“What’s so wrong with wanting to help people?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it; there’s just no point. You risk your life for a wet-eyed thank-you and a hug. It’s stupid.”
“No, Shanna. It’s our life, remember? That’s why we got married.”
“Oh, right—I knew there was a reason, I just forgot what it was.”
“No, Hari. No. Marriage is supposed to make you more than you are. It’s supposed to add something to your life, not take it away. You want me to be less, you want me to be more like . . .”
“All right, I will: more like you.”
“That shit flows both ways, Shanna.”
“Maybe it does. Maybe that was my mistake from the very beginning. I should have known better.”
AS DAWN LAYERED the Ankhanan sky with crimson and pale rose, the low-lying mist that rises from the Great Chambaygen every morning began slowly to recede, traces dissolving in the warming air.
Most of the workmen, the stablehands and the copy clerks, all those who were employed in Old Town but could not afford to live there, walked through the swirling mist toward Fools’ Bridge with breeches tied tight at the calf and trouser legs laced closed at the ankle.
This was a fashion dictated by necessity, for also through that 319 swirling mist scampered other inhabitants of the capital city, nocturnal citizens returning to their dens for the day, far more numerous than the human inhabitants. And anyone who’d done the Rat Dance as a panicked rodent clawed and bit its way up the inside of one’s pants leg had no desire to repeat the experience.
One particularly large and lean rat with patches of grey at the sides of its muzzle crouched by the notch where the single-leaf bascule of Fools’ Bridge would descend. It watched the dawn ceremonies with glittering eyes that held more than rodent intelligence.
This was far out on the arc of the span over the river, over the slow-rolling oily water, glossy black in the growing light. The rat watched the bridge captain stride out alone behind the reinforced crenels atop the Old Town gatehouse, diaphanous robes of translucent aqua flowing over his uniform.
The bridge captain wore these robes twice a day, at dawn and sunset, when he made ritual obsequies to the legendary river god Chambaraya. At dawn, he poured out oil from a golden cup to ask the river god’s permission to lower the bridge; at dusk, the cup held wine, in thanks for permitting the day’s traffic.
The bridge came down; the rat twitched back from its path, but as soon as the bridge settled into place, the rat streaked for Old Town. Its movements were somewhat hampered by two thin leather thongs like bootlaces that strapped a small packet of oiled paper to its back; the rat nearly perished beneath the boot of a startled soldier who stomped at it as it passed, but it escaped and vanished into the alley behind a nearby stable.
There it paused, as though uncertain of how to proceed; that eerie look of unnatural intelligence was enhanced by the way it sat up on its haunches and rubbed at its face with its front claws, the way some men do when deep in indecisive thought. The rat, however, was neither indecisive nor, actually, thinking; what little intelligence the rat had currently snarled in the back of its brain stem and lusted to chew through the leather thongs that strapped the packet to its back.
The thought, and the indecision, belonged entirely to Lamorak.
JUST BEFORE DAWN, she’d kissed him good-bye. She planned to ferry the tokali to the river barge in groups of four or five, the largest that she felt she could safely Cloak and still move swiftly through the streets. She’d nodded and stroked his cheek when he told her how he wished he could be with her, how he felt his place was on the street to help protect them, protect her, if only it wasn’t for this damned leg . . .
And when she turned away from him, when she climbed the stairs toward the street, that troubled, half-haunted expression had stolen over her face, the same one she’d worn in unguarded moments ever since Caine’s disappearance the night before.
It stung him, that look; he knew he was losing her. She’d seen him in the same room with Caine, side by side, sized them up, and somehow he’d come up short. Again. He didn’t understand it, couldn’t understand it. Why would a woman—or anyone, for that matter—prefer a sullen, scowling murderer like Caine to his own sparkling eye and heroic dash? But there it was: it was happening again like a recurring nightmare.
Somehow, even now, everyone in his life was conspiring to make him feel second-rate.
He’d seen trouble coming last night when she’d made him stay in that dripping frigging room aboveground and waste a good hour trying to figure out why Caine had been suddenly pulled. And she particularly pricked away at what Caine had been about to say—she simply refused to leave it alone. What was he about to say? What was he about to do? What, what, what, why, why, which—on and on until Lamorak was ready to slap her.
Some women, the only way to shut their mouths is to put your dick in them.
He knew damn well what Caine had been about to say, and he knew even better what Caine had been about to do. And he knew that, unarmed and with his leg busted, all he could have done right then was roll over and wait to die. He knew better than to think Caine would have mercy on him just because he couldn’t defend himself.
It was galling, too, that everything had been so carefully planned, so well thought out, well concealed, and Caine had jumped right to the truth without any evidence at all. He’d never be able to prove a fucking thing. There’d be no court on either world that would accept his unfounded hunch as evidence. Crap, forget court; it wasn’t even, strictly, illegal. But none of that mattered; Caine wouldn’t trifle with any sort of legal authority, with any sort of official procedure at all beyond a swift flurry of his slaughtering fists.
This had been much on Lamorak’s mind overnight as he’d sat high up above the waterlogged floor in a nest of empty crates that several of the grateful tokali had constructed for him. He’d spent the night working on his leg, pulling Flow and visualizing carefully the layering of calcium across the break, knitting the splintered ends together. He hoped that by the time Caine made his next entrance, his thigh might be strong enough to bear his weight and give him a fighting chance.
Not that he had any intention of fighting.
It came to him, in one of his frequent periods of rest, that exactly as he was using his once-despised magick to heal his broken leg, he was also using this same ability to heal his broken life. He’d never quite understood how he could have gotten to be thirty-four without becoming a major star; he’d been so sure, as a boy, as a student at the Conservatory, as a novice Actor on freemod, that he’d someday be recognized as one of the legendary greats, that his name would be entered on that tiny list alongside Raymond Story, Lin Zhian, Kiel Burchardt, Jonathan Mkembe . . .
Hari Michaelson’s name was on that list, or so people said. Lamorak couldn’t see it, couldn’t understand how Caine’s career continued to soar while his own languished; Lamorak had found himself at thirty-four, when most Actors begin to make plans for retirement, without ever having cracked the Top One Hundred. Caine was what, thirty-nine? Forty? But Caine would never retire, not so long as his every Adventure landed in the Top Ten as though it grew there. His career had become self-sustaining, feeding on his past successes, to where it no longer mattered if his Adventures were any good or not. People paid and paid and paid, just to be Caine one last time—who knew how long he could keep it up? Who knew what Adventure would be his last?
Who, Lamorak often wondered, really gave a shit?
Just when another man might have become oppressed by a growing sense of failure and inadequacy, Lamorak had instead become aware that the reason behind his continuing disappointment was marketing—or rather, lack of marketing.
Caine got the best Adventures because the Studio executives expected him to have the best Adventures, and so they were willing to put out more effort, more money, more promotion to keep him up in his lofty position. All Lamorak needed was a break, one big shot, one opportunity to show the Studio and the public his real star qualities.
He was angling for precisely that: his shot. His big break.
Although as an Entertainer he was nominally a Professional, this was only a provisional recaste; on the day he retired, gave up being Lamorak and became, finally and for all time, merely Karl Shanks, he would reassume his true caste, his birth caste of Business. He could retire tomorrow and take a position with the family business, SynTech, the electronic chemicals giant, and make five times more money than any Actor, even Caine.
But that would mean leaving show business.
That would mean admitting that his father, the spineless flatterer, was right. That his brothers were right, and his mother. They’d all said he’d never make it as an Actor. It would mean going on his knees to his grandfather, the old bastard who still perched on SynTech like a senile dragon on his mound of gold, to beg for a chance to prove himself a real Shanks.
However much he might despise his family, it didn’t stop him from using their powerful upcaste connections to pressure the Scheduling Board. He had the Board thoroughly cowed; they were only a pack of butt-covering Administrators, after all. But even with bigger, more frequent Adventures, he still didn’t command the kind of promotional budget—and, hence, public following—that Caine did.
Ironically, it was the one man most responsible for Caine’s success who’d come to Lamorak with a plan and an offer: Arturo Kollberg.
“Do this one little thing for me,” he’d asked. “Spice up Pallas Ril’s Ankhanan operations enough to get Caine involved, and I’ll take you under my wing the way I did him. I made Caine what he is, but he’s become increasingly sullen and troublesome. I can make you what Caine is, and you won’t treat me and the Studio with disrespect and attitude. You’ll know how to repay me: with loyalty, with courage and honor . . .”
And if Caine ever understood what Lamorak was really up to, down deep, that what he was really doing was helping Pallas’ career—and at great personal risk, I mean, look at this leg, look at how he’d been nearly tortured to death because he’d been doing his part to turn a mundane, run-of-the-mill Adventure into something exciting and memorable—why, Caine would thank him. They’d both thank him. But no, instead of gratitude, Pallas was running off with her damned tokali and fantasizing about her husband, and Caine wanted to kill him and eat raw bloody chunks of his flesh. It was all so fucking unfair. . .
But he knew how to get back at them, he knew how to pay them out for making him a loser: magick. That’s what was making the difference now; that’s how he could make them regret their disrespect. He was more adept than either of them suspected, and he was going to use this hidden skill to make sure, once and for all, that everyone concerned got exactly what was coming to them—especially himself.
Once this was over and he was back on Earth, his career would really kick into high gear.
He couldn’t think about this too much, the images and the fantasies of finally getting the respect he deserved: they were too potent, they intruded too much into his minute-to-minute consciousness. So he held them tenderly at the rear of his mind, carefully foggy and unformed. They lurked behind everything he thought or did and whispered heart-swelling endearments to him—faint and ghostly mumblings that Lamorak never analyzed, because he wouldn’t let himself listen hard enough to really understand them.
They murmured that Caine’s time was past, that it was right Lamorak should step up to take over for him. They murmured that Pallas had been only using him, after all, and that even the love she had pretended to feel for him would vanish without a trace as soon as they transferred back and she audited Caine’s Adventure. They whispered that Caine had been lying in the first place: Pallas wasn’t off-line. That was ridiculous. He was only jealous, because his star was fading while hers was on the rise. Caine was trying to destroy Pallas’ Adventure, even as Lamorak worked so hard to make it brilliant.
And the final, most potent whisper, least rational and buried the deepest: They were in it together, against him. Caine and Pallas had concocted this whole fantastic plan to make him expose himself, to draw him out where they could humiliate him before the world and destroy his last chance for happiness.
All of these back-of-the-head whispers combined into a powerful feeling of justice—a conviction that he’d really thought this whole thing through and what he was doing was not only necessary, but was right.
He’d begun to deal with what he privately termed the Caine Problem last night, after he and Pallas had come back alone from their conference. After Lamorak had been settled into his nest and Pallas had gone off somewhere to brood by herself, the King of Cant had climbed up next to him and begun half-casually questioning him about Caine.
Lamorak realized with growing delight that the King—however reluctantly—suspected Caine of working for the Imperials!
Once he understood, it was simple to inflame those suspicions while appearing to attempt to allay them. The way Caine had vanished—as Lamorak was forced to put it, “He didn’t explain, he just left without a word”—made everything all the better. Lamorak knew that not only could he get away with betraying Pallas and the tokali, but he’d be able to pin it all on Caine.
Majesty half believed it already, against his will; that Charm Pallas had laid on him made him fanatically, paranoically protective of her. He’d take any Imperial interference as proof that Caine had betrayed them.
The evidence of the morrow would remove all doubt.
And so when Pallas Ril left that morning, a half hour before dawn, with her four tokali in tow, Lamorak had set to work without the faintest twinge; with, in fact, a swelling sense of righteousness and delight in his own skill and imagination.
It was a tricky business: finding a way to ensure that the Grey Cats would interfere at the docks without exposing himself once again to Berne’s lunatic temper. The solution that Lamorak hit upon not only satisfied that requirement, but there was a certain sense of tradition to it as well, a sort of metaphoric rightness that lent an additional air of conviction to his assurance of success.
Rats were everywhere in this warehouse; the paper, the oil, and the knife to cut the strips of leather were easily obtained from the Subjects of Cant with the explanation that he needed them for the healing magick he planned to do on his leg. Knowing nothing about real magick, the superstitious mopes hadn’t even raised an eyebrow.
He found himself a secluded compartment in which to work, and Talann was more than happy to guard the door and ensure that he would not be disturbed. It was the work of mere minutes to pull enough Flow to trap the will of a suitable rat, which he then sent scampering off toward Old Town. He had to stay there and maintain mindview, continuing to pull in order to keep the rat under control, but even that was no danger. If Pallas returned and inquired about the Flow currents swirling toward his compartment, Talann and the Subjects would tell her he was still working on his leg.
It was perfect; it was easy. The indecision that he faced once the rat had crossed the bridge was not a hesitation to betray—he was simply trying to decide which would be the quickest, safest route to the headquarters of the Grey Cats.
THE RAT SCUTTLED along Gods’ Way with a back-humping lope. It stayed just far enough beneath the boardwalk to be in shadow, dodging curses, horses’ hooves, and the occasional boot or hurled brick; the hazards of this open route were much easier to avoid than the dogs and feral cats that prowled Old Town’s smaller streets and back alleys. It barely escaped the steel-bound wheel of a nobleman’s carriage as it sprinted past the Colhari Palace onto Nobles’ Way, then south off Old Town, across Kings’ Bridge to the South Bank.
The closest the Grey Cats came to an actual headquarters was the walled compound of the townhome that Ma’elKoth had granted to Count Berne as part of his ennoblement. The rat slipped easily between the iron bars of the gate and ran for the house. All the doors and windows were spread wide, and men lay here and there sprawled in the elbow-to-eyes posture of hungover slumber.
One of them happened to lift his head. Rubbing sleepily at his face, he spied the rat. The Cat jerked awake with a yip of surprise that brought other heads up with dismaying speed and alertness.
The rat did not see Berne anywhere among them—perhaps an upstairs bedchamber? It dashed for the stairs. Despite what appeared to have been some sort of drunken revel the night before, the Cats were awake in an instant with mocking shouts like huntsmen whose dogs have started a fox.
A thrown dagger thrummed into the floor only inches in front of the rat’s nose, causing an abrupt change of direction. Suddenly the air was filled with a rain of steel, hacking into the floor, the walls, chipping large chunks from the hand-carved woodwork of the banisters—all to the sound of the Cats’ delighted laughter.
The rat scampered this way and that, still trying for the stairs, and when a pause came in the shower of daggers—perhaps they’d thrown them all?—it sprinted once again for the bottom step. Something heavy struck it in the spine and drew a line of ice across its back; its hind legs twitched convulsively, beating against the floor, and it twisted and squealed and bit at the knife that had struck through its haunches and pinned it to the floor.
All semblance of intelligence fled; now there was only its last instinctive desperation to wound what had killed it, its attempt to leave a mark of its life behind it when it passed.
ONE OF THE Cats bent over the dead rat and squinted blearily at the oiled-paper packet before slicing through the leather thongs that held it in place. He examined it against the morning light. “What do you make of this?”
The other Cats gathered round.
He unfolded the paper packet and read:
Simon Jester moves the Aktiri today on a downstream barge for Terana from the Industrial Park docks. A full hood of silver net, draped over your head, will defeat the spell that hides them all.
His eyes went wide, and his heart surged. “Where’s the Count?” he snapped. “Who knows where Count Berne spent his night?”
Instead of answering his question, the others babbled questions of their own: The message on the paper, what had it said? Whom was it for? Who’d sent it? He waved the paper over their heads.
“Someone has given us Simon Jester once again; this time we must not fail! Ride to Onetower; command them to stand ready at the antiship nets—and find the Count!”
TOA-SYTELL WAS SUMMONED from his breakfast by a breathless page instructing him to attend the Emperor immediately.
He had no need to ask where the Emperor might be; at this time of the morning the Emperor was invariably in the Lesser Ballroom, constructing the Great Work. Art, he had always said, is done best from dawn to noon, its power rising with the sun; done after noon it becomes decadent and reducing, draining power from the artist to replace what it should get from the fading sun above.
In the Lesser Ballroom, Toa-Sytell found Berne already in attendance. The Count wore his fighting clothes, the formfitting tunic and pants of patchy strawberry serge. His stolen blade was shoulder-slung. Instead of his usual hungover surliness at this hour of the day, Berne looked rested and ready for action. The glitter in his eyes spoke of an excitement that, for him, came only from the prospect of slaughter.
The Emperor stood beside him, at the cauldron’s rim, clay drying and cracking on his crimson kilt. Barefoot and bare chested as he always was when working here, flushed with the heat of the coals that kept the clay boiling, muscle rolled like boulders beneath his skin as he extended his hand to Toa-Sytell.
“Come, My Duke. What make you of this?”
He pressed a fold of paper into Toa-Sytell’s hand, but Toa-Sytell’s eyes were caught by the manikin that bobbed gently in the steam-misted air, hovering forgotten over the boiling clay of the cauldron.
It was of Caine, yet again; Ma’elKoth had spent all the time allotted for his Great Work yesterday attempting to fit Caine into the gigantic puzzle-piece sculpture, trying innumerable postures and expressions, but finally coming to frustrating failure. Now he must be trying a new strategy, for this Caine manikin was vastly larger, perhaps seven feet tall, matching the Emperor’s own stature.
Toa-Sytell frowned. This seemed faintly blasphemous, somehow, though he couldn’t put a reason to his feeling. A fundamental pragmatist, he had long ago accepted his inability to appreciate art, but it was disturbing that Caine had come to occupy so large a place in the Emperor’s thoughts in so short a time.
Toa-Sytell looked down at the paper in his hand and read there the message of Simon Jester’s intention to move the Aktiri, and of the hood of silver net.
“Lamorak,” Berne said tightly. “I know his hand.”
“Hmpf.” He turned the paper over; the back was blank. He shrugged.
Toa-Sytell permitted himself a razor’s edge of smile. “I’ve known for some time that Lamorak had been, before his capture, your source close to Simon Jester. My impression, however, was that you have had some, mm, falling out. Breaking his leg, ordering that he be tortured to death—these are not signs of a close working relationship.”
Berne spread his hands. “He’d outlived his usefulness.”
Toa-Sytell lifted the note consideringly. “Apparently not. Though if I’d used a source as you did him, I would never trust his word—”
Ma’elKoth’s distant thunder cut off all possibility of discussion. The Emperor laid massive hands on the shoulders of his two servants.
“We cannot deduce what profit Lamorak can hope of this; we must assume that it is part of some tactic. Berne and his Grey Cats will pretend to be taken in by it; they will watch, and search the barges.”
“What of this silver hood?” Toa-Sytell asked. “It seems that I’ve heard some rumor of such a thing—”
“Mmm, yes. Master Arkadeil from time to time employed a certain artificer, Konnos by name, who constructed some of his equipment for the Theater of Truth. The most recent such piece was a suit made entirely of fine-worked silver mesh that would supposedly render him immune to any of the subtler magicks accessible to a Donjon-bound thaumaturge: an expensive piece of work, for which Arkadeil paid, I believe, by having Konnos denounced as an Aktir.”
The Emperor sighed heavily. “I Myself considered this creation to be of limited utility—anyone wearing it is cut off completely from Flow, and hence is essentially powerless. I may have been too hasty: My feelings were prejudiced by My own strengths. I have ordered several full-sized versions of this silver net constructed, after which I shall conduct My own experiments. For the nonce, I have sent to the Donjon for Arkadeil’s suit, which can be cut into material suitable for three or four hoods, in addition to the one that is already part of it. We shall test Lamorak’s message in action, as soon as the hoods are ready.”
Toa-Sytell nodded up toward the oversized manikin of Caine. “What word do you have from him? What does he think of Lamorak’s message?”
Ma’elKoth wheeled on him; the hand upon his shoulder became a grip of iron that lifted him into the air. Sudden fury twisted his beautiful face into a demon’s mask, and his eyes flared scarlet as the rising sun.
“I do not know!” he roared, so loud that Toa-Sytell’s ears felt as though they’d been pierced by knives. He felt the actual heat of Ma’elKoth’s gaze upon his skin. All the breath left his lungs along with the strength from his limbs. He hung like a hare in the jaws of a lion.
Throughout the Lesser Ballroom the pages jumped at the crash of the Emperor’s voice and exchanged fearful glances; no doubt every sleeper in the Palace awakened in panic as though from a nightmare. Toa-Sytell had a sudden feeling that across the city, throughout the entire Empire, every man and woman and child who had undergone the Ritual of Rebirth paused as the routine of their lives was suddenly interrupted by a rush of indefinable unease. He felt that every Child of Ma’elKoth had a premonition of some unforeseen disaster.
An instant later Toa-Sytell was returned to his feet. The crushing grip on his shoulder had become a warm and fatherly hand of support to steady him until he could once again stand.
“You have My apology, Toa-Sytell,” Ma’elKoth said softly and calmly, though echoes of that titanic fury still hummed beneath his tone. His chest expanded near to bursting and fell again in a long, long sigh. “The Work goes poorly, and My temper is short.”
The Duke said nothing, still slowly recovering from the scorching rage with which he’d been struck. Like a child feeling a parent’s fist for the first time, he couldn’t quite sort through his emotions: he was hurt and frightened and ashamed and uncertain what to say or what not to say.
Tiny beads of sweat prickled out all over his body, sweat that only peripherally related to the Lesser Ballroom’s saunalike heat, and even Berne looked shaken.
“Observe.” Ma’elKoth turned away from them, so that neither could see his face.
“When Berne first came to Me this morn, I attempted to Speak to Caine, to get his word on this missive. If he is still in Lamorak’s company, Caine would be able to confirm this report or tell Me of its falsity. At the very least, I would have a vastly clearer vision of what is happening. Observe the result.”
The outsized manikin rose higher over the rim of the cauldron, drifted toward the three, and descended to the floor nearby.
Ma’elKoth extended his right hand as though offering benediction, his outspread fingers shading the manikin’s face from the morning sun. An in-drawing tension, as though the palace itself held its breath, and the air around Ma’elKoth heatshimmered with power.
The word echoed within Toa-Sytell’s head like a whisper in a cave, but the manikin remained mere blank and lifeless clay.
Always before, the posture, attitude, even the spirit of the target would come to animate the manikin through which the Speaking took place. Ma’elKoth spoke to it, and it would answer as though it were the very man to whom he Spoke. Now, though, now . . . Toa-Sytell squinted and moved closer, bending his neck to look up into the manikin’s face of blood-worked clay.
There was something indefinable missing here, something beyond the obvious lifelessness of the Speaking’s inexplicable failure. Some quality of life, of truth, of implicit motion was missing from this figure. The manikins of which Ma’elKoth constructed his Great Work always carried an impression of immanent activity, of not-too-deeply buried life, as though they might move and speak and laugh and love as soon as one turned one’s eyes away—but this Caine looked as dead as a discarded doll. Though each individual feature appeared as perfect as one would expect, some ineffable crudity of their combination made it merely a large hunk of Caine-shaped clay.
“You can see,” said Ma’elKoth, deep in his chest, “that this goes beyond a simple refusal to answer. Somehow, somewhere, Caine is beyond the reach of My voice.”
“I am surrounded by mystery. Why can I not penetrate the magick that beclouds Simon Jester’s every move? Why is Lamorak so eager to betray that he will forgive a sentence of death? Where is Caine?”
“You think maybe he’s dead?” Berne asked hopefully.
Ma’elKoth snorted contemptuously. “Have you no eyes?” The manikin swung around the Emperor to bob pugnaciously a hand span from Berne’s nose.
“This is not the face of a corpse! This is the face of a man who never was! Caine has been wiped from existence as though he were a phantom of our collective daydreams. I will know how. I will know why. I will bend My magicks to this end, but Caine has, in the past, proven too slippery for such a grip.”
The manikin suddenly jerked high over the cauldron’s rim and splashed down into the boiling mud as though tossed by a careless giant. Ma’elKoth stood between his two nobles and cracked his knuckles like a wrestler.
“Berne, take your Cats to the barges. Perhaps the note is a diversion, a bait; if Simon Jester thinks we have bitten, perhaps he will move openly elsewhere. Or perhaps the note is honest, and we will take him today at the river. Toa-Sytell, you will place every man, woman, and street-child ever associated with the King’s Eyes on alert. I wish to know everything that happens in this city today. Everything. And you personally,” Ma’elKoth leaned close to the Duke, his breath hot and bloody, “will turn your whole attention, Toa-Sytell, to discovering where in the world a man can go that he cannot hear My voice, where it is that My will does not extend. This is, at the very least, equal in importance to the capture of Simon Jester; it is vital to the return of My serenity.”
He turned away and vaulted up over the cauldron’s rim, walking barefoot across the liquid surface of the boiling clay. He raised his arms, and a new figure arose from the mud, forming again into a man, ten, twelve feet tall. As his will began to sculpt its broken nose and fringe of beard, he turned his face toward Toa-Sytell one last time: his eyes smoked emerald fire, and his voice scraped and rumbled like a mountain avalanche.
“AND YOU KNOW, I can’t figure out if he planned it this way, or not. I can’t even figure out if it matters one way or the other.”
Because standing still hurt too much, Hari Michaelson sat by the small square window on an uncomfortably hard examining stool.
His right arm was strapped to his chest to partially immobilize his ventilated trapezius. The wound could not be visibly treated beyond debridement and crude stitching; use of advanced medical technology would cause a continuity flaw when he transferred back to Ankhana. He’d taken several injections of timed-release universal antibiotics and had a week’s supply of pinhead-sized analgesic caps slowly dissolving within the muscle. His left shoulder and his knee both ached fiercely from the beating they’d taken as well as from the steroids that had been pumped into both joints; and even though an anti-inflammatory had been injected into each one of the innumerable purple-black bruises from the gelslugs that had hammered him into unconsciousness, his entire torso was strapped with surgical tape to help keep down the swelling.
When he returned to Ankhana, he’d be able to explain away the bruises as battering from the fall down the Shaft sump. It was a good story: the media believed it already, and so did the meditechs who’d treated his wounds.
He stared at the rolling lines of raindrops that slid vertically down the windowpane as though his future could be read there. It always seems to rain, when I come here, he thought.
“I don’t see how it could be going any better for him,” he said. “He even opened my infirmary room to the media—they were on me from the instant I opened my eyes. In the cab, on the way here, I couldn’t find a channel that didn’t have a story about me on it. If they didn’t have one of my quotes, they had an interview with the meditech, or they had retired Actors offering odds on my Final Confrontation with Berne, or some flack from Studio Marketing talking about the record advance orders for the secondhand cubes, or some other asshole claiming to know something about the ‘malfunction in the Winston transfer mechanism.’ ”
He set his left fist on the glass and leaned on it, examining the folds of skin on his thumb and forefinger, the thick pads of callus across his knuckles.
“Some guy in Chicago managed to get an interview with Shanna’s parents. They, y’know, they—” He had to cough away a sudden huskiness in his throat. “—Alan and Mara can’t get seats, y’know? They don’t get their next-of-kin comps because this is my Adventure, not Shanna’s. They’re Trade, y’know. They can’t afford a first-hander berth. Shit, I’d give them the money, but I didn’t even think of it, and they’re too proud to ask me . . . So this Chicago asshole, he’s asking for donations, a worldwide sympathy plea to get the Leightons on-line for the rest of my Adventure. Doing well, too, they say—makes you wonder who’s gonna keep the leftover profits.”
Once he’d managed to fight his way free of the media feeding frenzy at the Studio infirmary, Hari hadn’t even bothered to do a fly-by on the Abbey: he knew damned well the place would be shoulder to shoulder with news crews. Marc Vilo wouldn’t return his calls: he’d left the Studio the night before, while Hari was still unconscious in the infirmary. Hari guessed he’d probably had his usual luck with Dole and was currently happily humping away at some Leisure tail. And Vilo would have only been good for shielding him from the press. Even with Vilo, Hari couldn’t have spoken what was in his heart, couldn’t have said the things that he needed so desperately to say.
Many of these words, these thoughts, were dangerous; he needed to say things that could get him cyborged if they were repeated to the Social Police. Vilo couldn’t protect him, and Hari wouldn’t put his Patron in that position.
So he went to the one place he could always go, turned to the only man who could safely hear whatever he needed to say. He went to the Buchanan Social Camp, to the Mute Facility, where nothing he said could possibly be taped, or even overheard, and told it all to his crazy father.
“How could he have put it all together so neatly? I mean, was he planning this when he sent Lamorak to betray her? When he approved her Adventure in the first place? How far back does it go? Back to Toa-Phelathon? What does he care about more, eliminating Ma’elKoth or getting the ratings?”
Duncan Michaelson had lain nervelessly in his bed, listening to Hari in silence broken only by his occasional rasping cough. Veins twitched across his forehead, and as always Hari couldn’t tell how much Duncan could understand until he spoke.
Hari looked at his father’s pale and ghostly reflection in the rain-streaked window. “No, I guess it doesn’t. I’m dead either way.”
“Not . . .” Duncan coughed harshly, convulsively, his mouth filling with phlegm. Hari came to his side, loosened the straps that held his wrists, and pulled out a paper handkerchief for his father to spit into. He wiped Duncan’s lips gently.
“. . . not dead,” Duncan murmured painfully. “You’re winning . . .”
What’re you, nuts? Hari barely kept the reflexive words from his lips, and he had to fight down a bitter laugh.
“Winning? Dad, I’m barely walking. Shanna dies in two days. She’s in love with the bastard who’s going to kill her, and I’m getting crushed between the Studio and the fucking Ankhanan Empire. Even if I can get back to Shanna in time, even if I live that long, she doesn’t want to be saved . . .”
“What, what about . . .” The effort of speaking seemed to be exhausting him. “. . . what about Kollberg?”
Hari lowered his head. “He’s too smart for me, Dad. He’s been two steps ahead of me the whole way.” His fingers laced together and twisted, cracking his knuckles in a machine-gun stutter.
“When I woke up in the infirmary, it took me half an hour to really believe that I’d been about to kill him. It took me another hour to get over failing.”
“Stupid . . . stupid kid. Didn’t I tell you . . . didn’t I tell you once what your problem is?”
“Yeah, whatever. You’re always telling me what my problem is. I’m a slave, right?”
A thin and bloodless smile stretched Duncan’s withered lips.
“He . . . Kollberg, he’s not smarter than you, Hari. Very few people are . . . He just . . . He goes for what he wants, y’know? He’s always shaving the odds, always taking another baby step toward where he wants to go, even when he doesn’t know how it’ll all pull together in the end . . . When you do that long enough, hard enough, eventually things fall into place and . . . and you look like a genius, when you never really planned anything . . .”
“Listen.” Duncan’s trembling hand gripped Hari’s wrist with surprising strength. “You do the same; you always have. Caine does it; so do you. When Caine wins, that’s how you do it every time. You inch toward daylight, and then when it comes together, you take it all, one fast move puts it all together—right?”
Hari frowned. “Well, yeah, I guess—”
Hari narrowed his eyes, suddenly thinking hard.
“See?” Duncan went on. “. . . not a slave. You’re thinking . . . how you can beat him. A real slave can’t even think like that—slaves can’t fight back; they won’t let themselves fight back. He doesn’t own you . . . in your mind. You can fight him now. You’ve won.”
“No no no. Think. I couldn’t teach you much, but I tried at least to teach you to think. Beat Ma’elKoth—there’ll be other Ma’elKoths. There’ll be other Kollbergs. You’ve already beaten the worst enemy you’ll ever have—that voice in your head . . . It tells you the fight’s already over . . . whispers there’s nothing you can do . . . If you beat that voice, it’s a victory that can’t be taken from you. You might die, but you’ll die fighting.”
Or I might end up here, in the next room in the Buke, he thought. Duncan had taken his own baby steps, had beaten that voice—and had been crushed like a roach under a boot heel.
Hari sighed and shook his head. “I haven’t beaten it, Dad. I’m trying, but so far I haven’t been able to lay a fist on it.”
Duncan’s eyes drifted closed, and he allowed himself a rusty chuckle. “You will . . . Identify the enemy—it’s half the battle . . . Take that step, Hari. Take that first step, and then just don’t stop.”
“Easy for you to say,” Hari muttered under his breath, looking away. “It’s over for you. You lost a long time ago.”
“Nothing’s over,” Duncan said. His brain might have been out of order, but there was nothing wrong with his ears. “And I haven’t lost yet. I’m still in there pitching, Hari.”
Hari stared at his father’s ruined face, at his withered smile that showed a gentle confidence that was so out of place, so ludicrous from this shattered straw man, that it defied argument.
“Still taking those baby steps, kiddo,” Duncan said, wiping phlegm from his lips with a crippled hand. “I took another one, just now.”
HARI SPENT HOURS in Duncan’s room that day; he had nowhere else he needed to be. Kollberg had already scheduled his return to Ankhana for tomorrow morning, and Hari had only a single Studio obligation in the interim, a follow-up interview with LeShaun Kinnison on DragonTales.
They had much to talk of, father and son. Hari had heard other men speak of finally coming to know their fathers as men; for those other men, this slow process had begun in their twenties. Duncan’s madness, Hari’s career—any number of things had stripped this opportunity from Hari’s life. Nothing he could do or say would bring it back, but that day he felt as though he made a beginning, like he began to have the faintest glimmer of how Duncan’s students must have felt about him thirty-five years ago.
He knew, too, that a beginning was all he could ever have; he’d waited too long. Duncan was too far gone in his cycle of madness.
They tried to spend the day discussing Hari’s problem, exploring options for getting Hari and Shanna out from under the hammer that poised trembling over their heads. Hari used up a lot of favors that day, promised kilos of cocaine, to keep himself within the room, to keep the attendant passing by with his occasional injections.
Duncan cycled in and out of lucidity according to a very delicate balance of his medications; much of the time Hari spent in that room was taken up with Duncan’s fantasies of a different time, of the years before and just after Duncan’s downcasteing, when Hari’s mother still lived, when they were still a family. Duncan would grill Hari on his geometry lesson or send him to the bedroom to check on his mother’s fever. Hari found it frighteningly easy to slip back into that dream-surfing process of riding the advancing wave of Duncan’s fantasy, to be precisely what Duncan expected him to be.
Duncan mentioned the same thing, in one of his lucid cycles. “You’re so good at playing along, Hari—seamlessly, faultlessly good . . . I know I beat that skill into you with my fists, before you were big enough to fight back—I remember that, sometimes . . . It’s made you wealthy, and famous—but now it’s going to get you killed. See, you’re so good at being what they want you to be that nobody remembers you don’t have to do it. Not even you. You’ve fooled them all into thinking that you are Caine; you’ve even fooled yourself. You don’t have to solve every problem with your fists, Hari. That’s Caine’s way. That was Caine, down there in the Chairman’s office. The Chairman hurt you, and your reaction was to beat him to death with your bare hands—but that was Caine’s reaction because Caine doesn’t have any other option. It’s the only problem-solving strategy he has.”
“What else is there?” Hari sighed with a weary shrug.
“Plenty. There’s plenty. Dammit, you’re too smart to kid yourself this way. You’ve been taken by your own con, Hari. The whole world thinks that Caine is all of you, and you’ve let them talk you into agreeing. But it’s not true. It never was true. Aren’t you the one who’s supposed to be looking the world square in the eye?”
Hari shifted uncomfortably. “That’s the general idea—”
“Well, it’s crap. You’re pretending to be less than you are. You’re pretending the world is worse than it is. You’re kidding yourself just as much as any Pollyanna optimist does. You know what it is? It’s an excuse to lose. And you can’t afford it. Not this time. The stakes are too high.”
“But what am I supposed to do about it? I mean, really do?” Hari said tiredly. “I’m fucked from every direction.”
“First, quit whining. Then quit kidding yourself. Let the Chairman, let the Emperor, let everybody think that Caine is who you are—just don’t let yourself think that. That’s your edge. People have been watching you almost twenty years, and nobody knows yet how smart you really are. Take those baby steps, Hari—inch toward daylight. Trust that if you just don’t quit, eventually you’ll find yourself on the pivot, you’ll be in a spot where one bold stroke will lock everything down. You know your enemy, but he doesn’t know you. Kollberg thinks that as long as you can’t get your hands on him, he’s safe.”
“Dad . . . you, uh . . .” Hari said, shaking his head. “You make it sound so simple . . .”
“Maybe it is,” Duncan rasped. “Hey, being crazy doesn’t automatically make me wrong.” He rolled his head sideways on the pillow, so that he could look out the window.
He said distantly, “And a man . . . a man can be excused . . . taking a certain amount of pride in his only son.”
Hari swallowed hard and blinked past the sudden heat at the corners of his eyes. “Well,” he said, “I guess the first thing I need to figure out is who might take my side in this, who’s big enough that the Studio can’t just step on them.”
They’d talked for a long time more; it was midafternoon before Hari left. From the cab on his way home, he keyed Marc Vilo’s private number, and this time the stubby Businessman answered.
“Anything, kid, anything. You really pulled it through for me. She signed over Green Fields this morning—”
Vilo shook his head. “Back to Kauai. Why?”
“That’s the favor,” Hari said. “I need an audience with Shermaya Dole.”
“That’s not a big one, kid,” Vilo said with a broad grin. “This’s one old widder lady that’s real happy to oblige, you follow?”
Hari took a deep breath. Inch toward daylight, he thought. “How about this afternoon?”
BERNE’S STRAWBERRY SERGE stood out among the grey leather of the Cats. They gathered within the bridgehouse on the Old Town side of Knights’ Bridge, nearly two hundred men of closely matched height and build, the entire capital detachment.
Gone was the horseplay and revelry that characterized their nights; every man in the room wore a face of deathly determination. Every man in the room knew that they were about to go into action against Simon Jester; every man in the room felt the loss of the six men who’d been slaughtered in the failed raid less than a week ago; every man in the room had lost a comrade, a friend.
Every man in the room swore in his heart that he’d be the one to avenge them.
Behind Berne stood what he’d decided to call his Catseyes—four of his bravest, steadiest men wearing flat caps draped with veils of silver netting. The procedure he’d improvised to take advantage of Lamorak’s tip was simple: One Catseye would accompany each pride, and he’d describe to the pride alpha at his side each and every person he saw. If the tip was true, and this netting rendered a man immune to Cloaks and other mind-altering magicks, eventually one of the Catseyes would begin to describe people and things that the alpha beside him could not see. Encirclement and capture could then begin according to their standard procedures.
“The Emperor wants the thaumaturge alive; everyone else can die,” Berne said simply.
This particular instruction had been carefully planned; he had to be able to say truthfully to Ma’elKoth that he didn’t order a massacre. If the boys got a little out of hand, well, that was understandable, considering the losses and humiliations inflicted on them this past week. It was the frustration, don’t you see? And anger—all those boys lost friends this week, and I guess they just had to take it out on somebody . . . He was thinking specifically of Caine, hoping, praying deep in his heart that Caine would somehow be there.
He thought, privately, that the reason Ma’elKoth couldn’t Speak to Caine was that Caine had truly gone over to Simon Jester—perhaps was himself Simon Jester—and had somehow draped himself with this same magickal fog that still frustrated the Emperor. He planned to keep one Catseye by his own side; he dreamed of facing Caine while the power of Ma’elKoth filled his chest to the very brink of shattering orgasm . . .
And maybe Pallas Ril would be there, as well. She’d escaped him in the Warrens, humiliated him and his men, but today, just maybe, he’d take her. Take them both.
This sweet mirage drifted shimmering at the fringes of his mind and brought a faint curve of smile to his lips, even as he issued instructions to the Cats.
“Guard the Catseyes: Simon Jester will go for them with everything he’s got. If a Catseye falls—” Berne swept his men’s grim, set faces with a smoldering glare. “—the man at his side will take his veil, and become the new eyes of his pride. There will be no escape for Simon Jester, not this time. To live, he must defeat us all in open combat.”
He flicked his gaze to a corner of the bridgehouse wall, to where a horns-and-grin graffito of Simon Jester had been scribbled in red chalk. He had, in fact, secretly scratched it there himself, only a few minutes before the Cats had assembled, with precisely this moment in mind.
“Look at that,” he said darkly, reaching over his shoulder for the hilt of Kosall. “Look how he defies us. Look how he laughs.”
He slowly pulled Kosall from its scabbard. When he grasped its hilt, its high whine vibrated in the teeth of every man in the room. He extended the blurring edge of the blade to tap the stone where the graffito lay, as though taking its measure.
A flick of Berne’s powerful wrist snapped Kosall in a sizzling arc around its point as he lunged into the wall, a degage that sliced a cone of shining rock from the limestone; it slid free. Berne tapped it spinning into the air with Kosall’s flat, then caught it neatly in his left hand. He held it up, so that the assembled Cats could see the face of Simon Jester upon it.
An act of will summoned his enchanted strength, and he crushed the cone of rock within his fist with a sound like cracking bones, crumbling it to gravel, to dust that he allowed to trail between his fingers and trickle to the floor.
The Cats greeted this display with a fierce stillness, a silence that was far more profound than any cheer.
He said, “The tale of Simon Jester ends today, in defeat and bloody death. To your places.”
As the Cats assembled in their prides and filed silently from the bridgehouse, every man of them swore in his heart to make Berne’s vow become truth.
“AAAH, LADY?” THE barge captain’s whiskey rasp came from out of sight beyond the hatch at the ladder’s top.
“Y’might wanna come up here and look at this . . .”
Pallas pushed herself to her feet, aching in every joint. When the barge captain said lady, he was always talking to her. Everyone else was hey you, even Talann; he’d told them outright that he didn’t want to know any names.
The newly hired crew had done a fine job on the bilge, flooring it with layers of open-worked shipping pallets, to make a slatted floor eight inches above the slop that still covered the bottom. They’d scrubbed the bulkheads and hung lamps from pegs and generally made it temporarily comfortable.
Several of the tokali were tall enough to knock their heads on the beams that supported the deck above, and even the shorter ones felt oppressed and confined by the low ceiling; there was very little moving about. The tokali sat huddled into their family knots, here and there, and they all looked at her with wide, frightened eyes. As usual, muttered some weary and resentful part of her brain.
As soon as she climbed the ladder, they’d start asking each other what was happening, spinning ever-more-alarming fantasies about what might be going on in the daylit topside world; eventually, one of them would summon the courage to brace Talann about it. Talann would assure them that all was well, and they’d return to their family knots, and the whole process would begin again.
She’d Cloak-walked Talann with the last of them from the warehouse in the Industrial Park an hour ago. Lamorak had decided to stay with the Subjects, and that was all right with her. Majesty and the Subjects could take care of him, hide him, and protect him from the Imperials better than she could. Now they waited only for the barge’s turn to slip from the docks and head downriver. The captain had bribed the dock boss to move them up the queue, and they had less than another hour to wait.
All Pallas wanted was to get the tokali out of town and well on their way downriver. Then she could leave the barge, walk back into the city, find a way to cancel the Eternal Forgetting, and get herself on-line, safe from amplitude decay. She would come back to the city just in case the Studio had prepared an autotransfer protocol, waiting for her transponder signature; she didn’t want to be unexpectedly transferred out in full view of the tokali, the crew, and Talann.
Then she’d see what she’d see; if the Studio chose not to pull her, she’d make her way back to the barge—a fast horse would catch it in less than a day—and ensure the tokali made it safely to Terana. If she found herself suddenly back on the transfer platform in the Studio, well, she’d deal with that when she got there. At least she’d be able to call Hari and find out what in the name of god was going on.
His sudden transfer last night had wakened terrifying images of what might happen to her—and it was a mystery that chewed on the fringes of her consciousness.
Why would the Studio have pulled him in the middle of an Adventure? It didn’t make any sense.
And that long moment of stillness, that slow count of ten where he’d sat without so much as a twitch of his finger . . . She’d seen that from him before—the catatonia of thought so consuming that he didn’t have enough brain capacity left over to remember to breathe. What had come to him, then? He’d looked straight at Lamorak and said, “You. It’s you,” with another look on his face, one Pallas had seen only a few times before: his soul-extinguishing rage that brought instant, reflexive violence.
It was the look she’d seen on his face the night he’d come for her at Berne’s camp, back in Race for the Crown of Dal’kannith. When he’d loosed her bonds and helped bind over the burns and salted cuts of Berne’s amusements, she’d whispered, “Take me out of here.” When he looked at her wounds, then at the flayed corpses of Marade and Tizarre, still lying in the tent with her, then out through a slit in the tent flap at the men who had done this to all of them, sitting around their campfire, drinking and laughing among themselves, that was the look his face had worn.
He’d looked at Lamorak the same way he’d looked at Berne that night, and she didn’t know why.
But she didn’t have time to think about it much. Time pressed on her from all sides: how little of it she had, to move thirty-six tokali out of Ankhana, to find a way to save her own life. She’d already spent far too much of her limited time thinking about Caine, about the last look on his face when the crystalline prismatic shimmer began to halo his body.
It stuck with her, and she couldn’t shake it; she kept coming back to it in unguarded moments.
It stuck with her because he’d been in his killing zone, consumed by that berserk fury that seemed sometimes to rule his life, the state of mind where nothing mattered to him but blood and pain. But when the world had begun to halo out, in that half second he had to act, he didn’t attack. There wasn’t any time to think, to consider consequences, to weigh a choice.
His reflex had spun him away from killing and back toward her.
She knew what he’d been trying to do when his hands had stretched toward her: extend the transfer field, take her with him back to Earth and safety. It shook her; it really did. It didn’t fit her image of him at all. It made her think that maybe he was changing, a little, slowly and gradually in her absence; it made her think that maybe it’d be worth her trouble to get to know him again.
She fought these thoughts, recognizing them for the succubi they were, seductive fantasies that could lead only to more heartache. That was past, she told herself again and again. I’m over him.
Beneath the layers of her resentment, she’d often felt a sneaking envy for his ability to surrender himself to bloodshed. There must be something deeply free about hating so much, having so much anger that consequences became irrelevant, the way he hated Berne.
After all, she’d suffered more at Berne’s hands than he had. It wasn’t him who had been bound in that tent, watching friends being tortured to death, feeling Berne’s loathsome caress between the kiss of hot coals and the icy pain of needle and knife edge; it wasn’t him hunted through the streets, hiding in basements, remembering the swift and efficient slaughter of Dak and Jak. But he was the one who could forget everything, drop his whole life in an instant for a chance to hurt Berne—or really, any of the enemies he’d made over his career.
She’d always been the mature one, the dedicated one, the one who could put her personal feelings aside, the one who had her priorities straight: save the innocents; protect the children; hold back; think, plan, strategize until her brain went numb.
This came partly from the voluntary discipline of her art; effective thaumaturgy was as precise as mathematics, and like mathematics it required a certain coldness of mind, a detachment. But she had a not-too-deeply buried desire—once in her life, just once—to let it all go, to cut loose the way Caine did.
All of these thoughts swirled and colored each other as she mounted the ladder, passing through her brain in seconds, chasing each other in the confused and feverish way that comes with bone-deep fatigue. So when she stepped out onto the sunlit deck and saw the antiship nets being cranked slowly up from the river’s surface, dripping weeds and slime, she couldn’t really register exactly what was happening, or why it was important.
The upper rim of the antiship nets stretched in a deep catenary across the river from the titanic windlasses, down-geared and ratcheted, atop Onetower and the northwest garrison on the downstream side, and from Sixtower to the northeast garrison at the easternmost tip of Old Town, almost out of sight around the curve of the island. The nets were made of huge steel links, each one nearly six feet long and as thick as Pallas’arm, bent to join with each other like the rings in a shirt of chainmail. They sealed off a stretch of river docks and the barges and boats moored there along the whole curve of the bank opposite the towering limestone walls of Old Town, including the barge on which she stood.
For the moment, though, Pallas could only feel the blessing of sunlight and a fresh breeze; ever since her encounter with the Cats two days ago, she hadn’t been outside in daylight without being Cloaked, separated from her sensations by the focused concentration of mindview.
The two poleboys—ogre brothers, each a great hulking hunchbacked brute over eight feet tall—leaned on their twenty-five-foot river poles, staring silently west toward Knights’ Bridge. In the wheelhouse, the pilot—human, but ugly enough to be part ogrillo—stared in the same direction, and the two human bilgeboys peered out from a gap in the deck-lashed stacks of cargo crates.
The captain nodded toward the high-arching span of Knights’ Bridge while he pretended to light a long-stemmed pipe.
“ ’S not just the nets, lady. I’m thinking, that up there might be trouble for us.”
That up there—Pallas could barely make it out with a squint; the captain must have exceptional eyesight—was two men standing at the center of the Knights’ Bridge arch, leaning on the stone rail to look out over the river, the sun very nearly at their backs. In the glare, she had difficulty defining what it was about them that disturbed her so much. One had something on his head, some kind of hat, or a hood, and the other—
A tendril of cloud passed before the sun, and in the sweep of shadow, she could see that the other man wore a shirt of faded and blotchy strawberry and had something that looked like the hilt of a sword sticking up over his left shoulder.
And he seemed to be staring directly at her.
A shock went through her, from the top of her head in a wave down to the soles of her feet. She froze for an endless second before reason took over. There was no way he could pick her out, recognize her from that distance among this crawling mass of boats and barges along the busy dockside. On the other hand, there was no reason to dawdle up here in plain view.
Now, too, she could see men in grey leather fanning out among the dockworkers and the rivermen. They seemed to come from everywhere, casually half stealing into view simultaneously from doorways and alleys all along the dockside.
“Chi’iannon’s Grace,” Pallas muttered. “There must be a hundred of them.”
She turned to the captain. “Keep the crew calm,” she said. “Think of this as just another inspection. I’ll Cloak the passengers below, exactly as we did for the inspection this morning. They’ll look around; they won’t find anything; they’ll go away.”
He shook his head dubiously, sucking on the pipe stem. “Dunno, lady. My boys, they’re good boys. I’d put ’em against any barge crew; I’d put ’em against most river pirates. Nobody can ask ’em to stand against Grey Cats.”
“It won’t come to that,” she said, putting a reassuring hand on his arm. “Tell your boys to play dumb; you go on and yessir-nosir the Cats until they’re sick of your voice. I’ll handle the rest.”
She swung back down through the hatch before the captain could render another objection. The huddled knots of tokali below raised apprehensive eyes to her with unspoken questions. She lifted her hands.
“It’s another inspection, that’s all. We’ll do this exactly like the last one, all right? Everyone stay still and quiet while I Cloak you, and we’ll send off these inspectors none the wiser. It’s best to be ready, though. Everybody find a comfortable spot and lie down. Go on. It’ll take only a few minutes; try to relax. In less than an hour, we’ll be on our way downstream to safety.”
She paused for a moment and waited and watched until the tokali slowly began to arrange themselves. Lying down was best; when she was doing something so complex as a mass Cloak, sudden movement in her eye plane could distract her.
Talann sat below her on the stairs, sunk in some kind of brown study, resting her chin on her hands. She’d been listless and uncommunicative ever since Pallas had returned last night from her talk with Lamorak and Caine.
Pallas sat down beside her and murmured, “I need you alert and with me, Talann. It’s the Cats.”
Talann looked at her blankly, light only gradually returning to her eyes. “Sorry?”
“The Cats, Talann. And I’m exhausted.”
Her gaze gradually sharpened. “Is Berne out there?”
“Yes, he is,” Pallas said slowly, with a growing frown. “Why?”
“He fought Caine—he fought Caine again, just two or three days ago, in a brothel in Alientown. The Subjects were talking about it last night. Caine lost. Again.”
“Let me tell you something,” Pallas said sharply. “Facing Berne and living through it? I wouldn’t call that losing.”
“He ran,” Talann said, staring off into some private distance.
“What? I’m what?” Unaccountable anger harshened her voice. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” Talann murmured. “It’s not the same.”
Then she mumbled something under her breath, something that Pallas couldn’t make out, something that she wasn’t supposed to hear, but somehow she understood the indistinct mutter all the same: But I wouldn’t run . . .
It was all too clear that Talann was going through some kind of adolescent crisis, and for a brief moment Pallas actually imagined herself talking to the young warrior about it. This distracted sullenness and resentment—this had something to do with Caine, and with Pallas herself, and with Caine’s disappearance. They’d spent a whole day together, alone except for the intermittently conscious Lamorak . . .
The thought slid into her mind like a hot needle: Did he sleep with her?
But this came only from fatigue and the pressure of fear, a mind trick to avoid thinking about the approaching Cats; she shook it off and forced herself to concentrate on the immediate problem.
“Listen,” she said. “Don’t even think about Berne. Help me keep everybody quiet, and for the love of Chi’iannon don’t do anything stupid. Don’t forget what we’re here for, all right? We’re not here to kill Cats; we’re not here to fight Berne. We’re here to save the lives of these people.” She nodded toward a far corner of the bilge, where Konnos and his wife tried to quiet their younger daughter, who had become restlessly hyperactive, spurred by the tension and the inactivity.
Talann stared at them silently, stared past them, beyond the hull. “I know it. Don’t worry about me.”
Pallas took her at her word. With a final, comradely squeeze of Talann’s shoulder, she stepped to the corner of the bilge and sank into the Warrior’s Seat position that Hari had taught her. Though not quite as comfortable as her accustomed Lotus Seat, the Warrior’s Seat had the advantage that one quick surge of the doubled legs beneath her would pop her to her feet, already in a fighting stance.
She began the slow pattern of circular breathing that brought her to mindview. All of her worries, her doubts, and her fatigue sloughed from her spirit like dry leaves stripped by an autumn breeze, and now she began the long and intricate process of erasing her mental image of each person in the bilge. One by one they faded from her consciousness, each of the tokali, then Talann, finally even herself, and then she wiped away the provisions, the ragged palliasses, the shipping pallets that made the dry-slatted floor, then the lamps that hung from the pegs on the walls, as well as the light they cast.
And as her final touch, which would have been far beyond the skill of a lesser adept, she added to the scene: scuffed the walls with mental grime, raised the level of black wastewater, and imaged bits of unidentifiable flotsam bobbing on its surface.
This last was to discourage the Cats from coming down the ladder for a closer look. This water would look real, but there was no way she could disguise the feel of the dry pallets beneath a man’s boots. If one of them came down the ladder, the game would be up, and they’d have to fight their way out.
Time passed unnoticed in mindview, and the level of concentration she required to maintain a Cloak of this complexity prevented her from any more than barely registering the sounds of voices and of boot heels on the deck above. She knew that the Cats were here, that even now the barge captain was muttering with his best pretense of simpleminded helpfulness, but she couldn’t spare enough attention to comprehend the words they spoke.
A shaft of light speared into her Cloak as the hatch opened, but she was ready for that. Her disciplined mind automatically made the necessary adjustments of light and shadow, and added a glittering reflection from the surface of the illusionary water. Even in mindview, she felt a certain pride at the quality of this illusion. It was unbeatable.
A pair of heads appeared, silhouetted against the afternoon sky; one of them wore some kind of hood, made of metallic-looking netting, and she heard a gasp that came from down here in the bilge itself. She knew the voice: Konnos.
What in the name of god could have startled Konnos so much that he’d give them all away?
There was no way to tell if the Cats could hear it as well—they were up in the breeze and the dockside noises—but now the bareheaded Cat said something, and the one in the hood replied. Both heads withdrew, and the hatch started to swing closed . . .
And Talann streaked up the ladder and threw herself against the descending hatch.
The sudden motion startled Pallas out of mindview. What was that lunatic doing?
But now memory surged back, and she understood what the Cats had said, the words whose meaning hadn’t penetrated mindview: “Nothing. It’s empty and it smells bad.” And the reply from the one in the hood: “It’s full of people . . .”
Talann hit the hatch door like a locomotive, hammering it open, ripping it from the grasp of the startled Cats. She reached up through the open hatch and tangled her fists in the leather collars of the two Cats, then kicked off from the ladder and let herself fall into the bilge, her sudden weight pulling both of them in after her.
The bilge rang with shouts and screams of alarm as the tokali wailed with a single voice. Talann released the falling Cats before she landed, then skipped back to let them fall in a heap at her feet. As they struggled to disentangle themselves from each other, Talann spun and cracked a heel kick into the back of one’s head; he went down twitching. She jumped high and landed with the heel of one foot on the side of his neck. He flopped like a landed fish as he died.
The hooded Cat came rolling to his feet, and Pallas’ startled paralysis broke. Even as he drew his sword, she popped out of the Warrior’s Seat into a fighting stance and smoothly slipped her bladewand from its sheath along her wrist; a simple twist of her mind triggered it.
For the brief second of its existence, the blue-white energy of a bladewand is as irresistible as Kosall; a stroke of her hand sent the bladewand’s immaterial edge through the Cat’s wrist. His sword and the hand that had held it fell together to the slatted floor, and a crimson jet fountained from the stump of his wrist as he howled in disbelief.
Talann lunged past him, snaked her arm around his neck as she passed, as though to put him in a headlock. She planted her feet, locked her hands together, and twisted, cracking the stunned Cat like a whip. His neck snapped loudly, audible even over the terrified shouts of the tokali.
The bladewand’s energy flickered out, and Pallas said numbly, “You killed them both . . .”
Talann offered her a feral grin so much like Caine’s that it hurt her heart. “You had a better idea? What now?”
Pallas shook herself and answered, raising her voice to be heard over the tokali.
“How many of them are already aboard?”
“Couldn’t tell. A lot. Does it matter?”
“No. If we stay down here they’ll shoot us like rats. We fight.”
She looked at the metal netting that covered the face of the hooded Cat and understood its significance. “My Cloaks have just become obsolete.”
Talann spread her hands. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Booted feet pounded on the deck above, approaching.
Pallas turned to the tokali. “All of you: stay here and stay down! I don’t know what’s going to happen; whatever it is, it’ll be extreme. Find something to hold on to.”
Talann said, “They have the hatch surrounded—they’re just waiting for one of us to put our head up.”
Pallas nodded. “That’s what I’m counting on.”
A flick of her wrist produced one of the last two buckeyes she had. Talann’s eyes lit with fierce delight.
The lines of power inscribed upon the buckeye’s surface spoke to her mind, and she touched them with a tendril of her Shell. The buckeye began to trail smoke through her fingers, and she lobbed it gently, underhand, up through the hatch. It triggered five feet above the deck with an earshattering boom and blew the deck around the hatch to smoldering flinders; the ladder fell in splinters to the floor.
Where the hatch had been was now a smoking hole about six feet in diameter; the waiting Cats would now be scattered across the deck, some unconscious, others madly rolling and slapping at themselves to put out the flames that clung to their leather clothing.
“There’ll be others, and crossbow fire as we come up,”
Pallas nodded. “You’ll have to draw fire till I get clear.” Pallas made a stirrup of her hands, and Talann understood instantly. It’s almost like working with Caine, Pallas thought. As though we’ve been doing this for years.
Without another word, Talann sprang into Pallas’ hands; Pallas continued the momentum with all the strength in her own legs. She heaved upward while Talann leaped again, and Talann shot up through the hole onto the deck, rolled, and came up running.
Pallas came right behind her, jumping up to catch at the smoking rim of the hole, pulling herself up and out to roll to her feet, so fast and smooth that the smoldering wood could do no more than singe her palms. She dove toward some of the cargo crates lashed to the deck, going over one scorched and unconscious Cat. The whacks of firing crossbows seemed to come from everywhere and were echoed by the loud splintering thumps of quarrels slamming into the deck and the crates around her. Pallas found cover among the crates and cautiously poked her head up.
Talann fought hand to hand against two Cats on the foredeck, springing, leaping, and tumbling to avoid their slashing blades, slicing back at them with the pair of knives she always carried behind her belt. She was safe enough from the crossbow fire for now—the Cats wouldn’t take the chance of shooting their comrades—but more Cats sprinted toward the barge along the wharfside. Pallas triggered her final buckeye and slung it overhand toward them without a second thought. It was her last, but they wouldn’t know that, and caution would slow them down.
The fireball exploded above them, flattening three or four and sending a couple tumbling into the river. The other approaching Cats scattered toward cover.
We’re about as trapped as you can get, Pallas thought. She might be able to escape—especially with Talann along to cover her back—but she was the only hope of the tokali. If she could cut away the ropes that moored the barge to the docks and somehow get the barge to swing out into the current, they’d eventually drift against the downstream antiship net, which she could probably, maybe, cut through with the bladewand, given enough time. She didn’t have a lot of hope for this plan; this would be a long, slow drift in the sluggish current, and she’d have to hold off the Cats the whole way . . . and pass right under Knights’ Bridge.
First things first. She had to get the scorched Cats off the barge. They’d be swiftly recovering from their shock and even she and Talann together couldn’t deal with that many Cats in close quarters. A quick scan of the deck visible from her position found the two ogre poleboys squatting behind a stack of crates not far to her right.
“Hey! You two!” she shouted. “Pick up the guys that are down and toss them overboard!”
One of them shook its massive head. “Not. They s’oot uz,” it explained in a growl that mushed around the curved tusks that protruded upward from its lower jaw.
“I’ll take care of the crossbows,” Pallas snapped. “Move!”
They both shook their heads stubbornly and hunkered down even lower behind the crates. Pallas swore. She once again produced the bladewand and triggered it. A handbreadth plane of shimmering blue-white force sliced through the crate just above one of the ogre’s heads.
“Do it or I’ll kill you right now!”
They flinched, and their leathery faces went pale: they believed her. They started to scramble out from around the stack.
Now Pallas had to keep her end of the bargain.
She breathed herself into mindview, and the shouts of the battle faded. In her powerful imagination, she structured a shining lattice of golden energy, one huge and powerful and curved around the entire barge. It was far larger than anything she could have charged into a crystal; the quartz would have shattered under the strain of holding so much power. It had to be more, it had to be stronger, larger, to hold against the crossbows, against the fists and feet of the Cats; she pulled Flow far beyond her capacity, far beyond what she’d ever dreamed possible, far beyond the point where another adept would have charred his brain and fallen dead on the spot with smoke leaking from his nostrils.
She drew Flow into a towering whirlpool of force that passed into her and through her and powered this enormous shield with an energy beyond any she’d ever controlled. Suddenly her mindview shifted; it was as though she stood outside herself, looking on.
She saw the rigidity of her body, the frown that concentration twisted into her brow, and the titanic energy that flowed through her. A sense of wonder, of awe that was almost religious, entered her along with the Flow. Fatigue and ultimate necessity had combined to thrust her upward into a higher level of consciousness, where she could sluice power through her body to energize the Shield but leave her mind free to look on with a curious sense of release, with what was almost an indifference to the consequences, to the outcome of the battle.
The purity and beauty of the Shield; the ease with which it absorbed the flight after flight of crossbow quarrels; the astonishing grace of Talann’s combat as she dispatched first one Cat, then the other; the slow, twisting arc of the wounded and unconscious Cats that the ogres tossed spinning into the Great Chambaygen; all these combined into an intricate dance that began with the quantum buzz of electron shells within the atoms that made up her body and extended outward to the mighty sweep of the galactic arm, to the endless dance of the galaxies themselves about the core of the universe.
This transcendent blossoming of awareness carried her away; her consciousness vanished within the universal dance and swung there for an instant eternity. She might have hung there forever, blissfully one with the infinite, but she was brought back to herself by a white-hot surge of feedback through her Shield.
Instantly the barge and the river and the wall of Old Town reassembled in her vision, and everything was washed with flame. The flame vanished from the surface of her Shield, but it clung to the decks of the barges nearby, and the crates stacked on the pier. Around the barge, everything burned. The scarlet shaft of power that sprang from the arch of Knights’ Bridge and terminated within the Dusk Tower of the Colhari Palace answered her instant question.
It had been a firebolt. From Berne. From Ma’elKoth.
Yesterday—even this morning—a surprise like this might have dropped her from mindview, but she was far beyond that, now. This must be what Caine feels, she realized, this serene confidence that his art is perfect, this release from fear of the outcome, this knowing that any result, even death, has a beauty of its own.
Another firebolt followed, a roaring shaft of flame that speared through the air above the river and splashed across her Shield.
All the troops that watched this battle from the fortified walls of Old Town, all the laborers and common folk who had peered from Industrial Park windows, everyone save the Cats themselves, now found this fight to be vastly more dangerous than it was entertaining. Helmeted heads vanished behind the crenels atop the wall, and the streets and alleys that led away from the wharf were suddenly crowded with fleeing townsfolk, shoving and trampling each other in their sudden terror.
This firebolt hurt, and she knew that for all her newfound power, she couldn’t hold this Shield forever. She couldn’t match Ma’elKoth strength-for-strength—not yet, maybe not ever.
Another shattering roar, and even the sun dimmed behind the fury of the flames that hit her Shield. How could he attack so fast, again and again? She could hold her defense no longer. Blackness danced within her eyes, and her Shield scattered like cobwebs in the wind. Talann was at her side, to catch her as she crumpled.
Pallas clung to her. “Seconds—we have only seconds before he kills us all.”
Talann shrugged and bared her teeth. “What would Caine do, if he were here now?”
Pallas looked gratefully up into Talann’s vivid violet eyes and drew strength from the solidity of the arms that supported her.
“He’d buy me some time,” she answered, “but—”
“Done,” said Talann, and before Pallas could say another word Talann whirled and sprinted across the deck of the barge. She sprang onto the pier and across it to the burning deck of the barge opposite, then curved for shore, outracing the flames. Cats angled to meet her across the docks, but she slanted away from them, sprinting with incredible speed along the riverside, west toward Knights’ Bridge.
Pallas reached for that inexhaustible source again and poured herself into the Flow, building another Shield to defend the barge against the firebolt she knew was coming. She layered it upon itself, thicker and thicker, angling it toward the span of bridge, but the firebolt that came next battered it into nonexistence and blasted away her consciousness.
When her eyes opened, she picked herself up and knew that she’d been down only a second or two. She caught the last glimpse of Talann as she vanished into the mouth of an upsloping street at the west end of the wharf, and Pallas knew where she was heading: the center arch of Knights’ Bridge. Pallas sighed out a prayer that wished her luck and the blessings of every good god.
Her Shield had done its work: the barge still floated unhurt. Now to get the thing moving out into the stream . . .
She looked around, leaning on the crates around her against a wave of dizziness; none of the crew were anywhere in sight, and she didn’t blame them. She only hoped that none of them had gone overboard. She might need them, later.
The Cats who watched the barge from the wharf were in no hurry to attack; some of their number had raced off in pursuit of Talann, and the rest had no desire to get caught on the fringes of one of Berne’s firebolts. They contented themselves with firing a crossbow quarrel at her now and then. Pallas once again drew her bladewand. She kept under cover behind the crates as she slashed at the ropes that moored the barge to the pier; they parted silently.
But how was she to move the barge out into the current without the help of the poleboys? Even if they would help, could she protect them from the quarrels of the Cats if Ma’elKoth and Berne kept scaling up the power of their Shield-breaking firebolts?
She refused to give up; she refused to allow the tokali to die here.
Now, far to the west, another figure raced out up the curve of Knights’ Bridge, a figure with platinum hair and the lithe grace of a thoroughbred, a figure that ran headlong toward Berne. Tears swam in Pallas’ eyes.
Talann was buying her this time with her life. She wouldn’t waste it.
She began once again the circular breath control that would draw her into mindview.
AS BERNE WATCHED her run, he knew her: she was that wild-ass bitch his boys had taken with Lamorak, the one Caine had helped escape from the Donjon. When she pulled away from the pursuing Cats and vanished up one of the streets that sloped from the riverfront to the city above, he pounded his fist on the bridge wall in front of him and cursed savagely enough to make the Catseye beside him flinch.
The Cats had overcommitted; every one of those bloodthirsty fucking idiots down there wanted to be in on the kill. They’d left no reserve to seal the wharf, and now that wild-ass bitch was going to get away.
Something sizzled in the back of Berne’s head when he remembered seeing the smooth curve of her muscle, her golden skin stretched out nude on Master Arkadeil’s table. For a long moment he struggled with a compelling temptation to leave the bridge and chase her himself. The sweetness, fantasy rich, of catching her in the crook of an alley, alone, of bending her over against the rough brick of a manufactory’s rear wall . . .
Arkadeil had pincushioned her with his silver needles; Ma’elKoth himself had put her to the question with all the power of his mind. To neither had she given so much as her name.
Berne knew beyond doubt that she’d give him that, and more.
The heat that came to his groin as he imagined it nearly pulled him from the bridge.
But down there on that boat was an enemy thaumaturge of incredible power; he couldn’t know for sure, but he dared to hope that this was indeed Simon Jester. Neither he nor Ma’elKoth had truly expected this dock sweep to work, but when that Shield had gone up—that huge fucking thing the size of the Temple of fucking Dal’kannith—when it had held against three of Ma’elKoth’s fire-bolts, Berne knew that his place was here. Ma’elKoth would accept no excuse for another failure.
After all, half the dockside was on fire down there; he’d damned well better catch an Aktir or two to blame it on. With all the fires and explosions and battles and failed raids of the past week, Ankhanans were becoming more afraid of their government than of the Aktiri.
And that weasel-dick Toa-Sytell would be right there at Ma’elKoth’s side, whispering in his ear, telling him how Simon Jester should be left to the King’s Eyes, that the Cats would be better used in the hands of someone else, someone competent. . .
No, Berne would stay on this bridge until his Cats well and truly cornered and took whoever that was down there.
A flicker of blue-white force caught his eye, and now the boat rocked slowly away from its mooring. Berne smiled and muttered under his breath, “And just where do you think you’re going, pal?”
Louder, distinctly, he said, “Ma’elKoth.”
And he was: the Presence, the jittering, buzzing power that filled every crack in Berne’s soul, the melting edge of explosion like trembling on the verge of orgasm hummed in Berne’s ears and stretched an irresistible smile across his teeth.
BERNE: THE POWER THAT I DRAW FROM MY BELOVED CHILDREN FOR THESE FIREBOLTS IS EXTREME. THE LAST ONE ALONE TOOK THE LIVES OF EIGHT OF MY WEAKENED CHILDREN. USE THEM WISELY.
“I will,” he said through his teeth, on fire with power. “I will. I need it, Ma’elKoth, they’re getting away.”
And the jittering buzz smoothed, then swelled into creamy heat and seemed to lift him to his toes. The Catseye at his side stepped unobtrusively away. He felt tiny flames course over his skin, flames that did not burn but caressed him like a lover’s fingertips. The barge still rocked ponderously at its pier, moving away by inches, and no Shield was in evidence. Berne raised one fist to the sky and extended the other toward the barge.
“Yesss,” he hissed, withholding his power for this last sexual instant. “Oh, oh yes . . .”
“My lord Count!” The harsh cry of the Catseye at his side drew his eye, and he barely managed to halt the stroke. The Catseye swept his hand up to point to the north, along Nobles’ Way, the road that divided the Industrial Park from Alientown.
Along it, sprinting toward him, ran that wild-ass bitch.
Ten Cats broke into view in pursuit, pounding after her. Even as Berne watched, four of them split to the roadside, stopped, and fired crossbows. The wild-ass bitch seemed almost prescient, the way she jigged at exactly the right instant to make the quarrels pass in front of her; she came on, hardly having broken stride, and even the six Cats behind her who had not stopped were losing ground.
The power throbbed inside him, and he raised his fist to strike fire along the street and roast her in her own juices. But Nobles’ Way was lined with townspeople, fearfully crowded against storefronts, but still there, still watching; and there was a knot of them around one or two who must have been hit by the errant quarrels and were down on the street. And Ma’elKoth became furious when innocent citizens were harmed.
His instant’s hesitation on seeing this, on thinking this, cost him his shot. She’d already sprinted up the long arching span of Knights’ Bridge. Behind her, in his literal line of fire, were the pursuing Cats.
He cast a glance back toward the barge. No Shield was up—the enemy thaumaturge was probably unconscious from feedback through his broken Shield—and he could see his Cats cautiously advancing from cover to cover toward it. They’d reach it long before it rocked clear of the dock; why not indulge himself?
He said to the Catseye at his side, “Take her, Mikli. Don’t kill her, just take her.”
The Catseye smiled through his silver netting as he drew his sword. “My pleasure, my lord Count.” He slipped the hood off his head and gave a happy sigh.
He stepped out onto the middle of the bridge to wait for her, balancing his weight forward with his knees slightly bent. Mikli was a superb swordsman; he’d always been lightning fast and very precise, and for the past few months, Berne had personally overseen his training. Berne had no doubt that Mikli would perform exactly as ordered.
The wild-ass bitch never slowed. She sprinted straight for him as though she planned to run him down. At the last instant Mikli slipped to one side and cut at the back of her neck as she passed, swinging with the flat of his blade for the quick knockout. Once again, her almost prescient reflexes saved her: she threw herself under his strike into a dive roll that brought her to her feet with her back to Mikli, only a couple of paces from Berne.
She gave him a grin that held no hint of reason. “First him,” she said to Berne, violet eyes burning with manic fire. “Then you. Don’t go anywhere.”
“And miss this?” Berne said with an answering grin, keeping his eyes on her so as not to warn her of Mikli’s swift approach at her back. “Never.”
She lifted her hands as though to show Berne the pair of knives that she held reversed, their blades along her forearm; then she whirled and cut at Mikli’s leg as he fired a side kick at her spine.
Her knife-edged forearm parried the kick, but the wire that reinforced Mikli’s leather leggings turned the blade. He followed with a slanting neck cut that she blocked with the knife along her left forearm as she stepped into him and sliced down with her right, hooking his sword wrist between the blade and her forearm. A push with her left while she pulled with her right twisted the sword out of his grasp, but she paid for it: Mikli was too experienced to try to hang on to the sword. Instead he let it go and slammed his doubled elbow into the side of her head.
She rolled with the blow, letting it drive her to the ground; then her legs shot out and tangled Mikli’s ankles, and he fell. As he twisted to turn the fall into a roll, the wild-ass bitch backhanded the point of a knife deep into the base of his skull.
It went in with a crunch; bone and ligament crackled as she twisted it out, neatly severing Mikli’s spine.
He spasmed on the ground, flopping spastically, moaning, “No . . . no . . .” as the light slowly faded from his eyes.
Berne watched this for a cold moment before he pushed himself off the wall and reached over his shoulder for Kosall.
“Y’know, little girl, I’m starting to think you might be good enough to dance with me.”
She slipped her knives back behind her belt and picked up Mikli’s sword as she rose. She nudged his body with her toe. “I’d imagine he’d agree with you, if he could. So would my last four dance partners, back down there on the boat.”
“Five?” Berne said, eyebrows lifting, pretending to be impressed as his juices began to flow, his heartbeat picked up, and heat gathered in his loins. He pulled Kosall free of its scabbard by the quillions, and only then did he activate its magick by grasping the hilt; a second later its humming vibrated up his arms and into his teeth.
“Five of my boys already today?”
She looked upon this weapon with respect, but no surprise: she must have known already he carried this sword. She nodded toward the other Cats, her pursuers, who now had arrived at the center span.
“Want to go for ten? Fifteen? Want to bet I can’t kill every single one of them?”
Berne shook his head and lifted a hand to hold them back. “You already know there’s no way for you to get off this bridge alive,” he said slowly, his voice thickening with lust. “So I’m not just gonna kill you. You’re ready for that, I guess. Instead, I’m gonna fuck you. Right here in the middle of the bridge, for everyone to watch. I’m gonna bend you over this wall and fuck you. And when I’m done, each one of them—” He nodded toward the waiting Cats. “—gets a turn. Then, if you’re still alive, maybe we’ll give you to some of the passersby, y’know? The bridge traffic. What do you think about that?”
She shrugged carelessly. “You have to beat me, first.”
He matched her shrug. “Yeah, all right. You know, I never did get your name.”
“No reason to tell you now,” she said. “You won’t live long enough to use it.”
“Come on, then,” he said. “Whenever—”
She sprang at him, her neck cut so fast he barely saw the blade move. He made no attempt to parry, just shifted his Buckler to protect the joining of his neck and shoulder. Her borrowed sword rang as though she’d struck metal, and her eyes widened.
He shifted his Buckler to his hand and grabbed her blade. She tried to yank the blade away, to slide it slicing through his fingers, but his magickally strengthened grip held it as though it had been driven into stone. He laughed and cut at her arm with Kosall. She released the blade in time to save her arm and dropped into a back-roll away from him, coming to her feet and staring with widened eyes out of which that manic confidence swiftly drained.
Berne flipped her sword into the air and sliced it in half with a stroke of Kosall. The pieces rang on the limestone and skittered away.
“Tell me,” Berne said in his richest, oiliest voice, “are you starting to think you might have made a mistake?”
IN MINDVIEW, PALLAS had examined and discarded options with computerlike speed and dispassion. Only seconds passed until she knew beyond all doubt that nothing in her experience could save the tokali—and the barge crew, for whom she’d also now become responsible—from this trap.
She didn’t have it, and that was all. No spell, no trick, no power she had or had ever held at her command could save them. This knowledge did not bring dismay, though, or fear, or sadness: it had entirely the opposite effect.
It brought clarity and perfect freedom: the freedom one can only feel on the very knife edge of death.
The fear, that familiar paralyzing apprehension, would have come from seeing only one chance, one slim opportunity to escape if everything came together just right. A choice between two chances, equally slim, would have been even worse; then she would have been in terror of making a tiny mistake that would cost the lives she had sworn herself to save. Having no chance at all—that allowed her the ice-and-high-mountains freedom to do exactly what she chose, with no attachment to the outcome.
If all paths lead equally to death, what’s left to direct you at the crossroads except pure whim?
With a mental shrug, she settled on a course of action based solely on a childish, fairy-tale metaphor: cats hate to get wet.
Seeking a way to move the barge out from the dock, to make them swim for it, she sent a tendril of her Shell downward, into the river. She felt the life there, felt it pulse into her Shell; the tiny flickering aurae of crayfish, sluggish rivercats, gleaming, thick-bodied carp. And she felt something else, faintly, like a bare, fading echo of memory, something that seemed to link all those Shells together, as though it were a field upon which they all played.
Pallas sought that echo, diving deeper into mindview, no longer merely visualizing her Shell but inhabiting it. That same sense of letting go, of releasing her attachment to her body, came instantly and easily now; she shifted beyond her physical self, became a matrix of pure mind, patterned by her body but no longer bound to it, a matrix tuned to the pulse of Flow itself.
Down within the river, everything she found was Flow.
Flow proceeds from life: it powers life and is powered by life, and here in the river, everything lived. As she sought the echo, the field, she seemed to move downward, ever deeper, not in the physical sense of farther under the water, but deeper than the Shells of the carp and the crayfish, deeper than the murky green aura of the trailing weeds, down and down and down, not below but through. . .
Through the moss and the algae, through the protozoans, through the bacteria and the most basic molds themselves, she went farther and farther without finding what she sought. Her consciousness expanded, questing outward, following the dimly sensed links back up—
Another level of Flow lived here.
Behind and below was a slower, deeper pulse, far beyond the busy foreground of species’ competition. Far, far deeper than the clash of Shells as a carp takes a newt, far deeper than the silent struggle between two varieties of river weeds fighting for the same stretch of sandy bed, this was Flow of a sort she’d never dreamed existed. Tentatively, she tuned her Shell to its pulse, surrendering herself into its powerful rhythm.
Wonder wheeled inside her with the majestic spiral of a galaxy.
She’d found the Shell of the Great Chambaygen itself, the life aura of the entire river system from its farthest springs high in the Gods’ Teeth to its mighty delta at Terana on the western coast. This Shell swelled with not only what lived within the river itself, but its entire watershed: the grassy plains it meandered through, the forests that drank from it and returned their rich soil to it, the whole ecosystem that supported it and was in turn supported by it.
The staggering power of the life it contained threatened to burn Pallas’ brain within her skull, and would have, had she struggled against it. Instead she relaxed; she surrendered; she sought her own place within that life and found it. The jewel of her consciousness hung there, fit with perfect inevitability into precisely the place where it belonged, slowly turning, regarding the life of the river with awe.
For there was more than life here: there was Mind.
The river sang its life, from the freshening trickle of snowmelt in the summer of a geologic age ago, from the bubble of a mountain spring to the soft crackle of corn growing in the night, the crash of an oak toppling with roots undermined by the river’s flow to the roar of a vernal flash flood, the whisper of reeds and the rustle of cattails in the backwaters; birdsong was there, from ducks and geese, herons, kingfishers and cranes; the splashing flutter of fish, the flashes of color in the muscular arc of trout and spawning salmon, the slow patience of a snapping turtle waiting in the mud.
The river sang of men, too, poling their boats along its banks, sang of the primal folk who spoke to it with songs of their own in days of old, of the stonebenders who dammed and diverted its waters to power their mills.
And it sang of Ankhana, the massive boil that straddled its middle, the aching running sore that poisoned it for miles downstream.
And now into that song came a new note, a strengthening; the song shifted from the murmur of a lonely under-the-breath sighing to the warm, pure notes of the old singer who’s suddenly found that he has an unexpected audience. Note slid against note, the echoing call of a distant moose blending with playful chirps of young otters, underscored by the splash of a sudden autumn wind across a ripple . . . and became charged with meaning.
No words flowed in this song; none were required. Melody became meaning, and meaning became Song.
I KNOW YOU, PALLAS RIL, AND YOU ARE WELCOME IN MY SONG.
Where Pallas hung, she had neither breath nor mouth, but from within her came a melody of answer: Chambaraya. . .
MEN NAME ME SO, AND IMAGINE THAT THEY KNOW ME. JOIN YOUR SONG TO MINE, CHILD.
And song poured from her, an effortless counterpoint that became perfect harmony. Here within the song there was no dissembling, no hiding or shading the truth of her; everything that she was flowed into the river’s song, and the river knew all of her. Chambaraya took all her strength, all her weakness, the shameful tangles of her jealousies and pettiness, the purity of her courage, and accepted them all with the same perfect serenity.
There was no judgment here, could be no judgment: all was one single current from the mountains to the sea.
In her song was the melody of her need, of the desperation that had driven her to dive so deeply and search so far. The river did not understand why men wished to hurt her, did not understand even why she feared them; death and life were both parts of the same endless wheel, out of one cometh the other, everlasting. Why should she resist returning to the earth from whence she came?
But she asked, nonetheless: Please, Chambaraya, save us. Show your power.
I CANNOT/WILLNOT. THE COVENANT WITH THE LESSER GODS, THAT DAMMED JERETH GODSLAUGHTERER’S REVOLT, CHANNELS ME AS WELL.
Lesser gods? she thought, as though to herself, but within the song nothing separated her from the river, nor it from her; there were no private thoughts, nor need of any.
YOUR GODS: WHO REQUIRE THE WORSHIP OF MEN: WHO CONCERN THEMSELVES WITH MORTALAFFAIRS: WHO ARE SMALL ENOUGH TO SUFFER BOREDOM AND PLAY GAMES OF POWER TO RELIEVE IT.
Pallas understood with perfect clarity; Chambaraya was far beyond any concern with the lives of individuals. To the river, a human life was no more than the life of a single minnow in a flashing school—but also, no less. To the river, life is life. What could she offer, what could she do to persuade the river? All that it needed, it had already, in perfect sufficiency.
The Covenant of Pirichanthe had bound the gods outside the walls of time, limiting their actions to providing their priests with power and occasional guidance—and perhaps that was an answer.
From deep within her self came her offer: Make of me your priest. Grant me some small measure of your power, and I shall be your voice. I shall teach men the proper respect for you.
I NEED NO VOICE: THE RESPECT OF MEN IS WITHOUT MEANING: THIS REQUEST HAS NO MEANING. A SONG DOES NOTASK ITSELF FOR POWER.
A song does not ask itself for power . . . She was the song; asking the river for power was like requesting of her hand that it make a fist. It had been only the vestiges of her human viewpoint that had created this separation, this I and Thou, this conversation of Pallas Ril and Chambaraya as two separate beings.
While she was in the song, her need, her will, her fierce devotion to the lives that were in her charge, these were all in the song as well, threads of its most basic melody. With this realization, her final remnants of separateness, of personal identity, blew away like cobwebs before a storm.
She herself was the only part of the river that could suffer this desire . . . but there were no parts here. All was one, was wholeness. Her desire became the river’s.
While she was in the river’s song, she was the song, she was the river, and her will touched its waters with power unimaginable.
She surfaced within herself and regarded this single tone within her song: one small grace note with its curling spray of hair, with this cloak of blue and clothes of grey. It seemed very small, and somehow distant, but very present as well. She felt the lives within the barge with the same sense that felt an early snowfall high in the Gods’ Teeth, with the same sense that felt the death struggle of a trout and a carp in the Teranese delta. She saw that the danger that threatened these trembling humans was purely local; moving the barge would remove the danger, and moving the barge was no effort at all—it was precisely her nature.
She breathed in, and the flow from mountain to sea stilled along its span entire.
She breathed out, and power gathered beyond any dream of resistance.
THE WILD-ASS BITCH drew her knives and came at him again, flourishing them in an intricate flurry, blank translucent concentration on her face. Berne let her come, waiting; when she came within Kosall’s reach he cut at her head. She slipped beneath the stroke—for all his magicked strength, Kosall was a large and rather unwieldly weapon.
As she drove in under the cut, Berne whipped a straight-leg roundhouse kick at her ribs while holding his Buckler across his solar plexus to stop her knife thrust. Her point slashed through his shirt and skirred across his skin, and his roundhouse crumpled her like a doll, lifting her off her feet and sending her rolling across the bridge.
She rose unsteadily, blood on her lips. His kick had probably ruptured something in her midsection. But she offered a grin that displayed her bloody teeth, and she pointed to his leg.
“You’re not invulnerable,” she said.
Berne looked down. She’d cut his leg, the leg he’d kicked her with, with the other blade. The cut was shallow, only a skin-deep slice: his serge breeches soaked up the blood that seeped into them.
“Maybe not,” he replied, “but I’m a long fucking way closer to it than you are.”
Now for the first time, he advanced, attacking, slashing. She was a ghost, even injured: with more than human speed and grace she slipped away and around every stroke, never parrying, never blocking, avoiding Kosall’s irresistible edge by inches.
It became a dance, a whirling ballet, and sweat began to prickle across Berne’s forehead and shoulders. She’d lean back to let Kosall sizzle past the end of her nose, then whip forward, both knives slashing, to score another thin line of blood across Berne’s body before he could recover for the backstrike. She was the most extraordinary fighter he’d ever seen, let alone faced, but skill is only one element of battle. Her skill wouldn’t save her forever—the internal injury that brought a trail of blood down her chin to her chest would tire her, and slow her. Berne had no doubt of the outcome.
It ended with unexpected swiftness. Practically in midlunge Berne saw her concentration slip, saw her mouth drop open and her eyes go wide. He leaned into the lunge, and sweet release flooded his body as Kosall’s thrumming blade entered her belly through the golden skin just below her navel, thrusting in to the very hilt.
She said, “Oh, Great Mother . . .”
Berne pressed his body against her slackening flesh, and he kissed her on her bloody lips, savoring their soft fullness and the copper taste of her blood. Then he stepped back and twisted Kosall’s hilt so that the blade sliced outward through her side, opening a massive, gaping wound, from which spilled her uncoiling intestines.
She gasped and fell to her knees. Berne stepped back, panting, and watched her fingers gingerly explore the huge extent of the mortal wound, this incredible gape that split her front to back, watched her follow the ropes of her guts out onto the dirt and grit of the bridge span. Her face was utterly blank with disbelief.
“Never thought it could happen to you, huh?” Berne said hoarsely, breathless. “Sorry I won’t get to fuck you. Don’t really like ’em cold, y’know? But this, this was almost as good.”
He thought for a moment she was going to say something to him, but then he realized that she wasn’t looking at him, hadn’t been looking at him from the moment he’d stabbed her. She looked behind him, over his shoulder, east along the river. Berne turned to follow her gaze, and his breath stopped.
He thought, Fuck me like a goat.
Coming toward him, along the river, thundered a wall of green-foaming water a hundred feet high, a titanic wave that bore before it boats and crates and the bodies of men. Berne looked up, and up, unable to comprehend the enormity of the catastrophe that rushed down upon him. The sun struck gold on the unutterable mass of water that still grew as it approached, not yet cresting. High up upon its face rode the river barge, sliding down the face of the wave yet borne up by its rolling progress—and high above the river barge, standing like a god at the very crest of this mountain of water, stood a lone figure, a woman . . .
His reaction was instant: he knew he’d never make it if he tried to clear the bridge. There was no time.
He said, with perfectly enunciated calm, “Ma’elKoth.”
High above him, on the crest of the wave, Pallas Ril rode toward him—without any sign of a Shield.
Berne said, “I’ll take that firebolt, now.”
Flame burst from his skin, and he lifted his fist.
SHE SANG IN her mind, without words, without images: pure melody and pure desire. She sang a wave that would carry the lives within that barge far, far to the sea in a single wave, a rolling sweeping falling that would strike bottom only in the Teranese harbor.
And men fired upon her as she rode the crest of this wave, but their target was only a single note of an eternal song. The song had a life of its own that would not allow her harm. She lifted her arms, and water sprang up around her as though it were castle walls. Quarrels plunged bubbling into these walls, lances of air that trailed to nothing.
Far, far below she saw Berne, and Talann’s body beside him on the bridge. The westering sun struck off the face of the wave that reared high above him, reflected from it and lit his face as though with fire; she saw the pulse of the channel that linked him to the Colhari Palace, and felt the surge of Flow.
His firebolt clawed toward her.
She could not match their power, even now; but matching power with power was no longer required. A shrug of melody, a twitch of rhythm raised a mighty arm of foam to take the bolt. It exploded into hissing steam, a warm twisting cloud of purest white that broke around her and below her as she soared ever higher on the crest.
Knights’ Bridge trembled as the wave approached, and shattered when it struck. With a thunder that shook the Cyclopean walls around the whole of Old Town, the wave rolled on, carrying the barge and half a dozen smaller vessels high over the top curve of the antiship chains, and sent them spinning downstream for freedom.
I did it, Pallas thought. I did it, and that second’s thought brought her back to herself—
Standing at the crest of a wave two hundred feet high, looking down on the rooftops of Ankhana, looking down even upon the Colhari Palace itself, looking down at incredible destruction along the wharf from the very edge of Fools’ Bridge to the ruin of Knights’ Bridge: ships and boats overturned, splintered against each other; dozens of men in the water, some struggling, some only floating facedown; front walls of warehouses all along the riverfront staved in, water still pouring out from them; fish flopping desperately on the dockside . . .
She cried out involuntarily at the sight of the shambles she had made. In that instant of shocked immobility, as the wave started to fall and she came down with it, an unknown bowman fired his weapon from the city wall, and his quarrel slammed into her chest, shattering a rib and spearing into her lung.
She fell in a dream, tasting blood that bubbled up her throat along with her breath. Her hand lazily investigated the steel flanges of the quarrel that were stuck hard up against her light leather body armor.
I’m hit, she thought numbly. I’m hit, and: I did it.
This was all she could think during the long tumble to the river below; when she reached bottom, the impact with the roiling water snuffed her consciousness like a fist on a candle flame, and she knew no more.
THE UNIFORMED LABORER who piloted the smooth-humming cabin apparently did so simply by shifting a floor-mounted lever: forward for go, back for stop; otherwise, the car directed itself. Beyond this shifting of a lever, the Laborer’s only duty seemed to be to stand at attention and hold himself smilingly available for polite conversation with his passengers.
Neither of his passengers was interested in talking: Marc Vilo had the upcaste ability to make himself selectively blind to anyone below Professional, and Hari passed the ride concentrating on a meditative cycle of breath, hoping that he could loosen the knots in his stomach and swallow the acid tension at the back of his throat.
Marc had picked up Hari in his own Rolls. He had chattered with bluff good-fellowship across nearly a quarter of the Pacific Ocean, nattering on and on about his acquisitions and under-the-table deals, about undercutting this competitor and putting a regulatory squeeze on that one. As the cloud-topped islands came into view, though, his chatter had gone hollow, and finally stopped. Despite his presumed affair with Shermaya Dole, no one was entirely at ease while approaching the airspace of a Leisure compound—and the Doles were one of the original First Families.
Hari took the blessed silence as a gift. Had he always found Vilo this tiresome, and somehow managed to repress his irritation all these years? Did the man never think of anything beyond his balls and his bank balance?
It wasn’t until the Rolls was spiraling in for a landing at the Kauai carport that Vilo even thought to ask why Hari had asked for this interview.
His tone made it clear that this was a courtesy question, the way a man might give a distracted pat on the head to his dog in passing. How important, really, could anything be that would come out of the mouth of a downcaster? The question, even the entire trip to Kauai and the interview itself, was an indulgence, and Vilo probably expected Hari to squirm like a happy puppy at this show of avuncular affection.
If so, he was disappointed. As the Rolls settled onto the grassy landing field, Hari had given him a flat stare and answered the question through his teeth.
“I’m gonna ask her to find a way to get Arturo Kollberg’s dick out of my ass.”
Before Vilo could come up with a response, a uniformed attendant had stepped out of nowhere and undogged the Rolls’ hatch from outside. He’d ushered them out and across the lush grass of the landing field. Hari had had time to get only a breath or two of the rich, floral-scented air, only a glimpse of the riot of greens that climbed the ridge of mountains before him, before a section of volcanic stone at the edge of the field swung back, and the attendant led them inside to the waiting cabin.
The cabin moved on a computer-directed path through tunnels cut into the earth, cut through the rock of the ridges and up the mountains. Since the days of Shermaya’s great-grandfather, machines more complex than a bicycle had been forbidden in the interior of Kauai. Surface transport within the Dole compound was by horseback. But this was mostly make-believe, a show of back-to-nature simplicity, that let the Doles and their guests pretend to enjoy the raw outdoors without sacrificing the full comforts of a modern home. On Kauai, all those comforts and then some were there. An entire subterranean town complex spread like cancer through the bones of the island, thousands of servants and technicians and every imaginable luxury, carefully concealed but omnipresent.
During the smooth, silent ride to wherever the hell it was that Dole awaited them, Hari managed to quiet his nerves a little bit by observing Vilo’s. The stumpy Businessman shifted uneasily in his seat, chewing on the end of his unlit cigar, glancing at Hari from the corner of his eye and glancing away again. Clearly, he’d suddenly become very unsure that bringing Hari here was a good idea, but he also clearly felt he couldn’t say a damn thing about it, not in front of the servant—God only knows what kind of rumors would spread . . .
When the cabin hummed to a stop and the doors opened, Vilo leaned over to Hari and glared at him, his face as full of threat as a loaded pistol.
Very softly, almost whispering, he growled, “You behave yourself, Hari, and I’m not kidding,” then rose and stepped out of the cabin, his face clearing with practiced swiftness into a lickspittle grin. Hari shrugged, sighed, and followed him.
He stepped out into a rainbow.
The door had opened from a mossy stone outcrop onto a broad ledge, two-thirds of the way up the wall of a mist-bottomed canyon. The opposite wall of the narrow canyon seemed close enough to touch. Everywhere he looked there swarmed foliage of unimaginable variety, a vertical rain forest of every conceivable shade of green, shot through with ropes of brilliant flowers and punctuated with the iridescent shimmer of tropical birds that flitted back and forth among the vines.
High above the ledge where he stood, another outcropping divided a waterfall, so that a pair of hushing streams fell to either side and a sun-prismed spray filled the air.
Only when Dole herself rose from behind a twisted knee-height juniper, wearing loose-fitting clothing that was smeared with greens and browns, and calling out a hearty “Marcus! Over here!” did Hari notice that the ledge on which they all stood had been landscaped as a Japanese garden. Carefully cultivated dwarf shrubbery clumsily accented an array of colored stones and a trickling watercourse that must have sprung from underground pumps.
Dole beckoned to them with a pair of sap-stained garden shears. “One of my projects,” she called, waving the shears at the garden around her. “What do you think?”
Hari again trailed in Vilo’s wake, his wounds making him move stiffly and slowly, and listened silently to Vilo’s effusions about the garden. The Businessman sat on a rock near where Dole had once again knelt to hand-trim a bush, as near as he dared without risking her dignity with uninvited contact. Hari stood a respectful distance away and waited to be acknowledged.
Dole’s cheeks colored at Vilo’s praise, and she waved away his enthusiasm. “Well, you know, one must keep busy. It’s work that makes you happy, you know—I’ve never understood why our Laborers seem to dislike it so. Entertainer,” she said, waving Hari closer. “How do you like my garden?”
It’s a thumb in the eye of this place, Hari thought, but he said respectfully, “Your entire home is a garden, Leisurema’am.”
“Ah, a diplomat. Come, sit with us.” Once Hari had painfully settled in next to Vilo, she went on. “I was so enjoying your Adventure, Entertainer. You’ll be continuing tomorrow, in the morning? Yes, and I’m sure Marcus will squire me once again; I am so looking forward to a successful conclusion. I’ve been dreadfully worried about Shanna, you know.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Hari said. “Me, too.”
Inch toward daylight, he thought. “I’m not sure that they’ll let me succeed,” he went on. “That’s, uh, that’s kind of why I asked to be allowed to come here and talk with you.”
“Oh?” she said with a polite lift of the brow.
“Yeah, it’s a pretty tough spot,” Vilo put in. “Especially now that Berne has all these magic powers and that sword and everything. How do you think you’re gonna handle him?”
Hari shook his head. “I’m not talking about Berne. Him, I’m hoping not to handle at all. It’s the Studio. They want Shanna to die. It’ll make a better story.”
“Hari—! Jesus Christ!” Vilo said, choking on his cigar.
“Entertainer,” Dole said severely, “that is a very serious charge. If believed, it could harm their business; repeating it in public would leave you open to downcasteing for corporate slander.”
“Especially if it’s true. In corporate slander, truth is not a defense. Besides, I hardly think—”
“That technical malfunction,” Hari interrupted her desperately, “the one that pulled me out last night—it wasn’t a malfunction at all. I had this from Kollberg’s own mouth. I was too close to saving Shanna, and they pulled me. Deliberately. Kollberg himself hit the switch.”
“I can’t be hearing this,” Vilo said, jerking to his feet. “Don’t you understand that what you’ve just told me is a legitimate corporate secret? Do you have any idea how compromising this is? Now I have to either report you or face accessory charges—!”
“Oh, Marcus, sit down,” Dole snapped. “Stop fluttering. Nothing said here need ever leave this place.”
“I notice,” Hari said, “that you haven’t said you don’t believe me.”
“I, ah . . .” Vilo shifted uncomfortably, then finally dropped back down onto his rock. “Well, shit—your pardon, Maya. Everybody knows the Studio, kind of, ooches things around, to make the Adventures more exciting.”
“And that is,” Dole pointed out, “a perfectly legitimate business practice. Shanna is under contract to the Studio, as are you, Entertainer. If the legitimate pursuit of their business requires that they send you to your death, they are perfectly within their rights under contract law. It’s no different than if I ordered one of my pilots to fly into a storm; if he is killed, that is simply a consequence of his employment, and I am not criminally liable. Any grievances must be addressed in civil court.”
“I know all that,” Hari said. “I know that legally there’s nothing I can do to stop them doing whatever they want to her. That’s why I came to you. I know you care about Shanna. I came to ask you—to beg you, if necessary—to intervene for her.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Vilo said. “You think the Leisurema’am has nothing better to do than—”
“Marcus, please.” Dole turned to Hari, a look of well-intentioned helplessness on her face. “I’m sorry, Entertainer, but I don’t believe that there’s very much I can do.”
“He—Kollberg—he sent Lamorak over there with orders to betray her. He sent someone he knew she trusted. Lamorak’s been tipping off the Grey Cats at every turn. And you know why? Because she was too good at this—she’s too smart, too skilled. She was going to be able to save all these people without taking any big risks, without any big battles, without any innocents being killed—and Kollberg wouldn’t have been able to sell enough second-fucking-hander cubes!”
Hari trembled with the effort of keeping his fury under control. “He fucked her: he sent Lamorak there to betray her, for no other reason than a few extra marks.”
“Well, that’s reprehensible behavior, certainly, but still . . . Oh, was that it? Right before you were pulled?”
She leaned forward, her face lighting with more interest than he’d yet seen from her. “You realized that Lamorak was the traitor, and you were about to kill him! My goodness. That wouldn’t have been a very fair fight.”
“I don’t care much about fighting fair,” Hari said. “I’ll settle with Lamorak later. What I care about is saving Shanna’s life.”
“Oh, well, I too, of course, but I still don’t see any way I can intervene. They’ve done nothing wrong.”
“They’ve done nothing illegal,” Hari said. “They’ve done a lot that’s wrong.”
“From your point of view, certainly, I can understand.”
“Couldn’t you just—lean on him a little?”
“Put some pressure on Kollberg. Make him behave.”
Dole spread her hands. “I don’t think so. There’s very little pressure I can bring. The Studio is a public trust,” she said simply. “It was created to be immune to outside pressure. I’m sorry.”
Hari hung his head, but at his thighs his fists clenched spasmodically. Caine snarled within the tightness that bound his chest, and for a wild half instant he teetered on the verge of snapping and slaughtering them both.
He ground his teeth and tried to remember that these were not his enemies. His chest burned; he couldn’t stop remembering that if he tuned in Adventure Update right now, he could watch the seconds tick away on the Pallas Ril Lifeclock.
There had to be something, had to be. . .
“Wait a second,” he said, lifting his head. “You’re Shanna’s Patron. She’s the spokesman for three or four of your companies. That makes her a, ah, a corporate symbol, right?”
“Yes . . .” Dole said dubiously.
Vilo shook his head. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
Suddenly Hari was on his feet, his eyes alight, his hands grabbing inspiration from the air.
“But, but, but—don’t you get it? That gives her intrinsic value to the companies she represents, value that maybe could be legally separable from her employment as an Actor.”
Vilo frowned skeptically. “You’re going to go after the Studio through trademark law?”
“Why not?” Hari said. “Why not? By intentionally planning her death, Kollberg is deliberately infringing upon her value as a spokesman, isn’t he? The loss of consumer identification, from shifting to a new spokesman, that could translate to actual damages—”
“It’s ridiculous,” Vilo said. “It’s never been done. Shit, even if it worked, a precedent like that could destroy the whole Studio system—I mean, even scheduling an Actor on a few safe, boring Adventures would reduce his value as a spokesman and a trademark . . .”
But Hari had no attention to spare for Vilo’s objections; his breath had stopped in his throat as he watched the play of expression across Dole’s smooth and kindly face.
There was doubt there, certainly, but she was thinking about it—and she was slowly coming toward some kind of decision.
“It is,” she said suddenly, reaching out for Hari’s hand, “brilliant! So what if it’s never been done? Arturo Kollberg is deliberately reducing the income of a noncompeting business, and from an immune position, as an officer of a public trust. I should be able to get a cease-and-desist on him before the close of business today.”
She rose and laid a hand upon the arm that was bound to Hari’s chest for a moment, and then drew him, astonishingly, into a hug.
Hari and Vilo gaped at each other over Dole’s shoulder until she released him. Tears shone in her eyes.
“I knew you really loved her,” Dole said. “I knew it wasn’t just an act. I could feel it. Thank you so much for finding a way to let me help you save her.”
Hari’s whole body tingled, partly from the sheer height from which she’d stooped to touch him—Leisure to ex-Labor—and partly from an early intimation of victory.
Dole’s face now hardened. “And I tell you something else: if we can find any hard evidence, any evidence at all that will stand up in court, I swear to you that I will not rest until that vile little man is crushed. He will not live to try this again with someone else. That won’t be easy; you know their files and procedures are sacrosanct—”
“I know,” Hari whispered, because he could not trust his voice. Inch toward daylight.
“I’ll find something. You’ll see. Somehow, I’ll get what you need.”
Dole now turned away and spoke to the air. “Robert.” Mist jetted out from concealed vents in the rock face, and intersecting lasers formed a full-animation holosculpture of her majordomo.
She began issuing instructions to be channeled to the Dole Family’s vast galaxy of lawyers. Hari and his Patron were forced to wait while she made her plans and arrangements. A couple of times during those minutes Hari caught Vilo staring at him through narrowed eyes, a sort of newly appreciative squint, as though he was having difficulty reconciling what he saw with what he’d expected to see.
Hari answered this stare with an expressive shrug.
Dad was right, Hari thought. I don’t have to solve every problem with my fists.
His father had told him to inch toward daylight, but some inches are longer than others.