HABRAK STARED IN grim dismay and gathering anger at the tangled, soot-blackened rope tied to the notched steel bar. The sentry who’d brought this to him and laid it on his desk stood stiffly and spoke of how they’d found their comrade bound and gagged on the roof alongside the guardwalk. “They were untying him when I left. I don’t think he saw anything, and I thought it was more important to get this to you immediately.”
If he really had a bit of brain, Habrak thought, he’d have left the rope in place and taken each man as he climbed out of the chimney.
But, as it was, these intruders, these lawless scum—whoever they might be—who had crept into the Donjon, his Donjon, they were trapped. They were trapped, and he could take them.
“Assemble the guards without alarum,” he growled. “We’ll file down and search every inch. Our friends down there might not yet know we’re on to them. Tell the boys not to worry about saving them for questioning. Anyone who’s not a guard and not in a cell or the Pit, I want him dead. Shoot him down. No mercy.”
He rose and reached for his weapons. “I want a whole pile of bodies, you understand? A whole pile.”
“IT MIGHT BE different, had you not shot me,” Arkadeil pants with pain-thinned blandness, “but with this wound, no one will believe you are in my custody, and I daresay I haven’t enough value as a hostage that a guard will let you pass to spare my life.”
“I’m not planning to spare your life,” I tell him. “Shut up.”
“Caine,” Lamorak breathes thinly, as he ties what’s left of his blouse around the smile of the skin-deep slice across his belly, “make him take off his hood.”
Ten very nervous students sit on the lowest bench, trembling and licking their sweaty upper lips. I point at the biggest, strongest-looking one. “You. Come over here.”
“Me?” He presses a palm to his chest, looking around and halfheartedly pretending that I’m pointing at the guy next to him.
“Hey, why are you picking on me? I didn’t do any—”
“Talann,” I say sharply, “shoot this dumb son of a whore.”
He springs to his feet like an overwound jack-in-the-box and flutters his hands in the air. “Don’t! Don’t! All right!” He scurries over to me, wearing a smile of eager helpfulness frozen into a twisted rictus of fear.
“Ru-Rushall, if it please your—”
“Shut up. Lamorak—” I turn and offer him my arm. “—I give you Rushall to be your trusty steed. Come on—I’ll help you mount up.”
Lamorak squints at him, then shrugs and summons a sickly smile. “Beats walking, I guess.”
“P-please . . .” Rushall stammers.
“I said shut up,” I remind him. “Horses don’t talk. Turn around.”
Rushall continues to whimper wordlessly under his breath, but he accepts Lamorak’s weight obediently enough. They both grunt—Rushall in effort, Lamorak in pain.
“Make Arkadeil take off that hood, Caine,” Lamorak repeats with effort. “Then maybe I can help . . . otherwise, deadweight . . .”
His color is bad, corpse-pale and slightly green, and he looks like it’s an effort to hang on to consciousness. He’s fighting shock with long, slow breaths—the son of a bitch must be tougher than I thought. Even so he looks like he can’t spare the effort to explain, so I don’t ask. I go over to where Arkadeil huddles on the floor.
“All right, you heard him. Take it off.”
He flinches away from me and wraps his good arm around his head to hold the hood where it is. Rather than argue with him, I give a sharp, spiral twist to the vanes of the quarrel that sticks out of his shoulder; the steel vibrates in my hand as it grinds bone inside his shoulder joint. He howls and lets go of the hood to grab at my arm; I pull the hood off his head with my other hand.
He has the craggy, high-cheekboned face of a Lipkan noble and stringy hair now matted with sweat, as grey as his pain-blanched cheeks. He pants through clenched teeth that seal the whimpers inside his chest: he’s holding on to Lipkan honor as best he can.
Now, it’s damned clear to me that Arkadeil has no intention of cooperating in any—but son of a bitch, stand up he does, slowly uncoiling spidery limbs until he comes to his feet. I glance over my shoulder at Lamorak and now I understand. His surfer-perfect face wears a familiar expression: the transcendent concentration of mindview.
“The source for your suit,” Lamorak murmurs. “Give it to me.”
Arkadeil’s good hand slips robotically down through the neckline of his beekeeper’s suit. Glassy eyed, he speaks without any seeming awareness of his hand’s action. “You cannot imagine that you will escape . . .”
He goes on in this vein while his hand brings out a tiny, glossy black stone about the size of a pea. I’ve seen ones like it before: it’s a griffinstone.
You find them in the crops of the draft horse–sized bird-beasts; they can store an immense amount of magickal energy. Unlike dragons, who can tap Flow as directly as any human thaumaturge or primal mage, griffins are wholly dependent on the power of the griffinstones they carry in their muscular flightcrops. Lacking griffinstones, they’re every bit as clumsy and helpless as you might expect from a half-hawk, half-lion abomination of nature; with them, they become swift flyers and fearsome predators—and the targets of stonehunters, who have trapped them nearly to extinction. That makes griffinstones exceedingly rare and hideously expensive, even tiny ones like this.
Arkadeil steps mechanically over to Rushall and Lamorak and puts the griffinstone into Lamorak’s outstretched hand. A smile spreads over Lamorak’s face, and his eyes drift closed in what might be mistaken for sexual pleasure.
“All right,” he murmurs. “We can go now.”
“You heard the man,” I say to Rushall, nodding toward the stairs. “Giddyap.”
By the time we reach the top of the stairs, Rushall’s already panting under Lamorak’s hundred kilos; a bad sign. I step over the two unconscious guards—both breathing, so far—and nod to Talann.
“Let’s get out of here. We can bar the door from outside.”
“Wait,” Lamorak gasps thinly. “Wait one second.”
By way of answer, Lamorak lifts the fist in which the griffin-stone is clenched, and his eyes drift closed again. “Pick up the scalpel,” he says clearly, and far below us on the platform in the middle of the Theater of Truth, Arkadeil does.
“Thine eye offends thee,” Lamorak says, with venom in his voice more potent than I’ve ever heard from him. “Pluck it out.”
With robotic lack of reaction, Arkadeil drives the scalpel deep into his left eye.
Talann gags and says thickly, “Mother!”
“Fucker,” Lamorak says, his teeth showing yellow and savage. “That’s motherfucker.”
Blood and thick, clear fluid stream down Arkadeil’s cheek as he saws the scalpel back and forth within his eye socket. Rushall moans in terror and revulsion.
“Mmm,” I say thoughtfully. “Remind me to stay on your good side.”
Once out in the corridor, we bar the door behind us. While Lamorak is busy producing a flame to light the lamp, Talann leans close. “Can we haul him up that rope?” she says, low, nodding at Lamorak. “He’ll never climb it.”
“We’re not going up the rope.” I nod back in the direction from which we came. “That’s gone—the daycooks’ll be in there by now, with guardsmen to watch them. But there’s another way out of here.”
I grin. “What, you thought I wouldn’t have a fallback? Am I an amateur?”
“Well, y’know, that’s the trick. We have to go through the Pit.”
“Through the Pit?” Talann goes goggle-eyed. “Are you insane?”
“No choice,” I say with a shrug. “Our way out? It’s in the Shaft.”
Lamorak and Talann exchange a grim look, and Rushall blanches—they all know the Shaft’s reputation. Lamorak clenches the griffinstone, and Rushall calms; we put the lamp into his soft-fleshed grip.
We head off along the corridor, and a four-man guard unit swings into view around a corner ahead.
In the instant of recognition it takes for the guards to register our presence, Talann has already leveled one of her bows. The guard who opens his mouth to shout “Don’t move—” takes her quarrel right into the back of his throat.
It strikes through his spine and bursts out the nape of his neck, so the impact doesn’t knock him down: he stands, swaying, dead on his feet. The other guards fire wildly in their alarm, and their quarrels strike fire from the limestone walls. Something smacks the side of my right knee hard enough to buckle it, making a noise like a slap of raw meat on a wet butcher block. They’re shouting for help as they duck back around the corner to reload, and the leader finally topples on his face, twitching.
I start to sprint after them and my leg gives way, sending me sprawling. Talann’s right with me: she leaps over my head while I hold on to my knee, finding blood there that leaks through my fingers. She bounds like a gazelle toward the corner. Only one foolhardy guard manages to recock before she gets there, but she’s ready for him as he swings back around the corner, and she never seems to miss.
Even as he brings his bow down into line, Talann springs into the air and fires, using the smooth arc of her leap to make her hands as steady as if she stood still. She’s maybe three meters from the guard when her quarrel takes him in the heart. From this range, his armor can’t even stop the vanes: the quarrel punches right through his hauberk to vanish inside his chest.
She drops the bow and makes the corner without slowing, brushing past the guard who makes thick choking noises deep in the back of his throat. Around the corner, the guards’ shouted alarms become shouts of alarm, and the wet bone-on-bone music of close combat swells, just out of sight.
Now I find out what’s wrong with my knee: on the floor, close enough that I almost fell on it, is a steel crossbow quarrel, its point bent and blunted. One of the wild shots from the guards must have hit me on the bounce. Even blunted and with much of its force dissipated against the limestone floor, it hit the bone of my knee like the blow of a mace. My whole leg is filled with numb tingling, and I can’t feel my toes—probably chipped the bone. This is gonna hurt like a bastard in a few minutes. If it got in under my kneecap . . . I don’t want to think about it.
There’s no time to find out how badly I’m injured. I’ll worry about it after I’m sure I’m gonna live through this.
The sounds of combat cease abruptly, and a second later, Talann comes back around the corner, looking pleased with herself.
“Caine,” she says seriously, “I’m just warming up.”
She can do lots of impressive things, she’d said.
“You are really something,” I tell her weakly.
She shrugs and gives me a smile I’d have to guess would be dazzling if her face weren’t smeared with shit.
Still no feeling in my right foot, though little white-hot needles are starting to prick my calf. “Help me up,” I tell her. “I’m not sure I can walk, yet.”
She takes my hand in hers, weapon to weapon, and lifts me to my feet with easy strength. The look in her eyes goes through me like a spear. When was the last time my wife looked at me like that?
This is something I can’t think about right now.
The side of my knee is pulpy and swelling already, making sausage skin out of the tight leather of my breeches—nothing feels broken in there, but between the numb tingle and the swelling, nothing feels much of anything in there.
Better keep moving and hope for the best.
Talann slips a muscular shoulder into my armpit and helps me along. Rushall and Lamorak still stand swaying in the middle of the corridor; Lamorak’s barely hanging on, head drooping like a freighter pilot’s at the ass end of a two-day run.
Shouts that answer the alarms of Talann’s recent victims come from ahead of us, toward the Pit.
Talann glances from Rushall’s blankly sweating face to my knee. “We can’t outrun them.”
“No shit. Lamorak, we need some help, here.” I take his shoulder and shake him gently. “Come on. Stick with us, man. We’re about to have guards crawling all over us. Can’t you do something to draw them off?”
His eyes barely focus. “N’much. Mmm, pretty useless . . . swordsman, y’know . . . shitty adept . . .”
I take my arm off Talann’s shoulder and whack him a stinging open-hand slap to the side of the face.
“Wake up! We got no time for this, you whining sack of shit! You pull it together—or I just cut your throat right now and we take our chances without you.”
His face seems to clear, and a half smile bends his lips. “Easy to be tough . . . unarmed man with a broken leg . . . A’right, I got something.”
He shakes his head sharply, struggling to keep his focus. “But you gotta look after, uh, after my horse, here—I can’t hold him and do . . . other shit at the same time.”
“No fear.” I draw one of the long keen fighting knives from the rib sheath within my tunic as the pale cast of thought returns to Rushall’s face. I show him the knife’s chisel point.
“Think of this as a spur. Don’t make me dig it into your flanks, huh?”
Rushall wheezes something incomprehensible, and we limp away, deeper into the Donjon, accompanied by the rising sound of boots clattering toward us.
They’re between us and the Pit, and so we try to swing wide. Lamorak mutters “Corner” from time to time and we turn; when one of the clattering patrols sees us, they insensibly point in the wrong direction and hustle off down other corridors at right angles to the one we’re in. Whatever kind of illusion it is Lamorak’s running, it’s obviously working.
Now at various places around the Donjon we can hear them shouting to and at each other: conflicting orders and argument over which way we went. It’s working swell, but there’s too many fucking guards down here—they’re everywhere, and Lamorak’s grip on consciousness is loosening.
Now and again one of the rushing patrols points at us. They see us instead of his illusion, once even firing on us, before Lamorak’s head jerks up like a narcoleptic marionette’s and the guards mill in confusion for a moment before stumbling off the wrong way.
And the prisoners are into the act now, wakened by the yelling. They amuse themselves as prisoners will, by imitating the shouts of the guards—“This way! That way! The other way! Have you looked up your ass?”—and by simply howling wordlessly to drown all voices in a rising surf of noise.
We turn aside again and again, dodging back from advancing groups, and finally, blessedly, around the curve of a corridor appears the steady light of the torchlit Pit.
I douse the lamp Rushall carries. In the yellow-rose glow from the Pit, his face is grey and slack—shit, he looks worse than Lamorak. His chest heaves, and tears stream down his face.
I can’t, he mouths again and again, and: Don’t kill me. It’s possible to feel some sympathy for the poor bastard until I remind myself what he was studying to become.
I motion for them to wait here, and I slide along the curving wall, limping up to the corridor mouth to get a look.
The door to the Shaft is all the way on the far side of the Pit, across the thirty-endless-meter diameter—a long, long walk around the perimeter balcony—and only a few steps from the verdigris-caked double doors that lead up the steps to the courthouse.
Standing by those double doors are nine very alert-looking men in full armor with crossbows at the ready, with the hip-height stone wall of the balcony rail for cover, and with, no doubt, orders to hold that door with their lives.
I mutter, softly enough that no one can hear, “We are lip-deep in shit.”
Is it too late to change my mind about this stupid escape thing?
But, y’know, I’m an optimist, and I can look on the bright side: at least we don’t have to cross the Pit floor below, with its surging mass of jeering, hooting prisoners. And better a quick death, choking on the blood that fills your lungs from a crossbow through the chest, than to be delivered alive into the Theater of Truth.
I slip back into the darkness to rejoin the others.
“Talann, you remember what I told you before, what you have to tell Pallas Ril if I don’t get out of here?”
Her face hardens, and she shakes her head stubbornly. “No. No, I don’t, and don’t waste your breath telling me again. We all make it or none of us do.”
Idiot child. “Lamorak, listen to me.” His eyes are glazed, and he seems to be looking at something deep within the stone over my head. I shake him until his consciousness swims up into view.
“Lamorak, goddammit, you have to tell Pallas she’s off-line, understand? When you meet Pallas, tell her she’s off-line.”
“Pallas?” he murmurs thickly. “Caine . . . shit, Caine, I’m sorry . . .”
He’s in a world of his own. “No time for that, now. Listen to me: Pallas dies in three days, or maybe less, maybe only two. You hear me? Pallas dies!”
Lamorak frowns, leaning his head on the back of Rushall’s shoulder; I think some of this is drifting into view through the fog in his mind. But now Talann stares at me with an uncomprehending squint.
“What do you mean, Pallas dies in three days? Is she hurt? Poisoned? What does ‘off-line’ mean?”
I bite down on my desperation and speak through clenched teeth. “Talann, I swear to you, if there’s ever a way for me to explain this to you, I will. But not now. For now, just accept my word.”
“Fine then. Lamorak, you got it? You have to tell her she’s off-line.”
His brows slowly draw together. “Off-line . . . Pallas is off-line? Bleeding god, Caine . . . she’ll die—!”
“Yeah.” Now she has two chances: if either one of them makes it, she might learn it in time to get to a fixed transfer point and live. “All right, follow me.”
I lead them up toward the mouth of the corridor; we all stop just barely far enough in the shadows that the guards on the balcony opposite can’t see us.
“All we have to do is get to the Shaft door,” I tell them, pointing.
Talann’s face hardens as she looks out there, but she says nothing. She understands as well as I do the brutal tactical reality of rounding that long open curve of balcony. I pull her back so that I can instruct her out of Rushall’s hearing. We don’t have to go far—it’s loud as a fucking nightclub in here.
“Once we’re through that door, we’re home free. At the bottom end of the Shaft there’s a sump, just a hole in the stone that they drop bodies down. It’s a long drop, but the bottom is full of a couple yards of shit and composting corpses on a ledge, and an underground stream flows right by there. That’s how we get out. Understand? Jump in and don’t swim; just hold your breath and let the current carry you while you count to sixty, like this: one-ankhana two-ankhana three-ankhana. Then swim for the side—the stream is narrow, just swim hard and you’ll bump into stone eventually. Keep hold of Lamorak—he can make a light. You’ll be in the caverns under the city. If I’m with you, everything will be fine—I know those caverns. If not, keep moving upward and calling out; you should be able to meet up with the Subjects of Cant—they use the caverns to move around under the city.”
Ma’elKoth showed me a map, that’s how, an emergency fallback in case something went wrong at the kitchen. I give her a grim smile. “I know a lot of things about this city. It’s practically my hometown.”
We go back up to where Rushall leans weakly on the wall, sagging under Lamorak’s weight.
“All right,” I tell them, “here we go.” Rushall whimpers, tears leaking steadily from his eyes. “Relax, kid. Once we’re inside the Shaft, we won’t need you anymore. And we won’t have any reason to hurt you, all right?”
He nods uncertainly, not really reassured.
“Lamorak, we need something from you again here, something to keep those guards busy while we cross the Pit.”
His breath rattles in his throat for a second or two before he whispers his answer, barely audible above the roar of jeering prisoners. “. . . I, I got nothing left, I think . . . Caine, sorry . . .”
Fuck. Yeah, that would have been too easy.
“All right,” I repeat, “let’s try it this way. Hands and knees. Stay below the balcony wall and get as far as you can.”
“Call that a plan?” Talann says. “Ever try crawling in a robe?”
“Deal with it. You lead. Give me those bows, I’m bringing up the rear.”
She hands me the crossbows and the two quivers and begins knotting her robe up around her hips. Rushall whimpers, “I can’t do it. Please. I can’t make it.”
“. . . can crawl,” Lamorak offers dully. “Don’t need him for that . . .”
“No you can’t and yes you do. And you—” I point a crossbow at Rushall. “—I’m not interested in your problems. You start to feel too tired, just imagine how you’ll feel with this quarrel sticking out your asshole. Move.”
Rushall flinches away from me with more energy than I’ve seen since I chose him for this job, and I turn to Talann. “When you get to that door, don’t wait for me, just open the damned thing. I’ll be right behind you.”
They set out with painful, nerve-racking slowness, creeping into the light. I hang back in the shadows, pressed against the wall with a bow in each hand, and watch the nine guards across the Pit.
Three minutes, that’s all I ask. Tyshalle, if you’re listening, if you’re there, give me three minutes and I’ll get us out of this.
Talann’s already out of my line of sight, and Rushall’s right behind her, crawling close to the wall, Lamorak riding him like a baby chimp clinging to its mother’s back.
I hold the crossbows upright, pointed vertically on either side of my head. Their weight makes my shoulders start to ache, and when I shift my balance a knife of pain jabs into my right knee. I hope to god I can run. I start a breathing routine and dull the pain with one of the meditative control disciplines I learned all those years ago at the abbey school.
The Shaft door stands closed and silent. As soon as that door starts to move or the guards give any sign of alarm, I’m gonna jump out, fire both bows to get their attention, and sprint for it. Maybe I’ll get lucky and drop one. A target moving at the speed I can run, across the thirty meters of the Pit’s diameter, will be nearly impossible to hit.
Or, I should say, at the speed I could run this morning. My knee feels like it’s being slowly crushed in a vise.
I only hope none of these guys can shoot like Talann.
No sign of alarm, yet. This is going to work. We’re going to make it.
And I, I confess, am loving this.
This is what I live for. This is why I am what I am. There is purity in violence, in the desperate struggle to pull life from death, that surpasses any philosopher’s sere quest for truth.
All bets are off, now, all rules suspended: no more grey-scale wandering through the moral fog of real life—this is elemental, black and white, life and death.
And even life, even death: they have little meaning for me now. They are only outcomes, consequences, vague peripheries. The violence itself consumes me, even in anticipation. When I step out from my cover, stake my life and the lives of my friends on my gift of slaughter, the caustic tide of mayhem will wash me with grace: a saint touched by his god.
Rushall interrupts my poesy by suddenly standing: he pops up behind the wall like a paper target in a shooting gallery. He’s holding Lamorak’s arms to keep the swordsman on his back—Lamorak looks like he’s out cold. Faintly over the din I can hear Rushall’s panicky scream:
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! I’ve got one!”
Did I say we’re lip-deep in shit? Make that: up to the eyeballs.
I spring out onto the balcony—I’d shoot that cocksucker if I could be sure of missing Lamorak—and level my bows on the guards across the Pit. They have no such reservations; even as I’m bringing my bows into line, eight of them fire. Some miss, but about five quarrels slam into Rushall’s chest and drive him spinning back against the wall. He slides to the floor with Lamorak beneath him.
I fire both bows from the hip. One quarrel strikes fire from the balcony wall as it glances upward, and the other takes a guard in the ribs. At this range, chainmail is no protection: the quarrel chops in till it’s stopped by its vanes, and the guard sags against the bronze doors—which are opening!—and now even more guards press through—
I duck behind the balcony wall to recock and reload, and one of the guards blows some kind of brief tattoo on a bugle that echoes through the Donjon.
This is about to get kind of hairy.
I have to run the opposite way, draw the guards off, but even as I’m uncoiling to stand, something snaps past my head and something else hammers my shoulder from behind. I roll with the impact, and a red-smeared crossbow quarrel clinks to the floor at my feet, even as I spin and see for the first time the four guards pounding up the corridor I was just in.
Fuck going the other way—I’m not feeling heroic enough to get pincered on this balcony just to provide a five-second diversion.
Two of the guards sprint toward me along the corridor walls; the other two stop in the middle of the corridor and take aim on my head.
I drop my bows and shoulder-roll to my feet, simultaneously drawing the little leafblades from my ankle sheaths and flipping them both backhand down the corridor. There’s no force behind the throw, but it’s enough to make them flinch and duck and spoil their shots.
I sweep up my bows and toss them over the balcony rail and follow them with the quivers. A bloodthirsty roar goes up from the Pit as a couple of prisoners find themselves unexpectedly armed. Then without hesitation I skip forward to meet one of the charging guards and grab his armor at the collarbone. I fall to my back and plant a foot in the pit of his stomach, kick him into the air, and he sails right over the rail and falls wailing into the Pit.
I continue the roll and let it bring me to my feet. The other charging guard has skidded to a stop out on the balcony, and now he looks like he’s not at all sure he wants to deal with me by himself. He says, “Hey, wait—” as I jump at him and smear his lips with a stiff jab.
In the instant that he blinks, I wrap my forearms around his head and twist around for the neck-breaking hangman’s throw. He clenches his neck enough to save his life, but the leverage sends him, too, over the rail to join his comrade among the prisoners below. He and his partner both had crossbows dangling from their baldric-slung shoulder straps.
Now four prisoners below are armed.
The two still in the corridor struggle with their bows; one doesn’t even have it cocked yet, and the other is hastily trying to fit a quarrel into the groove, hands jittering with adrenaline. I show them my teeth and beckon, and they exchange a worried glance.
I start toward them along the corridor, and their nerve breaks: they turn and bolt. The instant their momentum is taking them away from me, I spin and sprint back out onto the balcony, heading for Rushall and Lamorak.
More quarrels snap past me, two or three coming close enough to sting me with stone splinters they strike from the wall, one tugging at my leathers as it grazes my ribs. The guards across the Pit are busy with the bowmen downstairs: this flight of quarrels must have come from someone else, new guards answering the trumpet blast, but I don’t have time to turn and look.
My shoulder seems to be working well enough, despite the spreading slimy warmth from the wound. The quarrel must have missed the bone, slicing instead through my trapezius next to my neck, missing my spine by maybe two inches. Every step sledgehammers a railroad spike into the side of my right knee.
I round the curve, and Talann’s on the floor, keeping her head down as she fights to disentangle Lamorak from Rushall.
“Go go go!” I shout. “Get the door; I’ll bring him!”
Her head comes up at my shout; she nods and back-rolls away to her feet. Two guards across the Pit track her with their bows as she runs.
I shriek “Stay down!” but before they can fire, a pair of flat whacks sound from the Pit floor. Quarrels zip past their heads. They jerk back, and both their shots go wild.
The others by the courthouse door return fire down into the Pit. All I have to worry about is the four guards that come pounding toward me, now joined by the two I’d chased off earlier.
I have fifteen seconds before they get here.
I grab one of Rushall’s limp arms and try to drag him off. Lamorak shrieks in sudden agony—that’s all right, at least he’s awake—and Rushall jerks convulsively and moans; even with five quarrels in the chest it’ll take him a minute or two to die.
I see the problem: they’re pinned together by a quarrel that had struck through Rushall’s chest just below the collarbone.
The racing guards are forty feet away, then thirty.
I wedge a toe between Lamorak’s chest and Rushall’s back; all three of us cry out as I summon a burst of hysterical strength and yank Rushall upward, lifting him in my arms like a sleepy child. Blood pumps from Lamorak’s belly and from a deep ripped-edge puncture next to his right nipple.
“Run you worthless fuck get up and run!” I scream, and encourage him with an ungentle kick in the ribs as the six guards come thundering up behind me. Lamorak rolls over, groaning and starting to drag himself away on his hands and one good knee.
I spin to meet the guards with Rushall still struggling in my arms and throw him bodily into the leader. They meet with a solid thump, Rushall screaming and clawing frantically, clutching at the cursing guard to recover his balance. Their struggle brings them against the retaining wall; they tip, locked in a lover’s embrace, and tumble to the Pit floor. Howling prisoners swarm over them.
The remaining five guards skid to a halt and spread out, lifting their clubs to guard position and moving to flank me.
I could run now; I could get away and leave Lamorak to crawl and be taken—these men in chainmail could never catch me, even half gimpy as I am. Instead I wait for them in an open stance, fists up with fingers forward, presenting the meat of my forearms to absorb the coming blows of iron-bound clubs. Crossbows fire somewhere, and men scream in pain.
Past the closing guards I can see corridor mouths vomiting reinforcements onto the balcony as more patrols answer the alarm.
I wait, forcing air in and out of my lungs.
My soul sings poetry within me.
Their eyes flicker to meet each others’, preparing to strike.
I attack, letting go of conscious thought.
I spring to one side of the nearest with a passing-leg, and he folds around the impact of my shin, gasping, even while my fingers stab for the eyes of another. I shift my balance and side kick a third stumbling back over the wall into the Pit, before I spin and slice the edge of my palm against the base of the skull of the first. He drops, twitching spastically.
Just as I feel the first swelling surge of victory, one of the bastards pegs me from behind, not squarely but solidly enough to drive the breath from my lungs and buckle my knees: icy fire spreads from the point of impact above my kidney.
Another swings his club at the joining of my shoulder and neck, and I barely get my hands up in time to take it on the outside of my left forearm and the palm of my right hand. The club blasts the feeling out of both of them and crashes through my guard, on target, but instead of breaking my neck it only strikes meteors through my swimming head.
I snarl at the pain and slap his jaw with my doubled elbow, turning in time to duck under the follow-up of the guard behind me. From my bent-over position I hammer an uppercut into his armored groin—which only makes him grunt, but it lifts him up onto his toes—I grab his belt with my numb fingers and yank him forward and down on top of me in time to shield me from the down-stroke of the other. I can feel its impact through his chest, but it’s not enough to take him out through the padding under his armor, and now the one whose eyes I poked is blinking like he can see again, and I am in deep, deep trouble.
I can’t say exactly why I thought I could handle five armed and armored men—
There is, y’know, a history of insanity in my family.
I heave and roll out from under the guard; as he struggles away from me one of his boots whacks me in the eye hard enough to shoot more stars through my vision. I keep rolling while my head slowly clears—if I stop moving, they’ll beat me to death in a second or two. When I can see again, the first thing I see is a shiny black pebble on the floor about six inches from the end of my nose.
I get my hand on it as the three guards advance on me, clubs up for the kill. A quick glance back—there’s Lamorak, only five or six meters away, wheezing and dragging himself along, still maybe ten meters short of the door.
“Lamorak!” I holler. “Catch this fucking thing and give me a hand here!”
He looks behind, and I shoot the griffinstone at him like a marble. It skips and skitters along the floor, then it hits a crease on the rough-cut stone and bounces wildly into the air.
I track the stone with my eyes, the guards above me forgotten.
Lamorak squints like he can’t see it, like he’s lost it in the uncertain torchlight.
His palsied hand wavers—Where is the damned thing? Did it go over the fucking wall?—and it drops right into his palm.
His fingers close around it, and that dreamy sexual smile comes back to his face.
He says clearly, “Kill them before they kill you.”
I know better than to think he’s talking to me. I back-roll to my feet, away from the guards, as one of them pivots and swings his club like a baseball bat into the unprotected face of the man beside him. Bone disintegrates under the impact, and the man flips over like a pancake, dead before he hits the floor.
He swings on the other one, who’s still too startled to defend himself, and drops him too. Then he races away from me to meet the charge of the ten or twelve guards that are thundering toward us.
Lamorak has to concentrate to keep this going, so I scramble over behind him and lift him with my arms around his chest. Ten meters is all that’s left between us and escape. No one’s shooting at us; they all seem engaged in the exchange between the guards and the prisoners in the Pit. I look ahead—
Talann has the Shaft door open.
It opens out onto the balcony; she’s holding it wide to use it like a tower shield, closing off half of the balcony so that the guards on the other side can come at her only one at a time. The robe I gave her is painted crimson; no way to tell how much of the blood is hers.
I drag Lamorak toward her; now I’m wheezing and limping and this is taking forfuckingever.
Our tame guard goes down under a hailstorm of iron, a couple of the advancing guards stopping to stand over him and beat him until they make porridge out of his head. Lamorak is trying to take over another one, but his breathing is ragged and he’s lost a lot of blood and the effort is too much for him—more blood bursts from his nose in a bright crimson spray; he sags in my arms.
The guards sprint toward us, more and more seeming to join them with every step. I look over my shoulder—we’re almost there. As I drag Lamorak to the doorway, Talann is using the two knives I gave her in a very complex infighting style that looks vaguely like wing chun, a flurry that not only slices the wrist tendon of the guard’s club hand, but ends by driving a blade up through the soft underside of his chin.
She kicks his twitching corpse back into the arms of the man behind him, and we’re through the door. I drop Lamorak like a sack of meal and grab the back of her robe, yanking her backward into the Shaft. She whirls on me with a shout and recognizes me barely in time to stop the flashing arc of her blade a couple of inches from my eyes.
I step past her and haul the door shut, bracing a foot on the wall beside it to hold it closed against the pull of the guards outside.
“Don’t wait for you?” she says breathlessly. “You’ll be right behind me?”
“No fucking lip out of you,” I tell her.
With the door shut, there’s only a thin line of torchlight leaking beneath it for illumination. They pull a couple times, hard enough that I feel something pop in my wounded shoulder.
I let go of the door and shift my weight onto the balls of my feet while I draw one of my long fighting knives. This time, when they pull on the door, it swings wide, and I lunge like a fencer, stabbing the chisel point into the mouth of the nearest guard, splintering his teeth and slashing sideways to part his cheek back to the hinge of his jaw. He jerks backward and falls, howling. I slam the door shut again and hold it.
“Now,” I say softly, “we just have to wait for one of them to get a bright idea . . .”
Through my hands I can feel the grinding chunnk as somebody slides the heavy bar into place. “That one. They’ve barred the door from outside. They figure we’ll be here when they’re ready—they’ve got problems other than us, right now.”
The heavy door cuts almost all the noise from outside along with the light; now soft, despairing voices from below begin to ask each other if they can tell what’s going on.
The throwing knife from between my shoulder blades will serve perfectly. I pull it out and feel for the crack of the door, slip the blade within it, and pound it home with the pommel of my fighting knife. It’s just like pennying shut a door in the apartments where I grew up. It won’t stop the guards when they come for us, but it’ll slow them down and give us a little warning—we’ll hear them pry it open.
I pull Kierendal’s lighter from the pocket inside the waistband of my breeches and thumb it alight. From the darkness beyond the tiny pool of wavering light it casts, eyes peer uncertainly back at us.
“What’s happening?” somebody whispers. “You’re not guards—have you come for me at last?”
Talann’s breath catches, and I put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t answer. There’s nothing we can do for these people. To speak to them will only give them cruel hope.”
And the smell comes to us: bitter sweat and shit and the sweet rot of gangrene, the thick reek of gas escaping from bloated corpses below, a dizzying stench that burns my throat and slaps tears into my eyes. I hand Talann the lighter.
“Lead the way. I’ll carry sleepyhead, here.”
In the glow, Lamorak looks even worse, and the blood that once had pumped out from his chest wound now only flows sluggishly. I don’t know if he’s going to survive. Shit. At least I got him out of the Theater of Truth—that should count for something.
“Hang on, you bastard,” I mutter as I slap some of Ma’elKoth’s unguent on the chest wound; maybe it’ll slow the bleeding, anyway. I sling him up into a fireman’s carry that makes my own wounds, shoulder and knee, announce their presence loudly. “Hang on. I don’t want to have to look Pallas in the eye and tell her you died down here. She’ll never believe I didn’t kill you myself.”
We move down the long, long step-cut slant of the Shaft. The floor is slick with the condensation from the breath of hundreds of gasping prisoners, and now Talann reaches the first of them, all with one wrist chained to the wall above their heads.
The Shaft is maybe five meters across, just wide enough that the prisoners chained in an endless double row down along its walls can’t reach us as we walk down its middle. All are naked, clothed only in their own filth and the filth of those upslope.
Prisoners in the Shaft are unchained only if, through some extraordinary mercy, they are to be released from the Donjon. They are kept here, fed a minimal diet, and kept chained to the wall until they die. Their wastes flow downhill, to the sump that is our destination, so the prisoners below are bathed constantly in the shit and piss from those chained above. Rarely—perhaps once a month—the guards come in here to unchain the corpses and flush the Shaft with barrels of water. The corpses, too, are rolled downhill into the sump and left there to rot.
Our tiny bubble of light reveals men and women in misery so abject that they’ve become objects, not even animal, only bundles of shattered nerves and gangrenous sores that have no purpose left beyond experiencing the slow, shit-filled slide down to death.
Even Dante would swoon, here; Talann can barely take it. Her shoulders tremble, and sometimes I can hear a faint sob and a murmured prayer that the Great Mother have pity and release these souls from life.
Y’know, I admire Ma’elKoth, I really do—but if I ever start to actually like the man, all I’ll have to do is remind myself that he runs this place, and he could change it if he chose.
On the other hand, I guess it’s not that different from being born into a Labor slum. Shit, as they say, flows downhill at home as much as here—and in the Shaft, it doesn’t take as long to kill you.
The growing ache in my chest, that’s the strain of carrying Lamorak. The tears, they’re from the stench. And the sickening, retching revulsion in the pit of my stomach—
A squeal of hinges from above, and far, far back I can see a pinprick of light. We’re out of time.
“I see it!” Talann breathes hoarsely—and she’s looking ahead, downhill. She must mean the sump.
“All right. When you get there, don’t even slow down. Douse the lighter and hold it tight in your fist. Until Lamorak wakes up, that’s all the light we’ve got. When you hit bottom, move to one side as fast as you can; Lamorak and I will be right behind you.”
We reach the sump: it’s nothing more than a ragged natural fissure in the stone of the floor. Faintly up it comes the slap of water on rock.
Loud voices and the clatter of boots come from above. It won’t be long before the guards are in crossbow range despite the low ceiling: crossbows have an extremely flat trajectory.
Talann’s vividly violet eyes hold mine for a moment across the flame of the lighter, then she snuffs it; blackness so deep you can taste it surrounds us.
Her hand touches my arm, and on my mouth comes the quick brush of her lips; then a rushing absence fills the space where she had been.
It seems like a sizable bite of eternity before I hear her call faintly from below. “Go!” is all she says.
I take a deep breath and shift Lamorak’s weight on my shoulders; it takes every milligram of courage I possess to step from the stone and plunge into space.
We fall and fall and fall and bounce from stone and slide across shit-slickened rock: nothing can be seen—how far to go, how far we’ve come—we bounce and tumble and fall some more—
And land, driven deep into a soft pile that makes wooden splintering crackles beneath and around us.
I dig my way out of it, trying not to think about what’s smearing in and around the open wounds on my shoulder and knee.
She strikes the lighter. My god, I hope I don’t look as bad she does. It’s impossible to say what it is that layers and cakes every inch of her body because my sense of smell shorted out a couple of minutes ago up in the Shaft. The pile in which we lie is an unknowable number of corpses, layered with an unconscionable amount of human waste.
Hah, I can take it; landing here isn’t that different from the end of the Ritual of Rebirth.
By the light of the tiny, smoking flame we manage to locate Lamorak. The underground river is only a couple of meters away. That’s what’s kept this pile from swelling until it choked the sump: some of it is always washing away when it gets too high.
Lamorak is out cold; there’s only one thing left to do. I take off my cable-cored garroting belt and tie one end tight around Lamorak’s upper arm, the other tight around my own.
“Remember,” I tell Talann, “don’t swim until you count to sixty.”
“One-ankhana, two-ankhana,” she says. “I remember.”
She snuffs the lighter and slips noiselessly into the water. I get both hands over Lamorak’s mouth and nose, pinch them both shut, and follow her.
The water closes over my head like a blessing of the Mother, and I float in total darkness, without sensation, almost without thought except for the slow beat of the seconds I count in my head. If I were less exhausted, if the water were not so cool and soothing on my wounds, I might be tempted to panic, but as it is, I have no energy left for worry.
Seconds pass more swiftly than the beat of my heart.
I start to suspect that I’ve been trying too hard, that all my struggle and worry is a mirage, a dream, that I could be happy to simply float along in my life as I float here.
How long has it been? I’ve lost count, and I don’t care anymore. Struggling to hold my breath is too much work, and I know that pretty soon I’ll let it bubble out between my lips. I’ll breathe in water, and it’ll be as cool and soothing in my lungs and on my heart as it is on the leaking hole in my shoulder.
Now a point of light joins the shimmering phosphenes in my vision, and a familiar voice calls my name. I wonder if this is the tunnel they all talk about, if that voice might be my mother’s, until a powerful, calloused hand clamps my wrist and hauls me gasping up out of the water.
The lighter sits on the stone bank by the stream, and Talann belts me on the side of the head. “Wake up, damn you!”
I shake my head sharply and remember what’s going on. “All right. All right, I’m back now.”
Talann treads water beside me. “You’re sure?”
The lighter gives me something to swim toward, and by way of answer I make for it with a strong sidestroke, Lamorak trailing limply by my belt.
It takes Talann and me a couple of minutes to pump the water out of Lamorak’s lungs and breathe life once again into his nostrils. Once he’s breathing normally, we let ourselves collapse side by side on the stone.
“We made it,” Talann murmurs. “You did it, Caine. I can’t believe we really made it.”
“Yeah,” I say. Talk about passing through the belly of the beast . . .
“Yeah, we made it, but we have to keep moving. One or two of those guys might have the guts to follow us.”
“In a minute or two,” she says, putting a warm hand softly on my upper arm.
The water washed away the filth that smeared her features, and she’s really spectacularly beautiful, and she worships me.
“No,” I tell her. “Now. Come on, get up. The oil in that lighter won’t last forever.”
She pushes herself into a sitting position. “You can be a real bastard, you know that?”
I shrug. “That’s what my mother always said. Now move.”
TOA-SYTELL CONSULTED HIS tally sheet, checking his addition one last time before speaking. “My best preliminary estimate—that is, without knowledge of the current status of the guards and prisoners who were still alive when taken to the infirmary—is that twelve guards were killed, with fifteen more wounded in varying degrees of severity. Fourteen prisoners died in the riot that accompanied the escape, and eight more were wounded severely; fifty-six slightly injured. One of Arkadeil’s apprentices was killed, and Arkadeil himself is half blinded and may not regain full use of his arm.”
The stone rail of the Pit balcony creaked under the massive hands that gripped it; Ma’elKoth’s beard shifted as muscle bulged at the corners of his jaw, and a cracking sound came from deep within the stone as his grip tightened.
“Their wives, their children—they thought it would be safe for them to raise families, detailed here at the Donjon, away from the fields of battle,” he rumbled, deep within his throat. “They must be pensioned, each and every one. None shall ever know want due to My misjudgment.”
Ma’elKoth had insisted on coming personally to the Donjon to view the carnage with his own eyes. “It is not good,” he’d said to Toa-Sytell in passing, “for even God to sit removed from the pain of His Children; they too easily become abstract, and vague. I must taste the fruits of My commands, all the more so when that fruit is bitter unto death.”
By the time the three of them had arrived, the riot was long over. Surgeons had been moving about on the Pit floor, tending to the deep puncture wounds and limbs left shattered by the impact of steel quarrels. Ma’elKoth’s first order upon his arrival had been to carry the wounded prisoners up to the infirmary alongside the guards; he, himself, had followed.
With Toa-Sytell at his side and Berne trailing behind with cynical reluctance, Ma’elKoth had stopped at the bedside of each wounded man, spoken with each, and summoned his power to stroke away the pain of every wound with the warm paternal pressure of his enormous hands.
He opened the Imperial treasury to recompense two of the warrior-priests of Khryl, hastily summoned from their beds at their small sanctuary on Gods’ Way. Toa-Sytell had watched the creases of empathetic pain deepen across Ma’elKoth’s brow as he came upon men with limbs shattered beyond hope of even magickal repair; he saw crystalline tears swell in the Emperor’s coal black eyes as he blessed each of the dead.
“Not even I, Emperor and God, can see beyond this portal,” he’d murmured, unaware that Toa-Sytell could overhear. “I wish you well, each of you, on your journey, or the peaceful slumber of oblivion, whichever you encounter.”
When they had returned to the Donjon, the only remnants of the riot still visible from the Pit balcony were the pools of clotting blood on the floor.
“Quite a piece of work,” said Count Berne, sounding bored. He leaned against the balcony rail at Ma’elKoth’s side opposite from Toa-Sytell, with his back to the Pit while he examined his fingernails. There was an edge to Berne’s nonchalance, though; Toa-Sytell sensed that Berne overplayed it, just a bit, and he wasn’t sure why.
“Caine’s turned out to be an expensive indulgence, don’t you think?”
Ma’elKoth’s only answer was a subterranean rumble from the bottom of his chest.
Toa-Sytell coughed pointedly, and then said, low enough to be heard only by the Emperor and his Count, “I have not yet determined what, precisely, went wrong. The sentry from the rooftop guardwalk was found much more swiftly than can be accounted for by the normal routine of foot patrol. Does the Emperor wish me to pursue this, as a line of investigation?”
As he spoke, he kept his eyes on Berne, not Ma’elKoth, and so he caught the subtle flicker in the Count’s eyes, the tiny crack in his mask of unconcern. So, indeed: he knew already where such an investigation would lead.
But Ma’elKoth shook his head shortly. “No. You must bend all your efforts as you would a bow, with shaft aimed directly at recapturing Lamorak and the woman, and Caine. Anything less would be unconvincing to Our enemies; Caine must be given every chance for success.”
Berne glanced to his side and found Toa-Sytell staring at him; their gazes met for a brief, significant moment beneath Ma’elKoth’s chin. Berne forced a friendly, slightly sheepish smile, which Toa-Sytell returned with a bland I’ll be watching you stare. Berne shrugged and went back to cleaning his nails.
“What if,” Toa-Sytell asked slowly, “what if we catch him?”
“I surmise, in that event,” Ma’elKoth replied, “that a substantial number of your men will die.”
He shook his leonine head in sad disbelief, looking down on the clot-dulled surfaces of the blood pools that scattered across the Pit and on the balcony itself. “Twenty-seven men and women killed.
Twenty-five wounded, maimed, some crippled. More strokes added to Simon Jester’s bloody account—an account that I must share against My Will.”
“The Emperor will pardon my saying so,” Toa-Sytell murmured, “but that seems to be an inevitable consequence of associating oneself with Caine.”
The Emperor nodded slowly, lowering his head as if in prayer. “Yes. And I knew this when I sought him.” He released a long, slow sigh. “Twenty-seven dead . . . such boundless slaughter.”
He lifted his eyes as though looking at something deep within the stone, or something far beyond it.
“Caine could hardly cause more damage if he were, himself, an Aktir.”
ALWAYS CLEAN, ALWAYS crisp, brilliant white teeth gleaming within his polished smile. “This is Adventure Update, your only Worldwide Twenty-four-hour Source for Studio News. I’m Bronson Underwood.
“It’s now noon, Ankhana time, and this is our latest update from the Studio on Caine’s progress in his desperate search for his missing wife, Pallas Ril. As you can see by the Pallas Ril Lifeclock graphic in the corner of your screen, our best estimate leaves her with less than eighty hours remaining, plus or minus ten hours—perhaps as much as nearly four days, or as little as less than three. The entire world waits breathless, hoping and praying that Caine can find her in time. Here’s Jed Clearlake.”
“Thank you, Bronson. Our report from the Studio this hour has Caine still holed up in the Warrens with the native woman Talann and Lamorak—that’s the Actor, Karl Shanks. The Imperials are engaged in a manhunt on an unheard-of scale, flooding the city with troops, searching door-to-door for the escaped prisoners. It’s making Caine keep his head down, and I can’t imagine he’s very happy about it.”
“I’m sure he isn’t. What’s the status on the search for Pallas Ril?”
“As you might recall, Bronson, Caine organized last night’s unprecedented escape from the Imperial Donjon, at extreme personal risk, in hopes that one or both of Pallas’ companions could lead him to a prearranged rendezvous with Pallas herself. This hope has been dashed by the extreme nature of the Imperial response, making it simply too dangerous for them to move about the city. The rumor is that friends of Caine are checking the meeting places even as we speak.”
“And, I’m told, the situation there is interesting, politically.”
“Oh, yes—” a dry chuckle “—well, yes, indeed. Most of the world knows by now of the astonishing measures Caine took last night to save Lamorak’s life. Caine and Lamorak are in real life quite good friends—I don’t know if you know that, Bronson. What our viewers might not know as well is that Lamorak and Pallas Ril are also good friends, close friends; perhaps very close friends indeed.”
“I’ve heard some rumors . . .”
“They’re not only rumors, Bronson. It’s been kind of an open secret for some time, now. The question is, how much of this does Caine know? The Studio isn’t saying. I think the question on everyone’s mind is: what will Caine do when he finds out?”
“That’s a good question, Jed—interesting for us. For Lamorak, I’d guess, it’s rather terrifying.”
“Well, Bronson, as they say, Lamorak’s made his bed, and now he has to lie in it.” Another dry chuckle. “From Studio Center in San Francisco, I’m Jed Clearlake.”
“Thank you, Jed. In our next hour, we’ll have a Studio expert on—are you ready for this?—‘chaotic perturbation in multidimensional superstrings’ here, live, to take your calls. He’ll be explaining why we have such a large margin of error in our estimated Pallas Ril Lifeclock, and he’ll be answering your questions about the Winston Transfer. I’m Bronson Underwood. Stay with us.”
ARTURO KOLLBERG STUFFED another cake roll into his bulging cheeks and glared at the huge, curving POV screen. Every time Caine glanced away from the sunlit street outside to the ragged straw-leaking pallet on which Lamorak lay bundled in dirty blankets, the chant inside Kollberg’s head gained force, became a mantra, an incantation.
Die, you bastard, die. Die, you ratfuck, die die die.
But he wasn’t dying. When Caine and Talann had finally hauled him up out of the caverns, he was unconscious and shivering in deep shock; he should have died a long time ago. But they’d kept him warm, and now from time to time he woke up and they’d feed him warm broth provided by the Subjects of Cant. He’d pulled magick of some kind or other to help himself recover; they’d even managed to splint his leg while he used magick to dull the pain and relax the convulsive cramp of his thigh muscles around the tearing ends of bone within.
His leg swiftly and efficiently set, Lamorak had claimed he’d be able to walk with a crutch by nightfall, and then he’d promptly fallen back asleep. Caine and Talann and the amateur surgeon from the Subjects of Cant had taken advantage of his unconsciousness to unstitch his thigh and wash the insect eggs from the wound with the strongest brandy they could find, then resewed it and stitched together the deep slash across his abdomen, as well.
Anger had taken Kollberg wholly as he’d watched this, and he knew he couldn’t let the negative emotions rule his judgment; he swallowed another capsule of amphetamine and stuffed his mouth with sweets before the drug could kill his appetite, and he began to feel a little better.
And through it all the chant had rung in Kollberg’s brain, losing all sense, a meaningless singsong collection of syllables that would have, if there was any justice in the universe, driven the breath from Lamorak’s lungs and stopped his treacherous little heart.
Whenever the glowing mushroom of the emergency transfer switch crept into the bottom of his peripheral vision, his chest tightened and his teeth clenched. He wasn’t helpless here, he kept reminding himself. Caine’s little crack comparing the Shaft to a Labor slum had been nearly pointed enough to justify yanking him. It’s timing, y’see, that’s what’s important now, he told himself.
“MAJESTY’S ON HIS way,” the kid says, and he sounds a little awed. “I never seen Majesty come out for somebody . . .”
I look away, out the small window; I don’t want to admit that I don’t remember his name. From where I sit, here on the sharp terminus of sun and shadow, I can see the spot in the bazaar where I leveled this kid with a mutton leg a couple of lifetimes ago, there by Lum’s shack in the curving shade of the stadium wall.
“Nobody knows where she is, Baron. Tommie ’n’ me, we went there, an’ nobody’s there. I mean, we waited and everything, and Tommie’s still there, but I don’t know.”
A glance at Talann where she sits on the floor near Lamorak’s pallet, a glance that she returns with an irritable shrug. “It’s the only one I remember. I can’t help it.”
No, she can’t. It’s amazing that even one meet point leaked through the shield of enforced forgetfulness of that goddamn spell. She’s been getting more and more cranky ever since I explained what Pallas did, and I don’t blame her.
“Yeah,” the kid says, “nobody’s seen her since the big shitfight yesterday.”
Something that’s been squeezing my chest suddenly lets up. I can breathe now, and I gasp, “Is, is she well? Was she hurt? How did she look?”
He grins at me. “Pretty damn good, considering half the damn Grey Cats were chasing her down the street. That’s when the shitfight started.”
“Yeah, Baron, sorry, thought you knew.”
And he tells a pithy tale of Pallas taking on the entire Grey Cats in the Industrial Park; he makes it sound like she blew half the place up in the process of leading them toward the Warrens, and he proudly recounts how he himself had been there, had answered the call, and had personally thrown a wet clod of shit that splashed the face of Count Berne himself.
I can’t help but laugh as the kid mimes Berne’s astonished outrage at this maltreatment; the story kindles an unexpectedly warm feeling toward this kid—my god, my god, how I wish I’d been there to see it. He plays up to my reaction, doing the take over and over again, broadening it each time, until finally I wave him to stop. Even the idea of Berne taking a fistful of shit in the face stops being funny eventually . . . well, after the hundredth time or so . . .
And there’s maybe a little twinge here, a thumb in my ribs beneath my laughter, a ghost of a stab that she’s handling everything so well without me. Maybe I’ve been nursing an ignoble hope that she can’t make it without my help, that she needs me more than she’s ever admitted. Maybe it stings a little, that she’s put herself up against Berne, who nearly killed me, and Ma’elKoth, who could crush me like a housefly in his fist, and she’s holding her own. She’s free and effective, and the refugees she’s hiding are still out there somewhere. If it wasn’t for this unexpected side effect, I’d have no reason to be here at all.
“You have any idea how she ended up taking on Berne and the Cats?” I ask. “I mean, how it started? Why she was there in the Industrial Park?”
He shrugs. “I dunno. I think somebody told me something . . . nah, I don’t remember. Not important, is it?”
“I guess not. Thanks, kid. Do me a favor: Get back downstairs and keep an eye open for Majesty.”
The kid thumps his mailed chest in that silly-ass salute the Subjects favor, then coughs and rattles the hilt of his shortsword, checking that the blade’s loose in its scabbard; then finally, having thought of no further excuse to remain in my presence, he turns on his heel in a sloppy imitation of a military about-face and hustles out of the room. I listen to his boots clomp away on the soft and sagging dryrotted floor, and try to remember what it was like to be that young.
It’s hopeless: that was too many lives ago. I go back to looking out the window.
Over by the stadium a regular army platoon of heavy infantry fans out, sweating under their cuirasses, looking pissed and mean. They’re arresting passersby at random, questioning them, sometimes slapping them around. Heavy clouds move toward the sun, up from the western coast: it’s going to rain, again, which should do wonders for the soldiers’ moods. Go from sweat-boiling miserable to drenched and chilled and miserable, and have an endless supply of commoners to take it out on—it’s a soldier’s dream.
“There is one thing I remember,” Talann says slowly, after a while and in a tone so excruciatingly casual that it makes me think she’s been working on exactly how to say this for a couple of hours at least.
“About Pallas. In spite of this whatever-it-is spell. I remember how close she’d become with all of us. How much she cared for us—especially Lamorak.”
I’ve been gut-punched by experts, y’know, once even by Jerzy Kupczin, who was, at that time, heavyweight champion of the world. This doesn’t hurt much more than that did.
Is there anyone who doesn’t already know about them?
I take a long time answering, a long time to look down at Lamorak’s face, still surfer-perfect even under the swellings and the bruises. His face is all I can really see of him; it pokes out of the blankets he’s wrapped in, eyeballs twitching spastically behind closed lids; he bubbles a moan and twists within his dream, and I wonder if he’s dreaming about the Theater of Truth.
“Yeah,” I say. “She’s real caring, that way.”
“I know she’ll be really, really grateful for what you’ve done.” She’s drifting toward me. “Especially for Lamorak.”
Now I spend another long minute or two staring at Talann, now only an arm’s length away. Cleaned up and dressed in the same style of loose cotton tunic and breeches that she wore when I saw her secondhand, she’s one of the most spectacular women it’s ever been my pleasure to meet.
Even if the cotton of her clothing were heavy enough to leave much of anything to the imagination—which it isn’t—I had plenty of time back in the Donjon to appreciate the smooth curves of her form, the play of muscle in her legs and ass. Her platinum hair shines now, stripped of grease and filth, and forms an aureole of sunlight that perfectly frames the gentle curve of her cheeks and her jaw, lightly frosted with down. She’s so beautiful, and so courageous, with the singing dash of a real hero, and so impossibly skilled that she must have a dedication to her arts of fighting that far surpasses my own. I could reach out and touch her now, brush along her jaw with my fingertips, and draw her to me.
Her violet eyes are deep enough to swim in. As I watch her, she takes a slow breath, gently arching her back in a motion that’s almost imperceptible, to bring her nipples rubbing gently across the shirtfront and draw my eyes.
I’ve seen it done better—but right now I can’t seem to remember when.
She’s fishing, just tossing out a line to see if anything rises to nibble. That’s what this shit about Lamorak is, too, slapping the water to beat a fish toward her nets, and I guess I’m an idiot.
I must be an idiot, because I don’t want to be caught.
“Drop it,” I tell her. “I know all about it.”
“Lamorak and Pallas. I know what’s between them.”
She looks stunned. “You know? Then why did you—how could you . . . I mean, Lamorak and Pallas, and what you’ve done . . .”
A very, very strong man who is somehow small enough to fit inside my skull begins to pound on something behind my eyes. He’s using a morningstar.
“Can we not talk about this, please?”
“Is it . . . ? I mean, Caine, please, I’m sorry to pry, but—are you and Pallas done, then? Is that past?”
The guy in my head trades in the morningstar for a chainsaw, and it snarls in my ears. “She thinks so.”
“Caine . . .” The hand she lays on my shoulder, alongside the bandage strapped crosswise over my trapezius, is warm and strong, and the squeeze she gives seems to reach down into the muscle and start to loosen its knots. I meet those violet eyes of hers and . . . She’s not making a pass at me, that’s not what this is. This is something far more seductive and lethal than a subtle offer of sex. She’s offering me understanding.
I deliberately mistake her meaning. “No, the river washed it clean. I don’t think it’ll infect.”
This doesn’t fool her at all. She settles back into a Warrior’s Seat, legs doubled beneath her, and watches me with otherworldly calm.
I shrug, and pain stabs through my wounded shoulder—it hurts a lot more than I was pretending. I spend a couple of breaths summoning the Monastic version of mindview, the control disciplines. The guy with the chainsaw in my head wanders slowly away—even though I can still feel him in there, off in the distance but still inside my skull—and the pain ebbs from my shoulder. I spend most of my attention on massaging my swollen knee and wishing for an ice pack. By concentrating on that wound, I can talk about my other, more serious one.
“What’s between Lamorak and Pallas, that’s their business,” I say, low. “It’s got nothing to do with me.”
Talann manages to look skeptical without altering her expression.
“No, it’s true,” I insist. “It doesn’t matter.”
Her voice is as warm as an arm around my shoulders. “But, Caine, it does matter. It’s eating you up. Anyone could see that.”
“It’s their business,” I repeat. “How I feel about Pallas, that’s my business.”
“Then, for you—” The curves of her face seem to sag, just a little. “—for you, it’s not past.”
My head feels as heavy as a wrecking ball. “No, it’s not past. It’ll never be past. I’ve made promises, Talann, and I keep my word. Till death do us part.”
She doesn’t know the reference, of course—marriage in the Empire is more a business deal than a sacrament—but she gets the message, nonetheless, and she shakes her head in wonder and disappointment.
“What kind of man will go so far—nearly get himself killed again and again—to save the life of his rival?”
A fucking idiot, that’s what kind.
“It’s sort of difficult to explain.”
She places her hands on mine, covering them there on my injured knee, and waits until I have no choice but to meet her eyes. Deep inside them something is dying, like the last fading scraps of a dream you can’t quite remember when you wake up, and she says, “I hope Pallas Ril understands what an extraordinary man she is throwing away.”
Now I have to laugh; it’s the only reaction possible, short of outright tears. I feel the laugh inside, but I have to force it a little to get it to come out—a bitter chuckle.
“Oh, she understands well enough, I think. That’s part of the problem: she understands too well.”
I guess there’s not much she can say to that, because she doesn’t say anything, just sits beside me on the floor and silently watches me work on my knee.
Time passes swiftly in meditation: the angle of the sunbeam through the open window deepens perceptibly. After a while, I’m convinced that the swelling is receding—the pain certainly has—and I swim back up to the surface of my consciousness to find that Lamorak is awake and eating some solid food.
He looks at me from under his brows, oddly shy. “You, ah, washed out my leg, I guess. I can see in mindview that the, uh, the eggs are gone. Thanks.” He looks deeply, inexpressibly uncomfortable. I hope it’s from guilt.
“Ah, and, ah, thanks for saving my life. I owe you.”
Yeah? I snarl within my head. Pay me back by staying the fuck away from my wife! But instead I say aloud, “You owe me shit. If it wasn’t for that last surge on the Pit balcony, I’d be rotting down the sump right now. We’ll call it even.”
He looks away. “We’ll never be even.”
There’s some sort of harsh self-loathing in his voice, and a large, petty part of my soul grins wide to hear it.
Thunder rumbles, not so distant; I wince. It reminds me of Ma’elKoth’s voice. The first swollen raindrops beat staccato time on the windowsill, and I close the shutters. I can feel the impact of the rain through the wood, a tiny fractal drumroll like the footsteps of scattering rats.
Within half an hour Majesty arrives. He slips in through the door, alone and strangely furtive, shedding his wet cloak as he comes. Talann rises, smoothly uncoiling into a fighting crouch—she, of course, has no idea who he is, and she’s not taking any chances. I slow her with a hand on her arm and nod to him.
He looks us over, breaking into that wiseass half grin of his, and shakes his head. “Hot staggering fuck, Caine, you sure know how to stir the shitpot.”
“It’s a talent. Talann, meet the King of Cant. Majesty, this is Talann, a warrior and companion to Pallas Ril.”
He looks her over with naked appraisal before extending his hand in greeting—his appreciation of feminine musculature is every bit as developed as my own. When I introduce him to Lamorak, Majesty’s wiseass grin returns.
“Aren’t you the guy that used to carry Kosall? You know Berne’s got your sword?”
Lamorak winces, nodding, and Majesty goes on with a low whistle of mock sympathy. “Boy, that must sting. Kinda like gettin’ your dick pulled out by the root, huh?”
We make small talk about the manhunt and the general uproar in the city, and of course he’s got to hear the story of our escape from the Imperial Donjon. I have a really hard time keeping my impatience under control; wasting time on jibberjabber, when I’m this close to finding Pallas, is just about more than I can take.
Besides, hearing the story of my heroic rescue reminds me exactly how I got into the Donjon in the first place, the metaphoric woods through which my backtrail leads, and I can’t think about that too much. If either one of them finds out I’ve been hired by Ma’elKoth—
I’m not sure I’d live long enough to explain.
And I wouldn’t worry about this so much if Majesty would quit sliding me those significant looks, like he knows something I don’t.
Finally, as Talann drags out the fight on the Pit balcony, I can’t take it anymore. “Listen, is this important?” I ask. My tone leaves no doubt about my opinion on this question. “I have to find Pallas. Today. Now.”
“This is a problem,” Majesty says. “I’d like to find her myself, but I can’t put the Kingdom on it.”
“You can’t? Majesty, we’ve been friends how long—?”
He waves off my rhetoric wearily. “It’s not that, Caine. When the Cats hit her yesterday, they were waiting for her outside the spot in the Industrial Park where she had the tokali hidden—”
“They—she’s—” I sputter. “You know?”
“About Simon Jester and this Eternal Forgetting?” He gives me a patronizing What am I, an idiot? look. “Of course. Am I not the King of Cant? Though, y’know, I am curious about how you don’t seem to be affected . . .”
“It’s a mystery,” I tell him flatly. “All right, go on. The Cats were waiting for her outside the tokali’s bolt-hole.”
“Yeah, that’s right. I figure the way they found her there is the same way they found her here, three-four days ago. Somebody gave her up.”
My heart thumps once, heavily, within my chest. “A Subject?”
He nods. “Gotta be. Nobody else could have known. My source in the Eyes has no fucking clue—whoever it is deals straight to Berne and the Cats. Paslava, Deofad, one of the Barons, I don’t know. None of the rank and file would have the knowledge to sell, y’know? No stooges at the bolt-hole; she doesn’t trust ’em anymore.”
“That’s why you’re walking alone.”
“Better believe it. We’re gonna have to move you, and I’ll need the names of every Subject who knows you’re here. If the Cats come here looking for you, that’ll narrow the field a little.”
“When you find him,” I say thickly, “you make sure he lives until I get my hands on him. Will you do that for me?”
He lifts his shoulders. “No promises. I’m a little irked my own self, you might imagine. Giving her up like that . . . If I get my hands on that cockknocker—”
His fingers flex expressively, and blood surges into his face, pushing out veins twisting around his eyes. I squint at him. Something has changed since I talked with him day before yesterday. Then, this business was just a little jab in Ma’elKoth’s ass. Now it’s deadly serious, and more; he looks like he’s ready to spit lava.
“Just get me to her, Majesty. That’s what’s important right now.”
His clouded eyes turn on me with knife-edged suspicion. “Important why?”
I never really noticed before how small and piggy his eyes are. The veins around his eyes swell more, as though rage is pushing them closed. “Hey, Majesty, this is me, huh? Get a grip.”
“Yeah—” he says slowly, color slowly leaking out of his face. “Yeah. I know. I’m sorry. But she don’t need your help, Caine; shit, I’m pretty sure she invaded the Miracle the other night and got away with it.”
“Mm. Some kind of Cloak—and then a Cloak that cloaks the Cloak, know what I mean?”
I spent almost a year and a half in Battle Magick at the Conservatory before my transfer to Combat, and I understand immediately. Not even an adept can find her, because he can’t track her pull—probably an effect of the Eternal Forgetting.
My first honestly happy smile in days grows across my face.
Everyone stares at me. Majesty says, “What? What is it?”
“I,” I say cheerfully, “know exactly where she is.”
“ ’STRATOR, IT’S THAT Entertainer Clearlake, from Adventure Update. He wants to put a live feed on the net—of the reunion.”
“Tell him, ah . . . no, tell him no. The answer is no.”
Arturo Kollberg gnawed the corner of his thumbnail as he watched. Caine, ever the professional, ever conscious of dramatic necessity, insisted that Lamorak and Talann accompany Majesty and himself, despite the increased danger of discovery and capture. Arrangements took some minutes—a horse had to be brought for Lamorak, as well as heavy cloaks and hats for all against the rain that sluiced the alleys of the Warrens. They couldn’t risk the caverns, for security reasons; too many Subjects would be down there taking shelter from the rain.
A team of strikers was assembled, twelve Subjects of Cant whose job it would be to fan out ahead of and behind the party, to distract and otherwise interfere with any soldiers who showed interest in the group. They’d be sticking closer than such teams usually do, because the rain had become so heavy that visibility was little more than ten or fifteen meters, but that would also limit the activity of the searching soldiers; in all, the rain was a substantial advantage.
Kollberg had alerted the Update staff, of course, only seconds after Caine announced he now knew where Pallas was. This Clear-lake boy, he had good instincts; the scene unspooled in Kollberg’s mind: the anticipation, the approach, the first look, the meeting of their eyes, a line of dialogue—and cut.
Cut before the kiss, just before the first touch—it would play absolutely nuclear. It could double the advance orders for secondhand cubes . . .
Risky—it’d be damned risky, with Caine acting up, with the Board of Governors’ hot breath on the back of his neck. It’d take the kind of personal initiative rarely seen in Administration, the kind of daring, the boldness that bespeaks—even in his mind, Kollberg could only whisper the word—a Businessman.
The speed sang in his veins, whispering reassurance: Go for it, take the plunge, get it all . . .
On the 270-degree POV screen, Caine’s party had now crossed Rogues’ Way, heads down into the slant of the driving rain. Kollberg might have only a minute to make up his mind—but if Caine could hold off for, say, ten minutes—long enough for word to spread through the programming centers of the net—everyone would want a piece of this feed, everyone, all over the world . . . Why simply offer, why just throw the feed out onto Adventure Update?
They’d pay, all of them would pay. They’d go for it en masse like a swarm of lemmings; how could they afford not to? No channel could afford to be the only one in a market who’s not showing Caine and Pallas live. Licensing fees—the licensing fees for these few minutes could pay the overhead for the whole bloody Adventure, with millions left over!
Once his decision was made, Kollberg wasted no time in ordering the Studio comm nexus cleared for incoming traffic. A hundred marks per second? A thousand? He let the boys down in Marketing settle on a price that would make program directors gnash their teeth and tear their hair but stop short of actually fainting dead away; then he cleared a line to the Adventure Update office.
“Give me Entertainer Clearlake,” he snapped. “This is B—Administrator Kollberg.”
But not for long; I can feel it: not a mere Administrator for very much longer.
THE VOICES THAT speak from five billion wallscreens across Earth use tones of urgency that are usually reserved for declarations of war. Nearly all of the voices speak English; the few remaining ethnic channels that struggle for market share in their isolated backwaters are too poor to pay the Studio’s per-second asking price. The words spoken by these disembodied voices vary from channel to channel, but their meaning is identical: You must watch this. You must care about this. Nothing else in your life is as important as this.
And that face, his beautiful, earnest, clean-cut, honest face with the locked-down hair and the eyes with the glycerin glitter. Behind that face there’s an emotion so powerful it defies expression, some combination of religious exaltation and bone-deep smugness: I am here. I know. But you will know only what I choose to tell.
And there is a power in him; he blazes with it: a furnace of energy that pours into him from the eager eyes of the ten billion people who look at his face right now.
“Live, from Studio Center in San Francisco, I’m Jed Clearlake.”
WHEN MAJESTY SAYS, “This is it,” shouting to be heard over the waterfall sizzle of rain on our hats, my heart stammers.
The broken hulk of the warehouse looms shadowy in the fade-to-black grey-scale of the downpour, and a door gapes darkness. A chill river runs down my spine and empties along the leg of my breeches. I look up at Lamorak on the horse and at Talann, who’s kept a hand on the horse’s bridle throughout this furtive walk: they’re only ghostly silhouettes. I lean close enough to Majesty’s ear that our hat brims overlap, providing a handbreadth of sheltered air through which to speak.
“Pull your boys in,” I tell him. “Best to keep all your strikers here until Pallas is ready to move—we can’t have one of them talking about this to the wrong guy.”
He gives me that sidelong look again, the way you check something out of the corner of your eye to see if it looks the same as it did full-on, but then he nods.
“Way ahead of you.” He lifts his hand overhead and swings his arm in a long arc to call the strikers in. I can’t believe they can see it, but shortly men begin to appear, shuffling shapes with shoulders hunched against the rain. “But, I’m tellin’ you, we’ve watched this place. Tommie’s here right now. Shit, Berne himself was followed back here; he went inside to search, right after the shitfight. She’s not here.”
I allow myself a knowing smile. “You don’t know her like I do. She had thirty-some people here, set up with food and water, a place to sleep and a place to crap. She’s not going to abandon all that, not when she has nowhere else to go, no one she can trust. The best place to hide is where the hunters have already looked.” I look around: a dozen Subjects now surround us. “Let’s go in.”
I lead; Talann follows, drawing Lamorak’s horse; Majesty pauses for one last head count before bringing all the Subjects in behind us. Once inside, Majesty directs us through the maze of tumbled, half-charred beams, back to an interior office from which emanates the cheerfully rosy glow of a small campfire.
Built in the center of the floor, out of scraps pulled from the walls, invisible from outside, the fire’s keeping the chill off Tommie. He straightens from his squat when he sees me. “Hey, Caine! What’re you—” Then he sees Majesty behind me and straightens farther to do the chest-thump salute to me and then to his king.
“ ’Sno sign of Pallas Ril, if that’s what you’re after,” he says. “Didja bring anything to eat?”
“Where were they, a basement? Where’s the door?”
“Right there.” He points. “But . . .” Now through the empty doorway he can see Lamorak on his horse, which snuffles irritably at the fire, and Talann, and the other Subjects, and he shakes his head in wonder. “Outa all you bastards, nobody’s got nothing to eat?”
By this time I’ve taken Tommie’s lamp and lit it with a splinter from the campfire. I pull open the door and start down the squealing stairs; Majesty’s right on my heels. I can’t breathe—surging adrenaline makes my whole body thrum like a plucked bowstring.
I made it. I made it in time, with time to spare. I can’t believe I’m really here, really doing this. My stomach churns in time with my spinning brain, and we finally reach the basement floor.
“See?” Majesty says. “Nobody here.”
The floor is stone; it slops with a handbreadth of water that gleams black in the lamplight as it swirls around my boots. Old broken crates and stacks of mossy lumber lie scattered across it, and the combined deepwood smell of mildew and rot plugs my nose like a cork. It’s a big room, five-meter ceiling in places brushed by the mountains of old crates, sagging and waterlogged. I move deeper into the room, sliding my feet and feeling my way carefully under the concealing water. There are no doors, beyond the hole cut for the stairwell.
Majesty, out of sight behind me, says, “Dammit, Caine, bring that light back over here. This place is crawling with rats.”
Yeah, that’s all that seems to live here. I can see their tiny red lamps of eyes staring at me out of the shadows, and once in a while see their sinuous backs writhing through the water past my feet.
“Come on, Pallas,” I say loudly. “Quit screwing around. We need to talk.”
“Give it up, Caine,” Majesty tells me. “There’s nobody here—shit! Fuckin’ rat came halfway up my leg! Will you come back here with that fuckin’ lamp?”
Could I have been wrong about this? Impossible—this is exactly what Pallas would do.
“Goddammit, Pallas, you have no idea what I went through to get here.” A whiny edge of desperation creeps into my voice, against my will. “Drop the damned Cloak. I have news from home.”
That’s a code phrase that every one of us knows.
And a wave passes over and through me, a ripple through my mind, and now I can suddenly remember that I’m not alone.
As though from the bottom of a deep, deep well I can hear Majesty’s gasp.
It’s dreamlike—it’s exactly like one of those dreams where you’re out in public and you all at once remember that you’ve left your pants at home; this remembering comes in a surging rush, as though I’ve had my eyes closed and was pretending so hard that I was alone that I’d made myself believe it, but now my eyes have opened, and this reeking basement room is full of people.
It seems like they’re everywhere, perched on the crates and the roof timbers, men and women with children clinging close by their hips; they wear clothes that run from the sumptuous brocade of a merchant prince to the filthy, stained rags of a street beggar. But all of them are dirty, faces smeared by days without water enough to wash; all of them are silent; all of them watch me with eyes round in apprehension.
There’s a little group that I recognize, a man and wife with two daughters: it’s the Konnosi. I nearly nod in recognition before I remember that though I know them, they’ve never met me. I find myself deeply, inexplicably glad that they’ve made it, that Konnos’ funny self-important researcher act has not vanished from the world, that his wife is still loyal and his daughters still lovely beneath the marks of their ordeal.
She’s standing on a ledge of packing crates high above me, her arms folded over her breasts, one trim leg forward and her hips slightly cocked to emphasize the curve of her slim waist in a way that makes me ache to hold her. Her cloak drapes back over her muscular shoulders, and she gives her head that single toss, to swing the spray of her hair back out of her luminous, bottomless eyes—and y’know, she doesn’t look happy to see me at all.
“God damn you, Caine,” she says distinctly. “What will it take to finally keep you the hell out of my life?”
“CUT!” KOLLBERG SHRIEKED, surging up from the stage manager’s station. “Cut cut cut!” The techs in the booth stabbed at switches, and instantly one reported that the worldwide live feed had ceased. Kollberg fell back into the chair, trembling with victory.
That was perfect. That was better than he could have dreamed. Good god, he couldn’t have had a better teaser for a marketing campaign if he’d written it himself. Will Pallas survive? It wasn’t yet certain. Can Caine save her? No way to yet tell. What will it take to win her back? It was anyone’s guess.
He eased deeper into the chair, twitching in every muscle, squirming in a sort of sexual afterglow.
MAJESTY BABBLES SOMETHING, off on the other side of a stack of crates—he’s out of sight near the stairs. I struggle with a swelling roar in my ears, a thousand petty echoes of my voice, whining in righteous outrage: After all I’ve done for you, this is how you treat me.
“I meant it, Pallas.” I keep my tone pretty level, I think. “About the news from home. We need to talk.”
She sneers back at me with undisguised hostility. “I know why you’re here, Caine, and you can tell those greedy bastards that I’m handling things just fine, thank you. I don’t need your help. You can go home.”
We both know which greedy bastards she’s talking about. “It’s not what you think—”
“Then I suppose I should feel lucky to have you here to set me straight. Go on, Caine, tell me what I should think.”
It’d be easy, so easy and seductive, to let that tiny, searing spark of anger behind my ribs flare up to full life, to dive right back into the shouting, the name calling, the snarling toe-to-toe gut ripping that poisoned the final months of our marriage. In a way, she trained me for it: at first, it was a problem that I never raised my voice; only later did the problem become that we raised our voices too often.
Now I hang on, hold my temper with both hands: this is her life at stake. My wounded pride is meaningless here.
“Please,” I say simply, setting the lamp on a nearby crate to empty my hands. “Please, let’s not fight. Five minutes alone, to talk. Then I’m gone.”
The hard-set lines of her face soften for a moment: she was winding up for a brawl, and my preemptive surrender has taken her off guard.
She looks down at me from her high perch surrounded by the tokali. For an instant I feel her really see me; for just that one precious moment when our eyes meet she’s looking at me, instead of looking at the mental image of me that she carries in her head, the image that’s sullen and cynical, that casually homicidal villain who’s caused her so much pain.
We both carry those images, those built-up mental constructs. I think we’ve spent so long talking to ourselves, inside our own heads, arguing with an imaginary Caine, a fictitious Pallas, that we’ve virtually forgotten the reality that hides behind them.
Yet, here we are, and I can read inside her eyes. I can see that there’s still something there when she looks at me, and she must see the same, that it doesn’t have to be over for us. Her lips part as she takes a breath to speak—
A voice from behind those crates, from out of sight at the stairs, comes hoarsely. “Hey, Pallas. Bet you never thought you’d see us again.”
I can’t see him, but she can from her high perch, and her face lights with a radiance that I haven’t seen there in years. Her lips move, she mouths part of a name that her conditioning won’t let her finish, that my conditioning won’t let me repeat—it begins with a K.
“Lamorak!” she cries. “Oh great god, Lamorak!”
She scrambles down off the crates and splashes joyfully toward him. “And Talann, you’re alive, I can’t believe it!”
She’s forgotten I’m even here.
There is a happy buzz among the tokali, and many of them move toward the stairs, crowding toward the returning heroes. The basement echoes with splashing and happy babble, and I stay put for a bit.
I stand there with water lapping up the sides of my boots and stare at the deserted crates around me, and I listen to them all. I don’t think I can stand to watch this part, the part where she falls into his arms and covers him with kisses.
So I wait, and I wait, and the longer I wait the more pathetically ridiculous I feel, like an adolescent sulking in a corner at a high school dance. Only a couple of minutes pass before I can’t take it anymore; besides, seeing her in another man’s arms is something I’m gonna have to get used to, sooner or later.
With effort, I join the others. I move out of the darkness, into their circle of lamplight.
Many of the tokali are crying. Many of them try to keep a hand touching Lamorak or Talann, as though ensuring that these are not ghosts, not apparitions that will disappear as soon as their backs are turned. Pallas is between them; Talann is at her side, but Pallas’ arms are around Lamorak’s shoulders, there on the stairs, where he sits with his broken leg out before him.
I can’t help thinking, can’t help remembering that in the Theater of Truth, in the Donjon, during the whole escape, he never once asked about her. Not once. From Talann, it was one of the first things out of her mouth: Did Pallas send you? Is she well? Did she escape? Not Lamorak.
I wish there were some way I could tell Pallas that without making myself look like a petty, jealous asshole—which, of course, is exactly what I am.
Pallas now looks at me with shining eyes and speaks in a breathy voice. “Is this true? You broke them out of the Donjon? Alone? You?”
I shrug. “It was the only way I could think of to find you.” Well, sort of; but the truth would serve nothing, here.
Lamorak murmurs: “He saved me, saved my life over and over. There were plenty of chances; he could have left me behind and no one would have blamed him. Not even me.”
That’s a painless display of nobility for him—scraps from a rich man’s table.
Pallas gazes adoringly into his eyes; then she suddenly glances at me as though she’s only now remembered that I’m in the room. She starts to blush as she delicately disentangles herself. Seeing her effort to be considerate of my feelings hurts as much as seeing her arms around him did.
“Caine—I’m sorry, I . . . Well, you know. I thought—”
“Yeah, I know what you thought. Forget about it. Any other time, you’d have been right.”
“So, mm . . .” She leans forward uncomfortably. “So there really is news from home?”
“Yeah,” I say simply. “You’re off-line.”
All right, I admit it: it’s a childish thing to do, but I’m tired of screwing around. I’ll let her invent the lie to explain to the natives what off-line means.
She couldn’t look more stunned if I’d beaned her with a rock. Her face goes white, then red, then white again.
She stammers, “For, for how long?”
She takes in this information slowly and chews it over in her mind, and she’s thinking about something that I have a feeling I’m not gonna like. She stares through me, at some internal scene beyond this basement, then glances at Lamorak, then at me, and it’s me to whom she speaks.
“You’re right. We do need to talk. The three of us.”
TOGETHER WE HALF carry Lamorak back up the stairs, leaving Talann staring mournfully after us. That red surge climbs back into Majesty’s face as he watches us go, and his eyes go toward slits until a quiet word from Pallas sets him at ease. We go out past the Subjects, who are cheerfully chaffing Tommie for being fooled, and move deeper into the ruins of the collapsing warehouse.
I’ve got my good shoulder jammed up hard into Lamorak’s armpit; Pallas carries the lamp and helps him along from the opposite side; and I try not to think about the acid disappointment that’s eating the pit of my stomach.
Looks like she won’t even give me the chance to talk to her alone . . .
We find a sheltered spot, away from gaps where the drumming rain pours through the roof, and Pallas sets down the lamp. The floor is a jackstraw tumble of rot-eaten support members, and the place reeks with the chemical stench of wet charcoal. As we try to gently lower Lamorak to a seat on a fallen timber, he inadvertently grabs my injured trapezius. I wince and grunt, and Pallas looks at me, our faces only a foot apart, close enough that she should somehow sense my ache to touch her . . .
“Crossbow,” I tell her with a shrug. I know she hates this macho downgrade of pain, but it’s a habit; I can’t help it. “Through and through, missed the bone. Not serious.”
A silent moment cuts deep with sudden, overpowering shame. I can read her eyes: she can’t decide how much concern to show. She doesn’t want to be cold, but she also doesn’t want to encourage me. She can’t find anything to say, and it stings me at least as much as it does her, so I let her off the hook.
“What’s up with Majesty? Since when is he your guard dog?”
“I, ah—” She shrugs and looks away; she can’t meet my gaze as she says this. “I wasn’t sure I could trust him. There was too much at stake—”
“What’d you do, lay in a Charm?” I ask disbelievingly.
Her voice is very, very small. “I had no choice.”
“Sure you did,” I tell her. “It’s Majesty who doesn’t have a choice.” The small spark of anger in my chest is suddenly fanned by memories of countless self-righteous lectures from her. “Shit, you used to tell me I was the one with no principles.”
“You know, you’re right, Caine,” she says, heat banishing the shame from her voice. “I should have done it your way, and killed him.”
“You know the difference? You want to know the difference?” She gets right in my face, snapping. “A Charm wears off—in a couple of days, he’ll get over it. How long does it take to get over being dead? I found out he’s hooked up with Toa-Sytell himself. What would you have done?”
Majesty, in bed with the Eyes? So Kierendal was right . . . My voice is quiet and calm, and all I say is, “Oh?”
But she knows me too well; her quick anger flees, and she sags tiredly. “Don’t do it, Caine. I need him, you understand?”
From this range, I can see the red twist of arteries in her eyes, the purple swipes of fatigue beneath them. Her cheeks are sinking into her face, making her eyes larger and more luminous. She’s so exhausted she can barely see, and I don’t want to fight anymore.
“When was the last time you slept?”
She shakes her head irritably. “I get an hour or two here and there. I’ll be ready to move the tokali tomorrow morning; I’ll have plenty of time to rest after that.” She settles back a little; we’re so used to shouting at each other that the anger fades as quickly as it grows. “You look like you could use a nap yourself.”
I look at Lamorak and find on his face a frown of disbelief that mirrors my own. We both start to talk at once, because neither of us can believe that she meant what we just heard her say: tomorrow? Move the tokali? What is she, nuts?
“Stop it.” She takes off her cloak, folds it into a cushion, and seats herself on it on the floor. “I’ve been off four days, that’s what you said, right?”
“Yeah . . .” I say reluctantly. I don’t want to give her any rope, here.
“So, even allowing for uncertainty and a pretty big margin of error, I have at least twenty-four hours left. That’ll be enough to get them out of the city, and well on their way down to the coast.”
“That’s cutting it awfully close,” Lamorak says doubtfully.
“Too damn close,” I say. “You’ve cut it too damn close already. What if something goes wrong? What if you’re caught, this time? What if you’re the one-in-a-million statistic that breaks the lower edge of the boundary? Don’t you remember what—” My conditioning locks the words in my throat. “—what . . . it . . . will do to you? How are you gonna feel when everything starts to halo out? How long do you think you’ll stay conscious?”
I spread my hands, wishing I could find a way to express the throttling horror I feel. “How much time will you have to scream?”
“There are thirty-six people in there,” she says patiently, but with the calm finality she’s always used to settle arguments. It’s her My mind is made up, don’t waste your time voice. “Innocent people, who will be put to death if I don’t save them.”
“Fine. Save them. But save them on-line. Shit, that’s what you get paid for, isn’t it?”
“You think I do this for money?”
For an instant there’s a fresh spark of anger in her eyes—like she’s about to step up and start swinging—but then she lets it go. “Caine, you know me better than that.” She opens her hands wearily. “I don’t even know if I can do it—get back on-line. It’s the spell, isn’t it? The Eternal Forgetting?”
“I can cancel it one person at a time. I touch them and tell them they know me, like I did just now with Talann. But who do I touch to get back on-line?”
Me! shouts a primitive part of my brain. Touch me! But that’s just wishful thinking.
“Break the spell,” I tell her. “Cancel the whole fucking thing, and the sooner the better. Nobody knows how much time you have left.”
She shakes her head. “I can’t do that. The Eternal Forgetting is the only thing that’s keeping me effective. It conceals the pull of my magick, lets me walk Cloaked past the best adepts on the planet. And Berne knows me, and he knows I’m Simon Jester. I drop the spell, and he and Ma’elKoth suddenly know exactly whom they’re looking for. How long do you think I could hide from Ma’elKoth once he knows who I am?”
“Longer than you’re going to live if you don’t drop the spell!”
“But more than my life is at stake, here,” she says calmly.
“What if they figure a way to counter it? Ma’elKoth’s so far beyond brilliant, he’s terrifying. You think he’ll never find a spell defense that works? Then while you’re still expecting this Eternal Forgetting to protect you—”
“I’m not worried about that,” she says with a quick shake of her head. “The man who wrote this spell also invented what’s probably the only real defense against it—he’s down in that basement right now, Caine. I don’t think he’s planning to sell his new invention to Ma’elKoth.”
“A defense?” Lamorak says. He’s got a funny look on his face, like he’s suddenly really interested but for some reason is pretending this is just idle curiosity. “What kind of defense?”
“Those silver nets Konnos was using to conceal his family from seeking items,” Pallas tells him. “You remember, just before—”
“I remember,” I cut in forcefully. “And you know what? It’s not a new invention. Ma’elKoth already has that technology. Fucking Arkadeil was wearing a whole suit of that silver mesh while he tortured Lamorak. Tell her.”
He gives her a pale, shamefaced look; I guess he doesn’t really like thinking about the Theater of Truth. “It’s true,” he says. “Nothing I could do got through it.”
She nods grimly, her eyes fixed on some internal truth. “Not surprising. Konnos freelanced for the government from time to time.”
The bottom of my throat burns like I’ve swallowed acid. “You’re going through with it anyway.”
“They still haven’t made the connection,” Pallas says. “They don’t realize that it might be a defense; maybe it’ll take them another day to work it out. I only need twenty-four hours. It’s worth the risk.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the tokali—”
“You never did. I would never expect you to. That’s part of the problem.”
The burning in my throat forces its way up into inarticulate snarls. “Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck!”
I stomp around a little bit and bite down hard on my temper. Finally I feel like I can speak again. “Lamorak, you talk to her. Anything I tell her, she wants the opposite, no matter what.”
“Caine, you know that’s not true. That’s just childish,” she says, and Lamorak frowns like he’s been thinking hard enough to hurt his pretty head.
“Caine, I, ah . . .” he says, his voice low and slow. “I’m sorry. I agree with Pallas.”
“She has to follow her heart, don’t you see?” he says virtuously. They exchange a puppy-dog look that makes me want to slap them both. “I support her. I’ll help. No matter what.”
I lower myself onto the floor, slowly; I’m afraid my head will explode if I move too fast. The stabbing bitterness churns in my stomach. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe that after all I’ve gone through, I’m still going to lose her.
Because I know, y’see, I can feel it—this is her last chance.
The affair, her thing with Lamorak, that I can handle. As long as she’s alive and happy, I can handle it. What I can’t face is the thought that she will be gone, snuffed out of the world, that I’ll never see her, hold her, stroke her hair, smell the delicate scent of her skin, ever again.
Pallas says, “This is screwing up your Adventure, isn’t it?” That suspicious tone is back in her voice.
I lift my head to meet her eyes. “I don’t follow.”
“Bullshit you don’t. That’s why you’re upset,” she says, jabbing an accusing finger at my face. “They sent you here to rescue me, and I don’t want to be rescued, and it’s going to screw with your profit margin.”
I sit still for a moment, searching for the flame of anger her tone should have kindled inside my chest, but it’s not there.
Ashes, only ashes and bitter defeat.
“Pallas, you can believe me or not, it’s up to you,” I say heavily. “They didn’t send me here to rescue you. They’re allowing me to rescue you, like in my spare time. If anything, they’d prefer that you die—it’ll make the story a hell of a lot more dramatic.”
She leaves Lamorak’s side for a moment. Something in my tone has caught her, and she knows, whatever my many faults may be, I’m not a liar. She crouches just out of arm’s reach, and her brows draw together.
“You should explain that,” she murmurs.
I shrug and shake my head dismissively. “You ever wonder . . . Do you ever wonder why it is you’re fighting so hard to bring down a government that—in broad outline—is kind of like our own?”
She looks puzzled. “I’m not bringing anybody down. I’m just trying to save some lives.”
“You’re embarrassing Ma’elKoth: making him look like a fool. His hold on the nobility is based almost entirely on fear of his near omnipotence. But everyone can see that he can’t catch you.”
Now she frowns, disturbed. “I don’t want to topple Ma’elKoth. If anything, he’s right”—a twist to her mouth, parody of a smile—“the Aktiri are the greatest threat the Empire faces. He’s got the wrong Aktiri, that’s all.”
I shake my head minutely, slowly, and I can’t hold in the bitter laugh. “If only I could tell you how right you are.”
“I don’t get you,” she says, frowning, puzzled. Then her face clears to understanding, then to wonder, and passes through to wide-eyed horror.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. I’m a fucking idiot—I can never seem to remember how smart she is. A cascade of denials tumbles through my brain, but none of them can make it to my lips before she reaches out with a tentative hand that holds warm and dry on my wrist, a touch that goes through me like a lightning stroke and stops my mouth, stops my breath, my heart.
“Caine . . .” she whispers. “My god, Caine—tell me I’m wrong. Tell me that’s not what’s happening.”
“That’s the deal,” I say miserably. “That’s what I owe them, for the chance to come here. For the chance to save you.”
She looks stunned, sickened, horrified beyond words. “Another Succession War . . . and that’s the best you can hope for; that’s what happens if by some vanishingly small chance you don’t die a hideous death . . . Caine, I’m not worth that—”
I summon the courage to lay my hand over hers and squeeze. “Yes, you are. You’re worth anything.”
And there are tears in her eyes, and I wish I had the words to tell her how precious she is to me; she shakes her head, denying it, denying me, denying the infinite value of her life.
“But this is the last one, win or lose, live or die,” I tell her. “I fought it—I’m trying to leave that whole part of my life behind, but they won’t let me . . .”
“You waited too long,” she murmurs. “They’ll never let you.”
Lamorak has been looking from her face to mine and back again, and finally the truth has percolated through the pudding he uses for a brain.
“You’ve contracted on Ma’elKoth?” he breathes. “Fuck me like a goat. . . You don’t have a chance!”
And he’s right, of course. I agree with him completely, but I can’t tell him so, because right now, looking at his bruised and battered face, something has shattered an ice mirror inside my head. Its pieces rain tinkling around me, glittering and shining and chilling my back and making the hairs stand up on my arms. The pieces are falling into a new picture, a new mirror that shows a truth I hadn’t seen before, and each piece falls into place with a click like the tumblers turning inside a lock.
Fuck me like a goat—it’s a common enough exclamation of dismay, or incredulity, I suppose, but I’ve heard it recently.
Majesty’s voice is inside my head now, repeating, “Somebody gave her up . . .”
Another click, from Pallas’ memory that I share: Lamorak at the window, sun glow backlighting his perfect profile as he lights a smoke with just enough pull to be felt outside—a signal. And then his own words: Please believe I never wanted it to turn out this way. I’m sorry, Pallas. And this is where I pay for it.
And then one more, one that echoes like a boulder down a well, like the final steel-into-wood chock of a guillotine’s drop.
Ma’elKoth himself rumbles up from the deepest depths of my chest: I have found that two agents, working separately—even in competition—toward the same end, achieve that end much faster and more reliably.
I look into the eyes of this dead man, and say, “You. It’s you.”
He stiffens; he can see his death on my face, and he doesn’t even know why.
“Caine, uh . . . Caine?” he says. “Mm, Pallas, what’s—?”
She tries to hold on to my hands as I pull them free and stand. Her words come from impossibly far away. “Caine? What’s wrong?”
Her voice is buried by the winds that howl from the abyss in the center of my spirit; their roaring fills my head, presses outward until the entire universe breathes hatred.
I take a step toward him, and I try to bring my voice back from beyond the edge of the world to tell Pallas. I have to tell Pallas—
My voice is a passionless, mechanical rasp of cinder blocks; no shout, no scream, no howl of rage could ever approach what I feel. Any chance of expression is snuffed like a candle’s flame by the hurricane in my head.
“He’s the one. He’s the one that—”
But now chromatic, crystalline halos limn Lamorak’s face, and the timber on which he sits, and the lamp, and the walls, and Pallas’ panicked reach as she extends her hands to me. I turn and I leap for her, to touch her, to complete the circuit, a last desperate attempt to bring her with me, and my outstretched hands pass through her translucent, insubstantial chest, and I fall, gasping and retching out my anger, alone on the transfer platform of the Cavea, in the Studio, in San Francisco.
I CROUCH THERE on my knees, fingernails clawing at the seamless flat black plastic, smooth and cool. I’m shaking too hard to try to stand, but I can lift my head, lift my eyes past the row upon row of first-handers, faceless behind the blank plastic masks of their induction helmets, up to the mirrored shimmer of the techbooth panels.
I am in agony, and now, at last, here on Earth, where my conditioning does not block my tongue, I can give a name to my pain. It is the only word that can pass my lips:
“—BERG,” HARI FINISHED, full of that indefinable sense of loss that comes from ending an Adventure on the transfer platform, as the senselink was cut off, as he once again became alone, no longer the source of experience for millions. But the loss was a familiar one, and it sank almost without a trace into the ocean of his impotent fury, as all his raging hatred turned and coiled and stabbed him through the heart.
So close—he’d been so close. If he hadn’t pulled away from her, if he hadn’t started toward Lamorak, if he’d been half a second faster in his reaction, if his stiffened knee hadn’t slowed him—
She’d be here, beside him, now.
The bitter wound of this knowledge consumed him: he’d held her life in his hands, and he’d dropped it. For long seconds he couldn’t think, could hardly see, could only experience the taste of ashes, the astonishing pain of failure.
All his wounds dragged at him as he struggled to stand: the deeply bruised shoulder joint from Berne’s crushing grip; his swollen, fiery knee; the ragged hole in his trapezius that sent fingers of fever toward his neck; the stretched-tight new scar of the healed rip on his inner thigh; the innumerable aches and pains and bruises from being tossed through the air and beaten with iron-bound clubs. Of them all, the one that stripped the most strength from his knees and pressed the breath from his lungs was the knife of regret that lodged in his heart and pounded in time with his pulse.
Only later, slowly, gradually, did the questions start to come muttering through the haze of pain: How did he get here? Why in God’s name did they recall him?
Actors are never recalled in the middle of Adventures; it just isn’t done. Shit, Kollberg had needed special authority from the Board of motherfucking Governors to recall him at the end of Servant of the Empire—what could possibly justify this?
Why let him try in the first place, if they weren’t going to let him win?
He looked up at the blank spreading looking glass of the tech-booth wall high above, and opened his hands. He wanted to shout, to rage, to roar defiance, but all that could come from his chest was a ragged whisper.
THE TECHS IN the booth sat at their stations but only stared, silently wide-eyed. Not one was brave enough to say a word, to ask any of the questions or make any of the remarks that were in all their minds.
“That,” Kollberg said distinctly, “was a malfunction. Am I understood? A malfunction. You know your jobs. Do them.”
Slowly the techbooth came back to life as one tech, then another, then all of them turned to the tasks of closing down the transfer mechanisms and bringing the first-handers up out of senselink.
Arturo Kollberg cradled his fist to his soft and rounded chest, the fist that he had bruised on the emergency recall switch. He was painfully aware of how little sleep he’d gotten, the amphetamine-masked exhaustion that was the result of the state of continuous nervous excitement of the past three days, especially this last twenty-odd hours since Caine came back on-line.
He’d been drowsing in his chair despite the drug, almost dozing off in the afterglow of the successful live feed, when he’d been yanked bolt upright by Caine’s line about toppling a government so much like our own. He’d struggled heroically against the fog in his brain as he listened with growing incredulity to the conversation that followed, and he cursed himself for inattention, for waffling. He’d left it too long, let too much go out. By the time his horror finally overcame his natural inertia and he’d slapped the switch, it was too late.
There should be a feeling of triumph, here, however petty that triumph might be—he’d finally gotten that bastard, finally showed Caine and Michaelson both who was really in charge around here—but instead there was a taste of dust in his mouth and an uneasy griping in the pit of his stomach.
He looked down through the one-way glass at the transfer platform as Michaelson, below, lifted his eyes toward the techbooth.
He’s looking right at me. But . . . that’s ridiculous. How could he know I’m up here in the booth?
One of the techs whistled to himself, low and slightly awed. “He looks kinda angry.”
Another tech forced a weak chuckle. “It’s a whole different feeling when he’s looking that way at you, isn’t it?”
Kollberg huffed a sigh through his nose and thumbed the key to connect his intercom mike to the Security office.
“This is Kollberg. Send a riot team to the Cavea. Full gear.”
This was one of the reasons that Actors were never to be transferred in the midst of an Adventure: any emotions Caine was feeling right now would be chemically echoed in the bloodstreams of the five thousand first-handers. Even the tranks that were being fed through their simichairs’ neurochem drips didn’t entirely eliminate the possibility of trouble.
And then there was Michaelson, who wasn’t getting any tranquilizers at all.
Even as Kollberg finished speaking, Michaelson pushed himself upright and began to walk slowly and carefully down the long flight of steps at the side of the ebony ziggurat of the transfer platform.
Kollberg pressed his lips together and tapped his fingers against one another in series: index-middle-ring-little, over and over again, obsessively focusing on the inaudible four-beat drumroll. He’d have to say something, do something that would keep Michaelson on the platform, at least for the couple of minutes it would take for the secmen to arrive in their cardinal red body armor, with their stickyfoam and power rifles loaded with gelslugs.
He keyed the mike for general address, and his amplified voice boomed through the Cavea. “Michaelson? Er, Caine? Please stay on the platform. We’ve had a transfer malfunction. We’re trying to correct it right now; there’s a chance we might be able to send you back immediately.”
That should handle him; Kollberg turned his attention to his real problems. First, he’d have to find some way to mollify the chairmen of the linked Studios around the world; they would probably all call en masse to shout and scream and variously vent their outrage at this interruption of Caine’s Adventure. Kollberg expected these calls to begin any second, but this wasn’t his biggest problem.
He was also expecting—dreading would be a better word—a call from the Board of Governors. He’d have some explaining to do. Even the thought of dealing with that blank screen and digitally modulated voice twisted his guts into knots that seemed to tie his throat closed as well. He needed that confidence back, that rush he’d had with the live feed; it seemed now that he’d crashed as far as he’d risen. With trembling fingers, he opened the carton and pried out another capsule. He turned away from the techs and dry-swallowed it painfully.
“Uh, ’Strator?” one of the techs said dubiously. “You might want to look at this.”
“I hardly have time . . .” Kollberg began irritably, but his voice trailed off to silence and his mouth went suddenly dry as he automatically followed the line of the tech’s pointing finger.
Far down below in the Cavea, Michaelson was sprinting up the long slope of the center aisle, heading for the door.
But problems were what he was paid to handle. With only an eyeblink’s hesitation, he keyed his mike for Security.
“This is Kollberg again. Detail three men from the riot team to meet me at my office. Not in the Cavea, not at the techbooth, at my office, do you understand?”
His assistant would have already left for the evening; they’d have the kind of privacy Kollberg wanted for what was to come.
“And not regulars. Specials. I want three specials at my office, and three more specials up here at the techbooth. Order them to take custody of Hari Michaelson and escort him to my office. Authorize the use of force.”
He turned to the curious techs and looked into the growing apprehension on their faces. “When Caine gets here—and he will, ah, make no mistake, this is where he’s coming—tell him I’m expecting him in my office. Nothing more, nothing less. Three secmen will shortly arrive to take him there. It would be best, in fact, if you speak with him very little. I believe that he’s, ah, planning to hurt someone. Don’t let it be you.”
With that, he waddled toward the techbooth door as fast as his jiggling thighs could carry him.
HARI LOOKED UP at the blank mirrored surface of the techbooth as the echoing hollow words died away and realized that through this particular looking glass, he could find some answers.
With the thought came instant action: he sprang off the transfer platform and hit the floor running. The five thousand first-handers who filled the Cavea didn’t so much as twitch as he passed, still locked deep in the chemical slumber of the sendep cycle that would gradually bring them back to themselves.
Tuxedoed ushers scattered at his approach, and the broad double doors at the Cavea’s rear boomed back against the marblepaneled walls when he crashed through them. His injured knee screamed at him with every step, and his shoulder burned, and neither pain could register through the greater pain that squeezed his heart.
An alarm Klaxon blared as he slammed the crash bar of a service door, and the corrugated steel of the tech stairs rang under his boot heels. The long twisting spiral was tall enough to have him breathing hard before he reached the serviceway that circled the Cavea. Far below the alarm still hooted.
He burst through an unmarked door into the sterile monochromatic compartment of the techbooth.
Four men in tech whites stared at him, frozen in their chairs. They all had that pinched, flinching look of physical fear, but none of them seemed surprised to see him. One of them lifted his hands, palms out.
“Hold it!” he said, and patted the air as though Hari were an angry dog who could be stopped with a strong tone. “It was a technical malfunction, all right? Amalfunction.”
“You don’t lie even as well as I do.” Hari paced toward him. “What happened? Why was I pulled?” He came closer and bared his teeth. “If you start talking before I get within arm’s reach, I won’t hurt you.”
“Chairman Kollberg,” the tech squeaked, then coughed and started again. “Chairman Kollberg is, ah, expecting you in his office—”
“He called down here to tell you that?” Hari leaned on the back of the empty swivel recliner at the stage manager’s station—and registered that the leather was warm. “No . . . He was here, wasn’t he? He wasn’t talking from his office . . . He was right here.”
The warmth on the leather that he felt now, it had come from Kollberg’s soft, moist flesh. The idea of it caught in Hari’s throat, and he pulled his hand away with a grimace of revulsion. He saw the mushroom-shaped fist button of the emergency recall switch at the top of the panel in front of the chair. It was dark now, dead, but in his mind Hari saw it glow red, saw Kollberg’s round and sweaty fist slap down on it. For a moment he entertained a crimson fantasy of ripping Kollberg’s fingers off that hand one by one and jamming them down his throat; he shook his head sharply to drive the image away, but it came leaking back.
“And, uh, uh, Caine? He’s already, uh, already called Security—called them before he left here. They’re supposed to escort you down there.”
Hari nodded. “Yeah. He would.”
He understood that the nervous tech was trying to help by telling him this, trying to keep him out of trouble. He also understood that it was far too late for that. “Thanks anyway,” he said, and left.
They were waiting for him in the hall outside.
Three secmen, Studio Security in full riot gear: cardinal-colored body armor of carbon-fiber ceramic backed with Sorbathane, mirrored antilaser face shields locked down on their helmets, canisters of stickyfoam at their belts, Westinghouse power rifles with hundred-round hoppers of gelslugs held diagonally across their chests.
They moved with the robotic lockstep precision of Workers.
There were recurrent rumors that the Studio numbered some of the cyborged felons among its Security force. They made up for their lack of higher cognitive function by their perfect obedience; they could not even consider refusing an order.
When Hari stepped out, one of them said, “You will come with us,” in a flat, emotionally dead voice, and Hari suddenly lacked the energy to invent a reason why he should resist. He shrugged and kept walking; the secmen fell into step around him, flanking him to the sides and behind.
The secmen herded him out of the service corridors to the gilt-filigreed door of the Chairman’s private lift and keyed a code on a view-blocked pad. The elevator carried them down the long, ear-popping descent to Kollberg’s subterranean office.
It was cool here, far, far down below the tower of the Studio. Hari remembered the last time he was here, a lifetime ago, how it was almost cool enough to keep Kollberg from sweating—but not quite. The thought of even looking at Kollberg’s grey, doughy face made the whatever-it-was he’d eaten last, back there in the Warrens, rise up in his throat.
The door to the inner office stood open, and Kollberg’s voice came from within. “Michaelson. Come in. Don’t bother to sit.”
The secmen didn’t follow Hari through the door, but there were three more inside, as indistinguishable as cars from the same plant.
Kollberg sat behind his desk, looking—if possible—more repulsive than usual. The dim light from the night skyline that showed on the repeater gave his pale flesh a greenish cast and highlighted the dark shadows under his eyes. His jowls hung slack, and there was a bitter twist to his bloodless reptilian lips. Not even Kollberg, Hari noted, was sleeping well these days.
“I just got off the screen with the Board of Governors,” Kollberg said, “and I am in, ah, trouble.”
Hari felt a surge of gratification—the bastard wasn’t going to get away with this, after all—which was instantly dispelled by the Chairman’s next words.
“I am in trouble because I didn’t recall you sooner. I was there, in the techbooth. It was my fist on the emergency transfer switch. That responsibility was put into my hands directly from the Board of Governors themselves, and now my career trembles on the brink of disaster because I was too lenient. I let you go too far.”
Hari was acutely aware of a flesh-crawling feeling on the back of his neck, which probably came from the muzzle of a power rifle being aimed there by the silent secmen behind him; it was this that stopped him from going over the desk at Kollberg’s throat.
“Maybe you could explain that to me, Administrator,” he said tightly, chewing on the courtesy title.
Kollberg steepled his fingers in front of his face. “ ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,’ ” he said distinctly. “Do you know whom I’m quoting?”
Hari frowned. “Kennedy—John Kennedy, one of the leaders of the old—”
Kollberg’s hand slammed down on his desktop with sudden violence.
“No, you slack-jawed piece of Labor trash! I’m quoting you!”
Hari stood dumbfounded while Kollberg recounted his recent conversations with the Board of Governors; the Chairman grew angrier and more impassioned, coming to his feet, waving his hands and spraying spit.
“. . . and finally, in what was probably the stupidest single act I’ve seen you perform in your entire long career of stupidity, you come out and tell a hundred and fifty thousand first-handers that the Studio, Adventures Unlimited, an entertainment corporation, has ordered you to murder the head of state!”
All the hurt, all the anger he carried within, boiled until his chest might explode. They’d pulled him, they’d killed Shanna, over his politics.
The cords in Hari’s neck pulled his head down irresistibly, like a maddened bull’s, and all he could say was, “It was the truth.”
“The truth!” Kollberg snorted contemptuously. “If you’re so concerned with truth, why don’t you tell your Ankhanan friends who you really are? Why don’t you tell Talann how you found her in the Donjon? Don’t whine to me about truth, when everything you’ve built your life on is lies!”
“All right,” Hari said. His voice had that cinder-block rasp in it again. “I won’t. You just tell me one thing. When that all came out, all the shit about my contract, I was sitting there, holding her hands.” He was panting now, with the effort required to restrain his killing rage.
“If you’d pulled me then, the transfer field would have automatically extended, and she’d have come with me. She’d be here now. Why did you wait? Why did you fucking wait?”
“Don’t shout at me,” Kollberg said coldly. “Remember your place. I have had my fill of your insolence and disrespect. Raise your voice again and I’ll have the secmen shoot you. Understand?”
Hari ground out, “Why did you wait?”
Hari forced a “Yes” through his clenched teeth.
“Yes, Administrator, I understand.”
“Very well, then. The answer is simple. You are contracted to kill Ma’elKoth; once that is done, you may save your wife, or not, at your, ah, leisure. Not before.”
“That’s the price, then. That’s the real deal.”
“Yes. And, furthermore, if you wish the cooperation of this Studio, I expect you to confront and slay Ma’elKoth outside the Colhari Palace. The twenty-seven hours you spent out of contact are troublesome enough by themselves. If the climax occurs, ah, offstage, so to speak, we won’t get any cube sales or rentals whatsoever. Any more inflammatory remarks along the way, and please believe that I won’t hesitate to recall you again. If necessary, I’ll have you tried for sedition.”
The rage drained out of Hari as though a sluice gate had opened in his heart, and Caine looked out from behind his eyes.
“Maybe I should just kill you. Maybe if I kill you, I’ll get a better deal from the next Chairman.”
“Don’t waste my time with empty threats,” Kollberg said. “You’ll do nothing of the kind.”
“Ask me a question, Administrator. Ask me how I knew those King’s Eyes weren’t going to shoot me on the spot, shoot me down like a mad dog when I killed the Monastic Ambassador. Go on, ask me.”
Kollberg sat perfectly still. “Ah—”
“I didn’t,” Hari said flatly. “Think about it.”
The Chairman’s eyes slowly widened, and his lips smacked as he started to speak, stopped himself, started again, but he couldn’t decide what to say as it slowly dawned on him that he really could die here, in his office, right now.
“You think about that,” Hari told him. “You think about that before you decide you can sacrifice Shanna’s life for better ratings, for your fucking margin—”
Hari’s voice trailed away as he heard the words that he had just spoken.
He stood on the carpet, blinking.
For the second time in half an hour, that crystal shower tinkled around him, and the pieces clicked into a new picture.
The Long Form. Lamorak on freemod, cut off from Studio monitoring. Lamorak the traitor. And Kollberg had said something, something about Shanna’s Scarlet Pimpernel act working too well, being too easy . . . And the sudden insistence on rank, standard up-caste bullshit to avoid giving a straight answer to a straight question: Why had he waited until just then to hit the switch? What was the final straw?
And the only way that the truth about Lamorak could hurt the Studio, could hurt Kollberg, was if he was acting according to the terms of his contract.
If someone had ordered him to give her up.
“Oh, my god,” Hari whispered in awe. “Oh, my fucking bleeding god.”
All this brutality. All this pain. The fear, the loss. All the suffering—not only his, but Shanna’s, the tokali’s, Talann’s, the dead Twins, even Lamorak’s torture—it all began here. In this office. Behind this desk. Within the squirming maggoty brain of this evil, evil man . . .
“She was right,” he breathed. “Shanna was right. It’s all about profit margins. About ratings. She didn’t pull enough audience, so you had her sabotaged. You had her betrayed so that I’d have to go for her. You could make it a global event. You. Not Lamorak. You.”
Hari felt a twisting in his guts, a shimmering in his limbs: Caine coiled there, inside him, hungry, aching for blood.
“What are you babbling about?”
“What did you offer him? I’ve known Karl for ten years; what could you offer him that would make him do this?”
Kollberg pressed the meat of his lips together into a rumpled, liver-colored asshole. “Michaelson, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I strongly suggest that you do not repeat any of these wild accusations outside this office. The Board of Governors wants you cyborged, Michaelson, for merely making passing comments; it is only my, ah, my intercession that keeps you alive and free. Should you speak such treasons in public, I would not be able to protect you.”
And then it was too late: Caine surged up his throat and took possession of his brain, and he leaned forward onto the desk and bared his teeth.
“Kollberg,” Caine said, “I’m not gonna kill you. I’m not gonna kill you, because that won’t hurt enough—”
He would have gone on to list the ways that he would inflict pain, to demonstrate them one by one by one, but Kollberg suddenly dove below his desk, shrieking, “Shoot him shoot him shoot him!” and the whine of the power rifles in the hands of the forgotten secmen behind gave him only a quarter second’s warning before gelslugs poured from their muzzles like water from a firehose and pounded him into scarlet unconsciousness.
TALANN HAD A way of blushing that began with a tiny kiss of rose high on her arched cheekbones, then spread like the dawn around her eyes and down her neck. Her uncharacteristically shy smile, and the way she almost-but-not-quite pulled her hand from Majesty’s grasp, and her artfully artless answers to his questions, soon had the King of Cant wondering just who was seducing whom, here.
He was only killing time, passing the night in idle byplay, but the longer he wheedled Talann the more interested he became—and more suspicious that she was playing his game better than he was. An enchanting woman, taken all in all, and by all accounts a devastating fighter, nearly equal to Caine—some said better than Caine. The longer they spoke, the more Majesty found his attention drifting off into daydreams of what his life might be like with a Queen of Cant by his side, a Warrior Queen, feared by his enemies but beloved by his Subjects . . .
Fine as she was, though, she was, of course, no Pallas Ril.
He caught himself drifting off again. No question about it, he was losing—and, after all, wasn’t this no-longer-casual byplay between them a kind of infighting in itself? And this was a fight where losing might be more fun than winning.
His idle fantasies of family life scattered abruptly when Pallas came back alone. She appeared at the top of the stairs, backlit by Tommie’s campfire.
“Majesty—can you get a couple of your boys up here to help Lamorak?”
“Sure,” Majesty said reflexively, then he frowned up at her. “Where’s Caine?”
Silhouetted by the firelight, the expression on her darkened face could not be read, but in her voice was a troubled, uncertain note. “He’s gone.”
Majesty and Talann said together, in almost identical tones of dismay, “Gone?”
“He just left?” Majesty said, rising, disentangling his hands from Talann’s. “You let him go?”
Talann also rose beside him, taking on a look of bruised disbelief. “What happened? What did you say to him?”
“Nothing.” Days of exhaustion leached all the color from her voice. “I didn’t say anything. He came to deliver a message. He did it; then he left. I couldn’t have stopped him.”
“I thought—” Talann began. “I thought . . .”
Her voice trailed off, and she shook her head silently; she sank back down to her seat on the stairs and rested her chin on the heels of her hands. Talann looked blankly out over the tokali and the Subjects on their crate-built nests.
Majesty barely spared her a glance—that was fun and all, but this was business. He came up the stairs, took Pallas’ arm just above the elbow with a firm hand, and gently pushed her away from the stairwell.
Over at the campfire, Tommie and another Subject still warmed their hands. Majesty said, “Didn’t you hear the lady? Go get Lamorak. Now.”
With under-the-breath muttered protests at the unfairness of life, the two rose. Pallas pointed them in the right direction, and they slipped off into the darkness. As soon as they were gone, Majesty turned fiercely to Pallas.
“For fuck’s sake, Pallas!” he hissed. “Have you lost your sense? How could you let him walk out of here? I told you what Toa-Sytell said—!”
Pallas’ eyes had a distant, almost haunted look, lines of deep thought etched around them, as though it was a great effort to pay attention to what Majesty said to her, as though he was only a distraction, an irritation.
“How do you know? How do you know Caine isn’t running to the King’s Eyes right fucking now?”
The calm of her utter certainty slowed him, but it didn’t stop him.
“How do you know? I mean, I know it’s not like him, but you and Lamorak . . . Jealousy can make a man do funny things, Pallas. We’d better move the tokali, y’know, just to be sure.”
Her attention seemed to return from very far away, and she looked deeply into his eyes. “We don’t have to move them. Caine won’t betray us; he can’t.”
“Yeah, well, it’s all very fine for you to have that kind of trust in him, but this is my butt, too—”
She shook her head and gave a soft, bitter laugh, as though at a private joke that was more painful than it was funny.
“Trust has nothing to do with it. Besides, he left an hour ago. If he were going to the Eyes or the Cats, they’d be here by now.”
“Shit, I’d never have brought him here in the first place if I thought you’d really be here. You can’t take that kind of chance.”
She placed a comradely hand on his shoulder. “Majesty, you did right, believe me. In fact, you saved my life tonight. Tomorrow at dawn, I’ll ferry the tokali out of here, and all will be well.”
She let her hand fall and drifted away from him, down the stairs, deep in her private thoughts.
Maybe all will be well, Majesty thought as he watched her back sway tiredly down the steps.
Maybe it will. But if it isn’t, Caine had better have some fucking convincing answers. Some things are too low to stand for, even from a friend.