He took a deep breath, trying to slow his stuttering heart. “Yes, Gayle?”
“ ’Strator, on line one, it’s Geneva.”
When Caine had entered the palace grounds and his transfer link had been severed, Kollberg had had a thousand things to do at once—from ordering adjustments in nutrient drip for the first-handers to editing decisions on the clip release to Adventure Update. When the cutoff had occurred, the first-handers all over the world had gone into an automatic sendep cycle, and the Studio comm nexus had flooded with calls ranging from curious to outright panicky from the technical directors of the linked Studios around the globe. In the midst of chaos and confusion, Kollberg had forcefully resisted the urge to handle every problem at once.
The very first thing he’d done was put in a call to the Studio Board of Governors in Geneva.
He’d turned to other business while waiting for his call to be returned; it had taken only a bit more than an hour to mollify the other Studios, get the Caine first-handers into peaceful induced-sleep cycles, order his own supper, and catch up on some other work—some marketing decisions on two of San Francisco’s lesser stars, and a judgment call on scheduling for an up-and-coming Actress. This was mostly his way of pretending that For Love of Pallas Ril hadn’t consumed his entire attention.
But now his supper curdled in his belly and he tried to shake the tension out of his shoulders. All for Caine, all for Caine’s success. If only Michaelson knew how hard Kollberg worked, what Kollberg put himself through to take care of him!
He keyed line one, and his screen lit with the Adventures Unlimited logo, an armored knight brandishing a sword, mounted on the back of a rearing winged horse. The screen didn’t clear to visual; when the Board of Governors called, it never did.
The modulated, artificially neutral voice of the Board started in without preamble. “We are reviewing your application for emergency transfer authority. There are some concerns that you should clear up for us.”
The Board of Governors had a shifting membership of seven to fifteen high-ranking Leisurefolk who were charged with the responsibility of setting policy for the Studio system as a whole. There was no appeal of the Board’s decisions, and there was no politicking or playing one member off against another when no one outside the Board really knew who was on the Board at any given time; the blank screen and artificial voice prevented Kollberg from even knowing whom he was talking to. Kollberg was fairly sure that there was a Saud on the Board right now, as well as a Walton and a Windsor, but that was useless knowledge: it did nothing to moisten his lips or level his voice.
He rapidly, almost breathlessly, reeled out his prepared speech. “Based on Caine’s experience on the previous occasion that he entered the Colhari Palace on a mission, I believe that emergency transfer authority is a reasonable precaution, to protect the life and profitability of a major star. In fact, due to the severance of his transfer link and loss of transmission, we wouldn’t even get the usual death surge in sales of this Adventure—”
“We have little interest in this Actor’s life or profitability. Our concerns are of matters far more grave.”
“We were assured by you personally, Administrator, that the termination of this Ankhanan Emperor would be nonpolitical.”
He swallowed and said cautiously, “Nonpolitical . . . ?”
“We’ve questioned your judgment from the beginning regarding these recent Adventures of Pallas Ril. Do you understand the danger involved in allowing a heroine to be shown subverting civil authority? The danger involved in encouraging her fans to cheer her on as she defies the lawfully constituted government?”
“But, but she’s, well, saving innocent lives. . . Surely, that’s acceptable subject matter—”
“Guilt or innocence is irrelevant, Administrator. These natives were condemned according to the laws of their society, and the government that Pallas Ril defies is legally constituted. Do you wish to be responsible for the actions of her Earthly imitators?”
“But, but but, I hardly think—”
“Precisely. You hardly think. It’s been ten years since the Caste Riots, Administrator. Have you learned nothing? Have you forgotten how fragile our social fabric can be?”
Kollberg hadn’t forgotten—he’d lived though those terrifying days huddled in his Gibraltar Homes condominium.
A charismatic Top Ten Actor named Kiel Burchardt had inadvertently triggered the Caste Riots while preaching on Overworld; he played a priest of Tyshalle Deathgod, and the gospel of radical liberty and personal responsibility he’d preached to foment a peasant rebellion against the robber barons of Jheled-Kaarn had become the rallying slogans of spontaneous riots in cities across Earth. Disaffected Laborers turned on the upper castes, the mid-castes, and eventually themselves.
Fortunately, Burchardt was killed by one of those robber barons while leading an assault on his keep, and the Social Police rapid-response squads had eventually crushed the rioters, but the Caste Riots remained a chilling reminder of the mesmeric influence Actors could exert over their audiences.
“But,” Kollberg said, wiping with the back of his hand at the perspiration that bubbled out across his upper lip, “but she’s failed, you see? And she needs Caine—the completely nonpolitical Caine—to either rescue her or avenge her death.”
“That was our understanding. But how, then, do you explain this?”
The Studio logo vanished from the screen, replaced by the face of the Monastic Ambassador seen from Caine’s POV, and Caine’s recorded voice came over the speaker. “ ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.’ ”
Kollberg thought, Oh, Christ. Oh my god.
The logo came back on. “That is decidedly political, not to say subversive, even treasonous. Do you know whom he was quoting?”
He shook his head hastily. “No no no, not at all.”
Kollberg looked down; dark patches of sweat stained his pants where his trembling hands had rested. He laced his fingers together and squeezed until they hurt. “I, ah, I first-handed that scene, you know, and I don’t believe that Caine meant this as a political—”
“You do understand the pernicious effects of allowing an Actor of Caine’s popularity and influence to turn to politically motivated violence against an authoritarian government? Allowing him in Soliloquy to self-justify overturning a police state? This has echoes of the Burchardt business; Earthly parallels of this attitude would be explosive.”
“Caine often swears by Tyshalle, the god whose gospel Burchardt preached.”
Kollberg said nothing; there was no possible reply.
“Caine has begun to undertake subversive social criticism.”
Once again the screen changed, this time to the scene before Caine’s eyes as he walked through the burned-out borderland of the Kingdom of Cant. Caine’s Soliloquy: *Our Workers are worse, really; with the zombies, you can’t see the buried spark of life—intelligence, will, whatever—that makes Workers so tragically creepy.*
The logo returned. “Workers are convicted felons, Administrator, who are cyborged to repay society for their crimes. This could be interpreted as a plea for sympathy, that death is preferable to life as a Worker.”
“Death may be better for them; their death is not better for us. Workers support a substantial fraction of the world economy.”
“The Soliloquy,” Kollberg said more forcefully, belly quivering at his own boldness, “is purely stream-of-consciousness; it’s part of what makes Caine such a powerful and effective Actor. It reflects his emotional and preconscious instinctive reactions as well as his rational thought processes—if he must stop and consider the political implications of his every thought, it will cripple his performance!”
“His performance is not our concern. Perhaps Actors should be found whose emotional and preconscious reactions are more socially responsible.”
There came a pause, and then the neutral voice continued more slowly. “Do you know that Duncan Michaelson, Caine’s father, has been interred in the Mute Facility in the Buchanan Social Camp for more than ten years? That his crime was sedition? The seed does not fall far from the tree, Administrator.”
Kollberg’s dusty tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and a single drop of sweat rolled stinging into his left eye. He looked down, squinting against the tear the sweat brought, and bit his tongue hard to moisten his mouth so he could speak again. “What do you want me to do?”
“We authorize the emergency transfer. You will find that the emergency key in your Cavea techbooth is already active. We had considered ordering Caine’s immediate recall, but we are not unmindful of the potential profitability of this Adventure.”
The voice hardened. “There will be no more suggestion of subversion in this Adventure, do you understand? We direct you to personally monitor every second; delegate all other responsibility. You will be held personally responsible for the political and social content of this Adventure. When Caine kills Ma’elKoth or dies in the attempt, it will be the result of a personal vendetta, do you understand? There will be no further discussion of political motivations whatsoever. And there will be no discussion of Caine’s contract; the Studio is not in the business of sponsoring assassination. We provide entertainment, nothing more nor less. Do you understand?”
“It is not only your career that’s on the line, Administrator. Any serious breach of this directive will be turned over to the Social Police for investigation.”
The spreading coldness in his chest felt like someone had slipped an ice dagger into his heart. “I understand.”
Kollberg sat staring at the flat grey darkness of the screen for a long, long time. Then suddenly he twitched like a man jolting awake from a nightmare—Caine might have come back out of the palace already, might already be on-line, might already be doing or saying or thinking something that would destroy Kollberg’s life.
He jerked to his feet and brushed crumbs from his blouse; he slicked over his pale hair with the sweat from his palms and heaved himself toward the door of his private box.
Michaelson had threatened him yesterday; today the threat came from Caine. It was time, Kollberg decided, to smack that little bastard’s hand.
Just give me a reason that’ll stand up for the Board, he thought. Just one excuse. You’ll see what you get. You’ll see.