“Sometimes I wonder if you really respect anything besides power.”
“You see? That’s what I mean, that’s a flip, glib, toss-off answer. It’s because you don’t care about what I care about. The things that are important, that are really important—”
“Like what? Justice? Give me a break. Honor? Those are abstractions we’ve invented, to make the reality of power easier to face, to con people into voluntarily limiting themselves.”
“What about love? Is that any less abstract than justice?”
“Isn’t it funny how we always end up fighting about the abstractions?”
“Yes, we are. Maybe we’re not fighting about justice and love, but we’re sure as hell fighting.”
RING UPON RING of crumbling stone benches and walkways rose step-built above the bull’s-eye of rain-damp sand in the center; the whole titanic structure might have been a target offered for a game between gods. The inner wall that separated the sand from the seating had once been three times the height of a man. Though it was crumbling now with age and the decay wrought by the corrosive coal smoke from the steelworks in the nearby Industrial Park, on its raddled face could still be seen curved parallel scars left by the diamondine claws of draconymphs, ameboid chemical burns 161 from the acidic venom of wyverns’ tailstings, and pockmarks left by crossbow quarrels that had struck through the flesh of fleeing gladiators.
A third of the way up the arc of the seating stood a ring of pissoirs that had been built an age ago for the use of long-dead spectators. They were similar to the pissoirs that were scattered throughout the city, relics of the Brass King, Tar-Mennelekil, who’d nearly bankrupted his nation with his public works.
The public pissoirs of Ankhana were built above shafts sunk through the limestone that formed the bedrock beneath the city; within these shafts are three screens of progressively finer bronze mesh to capture the solid wastes and allow the liquid to drain into the bottomless caverns below the city. A parallel shaft descends alongside each. The muckers make their rounds about once in a tenday, to collect the valuable shit and cart it away to Lucky Janner’s Ankhanan Muckers and Manure on the outskirts of Alientown.
This much any citizen of Ankhana knows; what is less well known among the respectable citizenry is that concealed doors in these mucker shafts can lead one into those bottomless caverns, through which one who knows his way can move freely beneath the city.
It was up from these pissoirs that they came—the deformed, the blind, the crippled, amputees on their crutches and lepers in their pus-moist shreds of rags. They’d walked through the cloaca of the Empire to get here, and now the Knights of Cant, who stood in pairs at each pissoir door, swept them downward through the broken rings of crumbling stone benches with gestures of welcome.
Happy babble and snatches of song shivered in the night’s freshening breeze as the mass of beggars swarmed down from the pissoirs, scrambling over seats their ancestors could have only gazed at in envy, never touched—only the landed gentry ever sat so low, so close to the arena. They reached the high wall that surrounded the arena sand and flowed over it like sheep, like lemmings, like a wave of ravenous vermin.
The sand of the arena floor, still damp from the evening’s misting rain, now churned beneath sandals and rope-tied scraps of boots, beneath the iron ferrules of their crutches and the calluses of their naked feet. For two hundred years this sand had absorbed the blood and shit of mortally wounded gladiators, ogres, trolls, ogrilloi, and dwarfs; the half-digested bowel contents of gut-slashed lions; the ichor of throat-cut wyverns and the aqueous humors of draconymphs stabbed through their vulnerable eyes. For another hundred years it had stood abandoned to squatters, but no more: now oilskin tarpaulins were pulled off stacked cordwood in mounds taller than a man, and snapping bonfires leaped toward clouds so low that they reflected a dull orange toward the fires beneath.
Around the bonfires the cripples danced, for this hulking ring of stone was the Brass Stadium, and these beggars were the Subjects of Cant, and this night was the Night of the Miracle.
And among them a presence passed, a ghostly feeling of hereness that could not be explained.
A leper paused in his grinning tale of a fat purse stolen while its owner handed him a coin; he’d felt a brush along his own rags, but no one stood beside him. He shrugged and finished his tale. Warm breath on a blind woman’s neck caused her to turn and shift the filthy bandages over her eyes that she might see who’d stood so close. She rubbed her eyes and shook her head at her active imagination. Once, briefly, what must have been a trick of the shadows made footprints seem to appear in a clear patch, away from any feet that could have made them, but the Knight who saw this only sighed—his sharp suspicious wonder had instantly faded into bored forgetfulness.
A Cloak is a fiendishly difficult spell to maintain under the best of circumstances; among a constantly shifting crowd of suspicious and cynical professional thieves and beggars it’s nearly impossible. A Cloak doesn’t affect the physical world, it doesn’t alter the path of light or prevent its reflection; it works directly, and solely, on the mind. Holding a Cloak requires that the adept maintain a constant mental visualization of the surrounding environment, including the positions and postures of every single person present, saving only himself—in other words, the adept must carry in his mind a perfect image of the scene as it would look without him there. As long as this concentration is maintained the adept may still be visible to the eye, but not to the brain: an onlooker is magickally prevented from mentally registering the sight. It’s fairly simple when only one person is there to deal with, not too bad with two or three.
In the midst of the Subjects of Cant, no ordinary adept could hope to hold a Cloak. No ordinary adept would even attempt it—to be an outsider caught within the Brass Stadium on the Night of the Miracle was certain death, delivered instantly and ruthlessly without trial or appeal of any sort.
No one of Pallas Ril’s acquaintance would describe her as ordinary.
Forty hours, murmured a tiny niggling voice in some distant and disconnected part of her mind. I’ve been on the move for almost forty hours.
Her teeth felt fuzzy, and her eyes seemed to scrape within her skull every time she blinked, but she moved silently through the press, listening here, watching there, letting herself drift wherever her feet took her. It might have been foolish of her to trust these people in the first place, but she was not so foolish that she didn’t realize she’d been betrayed.
On the Night of the Miracle, all the Subjects of Cant gathered here. That meant that somewhere within this crowd was the man who’d betrayed her, who’d killed the Twins, and Talann—and Lamorak. She wouldn’t have to kill him herself; she knew that Majesty would be grateful for the honor.
Unless, a cold internal voice reminded her, the traitor was Majesty himself; she was not so naive as to eliminate the King of Cant as a suspect simply because she liked him. She needed evidence, she needed a finger to point out a target, and this need had brought her here. The nature of the evidence she’d find, she had no idea.
A restless, oppressive lust for motion had driven her here, a feeling that something she couldn’t see was gaining on her from behind. She had no real plan; holding a Cloak, which she’d been doing for several hours now, consumed so much of her attention that she was mostly confined to absorbing sense impressions for later examination. In what was very nearly a Zen state of meditative awareness, she’d opened herself to the radical present—and trusted that the moment itself would provide what she needed.
The moment provided a drumroll by an unseen hand, somewhere in the northern quadrant of the stadium seating.
There a ziggurat stood—nine ascending steps built above the stone benches, culminating in a massive high-backed throne that was carved from a single block of the native limestone. The drifting lace of Flow, that filled Pallas’ mindview with translucent veins of color, suddenly whirled up toward the ziggurat and dove down through it. Pallas nodded to herself; inside the ziggurat was where Abbal Paslava the Spellbinder would be standing, weaving the effects for Majesty’s entrance. Caine had described this to her once, and she knew what to expect.
Single-foot braziers of bronze flared into sparkshowers with no hand to ignite them. Dense billows of white smoke poured from the bronze bowls and down the platform, thickening until they utterly obscured the throne.
The scattered laughter and conversation among the Subjects died swiftly away; lamb shanks and wineskins were laid respectfully aside. Faces, rosy from the heat of bonfires, turned toward the swirling cloud. The drumroll stuttered into a marching cadence: down, out of the smoke, strode the nine Barons of Cant.
Pallas squinted at them, only half curious; she was familiar with the name and reputation of a couple of them, but she had no reason to suspect they even knew of her connection to the Subjects. They took up positions on the lower third of the nine steps, seven men and two brawny women, grounding the points of their naked blades into the stone and resting their hands upon cord-wound hilts.
Now the mist began to thin, slowly revealing first the shadowy silhouettes, then the motionless forms, of the Dukes of Cant arrayed on the third step from the top. Pallas knew both of these men: the skeletal figure in robes was Paslava, still pulling Flow; on the opposite side stood Deofad the Warlord, once of the Lipkan Imperial Guard, white-bearded and stolid.
She had met these two men shortly after approaching Majesty with the concept of the Simon Jester operation; either of them could be the traitor.
Then from the thinning mist at the apex of the ziggurat rang Majesty’s voice, deep and clear as a temple bell. Pallas heard no suggestion of strain, of raising his voice to fill the Stadium—the lateral swirl of Flow that whirlpooled outward from the apex suggested to her that Paslava was tricking up Majesty’s volume.
He said: “My Children. We gather tonight in this, the discarded arena of empire. And we, too, are discarded. We are the forgotten, the maimed, the crippled, the blind!”
The answering choral shout of the Subjects rang from the crumbling walls: “We are!”
“We are the thieves, the vagabonds, the beggars!”
“But we are not alone! But we are not helpless! We are powerful! We are brothers!”
“This Arena of Despair shakes before our brotherhood! The power of our brotherhood transforms the Arena of Despair into the Stage of Miracles! Here with your brothers, cast off your crutches! Cast off your slings, your bandages! Let the crippled walk, let the blind see! Rejoice! My Children, you are healed!”
And throughout the arena, crutches fell to the damp sand; limbs sprouted from empty sleeves; milky cataracts popped free from clear and sparkling eyes; and the dripping sores of leprosy peeled off from smooth skin as the last of the mist cleared and His Majesty the King of Cant sat on the throne in a coronal halo—a scarlet backlight from braziers that leaped to life above and behind him—as he motionlessly oversaw the transformation of his subjects.
Pure theater, Pallas well knew—no real cripple or leper would ever be allowed here—but she couldn’t deny the power of this simple ritual, the rush of joy from every side as all their masks fell away at once.
Caine had tried to explain to her how the Subjects were vastly more than a mere street gang, tried to describe their almost religious devotion to each other, their sense of family, of belonging to something greater than the sum of its parts; Pallas had seen this devotion in action, but now she was beginning to understand it. She also understood how this simple ritual made it thoroughly impossible for an outsider to conceal himself and blend in here, without the use of magick.
And, looking up at Majesty as he descended the ziggurat, smiling and relaxed, bringing his Dukes and Barons with him to receive tithes at the retaining wall, Pallas had to admit that he knew everything there was to know about making a star entrance.
She drifted toward the wall, carefully slipping aside from Subjects moving in the same direction, and got close enough to overhear as he accepted gifts, money and otherwise, from the Subjects that trailed past. Three Barons carted the loot away when all was done, and Majesty vaulted lithely into the arena to mingle and laugh with his people. The Dukes and the Barons all followed him, and soon the arena had become a sprawling party, as wineskins passed from hand to hand and voices rose in boisterous song.
Pallas stayed close by Majesty’s side, vaguely hoping for an opportunity to get him alone where she could speak with him, and so she heard Abbal Paslava’s low-voiced warning as he pulled Majesty to one side.
“There’s magick here; someone other than myself is pulling Flow within the stadium.”
Majesty’s answering smile was grimly humorous. “Well, point him out, and we’ll spank the naughty bastard.”
“Nor do I. I feel it tug at my mind, but when I turn my attention onto it, it seems to skitter away like a sun-flash in the corner of the eye. This is definitely cause for concern.”
“Keep working on it. And meanwhile, cover my exit; the tithing took too damned long and I’m late for a meet.”
“Done.” Paslava’s head tilted back, and his eyes rolled up; Flow spiraled into his Shell as he pulled a tiny doll from a pocket and rolled it between his fingers. A tendril of violet power clung to Majesty as he drifted away, and Pallas followed on his heels.
Not too closely; many a Cloaked mage has given herself away simply by bumping into someone. Once or twice she had to move quickly to avoid clumps of Subjects, and each time she stepped clear Majesty seemed to have inexplicably gained ground, nodding and speaking a word or two here and there among the Subjects that he passed. He never seemed to move quickly, but somehow she could never quite catch up with him.
Even in her dissociated, meditative state, it took her barely a minute to realize what Paslava had done. This must be a sophisticated variation of the Cloak she herself was under—anyone looking for Majesty would see him off on the other side of the arena somewhere, always just a bit too far away to interact with. She tipped a mental nod of professional respect for Paslava’s creativity. It was a clever spell, though she could break it with ease, if she chose.
Paslava might be clever, but for raw power he was not remotely in her league.
Breaking the spell, however, would require concentration that she needed to maintain her Cloak. Instead, she glanced around the arena; as her gaze passed the half-open gate on one of the beast chutes, Flow swirled more strongly around Abbal Paslava’s Shell, and she felt the faintest increase in the tug of the spell’s pull. She needed no more than this, and she let her desire to speak with Majesty draw her more strongly toward the chute, still drifting—she felt like she was floating, her legs obeying her desire for direction, but not for speed.
The darkness of the beast chute closed over her eyes as she moved away from the light of the bonfires and into the dusty scent of rotting wood and ancient urine. Here in the darkness, in unfamiliar surroundings, she couldn’t visualize accurately enough to maintain her Cloak; it collapsed around her and she sagged against the wall, suddenly trembling.
Mindview—the mental state necessary to perceive Flow, to cast and maintain spells—is a meditative state, almost transcendental. When in mindview, you don’t feel tired, you don’t feel fear, you don’t feel much of anything at all; you’re aware only of your environment and your will, what adepts call your intention. For hours, Pallas’ mindview had held at bay all the fatigue of protecting the Konnosi and the exhaustion of two days of running from the Cats, all the fear and horror of the fight, all the stomach-gnawing grief for the Twins, for Talann and Lamorak, the swelling ache of having led them to their deaths. But these emotions had circled her like hyenas: they hadn’t lost interest, they hadn’t gone off to seek other prey. Their patience was nearly infinite.
Now that her defense was gone they mobbed her; they sank needle teeth into her throat and dragged her gasping toward the floor.
For a moment faces flooded her, driving out all other thought: the terror and desperate hope of Konnos’ two daughters, so much like what she saw on the faces of all the tokali, the hunted, who huddled together beneath that abandoned warehouse in the Industrial Park, with no one but her to depend on. The manic confidence of Talann, the grim trust of the Twins . . .
And, of course, the face that stung her eyes with a single tear: Lamorak with his gentle smile, tapping the fresh-cut brick arch with the blade of Kosall. “And this is a gap I can hold for a long, long time.”
Oh, Karl . . . His name, the name she couldn’t say out loud, couldn’t murmur in her Soliloquy, the name that Studio conditioning wouldn’t allow her to so much as whisper until she returned to Earth.
Until she returned to Earth, alone.
He’d held that arch for perhaps a minute, no more.
All these hyenas chewed into her belly, but she was an adept: she lived and died by her control of her mind. It took only seconds for her to strangle these carnivorous thoughts, and soon she pushed herself upright. There was no forgetting the danger she was in, simply by being here. Now as she picked her way up the incline, one hand against the crumbling stone of the chute, the images she’d stored from the Miracle began to organize themselves within her brain.
*A meet,* she monologued. *A meet during the Miracle. When every Subject of Cant will be inside the Stadium. The one moment out of the entire week when you can walk the Warrens without being seen by a Subject of Cant.*
A pounding rumble like distant surf began to grind in her ears; blood rose into her face, and she picked up speed.
*Majesty, I swear . . . If it’s you, Majesty, I swear I’ll eat your rotten heart.*
Her practiced hands flitted unconsciously over the pockets on her tunic and within her cloak, searching by feel for something that would put her on Majesty’s trail without subjecting her to the foot-slowing necessity of mindview. She had plenty of artillery left, even without the boltwand she’d lost to the Cats: four of the charged-buckeye fireballs, two hunks of charged amber for Holds, a powerful Teke and a bladewand, as well as a less aggressive crystal Charm. This Adventure so far had consisted of mostly running and hiding; her defensive and evasive spells were depleted save only a single Chameleon, as were her few scrying devices. Without those prepared spells, she’d have to do everything in mindview—as she had the Cloak—which was dangerous and time consuming, at best.
When the inspiration came, she smiled to herself and swallowed a chuckle. The solution was so simple and elegant it was almost funny. She drew out from a pouch at her belt a small faceted chunk of purple quartz and patterned her mind to the sigils inscribed upon it. It was a process as simple as turning a key—no need to maintain mindview. The quartz grew warm in her hand, and as she held it out, an intermittent stripe at shoulder level along the wall began to fluoresce a dully ruddy magenta, as did faint, vaguely boot-shaped blotches along the floor. The Cloak variant Paslava had used on Majesty would be shedding magick continuously until it wore off, like a battery leaking charge—until then, she could use this simple detection spell to track his footprints and the places he’d brushed his hands along the walls, to follow his path through this Stygian maze.
The crystal caused trace magick to fluoresce at a range of only three to four meters; she had no fear of alerting Majesty, and the trace magick was visibly fading even as she began to follow it. When necessary, Pallas could move like a river, fast and smooth, and with only as much noise as her surroundings could absorb and cover. Moving at speed, she cleared the stadium in seconds and glided onto the streets of the Warrens.
Blessedly the clouds above parted, and the moon shone through. She could see him now, only forty or fifty meters ahead of her, moving at a steady lope. He’d picked up a hooded cloak somewhere along the way, but he must have been telling the truth to Paslava when he’d said he was late—he was moving too fast to conceal his natural gait, which was as distinctive as his voice. He didn’t appear to worry about being followed; why should he? He’d hear the boots of anyone who’d try to match his pace.
Pallas smiled grimly as she put away the detection crystal. She slipped off her ankle-high boots and held one in each hand as she ran after him lightly, springing along silently on the balls of her bare feet, staying close to the buildings at her side; the hard-packed dirt of Warrens streets was substantially higher and drier along their edges than in their centers, and the litter of stones, wood scraps, and potshards tended to drift downhill toward the streets’ centers. Along the side, she could sprint barefoot with little to fear.
Ahead, Majesty slid into the darkness of a doorless arch. Instead of following him within, she slipped back into her boots and slowly worked her way around the building. There, near a corner of the third floor on the far side from the arch Majesty had used, a sliver of lamplight leaked through weather-sprung shutters, the only light showing on the faces of this darkened hulk.
Controlling her breathing, she summoned mindview and scanned the twisted alleys around her, the faces of the buildings and what she could see of their roofs. The tangled lace of Flow drifted undisturbed, and no aureate Shells larger than those of rats shimmered in the shadows.
This meant that there were no stooges to watch this place, no guards to protect it; this meant that secrecy, even from his own men, was more important to Majesty than safety.
The distant surf of fury that rumbled in Pallas’ears drew closer.
But she held on to mindview and the surf faded. Of their own accord, her nimble fingers found the tiny model of a Chameleon in a pocket of her cloak. The beautifully sculpted platinum shone in mindview with complex whorls of power. These whorls spread into her mind, then downward across her body; to an observer, her skin and clothing would take on the grey-black moon-dappled appearance of the wall against which she stood. She paused a moment longer, to fix the image more strongly in her concentration, then she faced the wall and scampered up it with the ease of a lizard.
She hung effortlessly from the wall beside the splinter of light, and listened.
“. . . before Berne catches him. This is vital,” an unfamiliar voice was saying. “Berne has, already, entirely too great an influence over Ma’elKoth, and I believe that Berne is a deeply sick man—sick within his mind. It’s vital that Berne does not succeed, here, and that I do. Don’t try to tell me you’re not involved: three of the five dead lookouts were known Subjects. The other two probably were as well.”
“If I had him to give, he’d be yours, Your Grace.” Majesty’s voice was oddly humble, even obsequious. “I don’t ask the Subjects for full accountings of their actions, only of their incomes. If some of them have chosen to supplement their incomes by stooging for Simon Jester, it’s really none of my affair, unless they fail to pay their full tithe. They were my people, though, and I expect compensation.”
*Your Grace? That’s probably Toa-Sytell himself!* Pallas monologued, a sickening dread sinking into her stomach. Suddenly it was all too clear why this particular, private hour had been chosen for this meet. *So it’s him. The King of Cant betrayed us all. I should have suspected: he’s Caine’s best friend. But . . . ahh, gods, I was really hoping he’d be innocent.*
The blood-smeared faces of Dak and Jak, of Lamorak and Talann rose up before her eyes.
*I could frag them both. Right now. Right here. Trigger a fireball and poke the buckeye in through this gap in the shutters. I could drop to the ground, be well out of the blast radius. I wouldn’t even have to hear them scream as they burn.*
She shook the image out of her head. I lived with Hari way too long, she thought. She understood too well the trap of fury to give in to it here; that it was a righteous fury made it more dangerous, not less.
She monologued, *But I won’t. I’ll wait, and I’ll listen. If there’s killing to be done, I can do it after I understand what’s going on.*
“I don’t think you understand the gravity of this situation,” said the unfamiliar voice, as tonelessly as a man ordering breakfast. “Simon Jester has already embarrassed the Emperor. Not only does he seem to operate with impunity, even here in the capital of the Empire, but this graffito of his has appeared on walls within the Colhari Palace itself.”
“I’m doing everything I can, Toa-Sytell. No one seems to know who Simon Jester is, or where he’ll appear next.”
*And I can thank Konnos and his fancy spell for that.*
“I believe,” Toa-Sytell said, “that these accusees are still within the city limits of Ankhana. They number seventeen men, and many of them have taken their families—as many as thirty-eight persons altogether. Perhaps your energies may be more profitably spent searching out their hiding place?”
Pallas swallowed and hooked a buckeye from her hip pocket.
She couldn’t see the sigils of power that scribed its surface, not being in mindview, but she seemed to feel them scorching the flesh of her palm.
She might have to frag these men after all.
*Majesty knows where they are; Konnos’spell wouldn’t have altered that at all. Take two lives, to save thirty-six.* She drew in a deep breath, preparing physically, while she clamped a mental hand down upon her emotions.
Majesty said apologetically, “It’s a big city.”
He went on, “I’ll put my people on it right away, but I can’t make any promises. There’s lots of places to hide, and more than a few of them aren’t open to the Subjects.”
“Do what you can on this. There is vastly more than money riding on it, as you might understand. If the Barons of the outlying marches see that defying Ma’elKoth is easily and safely accomplished . . . I believe you can imagine the possible consequences.”
“Yeah. Another civil war, we don’t need.”
Pallas found herself panting, white-knuckled fingers crushing the buckeye within her grip. What kind of game was Majesty playing? And she’d almost killed him, almost killed them both; only by the grace of some kind god had she waited long enough to hear this last . . .
She barely half listened while the two men went on to other, less pressing business, dealing with the day-to-day politics of the Warrengangs and tidbits of rumor that Majesty had picked up from the Subjects. This Chameleon that held her to the wall wouldn’t last forever; she’d begun to move away when she heard Majesty say, “One last thing. I need to know what this warrant on Caine is about. What’s he wanted for?”
Caine? Pallas’ heart thumped painfully in her chest; she stopped moving, stopped breathing, and squeezed her eyes shut to listen harder.
“I do not believe that this is any of your concern.”
Majesty’s tone of nonchalance sounded faintly forced. “He’s a friend of mine. I don’t want this . . . arrangement between you and me to get in the way of that friendship. I also don’t want that friendship to get in the way of our arrangement, you follow? I don’t want to turn him in without knowing what he’s in for.”
Turn him in? Hari’s here? He’s here now? Pallas’ mouth went dry and her stomach clenched and her heart skipped into a trip-hammer beat. Her fingers tingled uncomfortably, as though she’d just slapped someone.
“Don’t concern yourself with this. I took Caine into custody earlier this evening, but he’s not in any sort of trouble. Not from us, at least; although I do believe that the Monasteries might be a wee bit upset with him. In fact, I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that Ma’elKoth plans to hire him.”
“What else? To find Simon Jester and kill him, of course.”
Of course, Pallas thought disconnectedly. Why else would he be here, if not to fuck up my life again?
She missed the two men’s friendly leave-taking while images and thoughts whirled scattershot across the surface of her mind. Caine would know, of course—he’d know who Simon Jester was and where Simon Jester was and where the tokali were—the Studio would have simply shown him her cube. And she knew, too, that he wouldn’t really hunt her down; not even Caine was that low. It was clear, it was all too fucking clear exactly what was going on.
The Studio had decided she’d bitched it up, this time. They’d decided that she couldn’t do this on her own. They’d decided they could make a bigger bang by sending in The Mighty Caine to save her useless, incompetent, female ass.
With Caine to ride in at the last moment and save the day, they’d make a hundred million more than they would if she somehow managed to pull this off on her own.
All her stifled rage roared into her chest like a waterfall. Didn’t they understand that this wasn’t some stupid game? That this wasn’t just entertainment? That lives rode on this, real lives, lives of real people who loved and grieved and laughed and bled?
And he had to be just loving this; she knew that too. Hari must be grinning right down to the scurf between his toes. She could almost hear his smugly patronizing voice say it: See? You can’t make it without me. Why even try?
And she heard her own response, too, or rather her lack of one, her inarticulate rage at being treated like a bit player in her own life, like a sidekick, nothing but a motivation for someone else’s Adventure. They weren’t going to give her the chance to have a story of her own.
The light had gone out behind the shutters.
She pattered sideways around the building, moving across the wall on all fours at the speed of a fast walk. Down below her, at the archway where Majesty had gone in, she could see the top of the hood of his cloak as he stood by the wall. He worked his tinderbox to light a cigar, little scrrting sparks drifting down toward the street. No one else was in sight; Toa-Sytell must have left by a different door.
She waited until the cigar was well lit, then she canceled the Chameleon and fell on him like an old building.
Her feet slammed into his shoulders and he went down hard; she bounced off and rolled into a low, balanced stance. Stunned by the unexpected attack, Majesty couldn’t do more than shake his head dazedly before she put her bare hand against his cheek and said, “You know me.”
This was how Konnos had told her she could cancel the effect of his spell.
First the haze cleared from his eyes, then she watched amazement grow there as her canceling of the Eternal Forgetting allowed the different things he knew about her to slowly relink themselves within his mind.
“P-Pallas,” he gasped, “great stinking Curse! What did . . . How did . . . And Caine . . . Caine—”
She crouched over him. “I know all about it. This is a dangerous game you’re playing, Majesty.”
“I, I, uh, shit . . . What did you hit me like that for?”
“I had to hit somebody,” she said. “You were available. Now listen while I tell you what we’re going to do.”
He sat up and began dusting himself off. “You know, I’ll take a lot from you. But you’ve really pushed this too far. Nobody lays a hand on me—”
Pallas interrupted him with a forehand slap on his ear. “You mean like that?”
Half-stunned again, he could only shake his head in disbelief.
She held her open hand up in front of his face. “You don’t like being touched like that? Just imagine what kind of touch you’ll get from Caine, after he finds out you’re in bed with Toa-Sytell when you’re supposed to be helping me.”
She crouched there and let him think about it.
It didn’t take him long. “Hey, uh, hey,” he said hastily, “I’ve been helping you all along; I’m even juicing Toa-Sytell to keep him out of your way.”
“Maybe I understand that,” she said. “You think Caine will?”
“Well, but, yeah, but . . . you don’t have to tell him, do you?”
“Maybe I don’t. But I want you to understand that I’m kind of angry about this.”
He rubbed his ear and slowly nodded. “I guess I can follow that. But it’s got nothing to do with you. It wasn’t me that fingered you to the Cats, don’t you see?”
“No, I don’t see. What I see is that you’re holding me in the bag until you get a better price from Toa-Sytell.”
“Don’t swear. You know what I’ve been doing these last forty hours or so?”
“In between staying a step ahead of the Cats and the King’s Eyes and generally trying to stay alive, I’ve been examining an innocent family, probing them in some ugly and extremely uncomfortable ways, to make sure none of them was a spy, or had a telltale planted on them—or in them. The father’s name is Konnos. You’d like him, Majesty. He works for the government.” She leaned close and bared her teeth. “Just like you.”
“Shut up.” She found herself suddenly short of breath and sweating, and her heart thumped inside her chest as she imagined pulling the bladewand from her wrist sheath and just slicing his damned head off. She shivered with cold fury, and she wondered fleetingly if this is how Caine felt, just before he killed someone. “I trusted you, Majesty. I trusted you, and you lied to me, and people I care about died.”
“Think about what you’re doing, Pallas,” Majesty said, licking his lips, shifting his legs to scoot back from her.
“You,” she said, “will never lie to me again.”
“Pallas, really, this isn’t necessary—”
“I think it is. I have no one left to depend on, Majesty, and I have thirty-six people counting on me to save their lives. There were some people, three or four, that I knew I could trust. They’re dead now. I’m taking no more chances.” She shut her mouth abruptly. Why tell him any of this? She was only talking to herself, really, trying to justify to herself what she was about to do.
She dipped into a pocket on the inside of her belt and brought out a prism-shaped crystal of quartz, slightly smaller than one of her fingers. It rode within a platinum cage, attached to a platinum chain from which it dangled; she twirled the chain between her fingers to make the crystal spin and splinter off shards of moonlight.
“Don’t do it,” Majesty said hoarsely, trying to sound fierce. “Don’t put magick on me, Pallas. Nobody puts magick on me.”
A single breath slid her into mindview and kindled the glow of the force-pattern within the crystal; the briefest caress of her Shell triggered the Charm. The moonsplinters off the planes of quartz took on a phantom solidity in mindview; the splinters shot outward, carrying the force-pattern of the Charm like poison upon a blade. They pierced Majesty’s Shell, and the shining net of the Charm spread over his Shell’s dangerous yellow-shot orange like oil poured upon rippling water. One scant breath later, the shades of anger and fear faded into the greens of serenity and the warm, solid earth tones of absolute loyalty.
“You’re sure?” she asked lightly, surfacing out of mindview. “It’s just a little spell.”
Majesty took a deep breath, visibly steeling himself. “All right,” he said. “I trust you. Do what you think is right.”
I deserved that, she thought, wincing. It made her feel a little sick.
Forget that she didn’t really have any choice. Forget how many lives depended on her—and on him. She had reached into his heart and made herself the best friend he’d ever had, closer than a sister, closer than his mother. It was a terrible thing to do, even to an animal; to do this to a man—how had she come to this, all of a sudden? The woman she had been, only a few days ago, would never have considered such a thing. She’d enchanted that crystal against an emergency, a desperate situation, where she’d have no other choice. Did this qualify?
She shook herself; she’d worry about hypothetical erosion of her morals after the people in her care were safely away from Ankhana. “Come on, Majesty, get up,” she said. “We have some work to do.”
Majesty rose obediently and gazed at her like a loving puppy. “Whatever you say, Pallas.”
THE STINGING YELLOW glare of the Ankhanan sun stabbed through Caine’s eyelids like the flash of a bomb and brought him bolting upright out of the chair where he’d finally slept.
For a second that stretched toward the infinite, he struggled with the gluey mess inside his head, trying to fit together where he was and what was happening; then his eyes finally focused on the six men in the livery of the Household Knights who formed a sort of human wall between him and His Grace the Imperial Duke of Public Order.
Toa-Sytell stood by the window, his hand still on the curtain that he’d just now thrust aside. Sunlight streamed past him, filled with swirling motes of dust. “How are you feeling?”
Caine scratched at his tangled hair. “That depends. Did you bring coffee?”
“Then I feel like shit.” Caine squinted at the Duke, who now moved away from the window into the light. Purplish smears trailed downward from the Duke’s eyes, which were themselves bloodshot and puffy. “You’re not looking too well yourself. Late night?”
“That’s not your concern. I’ve come to take you to the Emperor.”
“We could have done this last night.”
“And the reason for this is—?”
Toa-Sytell spread his hands. “Ma’elKoth did not choose to summon you until this morning.”
Caine nodded, scratching disgustedly at his beard; keeping others waiting is a privilege of power everywhere, but he didn’t have to like it. In fact, he’d probably be pretty damn angry, once he was fully awake.
“You don’t think you still need these guys, do you?” he said, waving a dismissive hand at the guardsmen. “I thought we’d reached a sort of understanding.”
A sere smile barely bent the Duke’s mouth. “Perhaps I should be confident that I can depend upon your good nature; I imagine that Creele was.”
Last night, when Toa-Sytell had cautiously installed Caine in this room in the Colhari Palace, a room already provided with a generous platter of cold meats, bread and fruit, a carafe of wine, and a piping-hot bath freshly drawn, Caine had shaken his head and given a bitter laugh. He’d said, “And to think I just now killed a man for turning me over to you.”
Toa-Sytell, watching from the doorway as Caine’s shackles were removed by the King’s Eyes who’d accompanied them, had replied without a hint of humor, “Perhaps you were somewhat hasty.”
While Caine picked at the food, Toa-Sytell had revealed why the reward had been issued, why he’d been arrested and brought here. The stinging irony of it left Caine speechless.
The Emperor wanted to hire him to find Simon Jester. Wanted to pay him to do what he was already doing, wanted to offer all the resources of the Imperial Government to help him in his search.
Creele, all unknowing, had been doing Caine a favor.
Caine had very slowly and carefully laid aside the sandwich he’d made, swallowed, and said, “Sure. What does it pay and when can I start?”
But here was the sticking point: Ma’elKoth wished to personally interview him. Toa-Sytell didn’t know why. Caine was invited to bathe and wash his clothing, and to hold himself in readiness. He’d eagerly done so, even mending the tear in his breeches from the ogre’s tusk; his fingers had trembled, shook with the anticipation and the astonishment he felt at this swift surge of fortune—palace access, an excuse to meet privately with his target, and the full resources of the King’s Eyes to find his wife.
After that, he’d waited some more.
Alone in the sumptuous room, he’d paced up and down, growing impatient and angry, then furious. The door was locked from the outside, and when he’d rattled it, the solicitous voice of a guard posted in the hall had inquired if there was anything he needed. He’d checked the concealed service door, remembering its location from the week he’d spent in this palace masquerading as a servant before the murder of Toa-Phelathon, but that too was locked. He could, he had supposed, break a window and have a chance of escape, but to what?
He was imprisoned here more by his own wishes, his own hopes and desires, than by the locks on the doors. This was an opportunity he couldn’t bear to let pass.
His thoughts had twisted around the axis of the female prisoner in the Donjon like a pinwheel in the hand of a running child.
She could be in his arms within an hour, or less.
Because of that spell, it was certainly possible that Berne could have captured her without understanding who she was, just taken her into custody for her proximity to the scene, arrested her because she was there. It was possible.
It was also possible that the prisoner in the Donjon was this Talann woman. Shanna could be anywhere. It could be she was having a lavish dinner at a club on the South Bank. It could be she was cornered in an Alientown back alley, fighting for her life against the Cats.
It could be she was already dead.
The uncertainty had chewed at him like a rat trapped inside his skull.
Ma’elKoth had never come, had never sent for him. As the night crept by he had only been able to pace angrily and watch the level of rose-scented oil in the lamp’s base shrink by the millimeter; he’d counted with the beating of his heart each minute of Shanna’s life that he wasted in this room.
Sometime past midnight he had gotten over any regret for Creele’s murder.
Finally exhaustion had dragged him into a soft overstuffed chair. He had sat, brooding on his helplessness, until that brooding passed seamlessly into sleep.
Now he preceded his escorts into the corridors of the Colhari Palace. The six Household Knights followed him in a shallow arc, and Toa-Sytell came last, his hands clasped behind him and an expression of thoughtful attention on his face. Their boot heels made no noise on the deep teal runner that half covered the pale, vaguely peachy marble floor. Toa-Sytell directed Caine verbally—turn here, here again, take these stairs.
The stairs were near an open archway that led onto a vertical shaft with oiled ropes at the back and sides that stretched upward and downward out of sight. Near the arch was a bellpull. Caine nodded toward this arrangement as they passed. “Too many of us for the Shifting Room, eh?”
Toa-Sytell replied, “Yes, the ogres on the donkey wheel in the cellar cannot manage more than three or . . . But then, you’d know all this, I imagine.” In his voice whispered an odd huskiness, a thickness of some unidentifiable emotion.
Caine shrugged and walked on to the stairs. They went down two floors in silence, and along another corridor, and Caine could now detect a growing carnal scent, a coppery, meat-locker kind of smell.
“You and I are nearly of an age, Caine,” Toa-Sytell said abruptly. “You cannot be more than four or five years my junior. Do you have children?”
Caine stopped and squinted at the Duke over his shoulder. “What’s it to you?”
“Sons are a man’s pride, Caine, and daughters are the comfort of his age. I am only curious.”
Caine shrugged. “Maybe someday.”
“I had two. Sons that I loved, Caine. Who grew into men of honor, strong and fierce. Tashinel and Jarrothe. They were both killed, only a month apart, in the Succession War.”
He said this as though he were reporting a rise in crop prices in the markets, but something dark and potent flickered behind his face.
Caine’s eyes held those of the Duke for a moment, gravely acknowledging his loss. Another knife aimed at my conscience, he thought. But compared with the other wounds his conscience had taken, this was barely a scratch.
Eventually, he dropped his gaze as though ashamed, then turned to walk again. Let him think I feel it more than I do, if that’s what he wants. Let him take what comfort he can.
And I should remember that Berne might not be my only enemy in the palace.
Toa-Sytell said, “Your destination is through that archway at the hall’s end. Take care not to speak, or in any way interrupt the Emperor. He’s engaged in what he calls his Great Work, and will address you when and if he so desires.”
“Great Work?” The capitals had been audible in the Duke’s tone.
The bloody scent grew thicker. By the time Caine reached the doorway he could taste it, like raw meat a couple of days old.
This room had been the Lesser Ballroom in the days of Toa-Phelathon, an intimate space for fetes of less than a thousand guests. Sunlight strong enough to singe the eyeballs glared in through the huge windows that dominated the south wall, narrow Gothic-arched windows ten meters high and separated by sturdy columns of imported granite. The center of the parquet dancing floor had been cut away, and a shallow bowl half a stone’s throw across had been scooped from the limestone beneath.
The resulting pit was lined with coals that glimmered red and cast a wilting heat, but no smoke or scent of any kind; supported on legs of brass above it was a massive cauldron, shallow as a stew bowl but broad enough to swim laps in. The cauldron was tended by pages who raced around its edges, stirring with long wooden poles held high above their sweat-soaked heads or pouring hods of this or that into the brew, while pairs of others roamed from side to side, bearing massive leather-lung bellows. These they rested on the floor and leaned upon with all their weight, to breathe searing yellow life into the coals below.
Within the cauldron appeared to be boiling mud, or very wet clay; it was from here that Caine thought the blood-scent—as well as some bitter, acidic undernote—might be coming. The entire room rippled and shimmered with heat.
Barefoot across the surface of the boiling mud walked the Emperor Ma’elKoth.
His size alone made him unmistakable. Caine stood just within the archway and studied him from there, mindful of that finger poking at the back his head, that nagging sense of familiarity to the way the Emperor had moved, had gestured and spoken in the recording Kollberg had shown him.
The Emperor wore only a kilt of crimson velvet bordered with a weave of cloth-of-gold, and there was something of the dinosaur, of the dragon, in the slow, majestic grace of his movements, the way he would flow from pose to pose with evident satisfaction, as though the play of muscle in his massive arms and shoulders, chest and back, gave him some deeply spiritual joy to be savored; as though it answered some personal aesthetic need in a fashion as primal as sex.
This wasn’t it—Caine couldn’t find that tug of familiarity here. These movements were as stylized as a bodybuilder’s, and as precise as ballet.
The boiling clay beneath Ma’elKoth spat smoking gobbets up his legs; he paid them no more attention than he did the breeze from the pages’ bellows. His eyes shone pale shamrock green and more: fluorescent emerald. He raised his hands like a priest extending benediction, and from the boiling clay there rose a formless mass, still spitting steam and roiling with its heat.
The mass of clay, a hundred kilos or more, hung in the heat-shimmer, two meters above the surface, supported only by Ma’elKoth’s will. Pseudopodia squirmed outward from the mass, five limbs that stretched and seemed to form themselves of their own accord. Clay fell away from the mass, dropping like fresh shit back into the mud beneath; four of the limbs stretched and thinned while one contracted, and the mass took on the shape of a man.
The man-shape looked small, even tiny, beside the Emperor’s bulk. It rotated in the air, its features refining. Ripples and folds of what would represent clothing passed in waves over its surface. Its face slowly swung through Caine’s view; this face had a close-clipped mustache and thin jawline beard, a nose with the slight bend of an old break and a scar across it, and his mouth went suddenly dry.
He lifted a foot to step forward, to get closer, and Ma’elKoth said, “Please do not move. This is, you might imagine, difficult.”
He had never even glanced toward the archway. There was no way he could have seen Caine standing there; not with his eyes, anyway.
Caine stared at the statue, barely daring to breathe. Tyshalle’s bloody Axe, he thought.
And by the time this thought was completed, it was true: it was a replica, perfect in every detail save only that it still had the color of the clay—it even matched his posture in the doorway. It hung in the air, rotating slowly like a body on the gallows, while Ma’elKoth studied his handiwork. The Emperor’s voice had the warm and distant rumbling tone of a father heard through the walls of the womb.
“You may move now, Caine. Please come in.”
The pages who scurried around the cauldron, stirring and pumping the bellows, barely spared him a glance as he entered the room. Caine’s step was tentative, and his chest ached with some emotion that he couldn’t at first identify because he really couldn’t remember ever having felt this before—seconds passed before he realized that it was awe.
This had been the most astonishing display of total mastery he’d ever seen: it was impossible for him to conceive of a man more completely in control of every element of his environment.
And I’ve contracted to kill this man, Caine thought. I’d better catch him in his sleep.
Ma’elKoth strode across the boiling surface of the clay, oblivious to the steam and the heat, the Caine-manikin he’d made bobbing along behind him like a puppy. His smile of welcome warmed Caine like a shot of whiskey, and he said, “I cannot quite see where this piece fits. What do you think?”
“Piece?” Caine said hoarsely. What piece? Piece of what? “I don’t understand.”
An Olympian chuckle: “Of course not. You look on this—” He nodded toward the clay statue. “—as a finished work of art. To Me, it is only a single piece: of that.”
Ma’elKoth swept up a hand to point behind and above Caine’s head. Caine turned and looked up, and up, and up. His mouth hung open like a child’s does, as he stared up the side of a skyscraper.
It could only have belonged to a Titan, to Atlas who carried the sky on his shoulders. From just above the arch to the very ceiling of the ballroom, thirty-five meters above, stretched this Gargantuan relief of a face.
It was less than half finished. Some parts were still bare wall; others had the structure of bones building slowly outward. Only the brow and one eye were truly complete.
Like the jigsaw puzzle of an insane god, it had been constructed of human bodies, layered and pieced and interlaced like corpses in a mass grave; an instant later Caine realized that these weren’t bodies, of course, not actual corpses, but were clay statues like the one of him that floated at Ma’elKoth’s shoulder.
The sheer immensity of it was staggering; when he thought of how much work it had taken to form each perfect manikin and fit each into place, when he thought of how much work remained to be done, that earlier awe swelled into his throat, choking off any real hope that Ma’elKoth was just another thaumaturge, merely a man of power writ large.
“Do you like it?” Ma’elKoth boomed. “I call it The Future of Humanity.”
At these words something clicked within Caine’s mind, and he saw it: he had an instant’s prophetic vision that built the bones outward, and fleshed them, and painted them with color.
Caine whispered, “It looks like you.”
“Of course it does. It’s a self-portrait.”
Ma’elKoth’s voice came now from just at his side, and Caine turned to find himself nose-to-collarbone with the Emperor’s immense chest. He must have leaped down from the cauldron’s rim as silently as a cat. Caine could smell him: rich masculine sweat over the lavender-scented oil that gleamed in his hair and beard, and the thick, meaty odor of the clay that caked his bare flesh. Ma’elKoth showed his perfectly white, perfectly even, and impressively large teeth.
“All great art is ultimately self-portraiture, Caine.”
There was something so daunting about being within the reach of those bulging arms that Caine couldn’t speak, could only nod in response.
The Caine manikin was beside him, perfect in height and every feature: Caine looked into his own eyes modeled in clay, and could see now that even individual hairs were modeled into the beard.
Ma’elKoth said, “And this is the piece with which I’m working right now, but I cannot quite see where it needs to go. Every piece must have its own place; every piece must contribute to the whole.
I have been working with this one from time to time for two days now, and I still do not see it. Perhaps you have a suggestion?”
Caine shook his head and forced words through his constricted throat. “I wouldn’t presume.”
“Just so,” Ma’elKoth sighed. “Well, then. If no proper place can be found—”
The Emperor lifted his hand up before his eyes and suddenly made a fist; the Caine manikin convulsed and squeezed out of shape, squirting its clay-flesh out between the fingers of some invisible giant.
For just one instant Caine thought he saw an expression on his face of clay, of some hideous and inexpressible agony, and then it too was crushed. Another gesture from Ma’elKoth, and the irregular ball of clay lofted up over the rim of the cauldron like a child’s ball to splash down into the clay from whence it had come.
Ma’elKoth said, “Any questions?”
“You,” Caine replied slowly, “are not subtle.”
“Subtlety is for the weak. It is a wheedling tactic they use to achieve their desires, when they lack the power to do so directly.”
Funny, Caine thought. I can remember saying almost the same thing, more than once.
A page walked by carrying a large bucket of dark liquid, which he then poured over the rim of the cauldron. Caine watched him do this, then squinted up at Ma’elKoth.
“Here’s a question: what’s this stuff they keep pouring into the clay? It smells like blood.”
“It is blood,” Ma’elKoth replied gravely. “All Great Works are built with blood; did you not know this?”
“That’s, ah—” Caine cleared his throat uncomfortably. “That’s usually just a metaphor.”
He rubbed his hands together briskly and suddenly clapped a comradely hand on Caine’s back, hard enough to make him stagger. “Come. I must wash, and you, of course, are hungry and should eat. We have much discussion ahead of us.”
He strode off through the arch with a swinging gait so fast that Caine had to jog to keep up.
THE BREAKFAST TABLE looked to be laid out for a banquet, loaded with everything from vegetable soufflés to stuffed quail. Caine sipped from a tall frost-rimmed goblet of iced coffee and tried not to think of Greek myths and pomegranate seeds.
Ma’elKoth lay on a curving couch at the far end of the table, reclining with leonine ease. He’d made skillful small talk while Caine had sat beside his bath; the three lovely girls who’d shared the bath with him, scrubbing away the hardening clay, had drawn no more of Ma’elKoth’s attention than had the table alongside the tub.
Caine hunched over the table so that the hilts of his new knives poked into his ribs; he was acutely aware of the presence of all seven of these blades. On the stroll from the baths to the breakfast chamber, Ma’elKoth had suddenly turned to him and said joyfully, “I must beg your pardon for a poor host. I have only now realized why you seem so uncomfortable and reticent in conversation. Please follow Me.”
The Emperor had led him to the Arms Gallery on the second floor and ushered him into a bedchamber-sized room whose walls and floor were filled with rack after rack of every conceivable style of knife, from bent-blades like khukris to fan-hilted mains gauche, katar-like punching daggers, tanto-style chisel blades, even a few with the foot-long isosceles blade of an Arkansas Toothpick. “Please,” Ma’elKoth had said. “Help yourself.”
Caine had picked up a rippled-blade dress dagger similar to a Florentine flame stiletto and turned it in his fingers. They were alone, together, in a small room with a thick door, and the place was full of knives.
“You know,” he’d said, “Creele believed that someone had hired me to kill you. You might be well advised to keep me unarmed.”
Deep amusement had sparkled within the Emperor’s brilliant green eyes. “Am I a fool? You, Caine, are never unarmed. I could cut your arms from your shoulders, and you would still kill with your feet. Please, accept My hospitality. It is My Wish that you be completely at ease.”
At ease? In the presence of Ma’elKoth?
And so Caine had sat down to breakfast with every sheath full of fresh steel.
Caine had been waiting all morning for Ma’elKoth to get down to business. Now, finally, he could wait no more.
“Duke Toa-Sytell explained what you want of me. I’m willing. I only want to know what resources I can use, and what you’ll pay me.”
He knew he was overplaying, showing too much eagerness, but he couldn’t help it and he no longer cared: that sharp need was there, in his guts, pulling him along. He had to get out of this place, had to get onto the streets and onto Shanna’s trail.
“Caine, please,” Ma’elKoth said languidly from his couch. “It’s vulgar to discuss business during a meal, and bad for the digestion.”
“You’re not eating,” Caine pointed out.
“I no longer eat,” Ma’elKoth said with a heavy shrug. “Nor do I sleep. In small, peripheral ways like these, power such as Mine can be a burden.”
So much for catching him napping, or slipping a couple drops of arsenic into his stew, Caine thought. He let a little of his impatience creep into his voice. “Well, if we’re not going to talk business, why are we wasting our time?”
“This time is not wasted, Caine. I am using it to study you.”
Caine carefully set down his goblet; he didn’t want to slop coffee onto the linen tablecloth if his hand should start to shake.
“Indeed. It was a Power, Caine, that drew your name and image from My mind, a Power from Outside that answered My query: Who shall bring this pestiferous Simon Jester into My grasp? Initially, I was inclined to trust this happy accident, that the Power showed me a face I knew so well that Drawing you here required less than two full days.”
“Drawing me?” Caine said, frowning. “You think I’m here because of some kind of—”
“Let’s not quibble, dear boy. I desired your presence, and here you are. These are facts; the mechanism behind them is irrelevant. Furthermore, while I am gratified that you now feel enough at your ease to interrupt Me, it is discourteous to do so. Even rude.”
The surface of Ma’elKoth’s tone remained light, but subterranean echoes beneath his contrabasso rumble hinted that some large and hungry creature slept fitfully, down within his chest. He waited, outwardly calm, staring at Caine with limpid hazel eyes—
Hey, Caine thought, weren’t his eyes blue, before? Or green? Momentarily distracted, Caine let the silence stretch to a painful length before coming back to himself. He met the Emperor’s gaze somewhat sheepishly. “Apologies, Imperial Maj—”
“Accepted,” Ma’elKoth said briskly. “I do not stand much on ceremony here, as you may have noticed. Ceremony is for insignificant men who lick others’pretended awe like spittle from their chins. As I was saying, My original intention of simply allowing you to undertake this task has fallen by the wayside because I, Caine, am a man cursed with curiosity. I asked the fatal question: Why you?”
Caine spread his hands. “I’m wondering the same thing myself.”
“My quest for the answer to this question led Me to consider your career.” Ma’elKoth suddenly sat upright and laid his palms upon the table between them. His eyes burned. “Do you have any conception of how extraordinary a man you are, Caine?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of the six crucial turning points of the history in this Empire over this past turbulent decade, you were a central participant in four of them. The only tangible links between the four are their magnitude, and the fact that you, personally, affected the outcome.”
Ma’elKoth ticked them off on his fingers. “One, the assassination of Prince-Regent Toa-Phelathon—” He held up a hand. “—do not bore Me with protestations of innocence—that triggered the Succession War, which ended in the destruction of the Menelethid Dynasty and My accession to the Throne. Two, you led the small party of adventurers who, at great personal risk, came out of the Boedecken Waste with news of the rise of Khulan G’Thar, and his unification of the ogrilloi, in time for Ankhana to fortify its border cities and raise two armies against his onslaught.”
“That was kind of by accident,” Caine said. He and his partners had been looking for artifacts and treasure among the ruins of an age-old primal metropolis—from the days thousands of years before when the elves still built and lived in cities—when they’d been captured by a nomadic ogrillo tribe. The bloody games the ogrilloi had played with them, and Caine’s bloodier escape with his two surviving companions, made Retreat from the Boedecken still a popular rental, after nearly a decade.
“Nonetheless. More than a year later, as incompetence among the Ankhanan generals allowed the Khulan Horde to threaten the very existence of humanity on this continent, it was you, Caine, who infiltrated Khulan G’thar’s personal guard. Not only did you furnish the Ankhanan army with G’thar’s complete order of battle in time for our armies to link with the Monastic Expeditionary Force and meet the Khulan Horde at Ceraeno, but you reentered the Horde, engaged the Khulan himself in single combat, and killed him.”
“Single combat,” Caine said with a slow smile, “is a little bit of an overstatement. I snuck up behind him during the battle and stabbed him in the back. The old bastard was tougher than I thought—he broke my arm with that morningstar he carried for a scepter. I can still feel it every time it rains.” The warm pride that snuck into his tone was only peripherally related to Ma’elKoth’s praise; Last Stand at Ceraeno was popularly considered Caine’s greatest Adventure.
Ma’elKoth shrugged. “Details are only trivia. On that particular occasion, you certainly saved the Empire single-handedly. In fact, as I glean stories and rumors from across the continent, you are involved almost constantly in great doings of one sort or another . . .”
His voice went deadly soft, a silken garrote sliding across a soft throat. “And I wonder how it is that one man can be so relentlessly important. Curious, isn’t it?”
It’s because the Studio sends me where the action is, he thought, and he didn’t have a better explanation. He was painfully aware of how treacherous had become the ground on which this conversation walked; it had suddenly shifted from dry and pleasant flattery to hungry quicksand.
How much did Ma’elKoth really know about these Aktiri he hunted so ruthlessly?
“Now a Power has told Me that you are the only man who can catch Simon Jester. I spent all of last night attempting to determine why that is so. While you slept, I subjected you to every test at My command.”
Caine’s mouth went entirely dry. “And?”
“And I found nothing. Whatever power it is that drives you to the center of these events, it is not magickal. The only peculiarity I found was the color of your Shell—it’s black, you know, and quite unreadable. This perhaps explains some of your success against thaumaturges—I know you’ve killed quite a number of adepts, in your day—and other magick-using creatures. Must be a substantial advantage, when your emotions and intentions cannot be read.”
“Sometimes,” Caine said, letting out a long, slow breath.
“But this is hardly unique; it is only rare. Lacking the resources to satisfy My curiosity by Myself, I have come to another course of action: to ask you.”
Ma’elKoth nodded ponderously. “Indeed. I hope you do; frustration I find intolerable. In My frustration of last night, I nearly killed you.”
Caine blinked. “Oh?” he said thinly.
“A spell. A power. I closely considered taking your life so that I could absorb some of the memories of your departing spirit.”
“That, ah,” Caine said carefully, “seems a little extreme . . .”
“Well, yes,” Ma’elKoth said with a dry chuckle. “Understanding how you can catch Simon Jester might have done Me little good without having you here to perform the task.”
“I guess I still don’t understand why you can’t find, uh, this guy yourself,” Caine said.
“It is a spell of concealment that Simon Jester has done, that is still in action. I have been able to analyze its effects, but I cannot counteract it—not yet, perhaps not ever. The Power from Outside told Me that this spell is easily broken once I lay hands upon its caster. It operates directly on the mind, splintering off the bits and pieces of knowledge I have about him; it prevents Me from connecting one to another, or even noticing that a connection is possible. It is infuriating to think that I may already know who Simon Jester is, and that I’m simply prevented from putting a face to the name.”
Oh boy, Caine thought. Oh, holy shit. It wasn’t a flash of inspiration, rather it was more of a slow dawning: he came to realize that the answer to this question was the same as the answer to the previous one.
Everyone here, the way their eyes would go vague whenever he mentioned Simon Jester, or Pallas Ril—the reason this didn’t happen to him was that in his heart, in his mind, in his cherished dreams of happiness, there was no Simon Jester. There was no Pallas Ril. There was only Shanna. He didn’t love the abstraction, the Scarlet Pimpernel game she’d been playing; he didn’t love the character, the persona of Pallas Ril. It was Shanna, had always been Shanna.
Would always be Shanna, forever.
There was no answer that could be made, even if he’d wanted to. If she’d been his worst enemy alive, the Studio’s conditioning would strangle his voice, even kill him, before the truth of her could pass his lips. And the closer Ma’elKoth came to the answer of his questions, the closer he came to the truth of Caine.
Truth that was, in this case, lethal.
I’m going to die, here, Caine thought. Eventually, he’s going to realize what’s going on, what I am, and then he’s going to kill me.
And even if he doesn’t, I’ve contracted to take him down. When I try, he’ll snuff me like a candle.
Death, like the sun, was something that not even Caine could stare at too steadily; he wondered fleetingly if Creele and Toa-Phelathon and his countless other victims would be waiting for him, then he put it out of his mind.
The best I can hope for is to get Shanna back to Earth alive. Win or lose, live or die, I don’t give a shit so long as she’s all right.
“What is it?” Ma’elKoth asked, leaning forward and studying Caine’s face. “You’ve come to some realization, I can see it. Tell me. Now.”
“I have,” Caine said, “come to the realization that I don’t really need to be polite to you anymore.”
“Oh?” Ma’elKoth looked more amused than offended.
He shrugged, and gave the Emperor a cynical half smile. “If you didn’t need me to catch Simon Jester for you, I’d be dead already. You said so yourself. So maybe I’m thinking it’s stupid to worry about staying on your good side.”
Some of the amusement in the Emperor’s eyes began to fade, and his rumble sounded faintly dangerous.
“Be reasonable: accept the facts, and let me get on with it.”
“Reasonable, indeed,” Ma’elKoth purred. He rested his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers before his face. “ ‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Thus all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’ ”
That’s Shaw! Caine thought, thunderstruck. That particular quote was a favorite of Duncan’s—where would Ma’elKoth have come across a quote from an Earth author? And a banned one, at that . . .
“You know,” he said carefully, “my father used to say that to me.”
“I know.” Ma’elKoth’s smile broke like the dawn. “You quoted him to Me once before, and I never forget.”
This shit has gone far enough, he thought, and said, “All right, I give up.”
Caine shook his head irritably. “I’ve been trying to figure out where I know you from. I mean, I know your reputation, from the Plains War and the Succession War, and I’ve seen what you’ve done here in Ankhana, but I keep getting the feeling that we’ve met, that I know you. Your manner—the way you talk, especially, the way every other sentence is some sweeping statement about the Nature of Reality or something—I know we’ve met before, somewhere, but I’m damned if I remember. And I’m damned if I can understand how I could forget meeting a seven-foot, three-hundred-forty-pound adept who looks like a sculptor’s wet dream.”
“Mm, flattery.” Caine could feel Ma’elKoth’s answering laugh vibrate against his chest. “We do know each other, Caine. You might say that you met Me in My former life. Once before, I hired you to do a job of work.”
“Indeed. And We worked rather closely together for a time. It was, oh, seven years ago, I’d say, shortly before the Plains War. I hired you to retrieve the crown which once belonged to Dal’kannith of the Thousand Hands.”
Caine stared, openmouthed. “You’re kidding.”
The Emperor shook his head smugly. “I am not. You knew Me as Hannto of Ptreia, and I believe by My rather uncomplimentary nickname ‘the Scythe.’ ”
“Hannto . . .” Caine breathed, unbelieving. “You’re Hannto the Scythe?”
The man who’d hired Caine to steal Dal’kannith’s crown had been a thaumaturge, all right; he’d been a rat-faced little weasel with bad skin, maybe ten years Caine’s senior. Hannto was fairly adept, but not spectacular; he specialized in necromancy to support his hobby, which was collecting relics of various historical figures. The crown was the only surviving relic of the legendary Lipkan warlord Dal’kannith, who later came to personify their god of war; it had been missing since Jhereth’s Revolt, more than three hundred years before, when Hannto had gotten a lead on its whereabouts. But Hannto . . . He was nothing, really; Caine could have broken him in half with one hand—he was known as the Scythe for his physique, his sunken chest and crooked back.
“I am not,” the Emperor said, “Hannto the Scythe. I was Hannto the Scythe, some years ago. Now, I am Ma’elKoth. Emperor of Ankhana, Shield of Prorithun, Lion of the White Waste, and so forth and so on.”
The Emperor grinned, obviously enjoying Caine’s awe. “What is so difficult to believe? With the power of the crown—and some few other bits and pieces I’d acquired over the years—I transformed Myself.” He stretched like a sleepy lion. “I made Myself into the man I had always wished to be. Is this so very odd? Have you, Caine, not done the same?”
“Maybe,” Caine allowed slowly, “but for me the results weren’t so, ahh, spectacular. . .”
“You’re too modest. Your acquisition of the crown, by the way, that’s the fourth of those crucial turning points of the history of the Empire of which I spoke. And the most important, if I do say so Myself.”
Caine continued to squint at Ma’elKoth, still trying to glimpse the whiny, neurotic little necromancer he’d known, somewhere within this mountain of granite assurance.
“What are you? I mean what are you, really?”
Ma’elKoth spread his hands. “What you see before you. I have no secrets, Caine. Can you say the same?”
There was no safe answer for this; Caine only continued to stare. After a moment Ma’elKoth sighed and pressed himself up onto his feet.
The plate before him had barely been touched. Caine shrugged. “I guess I don’t have much appetite.”
Ma’elKoth made for the door. Caine quickly mopped the corners of his mouth, and then surreptitiously swiped the napkin over the cold sweat that had moistened his forehead. At least I managed to change the subject.
He wadded the napkin and tossed it onto his plate. He rose and followed in the Emperor’s wake.
THE GREAT HALL of the Colhari Palace was vast, a titanic echoing space floored with marble and walled with travertine. Caine remembered walking that floor as he’d paced up to the Oaken Throne almost a decade ago.
Tel-Alcontaur, the elder brother of Toa-Phelathon, had offered Caine a barony for his heroism against the Khulan Horde at Ceraeno. The Studio had had no interest in their fastest-rising young star settling down to run a backwater holding on Overworld, and furthermore it was traditional for Monastic citizens to refuse titles and decorations offered by temporal monarchs, and so Caine had come to respectfully turn down the old King’s offer, a ceremonial formal refusal.
He remembered how empty the Hall had felt, despite that it had been packed nearly shoulder-to-shoulder with nobles and dignitaries and officers and prominent citizens of all descriptions. The towering opalescent arches of the ceiling shot back hollow echoes of every sound and made the place feel empty no matter how crowded it might be.
The Oaken Throne, where Ma’elKoth now sat, still stood on its broad rectangular dais, twenty-seven tall steps above the vast floor of the Hall; narrow tapestries with the dust- and lampblack-smokiness of age still hung between the soaring buttresses, but this was the extent of the Hall’s resemblance to Caine’s memories.
Ma’elKoth had made some changes around here.
The dusty light from the south windows vanished into the magmatic glow of twelve bronze braziers, each wide enough for a tall man to recline within. Coals of the same sort as the ones beneath the cauldron in the Lesser Ballroom burned there, light and heat without smoke. They did not seem to consume themselves, but their light was not so steady as that cast by lamps might be; rather it shifted and pulsed until the shadows it cast seemed alive, and purposeful.
In the center of the floor a gigantic platform had been built, a square nine feet high and hundreds of feet on the side; it was draped with enough maroon-and-gold bunting to clothe the entire palace staff.
Over it all towered a statue of Ma’elKoth, nude, cast in bronze.
The shining bronze nude stood with arms akimbo and feet spread in a stance of authority and power, its crotch a meter or so above the level of the platform’s floor. Not even the faintest tint of verdigris dulled the shine of its mighty musculature, and the expression on its face was one of perfect benevolence and warmth. From his angle, Caine could see that the statue was double-sided, so that there was another face staring back over the platform.
Caine nodded to himself; he took the statue’s double face as a warning omen.
Between the legs of the statue was a short, angled slide, also of bronze, that led down from the platform to a shallow basin at the foot of the steps to the throne. Caine could just barely make out the shadow of a Herculean penis on the opposite front of the statue; on this side there was only a swollen fold at the crotch that seemed to be a stylized representation of a vagina.
He had a feeling that things were going to get weird.
He sat in a tiny curtained alcove just behind the throne. There were a pair of chairs in this alcove; Caine sat in one, his eye pressed to a tiny judas gate in the wall at Ma’elKoth’s back. Ma’elKoth had installed him here, explaining that he had no desire to forgo the pleasure of Caine’s company simply because the hour had come for Ma’elKoth to give audience.
So Caine sat and watched, while delegation after delegation from around the Empire was ushered into the Great Hall. One spokesman from each group would come forward and mount the steps to the throne to present their supplication. Ma’elKoth would listen and nod, and when they were finished he’d direct the delegation to the platform. The delegations would go beneath the platform, and there remove their clothes.
A line of naked men and women, from humble Squires to Dukes of the Empire, climbed the stairs to the platform.
They joined the growing crowd there, a crowd of naked shivering men and women of all ages, who waited and watched—understandably, a little nervously—while Ma’elKoth dealt with each of their successors.
Through this all, Ma’elKoth kept up a running sotto voce commentary for Caine’s benefit, speaking of this Baron or that Knight, and the troubles in their lands, their past political connections, their current ambitions, and what use Ma’elKoth might find for them in his Great Work. Sometimes the conversation ranged widely, but it always seemed to come back around to Ma’elKoth, to his accomplishments and his plans.
Caine suspected that Ma’elKoth held him here, told him all this, largely because Caine had known the man he’d once been, and thus could appreciate how far he’d come and how much he’d done; the underlying desire for approval this implied might have been his only human weakness.
Caine slowly—and uncomfortably—decided that he really, kind of, liked Ma’elKoth. There was something immensely attractive in his effortless and unlimited confidence; his arrogance was so fully supported by power that it became almost a virtue. Whenever Caine let himself forget why he was here, and what he would have to do, his trepidation dwindled and he found himself drawn to the man; not, perhaps, in the sense of human attraction, of friendship, but rather more in the sense that some men are drawn to the sea, and others to mountains.
How could he not like someone who took such obvious joy in simply being alive, in being who he was?
“I destroyed the crown, of course,” Ma’elKoth was saying. “It was only a key to unlock the gate that restrained the power I now wield, and I saw no sense in allowing anyone else access to this power. And I could use this power—” He passed a hand over his robes as though to say, Voila! “—to remake Myself in any image I chose. First, I made Myself beautiful—recalling how Hannto looked, you might understand why. Then I gave Myself brilliance, an intellect that borders on the omniscient. Next, I gave Myself another form of power: nearly unlimited wealth. Latterly, I have become the Ankhanan Emperor: political power, real authority. But I’m not finished yet.”
“You’re not?” Caine asked. “What do you do for an encore, become God?”
And the very next delegation had come from the free farmers of Kaarn; they’d traveled a thousand miles to ask the Emperor to break the drought that was searing their fields. Ma’elKoth gave his word in agreement and sent the men to the platform.
As they walked with stiff dignity under the bunting, Caine whispered, “That’s quite a promise.”
Ma’elKoth answered with his infectious Olympian chuckle. “And I’ll keep it. I’d be a piss-poor god if I cannot even make rain.”
He spent a moment settling a land dispute between two Kirischan Barons. He did it well, so far as Caine could see; both Barons appeared satisfied as they ducked under the bunting below the platform. Then Ma’elKoth returned to the subject.
“Ironically, it was the Aktiri who inspired Me in this.”
Caine was glad to be behind the wall and out of sight; he swallowed and steadied his voice before he said lightly, “The Aktiri? Aren’t you a little old to believe in Aktiri?”
“Mmm, Caine, if you had seen what I’ve seen . . .”
“I thought,” he said carefully, “well, to tell you the truth, I thought this whole Aktir hunt was just a dodge to wipe out your political opposition.”
“And so it was. I am a tyrant, after all: I hold the throne without any legitimate claim of succession. I am, in fact, a commoner.”
He settled back into the Oaken Throne and looked darkly out upon his subjects. “Despite My ability, and My popularity with the common folk of the Empire, the nobility has been arrayed against Me since the day I took power. Denouncing this Count or that Baronet as an Aktir not only destroys the credibility of his opposition, but it gives Me a perfectly legitimate excuse to have him killed. And yes, I thought that the Aktiri were no more than stories, convenient phantoms to shade the features of My enemies.
“Until they tried to murder me.
“Eight men, with weapons such as no one has ever seen, that spit pellets like slingstones in a stream like rainwater from a gargoyle’s mouth; they attacked Me within the very halls of My palace. Twenty-six of My household died in that attack, only seven of them Household Knights, only three others of Armiger rank; the rest were unarmed: servants, men and women, and three pages who were no more than children.”
Caine winced behind his concealing wall. Eight men with assault rifles . . . Kollberg, you’re a real hero.
“I took six of them alive. Three died in the Theater of Truth, under the care of Master Arkadeil; it was there that I learned much of the Aktiri. They are as human as you are, Caine, as human as I once was. Some geas of their masters stops their breath if they attempt to tell of their world, but I learned much from them nonetheless, and more from the other three that I killed with My own hands.”
Learned much? Caine thought. He knew the limits of Studio conditioning very well, the hand-to-his-throat choking sensation of trying to so much as speak English here on Overworld. The Studio claimed that it was impossible for an Actor to reveal himself or others as Actors, no matter what the duress—they would die if somehow they were forced beyond their capacity to keep silent.
“It was that spell we spoke of, the one I nearly used on you, Caine,” Ma’elKoth went on as though aware of Caine’s thoughts. “I developed and refined it in experiments on a number of enemies of the Empire. When in the mindview trance, holding this spell, I can trap the fading essence of a man’s memories—his soul, if you care to call it that—if his body no longer has the life to hold it within. In this way I learned much of their world.”
A freezing hand stroked down Caine’s spine. I’m one of the most famous men on that world.
“There, humanity is ascendant. They own the world and have only fading legends of the subhumans. They all speak a single language, and have magick that would beggar your imagination, Caine, if I were to try to tell you of it. You would think Me mad.”
He paused, his eyes distant as they ranged over the wonders of this alien world. “And I sought, among their memories, the reason for humanity’s success, there, why they have become so much while we have remained so little, and I believe that I have found it.”
Caine coughed into his hand to clear his throat. “Oh?”
“It’s our gods, Caine. The gods who rule us, they hold us back. Even though they are restrained from direct intervention in human affairs by the Covenant of Pirichanthe, they continue to squabble and fight through their priests and followers; they spark no end of conflict, wasting forces that should be used to defend the race. The Aktiri, though—more than four thousand years ago, a small band of desert raiders on their world originated a stunning idea. They decided that their god was the only real god; all others were either figments of the imagination or demons that had duped their followers. After two thousand years, the followers of this One God became evangelical, but not in our sense; they did not merely persuade folk that following their god would bring them greater happiness or better luck. They would not allow any other gods to be worshiped. They would often murder the priests, and their followers, and destroy the temples of competing gods. Over time, these tactics brought success. The extraordinary thing is, none of these Aktiri were certain that this god had ever existed—! Do you see? If so much can be done with a god who may be only an intellectual concept, how much more powerful would be the concept of a single god who is present, who is potent, who can unite every human soul to stand against the threats we all face? I am that god, Caine. I have become that god, so that I can save the human race from extinction.”
I don’t know if you’re completely fucking bugnuts, or I am, Caine thought, because I almost kind of believe you. He said, “Wow.”
“Excuse an impertinent question?”
“I already have. Several times.”
Caine took that for a yes. “Did you become a god because you wanted to save the race, or do you want to save the race because it gives you an excuse to become a god?”
Ma’elKoth’s laugh boomed out through the Great Hall, bringing startled flinches from the crowd and most of the guards.
“This, Caine, is part of why I so value your company. I have pondered that question Myself, from time to time. I have decided that the answer is irrelevant.”
The next petitioners came up the steps with clear reluctance, and no wonder: as far as they could see, Ma’elKoth had been muttering silently for some time, and just now had laughed out loud at a joke he’d told himself.
This wouldn’t improve his reputation for sanity.
He dealt with their request swiftly and neatly, and as they retreated down the steps he went on.
“And perhaps the greatest threat that humanity faces today is these selfsame Aktiri.”
“I, ah . . .” Caine said. “That’s, mm, don’t you think that’s a bit of an exaggeration?”
Ma’elKoth turned his massive leonine head to meet Caine’s gaze through the judas gate, and his eyes burned with righteous fury, with hatred so passionate that Caine felt it in his guts.
“You can have no concept of the evil of these creatures,” he said. “They are deadly enemies of mankind, and of Myself in particular. Tell me—try to guess why they come here, why they kill My people and try to murder Me, why they rape our women and slaughter our children. Try.”
Caine discovered that he had no voice. His stomach knotted.
“It’s entertainment, Caine. They’re worse than demons—even the Outside Powers that prey upon men do so to feed, to sustain themselves upon our terror and despair; the Aktiri do so to divert their idle hours. Just for fun.”
The loathing in Ma’elKoth’s voice hit Caine like a slap. “If that is not evil, I don’t know what is.”
Caine coughed wetly and found his voice. “Well, it seems, I mean, you make it sound like, they’re kind of . . . like gladiators, really.”
“Gladiators do not slaughter children. Gladiators do not murder Kings. And even gladiators I find disgusting. I have banned such pursuits from the Empire.”
There was a disturbance in the Great Hall below, a murmuring among the naked throng on the platform and the few remaining delegations on the floor. A door had been thrown open, and striding toward the throne, boot heels clacking loudly on the marble floor, came Berne.
A large dove-grey plaster spread its wings across his nose, and both his eyes were shadowed with purple bruise; this gave Caine a passing warmth inside.
“Speaking of evil,” he said quickly, grateful for a chance to change the subject, “here comes your newest Count.”
Berne shouldered aside the next delegation and took the steps two at a time. He dropped to one knee before the throne and spoke with low urgency. “Ma’elKoth, I’m sorry, I know I should have been here an hour ago, but—”
Ma’elKoth gave him an indulgent smile. “You are not too late for the Ritual, my lad. What news?”
“I’ve found the Aktiri,” Berne said breathlessly. Caine studied him through the judas gate as he told Ma’elKoth about it. His source had identified the hiding place of the fugitives—an abandoned warehouse in the Industrial Park—and the Cats now had the place surrounded. They were waiting and watching, so far, not wanting to move before they were sure they would snare Simon Jester in their net.
But Shanna’s in the Donjon already, Caine thought. At least, I hope she is—if she walks into that trap, I don’t think I’ll be out of here in time to save her.
And, belatedly: Who the hell is this “source?”
Watching Berne he found that, for now at least, he felt no burning need to rush out onto the dais and beat him to death. Maybe being off-line from the Studio, not feeling the pressure to entertain, made him less reckless; maybe it was a sudden uncertainty, an unfamiliar maybe-I-really-can’t-beat-him dread that dampened the kindling of his blood-lust.
The hate, though—that still burned hot as ever.
As Berne finished his tale, the indulgence faded from Ma’elKoth’s smile, and his voice became paternally correcting. “You have broken a promise, Berne.”
“Heh?” He seemed startled, and puzzled, but then his expression cleared and he touched the plaster across his broken nose with an apologetic hand. He dropped his eyes and clasped his hands before his crotch like a repentant schoolboy. “I know. I know I promised, Ma’elKoth, but . . .”
“When he came at me like that . . . I lost my temper, Ma’elKoth, that’s all. But I didn’t really hurt him.”
That’s what you think. Caine’s whole shoulder still ached where Berne’s preternaturally powerful hand had gripped it, down to the bruised bone.
“You will treat Caine with respect and deference while he is in My service. You would regret making Me remind you again.”
“I’m sorry, Ma’elKoth. I really am.”
The Emperor’s chin lifted a centimeter, and Berne’s protest died in the womb.
He lowered his eyes. “I, ah, I heard you caught him . . .”
“Indeed. In fact, he’s watching you now.” Ma’elKoth inclined his head fractionally to his left, toward the judas gate; Berne’s eyes followed the gesture and locked onto Caine’s. His lips pulled back from his teeth.
“He’s . . .” Blood rose up Berne’s neck. “Fuck me like a goat. You put him in my chair?” He strangled this to a throaty whisper.
Caine said with soft mockery, “Hey there, raccoon boy.”
The bruises around Berne’s eyes blackened against the scarlet that surged into his face, and veins bulged at the sides of his neck.
Ma’elKoth said, “Caine, that was childish, and beneath you. Berne, you will apologize.”
Berne could barely push the words out through the clench of his teeth. “I apologize. Caine.”
Caine grinned at him, even though Berne couldn’t see his face. “I accept.”
“Caine, you are under an identical restriction. Respect and deference, while you both are in My service.”
“Sure, why not?” Caine said. “I won’t be in your service forever.”
“That, dear boy, is an open question. Berne, take your place at the slide. I shall begin the Ritual in very few minutes.”
Berne turned swiftly and stalked down the stairs. Caine watched him go, then said, “I don’t understand how you can use that sick fuck. He’s barely human.”
“Some would say the same about you, Caine.” Ma’elKoth waved a hand dismissively. “I have made him the, so-to-speak, High Priest of the Church of Ma’elKoth, largely because he is efficient.
He will do whatever I ask of him—he would kill his own mother for Me.”
“Yeah? You think he had a mother?”
Ma’elKoth chuckled. “Come now, Caine. I confess it: he was not My first choice. You were.”
“Oh, yes. I was hoping I could find you in person; the Drawing that I have lately done upon you consumes entirely too much of My all-too-limited time and attention. Berne has proven an acceptable substitute. Ever since the business with the crown I have been most impressed with your tenacity and resourcefulness—not to mention your ruthlessness. I hope, even now, that you, Caine, will become My most trusted companion. You can hardly refuse ennoblement now, after all; I daresay the Monasteries can have little claim on your loyalties, not after last night.”
This would be a very bad idea.
“So, you want to give me Berne’s job, huh?” he said, trying to change the subject and still sound like he was considering it. “In a way, you already have. He’s hunting Simon Jester, right?”
“Oh, you won’t be taking over for him, Caine. I want you to operate independently. I have found that two agents, working separately—even in competition—toward the same end, achieve that end much faster and more reliably.”
“Yeah, kind of like . . .” Caine’s voice trailed away. —like me and Berne in Race for the Crown of Dal’kannith, he finished silently.
He said, “You’ve always worked this way, haven’t you?”
“That did not sound like a question.”
Caine swallowed anger. “It wasn’t. You did that to me, before. The crown,” he said evenly. “He was working for you, wasn’t he, working for you the whole time . . . You hired Berne at the same time you hired me.”
“Mm, not so. I hired him after your initial attempt had failed.”
“You know what he did? You know what that pig-fucking shit-sack bastard did to me?”
“I know what you did to each other.”
“But you got the crown, and that’s all you cared about.”
“Precisely. I know you find this upsetting, Caine, but I know also that had you been in My position, you’d have done exactly the same. Which, in the end, is more important, the power itself, or the method used to acquire it?”
Ma’elKoth smiled indulgently. “That’s a rhetorical question, dear boy. Now, be silent. I have only three more delegations, and then I shall begin the Ritual.”
“You’ll see. They bring Me greater gifts than mere tribute or taxes, and the Ritual is how I accept them. Hush now.”
He dealt with the last three delegations neatly, justly, and with dispatch, and when they had left their clothes beneath the platform and joined the nervous crowd atop it, Ma’elKoth gestured, a lazy wave toward a captain of the Household Knights. The captain saluted, then turned and issued crisp orders to his squad. Some of them mounted the platform to chivvy the naked throng into a rough square, while the others opened a smaller door and led in more naked men and women.
Caine guessed that whatever this ritual was, there was a specific minimum number of people needed for it: these newcomers looked like they could very well be unwilling volunteers, just terrified townsfolk press-ganged in here to fill out the numbers. The echoes grew in the hall as they all tried at once to ask each other, ask the Knights, and ask the waiting delegations above, What the fuck is going on?
Ma’elKoth stood, and the babble took on a frightened edge. He raised his arms.
An electric tension built in the hall, a yellowish breath-catching shimmer in the air like the light before a summer storm.
Into the silence, into the tension, Ma’elKoth began to speak.
His voice rolled out like thunder to match the lightning that shone from his eyes, long sonorous phrases metrical and unpredictable together, a slowly developing and growing rhythm like the plainsong of the elves: a long verse to love, to brotherhood, to hearth and family, the meter seeming to time itself to the beat of Caine’s heart, its sweeping rhythmic power washing away the individual words. Caine couldn’t follow the words, not exactly—they skittered away across the surface of his mind—but they hooked images out of the depths: his mother’s lap warm beneath him, the sweet huskiness in her voice as she read to him from a book spread wide before his uncomprehending eyes, the dry strength of his father’s hand on his arm as he frantically tried to balance on his first bicycle. He found unexpected tears stinging his eyes for what he’d left behind, and for the incredible promise of what he might find ahead.
Ma’elKoth’s upraised arms came to sway, gently at first, oak boughs in a freshening breeze, then they stroked the air like the wings of an eagle swimming majestically upward into the limitless sky. He turned first one way, then another, then his stance shifted and Caine’s breath left him.
The Emperor began, incredibly, to dance.
To only the spare, resonant music of his own voice, Ma’elKoth danced: a slow and powerful eurythmy of impossible grace, moving with the invincible elegance of a kabuki demon.
Caine knew enough of magick to have a fair notion of what was going on; with effort he tore his eyes away from Ma’elKoth. He was able to do so, he guessed, only because the ritual was directed not at him, but at the crowd on the platform. The guards below, he noted, kept their faces carefully averted; the crowd on the platform swayed in openmouthed awe, perfectly in time with the irresistible surge of Ma’elKoth’s dance. They began to moan softly, unconsciously, low and potent chords that beat in counterpoint to his rolling voice.
Ma’elKoth’s gestures became broader, his steps more sweeping, his voice charged with cresting energy until it hummed like a dynamo, everything building toward a shattering climax—and then he suddenly, shockingly, stopped.
Into the stunning silence a beat continued, a nearly subaural iambic rumble; Caine closed his eyes and filtered out the surge of blood in his ears. He listened: a’fum, a’fum, a’fum. . .
It was the breathing of the hundreds of people on the platform, sighing in perfect synchronization.
When Caine opened his eyes again, Ma’elKoth was looking at him over one massive shoulder. The Emperor’s lip quirked toward a wry half smile, and one eyelid drooped in a sly, sidelong wink.
Some undetermined time later, Caine remembered to start breathing again.
Ma’elKoth turned back toward the mass of naked people, who waited openmouthed in spellbound anticipation.
“These are the words you shall say to bind your souls forever to Mine:
By this, my heart’s blood, I am baptized a Child of Ma’elKoth.
I serve the dream of One Humanity with all my heart.
I pledge the service of my body and my eternal spirit to the Justice of Ma’elKoth, the True and Living God, the Father Almighty.
By this passage to a new life, I am Reborn.
I am Reborn without stain or allegiance save to the Holy Church.
I proclaim now and forever that there is no God but Ma’elKoth, and I am his living Child.”
The guards on the platform passed out tiny golden cups to the throng, who accepted them mechanically. The straight handles of the golden cups had been sharpened into blades, and with these the soon-to-be Children of Ma’elKoth each opened a vein in his or her left wrist and caught the sluggish, brightening blood as it flowed down their wrists.
And shortly the guards pulled a man from the mass, and there was no blood on his wrist. Ma’elKoth nodded, as though to himself, and beckoned for them to bring him forward.
“You have not offered blood,” he said. “Will you not swear?”
The man had the shaved head of a priest and the bearing of a warrior. He stood naked and unafraid, not deigning even to struggle against the grip of the guards.
“My Lord Emperor,” he replied, “I serve Rudukirisch Storm-god, as I have since my naming day. No power can induce me to deny Him, and His glance shall strike lightning death against any who would do me harm.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Ma’elKoth said testily. He glanced over his shoulder toward Caine and muttered, “This happens from time to time, in the random sweeps. It’s convenient, in a way.”
He turned back toward the platform and spoke with his usual resonance. “I understand your reluctance, but I do not permit it. You shall be killed.”
The priest shouted some words in a Kirischan dialect that Caine didn’t speak, and a sudden clap of thunder sounded outside, while within there came a blinding flash of light; when Caine’s vision cleared, the Kirischan priest gleamed with fantastically baroque armor, and he held in both hands a warhammer with a haft nearly as long as he was tall.
The Household Knights who’d held his arms stretched their lengths upon the platform, and smoke rose from their armor.
The priest glowed with power—a crackling aura of blue-white lightning that stretched upward and outward into a flailing serpentine lash of electricity, casting reddish shadows across the faces of the spellbound throng.
“Now, learn what it means to anger the God of Thunder!”
“Yes, yes,” said Ma’elKoth, sounding eager. “Get on with it, then.”
The priest extended his hammer toward the throne, and the lightning lashed out. Ma’elKoth made no move or gesture of defense, raised no spell of warding. The lightning scorched a smoking hole in the breast of Ma’elKoth’s robe; the robe itself caught fire with more than natural intensity. Even through his little spyhole, Caine could feel the heat baking his eyes as the robe flared up around the Emperor.
Then it had burned away, and amidst its ashes stood Ma’elKoth, bare chested and barefoot, only a pair of leather kneebreeches protecting his modesty.
He had not so much as blinked.
Cords rippled in his forearm as he lifted his open hand toward the ceiling, then closed it as though grabbing power from above. He stroked his fist toward the priest below as though cracking an invisible whip.
The priest lifted his warhammer to ward the blow, and his lightning shield flared bright with his god’s defense. All his priestly power, his devotion to his god, his courage and his god’s love for him made no difference whatsoever: when whatever power Ma’elKoth had summoned struck him, the warhammer that he held, the very symbol of his faith, exploded in his hand like a short-fused grenade.
Blood fountained from the shattered stump of his wrist, and the shards from the hammer ripped through his flesh like shrapnel. Household Knights closed in around him, and they pulled him out of sight on the other side of the statue.
“Your courage earns you this honor,” Ma’elKoth boomed.
“You shall smooth the way for the faithful.”
Blood now began to drip from the statue’s stylized vagina, and Caine caught a glimpse of the priest’s legs as the Knights apparently upended him as though to force him headfirst into the statue’s belly; there must have been some kind of a channel cut through the torso of the statue, and the blood must have been the priest’s. The legs moved out of sight, and Caine heard a muffled grunt. Then the priest’s head and shoulders emerged downward from the statue’s vagina and he stopped there, held suspended while his blood flowed down his face and dripped onto the bronze slide beneath.
A tall, broad-shouldered man wearing the dark brown dress of an Ankhanan midwife stepped out from beneath the platform; in his hand was a short straight sword, thick bladed and single edged, and on his face was a smile of sexual anticipation.
The priest caught sight of him and shouted, “I confess the power of Rudukirisch! I confess—”
His cry was cut off by the silver arc of Berne’s cleaver. The blade sheared into his neck, crunching through vertebrae and slicing out the other side. Berne cleared the blade of blood with a single, professional flick of the wrist as the priest’s head, mouth still wide open, tumbled onto the slide in a shower of blood and rolled down into the basin. His heart, far above, pumped furiously, fountaining crimson jets from neatly severed arteries, and it seemed a very long time until the fountain tapered to a trickle. Whatever held the body released it, and it slid smoothly down the blood-slick slide and lay limp in the basin.
And through this all, the spellbound crowd on the platform watched silently.
Now the Knights herded them into a queue at the statue’s side, and they each willingly followed in the priest’s path, pausing briefly to pour the small cups of their own blood over their heads, intoning their oath and then sliding headfirst into the statue’s belly and out through its vagina, down the slide and into the basin, from whence other guards would lead them away to wash away the blood and bandage their wrists.
Occasionally, for no reason and with no signal that Caine could see, one of them would be caught, head down; Berne’s blade would flicker, and another head and body would enter the basin separately. The twitching bodies were left there, a grisly cushion for the living ones that followed.
Ma’elKoth stepped away from the pile of ashes that had been his robes and seated himself again in the Oaken Throne. He sighed and said meditatively, “Well, then, what do you think?”
Caine was mesmerized by the endless flow of men and women down the slide. “It’s, ah, pretty gruesome, isn’t it?”
“As is any birth,” Ma’elKoth said.
“How do you decide who lives and who dies, down there? Who decides who gets caught and chopped?”
“Each decides for himself,” Ma’elKoth said, and now a smile grew slowly across his face.
“I spoke clearly enough. It is not for you to know, not yet. If you survive it, you’ll understand.”
“If I survive it? You’re gonna make me go through that?”
Ma’elKoth answered with only a smile.
“How will you approach your quest for Simon Jester?” he asked thoughtfully. “I am certain you’ve already given this question some thought.”
“Some,” Caine said. He’d spent all of the night before thinking about it and had come up with a plan both simple and elegant, perfectly in character and, he hoped, daring enough to be irresistible. “I want to break your prisoners out of the Donjon.”
“One of the accomplices of Simon Jester that Berne captured chances to be an acquaintance of mine, a minor adept named Lamorak. You get me into the Donjon, and I break him and the other one out. That should be enough to get me close to Simon Jester.”
“How did you know of this? That this Lamorak is in our custody?”
“You’re not the only one with sources,” Caine said, hoping that Ma’elKoth wouldn’t press.
Ma’elKoth’s mind was working along other lines. “I see problems with this. Isn’t it somewhat extreme? Won’t Lamorak be suspicious, to be suddenly rescued? Are the two of you so close that he will believe you’d risk your life for him?”
“Oh, he’ll believe it, all right.” Not that it matters a damn if he doesn’t. “We’re close enough. And I’ll tell him straight off that I’m doing this to get next to Simon Jester.”
Caine glanced down toward the ongoing ritual, where Berne had once again just neatly decapitated someone.
“Mmm,” Ma’elKoth said, thinking about it. “Mm, I think I see.”
“Lamorak is Berne’s prisoner, right? The whole operation against Simon Jester is Berne’s baby. Breaking him out will be a major embarrassment, and will put me in with Simon Jester, the perfect place for me to lay a trap to draw Berne out where I can kill him.”
Ma’elKoth chuckled. “And it will make a substantial addition to your legendary career. No one has ever escaped from the Imperial Donjon; if there is a man alive that folk will believe could do it, it would be you.”
“Nobody will dream I’m working for you; shit, nearly everybody in town knows there’s a warrant out for me. Just give out that I got away from Toa-Sytell and the Eyes.”
A cold hand reached into Caine’s chest. “Of course I will. What’s that supposed to mean? After all this, you don’t trust me?”
“I remember . . .” Ma’elKoth mused, “I remember a Caine who’d rather kill a man than lie to him . . .”
“Killing’s simpler,” Caine said, with a thin laugh that tried to sound hearty. “You do it, it’s done, it’s over. A lie is like a pet—you have to take care of it, or it’ll turn on you and bite you on the ass.”
He made his voice as flat as his thumping heart would let him.
“I’m as honest as circumstances allow.”
“Hmpf. A truthful answer, that. Very well. Remove your clothes.”
Something seemed to catch in Caine’s throat; all he could say was “Hah?”
“You cannot serve Me in body unless you serve Me in heart, Caine.”
The Emperor waved a lazy hand down at the platform. Below, pages in livery ladled blood out of the basin into bronze bowls—the same bowls Caine had seen them carry in the Lesser Ballroom, to mix into the clay of the Great Work, and his stomach twisted.
What did you think, you fucking ninny, he snarled at himself. Where did you think that blood came from?
He said, “You seriously expect me to go down there and put my neck within reach of Berne’s sword?”
“I do. If you do not trust Me, Caine, how am I to trust you? Pledge yourself to Me, place your faith in My justice, and serve Me now. Or deny Me this honor, and never serve Me again.”
It wasn’t even really a choice. Echoing inside his skull he heard Shanna’s words: He doesn’t care what happens to me. And this might be his best, his only chance to save her life.
There was no reason to hesitate.
“Yeah, sure,” Caine said. “Let’s do it.”
THE RIVER BARGE was every bit as disreputable as its captain, a grizzled old rummy with drooping red eyes and a permanently dripping nose, but when Pallas inspected the barge’s bilge, a dark dank space full of an eye-watering stink of urine and decay—like a dead turtle sun-baking in its shell for four days while being pissed on by a succession of tomcats—she found something that made her smile: a little horned face with the familiar sly grin, scratched into the sloppily pitched bulkhead recently enough that the wood exposed beneath still showed blond.
She jerked a thumb at it. “Simon Jester,” she said. “You know, you can buy some trouble, flying that particular flag.”
The captain wiped his nose on the back of his grimy hand. “Can’t say as anyone’d find me responsible. I crew this thing temporary, y’know? Can’t say who mighta scratched the little face.”
“I’d bet there’s any number of things you can’t say,” Pallas ventured.
The captain shrugged. “I mind my manners, if that’s what y’mean.”
“I’d bet you can’t say why that scratching’s a couple of weeks old, and it’s still there.”
“You’d lose that one, girlie,” the captain growled. “Gave passage to Baron Thilliow, him of Oklian, and his whole family, fifteen year ago and more, when days was better for us both. And he was a good man, and no bloody Aktir, no matter what th’Emperor says. Nothing against th’Emperor; I figure there’s some as is tellin’ him some lies, and puttin’ good folk to the axe, and I’d just as soon Simon Jester gets ’em away as see ’em dead. And that—” He reached up and touched the crude little carving. “—that’s just to remind me, that’s all. Don’t really mean nothing.”
Pallas extended her hand, and a shining gold royal appeared between her thumb and first finger. She flicked her hand and another appeared, then another flick and another coin. They gleamed like the sun in the steady lamplight.
She’d gotten his attention with the first one; by the time the third appeared, it was all he could do to keep the drool behind his lips.
“You can use these for provisions. Forty people for a week. Don’t buy it all in one place. Use the rest to crew up. Whatever money’s left over, keep for your trouble.”
Flick. Now there were four. “This charming little family has relatives downstream. Forty of them. One for each of my friends who’ll be riding here in your bilge, provided they make it safe and healthy down to Tinnara, plus a few extra. A gratuity for exceptional service.”
He mopped at his face furiously, until the grease and dirt on the back of his hand was streaked with snot. “That’s, ah, that’s tricky work. Maybe a bit more up front would, ah, steady my nerves . . . ?”
“You’ll have to trust me,” she said with a quick shake of her head. “We’ll have to trust each other. If I don’t come through with the gold, there’ll be forty people wandering around Tinnara that’d be worth a noble or two apiece to any Eye or army officer.”
“Forty royals, though . . .” he murmured. “Could really fix up m’old lady, here, get a real crew again . . .”
“We’ll call it a deal, then.” She handed him the four royals.
“We will, that,” he said, and followed her up the ladder into the warm afternoon sunlight. “Gimme two days to crew and provision, and get your friends here by midafternoon on the second—we’ll wanta be a few miles downstream by sundown.” He accompanied her to dockside and held out his arm to help her up the ramp.
“Do you,” he murmured softly, hesitantly, with a furtive look around at the busy docks to make sure no one was within earshot, “d’you really work for the Jester? Is he really, y’know, really real?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, he’s really real.”
“Is he really wantin’ to bring down Ma’elKoth, like they say?”
“No. No, that’s not it at all,” she said gravely. “He’s only trying to save some lives. These people aren’t Aktiri, Captain. They’re just people, innocent people, who have to get out of the Empire, or they’ll be killed. Killed because Ma’elKoth doesn’t like them.”
“Well, then . . .” He dropped his arm and looked at the deck beneath his feet, then spat into the sluggish brown waters of the Great Chambaygen. “Well, then, power to the Jester. And power to you, lady.”
Pallas forced a little smile and touched him on the shoulder. “We both thank you. Look for me in two days.”
She walked away along the dockside, past the steelworks and the long rows of warehouses that accepted river cargo from all across the Empire.
This should be easy; she’d seen no flicker of betrayal on the captain’s Shell, and even though she’d never tried to move this many tokali at one time before, she was confident.
This spell of Konnos’ had become so incredibly useful—she could pack all thirty-six of the tokali into the bilge and Cloak the whole lot of them. Any suspicious Imperial, even an adept, would see only dirty water and black-pitched wood, and the Eternal Forgetting would prevent this hypothetical suspicious adept from connecting any pull he might feel with the possibility of a Cloak. To make it work, she’d have to ride with them all the way to the coast to get them past the toll points on the river, but that was all right.
The important thing, right now, was that she could do it, she’d get them safely out of the Empire by herself, and those greedy bastards back at Studio Scheduling could just screw themselves.
And when this was over and she was back on Earth, she and Hari were going to have a little talk about staying the hell out of her life. She should never have let him talk her out of filing divorce; this separation was foolish. It wasn’t doing either one of them any good, just drawing out the pain, that’s all, their own little improvised Death of the Thousand Cuts. She should have trusted her instincts and gone for the clean break, all at once, like ripping away a bandage.
And that’s what this really was, she told herself, this ache that seemed to poke low into her belly when she thought of him looking for her, when she thought of how she would ditch him and head downriver: phantom-limb pain. There had once been a part of her that had tied her to Hari’s life, that was now cut away; the twinges she felt from it once in a while were only psychological revenants of the amputation.
And Hari was part of why it was so easy to be ruthless with the King of Cant; Majesty was one of Caine’s best friends. He made a pretty good surrogate when she couldn’t hit back at Caine directly. As she’d continued to use him, though, she’d surprised herself with a growing sense of contempt; she’d caught herself thinking that this man was only a thug with a gimmick, after all, really just a street punk like Hari once was—but Hari had grown into something more, she’d grant him that much. Hari or Caine, neither would have let anyone treat him like she’d treated the King of Cant; Caine would have gone for her throat the second he caught a glimpse of the Charm crystal.
On the other hand, she wasn’t blind to herself: she knew that part of her contempt for Majesty was a reflexive self-justification for using him so badly. But still . . .
Caine had a peculiar integrity, a stubborn attachment to his self-respect, however misplaced it might be. Integrity wasn’t a word that came to mind when one thought of Majesty; the man was a weasel on two legs. Useful, even necessary, but a weasel nonetheless.
As twilight drifted down through the deepening blue of the sky, she made her way toward the warehouse beneath which she’d hidden the tokali. Her mind wasn’t on the crowds that thickened around her as curfew neared and folk of all descriptions flooded across the bridges from Old Town; she was absorbed with the melancholy realization that even now, she still compared every man she met with Hari.
Shaking her head sadly at this sentimental foolishness, she walked into the expanding shadows of the Industrial Park’s side streets.
She rehearsed for the millionth time all the reasons that they would never be able to work it out, all the fights and the jealousies and suspicions. They should never have married in the first place; they’d been great as lovers, their affair was passionate, tempestuous, consistently unpredictable, thrilling—but all the things that had made them great lovers made them shitty as husband and wife.
Opposites attract, but similarities bind.
They were the opposite poles of Acting, for one thing. She’d gone into Acting in the first place because on Overworld, she could have the kind of power that would be forever denied her by her Tradesman subcaste in Earth’s remorselessly rigid social system: the power to help people, to make a real difference in people’s lives, a positive difference. She could truly say that her career had helped make Overworld a better place, and she was justly proud of it.
Caine, on the other hand, was just in it for the blood.
She saved lives; he took them.
And his Adventures outsold hers three to one.
In her honest moments, she was able to admit that this was part of the problem, too. She wasn’t proud of it, but she couldn’t deny it, either.
She sighed and tried to haul her attention back onto the problems at hand. She’d deal with Caine later, when he could no longer be avoided. It was the fatigue, the endless hours of running and hiding and fighting, that made it nearly impossible for her to keep her mind on business; but now, as she neared the bolt-hole where she’d stashed the tokali, a lapse in concentration could be fatal.
The tokali were hidden beneath the rotting, treacherous floor of a fire-gutted warehouse; it stood in a block with a number of other warehouses in states of similar disrepair. Dry spots here and there—where slanting remnants of charred rooftops leaned against a sturdy wall to keep off the rain—had become shelter for a number of families of squatters.
She’d posted no stooges here who might betray it, had left no sign. The dry, cavelike basement here was her third fallback; she’d prepared it with the help of the Twins and Talann and Lamorak, enchanting sigils across the walls and doors to divert seeking items and other magick of that sort. Majesty himself, in disguise, had helped her move the supplies inside; though he despised physical labor, her Charm had ensured that he’d work without complaint and would die before he gave up its location. Pallas believed that everyone else who knew of its existence was dead.
The entrance was concealed within a former interior office; getting to it required threading through a maze of collapsed walls and treacherously rotten flooring. At the last moment she turned aside instead of entering, drifting past its charred facade as though still lost in thought.
The trickle of day laborers heading home was steady as ever, no more nor less than usual. Glancing at their faces and clothes gave Pallas no explanation for her sudden nerves, but she trusted those nerves, her instincts; they were all she had left to save her life.
She found a solid-looking piece of wall to lean casually against and scanned the street. What’s wrong with this picture?
The squatters . . . There were two families in particular, one across the street in what once had been a grain store, and one further down in a former smithy. Now, here, at twilight, they both should have had small, protected fires burning, heating up whatever scraps they had scrounged for their dinners. The intermittent, almost daily rains that came with late autumn in Ankhana would have dampened all the scrap wood there was to be found—but there was no smoke.
It might be nothing. They might both have moved on to some drier and more windproof shelter.
Or: they might be tied down, even dead, while Grey Cats crouched beside them, watching her through fire-sprung chinks in their borrowed walls.
Not for nothing did they identify themselves with cats; they might have been there for hours, slowly creeping into position, watching intently for any sign of movement around the mouse hole where the tokali huddled. But they couldn’t know that both these families cook at twilight.
She kept moving, kept drifting, until the spire of the Colhari Palace swung into view through a gap in a collapsing wall. She breathed herself into mindview, and the twisting lace of Flow filled her vision, slowly stirred by the dim Shells of the passing townsfolk. She saw no beam of channeled Flow from the Palace, but this was no assurance that she was safe; the Cats themselves wouldn’t attack her on sight, having no idea who she was, but if Berne was here with them . . .
The Imperials knew that Simon Jester was a thaumaturge; this was proven by the spell that frustrated their search. In seeking to trap him, Berne and Ma’elKoth wouldn’t hold that channel open; it’d be like sounding a trumpet and waving a flag to any adept in mindview.
But Berne, he had reasons to pounce on her unrelated to his hunt for Simon Jester. If he was there, coiled to spring from one of those buildings, and he saw her on the street and recognized her, his own cupidity, his lust for blood, for any way to injure her or Caine, would probably drive him to—
And there it was: from the spire of the Colhari Palace that shaft of crimson power sprang to instantaneous life.
Surrounded. Alone. The Subjects would help her if they knew she was in danger, but there were no Subjects here to be found.
If Caine were here, he’d quote Sun Tzu: “On deadly ground: fight.”
From a pocket at her breast, her hand pulled a lovingly carved model of itself in miniature: a tiny hand of the same glittering quartz she used for her Shields.
The lines of power shone upon it and spoke to her mind.
The shaft of channeled Flow ran straight as the beam of a laser from the palace to the crumbling warehouse across the street: there was no way Berne could hide from her.
The lines scribed upon the hand of quartz spread like a net, spun like a whirlpool, a massive vortex of Flow that made her flesh shimmer with power. No matter how much power Berne channeled from Ma’elKoth, he was himself no thaumaturge: without mindview, he had no way of knowing the depth of trouble he was in right now.
On her lips was a feral grin that Berne would have recognized, as she extended her hand and made a fist, and the invisible force of her Teke crushed the building like an eggshell.
It fell in upon itself with an avalanche roar and a spreading cloud of choking dust. If Berne wanted her, first he’d have to dig himself out.
The flat whacks of firing crossbows sounded from all around her, but Pallas was already moving, diving away deep into the screening dust. Quarrels sang by her, spanged off cobblestones and thrummed quivering in wood. Shouts and screams from the city folk filled the air as they scattered, running for their lives.
Pallas rolled to her feet and flicked her hand, doing the same trick she had for the captain of the river barge; instead of coins, what appeared between her fingers were her charged buckeyes—one, two, three, four.
Blood hummed in her ears, and a savage exaltation filled her chest. Teeth gleamed through her happy snarl as she triggered a buckeye and fired it along the street with her Teke, directly into the building from which most of the crossbow fire had come. Flame roared out though shattered windows; the building front crumpled and collapsed.
That, she guessed, should be enough to get their attention. She turned and sprinted away at a dead run, heading toward the Warrens.
Come on come on come on, move it, you bastards, she chanted inside her head. It’ll take all of you to make sure I don’t get away.
And come they did, breaking from cover—ten, fifteen, thirty hard-eyed men in grey, running behind grimaces of fury, pursuing at a ground-eating lope as she led them away from the tokali and into the Kingdom of Cant. Behind her, the building she had crushed, the building she had brought down on Berne’s head, began to pitch and heave and bulge in the middle like a caterpillar carcass birthing a brood of wasps.