TWO HOUSEHOLD KNIGHTS pushed him ahead of them into the Shifting Room, and one of them yanked the bellpull for the ninth floor before joining the others within. A whip crack came faintly up the shaft, followed by a slow-oiled creak of rope as the ogres below pushed against the donkey wheel and the Shifting Room began to rise.
Caine rode it silently, hands clasped behind his back, avoiding the eyes of the soldiers around him. For their part, they watched him intently, occasionally licking nervous sweat from their upper lips, hands moist on the hilts of their scabbarded shortswords. They knew him by reputation and were taking no chances. Once he jangled the chains of his manacles, just to watch them jump; they did not disappoint him. He chuckled dryly, without humor.
Old and frightened: not for himself, not fear for his own life. He’d always known he’d die on Overworld. He’d had a few days to get used to the idea of dying soon, dying now, dying like Talann, like the priest of Rudukirisch at the Ritual of Rebirth; dying because he was utterly overmatched.
He was afraid he was going to screw up, somehow.
On the sand at the Brass Stadium he could act without hesitation because he’d seen his goal before him, solid in front of his eyes, and the path between where he was and where he needed to be was physical, was an actual expanse of dirt and stone.
But now, though his goal burned like the sun before his eyes—Shanna, safe on Earth—the path from here to there was only a thick fog of possibility. He was vastly too far from his goal to choose the safe path toward it, and deep within his chest he knew that there was only one that threaded through to Shanna’s life, one among a million choices. Even that single safe trail was lined with quicksand and pits full of sharpened stakes, and it was patrolled by monsters that hungered for her life.
Inch toward daylight, he told himself, along with his other subsurface mantras: Pretend you know what you’re doing. Never let them see you sweat.
The thick-beamed ninth floor slid down across the doorway of the Shifting Room and stopped; two more Household Knights met his keepers at the door. The first soldier to get out had to step up, but the room lifted a few inches when each man left it. By the time Caine came out they had to help him down. The steel bar between the bilboes that held his ankles wouldn’t let him take that large a step.
They exchanged passwords with the guards who stood by the door to the Dusk Tower, then stooped to remove the shackles from his legs. It was a long climb up spiral stairs.
Going up with two soldiers in front of him and two behind, Caine slowly became aware of a smell up there, an electric scent of charged metal that brought a bitter tang to the back of his throat. As they came closer to the top, to the open door, he also caught a whiff of sulphur and decay, like a corpse half mummified by the fumes from a volcanic fissure.
Two men stood in the room at the top of the stairs, sidelit by a languidly wavering lamp flame, watching him approach: Toa-Sytell and—
“Hey, Berne,” Caine said, faking cheerful mockery. “I wondered what the smell was.”
“Keep laughing, goatfucker,” Berne replied evenly. “Your turn’ll come.”
“That’s what my mother always said.”
Toa-Sytell spoke colorlessly to the lead soldier. “Unbind his hands.”
The soldier frowned. “You’re sure—?”
“Ma’elKoth wills it so. Free him and go.”
The soldier shrugged and unlocked the manacles, then he and the others trooped away down the stairs. Caine listened to them go while he made a show of picking the shreds of skin off his wrists, where they’d been scraped by the manacles’ rough edges.
“Where have you been, these past two days?” Toa-Sytell demanded.
Caine ignored him, walking to the window and peering out. Clouds had come in with the twilight, and now they took on a ruddy glow from the fires beneath. Far-off shouts came clearly on the wind, and in some of them he could hear the faint chant “Ak-tir . . . Ak-tir . . .”
The Subjects were holding up their end of the bargain; if only he could find a bare chance to hold up his own . . .
“I want an answer,” Toa-Sytell said, with more heat than Caine had ever heard from him.
Caine turned and sat against the windowsill, regarding the shadowed, backlit faces of his enemies. “Here’s news, Duke. I don’t have to tell you shit. You can get your answers from Ma’elKoth, if he feels like giving them.”
Berne took a step forward, his hand creeping up his chest toward where the hilt of Kosall projected above his shoulder. “You little fuck. I should kill you right now.”
“You look kinda stiff, Berne. Did Talann cut you a couple times?”
Berne’s pale eyes darkened dangerously, but his voice came out light. “Was that her name? She died before she could tell me. Her last words were ‘Please, please, Berne, fuck me like an animal.’ ”
Caine shook his head and fought to make his snarling bared teeth look like a smile. “You’re such a baby. It’s a shame I can only kill you once.”
Berne took another step forward. Caine grinned and lifted his hands, turning them this way and that as though displaying jewelry. “Too late. You should have done me while my arms were still tied. You might have had a chance.”
He poised himself bonelessly against the windowsill. One wild lunge from Berne, and Caine was fairly certain he could topple the sonofabitch right out the window at his back. Let’s see how that Buckler of yours works when you hit the street at terminal velocity.
Toa-Sytell laid a gently restraining hand on Berne’s arm. “Answers from Ma’elKoth?” he said. “Are you saying that Ma’elKoth knows? That my search has been a, some kind of a, an entertainment? Is this merely for amusement, or part of some larger game?”
Hey, why not? Caine thought, confusion to the enemy. “Don’t get pissy, Toa-Sytell. God, you may have heard, moves in mysterious ways.”
“He’s playing you,” Berne said. “Ma’elKoth doesn’t work like that. He’s always been straight with us, and you know it.”
Caine looked from one to the other. Berne and Toa-Sytell have suddenly become an “us”?
That alone was enough to twist his stomach even tighter.
He nodded toward the massive black iron door that dominated the north wall, its cold-worked surface incised with gleaming silver runes. “Ma’elKoth’s in there?”
Berne smirked. “He’s not the only one—”
Toa-Sytell hissed him to silence. “Let him learn for himself.”
Caine’s mouth went dry and chill as though he breathed a wind across an arctic desert. Blood sang in his ears. “Pallas . . .” he murmured, and for the stretching eternity between one thundering beat of his heart and the next, all the rational parts of his mind were driven off by the bloody imagery of half-forgotten tales of the Iron Room.
There wasn’t a tavern in Ankhana, maybe not one in the Empire, where you couldn’t raise a pleasing shiver and goose bumps on a warm night just by mentioning its name. The knots in his guts would have been far less tight if he’d learned they’d put her in the Theater of Truth.
On the other hand, the thought of walking in there himself didn’t bother him at all, not if going there gave him the shadow of a chance to help her.
He pushed himself off the sill, but Berne and Toa-Sytell together blocked his path to the door.
“When Ma’elKoth desires your company, he will summon you,” Toa-Sytell said.
Caine replied, “You want to get out of my way.”
“Wait till you’re called,” Berne said, stepping close to tower over Caine. “He doesn’t like to be interrupted.”
Caine looked up into Berne’s ice blue eyes, close enough that with a simple twist of his head he could sink his teeth into the swordsman’s throat. Though the old familiar fury still burned within his chest and the diamondine lust to tear Berne’s limbs ragged and spurting from his body had not slackened, he was a world away from doing anything as reckless and stupid as he had on the gaming floor at Kierendal’s. Instead he found within himself a cold and level purity of intention: everything for Shanna.
“Funny how things change in just a couple days,” he said casually. “I can imagine a future in which you’re still alive tomorrow, Berne.”
Berne snorted contemptuously, his breath heavy with meat. “Just stay away from that fucking door.”
Caine leaned to one side to frown at the door around Berne’s shoulders. “What, that one?” He flicked a humorous glance sideways at Toa-Sytell, reached out, and tapped lightly with two fingers upon the Duke’s chest.
“Hey, Toa-Sytell. Thought you told me once that I shouldn’t bother to hope that I’d ever catch you within arm’s length.”
For one brief second, Toa-Sytell stiffened, remembering Creele’s death in the Monastery. In that second Caine was able to straight-arm him out of the way and slip past Berne’s shoulder.
He reached the door and grasped the enormous Ouroboros ring of the knocker, lifting it with a grunt of effort—
“Caine, don’t!” Berne gasped from behind him, an unexpected note of honest panic in his voice that sparked, for Caine, a real smile.
He grinned back over his shoulder: Berne and Toa-Sytell both stood where they’d been, faces identically pale, their hands out imploringly as though they’d stop him if they dared, but feared to make a sudden move that might startle him into letting the knocker fall.
“You don’t know . . .” Toa-Sytell said hoarsely, “you don’t know what might be in there—!”
“Shit,” Caine said with a laugh. “All right, relax, you big babies. I won’t knock.”
Instead, he yanked the door open.
The smell from within was all blood and old shit, washed down with salt water, and sharp cedar from the coals that smoldered in the braziers. The high-ceilinged room was broad enough to throw back an echo from the scrape of Caine’s boots, but when Ma’elKoth rose and turned majestically toward the door, the room shrank like a receding dream, as though there was no place within it beyond the reach of the Emperor’s arm.
“Caine. Come in. Shut the door behind you.”
Caine flicked a shrugging glance back at the two behind him. Berne and Toa-Sytell each managed to look awestruck and vaguely alarmed and deeply suspicious all at once.
He winked at them and went in.
THE DOOR’S SLAM behind him made the whole room ring like a gong.
Ma’elKoth drifted toward him, a human thunderhead. “I have been awaiting your return.”
He wore a veil, a drape of some kind of mesh that covered him from head to foot like a kid playing ghost with a sheet over his head; from the lower hem of this mesh sheet hung four large, irregular, shiny black rocks that looked like griffinstones. Beneath the transparent mesh he was naked save for the tight leather knee breeches that he’d worn beneath his robes for the Ritual of Rebirth. Sweat glistened across his breathtaking musculature as though he’d been oiled like a bodybuilder, and it darkened the ends of his bristling beard as well as the lower third of the mane of chestnut hair that curled to his shoulder blades.
“I will be interested in some answers from you, Caine,” he said, and there remained no trace of his usual paternal indulgence. If distant thunder could be made into precise words, broken into clipped and overarticulated speech, it would have the impersonal, dispassionately threatening sound of Ma’elKoth’s voice.
“Pallas Ril is your lover. Pallas Ril is Simon Jester.”
The Emperor towered over Caine like a mountain poised on the brink of avalanche. His mask of calm began to break, cracked from the inside by the swell of outraged veins in his massive neck. “You will regret having deceived me, Caine.”
Caine barely heard this threat. It had no meaning for him, could have no meaning. Beyond the Emperor, a slim form, bound nude upon the table-sized block of bloodstained limestone, held the universe’s hope of meaning upon its still and silent breast.
Her eyes were open, staring blankly at the circle of grey-brown exposed stone of the ceiling above her. Her hands had been tied together stretched above her head; her ankles were tied similarly, by ropes that looped through heavy iron rings on the floor nearby. Her body was mottled with bruise, so many small insults upon her precious flesh that they’d blended together into one. Linen that once had been white stretched tight across her chest; it was now crusted with brown, shading to wet-gleaming crimson. But mostly what held Caine was her eyes, those eyes—
They were open and they did not blink, and he could not make himself care what Ma’elKoth might be about to do to him.
It seemed that he stood there forever, motionless, timeless, unable to think, unable to breathe. Even his heart paused for an eternal instant while he lived wholly through his eyes.
And then her chest rose, slowly, gradually; when it fell again, Caine felt the dawn of a new day. With her breath, his own returned, and the world began to make sense once again.
“But first,” Ma’elKoth said, so close now that Caine could smell corruption on his breath, “I will know where you have been!”
Caine shook himself back to the present. “What are you, my mother?” he said, trying for the cheerful mockery he’d used with Berne. A flash of movement gave him barely enough warning to begin to roll with it as Ma’elKoth’s open hand slapped him spinning irresistibly, tumbling and skidding across the iron floor.
Holy shit, he thought dizzily as he tried to unravel the stunned tangle of his limbs and reach his feet. This is a problem . . .
Ma’elKoth pounced on him like a hunting cat. The Emperor yanked him into the air by huge handfuls of his leather jerkin and shook him the way a terrier shakes a rat to snap its spine. Every single one of Caine’s wounds screamed pain at him, and the shout of agony seemed to clear his mind.
All at once, he became aware of a number of things:
One: He was about to die, here. If Ma’elKoth didn’t get an answer that satisfied him, he’d beat him to death with his bare hands—and there was no answer that Caine could give.
Two: Ma’elKoth was using his bare hands not merely from rage, but because his magic was inaccessible. The net—this was silver mesh that he wore over his head, just like the suit Arkadeil had worn in the Theater of Truth, just like the veils that Konnos had invented. It must be cutting him off from the Flow. This was how he knew who Pallas was and knew that she was Simon Jester: the silver net protected him from the Eternal Forgetting.
Three, most important, dizzying, staggering in its implications: Cut off from the power that made him what he was, Ma’elKoth was vulnerable.
He’d never get a better chance.
Even without the knives that the Household Knights had confiscated, despite the enormous power of the sheerly physical sort held within Ma’elKoth’s massive body, despite being a foot and a half shorter and about half the weight of this man-god, Caine had a chance, had a good chance.
Ma’elKoth shook him again—the room spun and jittered crazily around him—and roared into his face. “Where? Answer me! Where have you been?”
“All right,” Caine said, “all right—”
Ma’elKoth shifted his grip to hold him in the air by only one hand, while he drew back the other in a fist the size of a catapult stone. Caine got his own hands, both of them, up in front of his face in time to absorb some of the thundering force of this punch. Instead of breaking his neck, it only shot stars through his vision. A hot rush of blood filled his mouth from his smashed nose and teeth-cut lips.
“Ma’elKoth, stop!” Caine said with as much force as he could press through his half-stunned slur. “You’ll kill me . . . and then you’ll never know—”
Ma’elKoth held him there, his feet dangling loosely below him; his mighty chest heaved like a bellows as he worked air in and out through teeth clenched so tightly that scarlet patches overlay his bulging jaw.
“I trusted you, Caine,” he ground out. “I do not give My trust lightly to any man. I will have My answer, or I will have your life.”
Caine met his smoldering gaze with a flat stare of his own. “Put me down.”
Ma’elKoth’s face went from red to white with rage. For a long moment Caine’s life teetered on a knife’s edge, but Ma’elKoth suffered from a curse that plagues all brilliant men: he had to know.
Slowly, struggling with his anger, he lowered Caine to the iron floor; slowly he opened the fist that held Caine’s jerkin.
Caine pretended to straighten his clothing; he pretended that wiping the blood from his lips really mattered; this gave him the space of two breaths to rake Ma’elKoth with his eyes, deciding where to hit him first.
His knee, the joint vulnerable behind the tight leather; his bulging groin; the nerve cluster behind his solar plexus—? No: the bare hint of skin-covered cartilage that showed between the cabled muscles of his throat. A handspear or a phoenix fist, either one, quick and sharp. Even if the larynx didn’t break, the muscles around it would clamp down in reaction: he wouldn’t be able to yell an alarm. Then it would be flesh against flesh, bone against bone, man against man: on those terms, Caine would not allow himself to lose.
Ma’elKoth would die before the altar on which he’d bound Pallas Ril.
And yet, poised here on the cusp between killing and dying, knowing full well that if he did not attack, Ma’elKoth would give him no other opportunity, looking up into the rage-poisoned eyes of this giant man-god, Caine thought inexplicably of Hamlet coming upon Claudius the King at prayer: Now might I do it pat, now he is a-praying . . .
Images cascaded through his mind: the fight, the death of Ma’elKoth, freeing Pallas Ril, opening the door of the Iron Room—to find Berne and Toa-Sytell outside, whom he cannot kill before their shouts alert the Household Knights at the foot of the stairs. Ma’elKoth is not the Wicked Witch of the West, that his retainers would cheer his death and let his killers go merrily on their way. He was loved. He was revered . . .
He was, in fact, a damned good Emperor.
And he’s one of the few men I’ve ever met that I respect, Caine thought, and one of the fewer still that I kind of, even, admire.
A good man? No, clearly not; but then, neither was Caine, and he well knew it. But Ma’elkoth was better than most; intellectually honest, at least, aware of his own brutality, and with the good of his subjects at heart . . .
Kill him now, kill him here, what happens? Ma’elKoth dies, Caine dies, Pallas dies, maybe Berne, maybe Toa-Sytell, maybe hundreds of thousands more in the Second Succession War that will surely follow. Who wins?
The Studio wins: a massive, destructive civil war is exactly what they’ve been hoping for.
That, Caine decided, was not an acceptable outcome.
His father had told him to forget the rules. He’d shrugged it off. He’d never paid much attention to rules in the first place. But now he found that there were rules he’d lived by, rules that had made Caine what he was, patterns of behavior, trip wires of which he wasn’t even aware. Now it came as a startling revelation:
Maybe I don’t have to kill him.
Not only did he not have to kill Ma’elKoth here, he didn’t have to kill him at all. That was a Caine pattern: when threatened, kill. But he could choose not to be a slave to his own past.
Maybe here in the prison of the Iron Room, he’d found another kind of freedom.
Everyone thinks Caine is all of me; that’s my edge.
Step outside the Caine patterns—he’d already begun. Maybe if he stayed outside, circled around them, so to speak, used the patterns themselves as a weapon—those patterns that determined what friends and enemies both expected of him, what they thought he was capable of—he could have it all.
Why settle for less than everything?
Save Shanna. Save himself. Pull the King of Cant out of the shit-hole he’d dumped him into. Get Kollberg. And screw the Studio: save the Empire from another Succession War.
He saw a chance, a vague and misty path through the fog, so dangerous that the mere thought of it stopped his breath. But he’d already started along that path—he’d been pushing through it blindly, picking his way among the pits and the mires—and now the sun had risen within him, and the fog had begun to burn away. He saw that he was already doing it right: he was already on a path that led to everything, if he only had the guts to risk it all. The slightest hesitation, the vaguest stirrings of fear, and he’d be lost. The demons that patrolled this path would close in and rend him at the first hint of uncertainty, but he didn’t mind that at all.
There was one Caine pattern that he’d never change: when in doubt, go for it.
A wild grin took over his face.
“You know what?” he said brightly into the teeth of Ma’elKoth’s expectant fury. “I don’t think I’m going to kill you.”
Ma’elKoth’s eyes widened, then his brows drew together. “Of course you won’t. What makes you think you could?”
“Let me put it this way: I’m hoping I won’t have to.”
“No games, Caine. I am waiting for your answer.”
“You’ve been here all day, haven’t you? Must be frustrating, questioning her with that net over your head. No wonder you’re in a temper. Kind of funny, if you think about it: With the net, you can’t use your magick to force the answers out of her. Without the net, you can’t remember what questions you want to ask, or even why you’ve tied her up here. So, what are you left with? Pain? You know in advance that won’t mean much to an adept.”
Ma’elKoth grunted. “I haven’t touched her. The bruises are from her capture.”
A knot loosened in his chest. “Then what’s wrong with her?” he said. “Why does she just stare like that?”
“Caine, I am a patient man,” Ma’elKoth rumbled dangerously, “but not today.”
“Yeah, no shit. Me neither. Listen, if you keep that net on, I might just go ahead and beat you to death.”
One eyebrow lifted, and a corner of Ma’elKoth’s mouth quirked; fury had become amusement without transition. “Oh?”
“Yeah. You know I can; I mean, for all your size and strength, you’re no warrior. Without your magick, I’ll drop you like a bag of rocks.”
“You would never escape the palace.”
Caine shrugged. “I’ve done it before.”
Ma’elKoth pursed his lips while he considered that.
“Just so,” he said at length. “And why is it that you tell me this?”
“Making a point, Ma’elKoth.” And getting your attention off where I’ve been. “If I meant you harm, I could have your life. Right now.” He opened his hands, showed them to Ma’elKoth in a gesture of innocence. “I also want you to take off that net.”
“And why is this? Do not hope that this spell that protects your lover will win her release. I may forget why she is bound here, but I will not forget the use of this net, and that by putting on this net I relearn the identity of Simon Jester.”
“Nah, nah, nah, that’s not it at all. First, she’s not my lover. She dumped me months ago. Second, she’s not Simon Jester—not in the sense of being the mastermind who’s protecting the enemies of the Empire.”
“Come now, Caine. Berne himself—”
“Is an idiot, and you know it. He assumed she was; she never bothered to correct his mistake. She’s protecting the real one.”
“Hmpf.” Ma’elKoth looked away now, then back. “At one time, he thought that the real Simon Jester was you.”
Caine snorted. “I’m not that smart. Neither, obviously, is he. But I can tell you who is.”
Ma’elKoth folded his massive arms. “And?”
The lie came out smoothly, without hesitation. “It’s the King of Cant.”
“Impossible,” Ma’elKoth said instantly. “Duke Toa-Sytell—”
“Has been completely fooled. I have it from the mouth of Majesty himself.”
“But . . . but . . .” Ma’elKoth frowned, sputtering.
Caine almost laughed out loud; he’d never imagined he’d see the Emperor at a loss for words. “Do you want to know what they’re doing right now? Take off the net.”
“Of course you don’t,” Caine snapped. “You’ve spent the whole fucking day in a room with no windows, a room that makes everybody crap their pants just thinking about knocking to tell you what’s going on outside! And then you can’t feel anything in the Flow because you’ve buried your head in this damned net of yours. You want to be a god to your Children, Ma’elKoth? Well, there’s thousands of them screaming for you as we speak. You want to step outside and look? Half your fucking city’s on fire right now!”
“Fire?” Ma’elKoth said, sounding suddenly young and vulnerable, like a small boy caught half asleep. As though they moved of their own volition, his hands lifted and caught at the netting from the inside, pulling it down over his head, taking long strands of his curling hair with it, dragging them across his face, ripping the hairs from his head with faint tearing sounds that Caine could barely hear but that must have buzzed like harsh static inside Ma’elKoth’s skull.
When it came free he cast the net blindly aside. He lifted his head like a hunter who’s heard the far-off call of his prey, and he froze in that position as though he’d been turned to salt.
He said once, softly, “Ahhh . . .”
Caine took a breath, then another. Ma’elKoth wasn’t moving, wasn’t even breathing: he stared into some impossible distance, his face as blank as a river-smoothed stone.
For a long moment, Caine was held every bit as tightly as Ma’elKoth; then he forced himself to look away, forced himself to turn and move, to walk over beside the altar upon which Pallas Ril was bound.
Her eyes stared wide and vacant; they looked as empty as Caine’s chest felt, hollow and lifeless. Dried blood crusted her nostrils, and her hair was matted, still tangled with twigs and scraps of weed from the river. His hand went to her face, to gently pull a weed from her hair, but some savagely cynical part of his brain sneered at him, Sure, you can touch her now, now that she’s tied down. He jerked his hand back, his face heating up with unaccountable shame.
“Pallas . . .” he murmured, softly so that Ma’elKoth might not hear, and he lowered his head over her to gaze into her empty eyes. “Pallas, where are you?”
At his words, her chest filled as though with an incoming tide, and she inhaled consciousness along with her breath.
“Caine . . .” she said. In her voice were distant inexpressible echoes of meaning, far beyond anything he’d even attempt to interpret. “You’re so alive . . .”
His eyes stung madly. “I don’t understand—”
“I’m safe, Caine,” she said, barely audible, looking at him as though from far, far away. “I cannot be harmed . . . Save yourself . . .”
“Pallas . . .” he said helplessly.
As the light faded once more within her eyes, she said faintly, “I understand now, so many things . . . We should have been happier . . . I’m so sorry for your pain . . .”
She returned to whatever mysterious place within herself from which she had just come, and she took all of his heart with her.
I swear to you that I will make it right. All of it. I swear.
He could only stand and stare, immobile, frozen with agonizing dreams of happiness, until a step came behind him and Ma’elKoth’s monstrous hand closed on the back of his neck like the jaws of a dragon.
The weight of the Emperor’s arm forced Caine to his knees beside the altar. The power of his grip strangled Caine’s voice. “Ma’elKoth . . . what . . . ?”
“My Children scream in pain and fear; they writhe in panic and bleed out their lives in misery and terror; and you have done this!”
Maybe I should have killed him while I had the chance, Caine thought with a sickening lurch.
And then, belatedly: How does he know?
He tried to struggle, to speak and deny the truth, but Ma’elKoth’s grip had crushed the speech from his throat and blocked his blood flow like a garrote; the room darkened around him.
“Their torment echoes within My heart; it tears like savage talons into My belly. I brought this upon them, I, I who would hang from the Tree of Gods for them! This has happened because I brought you to Ankhana, because slaughter follows you as inevitably as crows pursue an army. I, who knew this, Drew you to My city to rid Me of a minor irritant, something less than a thorn, less than the prick of a spider’s bite, and now I am undone . . .”
His voice scaled down from apocalyptic fury to a kind of puzzled anguish, and his glorious eyes filled with gemlike tears. “My people cry out to Me to save them, to ease their suffering. Others plead with their lesser gods, but to whom do I turn? To whom? I have set Myself among the gods, and now there is no one upon whom I can call to bear witness to My pain.”
The hand released his neck, and Caine collapsed bonelessly, sucking in great gulps of air while the room brightened within his eyes.
He understood now: Ma’elKoth didn’t know of Caine’s direct involvement, here. This was some sort of metaphorical responsibility; Ma’elKoth seemed to think that Caine had caused this simply by being here, and Caine didn’t see any reason to correct this delusion.
Towering above him like the titanic icon in the Great Hall, the Emperor raised a fist as though to crush Caine like a roach and lowered it again. His face sagged into painful loathing, as though Caine were a mirror in which he saw himself and could not bear the sight. “I will make of Myself something worse than you, if I slay you for this, My crime,” he said.
Caine pushed himself back up to his knees, waited another moment for the spinning in his head to subside, then rose and dusted himself off again.
The trick to handling this guy, he thought, is to keep him so pissed he can’t think straight. All the brains in the world do you no good if you’re too angry to use them.
“What I want to know is,” he said deliberately, “when did you turn into such a whiner?”
Ma’elKoth’s mouth opened, then closed again. His eyes bulged like the veins in his neck. “You dare?”
“I dare fucking near anything,” Caine said. “That’s why you need me. Why don’t you stop whimpering and do something?”
“Do—?” Ma’elKoth said, while lightning flickered within his eyes. “I will show you what I can do.”
Ma’elKoth reached for Caine with such smooth inevitability that he couldn’t even think of dodging the Emperor’s grasp. His fingers once again closed upon the front of Caine’s tunic and lifted him into the air.
Y’know, Caine thought numbly, I’m getting pretty damn sick and tired of being manhandled like this.
Ma’elKoth raised his eyes to the ceiling and gestured with his free hand; then without warning his knees bent and he leaped, springing upward as though Caine’s weight and his own bulk had no meaning to him, up through the solid stone of the ceiling.
Caine flinched involuntarily as the limestone rushed down toward his head, but he passed through it as though it were nothing more than thick pale mist, up into the smoke-reeking air of the city’s night. Ma’elKoth set him gently on the once-again-solid stone beneath him; they now stood together atop the Dusk Tower of the Colhari Palace.
From the city around them volcanic columns of smoke and ash boiled upward, straight toward the clear, still stars—stars that faded one by one behind the thickening pall, until the only light on the streets of Ankhana was a frenzy of nightmare orange cast by the flames of burning buildings.
“Not the faintest breath of breeze,” Ma’elKoth growled to himself, “and still it spreads. Still it grows.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” Caine said dryly. “Did you think any of those are accidents?”
Ma’elKoth drew himself up, and his chest expanded as though it would burst. Something wild and elemental entered his eyes; they cast a light that Caine could see upon stone around him, green as sunshine through an emerald.
“Do they think I’ll stand idly by and let them burn My city?”
Before Caine could answer, Ma’elKoth raised his hand to the heavens as though grasping power from above. Caine had seen this gesture before in the Great Hall, and he threw himself out of the way as Ma’elKoth’s fist stroked forward. Thunder cracked around them so loudly that the very stone trembled beneath their feet.
Far, far away, at the easternmost tip of Old Town below Six-tower, the flames that leaped from a huge building suddenly stilled—snuffed as though they had never been; not even smoke rose from its hulk.
Christ Almighty, Caine thought, shaking his head against the ringing in his ears that was nearly as loud as the thunder had been. He couldn’t even imagine the mechanism behind this feat. Nothing he knew of magick would allow it.
Does he have any limits at all?
As Ma’elKoth once again lifted his hand to the sky, Caine said, “That’s kind of stupid, don’t you think?”
The Emperor wheeled on him, his hand still upraised, and his glare smoked green. “Have a care, Caine—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Threaten me some other time, all right? Think about what you’re doing, Ma’elKoth! Are you planning to stand up here all night and throw power around for nothing? An hour from now, less probably, every fire you snuff will be burning again, bigger and better than before.”
His hand slowly lowered and the light in his eyes began to fade. “This is true. This is too true; I attack a too-limited area of the problem. A storm,” he said desperately, “a storm is the answer, a thunderhead to douse the fires and drive the rioters indoors, but . . . but I have sent the weather to Kaarn. It will take hours to call a storm . . . And meanwhile Ankhana burns; I cannot snuff the fires while I call the storm, and I cannot call the storm while I . . .” His voice trailed off; Caine could almost feel sorry for the man, for the real anguish he so obviously felt.
“Yeah, too bad. I got news for you. That’s not the worst of your problems.”
Caine nodded. “See, you’re only looking at the outside. All you’re seeing is the results. You have to look deeper for the causes. You know where these riots come from?”
“From, from, I suppose from fear—”
“That’s right,” Caine said. He squinted out over the city and took a deep breath to time the pause just right.
He swung his gaze back toward Ma’elKoth, letting it sink in.
The Emperor looked like he’d been clubbed. Some constriction of the throat allowed him only a monosyllabic gasp. “How?”
“You did it to yourself,” Caine explained, trying not to look like he was enjoying this. “Your Aktir hunt has your people terrified. You did such a good job, whipping up fear of the Aktiri, that it was pretty simple to twist that around into fear of you. I’m telling you, it’s the King of Cant behind it all.”
He squinted at the Emperor’s face, trying to read comprehension behind the pain. Was he getting through to him? He had to deliver this information now, while it still had value as intelligence; the King’s Eyes would be reporting all this within hours, and then it would be too late.
“It’s easy to spread a rumor in this town: at least half the beggars in Ankhana are Subjects of Cant,” he went on. “And it’s no wonder people believe it. Your Aktir hunt has trained people to be suspicious of anything that is unusual or inexplicable about their neighbors, trained them to be constantly on the lookout for Aktiri. And, y’know, there’s a lot of stuff about you that people find a little creepy.”
“But this is absurd—!” Ma’elKoth insisted. “Why would I, who have done so much . . . ?”
Caine reached out and laid a hand on the Emperor’s sweat-slick arm. He looked into Ma’elKoth’s eyes and shook his head pityingly. “You’re looking at it rationally, Ma’elKoth. You’re looking for a reasonable answer to an unreasonable situation. You’ll never get there from here.”
“But surely, eventually, they’ll remember—”
“Yeah. Eventually. But by that time, the city’s in ashes, and every last surviving noble is openly at war with you. The whole Empire goes down in flames. The way I see it, you have one chance. Break the Kingdom of Cant. You have maybe twenty-four hours, no more.”
Ma’elKoth’s hand blindly sought Caine’s and engulfed it. “Twenty-four hours . . .”
“You have to stop him now, before it gets out of control. You have to stop him before the nobles get into the act.”
“I will. I will stop him. I will flood the city with troops; I’ll burn the Warrens to the ground if I must. This should have been done years ago.”
“And you’ll fail.” Caine licked blood from his lips and forced down a creeping smile.
It wasn’t so different from fighting, what he did here on this tower—combat of another sort, perhaps, but still combat. He was fighting for his life, for Shanna’s life, and for Majesty’s. Hours ago, he had thought he was betraying his best friend; now, if he could only swing Ma’elKoth in the right direction, he would reverse that betrayal. He’d make every lie he had told Majesty into the truth.
He had to keep Ma’elKoth away from the military solution for one simple, awful reason: it would work.
Think of this as combat, he told himself. His usual tactics would serve him as well here as they did in hand-to-hand. Attack attack attack—come at your target from every possible direction and press until his defenses overload. Never give him time to recover his balance: never give him time to counter.
Looking at this like a fight gave him confidence. He knew that every solution Ma’elKoth offered was only a parry, a block, and like their combat equivalents these parries and blocks created other openings through which he could strike. An all-out military assault on the Kingdom of Cant would certainly succeed; Caine had to ensure it wouldn’t be attempted, at least not yet.
“You can’t catch the King with the army,” he said. “The Subjects of Cant are masters of the caverns under the city. There’re miles of them, y’know. At the first hint of military response they’ll go underground—literally—and it’ll take days, maybe weeks to root them out. You don’t have that much time.”
“I do not need it,” Ma’elKoth said. “I can Draw this man as I Drew you, Caine. I will put forth My power—”
“Yeah? If it’s so easy, why couldn’t you find me this past day or two?”
A vein pulsed in Ma’elKoth’s forehead. Muscle bulged at the corners of his jaw, and he made no answer.
“I’ll tell you why,” Caine said. “I was with the King of Cant.”
“Where? Where was this? Where were you?” Ma’elKoth lunged and once again those gigantic hands shot out to grab him, but this time Caine slipped aside and skipped behind the Emperor’s rush. Ma’elKoth wheeled on him, and Caine stepped back with his hands up.
“Now just fucking stop it,” Caine said. “You don’t want to put your hands on me again, Ma’elKoth. I’ve been very understanding so far, but don’t push me. You’re starting to make me angry.”
Ma’elKoth drew himself up. “You will give the answers I require or I shall teach you what anger is, Caine.”
“Guess I should have known better than to expect an apology, huh?” Caine said without humor. “It’s like this: you know how the rock around the Donjon impedes Flow? All the rock beneath the city acts the same way, and the Subjects know it—that’s why they use the caverns. The King of Cant’s house thaumaturge, Abbal Paslava, is a sharp character—a lot of this has been his idea from the first—and he’s found some caves that are so deep that Flow never touches them at all.”
“The power of My will, foiled by mere rock? I don’t believe it.”
“No? Then how come you couldn’t find me?” Caine said simply.
Ma’elKoth scowled and didn’t answer.
“It’s this simple: the only way you will root Majesty out of those caverns is by brute force, and you don’t have time. Go for him now with the army and you’re throwing away the one real advantage you have right now: He doesn’t know what you know. He doesn’t know that you know he’s Simon Jester, that he’s behind the whole thing. It’s your shot, Ma’elKoth. It’s your big chance. You have to bait him out.”
Ma’elKoth looked out over his city, and its fires burned within his eyes. “But how? How can I do this in time?”
Caine chuckled. “That’s the easy part. You have Pallas Ril, right?”
Ma’elKoth turned to him, frowning, his eyes clouded once again. “Pallas Ril? Yes . . . yes, she is here. What has she to do with this?”
“There’s no way to explain it, Ma’elKoth. You’ll just have to trust me on this. She’s in this up to her neck. She was captured while helping the Aktiri escape, remember?”
“Yes, ah, yes. This is the action of that spell . . . I feel its pull—”
“Anyway, listen, this doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you what does: Majesty is counting on that spell to frustrate your interrogation. He has no way of knowing that you’ve got a way to beat it with that silver net of yours.”
“You’re still the Emperor. When you talk, people will listen. You have all the pages of the Imperial Messenger-News to carry your word. You can summon the storm. Save the city. Then at dawn, you send every page and crier out with this call: At noon, you will answer your critics. You will show who the evil genius behind our current troubles truly is. And you’ll do it this way: At high noon, you’ll take Pallas Ril out into public somewhere—say, the new stadium, Victory Stadium on the south bank, where thousands upon thousands of your citizens can bear witness—and you’ll do that spell on her, the one that you used on the Aktiri that you captured within the palace. You’ll kill her and magickally capture her memories. You’re doing it publicly so that everyone can see. You have nothing to hide, right?”
“But, but what good will this do . . . ?”
“None at all. You won’t learn anything that you don’t already know, but Majesty doesn’t know that. See? He’ll have to act to cover himself. He can’t afford this kind of exposure. If he’s publicly associated with the Aktiri, the nobles won’t rise with him, and none of this comes off. You load the crowd with Grey Cats in civilian dress, and they take him when he moves.”
“You think he’ll try to rescue Pallas Ril?” Ma’elKoth asked skeptically.
“Shit, no,” Caine said. “She’s not even really the bait. You are.”
“Ah . . .” Ma’elKoth’s eyes went distant again. “Ah, I think I begin to understand . . .”
“He’s not interested in her at all. Oh, sure, he’ll kill her if you give him the chance. But what he’ll really go for is the chance to kill you.”
“Will he have a chance, Caine? Is this Paslava a thaumaturge of Pallas Ril’s strength?”
“Maybe, but I’ll handle him tonight. Listen, I have a better idea,” he said, as though it had only now occurred to him. Caine knew Ma’elKoth would think of this on his own soon enough; he might as well bring it up himself and score another point or two. “Why put yourself in danger at all? You’re too important to the Empire to do anything reckless. You can do those substantial illusions—Fantasies—can’t you? Like what’s her name, that elf dyke who runs the Faces?”
“Kierendal,” Ma’elKoth said musingly. “Yes . . . yes, I believe I can.”
“Then there’s no real reason for you to expose yourself at all. From right here on the Dusk Tower you could create an illusion of yourself and make it move and speak and breathe just like the real thing. You’d never be in the slightest danger. You could do the whole operation as a Fantasy. Shit, you don’t even need Pallas there: you can project an illusion of her, too. That wouldn’t be too complicated for you, would it?”
Caine watched the wheels turn within Ma’elKoth’s mind as he imagined the event from every possible angle and through every conceivable outcome. “No,” he said slowly. “No. Pallas must be in the stadium in truth; there is a limit to what even I may convincingly accomplish with an illusion. The play of light and shadow, the touch of a breeze in My hair, even My voice. Heard only with the mind, it must perfectly counterfeit what would be heard by the ears. We can afford no slip; the slightest flaw would signal Our ploy to Our enemy.”
“No, you can’t,” Caine said, his voice low and desperate. “You can’t put her there. It’s too dangerous. Please.” Please, he thought, don’t throw po’ li’l me into that briar patch . . . “I can help you, Ma’elKoth. I can make this work for you. But if there’s any danger to Pallas, we have no deal.”
Ma’elKoth stepped close to Caine to tower over him and gaze down deeply into his eyes. “So. In the end, it comes down to the woman.”
Caine didn’t answer; he didn’t trust words to come clearly through the hammering of his heart.
“I have nearly killed you twice within the hour,” Ma’elKoth murmured. “The King of Cant is, or was, one of your close friends. He has made you an honorary Baron of Cant, sheltered you, shared bread, wine, and perhaps his inmost thoughts. And you betray him to me—for a woman. For Pallas Ril.”
“You have her. I want her,” Caine said hoarsely. “When this works, you won’t need her anymore. Give her to me.”
“Why? You said that you are no longer lovers.”
“That was her choice, not mine.” Caine squared his shoulders and looked up into the Emperor’s face with level frankness. “I love her, Ma’elKoth. I always have. Alive, there’s a chance she’ll change her mind about me.”
He let the truth of his words carry him away; if Ma’elKoth read that truth in his face, it would paint over the cracks in his lies.
“Even after you have betrayed the King of Cant?”
“Yeah. Even then. He betrayed her, first.” Caine stepped back and wrapped the truth around himself like a flag. “She was never in this to be against you, Ma’elKoth. She never opposed the government. She never hurt anyone until the Cats started pouncing on her everywhere she went. All she wanted was to save the lives of some innocent people.”
“None too innocent—” Ma’elKoth began, but Caine cut him off.
“Bullshit. She’s not political, all right? Whatever reasons you had for starting this whole thing, those people aren’t Aktiri; you know it, and so does she. She’s a . . . a, well . . .” Caine coughed through a sudden thickening in his throat. “She’s a hero, Ma’elKoth. A real hero, not like me—or you either, no offense. She couldn’t stand off and let innocents be killed, and that’s the only reason she’s involved in this in the first place.”
“Mmm,” Ma’elKoth rumbled. “If she is such a hero, how did she come to be the lover of a man like you?”
Caine shook his head and looked away. “I don’t know. Maybe she thought she could save me, too . . .”
He realized that Ma’elKoth had led him off his thread, and he forced his mind back onto the business at hand. “The point is that the King of Cant saw an opportunity to strike at you through her; through your Aktir hunt, he saw a chance to bring down your whole house. She wouldn’t go for it, not at all. That was never why she was in this game in the first place. They quarreled, and she threatened to expose him. That’s why he gave her up. He couldn’t betray her through Toa-Sytell—that would reveal his complicity. So he had Lamorak do it.”
Ma’elKoth’s brows lifted. “Indeed? Lamorak has been in the pay of the King as well as the Cats? How very enterprising.”
“Didn’t you wonder why he blew the riverboat to you after you nearly had him tortured to death?” This was a risk, but only a slight one; Caine was almost positive that it was Lamorak who had brought the Cats to Knights’ Bridge.
“Yes,” Ma’elKoth said slowly, “yes, I did. Now many things begin to come clear . . .”
“You screwed Majesty’s plans for real when you took her alive. That was one outcome he hadn’t planned on. To kill her himself would have been too raw for the rest of the Kingdom. They still have some illusions of honor. He was gonna let Berne do the job for him, but Berne fucked it up. Pallas is still alive. That’s why he’s had to move. That’s why the riots, the story about you being an Aktir. He has to hit you hard before you break her, so that by the time you know who to hit back at, it’s too late. You get it, now?”
“I see . . .” Ma’elKoth mused. “And once my illusionary Emperor has apparently slain Pallas in the stadium, any of her surviving enemies will believe her dead, thus protecting her from reprisal.”
“Exactly,” Caine said. “And we can go off and live happily ever after.”
“But if the King of Cant is her enemy, why does she still protect him then? Why does she resist Me?”
“She’s a hero,” Caine said simply, his mouth dry. “She can’t do anything less. That’s why I love her. If you want my help, keep her here in the palace, out of danger.”
“I have explained to you the difficulty with this,” Ma’elKoth began, but Caine cut him off with a slash of his hand that was all too close to a killing strike.
“Don’t bitch to me about your problems,” he said. “You’re the one who wants to be a god; are you telling me you can’t do a simple fucking illusion to save your empire?”
The Emperor scowled darkly. “You doubt My power?”
“You’re the one with doubts,” Caine countered.
The Emperor’s eyes went vague, his thoughts drifting far to a noontide in a sunlit arena on the south bank.
“Perhaps it can be done,” he said at length. “Difficult; nearly impossible. No mortal could hope to accomplish such a feat—an interesting challenge. But I can take no chance with Pallas; her power has become extreme. Without My will to block her, she may find a way to pierce My wards and reach the Flow once more.”
Caine shrugged. “Put her in the Donjon.”
Ma’elKoth frowned musingly. “I suppose—”
“It’s the safest place,” Caine said easily. “And the rock will keep her from pulling Flow.”
“Yes . . .” Ma’elKoth said slowly. “She can be kept in the Donjon safely enough, I believe.”
You just keep on believing that. He’d given in too easily on this; he had other plans for her. That’s all right, Caine thought. So do I.
Ma’elKoth’s eyes focused on Caine once again. “It shall be done. Even if the Fantasy fails, little will be lost. No matter the outcome, I will still have the huge public forum in which to accuse the King of Cant; the risk is small. Caine, I have underestimated you. You are thoroughly brilliant.”
The consideration in the Emperor’s features hardened into resolve. “We shall do this thing. It will be a simple matter to contrive to ‘lose’ the apparent corpse of Pallas Ril before it is burned, or to find another corpse of strong resemblance to consign to the flame. Caine, you have My gratitude. Once this affair is complete, you shall have more: you shall have a title, and lands, and vassals to do your bidding. And you shall have the life of Pallas Ril.”
Holy shit, Caine thought in wonder. I did it. This might work.
CAINE STOOD CLOSE to the altar where Pallas was bound while Ma’elKoth spoke to Toa-Sytell and Berne. He wished impotently that there were something he could do for her, right here and now, some way that he could, at least, cover her naked body. This was more for his own comfort than for hers: she was far away still, in that distant mystic place of her own, utterly dissociated from what went on around her.
He watched the eyes of Toa-Sytell and Berne as Ma’elKoth paced around the Iron Room, issuing his orders. Berne’s kept flicking wetly to Pallas’ naked, bruised body tied to the altar. Once when he caught Caine looking at him, he slowly and with obscene deliberation ran his tongue around the rim of his lips.
A sole regret burned within Caine’s stomach: his plan included no opportunity to personally murder that sick motherfucker.
Toa-Sytell’s eyes, however, remained fixed on Ma’elKoth’s impossibly beautiful face. Behind the Duke’s habitual mask of polite blankness lurked concern that bordered on fear. When Ma’elKoth revealed that the true enemy was the King of Cant, blush flooded the Duke’s face. “I don’t believe it,” he muttered. “I don’t believe it for one second.”
The Emperor rounded upon him. “Belief is not required of you, Toa-Sytell. Obedience, however, is.”
“But, but . . . you don’t understand!” Toa-Sytell stammered. “What word do you act upon but Caine’s? Have you forgotten the destruction that follows him everywhere? Have you forgotten the Donjon? Have you forgotten the Succession War?”
Ma’elKoth stepped to him, towering over him, his face darkening as though a cloud had passed before the sun.
“I have not. Take care that you do not forget: I am Ma’elKoth. The Empire is Mine to risk, should I choose. As is this city; as is your life, Toa-Sytell.”
The Duke didn’t flinch, but he could not abide the Emperor’s gaze. As soon as he dropped his eyes, though, Ma’elKoth relented, laying an avuncular hand on Toa-Sytell’s shoulder. “I understand your concern, My Duke, but you should also recall that the destruction attendant upon Caine’s presence has always redounded to My benefit. It was the Succession War that brought Me to power; the slaughter in the Donjon has brought Me to the brink of victory over My most troublesome adversary. I do not ask you to place trust in Caine’s word, but rather in My judgment.”
Berne stepped forward, a half sneer on his face as he chewed the inside of his lip. “And where’ll Caine be during all this? Ask me, I’d lock him up here where you can keep an eye on him.”
“I did not ask you, Berne.” Ma’elKoth bent down and lifted the net from where it lay piled on the iron plates of the floor. He wrapped it about itself with a flick of his powerful wrist—the griffinstones knotted into its hem gave it plenty of heft—and he tossed it as a bundle to Caine. “Caine has a part in this, as well.”
Caine caught the net in one hand and tied it into a bundle as he spoke. “The one sticky point in the plan is Abbal Paslava. They call him the Spellbinder—he’s sort of the house wizard for the Kingdom—”
“We all know who he is,” Toa-Sytell cut in dryly.
“Well, he’s a problem. He’s a specialist in illusions and shit like that. He might be able to detect Ma’elKoth’s Fantasy somehow, or even dispel it. That would blow the game for real.”
“And what do you intend to do about him?”
Caine hefted the netting. “Kill him. It’ll be easy enough. I’m trusted there, remember? I get him off alone, throw this net over his head so he can’t defend himself, and one breath later our problem is solved. I know more than a few ways I can kill him that won’t leave a mark. Paslava’s not a young man; if I tell Majesty that he suddenly collapsed and died in my arms, everyone will believe me.”
Berne directed his appeal to Ma’elKoth. “How do we know that he’ll do what he says? Why take the chance of letting him go? Ma’elKoth, I’m telling you—”
“Fear not,” Ma’elKoth rumbled. “I have taken Caine’s measure and not found him wanting: he will be true. Toa-Sytell, you will give the necessary orders for all other arrangements; you have complete authority in this matter. Berne, you will have the Cats ready and present. Once the King of Cant is in My hands, we will raise the matter of Pallas Ril.”
Play it out, Caine thought. “Ma’elKoth, you promised—”
“I did not. My word was given conditionally: once this affair is complete. Nothing is complete until I have determined to My satisfaction that Pallas Ril is no longer a threat to the Empire. When dusk falls tomorrow, if the city is calm again, I shall continue My examination. If I can make certain that your tale is true, she will be released.”
“Released?” Berne looked stunned. “You can’t!”
“I can. I will. Caine, you have much to do. Go with Toa-Sytell and arrange to escape from the iron carriage as you are transported to the Donjon. You are to be convincing, but—” thunder gathered upon the Emperor’s brow “—kill no one. Reserve your slaughter for Our enemies, and you shall be rewarded. Take the lives of My loyal soldiers, and you shall be punished. Am I understood?”
Caine shrugged irritably, showing plain displeasure. “Yeah, whatever.”
“Go then, all of you. I also have much to do; I must summon back the storm from Kaarn to save the city. It will be work of some hours, and then I must prepare the Fantasy for the morrow. Go.”
The three men exchanged a glance: Caine’s was grim, Toa-Sytell’s bland, and Berne’s openly venomous. Caine took a deep breath and reluctantly headed for the door. It required a physical effort for him to step away from Shanna’s side. He set his teeth and didn’t look back.
Toa-Sytell beat him to the door and pulled it open for him. As they both stepped into the entry room, Ma’elKoth rumbled behind them, “Berne, bide a moment.”
Caine turned back instantly. The image of Berne left behind in the Iron Room with Shanna while Ma’elKoth wandered off to do his weather magick was so sickeningly potent that he couldn’t help himself. Ma’elKoth made an absent flicking gesture from across the room, and the door clanged shut in his face.
He stood for a moment, staring at the silver runes that spidered across the Ouroboros knocker, trying to breathe, trying to recover his mental balance.
Toa-Sytell’s voice had an unfamiliar intensity. When Caine looked back over his shoulder at the Duke, Toa-Sytell’s normally bland face had gone white with suppressed fury.
“You’ve made me play the fool once before, Caine,” Toa-Sytell hissed, “and a hundred thousand people died in the Succession War—including my sons. I know you, Caine, and I will not be made the fool twice. I do not know how it is that you’ve gulled Ma’elKoth, but I tell you this: I am not deceived. I am watching you, Caine, and at the first hint of treachery I will see you dead.”
Caine met his fury with bared teeth. “You’re just pissy ’cause I do your job better than you do. Majesty conned you exactly the same way Lamorak conned Berne.”
“Y’know, if I were you, I’d be paying less attention to me, and a little more to covering your ass, Toa-Sytell,” Caine said, conspicuously backing off from the confrontation, becoming almost friendly. “I’m going to give you some advice, Duke. Not because I like you, you understand, but because I think that fundamentally, you’re a decent man. You should be remembering who your friends are. You should be thinking about what you’ll do if Ma’elKoth falls.”
“He will not fall, not while I live,” Toa-Sytell said.
“Don’t make that promise. If Ma’elKoth goes and you go with him, who would that leave in charge? At least until somebody kills him and takes over?”
Toa-Sytell frowned; then his eyes widened and he started to go a little pale. A moment later he shook his head and murmured, “But . . . but no one would follow him; he’s only a Count—he has no authority, no real power . . .”
Caine offered an openly cynical smile. “Hey, there are people in the world who just need someone to tell them what to do, and they’re not particular who it is.”
Toa-Sytell looked grim, but then he shook that distressing image out of his head. “But Ma’elKoth will not fall. He cannot fall.”
“Don’t bet your life on it. He’s been acting a little strange lately, don’t you think? These sudden rages, this obsession with me, with where I’ve been, what I’m doing. I’m starting to think he might be cracking up.”
Toa-Sytell narrowed his eyes, and his gaze became distant; Caine could see that he’d been thinking along these lines already.
“Sure,” Caine went on, “we’ll handle this particular threat tomorrow. But I think you can already see that Ma’elKoth isn’t untouchable. If we can see it, so can his enemies.”
“I’m sorry about your sons, Toa-Sytell. I know it doesn’t mean much at this late date, but I swear to you that nobody knew how bad the Succession War was going to be. The Monastic Council would never have sent me in here if they’d thought it would get like that. I don’t want to see another one any more than you do, all right? Think about it. Someone has to be in place to keep order if Ma’elKoth goes down. I can’t think of anyone who’d do a better job than you would.”
Muscles bunched at the corners of Toa-Sytell’s jaw and relaxed again, and slowly his vision regained its focus. “Come. We must arrange your escape.”
“I CAN’T BELIEVE you’re trusting him,” Berne said, pacing furiously, stabbing at the air with his stiffened hand. “And I can’t believe that you’re going to let her go! After what she did to me? Do you know how many of my boys she’s killed?”
“Hush, dear boy,” Ma’elKoth rumbled. “Recover your center. I do not trust Caine. Nor will Pallas Ril be released. Her feat at the docks—” A fleeting shadow crossed his perfect features. “—I Myself might not be able to surpass. She has become a Power; vastly too dangerous to be allowed to live.” too dangerous to be allowed
His massive shoulders lifted and fell again. “She, after all, suffers a sucking wound to her chest. Life will slip away from her soon enough, I think; she shall live only until We have no further need of Caine.” He smiled into his beard. “It may be instructive to perform that pretended spell on her in truth, instead . . .”
“Need him for what? Why did you let him go?” Berne’s voice took on a rising, petulant edge. “Why won’t you let me kill him?”
“I may do that, even yet.” Ma’elKoth laid a hand on Berne’s shoulder. “The tale he brought to Me is a convincing one; it fits every fact, and he had an answer for every question. This alone would make Me suspicious: only fictions tally so neatly. Life is less orderly.”
He turned majestically, a ship of the line tacking against the wind, and drifted over to the altar. He looked down on the still, blank face of Pallas Ril, and his hand extended to absently stroke her eyelids closed.
“And I have reason to doubt the word of Caine already,” he went on. “His plan, however, suits My purposes so well that I wonder at it: a tremendous gain for no risk at all. It may be that he is true. I accept the possibility, but I do not rely upon it.” He looked up, and the sleepy cast of his musing cleared from his face; he fixed Berne with a stare of sudden intensity.
“Give me your knife.” Ma’elKoth held out his hand; Berne pulled his dagger from its sheath and handed it to Ma’elKoth without hesitation. The dagger was dwarfed by Ma’elKoth’s hand as he raised it to the level of his eyes; it looked like a pocketknife. “The net that I gave to Caine—as I lifted it from the floor I put my mark upon it.”
His eyes glowed green. He smothered the dagger in his fist, staring at it with transcendent concentration. The dagger shone with the emerald reflection of Ma’elKoth’s eyes. When the light faded from his face, the dagger still glimmered faintly. He handed it back to Berne, who cradled it gingerly, savoring the remnants of Ma’elKoth’s touch in the warmth of its hilt.
“Point this dagger toward Caine, and it shall grow warm within your hand and shine green to the eye. Follow him, and learn his purpose. Take a team of Cats with you. If you should see a chance to capture or kill the King of Cant or any of his followers, take it. Do not follow too closely. I cannot spare a Cloak, as all My energies must bend toward calling the thunderstorm.”
“I’ll do it, Ma’elKoth,” Berne said, clutching the dagger as though it were the symbol of his oath. “You know you can count on me.”
“I do know that, Berne. I rely upon it.” Ma’elKoth turned away, and Berne’s gaze slid onto the naked body of Pallas Ril. The vacant look in her eyes, the bruises that covered her slim form, the bloodstained bandage that bound her breasts, even the chains that tied her hand and foot to the altar—Berne had never seen anything so erotic in his life. He wanted her so badly that it squeezed the breath from his lungs.
“When you’re done with Pallas, can I have her? I mean,” he said hastily, “I caught her, after all. It’s only fair.”
“Mmm, yes. Yes, it is: only fair.”
Kollberg came bolt upright like a hound scenting game. “How long was he off?”
“One hour, seven minutes, Administrator.”
“Perfect, perfect.” He leaned forward with a glance at the soapies; they’d finally sat, a couple of hours ago, in the chairs he’d provided. Neither one was moving. For all he could tell, they might be fast asleep.
The POV screen at the end of the techbooth was lit with the view inside the iron carriage. No Soliloquy, yet. Caine spoke offhandedly with a man Kollberg recognized as that Toa-Sytell guy, the Duke. There were two other men inside the carriage; they wore the uniforms of Household Knights. Caine kept glancing out the barred window at the fires on the streets and the people that ran back and forth—some armed, many bleeding, some carrying boxes and barrels and jugs, some savagely attacking the thieves to steal their loot for themselves.
“This is good,” Kollberg whispered. “They’re taking him right through the middle of the riot. I’m loving this . . . Damn, Caine, I knew I could count on you. I knew it.”
Kollberg giggled out loud at the blank shock and horror on the faces of the Household Knights when Caine’s manacles dropped off. He produced a tiny blade from somewhere, a small hooked knife that he held to the throat of the Duke.
“Kill him,” Toa-Sytell snarled. “Never mind me. Don’t let him get away! That’s an order!”
“Yeah, go ahead,” Caine told them. “Then who’ll be left alive to tell Ma’elKoth it was an order? You think he’ll believe you? Open the damned door and step aside.”
The Household Knights were in no mood to take chances with their lives. They opened the door, and Caine dragged Toa-Sytell backward into the riot. The Knights who rode guard on the carriage shouted in surprise as the two tumbled to the street, but they were no more adventurous than the ones inside. Caine and his hostage were able to back into a nearby alley.
“Is this far enough?” Toa-Sytell asked softly.
“Yeah. I practically grew up here. They’ll never catch me.”
“All right.” Toa-Sytell suddenly started to struggle and shout. He wormed his way loose from Caine’s grip, yelling for the Knights. Caine kicked him to the ground. He stood over him with the knife raised, long enough for the Knights to see him there as they charged toward him from the carriage, then turned and fled into the red-shadowed darkness of the alley.
Kollberg chuckled to himself as Caine dodged through the riot. All his jitters, all his bitter determination to destroy Caine, all the back-of-the-neck pressure of the soapies in the booth, all was forgotten. This was shaping into a spectacular Adventure.
No corner of Old Town was calm that night; from everywhere came shouts, sounds of fighting, and the splintering crash of breaking glass and pottery. Trust Caine to find a way to stir things up—that was, on reflection, perhaps his greatest talent. He skipped around a storefront where an embattled platoon of regular infantry struggled to hold off a mob of several hundred rock-throwing citizens; even as he passed, someone set fire to the building where the platoon had made their fort.
Caine slipped inside a nearby pissoir and startled a miserably squatting townsman when he splintered the mucker-shaft door away from its locking hasp with a strong side kick. He slid down the mucker-shaft ladder and found the concealed door at the shaft’s base that let him into the caverns below the city. A moment of digging in a pocket produced Kierendal’s lighter; its wavering flame provided enough illumination for him to keep a steady pace.
He filled in backstory as he walked silently through the caverns, rolling out imagery with his usual skill. There was an odd note to it, though, and Kollberg sat up straighter and cocked his head like a spaniel, trying to listen more closely, trying to determine what the unfamiliar element was. Something just slightly strained, a tiny bit stilted . . . Ahh, that was it.
Kollberg smiled satisfaction to himself. Caine was overcontrolling his Soliloquy. That’s what had caused the change. He must be making a conscious effort to leave out anything that might be controversial, so of course it didn’t flow with his usual free-associating style.
Kollberg smiled in spite of the lessened quality of the entertainment: he smiled because he had Caine running scared. On the other hand, he thought, he might be leaving out something else, as well. . . Where had that thought come from? Did he really think Caine was concealing something? What could he possibly be hiding? Kollberg smiled at himself again: this was purely the natural paranoia of the perfectionist.
Here and there in the caverns, the flicker of firelight reflected on rock came distantly to Caine’s eyes. He circled wide of several such places where the murmur of distant voices blended with the blurred plash of water, seeping through the limestone and dripping into pools below. He crept past a couple more where going wide would have taken him into unfamiliar places. In the knotted three-dimensional maze of caverns below the city, a wrong turn could possibly have required hours or days to correct. Finally he came upon one toward which he walked boldly. Three men who looked like beggars and one in the painted mail of a Knight of Cant lounged around a small fire built on the naked rock.
They didn’t seem overly concerned at Caine’s approach. He identified himself and exchanged brief recognition signals with them, and they nodded him along on his way. As he passed he said softly, “Could be unfriendlies on my tail. Be wary. You might even want to clear out.”
The Knight rose to his feet with confident ease, one hand on the hilt of his shortsword. “Want them stopped?”
“No. I don’t want anybody hurt. Just be alert, is all.”
He left them there and found a mucker shaft nearby; he climbed out of the caverns through a pissoir and into the firelit night of the Industrial Park.
He kept as close to the shifting blue-black shadows as he could and still move at speed. The streets could be deserted at one moment, then an instant later flood with shouting, struggling, looting mobs. At the mouth of an alley he tried to duck into, he was accosted by a pair of men brandishing broadswords. “Declare yourself!”
A sword point came perilously near his throat. “Are you for the Emperor or the damned Aktiri?”
“Loyalists, huh? You boys are in for a bad night, I think.”
While the loyalist tried to decide which side that meant Caine was on, Caine leaned around his point, grabbed his wrist, and twisted the blade out of his hand. His weight already shifted, he was able to stop the shout of the other with a whipping heel to the jaw. He let the momentum of the kick carry him around in a tight circle that ended by braining the first loyalist with the flat of his own blade. The blade quivered in his hand and sprang back straight, not bent: a decent grade of steel. “Huh,” he said. “Not bad.”
He held on to the blade as he dodged into the dark-shadowed alley away from the downed loyalists, even as they gathered breath to plead for their lives.
He loped through the streets, avoiding trouble and skirting crowds of any size or description, and finally arrived at a darkened apartment block that looked vaguely familiar to Kollberg. A quick glance at the on-screen telemetry assured him that this was Caine’s destination: his adrenal production had soared, and his heart rate was ramping up toward redline. A door hung slack from a single hinge. Caine went in and up two flights of darkened stairs.
At their top he called out a soft repetition of the recognition signal he’d given to the Subjects in the caverns and got a low-voiced response from the shadows beyond. He stepped out into the hall to find two Knights.
“Majesty sent me. He wants you both back at the stadium right now.”
The Knights exchanged a dubious glance. “I, uh, I dunno,” one of them said. “We’re supposed to stay here unless Majesty tells us personal, y’know?”
“He’s a little busy right now. Maybe you’ve noticed?”
“Sorry, Baron,” the other said. “He was pretty clear on this.”
Caine sighed and spread his hands in a gesture of surrender. “All right. It’s like this. I need to have a talk with our boy Lamorak in there. This’ll be the kind of talk that you don’t want to be witnesses to, you follow? Head back for the stadium and just pretend you believed me about the phony message. Majesty’ll understand.”
“I’m telling you, Majesty will understand. He wouldn’t expect you to, like, give your lives here,” he said with a significant twitch of the naked blade he held. He paused a moment to make sure they understood him perfectly. “You follow?”
They exchanged another long look and decided that absenting themselves would be the better part of discretion, but Kollberg was no longer paying attention.
Lamorak, he thought, oddly calm and obscurely pleased by his unexpected serenity. This is the safe house in the Industrial Park.
He made a fist and held it upraised, trembling above the emergency transfer switch; the chubby underside of his fist reflected an ominous red in the switch’s glow.
One slip, Caine. Just one—and it doesn’t even have to be from you. Let Lamorak so much as hint at a confession, and my fist shall fall like the Hammer of God.
His liver-colored lips quirked at the image, and he squirmed briefly in the stage manager’s chair, settling his weight in to get comfortable—but he couldn’t, not quite. He itched, here and there; he felt like ants crawled on his skin; and he couldn’t seem to relax his shoulders or slow the sudden racing of his heart.
Just a little while longer, he told himself. It won’t be long now.
WHEN I OPEN the door, he’s at the window, staring out, the light from fires in Alientown dancing red across his battered profile. As he starts to turn toward me I spring across the floor and lunge like a fencer; my fleche stops with the broadsword’s point a finger breadth from his throat. He freezes in the act of rising from his chair. I guess that splinted leg of his can now bear some weight.
“Don’t say a word,” I tell him softly. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
Slowly he takes his weight upon his arms and lowers himself back into the chair. Some thoughtful Subject has immobilized his broken jaw with a large bandage knotted on top of his head; he looks like a cartoon baby with a toothache. “Y’not?”
I sigh deep and long, then reverse the sword and offer him the hilt. “No. Try that Dominate, though, and I’ll break another bone in your face, you got it?”
He reaches tentatively for the sword, like a child for candy that it fears will be snatched away. Once his hand closes on the hilt, most of the tension drains out of his shoulders and neck. The relief that smooths his face is so strong I can almost feel it myself.
“I know all about it.” I turn away to light a lamp and set it so its glow will be visible outside. “We’re gonna have words, you and me, back home, but that’s not important now. I know what you’ve done, and I know why.”
His eyes bulge, and the sword point twitches up toward my face as his other hand takes the hilt as well. “I, I, but I—”
“You don’t have to say a word. I’m telling you, I know, and I understand.”
His lower lip quivers. “I never meant for anyone to get hurt—”
“I know. Lamorak, believe me, I know what it’s like—the kind of pressure they can put on you. I’ve been there, all right? I’ve done the same, and I didn’t like it any more than you do.”
Now his eyes start to moisten, and the revulsion in my chest nearly chokes me with the effort to keep it off my face and out of my voice. “Her career . . .” he whines. “Her Adventure—”
I cut in strongly. “The only thing that matters now is prying her loose from Ma’elKoth, all right? Help me now. Help me save her, and nothing else matters. I’ll even make sure that Majesty doesn’t kill you for what you did to him.”
“Caine . . . Caine, that was—”
“I’m telling you, Lamorak, I understand.” What a fucking whiner. “I scared you back in the warehouse the other night. You thought I was going to kill you.”
I give him a shrug and a moderately sheepish half smile. “And I was. Without the recall, you’d be dead, but hey, that was temper, y’know? Once I had time to calm down and think it over, I understood. Listen, we don’t have any more time to waste on this. I need your help.”
“For what? I mean, anything, anything I can do, to make this right, Caine.”
I show him the net, and his eyes fasten on the griffinstones in its hem with naked lust. “I’m running a deep game on Ma’elKoth, and I think the Cats might be tailing me magickally. I need to know, one way or the other; if so, I need to know if the tag’s on me, on my clothes, this knife, this net . . . You get the picture. I can’t have them following me everywhere; it’ll blunt the hook.”
“Tailing you?” he says, alarmed; his gaze skates nervously back toward the street outside.
“Relax. They’re not close. They don’t have to be, if there’s a tag on me.”
“How would they tag you? Where did you get this net?”
“Ma’elKoth.” I chuckle dryly. “Ironic, huh? This morning you tried to get me killed by making Majesty believe that I was working for Ma’elKoth—and I was. I am. Or, at least, Ma’elKoth thinks so.”
“Damn, Caine . . .” Lamorak says in a tone of awe. “Damn . . .”
“The point is, I have Ma’elKoth convinced that Majesty is Simon Jester, and that he can draw Majesty and the whole Kingdom out of the Warrens by performing a sort of public ritual on Pallas, where he’ll magickally wrench the true identity of Simon Jester out of her in front of twenty thousand people at Victory Stadium.”
“He wouldn’t. But I’ve got Ma’elKoth thinking that Majesty and the Kingdom will be on hand to take a shot at killing him, so Ma’elKoth and Berne are going to load the crowd with Cats and King’s Eyes and soldiers in mufti, to lay in wait for him—but Majesty and the Kingdom won’t be anywhere near the place.”
I show my teeth. “The point is, Ma’elKoth won’t be there, either. He’s going to run the ritual by remote control, using a Fantasy, to keep himself out of danger. Now, the reason for all these riots today is that Majesty and I, between us, have half the city thinking Ma’elKoth’s an Aktir. Put twenty thousand people in that stadium, and let them watch while I drape that piece of silver netting over Ma’elKoth’s illusionary double.”
It takes him a second or two, but then his eyes widen and his mouth hangs slack. “My god. . .” he murmurs. “My bleeding god . . . The net cuts off the image from the Flow, so it fades and vanishes exactly like an Aktir is supposed to. . .”
“Yeah,” I say warmly. “Nice, huh?”
“All the Cats, officers of the army, thousands of citizens—”
“All the King’s horses and all the King’s men. Yeah. Ma’elKoth’s government goes down in flames. It’ll be a matter of hours until he’s besieged in the Colhari Palace.”
“Caine . . . it’s brilliant. It could actually work.”
“It’s going to work. I have a couple more arrangements to make, and everything will be in place.”
“She’s as safe as possible, right now. Once the fighting starts, I can get her out.”
“Out of the Victory Stadium? How do you figure?”
“She won’t be in the stadium; she’ll be in the Donjon.”
“Yeah. It’s the only place Ma’elKoth can keep her, where she can’t pull enough Flow to blow his lights out.”
“But . . . you think you can bring her out?”
I give him a solid nod. “I know the way in,” I remind him, raising my right hand. “In all the confusion, it shouldn’t be too difficult. And to get out, all I need is to get within arm’s reach.”
He gives me a sharply speculative look that the bruises from his broken nose and jaw make kinda comical; I beckon to him. “Now, come on. She’s running out of time. So get started. Check me over and find the tag.”
I keep a close eye on him as he breathes into mindview. If he tries, even now, to turn that Dominate on me, he’s a dead man; I’ll find a different way to make this work.
A minute or two of under-breath murmuring as he examines me, then he nods and looks up, his eyes clear of mindview. “You were right. It’s this net. They can track it somehow. I don’t know the spell, but there’s definitely some sort of patterned power here, not just the leak-over from the griffinstones.”
Huh. Ma’elKoth must have tagged it in the instant that he picked it up, before he tossed it to me. He’s pretty smooth, that one.
Come noon tomorrow, I’ll show him what really smooth looks like.
I step over to the window and peer out. I can’t see anyone outside watching the place, but if they’re there they can see me. “Thanks, Lamorak. I gotta go now, but I won’t forget this. I’ll square things with Majesty, all right? He won’t lay a finger on you.”
“Caine, I . . .” He sounds all choked up. “Thanks, uh, thanks for not killing me, y’know?”
“Don’t mention it. We get back home alive, maybe I’ll get you in a ring somewhere and take it out on you then.”
“It’s a date.” He holds out his hand, and I force myself to shake it without breaking his wrist.
“See you later.” I bundle up the net again and go.
THE DOOR EXPLODED in a shower of splinters. Lamorak leaped from his chair with a shout through his tied-shut teeth, and his blade snapped up to guard; without hesitation he lunged from his splinted leg, and the first Cat through the door took a foot of steel through his thigh.
Lamorak was a fine swordsman, able to compensate for his immobilized leg and recover his balance before the following Cat could swing past his falling comrade. But even as Lamorak whirled his broadsword back up to guard, another Cat crashed through the window at his back and kicked him in the spine with stunning force. He spun hard to the floor but held on to his blade, rolling onto his back and hacking at the legs of every Cat in range. He said nothing: there was nothing to say. With grim, silent desperation, he fought for his life.
The blade’s edge hit a leg that it didn’t cut, that made the blade spring back and ring like a bell, made it sting Lamorak’s hand. Not a leg in grey leather; a leg in heavy serge that once was red, but was now faded to the blotchy shade of an old bloodstain. Lamorak lost his breath, and for an instant his grip slacked; before he could move the blade again, a boot heel came down hard on his wrist, and the matching boot kicked his sword away.
He looked up without hope, even the grim determination to survive bleaching from his face.
“Berne . . .” he murmured. “Berne, don’t . . .”
“Don’t speak,” Berne said, his amusement colored with deeply satisfied malice. “I heard about your little trick with Master Arkadeil.”
He reached back over his shoulder and pulled free Kosall. Its whine sighed a freezing breath up the back of Lamorak’s neck as Berne took its hilt and whirled it singing through the air. “You know, I never really properly thanked you for the gift of Kosall. Sure did a job on that fighting girl of yours: spilled her guts all over Knights’ Bridge. I hope you weren’t too attached to her.”
He dangled the blade point downward over Lamorak’s crotch. “You think if I drop it, its magick will fade before it cuts off your dick?”
“Shut up. I don’t have time for your treacherous little cock right now. I have to keep up with Caine.”
“Berne,” he began again, but the Count wasn’t listening; easily, casually, he reached over and tapped Lamorak’s mouth shut with the flat of Kosall’s humming point, and held it so. The blade’s song made his teeth buzz and fuzzed his hearing like a storm wind.
“Carry this sack of shit back to my place—no, don’t. If he can fight, he can fucking well walk. March him back and lock him in the den. I’ll make time for him later.” He looked down at Lamorak, and his smile pulsed wide into a grin, growing like a stiffening penis. “Mmm, yeah. I will make time. And, if he tries to talk to you? Kill him.”
He pursed his lips and made a smooching noise. “It’s all the same to me, so long as I make it back before you’re cold.”
He spun Kosall back into its scabbard and stalked off before Lamorak could summon the words to stop him, stepping over the Cat who sat pale on the floor, clutching his spurting thigh. “Pero, tie off Finn’s leg before he bleeds to death, huh?” he said, and was gone.
The other Cats he’d cut had only scratches, the wire that reinforced their leggings having mostly withstood his weakened blows. Without bothering to bandage them, the Cats prodded him to his feet at sword point and marched him, limping and in great pain, out the door. He drew breath to speak, not to Dominate, just to beg them to carry a message to Berne, that things were not as they seemed—
“Don’t,” said the Cat behind him and enforced this order with a jab of a sword point hard enough to slice skin over Lamorak’s kidney. “Talk, and you don’t live to cross the river, get it?”
Lamorak started to answer, caught himself, and nodded miserably. The Cat jabbed him again, and he lurched forward toward the stairs.
THE KING OF Cant, attired in a fashionable slashed-velvet singlet and satin pantaloons of matching silvery grey, strolled through the crowd around the knucklebones pit that dimpled the floor within Alien Games, one hand on the decorative scrolled hilt of the short blade at his belt. He shifted and bumped around shoulders, admiring the magnificent dark walnut of the dice table, its blond burled maple inlay that caught the light like brushed gold under what must have been several coats of buffed lacquer. “Nice,” he muttered under his breath. “Wonder how she got it here so fast. I heard Caine busted the shit out of her old one.”
“This is the old one,” came the whispered reply from inches behind his ear. No one in the push of the crowd around the bones pit could have heard it; and no one in any of the pits, at any of the bars, on the stage, or seated for dining could have seen the man who spoke.
“It is magicked, even as I am,” whispered Abbal Paslava, who walked at his king’s shoulder, fully Cloaked and using a pair of crystal-lensed Truesight spectacles to pierce the illusion of opulence. “Everything here is magicked; this is why I need fear no detection of my Cloak’s pull. This room, this entire building pulls Flow constantly. Nothing in this room is truly as it appears.”
“Huh,” Majesty grunted, a grim smile baring his teeth. “Including the customers.”
No windows allowed moonlight onto the gaming floor, where a view of the sky might have reminded the gamblers of the hours that passed in the outside world, but the ruddy glow of burning buildings angled through the street door. Alien Games was crowded, astonishingly so considering the rioting that still flared here and there across the city. Well-dressed South Bankers mingled with trickles of workmen coming off shift in the Industrial Park; for some, the pleasures of drink and dice come before all else, even safety.
Far from diminishing these pleasures, the riots added something, a certain zest in the cast of dice or the slap of a card. Everyone seemed to laugh a bit louder, talk a bit more. Here and there across the floor, knots of spontaneous dancing would suddenly break out and just as suddenly fade. The riots outside gave the evening’s gaming a festive, insular atmosphere, a carnival spice, as though nothing done here tonight could have any relation to everyday life: a sense that here was a small island of brightly indecent pleasures in the midst of a huge and bloody ocean of night.
There were a few faces, here and there, that the King of Cant did not recognize. He mentally estimated their number, coming up with a total of only fifty or so. Of these probably fifteen were covert guards in Kierendal’s employ—human Faces.
He ambled off the gaming floor to one of the bars, passing an appreciative hand over the glossy, hard wax finish. “Y’know, it’s a shame that I didn’t come here before,” he murmured. “This woulda been a nice place to relax, once in a while.”
“Pity,” came the whispered reply.
“Yeah. Don’t know what you got till it’s gone, huh? And, y’know? I’m kinda looking forward to meeting Kierendal. Should have paid a call under social circumstances.”
He beckoned to the bartender, a short and slender elf, ageless as they all were, who mixed drinks and measured narcotics with a speed that made him seem to have an extra arm or two. The elf narrowed his eyes at him, a fleeting frown passing across his feathery, translucent brows; then he stepped lively toward Majesty, his face now a mask of neutral cheerfulness.
“Does he see you?” Majesty muttered.
“No,” Paslava whispered, “but he may see an odd eddy in the Flow around you. He will know there is magick at work here.”
“Hey, so what?” Majesty said. “That’s not a secret.”
The bartender leaned on the back rail in a friendly fashion and gave him a professional smile. “First time in AG, sir?”
Majesty nodded. “You have a good eye.”
The bartender took this as a given. “It’s what I do, sir. You look like an alcohol man, am I right, sir? I have a very fine Tinnaran brandy, if you’re interested?”
“Mmm,” Majesty said, pretending indecision, “not exactly what I had in mind . . .”
The bartender nodded back over his shoulder at the rows of bottles and phials and baskets of herbs stacked up behind him. “If you want to try something and you don’t know its name, feel free to just point. If you’d like something you don’t see here, please ask and I’ll bet I can get it for you.”
The bartender’s grin became more honestly friendly. “Why not? This is a gaming establishment, sir. Shall we say, for a royal?”
Majesty gave him an ugly grin. “Sure, all right. I’d like a skinny fucking elf bitch dyke, about this tall. Goes by the name of Kierendal.”
That trace of a frown flitted across the bartender’s brow once again, as his smile congealed into a flat chilly stare. “Be assured that she is already on her way, sir,” he said coldly. “And you may find it wise to reconsider your tone.”
“Or the fellow behind you might open your skull—to adjust your attitude from the inside, sir.”
Majesty turned to find himself nose-to-sternum with a chest roughly the size of a river barge, and he slowly lifted his head until he stared up into the protuberant fist-sized yellow eyes of a troll, a nocturnal cousin of the ogres that worked here in daylight hours. Those huge lambent eyes spread a rich golden cast onto the brass-capped tusks that thrust up through slitted gaps in its upper lip. The troll wore chainmail painted in the scarlet and brass motif of the Alien Games uniform and carried a morningstar the size of Majesty’s head. It snorted down at him, its breath the exhalation of a late-summer slaughterhouse.
“Yeah,” it rumbled thickly. “Adjust y’attitude.”
“You’re ugly, and you stink,” Majesty said precisely, “and I think you should be falling down, now.”
“Huh,” the troll huffed, blowing a blinding gust of stench into Majesty’s face. “I don’t think—”
Its voice cut off an instant after Majesty heard the faintest of whispers, the rustle of the cloth on Paslava’s sleeve as the Cloaked thaumaturge reached past his ear and touched the troll with a spell that caused all of its skeletal muscles to lock into maximum contraction. Majesty fancied he could hear the creaking of the beast’s oversized joints as they took the stress; the troll swayed like an unmoored statue. Majesty placed a palm flat on the creature’s chest.
“I repeat,” he said, with a gentle shove that sent the troll toppling like a felled oak. It hit the floor with a thunderous crash that drew every eye in the room.
Majesty grinned into the sudden silence, waiting only a second or two for the last faint pitter of dice and clatter of numbered wheels to fade away. “I’m here to see Kierendal. Anyone else want to get stupid with me?”
Paslava whispered behind his shoulder: “She’s coming.”
“I can’t see her. I can feel her. She’s here.”
Three more liveried trolls converged on their fallen comrade with the ponderous threat of warships at full sail. They stopped a pace short of the one on the floor, their massive backs forming a wall against the crowd that pressed curiously around, and each held in his two clawed hands a morningstar with a haft as long as Majesty was tall. They glared at Majesty, growling low thunder-rumbles, but made no further move.
As though an invisible door opened edge-on in the air, a slender female elf stepped from nowhere into view. She bent down and stroked the face of the fallen troll, and the creature relaxed into unconsciousness with a sigh like a fresh-bunged keg of beer. She straightened and stepped around her fallen bouncer, coming near enough to Majesty that he could smell the curious spice of whatever unnameable dish she’d been eating.
She was taller than Majesty, and she hadn’t troubled to put on her human face. Her halo of platinum hair framed features that were purely alien: huge golden eyes slitted vertically, high chiseled cheekbones that swept back to ears as pointed as the carnivore teeth that gleamed through her pack-hunter’s fighting grin. “Why have you come here? Why do you assault my staff? Why shouldn’t I kill you for this?”
“I know who you are, cock. Answer my question.”
Majesty was tempted, just for a moment, to match her aggressive tone, but instead he only shrugged and offered her a friendly smile. He’d have a chance to play interpersonal power games on their next meeting; for now, he had to tend to business.
“Your problem, Kierendal,” he said slowly, “is that you’re not Warrens. You run a Warrengang, sure, but you’re not from there; you don’t know how things are done. If you have a problem with one of my people, you come to me, we work something out. That’s how things are done. You don’t give them up to the Imperials. That’s how wars start, y’know? People get hurt. Places get burned.”
“Your fucking ass,” Majesty said. “That’s what it’s about. Caine is a Baron of Cant, you stupid bitch, and you sold him to the Eyes for a lousy thousand royals. I’m cutting you slack for this, you understand? Instead of slashing your fucking dyke throat and torching this shit-hole with you and everybody else in it, I’m going to let you slide a little, because I figure you don’t know any better.”
“You’re the one who doesn’t understand!” Majesty roared her down. “You got five minutes to get your people and your customers out of this fucking whore palace. After that, it’s gonna be too late, and they’re gonna die in the fire, you follow?”
“If you would only listen to reason,” she said mildly, stretching forth a gently supplicating hand, her palm turned up, her fingers curving in a precisely defined pattern.
Kierendal went on, “We don’t have to be enemies. Caine came to me as a favor; he owed me some money, and this was his way of paying it back. Let’s work something out, can’t we? You and I?”
“Some sort of Charm,” Paslava whispered. “I grounded it off.”
Majesty met Kierendal’s yellow stare; her expression never altered, only momentarily froze as she watched her spell fail.
“We might have had a chance to work out something, I guess,” Majesty said. “Too late now. Anybody ever tell you what I do to people who try to put magick on me?”
Kierendal drew herself up, and her gown swirled around her like smoke. “Then the time for explanations has passed,” she said.
Paslava whispered, “She’s signaling with Flow.”
The charged silence in Alien Games suddenly sparked with the scrape of weapons being drawn from scabbards. Every bartender bore a club, every waitress a knife. Some of those unfamiliar faces among the customers now grinned as they moved through the crowds, advancing on Majesty with swords in hand.
He took all this in with a bored glance and gave Kierendal a contemptuous snort. “Rookie,” he said, then raised his fist and shouted, “One!”
Fully a third of the sumptuously dressed South Bankers slid daggers from their sleeves as they drew pragmatic, razor-edged swords from scabbards that had appeared purely decorative. Now all the armed waitresses, bartenders, and covert guards had at least three blades leveled toward their throats, and six men with knives stood at the backs of the three armed trolls.
Majesty chuckled. “That’s half of us,” he said warmly. “Wanna go for Two? And maybe you can guess what Three’s gonna be.”
Kierendal’s eyes blazed. “You invite a massacre.”
“Yeah. But it’s your call,” he said. “Nobody has to get hurt.”
She measured him for a moment, and Majesty sighed to himself. She was going to cave. He was almost sorry; he kinda liked her style.
“Another signal,” Paslava murmured.
Now a new rhythm underscored the restless silence: thumps of window shutters closing and scrapes of doors being barred. The distant shouts of rioters faded to muffled mumbling as the building was sealed.
“Now. Have your people sheathe weapons and exit through that door,” she said, pointing. “If anyone starts anything, I shall burn this place myself.”
Majesty clenched his jaw to keep from nervously licking his lips. “Horseshit.”
“Perhaps. But imagine a fire in this crowded building: Imagine flames raging up the velvet; imagine burning beams crashing down from the ceiling. Imagine a fire when there is only a single door, and far too many people need to use it. My staff knows other ways out of this building. Does yours?”
That pack-hunter smile was back around her wickedly sharp teeth. “As you said, it’s my call—but I raise, instead. Bet or fold, cock.”
For the space of one long indrawn breath, Majesty could think of nothing to do. He couldn’t back down, not in front of his men, but he saw in Kierendal’s eyes that he couldn’t push her. This was a bluff, he told himself. It had to be a bluff: Some of the men in this place were real South Bankers. If a few of them died in an arson fire, her business would never recover—not to mention that one or two might be minor nobility, which would put her in line for hanging.
As he looked at her skeletal grace and her razor grin, he became acutely aware of how unhuman she was; he had no way to gauge how crazy she might really be. What should have been a simple, safe little object lesson in manners had inexplicably escalated wildly toward a holocaust.
As though Paslava could read his thoughts, he whispered, “She is aware of me; there will be little I can do that she cannot counter.”
Majesty nodded, as though to himself, and gave a chuckle that sounded far more confident than he felt. “All right,” he said with an appreciative smile, “I apologize for calling you a rookie.”
“You’re most gracious,” she sneered. “Now get out.”
“It’s not gonna happen,” Majesty said sadly. “Caine was a Baron of Cant, and you gave him up.”
“At his own request,” she said through her teeth.
“I wish I could believe you.” Majesty looked around the room and shook his head. “You also should be thinking, here, that your boys and girls are outnumbered two or three to one. If shit starts to fly, most of them will die here. Secret exits or not.”
Her head came up like a cat’s, as though she heard the scratch of rat claws in the walls; her eyes lost their predatory focus, looking past him, through him, as though he wasn’t there at all.
Got her, he thought. “You’re not bad at this, Kieren-dolly,” he said kindly. “You just gotta understand that when you get in a pissing contest with giants—” He laid a pious hand upon his chest. “—you’re gonna get wet.”
She gave no sign that she heard him; instead, she stared glassily over the knots of armed and nervous folk who crowded the gaming floor, past the massive trolls that made a wall at her back. Everyone in Alien Games returned her stare: Face, Subject, and civilian. Each was suspended on a knife edge of action, a balance as dangerously unstable as a cocked crossbow, waiting for the slightest sign or word from either of them. Swords trembled in sweaty hands, and folk on both sides shifted their weight, seeking the best position to fight or run. She murmured, in a voice so subdued that even Majesty, a bare pace away, could barely make out the words, “No wonder all this spins out of control . . .”
Majesty scowled at her; he didn’t like this at all. What in fuck was she looking at?
“Something is happening.” Paslava’s whisper sounded vaguely awed.
“Yeah, no shit,” Majesty said from the side of his mouth. Hairs prickled along his arms and up the back of his neck; his heart pounded, and icy sweat trickled down from his hairline. He suddenly felt like someone had dosed his wine with rushweed: the floor seemed to rock just a bit under his feet. His head buzzed; it felt kind of carbonated, like fresh beer. He didn’t know what he might do in the next second—if he would launch himself at Kierendal’s throat, burst into tears, or drop his tights and crap on his boots. “What is this? Is this some kind of attack?”
“I don’t know,” Paslava whispered. “I don’t think so. It’s some kind of Flow effect; I can see dark currents drifting in from all directions. There! Over there!” he nearly shouted, forgetting himself, forgetting to whisper, forgetting that Majesty could not see which direction his Cloaked finger was pointing.
The excitement in his voice could not be told from panic, and in Majesty’s growing confusion, that was signal enough. He drew breath to cry the attack, to bring it all down, to let the slaughter begin just because straight-up bloodshed would be so much easier than this stretching, twisting, edge-of-the-cliff windmill-the-arms shit.
Kierendal reached for him and caught his elbow in an astonishingly powerful grip. “Don’t!” she said urgently, pleadingly. “Don’t—he’s here.”
Majesty tried to yank his arm away, but found her grip was not so easily broken. “What? Who’s here?”
“Weapons down!” she cried. “Everybody, put them away!”
From the direction of the single unbarred door came a splintering of wood and the sound of bone meeting bone through intervening layers of flesh.
“What? What?” Majesty couldn’t seem to make sense of what was happening. Who was fighting? What was Paslava talking about? Who was Kierendal trying to say was here? “What—?”
“Majesty, tell your men to put their weapons down! Do it!”
“Yeah, do it,” somebody said in Caine’s voice. “Let’s everybody play nice, huh?”
Majesty turned. Caine stood in the far doorway. His battered black leathers looked even dirtier than usual and shadows dark as bruises ringed his eyes, but it was unquestionably Caine.
“But—but—” Majesty sputtered, gaping, “but you were arrested!”
“That’s right.” He walked slowly onto the gaming floor, limping, heavily favoring his right leg. “And there’s a lot of people out looking for me, right now, so I’d appreciate it if nobody left this place. Can the two of you manage that?”
“I, ah . . . yeah. Yeah, sure,” Majesty said stupidly, then he raised his voice. “Hear that? Nobody leaves. Nobody.”
Caine kept on limping toward them, fixing Kierendal with a searching look. “And you?”
She pulled her head back, the whites of her eyes showing around her golden irises like a spooky horse. “We were quits, Caine. Even. You said you would leave me alone.”
She’ll face down a hundred fifty Subjects of Cant without blinking, Majesty thought with a puzzled frown, but Caine shows up and she’s about to piss herself.
At his shoulder, Paslava whispered, “It’s Caine.”
“No—that Flow effect. It’s Caine. He’s part of it, somehow.”
Caine said, “I can make it worth your while.”
“Another thousand royals?” Kierendal snorted and waved her hand at the roomful of armed men. “You see what the last one almost bought me.”
“How about an alliance with the most powerful Duke under the new Emperor?”
“What?” Majesty said, for what seemed like the thousandth time. Too much was happening, too fast; he couldn’t make sense of any of it. “What new Emperor? What Duke? If you’re handing out alliances with Dukes,” he said, “don’t you think you should be thinking about your old friends, first?”
“I am.” Outwardly, Caine seemed grim as a hangman, but behind his flat black eyes danced some secret glee. “You’re the Duke I’m talking about. You will be.”
Majesty and Kierendal exchanged equally dumbstruck looks.
“But . . .” Majesty struggled to sort through the hundred questions that crowded his brain, to find one or two that would be most pertinent. “But how can I be a Duke—? And no, fuck that; start with how you managed to escape.”
Caine grinned at him, and his teeth seemed edged with fresh blood. “Two questions, one answer: I gave you up to Ma’elKoth. I told him you’re Simon Jester.”
“You what?” The room seemed to darken and rock dizzily around him.
“Sure,” Caine said. “Why not?” He leaned close to the King of Cant, peering deeply into Majesty’s eyes as though cryptic runes might be read there. He said with slow, deliberate precision, “That’s how you will help me save Pallas Ril.”
“Pallas . . .” Majesty murmured. Of course he would; nothing was more important than Pallas Ril’s life, than her happiness. Majesty felt as though he was awakening from a dream: what foolishness had he been undertaking here, picking a fight with Kierendal, while Pallas was in danger? He passed a hand before his eyes and fervently thanked his every god that Caine had come along in time to remind him of what was really important . . .
Whatever Caine had been looking for, he apparently found, though this finding seemed not to please him. His mouth twisted briefly, a spasm of nauseous distaste. But an instant later his face cleared, as though he drove some evil thought from his mind by force of will.
“So, Kierendal,” he said cheerfully. “Who’s a guy have to maim to get a drink around here?”
The bartender who Kierendal summoned looked at Majesty and said in that infuriatingly superior tone that is acquired by a lifetime in fine food service, “You, sir, owe me one royal.”
“BUT IT’S NOT proof,” Kierendal says stubbornly. “It’s a trick, not real proof.”
Sometimes, the toughest part of a revolution is deciding to start one.
“But it’s a good trick. A good trick is better than proof,” I say with an easy grin. I nod toward Paslava. “Ask him.”
Paslava doesn’t wait for Kierendal’s question. He leans forward and clasps his skeletal hands judiciously on the tabletop near his mug of beer, and the table lamp’s flame paints deep shadows in the hollows of his cheeks. “It’s true. With twenty thousand witnesses, Ma’elKoth will never be able to deny, never be able to explain. It will shatter the morale of the army; without the army to keep order, control of the city—and the Empire—falls into the hands of the first man prepared to grab it.”
They exchange looks, lust sparking to life behind their eyes. Here in Kierendal’s sitting room, the air is still as a tomb’s; the flame of the lamp might as well be cut from shining glass. My faked ease is getting to them; infected by my perfectly feigned confidence, they’re starting to believe that toppling Ma’elKoth might be doable, after all, and the pure possibility makes it nearly irresistible.
The riots were one thing—they’re self-sustaining now. When the riots are crushed under the military’s heel and the main agitators are arrested, none of them will be found to be Subjects of Cant. This is something else: they’re seeing it now, in their minds, in their hearts; they’re seeing the Empire without Ma’elKoth, the army without leadership, Ankhana without law.
It pulls them like a river’s current, like the gravity of this world. The four of us, sitting around an ordinary dining table—an icon of Ma’elKoth watching us from the corner shrine—could take down the Empire. That lust in their eyes, it’s the same hunger that drives a kid to smash his only new toy on his birthday afternoon; it’s the same hunger that drives riots in the Temp slums, where we torch our own homes and dance around the flames; it’s the same hunger that drives a conquering army to loot and burn.
Sometimes, we destroy simply because we can. Because, when you come right down to it, it’s the kind of fun you just can’t get anywhere else.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t disapprove of that lust.
Majesty leans forward to weigh in. “Then why put troops there at all?” he says. “We’ll need every man we have to hold the city once the fighting starts. Why risk every Knight and half of the Subjects?”
I settle for being cryptic. “Chaos creates opportunity.”
He doesn’t give up that easily. “But opportunity for what?”
Every time Majesty’s natural pragmatism surfaces, all I have to do is reach out and tap on his weakness, that trump card that always seems to be there in my hand, no matter how many times I play it. “I told you before,” I tell him. “I’m going to rescue Pallas Ril.”
His eyes glaze over a little bit; the Charm still has him, even if it’s fading. “But how?”
“Because I can’t.” That’d give too much away to you viewers back home. “What this does for me is gives me a smaller, more concentrated version of the riots. I need someone to keep the Cats and the constables off my ass while I save Pallas. The rest is all gravy. The revolution? That’s just the come-on, to give you a little something for your trouble.”
“No, you want them there,” I say significantly. “All of them, or damn near, all gathered into one place.”
“Sure. Waiting for a small, elite strike team. With the whole Knights of Cant in the stadium, you can bury them.”
“Bury them under piles of our own bodies,” Majesty grumbles.
“You have to deal with the Cats,” I tell him flatly. “The Cats are the best troops in the Empire—not just man-to-man, but running small-unit tactics, too. Everybody’s afraid of them: shit, they can hold the army together by sheer terror, if they want. Nobody wants to cross the Cats.”
“Especially not me,” Majesty agrees grimly.
“On the other hand, they might not even fight.”
Majesty shakes his head. “You don’t know them. The Ma’elKoth bit won’t break their morale; Berne has them believing they’re more than human.”
I turn to the Spellbinder. “Your specialty is crowd control, isn’t it? You can whip up some sort of magick that’ll take the heart right out of them.”
“In theory,” Paslava says slowly. “But I don’t have that kind of power, to search them out in a huge crowd and hold their spirit down—especially not if Ma’elKoth smells what I’m up to.”
I chuckle. “How much power do you need?”
I dip two fingers into the thigh sheath where one of my throwing knives used to be and come up with one of the griffinstones from the hem of the net. I flip it skittering across the table, and Paslava’s hand strikes like a rattlesnake; breath leaves his lungs in a long hissing sigh as he holds the griffinstone up and regards it in the lamplight with naked, wet-eyed lust. Kierendal’s eyes widen, glittering in the lamplight, and flick from the stone to me with pure golden envy.
“Ahh,” Paslava says with breathless reverence. “Ahh . . . I’ve never even seen one this size. It’s flawless. It’s beautiful.”
“Will that do it?” I ask, knowing the answer.
“Oh, yes,” he says. “This will do it very well, indeed.”
“We’ll never get our men into the stadium,” Majesty interrupts gruffly. “They hardly look like real South Bankers, and there will certainly be a weapons search at the gates.”
“You can do it,” I tell Kierendal. “You can do an illusion that’ll hold up just fine.” I pull another two griffinstones out of the thigh sheath. “With a little sliver knocked off one of these on every Subject to power them, you can put illusions on them that’ll hold till next week.”
Paslava’s mouth drops open. In a second or two he’ll be drooling on the table. Kierendal reaches toward them with a tentative hand, and she sighs like in sexual afterglow when I put them into her palm.
“Here’s your alliance. The Snakes, the Dungers, and the Rats aren’t going to fade away. When the government goes down, you’re gonna have to fight them—and they’ll be recruiting deserters from the army, you can bet. With the Faces and the Kingdom of Cant together, the other Warrengangs won’t have a prayer.” I smile cynically. “They won’t have a prayer to Ma’elKoth.”
“What about Berne?” Majesty asks. “So what if Ma’elKoth’s not there? The kind of power Berne throws around these days, he can turn the battle by himself.”
“Don’t worry about Berne. He won’t show up.”
“No?” He makes a face. “What, he’s gonna be taking a snooze after kicking your ass again?”
I let him see all my teeth. “A long snooze. A permanent snooze.”
“I don’t like it,” he says decisively. He pushes himself up from the table. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“It can work,” Paslava interjects, each of his eyes reflecting an image of the griffinstone he twirls between his fingers. “We can do this.”
“Sure we can,” Majesty says, “but what then? Who’s gonna rule the Empire? Us?” The derisive edge in his voice makes it all too clear what he thinks of this idea. “Who’s to say whoever ends up in charge won’t be worse? And the Cats might be monsters, but they’re still Imperial troops. You’re asking me to commit the Kingdom of Cant to open rebellion—to regicide, for shit’s sake—because somebody has to storm the palace and kill that bastard; he’s too powerful to leave alive. And who else is there but us? Whoever winds up on the throne will have to wipe us out just to keep the Ma’elKoth loyalists happy; otherwise they’ll start working on their own revolution as soon as shit calms down.”
“Majesty, Majesty, you forget: you’re already committed,” I say. “If Ma’elKoth lives out the day, he’ll have your balls in his teeth by sundown.”
“I should kill you for that,” he says grimly.
“Too late, buddy. It won’t help you any, and you know it. Besides, didn’t I promise to make you a Duke? All you need is an Emperor who owes you a big favor.”
“And you’ve got one in your pocket?”
“No,” I say with a grin, “but you do.”
“Sure. Toa-Sytell,” I offer, then grin into the deathly silence that greets my suggestion. Majesty’s eyes bulge with the effort of restraining a curse, and he glances around the small back room as though to make sure we are still alone. Kierendal nods in grim self-satisfaction at this confirmation of her long-held suspicion. Paslava’s mouth drops open.
“Am I the only one who doesn’t know about this?” he says incredulously.
Majesty shakes his head at him. “I’ll explain later.”
“You’d better,” his thaumaturge says feelingly.
I go on. “Think about it. You need somebody you can trust. Despite the Kingdom’s loyalty, despite the position you’ve held in this city all these years, you’re a commoner. Your kingdom is one of spirit and devotion, not of birth. The nobles won’t follow you. Toa-Sytell, on the other hand . . .”
Majesty’s eyes go distant and calculating. “I see it.”
“He was created Duke by Toa-Phelathon, the last legitimate ruler of the Menelethids. That makes him a Duke for real, in the eyes of the nobles; they might deny titles conferred by Ma’elKoth, but not by their beloved Prince-Regent. Toa-Sytell also controls the King’s Eyes. You want to run the Empire, you need him.”
“Who says I want to run the Empire?”
“Screw running it,” I tell him. “When shit blows up, all you have to do is come to Toa-Sytell with an offer of support. The Kingdom of Cant will be the only real, organized troops that can keep order in the city. By being the first to come to his side, you could make him pretty grateful; I should think he’d express his gratitude with a title—maybe even a Dukedom and a seat in the Cabinet. Say, maybe, Commerce and Taxation?”
That cold calculation in his eyes starts to ring up stacks of gold coins.
I go on. “I mean, you guys already have a relationship, right? You trust each other?”
“More or less,” Majesty allows. “But Ma’elKoth—holed up in the Colhari Palace, he could stand a year’s seige . . .”
I lean forward and let all the easy humor drain out of my eyes, let my face go as passionless as an ice sculpture. “You can let me handle that.”
Majesty gives me a frankly scornful look. “You?”
“So, let’s see if I’ve got this plumb,” he says sarcastically. “These are your plans for tomorrow: Get up, have breakfast, kill Berne, sneak into Victory Stadium and discredit Ma’elKoth, grab some lunch, sneak out of Victory Stadium and into the palace, kill Ma’elKoth, sneak back out of the palace again, have dinner, maybe a couple of drinks, go to bed. Is that about it?”
“Roughly,” I tell him. “You forgot one thing.”
“No.” I reach out with my words to tap that trump on the table one more time. “I’m going to rescue Pallas Ril.”
Her name siphons the color out of his face, and his eyes drift closed.
While the Charm keeps him off balance, I hook him and reel him in. “The point is that Toa-Sytell is a fundamentally decent guy with a stake in keeping things calm. He has both power and a reputation for ruthlessness. He’s exactly what you need to keep the Empire from dissolving into civil war; on the other hand, he can’t hold the city without you until he brings the army to heel. He’ll need you as much as you need him. He’s perfect.”
“He’s also devoted to Ma’elKoth,” Majesty points out.
I grin. “I think we’ll take care of that part of the problem tomorrow. He’s devoted to the throne, not the man.”
“God damn you, Caine,” he says. “God damn if you don’t have it figured to the butt end. Paslava?”
The thaumaturge can barely tear his gaze away from contemplation of the beauty of the griffinstone in his hand. When he does, his eyes are pools of fiery possibility. “We can do it,” he says.
Unnoticed, her face and form have shifted throughout this conversation; her eyes have shaded from gold to hazel, and her platinum hair to a dirty blond that borders on chestnut; the harsh lines of her razor cheekbones have softened into an easier, more human oval. She gives Majesty a look that makes the air between them smoke, just a little. “I can help,” she says slowly, in a husky voice that reminds me, inescapably, of Pallas. What is she playing at? Can she read the Charm on him, somehow?
What she says next removes my doubt. “I’m with you, Majesty, but we must . . . cement our alliance, in a more, mmm, formal way,” and her tone is suggestive enough that she’s giving me a hard-on; I can only imagine the effect she must be having on Majesty.
He looks like he’s been sucker-punched; a moment passes while he remembers that there are other people in the world. He reddens, coughs, and looks at me, shaking his head. “And you get out of this . . . what? The gratitude of a new Duke? But you don’t even really care about that, do you?”
“You’re telling me,” he says slowly, “that you’re bringing down the Empire just to get a shot at saving Pallas Ril?”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
“All right,” he says, suddenly grinning like a maniac. “I’m in.”
I almost gather him into a hug before I remember myself and settle for sticking out a hand.
He takes it. “And thanks. I mean, really thanks, Caine.”
“For giving me a chance to help you save her. That means a lot to me.”
“Yeah,” I say, feeling just a little sick. “I knew it would.”
A long, slow, mediative silence drifts into the room like a shadow of tomorrow’s war. All we can do, for this eternal instant, is sit and contemplate the enormity of what we have decided, here tonight.
Finally, Paslava breaks the silence with a cough.
“And I am also curious,” says Paslava, “about this silver net of yours. I would like to examine it, with your permission.”
“That, ah, that won’t be possible until tomorrow. I stashed it.”
“Do you think that wise?” Paslava asks with a sudden frown of alarm. “The success or failure of this entire plot depends upon that net! If it is stolen, or lost—!”
“It’s perfectly safe,” I reassure them with a secret smile. “You’ll get a chance to look it over tomorrow. For tonight, I, ahh, have somebody watching it for me.”
CURSING SILENTLY, BERNE rappeled down the natural chimney to the very limit of the torchlight above and peered down into the black abyss below him. How deep did this fucking shaft go? How in fuck’s sake did Caine get down here without leaving a rope behind? And why was he hiding out down here? How did he even breathe down here in these reeking goatfucking fumes?
Before continuing down, he wrapped his wrist in the rope and used his now-free hand to draw the dagger Ma’elKoth had magicked for him. He swung it in a short arc, and sure enough its green glow was strongest still when it pointed straight downward. In fact, it was brighter than he’d yet seen it.
Bright enough, it was, to illuminate the bottom of the chimney only a few feet below and the untidily piled net that lay on the rock as though it had been carelessly tossed there.
Berne’s curses were no longer silent; they echoed off the stone loudly enough that the Cats waiting above startled like spooked horses.
Caine knew, somehow that slippery little fuck knew, and he’d ditched the net on purpose. Berne released the rope and dropped the rest of the way, taking the shock of landing with a slight bend of his strengthened legs. He bent to pick up the net, then hesitated and changed his mind. He grunted to himself, then swarmed back up the rope to the torchlit cavern above.
“You four,” he snapped, picking them out at random from his followers, “you’re staying here. He’ll be coming back for this. Don’t interfere with him. As soon as he shows, one of you come for me at the Colhari Palace. The others, follow him. Don’t let him know you’re there; if he makes you, he’ll make you dead.”
“The palace? You’re not going home?”
“Probably not tonight,” Berne said with a grimace that reflected a sharply twisting knot of apprehension in his guts. “I have to go tell Ma’elKoth that we’ve lost Caine.”
LAMORAK SAT AT a broad scarred writing table in the den of Berne’s house and stared out the window at the approaching storm, a massive wall of cloud that blocked the polar stars. Lightning speared almost continuously in the north, and the thunder was loud enough already to rattle the windows. Big freaking storm, big as he’d ever seen, but he watched it with only a scant corner of his attention.
What it really came down to, see, was survival, he told himself. Sure, he didn’t want Pallas to die, but having Pallas alive wouldn’t do him any good if he wasn’t around to enjoy her, right? And Caine . . . Well, fuck Caine. Caine knew that Berne and the Cats were tailing him, and he’d led them right there to Lamorak’s room. Caine might as well have locked him into this den personally.
Lamorak cherished no fond illusions or hopes of mercy from Berne. His only hope was to buy his freedom, to get himself at the very least out of the Cats’clutches and into the care of the Constabulary or the King’s Eyes—and to do it before Caine stirred the shitpot tomorrow. Even if Berne himself died in the inevitable riot at the stadium, the Cats would cut his throat before they’d let him go.
No: he had only one chance. He had to make a deal while there was still a deal to be made.
He couldn’t speak to his guards; they’d been well prepared against him. Instead, he ransacked the den until he found a sheet of lambskin parchment and a pen. A few minutes’ further search found an ink pot that still sloshed faintly when he shook it.
You left before I could tell you. I have news to sell, news of Caine that may save the Empire, if you act upon it. Come with Duke Toa-Sytell or the Emperor himself to guarantee my freedom, and I will reveal all of Caine’s sinister plot. You will not regret it.
He folded the parchment and wrote on the outside:
Give this message to Count Berne, and he is sure to reward you
He held it in his hand for a moment, weighing it briefly; it was no heavier than any other parchment, and it meant nothing at all.
He hobbled to the locked door and slid the parchment beneath it. Somebody should find it there by morning. He turned and leaned a moment to rest against the door before the trip back to the chair at the writing table. Outside, lightning flared and thunder crashed. The first scattered drops of rain mixed with a spurt of rattling hail clattered against the window. The rising wind howled like wolves in the wilderness.
Going to be one big bastard of a storm, he thought. Glad I’m not out in it.