“Hari, I’ve been thinking. I can’t do this anymore.”
“Shan . . . can’t do what? It’s four o’clock, for Christ’s sake. Can’t this wait till morning?”
“I don’t like who I am with you, Hari. Do you understand that? Can you?”
“I don’t understand anything at this time of the morning . . .”
ANKHANA WENT TO bed with terror and disbelief, but the disbelief fled during the night: at dawn, only terror remained—slow terror, the kind that feels like icy teeth chewing on your bones.
There was no one in the city who did not know of the battle at dockside, no one who did not have a friend or family member who had been there, who had seen it with their own eyes. Some had connected it to the recent explosions in the Industrial Park; it seemed that a day did not pass without a pitched battle somewhere in the streets of the capital.
Those citizens brave or desperate enough to risk these streets this morning did so with frequent over-the-shoulder glances. They strolled or hurried depending on how near they chanced to be to a sheltered doorway or narrow alley down which they could run should battle suddenly erupt.
Ankhana was a notoriously violent city, but even here there had always been limits: a brawl might end in a stabbing, or the constables might clash with a stonebender gang in Alientown, but a pitched battle in the streets was far beyond the pale.
Fear was fueled by a problem of scale, as well: jets of fire a thousand yards long, the whole dockside burning, that monstrous wall of water—it was insane, incomprehensible. Who could possibly be safe, even in their own homes behind Old Town’s massive walls, when such things can occur in broad daylight?
When Ma’elKoth had begun his campaign to cleanse the Empire of the Aktiri, only the most childishly superstitious of his subjects had believed that such beings existed. But as Aktiri were discovered, slowly, here and there in places of responsibility throughout the Empire, even among the nobility, this disbelief had turned to a sort of nervous suspiciousness.
Neighbors and acquaintances suddenly became conscious of each other’s peculiarities—the sort of little quirks of personality and behavior that had seemed harmless before, but now appeared inexplicable and more than a little sinister. After all, how was one to know who might secretly be an Aktir?
Rumors began to circulate of certain touchstones that would cry out when pressed to an Aktir’s flesh, of characteristic witch marks that could be found upon an Aktir’s body. Tales were told of men who woke and found an Aktir in bed beside them in place of their beloved wives—the substitution having taken place under a new moon at midnight—tales of Aktiri curses, of poisonings and massacres and more. Each was more extreme than the last, as though truth could be found only by topping what people thought they knew. Everyone felt in their secret hearts that the worst was yet to come, and so each fanciful escalation was taken as hard evidence of how bad things would eventually get.
There were conflicting stories about the proper way to destroy an Aktir. Some held that a simple ash-wood stake through the heart would suffice; others claimed that its lips must be sewn shut over a mouthful of copper coins, and then its severed head must be buried facedown at a crossroads. Most agreed that to burn the Aktir alive on a pyre of wood soaked with oil that had been blessed by a priest of Prorithun would serve as well as any other method.
Out in the provinces, these and many other techniques were widely experimented with on any number of the usual outcast folk—old solitary widows, eccentric men who kept to themselves at the edge of this or that village, all the folk of this sort—and all were found to work quite well.
Later, stories began to filter into the cities of wealthier, more prosperous peasants being accused, and even some gentlefolk, small landholders and the like. The cityfolk nodded wisely to each other at these tales of provincial superstition and speculated—often correctly—that the accusers in these cases somehow ended up in possession of the executed Aktir’s land and goods.
Only later did it occur to these worldly-wise city dwellers to wonder how the sum of their own little quirks and pecadillos might appear to their neighbors; only later did they wonder how vulnerable they themselves might be to false accusation; only later did they begin to eye their more prosperous neighbors, wondering how vulnerable they might be, as well.
These screws of tension had been driven tight into the heart of the Empire for months now, even while most of the citizens of the Empire only reluctantly, halfheartedly believed that the Aktiri were any more than a ghost tale to frighten children. Many of the citizens listened with a sort of sneaking approval to stories of the slippery rebel Simon Jester, who seemed to effortlessly defy the constituted authority of the entire Empire; Simon Jester had become something of a folk hero, a cunning rogue who could thumb his nose at the power of Ma’elKoth himself.
Anyone in Ankhana who still felt that way need only pause a moment and cast a glance at the wreckage of Knights’ Bridge, or pay a copper coin to a page of the Imperial Messenger-News to hear a recital of the names of the innocent dead along the dockside—a hundred men and more. Sailors, dockers, warehousemen, and clerks wiped from existence without warning. As a kitchen tale, Simon Jester was entertaining, but as a real, powerful, implacable foe of the Empire, he was terrifying.
These liveried pages also gave an account of how the thaumaturge who’d caused such unimaginable destruction had been captured by the heroism of Count Berne. The pages who wore the green and gold of the competing news service, Colin’s Pages and Current Events, gave a somewhat different story—of the marksmanship of an unknown bowman and the escape of a boatload of accused Aktiri downriver. The army had sworn to take them, but thus far they remained at large.
Suddenly the Aktiri had become real to Ankhana in a way they had never been before. The Aktiri really were out there, as powerful and terrifying as even the wildest stories had ever claimed them to be. Not off somewhere in some distant land across the sea, not in the provinces, not even in some other great city on the far side of the Empire, but right here, right now.
Those citizens who were given to prayer now prayed for Ma’elKoth, prayed to their gods to protect their Emperor and strengthen his mighty arm in his death struggle with the unholy Aktiri. Many more of the citizenry found themselves kneeling uncomfortably, unused to the position, before the statues in their small household shrines; instead of praying for Ma’elKoth, they prayed to him. The Beloved Children of Ma’elKoth had no other shield.
The object of their prayer was busy this morning. He had forgone his daily morning’s ritual of constructing his Great Work; instead he paced to and fro beside the bloodstained limestone altar in the Iron Room.
Some of the blood on the altar was fresh: it leaked through the neatly tied bandages that covered the sucking chest wound of Pallas Ril, who was staked spread-eagled across the coffin-sized stone.
The interrogation progressed very slowly indeed; Arkadeil was in no condition to work and Ma’elKoth felt he couldn’t trust any of the apprentices in a matter of such delicacy.
His own techniques lacked, perhaps, the elegance and refinement of Arkadeil’s art, but he felt sure they would prove equally effective, in the end.
THE MOB OF downcasters surged against the Studio gate and splashed back upon itself like a wave against a seawall. This incoming tide of desperate fans was vast—doubling, tripling the record numbers the Studio had expected. They were packed shoulder to shoulder over the surrounding right-of-way, pressed back to the walls of distant buildings. An excited secman, standing atop the gate in the light of the rising sun, babbled into his comlink that he was sure there must be more than two million people outside waiting for Caine’s arrival.
This was only a mild exaggeration; the secman had overestimated the size of the crowd, but not by much.
They were all to be disappointed: Caine was already inside.
His blood-crusted black leathers had been carefully removed from his battered, unconscious body in the Studio infirmary and stored overnight in the Studio ON vault. Hari had arrived by cab long before dawn, and it was down in the vault that Kollberg found him.
The vault, with its Overworld-normal field, conferred almost perfect privacy. Its thick walls were innately soundproof, and the slightly altered physics within its field prevented electronic eavesdropping.
Kollberg posted two of the riot-armed Worker secmen at the vault door on his way in. He kept two more with him, with careful orders to hold their power rifles at the ready between him and Michaelson and to shoot without warning if Michaelson made the slightest move to attack.
Michaelson had become so unstable that all of Kollberg’s precautions were predicated on the assumption that Michaelson would become psychotically violent at the first opportunity. Kollberg had made the mistake the other night of being in the line of fire; only the shield of his heavy desk had saved him from injury. This was a mistake he did not intend to repeat.
The safest option, of course, would have been to avoid Michaelson entirely, to have someone else deliver the greenroom instructions, but Kollberg knew well that the safest option is often not the best one. The instructions he must give were of a delicate nature; the fewer people who knew about them, the better. This was why he’d chosen the Worker secmen instead of drawing his guards from the more flexible and responsive Laborers: testimony by a Worker was meaningless in any court.
Furthermore, he’d been up all night basting in his own juices, in a fury after a curt screencall from a Dole Family lawyer—imagine, a Professional allowed, even encouraged, to disturb an Administrator at his home! The man’s tone was so clearly insolent that Kollberg had immediately filed a countercomplaint with the Social Police, but that had done little to ease the acid ball in his belly.
Between this disturbance, the brutal stress of preparing the climax of this Adventure, and the amphetamine he’d taken to give himself the energy to get everything done, he hadn’t slept at all.
And he couldn’t let an incident like this pass unanswered. No matter how big a star Caine might be, Michaelson was still only a Professional, and he could not be allowed to one-up his betters. In fact, this incident bothered him more than Michaelson’s attempt to lay hands upon him; the attempted violence was merely an outgrowth of Michaelson’s increasing instability, while this ridiculous legal maneuvering was clearly a calculated insult.
When Kollberg entered the vault behind the lockstepping Workers, Michaelson stood nearly naked before the dressing mirror. Caine’s leathers hung from a peg nearby, and the surgical tape that had bound his torso lay in scissor-cut tangles on the floor behind him. He wore only his leather jockstrap, and he watched himself in the mirror as he flowed through a series of complex stretching exercises, scowling and wincing at the aches and pains these produced.
He looked worse than Kollberg felt. Despite the antibiotics, the crudely stitched wound in his shoulder flared an angry red, and his back swelled with the neat blackened discs of gelslug bruises, clustered around a larger, ragged one tinged with red, left by a Donjon guard’s iron-bound club. Another red-purple bruise swelled at the outside of his bandaged right knee, and even Kollberg’s untrained eye could see the stiffness in each of his movements. From the pasty look of his hollowed cheeks and the shadowed smears beneath his eyes, he’d missed some sleep himself last night.
In the mirror, his reflected eyes met Kollberg’s without so much as a glance at the armored secmen.
“Kollberg,” he said flatly. “You don’t want to be in here, right now.”
“That’s Administrator Kollberg, Michaelson,” he replied with a tight smile.
Michaelson’s expression didn’t change. “Fuck you, shitheel.”
A cold tingle shot through Kollberg, as though he’d touched a poorly grounded terminal.
He blinked once, twice, then took a deep breath and answered calmly. “I’ll have my due respect or I will have you broken for caste violation.”
“That is your due respect, you flabby sack of shit. Do whatever you want.”
Kollberg glanced at the cyborgs between them. “Or I could simply have you shot.”
Michaelson shrugged. “Then what do you tell the Leisurefolk—what is it, a million of them, now?—that’ve already paid to be me this morning? Never thought that making me such a big star would whip around and bite you on the ass, huh?”
Kollberg nodded to himself; he should have seen this coming. “I came here this morning to, ah, outline for you the ground rules of this Adventure. I have already spoken with the Board of Governors on this matter, and they concur. The emergency transfer switch will remain active. At the first suggestion of seditious commentary, you will be recalled, and the Adventure will be terminated.”
Michaelson made no response. He stared into the mirror with an expression of peculiar concentration; he seemed to be watching his hands, his fingertips, as they lightly brushed first one, then another of the numerous scars that patterned his body, kneading each in turn.
“Seditious commentary,” Kollberg continued, “will include any reference to your contracted goal of the assassination of Ma’elKoth. When you face him, it will appear to be the result of a personal vendetta, do you understand? Any reference to this being at the direction of the Studio will result in your immediate recall.”
As if in answer, Michaelson’s hands stroked the flattened diamonds of scar tissue, front and back, left by a long-ago sword-thrust through the liver.
“If you make any reference to Lamorak as the betrayer of Pallas Ril, whether you connect it to his contract—to the Studio—or not, you will be immediately recalled.”
Michaelson ran his fingers over a jagged scar across his collarbone.
“If you make any reference to your mistaken idea that Pallas Ril’s difficulties are in any way related to any policy or directive of the Studio, you will be immediately recalled.”
Michaelson’s hand ran up a long, keloid-knotted scar on his right thigh.
“If you are recalled for any of these reasons, you will not be returned to Ankhana. Your wife will be left to fend for herself. The press will be told that the transfer malfunction seems to reflect some peculiarity of Ankhana itself, and it is too dangerous for you to return. Any public contradiction of this story will result in your being broken back to Labor and put out to work in the Temp slums where you came from.”
Michaelson slowly pulled on his leather breeches, then slipped into the blood-crusted jerkin and laced it up to his chest, touching each knife in its sheath as he did so.
“When you confront Ma’elKoth, you will do so outside the Colhari Palace. The Studio has invested far too much in this Adventure to have its climax occur offstage. At this confrontation, you will remove him from power or die in the attempt. If either of these conditions are violated, on your return you will face downcasteing for slander and corporate espionage.”
Kollberg smiled broadly, showing his teeth. “Your silly little cease-and-desist order contains information that the Dole Family could have gotten only through you; it’s prima facie evidence of corporate espionage. I own you, do you understand? I can break you any time I want.”
Michaelson pulled on his low boots of soft black leather without response.
“I understand.” Michaelson’s voice was low and flat, almost a growl; this certainly wasn’t the tone of submission that Kollberg looked for, the tone he demanded.
“Don’t think that Shermaya Dole can protect you, not from the Studio; she can’t,” Kollberg said. “Don’t expect her to even try.”
Now, for the first time, Michaelson turned away from the mirror and met Kollberg’s eyes face-to-face, and a cold shiver started in the Administrator’s belly.
Michaelson said, “Who do you think is going to protect you?”
Kollberg’s eyes bulged. “Have you heard a word I’ve said?” he spluttered.
“Yeah. Now listen to these words: there is nothing you can do to save your life.”
“What?” This was incredible; this was intolerable! Had Michaelson forgotten to whom he was speaking?
But as Kollberg looked into Michaelson’s expressionless black eyes, he realized he was no longer talking to Hari Michaelson.
“You crossed a line,” Caine said. “You crossed my line, and I’ll see you dead for it. No one uses Shanna like this and lives. Even if I win: if I survive, if I bring Shanna back, if I kill Berne and Ma’elKoth and god knows who else, come back to Earth with no harm done to live happily ever after; even then, there is no happy ending for you. Enjoy these last days of your life, Kollberg. You don’t have many left.”
Kollberg could only stare, his mouth opening and closing with the moist silence of the last gasps of a beached fish.
Caine stretched one last time, and his joints popped like faroff gunfire. He cracked the knuckles of both hands, one by one. “There’s about fifteen billion marks’ worth of audience out there waiting for me right now,” he said. “You’d better get out of my way.”
HAIR THAT GLEAMS like metal under the floodlights, lips wet with something like lust:
“Welcome back to Adventure Update. I’m Bronson Underwood. Our top story this morning is once again the Adventure of the Decade. Bloody but unbowed, Caine returns to Ankhana in very few minutes from now, for a final desperate attempt to save his wife from the horrors of amplitude decay. As you can see from the Pallas Ril Lifeclock graphic in the corner of your screen, we estimate that she has less than thirty-six hours remaining. However, due to chaotic uncertainty in phase locking, amplitude decay could theoretically begin within the day. Whatever the true limit is, time is very short indeed.
“Pallas Ril’s predicament, and Caine’s heroic attempts at a rescue, have captured imaginations worldwide, and the Studio has not been slow to capitalize. Here with that side of the story, live from Studio Center in San Francisco, is our chief correspondent, Jed Clearlake.”
“Good morning, Jed. This is quite an event, isn’t it?”
“Bronson, it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I’ve been covering Ankhanan operations for Adventure Update for a few years now, and I guess you’ve realized that this is the biggest thing to ever come out of San Francisco. The numbers released by the Studio this morning are nothing short of staggering. The previous record for first-handers on-line for a single Adventure—which, as you know, was set only four days ago at the outset of For Love of Pallas Ril—has been shattered more than tenfold this morning. Public demand for access to Caine has led the Studio system worldwide to cancel the majority of their other ongoing Adventures, preempting them to provide firsthand seats for this one. As Caine prepares to make his transfer this morning, official counts have his firsthand audience at one point six million. Assuming, as we do, that these are nearly all Leisurefolk and Investors, you should understand that more than seventy percent of Caine’s potential audience will be on-line. More than one billion people have already placed advance orders for the secondhand cubes. This is more than the Adventure of the Decade, Bronson. This is the story of the century.”
“Impressive numbers, Jed, impressive indeed. Does the Studio plan to share any more live feed with us, over the course of this extraordinary event?”
“I’ve been in contact with Studio Chairman Arturo Kollberg’s office, and all they’re saying is that we should hold ourselves ready. So I’m guessing all signs are good, Bronson.”
“Thank you, Jed. We’ll be back with you in a moment. Now we go to Chicago, where Jessica Roan has caught up with Pallas Ril’s parents, Alan and Mara Leighton, as they enter the Chicago Studio to firsthand this incredible Adventure. Jessica?”
And the whole world waits, and squirms, and drools like a glutton smelling a feast.
THE STUDIO’S PERSONNEL tracking system located Kollberg as soon as he left the ON vault, and the nearest wallscreen flashed at him and loudly announced, “Administrator Kollberg! Urgent message from Professional Mona Carson!”
Professional Carson was the San Francisco head of Studio Legal; this could only mean a serious problem. Kollberg muttered a curse and wiped his sweaty palms on his smock before he responded.
The screen lit with Carson’s bird-boned face, her delicate brows drawn together in a worried frown.
“Administrator, Caine’s and Pallas Ril’s Patrons are both up in the Cavea’s techbooth right now—and they’ve brought the Social Police. Please confirm receipt of this message, and then meet me there ASAP.”
Kollberg felt like he’d been sandbagged; he was about two rungs on the caste ladder too low not to go weak in the knees on hearing that soapies were waiting for him. For a moment, the hallway seemed to spin around him, and he was afraid he might faint.
The dizziness passed, and he fumbled in the pockets of his smock for the carton of speed, shaking out another capsule and dry-swallowing it painfully before sending the Worker secmen back to their racks. It wouldn’t do to arrive with secmen in tow; it’d make him look suspiciously frightened.
He glanced at the wallscreen and ordered his private lift, then strode toward it as forcefully as he could manage, as though by pretending confidence, he could generate some.
Carson was waiting for him at the techbooth door when he came puffing up.
“There’s nothing I can do about it, Administrator. They hit us with a surprise injunction, and the Social Police have a proper warrant: our public-trust exceptions are unbreakable, but they’ve dodged around them. I have Legal on their way to court already for a temporary restraining order, but they’re ready for us, and they’ll make us argue it out. It’ll take hours to get them out of here, at best.”
“This is about that damned cease-and-desist, isn’t it?”
Carson nodded. “They’ve brought the soapies to enforce compliance.”
Kollberg smacked a soft fist against his palm, and hairs began to stand up along his arms: he was getting a surge from the amphetamine already.
“Damn them. All right, I’ll take over here. You keep working on it.”
“I will, but I’m up against Dole Family lawyers . . .”
She didn’t need to say any more; Kollberg understood perfectly. “We’ll make the best of it, Mona. Don’t give up.”
She nodded, then left with a promise to keep up the fight. Kollberg took a moment to inhale deeply several times and smooth his smock before he opened the techbooth door and stepped inside.
Shermaya Dole sat in his chair at the stage manager’s station, holding court among the dazzled techs like a queen. They’d never been this close to Leisurefolk before, and they were stammering and falling over each other, blushingly obsequious.
Standing at her side like a prince consort was Marc Vilo, and behind them stood a pair of soapies in their sky blue jumpsuits and their silver-masked helmets.
Kollberg pasted a smile across his meaty lips and said, “Leisurema’am Dole, Businessman Vilo, it’s an unexpected honor to find you in my techbooth.”
Vilo snorted, openly contemptuous, and Dole said, “Marc, please. Be gracious.” She sat a little straighter in his chair and spoke regally.
“Administrator. I’m sorry that we must meet again under these . . . adversarial circumstances. I hope that you understand that none of this—” She waved a finger at the soapies behind her. “—is directed at you personally. They are only here because of some disturbing reports that are becoming common knowledge on the nets, and I feel that I must take steps to protect the interests of the Dole Family and our undercastes.”
“Common knowledge on the nets?” Kollberg said with a pretense of polite surprise. The upcaste bitch was trying to slip Michaelson off the hook, and there really wasn’t much he could do about it, here and now.
“Oh, yes. And while I understand that the Studio’s records and contracts are sealed, any observations made by social enforcement officers will be legally admissible as evidence.”
“You seem very well informed on Business law,” Kollberg murmured.
She shrugged coquettishly, a gesture Kollberg found gruesome in a beefy woman nearing middle age. “I have my little hobbies,” she said. “One must keep busy, you know. Now, I believe we must be on our way. Marc is squiring me once again in his private box, and Caine will be mounting the transfer platform at any moment. Thank you for your time, Administrator, and I do apologize for the inconvenience. Come, Marc,” she said, rising, and they left without another word.
Kollberg eyed the soapies; they hadn’t moved, and he felt a little queasy about sitting in the stage manager’s chair with these blank silver faces peering over his shoulders.
He turned to one of the wide-eyed techs. “Two chairs for the Social Police. Now.”
“We’ll stand,” one of the soapies said. They stood close enough together that he couldn’t tell from which one the digitized voice had come. “When we feel the need to sit, we’ll sit. Now get on with it.”
Kollberg coughed into his fist and settled tensely into the chair, painfully aware of hidden eyes behind him.
“All right,” he said tightly. “Fine. Signal the greenroom and tell Caine he’s on in five.”
THE CLOSET THAT materializes around me is barely larger than a coffin, and it leans at a crazy angle: it’s set into a wall that’s in the midst of a monthlong slow-sagging process of falling over. A little grey cloud-light leaks in from a rent above my head, and the closet reeks of moldy plaster and wet charcoal.
I put my shoulder against the moist and swollen wood of the door opposite the hinge side; it squeals briefly, muffled like a piglet in a burlap sack, then sticks fast.
All right. Screw being sneaky.
I brace my back along the angle of the wall behind me and kick the door sharply in the middle. The sodden, rotting wood tears more than it breaks, separating with a shriek of rusty nails, and I step out into the ruins of the same Industrial Park warehouse from which I’d been recalled.
Roof tiles litter the puddled floor around me, and shreds of the ceiling drape like the long arms of a dying willow. The thick fractal curves of steel-grey clouds press low above me, and the remains of recent rain still drip through the holes in the roof. In with the rain comes the clop of iron-shod hooves on paved streets outside, and the occasional shout or snarled exchange of curses from passersby.
I lift my arms and turn my face up into the pale light; I breathe in Ankhana and breathe it out again, waiting for that swift rush of freedom that Adventuring always brings.
All I feel is weight, dragging at me, pressing on my shoulders as though those clouds above are stones that I carry on my back, and a nagging, gnawing awareness of the tick of each passing second.
That freedom, it’s gone, and I’m starting to suspect it’ll never return. They’ve stripped it from me . . .
My father would say: freedom that can be taken away was never real in the first place, and maybe he’s right. Maybe that freedom was always only a figment of my imagination—but it was an illusion I cherished.
Shattering an illusion is the insult we never forgive.
I shake my head and set off, picking my way through the debris, threading deeper into the ruins. I’ll pick up the trail at the place where I lost it; though she told me she would be gone by now, there is no better place for me to begin my search.
The little sheltered office area is empty save for the dead coals of Tommie’s campfire, and the basement door stands open. I glance down the steps—most of the water seems to have drained off. I should maybe go down for a last look around.
But the creaks and groans of the settling warehouse become just a little too insistent.
I fade silently against the wall, alongside the only door. Busting that closet door must have made enough noise to draw watchers in to investigate; these are no innocent explorers. No honest man moves with this much care for silence.
A hoarse voice barely whispers from the other side of this wet-dough wall of plaster at my back.
“Caine? Baron, is that you in there? It’s Tommie.”
They’ve got me boxed. “Yeah, Tommie, it’s me. What’s up?”
He steps into the doorway, relief painted across his cheerfully ugly face.
“Was hoping it was you, Baron. Figured it was—figured you was the only guy could get in here, past the dozen Subjects we got watching this place.”
I take the undeserved compliment with a shrug. “Watching for what? Where is everybody?”
He shakes his head, and his face darkens.
“It’s bad, Caine. Pallas is shot and taken by the Cats, and that fighting girl with her, that Talann? She’s dead.”
He sees something in my face that makes him spread his hands apologetically. “Berne emptied her guts all over Knights’ Bridge.”
That’s all I can think for long seconds, all I can feel, every god damned day of my life piled onto my back.
You have to be young to take shit like this. You have to still be young and adaptable, and full of optimism. You have to still believe in happy endings, to believe that suffering has a point, that death is not a meaningless extinguishing of consciousness.
You have to be young enough to still hope that shit happens for a reason.
So maybe they get their wish, all those executives who put me here. Maybe there’s nothing left for me but revenge.
The weight of days presses me down like I’m slowly being flattened under God’s own millstone. I slide down the wall to sit on the floor; I search within the sick emptiness in my guts, looking for my anger.
If I can recover the rage that has always lived there, it’ll put enough strength back into my legs that I can get up and walk again. But I find only ashes.
Tommie says, “And the King wants to talk to you. We been waiting here since yesterday. Tell you, I din’t think you’d come back here, but Lamorak said y’would. He was pretty sure, I guess, and here you are.”
Still here, of course, still under the protection of the King of Cant . . .
Ahh, there it is, a spark kindling among this bitter ash, starting to trail smoke down there around my heart.
When I look up at Tommie, there are more Knights behind him—a lot of them. Naked blades gleam dully from their fists. My lips press through a thin smile. “Thanks, Tommie.”
“For giving me a reason to get up.”
I suit action to the words, and he steps back, taking a short coil of rope from one of the other Knights.
“Why so many of you? Majesty think I’d fight?”
Tommie twists the rope between his hands. “Aw, nah. ’S to keep each other honest, y’know? The King ain’t the only one wants to talk to you. The Eyes bumped your bounty a bunch and all. With us all together like this nobody can turn you in and collect.”
“Oh, yeah. Thousand royals . . .”
His gaze and voice go off to some distant place, some fantastic realm where they belong to a man a thousand royals richer; then he comes back to himself with an apologetic cough. “I’m, ah . . .” He clears his throat. “I’m supposed to bind your hands.”
I show him my teeth. “You’ll die trying.”
“Baron, c’mon, it’s nothing personal . . .”
“I’ll explain it to Majesty. He’ll understand.”
“Won’t try to escape, will you? Hate to have to cut you.”
“Escape?” I snort a cold laugh. “You’re taking me right where I want to go.”
ARTURO KOLLBERG BROODED in his seat, the faceless soapies still staring over his shoulders. He barely watched Caine’s progress. He rose out of his chilly self-contemplation only when Tommie led Caine into view of the tumbled wreckage that had been Knights’ Bridge and the soldiers who still picked over the shattered dockside, searching for survivors.
“Pallas did this?” Caine half whispered in awe. “Shit a brick . . . Where did she get this kind of power?”
“Barge got right away,” Tommie told him.
To judge from its aftermath, the battle had obviously been spectacular, extraordinary—and Kollberg hadn’t had an on-line Actor there, not one. No one had it on cube.
It might as well have never happened.
This did nothing to improve his mood.
He composed and dictated the press release right there in the techbooth, all the while keeping the red glowing emergency transfer switch in his peripheral vision. The huge curved POV screen now showed Caine hiking through the caverns beneath Ankhana under the guard of the Knights of Cant.
Kollberg was pleased with himself, pleased that his press release flowed out smoothly. He let the public know Pallas Ril had been captured in a calm and level voice that held no hint of his fury within.
In the very few minutes that had passed since the confrontation in the vault, his shock at Michaelson’s naked threats had transformed to cold rage. They were all after him, all of them: Caine, Lamorak, Pallas, Dole and Vilo, and the damned soapies behind him. But he didn’t have to lie down and take it.
He resolved, right here and now, that Michaelson’s career was over. Two can play that It’s too late game. If given the slightest, faintest ghost of an excuse that would pacify the Board of Governors, he’d take away Michaelson’s whole life.
Where would his arrogance be then? How tough would he sound, begging for work on a Temp netboard? Take away his money, his home, his friends . . . And, of course, the cut that Kollberg relished in imagination the most: he dreamed of being present, watching Michaelson’s face, while Pallas Ril slipped out of phase with Overworld and went to her hideous screaming death.
He only hoped that Michaelson lived that long. It’d be a bloody shame if he died on Overworld before Kollberg got his chance to crush him.
IT’S A LONG climb up the mucker-shaft ladder from the caverns to the pissoir, and Tommie holds the door for me when I step out into the pale, cloud-filtered light.
“On the sand,” he says curtly; it gives me a twinge. I’ve seen a couple Subjects called onto the sand for King’s Court. It ended badly for them, both times.
“You sure you can’t tell me what this is about?”
He shrugs and shakes his head grimly. “Would if I could. Sorry.”
Tommie and the other Knights follow me down over the curving rows of weathered stone-cut benches, into the deep bowl of the Stadium.
Majesty’s already there, up on what used to be the royal dais in the midst of the seats at the south end, on the comfortably overstuffed old armchair he calls his throne. Deofad’s on one side . . .
On the other, in the place of the absent Abbal Paslava, sits Lamorak. His splinted leg—a splint that I bound to that leg with my own hands—is thrust out stiffly before him.
I let my gaze skate off his surface. A lingering glance would yank me toward him, helplessly berserk: I’d go for his throat like a wolverine. As it is, I can feel him there, even with eyes averted, feel his presence as though he burns with a fierce actinic light that scorches my face.
The Brass Stadium . . . It’s always unsettling to be here in daylight, to see its shabby disrepair under the unforgiving sun. My memories of this place are of bonfires and dancing, good food and endless drink, the backslapping fellowship that was the most powerful glue binding me to the men and women that use this place; memories of a sense of belonging, a sense of family—the family that I’ve never had.
But the Kingdom of Cant is a night family; now here in the daylight, deprived of the seductive glamour of firelight and friendship, the house we shared is as depressing as a flop in a Temp slum. The rings of benches that rise above me are stained and broken. The sand in the arena is still damp from the rains—blackened here and there by the abandoned humps of bonfires and littered with mutton bones, apple cores, fish heads, cherry pits, and mounds of less identifiable detritus. A few large and tardy rats scavenge fearlessly in the growing light. They dodge the hooked beaks of squabbling gulls and the straight ones of crows that croak and hop aggressively at the gulls, the rats, and each other.
The birds lift off in a parti-colored cloud as I vault the ragged arena wall and alight on the sand. One bloated rat that’s too fat to waddle out of my way gets a sharp kick that sends it rolling across the sand, writhing with a high thin squeal.
The dozen or so Knights of Cant who brought me here follow me down onto the sand, and Tommie steps forward at a sloppy attention to begin the ceremony. He intones: “I bring before the assembled Court of Cant the Honorary Baron—”
“Shut up,” I tell him, and enforce this advice with a sharp slap to the back of his head. He stumbles forward a step or two, then wheels on me, his face ablaze with embarrassed anger.
“Caine, dammit, you can’t just—”
I ignore him, lift my face to Majesty and the Court.
“Save the horseshit, Majesty,” I say, full-voiced. “I’m here. Tell me what you want of me without the fucking make-believe.”
From the Knights around me come the sharp steel-on-steel scrapes of blades being drawn, but Majesty lifts a restraining hand.
“All right,” he says thickly. He leans forward, his face suffused with blood. “All right, you bastard. Where did you go the other night? When you left the warehouse, where did you go?”
“None of your business.” Shit, I couldn’t tell him if I wanted to.
I can see where this is leading. I glance around at the Knights who cage me, estimating my chances of fighting my way out.
“I’ve made it my fucking business, you shit,” Majesty barks. “I think you went straight to the Cats.”
“You’re out of your head.” I’d tell him who the traitor really is . . . but I can’t. Not yet. “Can you see me walking in to shake hands with Berne?”
He comes up out of the chair with a snarl of rage and raises his fist as though he would smite me with a thunderbolt if only he could.
“I know you work for Ma’elKoth, you pigfucker! You hear me? I know!”
In the silence that follows his shout can be heard the wings of the gulls, startled off again, and faint street sounds from the Warrens beyond the walls. The Knights around me look away, wincing.
They might not ever have seen Majesty this far out of control; I never have. But I’ve been bellowed at by bigger voices than he can command, and it takes more than rage to impress me.
“Yeah?” I answer quietly. “Maybe you might want to explain here who it was that would’ve told you that?”
His eyes bulge, and he makes a faint choking sound in the back of his throat. He sure as death doesn’t want to let gruff old Deofad and these Knights hear how he’s been in bed with the King’s Eyes.
Lamorak murmurs something in a voice too low for me to hear; my lipreading skills are pretty rudimentary, but I catch the words question and answer. Majesty doesn’t seem to hear him, but now he says, “I’m asking the questions, Caine. You’re answering them. You got that?”
I pause for one calculated second to make sure he knows I’ve heard and understood him, then I say, “Is Pallas alive?”
Majesty says through his teeth, “Maybe I’m not making myself clear—”
“Tommie, here, says Pallas was shot yesterday, and taken by the Cats. Is she alive?”
“Screw the games, Majesty. You and I, we both know how you should know. You want me to spell it out?”
He wavers for a second, and I wonder if he’s about to just say fuck this noise and have the Knights cut me down. He looks away.
All right, all right, huh. I can breathe again, and some of those days that burden my shoulders brighten and relax. Now I only need to figure out something to do about it.
“What are you doing to rescue her?”
Now he looks startled, as though the thought of a rescue had never entered his head. What in hell has happened to that Charm of hers? Has it worn off already? “Well, I, ah, I mean, the word is Ma’elKoth’s holding her himself, interrogating . . .”
I let a little of the furnace in my chest leak into my voice. “You son of a whore, you’re more interested in pinning this horseshit on me than in saving her life! What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Y’know, come to think of it, that’s a good question . . . This isn’t like him, Charm or no Charm. If nothing else, Majesty is a reasonable man, pragmatic, a planner. And he’s known me for years. He knows goddamn well I’d cut off my own balls with a rusty knife before I’d do anything like what he’s accusing me of.
Another question slowly filters through the solid bone that I use for a brain: if he really wants the answers he’s going after, why doesn’t he turn Lamorak loose on me with that Dominate of his, try to force the truth out of me?
Lamorak murmurs something else. I catch trust and business first, and Majesty says, “I can’t trust you with any plans until we settle this business first.”
Son of a motherfucking shit . . .
Lamorak hasn’t turned that Dominate on me because he can only do one spell at a time.
So much for the voice of reason.
Okay, maybe I don’t have to solve every problem with my fists . . . but every once in a while, a situation arises that is substantially improved by the judicious application of force.
Majesty was saying something that I missed, and now everyone’s looking at me like they’re waiting for an answer. I shake my head and say, “Sorry—my mind was wandering. What was that?”
He begins, “I said—” I miss the rest of it again, because as soon as everyone looks back at him for his reply I whip into a spinning kick that brings my heel against the cheekbone of the Knight at my right rear flank hard enough to snap bone and flip him into the air. He lands half against the Knight beside him, and they both go down.
But I don’t need to drop them all to escape the arena. For half a second nobody moves while they comprehend what it is I’ve just done. Tommie recovers faster than the others, but he’s also the only one who doesn’t have a sword in hand. I jump him as he claws at its hilt and get one hand on his wrist. A sharp twist and a blow from the other hand breaks the bones of his forearm. It’s a more difficult technique than breaking the elbow, but I like Tommie, and I don’t want to cripple him.
He howls as jagged bone rips through his flesh, and his knees go slack. I shift my weight and slam my forearm up into his armpit, then twist like a tennis champion delivering a backhand smash. Tommie tumbles into the other Knight right in front of me, spraying blood into his face from that forearm. They fall in a tangled heap.
The other Knights hesitate. Nobody wants to be the first one to get within my reach, and I don’t blame them. I take advantage of their eyeblink of indecision to run like hell.
A quick leap over Tommie and the guy he’s struggling with, and I’ve got a straight shot right at the dais. My wounded right knee snarls at me as I sprint. When I get to the nine-foot-high arena wall, the knee makes its displeasure fully felt by buckling exactly when I need it to leap.
I barely manage to avoid braining myself when I crash into the wall. I don’t have time for another attempt: the Knights are right on my ass.
The lead Knight tries to slow his headlong charge when he sees me whirl back toward him, but it’s too late. I skip out to meet him and foot-sweep his ankle while slapping a backfist into the nape of his neck. He goes headfirst into the pockmarked limestone wall and collapses to his knees.
The other Knights fan out to try to come at me from a couple directions at once. The stunned Knight shakes his head dazedly. He’s on his hands and knees at the base of the wall, so I use him like a footstool: I jump up onto his back, and before he understands what’s happened I jump off again. The two-foot advantage this gives me is more than enough to let me catch the rim of the wall and haul myself smoothly over.
“Get him kill him!” Lamorak shouts, and the edge of panic in his voice brings my blood up like the surge of a tidal bore.
I gain my feet in the lowest ring of benches. Deofad towers over me, his enchanted blade Luthen upraised and glowing like a bar of steel white-hot from the forge.
I have no desire to try conclusions with this tough old bastard, so I throw myself sideways into a shoulder roll as his blade descends to strike searing sparks from the stone. I come to my feet out of swordreach and bound up the bleachers toward Majesty and Lamorak. Majesty comes down to meet me, foolishly: he customarily goes unarmed, and if Lamorak wasn’t controlling him, he’d know better than to come at me barehanded.
When he closes with me, I let my knees bend and drop my shoulder to catch him under the ribs, letting his momentum flip him off his feet and over my back. He tumbles down the steps, and I keep moving.
While he’s trying to rise behind me with the anxious help of Deofad, I reach my objective.
Lamorak’s face is as white as a toadstool.
“Caine . . .” he whispers, and that thousand-yard stare of mindview steals into his eyes. “Don’t—”
My right hook catches him precisely on the hinge of the jaw, just in front of his ear, and the joint breaks under my knuckle with a deeply satisfying crunch.
“Stay with me, Lamorak.” I shake some light back into his eyes by a handful of his shirtfront. “I’m not through with you yet. Try another spell. Go on. Try.”
He puts his arms up to shield his head and averts his eyes so he won’t see it come. “No . . .” he says though his numb mouth. “No, pleass—y’broche m’zhaw, shit.”
I raise my fist and give myself a slow count of ten to think up one reason why I should let him live.
I’m up to eight when Majesty bellows, “Caine, stop! Everybody stop! Nobody fucking move!”
In the long silence that follows, I keep my eyes on Lamorak. If he starts to summon mindview, I’m gonna pop him.
Behind and below me, men curse in low voices as they pick themselves up and gingerly explore the extent of their wounds. Lamorak cups his broken face with both hands and avoids my eyes.
Majesty says, low and close behind my shoulder, “You mind telling me what the fuck just went on here?”
Lamorak flinches back from what he glimpses in my eyes. I mutter, “How much do you remember?”
“All of it, Caine, shit. I just couldn’t stop—and, you know, it made perfect sense at the time. Fucking creepy, is what it was.”
He steps around to where I can see him and lowers himself onto the bench beside Lamorak, staring into his face with aggressive concentration. “You wouldn’t mind borrowing me one of those big knives of yours, would you?”
I shake my head; I’ve come to a sudden decision. It’s a hunch, a feeling, irrational but powerful. “Let him live.”
“I don’t get it,” Majesty says. “I thought you guys were friends. Why would he want to do this to you? And why are you gonna let him get away with it?”
I look down at Lamorak, and now he looks back at me. I give him a faint lift of my brows, a minute nod toward Majesty, a Do you want me to tell him? kind of look. His eyes plead with me, and I shrug carelessly.
“The other night, remember we had that long talk?” I say slowly. “Pallas told him she’s coming back to me. He took it badly.”
Lamorak’s eyes bulge in disbelief. “You . . .” he sputters. “A lie! Thazz a lie! He, he—”
I say, “Thought I told you to shut up.” My swift side kick spreads his nose with a crackle of smashing cartilage and bounces his head off the front edge of the stone bench behind him. His eyes roll up and he sags, blowing blood bubbles through his open lips, out cold.
Great Grey God, that felt good. For one long moment I struggle with a nearly overwhelming lust to just go ahead and finish him, but I master it. Barely.
“Do me this favor. Hold him for me. Lock him in that apartment where you met us after we came out of the Donjon—but make sure no Subjects are within the sound of his voice.”
“No shit. All right. But when you’re done with him, he’s mine.”
Majesty grunts and pushes himself to his feet. “What are we gonna do about Pallas?”
“That’s the attitude I’ve been waiting for.” No way to tell if this question comes from Majesty’s own heart or if Pallas’ Charm is still operating. Y’know, in the end, I guess it doesn’t really matter. “I think it’s time for you to come open.”
He squints at me warily. “What do you mean?”
“I know what you want, Majesty. It’s not here in the stadium. It’s not in the Warrens. You’re playing for higher stakes than that.”
“Horseshit. You didn’t risk the whole Kingdom of Cant to support Pallas’ Simon Jester act out of the goodness of your heart. You don’t give a rat’s ass, one way or the other, about the Aktiri or any of the rest.”
He doesn’t answer me, just stares grimly down upon his wounded Knights in the arena.
“I know what you had in mind,” I tell him. “I know that you planned to roll up Simon Jester’s network and sell them to the King’s Eyes. What were you playing for, a title? Or just orders from Toa-Sytell for the Eyes and the Constabulary to look the other way while you operate in the city? Maybe some covert Imperial action against the other Warrengangs?”
When he turns to me, his eyes are bugged as though my hand’s around his neck. His mouth works, and only a strangled croak of denial can come up his throat.
He flinches away from the hand I put on his shoulder, but all I give him is a friendly squeeze. “It’s all right, Majesty. I’m not mad.”
“I, I, Caine, I swear, she said she dumped you—I thought you’d thank me . . .”
“Yeah, well, shit’s never quite that simple, is it?”
“But it’s different now,” he insists. “After I got to know her . . . Shit, Caine, I’d never do anything to hurt her. Never.”
“I’m giving you a chance to help her. You help her, and I’ll help you. You get it? I’ll outbid Toa-Sytell. You’ll get more from helping Pallas than you ever could from betraying her. You do this for me,” I say slowly, convincingly, “and I’ll put Ankhana into your hands.”
He turns to me, and there’s a glimmer of ambitious lust in his eyes. I have his full attention.
“I need so much going on in the streets that Ma’elKoth can’t spare any attention trying to figure out what I’m up to, you follow? I want a riot. Not a little disturbance in the Warrens, understand? I want the Constabulary, the King’s Eyes, even the bloody army all tied up trying to get things under control. I want the city in flames.”
“You’re asking a lot. You’re asking more than a lot. It could expose the whole Kingdom.”
“Listen, you don’t have a lot of choice. I mean, Pallas can’t hold out under interrogation forever. When Ma’elKoth breaks her, he’s gonna learn who’s been bankrolling her operation. He’ll have the goddamn army in here to mop you up. It spun out of your control the instant Pallas was taken alive. It’s too late to roll up her network or whatever because Ma’elKoth is going to do that without your help, and then he will fall on you like the wrath of a god, and that’s no fucking exaggeration. You have to hit first. You have to hit now. It’s your only chance, Majesty. Like the saying goes, opportunity is a nettle—grasp it boldly, or get stung.”
He stares consideringly into the middle distance, and I give him the space of a breath or two to think it over.
“We can set fires,” he says finally, “but that won’t be enough. The kind of riot you want has to get plenty of support from the straights. It has to be self-sustaining after my boys start it up. People need to be angry, and afraid—”
“That’s easy,” I tell him. “They’re already afraid. Ma’elKoth’s got them all whipped up with his Aktir hunt. Turning fear into anger is the easiest thing in the world.”
This part, at least, I already have figured out.
“We can beat on Ma’elKoth with his own stick. Ma’elKoth—” I spread my hands like I’m preparing a conjuring trick. “—is one of them.”
Majesty frowns, and I grin at him.
“He’s an Aktir himself,” I say. “The whole Aktir hunt is a dodge, a cover, a point-at-you-so-nobody-looks-at-me con.”
Majesty’s eyes go wide, and his hand clutches blindly at my sleeve. “Hot staggering fuck. . .” he says breathlessly. “Is it true?”
“Does it matter? When you tell a story loud enough and long enough, a story that plays right into people’s worst fears of betrayal, it grows its own truth.”
“But, but . . . Could it actually be? I mean, if there was such a thing as Aktiri. . . It’d make sense; it’d make perfect sense. It’d fit together just right . . . With some kind of proof, some kind of evidence, you could bring him down all at once. The nobles hate him anyway; they’d turn on him in a light breeze. The army wouldn’t fight for him . . . But without it . . .”
I can see now what I have to do.
This is gonna hurt like a bastard. This is gonna hurt for years.
But a choice between my integrity and Pallas’ life is no choice at all.
I clasp his shoulders with both my hands and gaze into his eyes with every ounce of level, direct, plainspoken sincerity I can muster.
“All right, Majesty,” I say slowly. “It’s true. Think about it: Ma’elKoth came out of nowhere during the Plains War. How can you look like that, be that size, have that face and that kind of raw power, without anyone ever hearing a whisper of your name until you’re what, forty? Where was he all those years? How in the name of every living god did he end up Emperor less than five years after he dropped out of the fucking sky? Where did he come from? Where are his boyhood friends? Where’s his family? There’s your answer: no family, no friends, no history. He’s an Aktir, Majesty. He’s one of them.”
“I can see it,” he says softly. “Tyshalle’s Blood. I can see it! But I’d need proof, Caine, something I can take to the nobles, make them rise against him.”
I say, with the perfect conviction of an honest man: “I’ll get you your proof.”
His eyes go vague, looking past me. He’s looking at the view of the Great Hall of the Colhari Palace, as seen from the seat of the Oaken Throne.
“Put that evidence in my hands, and you’ll have your riots.”
I shake my head. “It’ll take a couple of days. We need the riots now. Two days from now Pallas will be broken or dead, and Imperial troops will be camped all over the Warrens. The whole Kingdom will be wiped out. We have to hit now, today, within the hour. Act boldly, act now, and you win it all. Fire those riots, and you’ll have all the proof you need within two days. I swear it.”
He looks into my eyes, searching for truth that he’s not gonna find there. I look back at him, trading more than ten years of friendship, trading all the trust I’ve earned at his side for one massive act of betrayal.
By the time he finds out I’m lying, Pallas and I will either be home, or we’ll be dead.
Even if it’s wearing off, the residue of the Charm will make him inclined to help, but his natural pragmatism tells him he’ll be wasting the lives of his men in a lost cause. He balances on the knife edge between them, teetering.
He weighs our years of friendship and trust for a long time. He weighs his mental image of my reputation—Caine would rather kill a man than lie to him—then finally he nods, sharply, as he falls from the edge of the knife into the abyss below.
“All right,” he says firmly. “I believe you. The riots will start within the hour.”
I look down at Lamorak’s unconscious face, which seems to sneer back at me with malicious contempt.
Go ahead and sneer, asshole, I mutter inside my head. I never claimed to be any better than you in the first place.
“Burn the whole city,” Majesty muses, shaking his head in slow disbelief. “That’s pretty extreme for the life of one woman.”
“Fuck the city,” I tell him. “I’d burn the world to save her.”
THE WORD WENT out like an impulse through the nerves of a human body, a body whose head was the Brass Stadium in the Warrens. A Knight patrolling the border with the Face spoke with a family of leprous beggars. One of the beggars ambled onto Rogues’ Way and had words with a pack of dirty-faced street urchins. One of the children skipped into the Industrial Park to find a playmate who picked up pocket money paging for Colin’s Pages and Current Events. The page spoke to a workman lounging with his mates in front of Black Gannon’s Charcoalers at the corner of Lackland and Bond. The workmen scattered through the dockside. One of them murmured to a carter who carried the word with his goods across Fools’ Bridge and onto the island of Old Town.
They knew the drill, these clandestine Subjects of Cant: each of them spoke with at least three others. Within the hour, a beggar at Nobles’ Beach on the south bank of the Great Chambaygen said to a passing patron, “Y’know what I think? I think Ma’elKoth pushes a little too hard on this Aktir thing. You ever wonder where he came from? You ever wonder if maybe he’s covering something up? Thieves fall out; that’s what I think.”
Almost the same words could be overheard in taverns and inns from the Snakepit to the Financial Court. Most who heard them scoffed. It was inconceivable. It was ridiculous. But when they’d laughingly tell their friends of this outrageously silly rumor they’d overheard, there was someone in nearly every group who could say with an honest frown, “Well, I dunno. I heard it somewhere else already today. Maybe there’s something to it. I mean, you gotta admit it’s not impossible. . .”
The story took on a life of its own, though it might very well have died a natural death in a day or two. A few days of calm and quiet lets sudden fears relax and outrageous rumors dissipate.
But only an hour past noon, on that short autumn day, flames licked up the back of the Nobles’ Playhouse on the south bank. Even as a bucket brigade engaged that fire and began to quiet its roar, an apartment block half a mile away burst into flames. Half an hour later a stable burned in the shadow of Thieves’ Bridge. By that time, the bridge captains had already begun detailing regular troops to fight the fires and sending requests to the garrisons for replacements.
By midafternoon, soldiers were spread throughout the capital, sweating and red faced from the heat of the scattered fires they fought. More than a few of them griped to each other that “the Emperor can send rain to save a few peasants’ crops in some province a hundred leagues away, but he can’t spare even a squall to put out these damned fires? Maybe he wants the damned city to burn.”
The captain at the gatehouse of the shattered Knights’ Bridge pulled his men off their salvage duties and sent every one of them to help; he led them personally. He was overheard to observe to his aide as they quickstepped across the island, “There’s a bad smell to this, a bad one for sure. This’ll be worse before it’s better, no mistaking.”
No one in the city needed to be told this; they could feel it for themselves.
The entire city drew in a breath of fearful anticipation, and held it for the shout that everyone knew would come at nightfall.
KIERENDAL SAW THE current in the Flow a full minute before the knock came on her apartment door. This current resembled not at all the stringy lace of the pull of a thaumaturge; this was something vast and turbulent that seemed to organize all the Flow around her into something oceanic, something tidal; the current that rolled through her walls seemed only the tiniest portion of some unimaginable leviathan.
Perched on the back of the chair behind her, braiding Kierendal’s fine silver hair, Tup sensed her mistress’s tension through her tiny fingertips. “Kier? Is something wrong?”
“Get Zakke. He’s in his room.” Kierendal uncoiled from the chair like a releasing spring, her long pale limbs stretching into an arc as graceful and as tense as a bent longbow. Her money-colored eyes looked far beyond the walls. “Wake him up and both of you take cover. Something’s about to happen.”
Kierendal whirled on her tiny companion. “Don’t argue! Go!”
Tup’s bandaged wing didn’t allow her to fly, but her arboreal people were also as agile as monkeys. Infected by the urgency in Kierendal’s voice, she scampered and sprang from the back of the chair to a sofa, then skittered across the carpet and through an inner door.
Kierendal draped a robe over her angular form, afraid to spare the concentration she’d require to hold an illusion of clothing. She extended her Shell and tapped into the rushing pressure of this current, gasping as power entered her like a rough lover. It had a curious flavor, this Flow—one that she couldn’t quite identify, but felt she should somehow recognize . . .
She put these thoughts firmly aside and patterned the Flow with her powerful mind; when the knock came in one of the Faces’ codes, she was ready for anything.
She reached out with an imaginary hand, and Flow flicked back the door bolt and opened the door.
In the hall, their Shells lemon with nervous energy but overlain with amethyst triumph, stood a pair of her coverts, one human and the other stonebender. “Pardon, Kierendal,” the human said, “but we caught this one coming in the back, and we thought you might want to talk with him.”
Between them, his hands bound by manacles of steel and his Shell pulsing dangerously with lethal ebon life, stood Caine.
His Shell was vastly darker than it had been before: he was barely visible within the midnight shadow that surrounded him. Kierendal’s mouth opened in silent awe as she saw the shift in the direction of Flow: it moved toward Caine, as though he himself were a thaumaturge of godlike power. It didn’t pass into him as it would an adept; it swirled and eddied around him and beat back against the incoming currents. She could see that he wasn’t doing it purposefully—he wasn’t even in the mindview trance that humans needed to perceive and direct the Flow. What, then, could this be?
“Security’s gettin bettar, nah Kier?” the stonebender said. “Caught un dis time, didna we?”
“Don’t be idiots,” she snapped. “Cease this ridiculous act, Caine. Show them.”
Within his cloud, Caine shrugged, and the manacles dropped clattering to the floor. The two coverts jumped like they’d been goosed and went for their weapons. Caine raised his hands.
“Do we talk? Or do I break your puppies, here?”
“Leave him be,” she ordered. “Caine, come inside. You two, guard the door. And do a better job of it, this time.”
Caine stepped casually within, his half smile blurred by the raging Flow that whirled around him. He closed the door behind himself and leaned against it. Those shadow forms were back again, those ghostly Caine doubles that his every motion seemed to spawn. He was so utterly prepared for any possible action that the ghost doubles took on a solidity in the Flow around him. She could see them now, vague shifting patternings of force, where before she had only imagined them.
“Stay there,” Kierendal told him sharply. “This is a new day, Caine, and I am ready for you. Any threatening move will be your last.”
He spread his hands. “Don’t come all hostile, Kierendal. I’m here to apologize. I let them take me so I wouldn’t have to hurt anyone on my way in.”
“Yeah. Busting up your place like that—belting your houseboy, knifing the little treetopper . . .”
Kierendal squinted. His expression was half hidden by the ghost-Caines around him; she couldn’t decide how sincere he might be. “Money is love, Caine,” she said. “If you meant it, you’d say it with gold.”
“You cost me five hundred royals.”
One black-brushed eyebrow arched. “That’s a lot for a broken table and an eyepatch.”
“That’s how much I’d fronted to Berne. After your . . . departure . . . he cashed out and left.”
“I’ll double your money back,” Caine said with an easy shrug. “Turn me in.”
For a long frozen moment Kierendal could only blink. Had she heard him correctly?
Caine went on. “I’m serious. You know my new head-price. Send a runner to the Eyes, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Toa-Sytell himself shows up to put the gold in your hand.”
“Look, somebody’s gonna collect that money. Might as well be you, huh?”
“What kind of game are you playing?”
“That’s not your business. You want the money or not?”
“What I want,” Kierendal found herself saying with unexpected heat, “is some damned idea what’s going on.”
Caine grinned at her. “Don’t we all?”
“My agents report that there are fires all over the city; that everywhere they turn someone’s arguing over whether or not Ma’elKoth’s an Aktir—a rumor I hear was started by the Subjects of Cant, by the way. And everyone says there’s a riot heating to a rising simmer. Yesterday, a human thaumaturge raised the whole bloody Great Chambaygen to half drown the dockside and wipe out Knights’ Bridge—something that I would have sworn was impossible. And I hear that this thaumaturge, who has more power than any human has a right to, turns out to be your old girlfriend Pallas Ril. Now you show up at my place, asking to be turned over to the King’s Eyes. Why do I get the impression that this is all connected, somehow?”
“You have good sources,” he said impassively. She waited for him to offer more, but he might as well have been carved from stone: he didn’t even blink.
“I have to get into the palace.” He winced as though at a sudden shooting pain. “Ahh, bad pun, sorry.” At her blank look, he shook his head irritably. “Forget it. You don’t have to understand. You want the money?”
Kierendal hissed frustration through her overly sharp teeth. “If I don’t?”
Caine’s words were throwaway casual. “Then I go someplace else.” But the Flow that boiled around him darkened and roiled alarmingly, and Kierendal suddenly wondered why she’d resisted the idea; she’d never been averse to easy money. Watching the Flow pattern itself around him, she found herself suspecting that by far the safest course was simply to do whatever Caine wanted. Opposing power of this magnitude might crisp her like a moth in a candle flame.
“All right,” she said quickly. “I’ll send the runner, and I won’t ask any more questions. Someday, you’ll sit down and tell me the whole story.”
“There are,” she said carefully, “powers at work in your life that beggar my imagination. I see them, a small part of them, but I don’t understand them. You are at the nexus of forces beyond comprehension.”
He gave her a cynical, knowing smile. “Everybody is, Kierendal. We just don’t notice, most of the time.”
“I pity anyone who gets in your way.”
“Yeah, me too. Let’s do this, all right? I don’t have all fucking day.”
WHEN HE HEARD Berne enter the room behind him, Toa-Sytell turned away from the window only long enough to acknowledge the Count’s presence with a cold flat stare, then turned back.
This window overtopped not only the Sen-Dannalin Wall around the Colhari Palace, but the intricate spires of the neighboring Temple to the Katherisi; it commanded a fine view of the western reach of Gods’ Way. Close enough to be visible below the glare of the sinking sun, an iron-caged carriage drawn by four black horses rolled slowly through the heavy traffic. With Knights’ Bridge destroyed, all the poor folk and subhumans that resided on the north bank were forced to crowd toward Fools’ Bridge to beat the curfew at dusk. The day was unseasonably hot, and ending far too swiftly; it was clear to Toa-Sytell’s eye that there was no way for all these folk to crowd out of Old Town before nightfall. Fights had already broken out in several places along Gods’ Way alone, as a sweating townsman had his foot trodden upon one too many times, as another took one too many elbows in the ribs, as another took a gentleman’s whip across his face for blocking the path of a horse. The few constables in view looked nervous and harried. The army should have been out, helping to maintain order, but most of the available troops were occupied fighting the fires scattered across the city, which sent thick smothering coils of black smoke toward the cloudless sky.
Berne spoke from behind him. “Not here yet?”
Toa-Sytell twitched his chin vaguely toward that approaching carriage. “On his way. It’s a long way around, you know,” he murmured blandly. “Perhaps you hadn’t heard that Knights’ Bridge is down—?”
For once Berne didn’t rise to the bait. He said only, “Ma’elKoth wants him in the Iron Room.”
“I’d like to see him in the Iron Room myself,” Toa-Sytell muttered.
The Duke shrugged irritably. “He fell off the world. Then, this afternoon, he fell back on. Beyond that, I cannot say.”
He sighed within himself, waiting for Berne’s needles to begin their pricking. He couldn’t even retaliate: Berne’s Cats had done their job. Even though the Aktiri had escaped, Ma’elKoth knew where they were and could reach out his hand and take them when he chose, and the thaumaturge who had protected them was even now on the altar of the Iron Room.
The King’s Eyes, on the other hand, had uncovered no trace of Caine. It had been left to the elvish whoremistress of Alien Games to do his job for him. Berne was far too childish to resist such an opening, he believed, but now the Count surprised him. He took a place at the window beside Toa-Sytell, leaning with his palms on the sill and staring blindly out over the crowds that packed Gods’ Way.
“There aren’t any words . . .” Berne near-whispered. “There just aren’t any words to say how much I hate that man.”
Toa-Sytell stared at Berne’s profile—no longer flawless with the swollen bend of his broken nose, his face painted bloody rose by the setting sun—and was astonished to find within his breast a sudden flash of sympathetic fellow feeling. “Perhaps Ma’elKoth will let you kill him, now.”
“I hope so. I hope so. But . . .” He turned to Toa-Sytell and shrugged fluidly. “I don’t know. I’m worried, y’know? I have a feeling that there’s too much going on that I don’t know about. I have a feeling things are out of control. Not just for me: for us. For everybody.”
Toa-Sytell studied him for the millionth time, but it seemed as though he’d never really seen Berne before. Berne had come through the destruction of Knights’ Bridge without so much as a bruise—only a few now neatly stitched scratches from the knives of that girl he’d killed—a reminder of the power of Ma’elKoth that defended him, a reminder that here was the favorite of the Emperor. His masculine beauty, his powerful build and pantherish grace, all these were familiar to Toa-Sytell; new to his searching eye was this unexpected depth of concern for Ma’elKoth, perhaps concern for the Empire itself. Yesterday, even this morning, Toa-Sytell would have wagered his immortal soul that Berne was incapable of the very feeling that he now fleetingly displayed.
He had, during this week, wondered how much of Berne’s hatred for Caine might spring from jealousy, from the fear that the assassin might be replacing him in Ma’elKoth’s personal affections. Now he wondered how much of his own contemptuous malice toward Berne might have been prompted by the same petty emotion; after all, until Berne had been created Count and given command of the Grey Cats a few months ago, Toa-Sytell himself had been the Emperor’s closest advisor and confidant.
How peculiar, he thought, that I, who make a profession of knowing the minds of men, should be such a mystery to myself.
“I have felt this, even as you have,” Toa-Sytell said, coming to a sudden decision. “Berne, we have never been friends. I do not believe we ever will be. What I do believe is that we have spent too much time and energy bickering and backstabbing each other—jealous like rivals in romance—and the rift between us has given aid to the enemy. We each serve the Emperor in our own way; let us try to be content with that. Let there be peace between us.”
He held out his hand. Berne stared at it as though it were some alien thing, then shrugged and took it.
“All right,” he said. “Peace.”
Berne turned again to the window, staring moodily toward the sliver of sun still visible above the horizon. “But we have to do something about Caine. I thought, y’know, I thought that him disappearing like that . . . Well, I thought if he ever turned up again, Ma’elKoth would just let me take his head. But when I told him that sub bitch in Alientown had claimed his head-price, he laughed—that kind of rich-uncle laugh he has, you know what I mean—and told me to have him sent to the Iron Room, alone, as soon as he arrives. I think Ma’elKoth likes him, y’know? And maybe it’s more than that, too. There’s something between them that I don’t understand, something deep.”
Toa-Sytell nodded. “I agree. I recall Ma’elKoth saying only last week that he’d give Caine to you. I believe he meant it at the time, but now I do not think he’ll ever do it. Have you watched him at the Great Work?”
“All the different Caines he keeps trying to fit in there?”
“Yes. Since that night on the Dusk Tower, images of Caine have been his only subject. The first evening Caine spent here, Ma’elKoth spent the entire night examining him magickally. Since then, his obsession has only grown. Caine has taken over nearly his entire attention; it’s excessive, and inexplicable.”
“I should have killed him at Alien Games,” Berne said distantly, staring out the window.
“I agree,” Toa-Sytell said. “But it is too late, now. We must find some way to break this mesmeric hold he has upon Ma’elKoth. To do that, we must discover what it is. How much do you know of Caine’s past?”
Berne shrugged. “Only the same stories that everyone knows. But I’ll tell you where to go for more: the Monasteries.”
“Yeah. You know my father’s Monastic? An Exoteric. Well, they’re a little crazy about records. They write everything down; I mean, everything.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that,” the Duke mused. “They’d let me examine these records?”
“Not ordinarily, no—they’re supposed to be secret. But, y’know, the Monasteries might be a little perturbed with Caine right now . . .”
Toa-Sytell leaned against the window to look down into the courtyard’s thickening twilight as he thought about this. Far below, five heavily armed Household Knights stood at ready while a King’s Eye unlocked the cage door of the iron carriage. Torches flared around the courtyard in the gloom. The tiny figure of Caine stepped nonchalantly out into the shadow of the Sen-Dannalin Wall, apparently unmindful of the manacles on his wrists and the steel bilboes that held his ankles.
“Any number of people,” Toa-Sytell murmured thoughtfully, “seem to be a little perturbed with Caine. Come. We’ll await him in the Dusk Tower.”
AT DUSK, A company of mounted constables started to sidestep their horses west along Gods’ Way, pushing against the rear ranks of the crowd to force it along from behind. Voices were heard to mutter and complain. Why should they be forced off Old Town just because it was getting dark? Whose rule was that, anyway? Ma’elKoth’s? Why were these vicious bastards pushing so hard?
The street, already crowded, swiftly became choked. Children cried out, crushed between larger adults. Men and women shouted at the mounted officers to ease off, people are getting hurt, but the constable captain was as nervous as any. He wanted the trouble that he knew was brewing to boil over on the north bank, not here in his own district. He ordered his men to press harder. The sooner the streets of Old Town could be cleared of this rabble, the better.
It wasn’t long until the crowd began to push back.
The horses came to a stop against a solid mass of living resistence—human, stonebender, and primal bodies forced together until they might as well have been fused into a single organism. An ogre pried up a cobblestone with its long hooked claws and shied it at the captain, missing widely but giving the rest of the surging crowd an idea.
Rocks began to fly, and the mounted constables now unlimbered stout clubs that rose and fell upon heads and shoulders with cracks like drumbeats.
Someone in the crowd shouted, “Why you beating on us? Why aren’t you off protecting us from the damned Aktiri?”
Someone else answered him, “They takes their orders from the damned Aktiri themselves, that’s why! Why not put assfuck Ma’elKoth to the question, eh?”
The captain snapped swift orders that this treasonous agitator was to be arrested at once, but no one seemed to have seen him. Now other voices joined a growing chorus. “Aktir! Aktir! Put Ma’elKoth to the question!”
The first two speakers, the questioner and the answerer, were Subjects of Cant. They elbowed their way toward the mouth of a nearby alley, well satisfied with their work, encouraging the crowd that they shoved through with a simple chant: “Ak-tir, Ak-tir!” Voices echoed them, then took over of their own accord as the two slipped away.
The chant of the crowd grew, swelled dangerously: “Ak . . . TIR! Ak . . . TIR!” and they pushed against each other’s backs, surging against the line of horses, forcing them to retreat step by step along Gods’ Way.
Once the crowd realized that it had the power to move in this direction, it became unstoppable.
The captain could have pulled back his troops in an orderly retreat and maintained some control of the situation. He could have ordered his men to attack full force, slain a few in the crowd with club and sword, and perhaps broken the rising spirit. He did neither. Young and inexperienced, he dithered, shouting at his men to hold the line, for it seemed to him that he had no other option. Retreat equaled disgrace, and he felt he could not order his men to slaughter the folk they were sworn to defend. He hesitated, and was lost.
One of the constables was suddenly pulled from his horse; he vanished under the fists and pounding feet of the crowd around him. A roar went up like a great carnivorous beast giving tongue at the scent of blood.
A simple shift in perspective, an epiphanic flash of a shared singleness of purpose, and the crowd was no longer a crowd, was no longer a mass of individuals who chanced to stand together on this street on this day. Each man, each woman, dwarf and elf, ogrillo and sprite, had all become single cells in some massive hive mind, almost a single organism—an organism that was hungry.
In seconds another constable was down, then another. And then the company had broken, and they turned to flee under a pursuing hail of flying cobblestones and jeers.
When full darkness fell, the mob owned the street. The flames of buildings would be its sun, and the stores of the rich would be its table.