“Do you, Professional Hari Khapur Michaelson, take this woman, Professional Shanna Theresa Leighton, to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold, to love, honor, and cherish forever, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to cleave to her only all the days of your life, until death alone doth part you?”
THE THUNDERSTORM BATTERED Ankhana from midnight until an hour before dawn, breaking windows and cracking doors, peeling roof tiles off houses like a fisherman scaling a trout, kicking over trees like an angry child stomping through his mother’s garden.
The blinding downpour drove the mobs shivering to shelter; the streets belonged to the army. Between the smothering rain and the military bucket brigades, the fires were soon brought under control.
The riots, though, weren’t over: this was only a pause, a hitch in the breath between inhale and shout. All over Old Town, every sheltered spot was filled with North Bankers caught in last dusk’s initial chaos. Men and women, primals and stonebenders, ogrillos and trolls huddled in shattered storefronts or stretched out beneath overhanging eaves. Plenty of whiskey was still to be found: jugs passed hand to hand among drowsy folk who waited with a sort of sullen excitement for the end of the rain.
The army and the Constabulary were still too busy fighting fires and their own internal dissensions to engage in street sweeps and mass arrests; everyone knew that more trouble lay ahead.
Runners from the Imperial Messenger-News had braved the storm to summon every one of the pages that the IMN employed, hammering on their doors and yanking them from beds in the middle of the night. By the time the storm ended, they were all assembled and had received their instructions. When the first rosy glow pinked the summits of the eastern mountains, they streamed forth to take positions throughout Old Town and many more waited patiently on the ways for the bridges to lower at sunrise.
When the uppermost spires of the Colhari Palace were kindled by the first rays of the morning sun, bells began to ring all over the city, from the mighty brass clang out of the Temple of Prorithun to the intricate silvery chiming of the Katherisi’s carillon, from the crash of shields struck by swords in the Sanctum of Khryl to the hand bells of the IMN pages. An instant later the bells were joined by all varieties of horns, from simple bugles to the massive three-man bruhti atop Victory Stadium. The skull-splitting cacophony kicked citizens from their beds and drove them to their windows; it shocked dozing rioters scrambling from their improvised bedrolls and brought every soldier to attention.
The pages roamed the streets, swinging their bells and calling out their news. They did not wait for the coin and the nod that is usually required to get a story: this was an Imperial Announcement and was free to all.
The Emperor enjoined his citizens and Beloved Children to stay at home and remain calm, to hold fast to their faith in him. This day was declared a holiday; no store would open and no business would be conducted. The streets were ordered to be vacant until midmorning. From midmorning until noon, all who wished could make their way to Victory Stadium on the south bank, where the Radiant Emperor would greet his subjects and allay their fears. All were welcome, all would be safe, and the Emperor would calm every heart and answer every doubt.
The Subjects of Cant were still out in force, under orders to keep the pressure on. The rain had forced some changes of plan. The fires that began now started from within the still-damp buildings—from their dry interiors—and there were, perhaps, not quite so many. Nonetheless, a pall of grey-black smoke soon struggled with the lingering clouds above.
The army also took advantage of the curfew, reasoning that all honest folk would obey the Emperor’s order and stay indoors: all the troops that could be spared from fire fighting were organized into small units of ten to fifteen, and they roamed the streets at random in search of looters. Some were arrested; many more were surrounded and beaten to death.
The army took some losses as well, though; the looters began organizing into larger bands for self-protection, and many of these bands were well armed, especially in Alientown. There was longstanding, almost traditional bad blood between the humanoids and the authorities there. Much of that bad blood soon flowed through the gutters.
And a new story was on the street this morning, a fresh rumor about the Aktiri that afflicted the Empire. It spread from rioters to bartenders, from stevedores to carters, and it was muttered, whispered, and argued over wherever a knot of citizens might gather: The tale was of a magickal net whose merest touch would slay the most evil Aktir and send it screaming back to the hell from whence it came.
Also, in the new light of dawn:
A Grey Cat, lounging at the far end of a long upstairs hall, saw a folded slip of parchment lying on the floor in front of the door he’d been set there to guard.
In a cautiously neutral-ground room filled with the accouterments of the most luxurious bedchamber imaginable, Majesty and Kierendal gazed upon each other. The dawn light sparkled like lust in Kierendal’s eyes; Majesty’s smile had the sleepy satisfaction of a well-fed lion’s.
Berne reclined in the palace bedchamber he maintained and watched his twin nude valets. The brother and sister—both still musky with the sweat of sex and marked with bloody stripes left by the switch with which Berne still toyed—brushed his slashed-velvet tunic, making fearful glances back over their shoulders to be sure of his approval. He watched closely for the slightest flaw. The tunic must be perfect before he would set them to shine his boots: today would be a formal occasion, and he intended to look his best.
Ma’elKoth stood alone in the Lesser Ballroom and stared up at the Great Work. The room was silent around him; no clay boiled in the cauldron nor coals glowed beneath it. He had no leisure for art this day. He squinted at the emerging structure of the face that he’d built there, seeing something new in it, something he’d never intended—seeing one of those artful accidents that give great works their life.
It was to have been a model of his own face, but now, as he looked at it, he realized that without altering the existing structure one whit, a mere change of intent could make the Great Work into the face of Caine.
TOA-SYTELL RUBBED HIS gritty eyes and snuffed the lamp at his elbow. The window at his back in the scriptorium of the Monastic Embassy had an eastern exposure, and the rising sun was vastly easier on his eyes than the lamp had been. He grimly tried to bring the tiny letters on the page before him into clear focus.
He shook his head, surrendering. He rose and stretched, and his spine popped in a wave from his neck to his waist. He sighed and crossed his arms to rub his aching shoulders. He’d been at this all night and still had more questions than answers.
He’d gone to the embassy directly after Caine’s arranged escape. He’d had some difficulty getting in; the embassy was designed and built to be a fortress in the middle of the city, and it was buttoned up tight against the riots. But eventually, his calm-voiced reasonableness got him not only inside, but into the presence of the Acting Ambassador. This man he recognized: the Acting Ambassador was the grim-voiced older friar who’d been present at Caine’s arrest and the murder of the previous Ambassador. The Acting Ambassador had become deeply thoughtful when presented with Toa-Sytell’s request.
“Our records are our own,” he’d said slowly. “But here there are some special circumstances. The matter of Caine has been brought before the Monastic Council, but it is too early for a decision. It is possible that his death will be ordered; it is nearly certain that he will be cast out from Brotherhood, if not actually outlawed. I think that perhaps I may be forgiven for opening his record to unsworn eyes.”
“You have them? You have them here?” Toa-Sytell had asked, surprised. “I’d thought we’d be forced to send for them to, to, er . . .”
“Garthan Hold,” the Acting Ambassador had supplied absently. “No, his records are here. After the Battle of Ceraeno, Caine’s transfer to Ankhana became official, and his records were forwarded here. They may not be entirely up-to-date, but if you will wait in the scriptorium, they will be brought to you.”
Toa-Sytell had bowed his thanks and done as the Ambassador had suggested. Shortly two novices had arrived, each bearing a massive leather-bound book. One of them was full, and the other had been filled to a third. The Duke was astonished—how could one man have done so much in a single short life?
Through his night of study, his astonishment had only grown. Caine had been everywhere, had done everything; he had an unsettling tendency to abruptly appear in the middle of important events with little or no explanation of why he was there or even how he’d made the journey. In between these battles and assassinations and adventures so incredible that Toa-Sytell dismissed most of them as fantasy, he didn’t seem to be anywhere at all. He had no fixed home; there were no records of him spending any significant amount of time at any Monastery after he’d completed his novitiate and left Garthan Hold nearly twenty years ago.
His youth was equally puzzling. He’d arrived at the gates of Garthan Hold with a tale of having been born to a Pathquan freedman and sold to a Lipkan trader as a body servant during the Blood Famine—but it was recorded that he spoke Pathquan with an accent that no one had ever been able to identify. No attempt to contact his family was recorded; the Abbot at Garthan Hold had assumed the story was fabricated, that Caine was an escaped slave or a runaway serf of one of the local nobles. The Abbot had thought it significant that Caine displayed no particular aptitude, liking, or understanding for either horses or ironwork—seeing as how his supposed father allegedly was a farrier and the village blacksmith.
Toa-Sytell began to understand the Emperor’s fascination with this man; Caine was like some force of nature, some wind or storm that would suddenly appear and blast the land for miles about, then vanish again. No one knew where he came from, no one knew where he went: his only tracks were the indelible scars he left on the lives that he touched.
And Caine was more than this, more than a mere elemental power—the elements, after all, Ma’elKoth had shown he could control to a nicety. Caine was like a griffin or a dragon, a supremely dangerous animal that could be befriended but never tamed. At any moment his thin veneer of humanity could burst to reveal howling destruction within.
Thin veneer of humanity. . . It was true that there was something not quite human about him: his astonishing luck, his preternatural confidence, the way he could come from nowhere and go at will, as if by magick . . .
Toa-Sytell froze in midstretch, his mouth open to yawn—but his breath stopped in his lungs as though the air had become stone.
Like an Aktir . . . Toa-Sytell himself had said it, again and again, reminding himself and others of the destruction and death that followed Caine wherever he appeared. Even Ma’elKoth had said it, down in the Donjon as he leaned on the rail around the Pit balcony: Caine could hardly cause more damage if he were, himself, an Aktir.
The truth had been there, before their eyes; every one of them had looked right at it but had refused to see.
There was more than this—small coincidences of timing, tiny reactions that had seemed inexplicable then, but now made sense. Toa-Sytell needed none of these.
He knew beyond the possibility of doubt, he knew with the faith of a saint: Caine was an Aktir. Caine intended the destruction of Ma’elKoth, of the Empire, of all that was good in the world. Caine had to be stopped. He had to be killed.
One convulsive gesture—his fist smacked down upon the open page. He stood for a moment, breathing hard, thinking. Then he turned away, leaving the books open on the table, and he ran from the room as though pursued by wolves.
Berne, he thought, running. I have to find Berne.
THE PALLAS RIL Lifeclock graphic had ticked a steady yellow at the corner of the Adventure Update transmission for six days. At dawn it clicked over to scarlet and pulsed bloody light from wall-screens across the Earth.
That meant, explained the perpetually smiling Bronson Underwood, that Pallas Ril had entered the margin-of-error range on the phase-locking capability of her thoughtmitter. The time she had remaining was no longer possible to predict.
This announcement was followed by an extended feature on amplitude decay, including never-before-released images of the remains of the very few Actors who had suffered this fate and left any remains to be viewed. The unconscionably hideous nature of these images provoked a storm of protesting screencalls to Studio Central; but even larger was the flood of calls requesting that the feature be replayed, so that people who’d missed it the first time could record it properly on their home netplayers.
The Studio staffers who fielded the calls smilingly apologized: the feature would not be replayed, but copies were available for a low, low, one-time-only discount price . . .
TOA-SYTELL WASTED NO precious time searching for Berne himself. After warning the Acting Ambassador—and receiving full assurance that in the unlikely event that Caine presented himself for Sanctuary he’d be not only denied but detained—Toa-Sytell and his small contingent of personal guards galloped straight for the palace office of the King’s Eyes. There he spent only very few minutes quietly but forcefully giving a precisely detailed set of orders.
He defined Caine as an immediate threat to the Empire and the primary target of the King’s Eyes: every Eye in the capital was to drop his or her business to search for him. Toa-Sytell himself dictated the updated description, and he sent politely worded orders to the commanders of the Constabulary and the capital detachment of the army requiring their assistance. Caine was to be taken, no matter what the cost. If he resisted, he was to be killed—a shoot-on-sight order was permissible, at the commanders’ discretion.
Ma’elKoth would be furious, Toa-Sytell knew; but his loyalty was not to Ma’elKoth personally. His duty was to the throne, to the Empire, and he knew in his bones that the Empire would never be safe so long as Caine lived.
When he inquired for Berne, he learned that the Count had returned in the early darkness this morning, had spoken briefly with Ma’elKoth before retiring, and was now enjoying a late breakfast in his palace apartment. Toa-Sytell went straight there.
On his way up, he had time to marshal his thoughts, to arrange his evidence and organize his argument. He expected Berne to deny this revelation out of sheer contrariness, and Toa-Sytell was determined to overwhelm any resistance with a flood of facts.
Moving at a near run even within the palace, he nearly collided in the corridor with a grim-faced Grey Cat who hurried away from Berne’s apartment. When Toa-Sytell burst into Berne’s outer chamber, the Count was at table in his silken lounging robe. He smirked up at Toa-Sytell and began to offer the Duke a place, but Toa-Sytell waved him off. “I have no time for this,” Toa-Sytell said. “I must find Caine. We must find him.”
Berne’s fine-drawn brows pulled together. “Oh? That might be a problem . . .”
“It cannot be a problem. Berne, he’s one of them. Caine is an Aktir.”
Berne stared up at the Duke for one long second of stillness, then the corners of his mouth quirked toward a smile that grew into a grin.
“All right . . .” he said, considering. He mopped his mouth with a linen handkerchief, and some inexpressible energy drew him to his feet and lit his face with joy. “All right!”
Toa-Sytell was astonished. “You believe me?”
“Of course I believe you,” Berne said happily. “I don’t care if it’s true or not; I still believe it. Because this means we have to kill him. Right now.”
He snapped his fingers. A young valet appeared in the bedroom doorway, carrying an array of formal wear draped over his arms. “I was,” he said, “preparing to dress already.”
While Berne selected clothing and donned it, he related to Toa-Sytell how he’d been given the task of following Caine and how Caine had slipped him.
“But,” he said, showing as many teeth as could fit into his grin, “one of my boys handed me this, just now, before you came in.” He flipped a folded sheet of lambskin parchment at Toa-Sytell, who caught it neatly, unfolded it, and read the message in Lamorak’s spidery hand.
Toa-Sytell’s face lit up. “You have him!”
“Yeah, Caine led us there. I’m guessing he anticipated Ma’elKoth’s tag, and it was Lamorak who identified it on the net. He’s smarter than he looks.”
“Both of them. Come on, let’s go see what he has to tell us.”
“Ma’elKoth,” Toa-Sytell said. “We should see him first—he should know this. We need to tell him before we go.”
“Fuck that.” Berne shook his head and ticked his points off with raised fingers. “One, he’s busy preparing that illusion, and if we interrupt him it could blunt the hook. Second, he’s in the Iron Room. If you want to break in on him there, well, be my guest, but don’t expect me to be standing behind you. And last, if we tell him this, he won’t believe it. He’s known Caine for years—longer than I have. Even if he does believe us, like as not he’ll make up some excuse to order us to leave Caine alone. You know how he is—he’ll probably think it’s more interesting if Caine’s alive, or some fuck-me-in-the-ass thing like that. Better we find Caine and kill him first, don’t you think?”
Toa-Sytell compressed his lips and nodded. “I agree. Give me five minutes to assemble an escort.”
“The streets still aren’t secure—”
“Sure they are: you’re riding with me.” Berne slid his arms through the harness that held Kosall’s scabbard, then fastened the rope-worked silver buckle across his chest. His fingertips brushed the hilt, and Kosall answered with a buzzing rattlesnake’s threat inside its steel scabbard.
“We don’t need an escort. Let’s go.”
TOA-SYTELL STUDIED LAMORAK minutely while he listened to the traitor’s tale. Lamorak’s features appeared so open despite the swelling of his broken jaw and the crust of blood below his pulpy nose; Toa-Sytell could see that without these injuries he’d be ruggedly handsome. His was a face to inspire almost automatic trust.
Toa-Sytell found him fascinating in an abstract sort of way. A man’s features follow his character closely, as a common rule. Toa-Sytell found it extraordinary that he could find no hint of weakness in Lamorak’s, no clue to the void where the man’s spine should be.
When they’d entered the upper-floor den of Berne’s townhome, Lamorak had flinched like a guilty puppy; he cringed whenever Berne stepped close to him and twisted to keep his splinted leg as far from the Count as possible. He’d refused to speak until Toa-Sytell had given his personal guarantee that Lamorak would be taken from the hands of the Cats. Even after having received it, he spoke hesitantly through his tied-shut teeth, a guilty flush on his beardless cheeks. Toa-Sytell squinted at him, absently stroking the hilt of the poisoned stiletto concealed in his sleeve.
Outside the door, Berne had warned him: “Lamorak’s a crappy thaumaturge, but he has one trick that he does well enough to be dangerous. It’s a Dominate. Watch for it.”
Watch he did, but he saw no hint that Lamorak summoned power of any kind. A moment later all of these considerations were driven aside as Lamorak revealed the climax of Caine’s insidious plan.
Lamorak stammered out his betrayal, wincing now and again when the linen strips that bound his jaw cut into his swollen cheek, when his eagerness to prove the value of his news made him forget his wounds.
“. . . and, and then, you see, all he has to do is throw the net over the illusion, and the net cuts it off from Flow. It’ll vanish, don’t you get it? Twenty thousand people will see Ma’elKoth disappear exactly the way the Aktiri are supposed to. It’ll be proof. Ma’elKoth will never live it down.”
“That net, that goatfucking net!” Berne snarled. Veins twisted in his neck. A chair that got in the way of his furious pacing exploded to splinters under his kick. He wheeled on Lamorak. “What about Pallas? How was this supposed to help him rescue Pallas?”
“It wasn’t,” Toa-Sytell said, rising. “Don’t you see? He doesn’t care about her. Pallas is a blind, a decoy. Caine is the danger. The Empire has been his target from the beginning.”
“I don’t believe that,” Berne said. “You don’t know what he’s gone through for her.”
“But it’s all a game for them,” Toa-Sytell insisted. “Don’t you remember? Ma’elKoth learned this from the ones he captured in the palace. It’s a game, a play, just a story for them somehow. Entertainment. We suffer and die for the amusement of the Aktiri.”
“Entertainment or not, he’ll still try for her—” Berne went on, but Toa-Sytell lost the thread of what he was saying. He once again stared at Lamorak.
From the instant Toa-Sytell had spoken the word game, Lamorak had stared first at him, then at Berne, in eye-bulging panic. His lips hung slack as a blubbery child’s, and a guttural sound of breathless choking came from his throat.
“What is it?” Toa-Sytell asked. “Lamorak, what’s wrong?”
Lamorak waved him off with a trembling hand. “I, I, nothing, I just, I can’t—”
Berne sneered contemptuously. “He’s about to piss himself, isn’t he? Aren’t you a little old to be afraid of Aktiri?”
“I, no, I—” Lamorak’s chair scraped backward; he was blindly trying to press himself back with his good leg.
“No, it’s more than that,” Toa-Sytell said, stepping close. “I’ve seen this before. It’s like a sickness. Some men fear spiders in this way; another man I once knew could not even mount a stepladder for his fear of falling.”
“Yeah?” Grinning, Berne suddenly jumped at Lamorak and grabbed his shoulders. He hauled him up out of the chair, holding him off the floor and shaking him like a child.
“Are we a little scared, then? Have a little problem with this?” He laughed drunkenly. “Say it with me: Caine is an Aktir. Go on, say it! Caine is an Aktir.”
Lamorak shook his battered head wordlessly, struck mute with terror.
“Berne,” Toa-Sytell said with a hand on his arm, “this serves no purpose. He can’t help himself.”
Berne turned only his head toward the Duke. The look on his face was that of a puma challenged over its kill. “Take your hand off me if you want to keep it attached to your wrist. He’ll say it, or I’ll pull his fucking arm off.”
Lamorak moaned as Berne pulled him close and shook him again. “You think I can’t? You think I’m not strong enough? Say it! Caine is an Aktir. Say it!”
Lamorak’s eyes rolled like those of a horse caught in a barn fire. His face went red, then purple. “C . . . C . . .” he forced out through his teeth, choking, “C-Caine . . .”
Toa-Sytell felt a chill flame climb his spine. His mouth dropped open, then closed again, and opened to say, “Berne, wait! He can’t say it! Don’t you see he’s trying? But he can’t! Remember that spell, the one that blocks the tongues of the Aktiri? Remember? You must have heard Ma’elKoth speak of it—!”
Berne frowned at him; for a moment Lamorak dangled forgotten from his fists. “I don’t see what you mean.”
“Don’t you? Lamorak is one of them! He can’t tell us that Caine is an Aktir because he knows it’s true!”
“I’m not!” Lamorak said shrilly. “I swear! I’m not, I swear it! It’s not true, it’s all a lie, I—”
“Shut up,” Berne said absently, emphasizing the order with a shake that snapped Lamorak’s head back. Without transition he’d become calm and bonelessly relaxed, with a sort of luxurious satisfaction like sexual afterglow.
“Well. How about that? Fuck me like a virgin goat. Thieves fall out, they say.”
Toa-Sytell nodded grim agreement. “They do say indeed. Do you understand what this means?”
Berne shrugged. Lamorak whimpered, and Berne slapped him with stunning force on the purple-black swelling over his broken jaw. “Quiet.”
“It means we’ve found a test. Set him down in that chair.”
“Take his hand,” Toa-Sytell said.
Lamorak tried to cower away, but Berne’s strength was irresistible.
“Now,” Toa-Sytell said, “pull his fingers off one by one until he repeats the phrase, ‘I am an Aktir.’ My guess is, he’ll lose all ten.”
Lamorak began to howl, his screams muffled and distant behind his teeth, even before Berne twisted and yanked his smallest finger from his hand. The bones crackled like crumpling paper, and the flesh tore with a sound like the ripping of heavy cloth. Berne tossed the finger over his shoulder like a gnawed-clean chicken bone. Blood sprayed his grin, and he licked it from his lips.
Toa-Sytell stepped in and tied his belt around Lamorak’s wrist, tightening it until the crimson spray trickled to a sluggish drip.
“Why don’t you just go ahead and say it?” Berne asked. “I can do this nine more times without any trouble at all. It’s easy enough to say, no? I am an Aktir. I am an Aktir.”
Lamorak shook his head and drew breath to speak, but Berne covered his mouth with his bloody hand. “Think about what you’re gonna say, Lamorak. Anything that comes out of your mouth that’s not I am an Aktir is gonna cost you another finger.”
He took his hand away. Lamorak said nothing, only looked a silent plea at Toa-Sytell. The Duke shrugged—Lamorak would be of little use to anyone if he was in deep shock or dead from blood loss. “We’ve learned what we need to know here, Berne. Now we must take Lamorak to Ma’elKoth. This is a way we can prove to him the danger of Caine. With the evidence of Lamorak, Caine’s true nature no longer rests on speculation.”
Berne nodded. “You go on with that. Some of the boys can escort you. Me, I’m thinking that for his plan to work, he needs that net. I posted four men to watch it and follow him when he comes for it. They might know where Caine is right now. I’m gonna go and ask them.”
He reached back over his shoulder and touched Kosall’s broad quillions as though he caressed a lover’s thigh. “If I can catch him, I can solve all our problems with a single stroke.”
“Time grows short,” Toa-Sytell said with a nod toward the rising sun, now high above the rooftops. “Waste none of it.”
Berne held out his blood-soaked hand. “Good luck with Ma’elKoth.”
Toa-Sytell shook it without hesitation. “Luck to you, Berne. And good hunting.”
KIERENDAL COULD FEEL each blink as though the leading edges of her eyelids were dusted with broken glass. Cautiously, extending her Shell wide and deep so that the pull would be difficult to detect, she allowed fatigue-suppressing energy to trickle in from the Flow. She’d have plenty of time to rest once this show was over.
Beside her, the King of Cant stared out the window at the crowds below. His Shell swirled with silver that glittered with rosy, dawn-colored highlights. Some of those highlights, no doubt, sprang from his appreciation for the face and form she presented to him. Over the past night and day, she had tuned the illusion of her appearance in careful, gradual increments—shading her hair toward curls in richer shades of chestnut, her eyes toward hazel, layering her skeletal flanks with the look and feel of lean tawny muscle, to capture just that hue in his Shell.
Any man is easier to control when you can lead him by his dick.
“Those guys, there, they’re ours, aren’t they?” Majesty’s voice thickened with excitement. “Gods, those too, they could be ours. See them? Didn’t you do a couple with the plumed cap and tights look?”
Kierendal twisted to glance lazily out the window, not really interested in the thronging crowds massing to file into Victory Stadium. For her, the real action was taking place right here in this room with Majesty.
“I don’t know,” she said. “They could be. I did so many, really, that I can’t remember them all.”
“And you can’t tell, right? You can’t look down there and tell which are ours? Even though you did the spells yourself?”
Kierendal shrugged. “The griffinstones power the illusions; they draw no Flow. Undetectable.”
“Good thing, too. Fucking body searches—without your magick I don’t think we’d get a toothpick in there.” When he looked at her, the thrill in his eyes made him almost attractive. “You sure you don’t want to join me? Gonna be a fucking spectacular show.”
Kierendal smiled like a cat. “I’m a lover, not a fighter.”
She had no intention of being anywhere near the stadium at noon.
If she could help it, she never wanted to be that close to Caine again.
The energy that surrounded him, that oceanic, tidal current of Flow that somehow followed him—she couldn’t tell what it was, or how he did it. She was fairly certain that he had no idea of the power that rolled through his life. Perhaps it was a human thing; perhaps, as a species, they had more power below the surface of their consciousness than did any primal mage, and she had only become aware of it through her close study of Caine’s oddly black Shell. That power seemed to grow on him, to gather into itself, doubling and redoubling like a river piling up behind a weakening dam. She had some clue what effect it might have when released: she had seen the hints of it during the standoff with Majesty at Alien Games.
It would be chaos. Pure destruction.
She suspected that it was that dark current in the Flow that had so nearly escalated the situation at AG out of anyone’s control; she suspected that Caine, by his very existence, piled up potential forces like snow and rock in the Gods’ Teeth. Where peace had reigned for years, one shout from Caine might bring down an avalanche.
She had no intention of being downslope from him. Not this time.
No point in trying to explain this to Majesty. He’d never believe her. Besides, if he died today, she’d have a fair chance at gathering whatever survived of the Kingdom of Cant under her hand. On balance, of course, she’d prefer that he lived, and that Caine’s plan went perfectly; she was well on her way to permanently cementing her relationship with Majesty.
Speaking of that, she thought, glancing at the entourage of mingled Subjects and Faces that littered the rest of the room. “I think,” she said slowly, “that we should empty this room, so that we can, mmm, negotiate some more.”
The hand that she laid on Majesty’s arm was warmer than a human’s, and it sparked some answering heat in his smile.
“I’m not sure we have time,” he answered.
Three minutes at most, she thought, but kept that thought off her face. “Mmm, if you say so.” She sighed as though disappointed; his attention had already been drawn away by the scene outside. “Where are your Dukes?”
“Deofad’s already inside the stadium. Paslava . . . well . . .” He turned to her again, and his grin got wide and slightly malicious. “Paslava’ll be here later. Right now, he’s got some business in the caverns.”
ARTURO KOLLBERG MOPPED sweat from his upper lip and leaned close to the chairscreen’s mike to half whisper hoarsely, “No, dammit! No feed, not now.”
The VP for Marketing frowned a Businessman disapproval through the screen at him. “They’re all over me on this, Art. They want another feed, just like the other day.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I’ve just heard from the Board . . .”
Kollberg twitched involuntarily—that ants-on-the-skin feeling was back again. He glanced over his shoulder at the two soapies. Their face shields seemed to be directed at the phosphene kaleidoscope of the POV screen, but he had no way to know for sure.
“You’ll just have to wait,” he insisted. “All of you, you’ll have to wait. Nothing’s happening right now, for Christ’s sake!” His eyes bulged and he spoke through teeth clenched so hard his jaw hurt. “Nothing’s happened for hours! He’s asleep, all right?”
“Jesus, Art, calm down. Okay, he’s asleep. No problem. But I want an assurance that we’ll get a feed for the big blow-off, yeah? This thing he’s supposed to be pulling on Ma’elKoth—we want this live on the net. That Clearlake guy, the Board’s very up on him right now. They want him hosting.”
Kollberg’s hand trembled as he wiped perspiration back into the thin strands of hair that were already pasted down with his sweat. “You’ll kill our cube sales. You know that, don’t you? That’s the climax of the whole damned Adventure! Caine’s the best at this—you know he is. I’ve been running Caine’s Adventures for fifteen years. This is his trademark. He’s pulling everything together for this show at the stadium. It’s all going to happen at once. Put it out live and everyone in the world will know how it comes out!”
“We’re okay with this. The Board’s okay with this, Art. The fees for the feed will cover any drop in the cubes—and we’re projecting that any drop will be minimal. This is a collectible, Art. Especially if he dies.”
IT WAS HEARING distant voices speak the name Caine that brought Pallas drifting upward like a bubble through the layers of Chambaraya’s song. There was no knowing how long she had let the currents of song carry her gently away from the awareness of her body; her last clear memory was of speaking to Caine, here from the body that was tied upon the altar.
He shone like a star, she thought. There was some power within him, something not Flow-based—but perhaps Flow-related—some dynamic energy of life that had called to her within her river dreams. It hadn’t come from the Flow or from any outside source; the very room had heated up at his entrance as though he carried a furnace within his chest. How could she never have seen this before?
All of their struggles, all the wounds inflicted and taken on both sides, his endlessly simmering anger, her tangled envy, all seemed so distant, so trivial. She couldn’t comprehend, from this perspective, how they could have made each other so unhappy.
There is nothing easier than happiness; it’s the feeling that comes when you’re open to the life that flows through you, when you know that you are the river and the river is you. She and Caine, they had somehow never found that. Cut off from each other, cut off from themselves, they had clutched at their lives, had scrabbled for them like misers hugging gold, pretending that life itself could be hoarded, or spent.
No wonder they couldn’t live together.
If only she could tell him that, somehow get through to him, tell him how easy it is to be happy.
She knew that she didn’t have much time, that this body was dying, that the life she had borrowed through thirty-three years was leaking out through the hole in her lung. This prospect didn’t distress her. It was nothing more than the little rivulet called Shanna Leighton, called Pallas Ril, slowly drying as its water returned to the river. She only worried about Caine; she hoped that she could hold life inside this body long enough to speak with him one last time.
She wished she could ask the river how much time she had left, but that way was blocked for her. She could still hear its song, could still let the mingled melodies float her away. No wall of stone or steel or magick itself could sever this link, which was as much a part of her as her heart and her spine, but some immaterial barrier prevented her from adding her own voice to the song, from drawing its power through herself.
She knew from whence that barrier came: from the same source as the voice that now said, You cannot ask Me to accept this without proof.
Him, she could see without opening her eyes: a gigantic foaming Kharybdis of Flow, sucking energy in from every direction, draining it to power his massive body and to light his extraordinary mind. The Iron Room rang with its echoes, and every stone of the Colhari Palace resonated with the beat of the Emperor’s heart.
She knew, vaguely, of the fires and turmoil, of the riots and the fighting in the city outside. From her vantage it seemed that Ma’elKoth’s distress was not the product of the chaos, but was its source. His internal furies had somehow broken out, spilled over, sparked the disorder as though the city itself was an extension of his body.
She would need her eyes to see the others, but she wasn’t up to that level yet—still rising, registering now the beats of her heart and the pain that came of struggling to breathe. They continued to speak of Caine, though—spoke in voices that she knew.
And they named him as an Actor.
She knew in a disconnected way that this was a bad thing, that it would be a problem. As her attention gradually sharpened she heard more of some plan of his they’d discovered, of a silver net and griffinstones, some plan to paint Ma’elKoth in the colors of the Aktiri before thousands of his subjects.
Ma’elKoth’s voice now came to her in tones of weakness, of self-doubt and inner pain unlike any she’d heard from him.
Is it possible? I cannot comprehend the depths of . . . No, no, it cannot be! This is impossible! My entire career . . . My rise to the throne, all planned, all the work of an Aktir . . .
I cannot believe it. I do not believe it.
As Pallas’ consciousness rose to the surface, she recognized the voice of Toa-Sytell, every bit as neutral as it had been that night she’d overheard him with Majesty.
“It is an unconscionable risk. You must cancel the ceremony.”
“Cancel? Now? My Children enter the stadium already; to cancel the ceremony would be an admission of guilt; the result would be the same in the end.”
His voice became thready with unaccustomed self-pity. “To be tumbled with one swift stroke from the mountaintop unto the depths of a dung heap. Had the other gods hated Me from birth they could hardly have used Me worse. To believe that it could have been planned from the very beginning, that seven years ago Caine brought Me the crown of Dal’kannith to start Me along a path to bring me here, where with one stroke he can shatter the Empire itself . . . Can he be that brilliant? Can he be so far beyond even Me? You—you know him. You are his companion; you have brought Me this news. Speak, now. Tell Me the truth of this man.”
Pallas wondered fuzzily, Is he talking to me? Does he think I’ll start talking now just for asking? He can’t force my voice by torture or magick, and so he’s decided to be polite?
A rustle of footsteps, the half-tearing sound of stressed cloth, and she opened her eyes.
Ma’elKoth faced three-quarters away from her. The oiled muscles in his bare back were rigid as stone. His fist held the tunic of a man, held this man high in the air. Pallas had a vague flash of memory, of Ma’elKoth holding Caine in precisely this fashion—but this wasn’t Caine.
This man had a broken leg tied to splints with dirty linen, had manacles on his wrists and a bloody bandage tied around one hand, had knotted linen tying shut a painfully swollen, purple-black jaw, his nose equally swollen and spreading blackened rings of bruise around his eyes.
Not until he spoke did she recognize him.
“I don’ . . . I can’ . . . All I know I already tol’ you . . .” Lamorak said miserably, his eyes wet and blinking.
I held this man in my arms, she thought, marveling. Kissed him, made love with him. And now I can’t remember why. . .
But her Olympian perspective made everything clear. Looking back, the answer became obvious: She’d turned to him because he wasn’t Caine, because he was Caine’s opposite in every way. Tall, and blond, beautiful to look upon and clearly heroic, a good man in every sense of the word, caring and compassionate, romantic and brave.
And hollow inside. A beautiful shell, fragile as a blown egg.
This was the final opposite: Caine, at least, was all of a piece. What you saw was what you got. That’s why Caine would never break the way Lamorak had so clearly broken: he was solid, through and through.
“This, then, is what shall be done,” Ma’elKoth said, turning once again to Toa-Sytell, who stood with respectful stillness nearby. Lamorak dangled trembling from his fist, forgotten. “I am Ma’elKoth. I do not run. I do not hide. If Berne cannot recover the net, I will meet Caine face-to-face upon the arena floor.”
Toa-Sytell looked alarmed. “Ma’elKoth—”
“No. If I cower within My palace, Caine’s plan succeeds. I shall reverse this with a single stroke of my own: I will truly be there.”
He opened his fist, and Lamorak dropped clattering to the floor. “I have never been comfortable with the idea of employing a Fantasy. It would be a fake, a pretense, and I do not lie to My Children. I shall do this ritual in truth. I shall take these lives upon the arena floor. I shall have the memories of Pallas Ril, and of you, Lamorak, however distasteful it may be to absorb such revolting worthlessness.”
He stepped close to Toa-Sytell and looked down upon his Duke. “Continue the search for Caine. If he can be taken before the ritual, do so. If he must be killed, so be it. I suspect, however, that you will not find him. He’s too resourceful; too ruthless. But I am more than he is. I am Ma’elKoth. Whatever happens, I shall be ready.”
He clasped his mighty hands together and twisted them against each other, popping his knuckles like a string of firecrackers.
“I shall be ready, and I shall kill him with My own hand. And then I shall have his memories, as well.”
All the rich and boundless energy that had drained from his voice before had now rushed back; the maelstrom of Flow that fed him gathered unimaginable power.
“Then all questions shall, at last, be put to rest.”
Oh, Hari, Shanna thought, as her eyes drifted closed. The death of this body she could accept with a certain equanimity, but the new star that had shone within Caine was so unexpectedly lovely, a surprise of beauty: a perfect rose in a wasteland.
I’ll hold on. I’ll find a way. To warn you. To help you. Somehow.
I can live that long, I think.
BERNE CLENCHED HIS teeth and resisted the urge to cut his way through the surging crowds.
The curfew had lifted at midmorning, and it seemed that the whole city had streamed onto the streets. More than one citizen received a bone-crushing kick from Berne’s horse, a spirited animal that disliked breasting through the crowds. It rolled its eyes toward anyone approaching its flanks or rear, and Berne let it have its head a little—a few bleeding townsfolk flat in the street behind him went a long way toward clearing a path before him.
Finally he struggled through to the pissoir closest to the shaft where he’d left his Cats to watch the net. He loose-tied the horse at the post outside, looping the reins through the topmost hook. The lock on the mucker-shaft door squealed and snapped with a simple twist of his wrist. A moment’s work with flint and steel lit the lamp that he took from a peg just inside the door; he strapped the grip to the outside of his hand and went down the ladder into the darkness. He curled his lip against the smell as he sloshed through the puddled urine across the pissoir’s shaft base; he ducked through the cavern entrance and moved at a fast crouch until he could stand upright again.
Soon he edged along a ledge midway up the curving wall of a gallery that disappeared into darkness below him and fought off the temptation to take the shortcuts that seemed to offer themselves. He kept exactly to the route he’d marked on his way down here before—he well knew that the easiest thing to do in these caverns was to get irretrievably lost and wander until the oil in the lamp died. He clambered down a narrow shaft to a lower cavern. For a moment, he thought he glimpsed lamplight reflecting from rock somewhere ahead. Tiny stalagmites broke away under his boots and skittered loudly across the stone, and the light went out before he could be sure it had ever been there.
He shook his head. He’d told those idiots No lights. They had each other for company in the darkness, and any lamplight would warn off Caine.
He arrived at the spot, the broad bowl-shaped depression with the well to one side, and looked around. No sign of his boys; he nodded approval to himself—they were properly remaining covert until sure of his identity. “All right, boys. It’s me. Come on out; there’s a change in our plans.”
And he stood there, listening to the fading echoes of his voice and the lonely plash of millennial water seeping through the limestone.
With a sudden curse he remembered the dagger that Ma’elKoth had magicked for him, that still rode his hip in its leather sheath. He drew the knife; the green light from within the blade was faint, barely visible in the glow from his lamp. As he swung it around at arm’s length, he found that it only barely brightened—while pointing diagonally up and away.
“Bastard,” he muttered. “Bastard. He’s already been here.”
His boys should have left some sign of which way they’d gone. He couldn’t just follow the dagger, not down here. As he circled the chamber, he passed the mouth of the well—the vertical shaft where the net had been—and from its mouth breathed the smell of shit and rich metallic blood.
Berne let his eyes drift closed as he stood at the rim of the well. He didn’t have to look down there to know what he’d see: the piled bodies of his four Cats.
But if they were dead, whose lamp threw that light he’d seen?
He spun, trying to whirl away from the well’s mouth, but it was already too late.
He got no warning at all. No scrape of boots, no breath of breeze, nothing except silent and invisible hands striking his back at his center of balance while an invisible tether held his ankles. Before he could understand what was happening, he found himself falling headfirst down the well, tumbling as he bounced from wall to wall, crashing into the yielding cold-meat bodies of his men.
Light flared in the chamber above him, and five heads became visible as men above peered down the shaft at him.
Slowly, Berne disentangled himself from the nerveless clasping limbs of the corpses, picked himself up, and made a show of brushing dirt and blood from his clothing, all the while digging his feet around to find stable footing on the stone below the bodies.
“I am Abbal Paslava,” said one of the men above. “Men call me the Spellbinder. I thought you might be interested to know who has killed you, Berne.”
Berne bent his neck to look up at him and nodded with an expression of professional appreciation. “Good trap, Abbal Paslava the Spellbinder. Nicely done, indeed. Now I expect those men with you will be shooting me with crossbows, or dropping rocks on my head, or something like that.” Berne chuckled warmly. “This was Caine’s idea, wasn’t it?”
“Why yes, in fact, it was,” Paslava said with a broad malicious smile. “He told us of your magickal enhancements, and he decided that this would be the best way to kill you, to draw you down here into the caverns where your magick will not function. Not your strength, not your invulnerability, and most especially: not Kosall. With a griffinstone pulled from the net your men so thoughtfully kept watch over for us, I have more than enough power down here to slaughter you.”
“A good trap,” Berne repeated. “He’s smarter than I thought he was. But there’s something Caine doesn’t know.”
“Mmm,” Paslava hummed judiciously. “Caine said you would try to bargain for your life. What information do you have that could possibly be of greater value to us than your death?”
“Information?” Berne laughed out loud. “I’ll give you information,” he said, as he reached back over his shoulder and drew Kosall.
Once the blade cleared the scabbard, he took its hilt, and Kosall whined to tooth-grinding life.
Berne grinned and waved up at him with the humming blade. “You’re not the only one with a griffinstone.”
Paslava shouted, “Shoot! Shoot him now!” but before the Knights of Cant with him could bring their bows to bear, Berne bent his knees and sprang out of the well with a single leap. The Knights all ducked as he shot upward like a quarrel from a crossbow’s slot. He arced high over one ducking Knight and split the man’s skull from base to crown with a single backhanded swipe of Kosall.
He somersaulted in the air and landed gracefully poised. The dead Knight collapsed slowly to his knees, then tumbled forward into the well behind him.
He turned and leveled the blade at Paslava while the other Knights scrambled back and went for their swords.
“Come on, then,” he said cheerfully. “Fight or run. You’re dead just the same. I don’t have all day.”
Berne did not consider himself an intellectual, or even an intelligent man; he preferred to leave thinking to men who were good at it, like Ma’elKoth or Toa-Sytell. Nonetheless, a question of the sort that he generally didn’t bother to consider sparked within his brain as he killed first one, then another of the terrified Knights of Cant. By the time he casually, rather distractedly slaughtered the third, this question had acquired real significance: it was a puzzler, and he suspected that its answer was somehow vital in a way he could not, yet, understand.
So it was that when he pounced on the fleeing Paslava and sliced the thaumaturge’s leg off precisely through the middle of his knee joint—so that Paslava tumbled to the ground in a screeching spray of blood, skidding his jetting stump along the jagged limestone—Berne did not finish him immediately.
Instead, he seized the thaumaturge by the thigh on his half leg, his strengthened grip cutting into the muscle until the arterial spray of blood diminished to a trickle. He lifted Paslava into the air, head downward to keep his blood pressure up so the wounded man wouldn’t faint.
Holding him out at arm’s length, Berne frowned into the Spellbinder’s upside-down eyes. “So tell me, before you die,” Berne said slowly, with a growing premonition that things were somehow going hideously wrong, “exactly how Caine knew I’d be coming down here to get that net.”
WELL BEFORE NOON, Victory Stadium was full, dangerously full. A close-packed sweating mass of humanity squatted on stone benches and crouched in the aisles. Some stood in knots around the closest man with a jug. Many struggled in disorganized masses at the doors of the grandstand pissoirs.
The Imperial official in charge of the stadium, himself sweating and wringing his hands, told the Commandant of the constables to shut the gates. Then he turned to kneel in front of the small icon of Ma’elKoth that stood in the corner of his office to pray that there wouldn’t be a riot.
When the constables swung closed the public gates, the crowds outside recoiled upon themselves like worms encountering hot brick; a ripple passed outward from the stadium to the farthest reaches of Games Way and the street that joined it, Long Way, as people began to reverse direction to fight back against the press of bodies behind them.
A reinforced cavalry brigade began driving the commoners off Nobles’ Way and away from Kings’ Bridge: soon Ma’elKoth himself would travel this road.
HIGH ABOVE THE city in the Iron Room, Pallas Ril had paid little attention to the Household Knights that draped a linen shift over her and transferred her manacles from the altar to a jointed frame of oak—no more attention than she had paid to Lamorak’s single miserable plea for forgiveness. They were bound identically under the thoughtful supervision of Ma’elKoth himself. A silver net had been tied over Pallas and her frame entire; this had at last captured her attention, as the twisting lace of Flow vanished from her mindview. Now when she looked upon Ma’elKoth, she saw only a man of great size and surpassing beauty, instead of the godlike whirlwind of power that had stood at the altar’s side for two days.
Cut off from the Flow, she tumbled out of mindview and groaned weakly at the pain that chewed at her.
The Household Knights carried the frames upon which she and Lamorak were bound as though they were stretchers, down and down and down the endless flights of stairs to the front courtyard of the Colhari Palace. There a huge processional was being organized—hundreds upon hundreds of Knights and musicians and acrobats, pretty girls with garlands of fresh flowers, strong young men with baskets of sweets and pastries to throw to the crowds. The centerpiece of the parade was an enormous open wagon. It was hung with flowers until its frame could not be seen, and upon it were bolted a pair of freestanding iron racks. The jointed frames upon which Pallas and Lamorak were bound were swiftly unfolded into wide X shapes and hung upright upon the racks.
Being vertical for the first time in two days caused Pallas to nearly black out; as her vision dimmed and the scene swam in the brilliant sunlight, she saw Ma’elKoth leap lightly from the ground to the center of the wagon. The paraders around him, the Knights, everyone present in the courtyard or looking down from the windows cheered—a happy racket that he acknowledged with a sweeping bow and a grin that brought more cheers and applause.
Even without mindview, Pallas could see how he fed on their love, how it elevated him far above the concerns of mortality. His doubts and grim determination of this morning had vanished without a trace; here in the presence of his Children, Ma’elKoth rivaled the sun itself, all power and supernal beauty.
She looked over at Lamorak, at his battered body crucified like her own, his eyes closed on his private misery. She looked down at herself, at the linen shift that was already showing crimson stains of the blood that leaked through the crusted bandage around her chest, then again at Ma’elKoth, who now waved for the gates to be thrown back. She tried to summon mindview, to recover some of the serenity that had sustained her in the Iron Room, but the pain in her wrists and ankles, the agony of drawing each breath into her punctured lung, the tumult around her, all combined to prevent her from reaching that sanctuary.
She was alone, without even the faintest beat of life’s song to comfort her.
The gates swung wide, and Ma’elKoth’s face seemed to cast a dazzling light of its own. The waiting crowd outside answered his appearance with a full-throated roar.
HIGH IN THE stands within the stadium, the King of Cant looked down. Over a thousand Subjects of Cant were seeded through this crowd—every man, woman, and youth of them armed. They would fall upon the Grey Cats like an avalanche. Even now, as he sat with his palms pressed together between his trembling knees, the Faces were spreading through Old Town, taking strategic positions to cover a retreat, if a retreat became necessary. It wouldn’t, though: this Majesty knew beyond doubt.
By nightfall, he would hold this city in his hand, ready to deliver it to Toa-Sytell—in return for, ah, certain considerations . . .
The tremor in his knees and the fluttering in his guts, these had nothing to do with fear: they were pure anticipation. Only one thing troubled him as he squinted upward to check the near-vertical angle of the rising sun.
Where in fuck is Paslava? He should have been here half an hour ago. If he’s not around to do his crowd-control stuff, a lot of people are going to get hurt.
From outside, far beyond the walls of the stadium, he heard the voice of crowds that roared like an approaching hurricane.
TOA-SYTELL MET THE parade at the south end of Kings’ Bridge. A handful of King’s Eyes forced a path for him through the crowds, and the Emperor paused in his joyous acceptance of his Children’s adulation long enough to wave him aboard the wagon. He clambered up and stood close to Ma’elKoth’s side, yelling at the top of his lungs to be heard over the crowd that Caine was nowhere to be found. Every person who’d entered the stadium had been searched, and every man who answered Caine’s general description had been detained. Toa-Sytell himself had looked over the detainees, and Caine was not among them. Caine had not entered the stadium, and there was no way he could get in, now that the gates were sealed.
Ma’elKoth bent his neck to look down on his Duke. Sudden silence surrounded them, though Toa-Sytell could see that the crowd lining the streets still shouted as lustily as ever.
The Emperor smiled and said gently, “You misspeak. You mean to say: Caine has not entered the stadium since your search began. Mark Me: he will be there.”
“ALL RIGHT ALL right allright allright,” Arturo Kollberg muttered, chewing the words around the ends of his nail-bitten fingertips, still in his mouth. His heart beat double march time against his ribs, and blood sang in his ears. His face felt swollen, bloated with the pressure inside his brain, and it glowed with the same malignant flush of rose as the fist button of the emergency transfer switch.
After two swift glances, one over each shoulder, back at the impassive mirror masks of the soapies, he again faced forward and checked Caine’s telemetry as it scrolled across the darkened POV screen.
“All right,” he said again. “He’s awake. He’s moving. He’s making a move. Start the feed.”
EVEN THE SMALL-MARKET, ethnic-language channels buried in the non-English-speaking backwaters of the world carried Jed Clear-lake’s summation of the tale; their poor advertising revenues did not give them the funds necessary to carry the live feed itself, but they could go this far. They would break into their programming at intervals with whatever updates became available.
Clearlake’s summary was a model of clarity; other broadcasters could only helplessly envy his characteristic blend of emotional intensity and suave good nature, his air of being on the inside, of being a player.
“Now, after this message, we’ll return with Caine: Live!”
The following message was from the Studio itself, sixty seconds of opportunistic self-promotion, worldwide and free. Their slogan, Adventures Unlimited: When you need to be somebody else faded slowly from screens around the world; then the feed began.
And the world ground to a halt.
Foot traffic was gridlocked in Times Square as shoulder-to-shoulder pedestrians stared up at the ring of Jumbotrons. Tokyo was in a similar state; London, Johannesburg, Kabul, New Delhi . . . Those citizens fortunate enough to be carrying handscreens stopped in their tracks to watch, and all the others rushed to their homes, to taverns, to storefronts where at least they could look at the pictures. Trading on the commodities and stock exchanges was suspended; air traffic was maintained only in the computer-directed slavelanes.
Nearly every breathless human being on Earth heard Caine’s Soliloquy:
*Seems like I spend most of my life climbing up out of other peoples’ shit.*
THE TOILET SEAT makes a dimly backlit ring above me as I clamber up the side of the shaft, get my hands on it, and quickly chin myself to get a look around. The latrine is empty, as I expected it would be; the Eyes who searched this place were too fastidious to climb down into the shaft—it figures that they wouldn’t spend more time here than absolutely necessary.
I push the seat up and pull myself out of the toilet. It’s a struggle not to groan out loud when every single one of my injuries acutely reminds me of its presence—from the fever that’s scratching my eyeballs all the way down to the bone bruise that stiffens my right knee.
Tyshalle’s Bloody Axe, I’m a wreck. Spending a few hours sleeping in petrified shit at the bottom of a latrine shaft didn’t really agree with me.
Could have been worse: if Ma’elKoth hadn’t banned gladiators, there might have been guys using this shitter while I was down there.
Daylight leaks in through the vents at the joining of wall and ceiling, and the rising thunder of the crowd’s roar tells me that Ma’elKoth will be coming through the outside gates anytime now.
Those vents up there perforate the arena wall. The gladiator latrine is right next to the glory hole, to handle the nervous bladders and spastic sphincters of men walking out to die. I spend a nervous moment myself when I go to the doorless arch and peer out into the glory hole itself.
It’s empty, thankfully, and dark—an iron door closes it off from the gated shaft that leads to the arena—and I go back to the vents, jump up, and chin myself to look out. I don’t have to worry about making noise; with twenty thousand Ma’elKoth fanatics howling over my head, I could set off a bomb in here and attract less attention than a fart in a brothel.
The arena wall’s about three feet thick here; I wriggle headfirst into one of the vents to get a decent view. I have to struggle to hold down some incipient claustrophobia—I can feel the weight of the stone an inch above the back of my head, and my elbows brush stone on either side. I’m in black shadow cast by the noonday sun, invisible.
The mouth of the vent frames the golden glare of sun off sand. Across the arena the bright holiday clothes of the spectators—shoulder to shoulder in the stands—make a splintered mosaic of random color that shifts and ripples like a patchwork flag.
I spend one more moment looking out at the crowd. Some of them are nervous, some seem angry, some of them look sincerely happy.
A lot of them will be dead within the hour.
My field of view no doubt includes any number of Grey Cats in mufti and probably more than a handful of disguised Subjects of Cant. I’m not worried about them; they’re all here to fight.
I wonder, though, if any of the civilians out there had a premonition, a queasy feeling about coming here today. I wonder how many won’t be surprised when the shit explodes, how many will feel only a sickening stomach-drop of recognition, how many will die with I knew I should have stayed home echoing in their heads.
I wonder how many homes will echo with keening for the dead tonight.
Y’know, if the situation was opposite, if someone I loved died because some guy did what I’m about to do, I wouldn’t rest until I’d hunted that man down and killed him with my own hands.
But: if I could buy Pallas’ life with the deaths of every man, woman, and child in this stadium, I’d do it. Cheap at twice the price. Even so, I’d be inclined to haggle—in fact, today I’m gonna drive a hard fucking bargain.
Maybe I’m getting thrifty in my old age.
The roar that rocks the stadium notches up another five decibels or so, cutting short my seesaw of second thoughts.
He’s brought a whole parade, hundreds of revelers in holiday costume; they come dancing onto the sand, casting sweets and coins up into the grandstands as they circle the arena, urging the crowd to join them in the singing of Ma’elKoth’s anthem, “King of Kings.” There are a few pretty girls among them, but most of them seem to be men—not young men, either. I can pick out weathered creases beneath the holiday face paint, and behind the smiles are the cold eyes of career soldiers, veteran killers.
The crowd isn’t really going for the song. The voices that do join in are nearly drowned by the ever-increasing general roar.
And then the Rose Parade wagon rolls across my black-framed field of view.
It moves without visible means, powered by Ma’elKoth’s will alone. That’s him, there in the middle—the one who looks like a hero of legend, a god from myth, standing like the figurehead of a battleship as it rolls to the center of the arena floor, fists on his hips, head thrown back. And for those of you who are new to this story, the fellow at his side—the one looking very natty indeed in the ruffled doublet and pants side-buckled down to his thigh boots—that’s Toa-Sytell, the Duke of Public Order, for which read “head of the secret police.” Very competent. Very dangerous. His face is characteristically blank as he scans the stands.
He shouldn’t be here; I was hoping he’d know better. If he gets killed today, Majesty and the Kingdom are deep in the shitter.
Yeah, oh well—too late now to worry about Majesty. I have other business. Business up there on that wagon with Ma’elKoth.
Hard as I try not to let myself register the twin X-shaped frames on either end of the flower-decked wagon, there they are; I can’t look away. From one, Lamorak hangs limply, head down. He looks like he’s already dead, which would be a pity.
I’d hate for him to miss this.
From the other, inside a drape of silver net, hangs my wife.
A chill opens in my belly, like I’ve swallowed ice, a freezing void that spreads to my chest, to my arms and legs, to my head. In that icy emptiness it seems that I’m watching myself lie here, hearing myself think. I can’t feel my heartbeat, just a sizzling hiss behind my ribs that crackles in my ears like lightning on a radio.
Pallas has her head up. She looks alert and worried: she’s a long way from that private mystic bolt-hole where she’d kept herself safe. The shift of white linen that covers her is stained with a crimson trail from her ribs down her left leg. Her blood drips from her heel into the flowers below her feet.
That rack she’s hanging from—that’s going to be a problem. Somehow I didn’t expect to find her crucified . . .
Maybe I didn’t think this through quite as well as I could have.
No Berne, though: that means his body’s cooling at the bottom of that well in the caverns even now. Shame I couldn’t be there myself to watch the light go out of his eyes—but I can settle for knowing I’ve outlived him.
Ma’elKoth lifts his bridge-girder arms, and silence bursts from him like the shock front of an explosion, as though God has reached down and spun the volume dial on the world.
He begins to speak to his assembled Children.
I pull myself scraping forward and roll headfirst out of the vent. My hands grip its lower rim so that I can flip neatly forward and land on my feet.
There’s no hesitation now, not even time for a slow breath. There’s no profit in any second thoughts: there are no choices left to make.
I hook my thumbs behind my belt and stroll out across the arena floor.
I’m here. On the sand. In my last arena.
Twenty thousand pairs of eyes swing curiously toward me: Who’s that idiot in black? What’s he doing here?
And hundreds of thousands more, all of you here with me inside my skull, all of you who think you know what I’m about to do. Maybe I’ve got a couple surprises for you, too.
A few of the costumed mock revelers see me now and still themselves, hands drifting toward folds of clothing for the weapons concealed there.
I keep walking toward them, slowly, offering a friendly grin.
The golden sand of the arena crunches as it shifts slightly under my boot heels. The sun is hot, and it strikes a reddish glow onto the upper reaches of my vision, where it glistens in my eyebrows.
All my doubts, all my questions fly away like doves in a conjurer’s trick. Adrenaline sings in my veins, a melody as familiar and comforting as a lullaby. The thunder of blood in my ears buries all sound except for the slow, measured crunchch. . . crunchch of my footsteps.
Toa-Sytell sees me now; his pale eyes widen and his mouth works. He tugs on Ma’elKoth’s arm, and the Emperor’s head swivels toward me with the slow-motion menace of the turret of a tank.
As I walk toward him, my chest swells with some inexplicable emotion; I’m nearly there before I can tell what it is.
I am, right now, as happy as I will ever be.
I look up at Pallas and find her eyes on me, full of horror.
I acknowledge her with a droop of my eyelids that is almost a bow, and I mouth the only words I can give her: I love you.
She’s trying to say something back to me, something about Ma’elKoth. I can’t read her battered lips, and I won’t have the chance to figure it out.
It’s time for the killing to begin.
THE COMMANDER OF the northwest garrison had only just lain down, heading for a richly deserved nap after thirty solid hours on his feet. He was stretching his exhausted body on an obscenely comfortable pallet in a back room, his eyes drifting closed, when the entire building trembled and shook as though struck by a giant’s fist.
Outside his room, men shouted in confusion and terror. He scrambled to his feet and staggered to the peg where his scabbard hung on the wall. He clawed numbly at the hilt of his sword, but before he could draw, the door burst squealing around the bar that locked it and fell in rattling splintered fragments to the floor.
The man who stood panting in the doorway was covered in moist and clotted blood, as though he’d been swimming on a slaughterhouse floor. His eyes burned fiercely within his red-smeared face. As he gasped for breath he snarled: “Call your men . . . all of them. And I need . . . a horse. Your best fucking horse. Now.”
Slowly the commander’s fatigue-dazzled brain registered who this was, and he stammered, “I, ah, Count Berne—! Count . . . my lord Count, you’re hurt!”
Berne’s teeth were nearly as red as his bloody lips. “It’s not my blood . . . you stupid . . . sack of shit. Get that horse. And sound the alarm. Every man, every fucking trooper, I want the whole shit-eating army at Victory Stadium right fucking now!”
“I, ah, my lord Count, I don’t understand—”
“You don’t have to understand. Just do it. He talked; I knew the sonofawhore would talk.”
Berne strode into the room and took the commander’s shoulder with a grip powerful enough to make the commander wince as the joint popped. “All your men, all the men from the other garrisons. Get them to the stadium and arrest everyone. Anyone who offers resistance, kill them.”
Berne leaned close, and his eyes smoldered. The commander nearly choked on the rich meaty scent of blood on his breath. “Fucking Caine—the whole goatfucking thing’s a setup!”
Without effort he lifted the commander off the floor and snarled into his face. “Now do I get that horse and those men, or do I tear your fucking arms off?”
FAR BELOW, HE was only a stick figure in black, a sharp contrast to the golden sand and the brightly costumed revelers, but to Majesty’s eye he was unmistakably Caine. The slight, unconscious swagger, the flash of teeth in the swarthy face, the leisurely walk that drew out and stretched the awesome silence of the Stadium. Too late now for Paslava to arrive, Majesty thought, his heart sprinting.
His white-knuckled fingers dug painfully into his trembling knees. Without Paslava, this was going to be bloody, but there was no going back, not now, not when victory was this close. . .
He caught the eye of Deofad. The grizzled warrior sat twenty rows away, and he returned Majesty’s look of sizzling anticipation.
Deofad’s reply was a barely perceptible nod.
Majesty lifted one finger and held his breath.
Now, everything waited for Caine.
A LANGUID WAVE of the Emperor’s hand parts the sea of revelers, and they allow me to pass. I don’t have to look back to know they’re closing in behind me, but that doesn’t matter. All that counts is how close I can get before the shitpile explodes.
Slowly, with the same kind of deliberation my father used to use when he’d take off his belt to beat me, I untie the silver net from my waist and coil it around one fist.
“What news, Caine?” Ma’elKoth booms with hokey feigned surprise. Whatever his other talents might be, the sonofabitch sure can’t act. Toa-Sytell at his side watches me expressionlessly, one hand stroking his other wrist up the sleeve of his blouse. Pallas croaks some unintelligible raven sounds, her breath stolen by her punctured lung.
I stick my free hand through the garlands of flowers that hang over this huge wagon to get a grip on its wooden underframe, then climb up aboard.
Now the silence from the crowd is no longer enforced by Ma’elKoth’s magick: everyone stands, and stares at me. This is obviously not part of the show.
“I can see through the eyes of this image,” Ma’elKoth says, “and speak with its voice. Why have you come here, Caine?”
I get up onto the platform and uncoil the net. From outside the stadium, a thousand voices shout in distant confusion and outrage, overscored by the sound of brass trumpets. Toa-Sytell turns his shoulder a bit toward me, his hand still up his sleeve. Pallas croaks again, and now I can understand her. “. . . it’s a trap . . .”
I smile up into her black-ringed desperate eyes. “Yeah, I know.”
The Emperor towers over me, a mountain of meat; I can smell the oil that curls his hair and smooths his beard, hear the faint rustle of his kilt as he steps close.
“I ask again, why have you come here?”
If he bent his neck another inch, if I stood on tiptoe, I could kiss him on the lips. The cold hollow that has opened around my heart spreads to my arms, to my legs; I’ve cycled between exhilaration and dread so many times in these last seconds that emotion has become abstract; I can no longer feel anything except a chill empty stillness. I look deep into his bottomless eyes.
“Your wife?” A certain mild astonishment enters his face. “You never told Me you were married.”
“There’s a lot of things I haven’t told you.”
Now that I’m here, now that I’m committed, I’m inexplicably reluctant to begin. I’ve aimed the gun, but I can’t seem to pull the trigger. As long as I draw this moment out, Pallas and I, we’re Schrödinger’s cat, equipoised between life and death, and my first move will collapse our wave function into history.
“Indeed,” Ma’elKoth murmurs smugly. “Like, for example, that you are an Aktir.”
An invisible hand closes my throat. Even if I were cool enough to take this in stride, which I’m not, my conditioning won’t let me answer. I settle for a small smile that might look confident.
“What are you waiting for?” Ma’elKoth says. “Here is My image. The net is in your hand . . . Second thoughts? Now, when you face the moment to strike at God?”
I force words through my half-choked throat. “You know what a dead spy is, Ma’elKoth?”
“Yeah. It’s a name a writer from back home gave to the guy that you feed false intelligence to, when you know he’s gonna be captured by the enemy. When they break him and he talks, he tells them exactly what you want them to know. He thinks it’s the truth. See?”
Ma’elKoth’s lips quirk oddly, and a glow enters his eyes. “Lamorak . . .” he murmurs.
Rather than being dismayed by this concept, he’s clearly amused and appreciative. His amusement grows as he murmurs down the chain of reasoning.
“Of course. That’s why you do not strike with the net . . . You know I am present in truth, not in image. You planned things so. How else could you draw us both out of the palace, which is defended against Aktiri magick by the power of My will?”
Lamorak makes a choking sound from up there upon his cross. “You knew. You did this to me—!”
I nod up at him. “Yeah. I was counting on you. Shit, Lamorak. Just the other day I killed a better man than you’ll ever be for doing less than you did. Did you really think I’d let you live?”
Now, all I have to do to make this work is get Pallas down off that cross. Toa-Sytell is sidling closer to me, his hand still up his sleeve—on a weapon, of course: he’s too freaked to be subtle.
“But what now?” Ma’elKoth murmurs. “You are here in the midst of My power. How can you possibly hope to escape?”
He rumbles on in this vein, but I lose the chain of his words. I’m looking up into the light of the only eyes that have meaning for me now.
Even the most flexible thinker in the world takes time to shift her paradigm. When I walked out upon the sand of the arena, all Pallas could think of was the appalling danger to me—that horror had shouted from her eyes. She’d given up on herself, and by the time I climbed up onto the wagon, she’d given up on me, too; inside, where it counts, she’d left us both for dead.
But she’s too smart, the life within her is too powerful. This is the point of my pointless jabber with Ma’elKoth: it gave her time to adjust. Now, as I pull the griffinstone from my pocket, holding it by my side where she can see it but Ma’elKoth and Toa-Sytell can’t, when I look up and with my eyes I ask her Are you ready?, I see a response that is fierce and potent and still somehow serene.
Ma’elKoth is still talking, burbling on with the cheery unconcern of a whodunit fan mulling over the clues. When I turn back to him, he’s saying “. . . and why carry this net, when you knew it would be useless?”
“Oh, that.” I give him a cold chuckle. “It’s not useless. It’s the signal for the Subjects of Cant to attack.”
While he’s parsing this revelation, I whip the net over his head. He bats at it with condescending annoyance, but it drapes over him nonetheless. Toa-Sytell lunges at me like a fencer, in his hand a dull flash of steel. I twist away from the blade and stamp the side of his knee; it breaks with a dull crunch, and he pitches toward me, grunting in sudden agony. The revelers below the wagon draw their blades and charge as I skip away from Toa-Sytell—and Ma’elKoth’s arms reach toward me within the net.
I smile at him. “Didn’t I tell you about putting your hands on me?”
He’s not thinking about what he’s doing, not registering that the net cuts him off from his magickal defenses.
My smile grows to a wild grin as I haul back my leg and kick the Emperor in the balls.
His testicles squish against my instep, and his eyes bug out like baseballs jammed in the sockets, and his jaw drops open as all his breath leaves him in a whoosh, and the look on his face makes me laugh out loud.
While he’s still bending over, his hands twitching blindly toward a clutch at his injured groin, while he’s stuck in those timeless seconds between impact and discovery of how sickeningly intense the pain will become, I whirl away from him and leap onto Pallas’ cross. I tangle my fingers in the silver net that covers her and haul myself up, and we come face-to-face for an eternal instant.
My eyes ask another question, and she says “Yes.”
I kiss her, once. Our mouths meet hungrily through the net. I have lived every day of my life only to bring myself here to this moment, and it’s been worth every second.
I press the griffinstone between the strands into the palm of her upraised hand. Her fingers close around it, and I speak against her lips.
Tears surge into her eyes. “Buy me time.”
Quarrels snap past my ears as I drop back to the wagon’s platform. I feel an instant’s sickening conviction that Pallas has been shot, but a glance upward shows the net sprung outward, tight over an enormous sphere of semisubstantial glass with Pallas at its center. She’s gotten a Shield up, and the quarrels bristle from its surface. But even with the griffinstone, she can’t do two magicks at once, can’t hold the Shield and get herself off the rack at the same time.
Down here beside me, Ma’elKoth snarls wordlessly from his knees. His face strains purple as he claws at the net over his head. I chamber for a kick, but then change my mind and drop my foot again.
Some things cry out to be done by hand.
I lean into an overhand right.
My chest expands with raging joy as my knuckles smear his perfect nose sideways onto his perfect cheekbones and his eyes cross and flood with the pain. My blood’s up and I’m gonna kill him now while I have the chance, but an icicle spears into my left thigh.
It’s that little fucking knife of Toa-Sytell’s. He’s a lot tougher than he looks, still going for me, dragging a shattered knee. He looks up at me with an expression of savage completion on his face: he’s done what he needed to do with his life and he’s ready to die.
That expression makes no sense; it’s barely even a flesh wound. I pull the stiletto out of my leg like a splinter and toss it away—and let him have a roundhouse in the side of the head hard enough to kick the light out of his eyes, but not to kill him. He flops bonelessly onto his side, still semiconscious—he is tough—and I make sure of him by dropping to one knee and slicing the edge of my hand to the base of his skull.
Quarrels still fly, but none come close to me here—they’re shooting from the seats, and they can’t take the chance of hitting Ma’elKoth. He’s getting a grip on the net, now. I have to finish him and damned fast, too. Any second those mock revelers are gonna be all over me.
Trumpets blare, too close by. The gate, the gate on the tunnel that leads outside, it’s open—!
Half-armored lancers flood through the gate at a gallop and fan out across the arena floor. Sunlight splinters from their steel-bladed spears, except for one group—five of them riding behind an unarmored man who’s covered with blood, who waves a bastard sword as lightly as a conductor’s baton.
Our eyes meet across the sand, and Berne shows me his bloody teeth.
And now fingers of liquid fire spread through the large muscle of my left thigh, and I understand where that mysterious look of satisfaction on Toa-Sytell’s face came from.
The little cocksucker poisoned me.
With a dull ripping sound like the tearing of flesh over bone, Ma’elKoth shreds the net and casts it aside. He comes to his feet in a surge like a tidal wave. I leap into the air, chambering my leg for a side kick at the point of his chin, but the purple blood is draining from his face. His magick is back and he’s already too fast for me: his huge hand strikes like a snake and wraps my ankle before I can fire the kick, and he slams me down to the wagon hard enough to splinter its bed.
Meteors shoot across my vision and I can’t breathe. Ma’elKoth picks me up by the ankle, so that my head dangles near his knees.
He purrs, “Now, you will learn what it means to trifle with My wrath.”
This isn’t working out quite as well as I’d hoped.
But there comes a shout like the end of the world, and the wagon bucks as though it’s alive. Ma’elKoth staggers.
His hand opens and I fall. For one brief instant the air is filled with metallic snicks and clacks: Ma’elKoth’s belt buckle springs open, and the manacles that hold Lamorak to the cross over my head burst wide and he falls toward me. Throughout the stadium pieces of armor fall as their buckles unclasp; even locked doors slam open and gates bend wide.
The wagon bucks again, and this time I can see it’s not the wagon that’s moving—it’s the whole fucking stadium. Horses stagger and men fall and screams rend the air—fading behind the grinding roar of the earthquake.
Pallas floats above us, hanging in the air five feet above the cross on which she’d hung. She is the only motionless thing in the pitching world. She extends her hands, and the linen shift that covered her burns away in a flash of pale fire, a fire that burns ever brighter until I can’t look at her, burns to a pure white streaming light that melts the last remaining shreds of the net that had restrained her power. The grinding roar of the earthquake gets louder, beating against my ears, rhythmic—
And becomes a Voice, as though the world itself speaks to us.
“HARM MY HUSBAND, LITTLE MAN, AND I WILL TEACH YOU TRULY WHAT IT IS TO ANGER A GOD.”
EVERY TECH IN the booth was on his feet, eyes riveted to the POV screen. Arturo Kollberg was right behind them, breathless, trembling.
“Jesus stinking Christ on a stick! That’s Pallas! The earthquake, the voice . . . My god, if I’d known she’d show this kind of power, I’d never have . . .”
He felt a presence behind his shoulder. Kollberg bit off the sentence, wincing, suddenly aware of the chill sweat that trickled between his shoulder blades down the curve of his spine.
A digitized voice said flatly, “You would never have what?”
He flicked a glance at the soapy’s mirror mask; a fisheye-distorted image of his own black-bagged, red-veined eyes leered back at him. He licked his lips and tasted the salt sweat that had moistened them. The speed muttered in his veins and leaked into his head until he thought his skull might burst like an overblown balloon.
“I’d, ah, never have let her take on a mission of such, ah, limited audience appeal. I’d have pushed for something, ah, more, you know, bigger, more like, well, more like this. . .”
Impossible to tell if that satisfied the mirror-masked face or not. This was a nightmare, and he couldn’t wake up. He wiped his sweaty palms on the legs of his jumpsuit and prayed that Carson would come through with her restraining order before something really damaging slipped out.
Damn that Dole cunt, he prayed to a god in whom he did not believe. And her lawyers, and her damned soapy goons, and Marc Vilo, and damn the frigging Studio too while you’re at it, and yes, most of all: damn Caine.
Kollberg’s rolling eye fixed upon the emergency recall switch.
Majesty had stayed at his vantage in the upper reaches of the grandstand. He’d signaled the attack when Caine threw the net. Loyal old Deofad had gone diving onto the arena floor, his enchanted blade Luthen upraised and shining like a bar of white-hot iron in his fist. He had already cut down one man to spill out his life onto the sand and was fighting another before any of the Subjects following reached the sand behind him. None of them saw Majesty’s frantic wave of negation, nor heard his throat-clawing screams of “No! Come back!” when he saw that Caine’s lunatic plan had failed. Ma’elKoth was really here, and though he was currently occupied with killing Caine, it was all too clear that this was the time for all prudent folk to be finding an exit.
Then the gates had opened, and the Ankhanan Horse Guards had thundered in. Deofad could still be seen down there, his blade scattering gouts of molten steel that it cut from the lancers’ armor—but the lancers charged, spearing Subjects and mock revelers alike. And the earthquake began, and that awful voice that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.
He kept his head, Majesty did, in the midst of the screaming, staggering townsfolk around him. He kept his eyes open for a chance to get away, looking away from Pallas Ril, who shone like the sun.
A shadow fell across him, and the heat of the sun vanished. Curving within this huge shadow that painted the stadium in dark greens were twists of purest gold, like the sun seen on the bottom of a rippling pool of clear water. He couldn’t understand what cloud could cast this sort of shade, and he looked up—
And saw the river, up over his head.
THE MOST FRIGHTENING part of this is that Ma’elKoth isn’t afraid.
He looks up, shading his eyes against the stinging actinic light that streams from Pallas’ nude body, and he grins the grin of a rich kid on Christmas. There is some deep sexual anticipation in his voice.
“Chambaraya, I take it? I had always thought that you were a myth.”
The Voice that answers him shapes itself of birdsong, of cracking stone and splashing water, of the very shouts of the fighting itself that storms around us.
“NO MYTH, LITTLE GODLING. STAND AWAY FROM CAINE, FOR HE IS OURS.”
Chambaraya? My mouth flops open a little wider. The freaking river god?
“Stand away? Most assuredly,” Ma’elKoth responds with silken courtesy. He steps back from where I lie helplessly watching, and he dusts his hands like a workman finishing a well-done job.
“I have been waiting for the Old Gods to come and stand against Me. I had been hoping for someone more . . . impressive. But you will do.”
Pallas closes her fist, and the flowers that garland this wagon suddenly writhe to life—snaking over and around Ma’elKoth, pinning his arms to his sides, wrapping his neck. Even the wooden platform beneath his feet squirms and shapes itself to manacle his ankles. For a moment he tests his purely physical strength against them, his robes rippling with the play of parahuman muscle. They creak but hold him fast. He looks down at the riot of flowers making a jungle of his massive body, and his grin spreads.
He laughs, and the sun goes dim.
He lifts his head, and lightning spears from the darkening sky, crackling energy that transfixes him; flames explode from his body, igniting the wagon, charring the vines to blackened ash in the blink of an eye.
The thunderclap that follows blows away my hearing, and Ma’elKoth stands triumphant amidst the flames.
He raises his fist, in that gesture I remember from the Ritual of Rebirth in the Great Hall. I roll away, shouting a wordless warning for Pallas.
Ma’elKoth’s fist strokes outward. A blast furnace ignites the air with a shattering roar, a shaft of power that strikes my wife full upon the breast—and she opens her arms to receive it as a flower opens its petals to the sun.
Her laugh is full of alien power. She points north, over the wall of the stadium, angled high into the noonday sky.
A pulsing crystalline mountain rises there, blocking half the sky, emerald with algae and sparking with the silver-mailed flickers of darting fish. The river itself is spilling upward against all reason—
It shapes itself higher, and higher yet, a globe the size of a village growing upon its end. Then the globe unfolds, like a flower, like a starfish—
The Hand of Chambaraya descends upon the stadium. All around us fighting men, seasoned veterans of a hundred battles, cast aside their weapons and throw themselves to the ground, covering their eyes and screaming like children. Civilians clutch each other and wail. And I . . . I can’t look away.
What has Pallas become, that she can do such things?
The hand is the size of a battleship, a freaking aircraft carrier, and it closes upon us. The flames of the burning wagon hiss and boil through it, sending a cloud of bubbles skyward. For a long, astonishing instant I am underwater, face-to-face with an equally astonished carp that’s bigger than my head. Then the surface leaves me, lying here upon the smoking dripping reeking ruin of a wagon, wet through, with the poison still spreading through my fiery leg.
High, already so high above that the sun glares through it, the hand holds Ma’elKoth within its watery grip—it’s a globe of water again a hundred meters through—I can barely see him deep within its center.
Sudden steam bursts boiling around him as he spreads his arms and begins to burn.
He hasn’t given up yet, and I’m not all that sure that Pallas—Chambaraya, whatever—I’m not sure they can beat him.
I’m not sure that anybody can.
I roll over, coughing out a throatful of thick greenish water, and find myself staring into the ruins of Lamorak’s face. We’ve really done a number on him, over the past few days—broken leg, broken jaw, shattered nose that has his eyes nearly swollen shut. Those swollen eyes meet mine and begin to drift hopelessly closed; if I choose to take his life right now, there’s not a goddamn thing he can do about it, and he knows it. He’s letting go of consciousness because he knows me too well to waste his breath begging.
“Stay with me, you worthless sack of shit,” I snarl, twisting my fingers into the bandage that ties shut his jaw. The sudden sharp pain of the linen cutting into his swelling brings him back, and his eyes roll like a spooky horse’s.
“Stay with me. I want you awake for this.”
“Wha . . . but, but Caine . . .”
I’d love to lie here for another day or two, but I drag myself to my feet. My poisoned thigh has gone numb around the wound now, and a creeping wave front of fire enters my pelvis.
I’ve got maybe five minutes to live.
I stumble over Toa-Sytell’s unconscious body—hope he drowned, the sneaky little shit—and barely make it to the X-shaped framework that Pallas had hung from.
She’s up there, over my head, shining like the sun.
She’s the only light left in the stadium. Black clouds have come out of somewhere—huge rolling granite boulders of storm clouds licking the sky with tongues of lightning.
All I have to do is get to her, get my hands on her, and I can save us both, but she is far out of my reach, floating, borne up by the air itself—
I shout her name, over and over again, but winds have come, gale winds that rip the sounds from my mouth and cast them carelessly away. She can’t hear me; she’ll never hear me. Maybe, maybe if I climb the rack, I can balance on the top, and jump—
Both my legs are killing me, my right knee and my burning left thigh. I groan as I pull myself up onto the cross . . . and that’s when I see Berne.
He’s down on the arena floor, shouting and cursing and kicking the soldiers that cower on the ground around him. I can read his twisted lips, screaming for somebody to just shoot that fucking bitch, but none of the men nearby have bows and none of the bow-armed Cats that still struggle with Subjects here and there in the stands can hear him.
He lifts his head, and the light from her body blurs his face into featureless white, and he’s calculating something. He reaches a decision, and Kosall comes up like his cock, his legs bend—
He shoots upward like an arrow. I jump up and out to intercept him, with all my failing strength. I’m starting fifteen, twenty feet above him, but it doesn’t matter, it’s not enough, I’m too late, too slow. I stretch forth my hands . . . and my fingers find his boot top as he soars past me, and I hang on.
The opposing angles of our momentum jerk us into a crazy tumble in the air. I fall down, down, and down, losing my hold on him as we twist apart, and the sand slaps all breath from my lungs.
I can only lie there, limbs twitching like a dead man’s, while I try to drag air into my chest. Even as it comes in a great whooping gasp, Berne looms over me, backlit by the lightning-shot storm clouds above us.
“What the fuck,” he says, raising his voice above the wind. “I’m nothing if not flexible. You first, then.”
He lifts Kosall and regards its shimmering edge. “Y’know, I’ve been waiting a long time for this.”
“Yeah, me too.” I hook his ankle with my instep and stamp the side of his knee, but he’s seen that one and it nearly costs me my leg. He bends the joint to absorb the impact, slicing down toward my thigh with Kosall, and I only barely throw into the back-roll in time. I go over my back to my feet while he’s pulling an arm’s length of Kosall out of the sand.
I back away from him, glancing at the ground around my feet so that I don’t trip over one of the cowering soldiers. He comes for me, stalking cat-footed, holding the blade loosely canted at a high angle between us. The smile on his face looks like what people must see on mine before I kill them.
It’s not much fun from this side.
Thunder cracks over our heads, and the flashing glare of lightning above tells me that the other fight, the important one, is still going on: Pallas and Ma’elKoth, duking it out in front of twenty thousand terrified witnesses.
Nobody’s watching Berne and me. Nobody cares about this dirty little grudge match.
He’s vastly stronger than I am, inhumanly fast, his technique and balance are better than mine, and he has a sword that’ll cut through anything. Not to mention that this Buckler thing of his makes him virtually invulnerable.
I have to. Because Pallas has no attention to spare for him, and there’s nothing but me between them.
I glance around, and he comes for me in a lightning lunge, covering three meters in less than an eye blink; Kosall’s point sizzles through my tunic, parting the leather without resistance, as I twist aside barely in time. I take his wrist lightly as he passes me, pulling him along to draw his balance, and then clothesline him with a forehand chop at his throat.
He drops his chin and takes it on the mouth—I don’t even draw blood—but his boots skid on the wet sand and he goes down on his back. No point in trying to take advantage: I can’t hurt him and he can muscle out of any pin. I whirl away and run as fast as my limping legs can carry me.
“Hey, Caine?” he calls mockingly from behind me. “You used to be able to outrun me!”
And he’s right on my ass already. I can hear his booted lope, but I’m almost there, almost to the spot I’d found with that risky glance. His Monastic training saves my life—as he swings for the back of my neck, he exhales a sharp chuff, like a ki-ya. I dive into a forward shoulder-roll. Kosall hisses through the space that my neck just vacated, and when I come up, the net is in my hand.
Berne stops and cocks his head, still smiling. “What do you think you’re going to do with that?”
“Recognize this, Berne?” I say. “This is the one four of your boys died watching.”
I draw a long, chisel-bladed fighting knife from its scabbard below my armpit. “So I’ve been saving it to kill you with.”
He snorts. Lightning flares and thunder crashes.
I don’t cast the net over him, as I did to Ma’elKoth. Berne is a born fighter, a natural warrior, and I’d never catch him like that. Instead I use his incredible reflexes against him: I snap the net like a whip at his head.
He disdainfully blocks it with Kosall, but he hasn’t carried this blade very long, not long enough to retrain himself: he blocks the net with Kosall’s edge. It slices right through, so instead of wrapping around the blade, about half the net splashes across his face. In that half-second reflexive blink, I lunge with the knife.
He knows how I fight. He knows I favor the heart, and so I stay away from it—that’s where he will have focused that Buckler of his. Instead I lowline him and shove a foot of cold steel through his groin right into his hip joint.
The hilt vibrates against my palm as the blade grates on bone. Berne gasps and gives a lover’s low moan. I jam the knife in deeper, right into the joint. As his superstrength muscles clamp down around the injury, I wrench the knife downward, leaning on it with all my weight. The hilt snaps off in my hand.
He looks at me in white-faced astonishment: he can’t believe how badly I’ve hurt him.
I drop the hilt with its stub of blade. I reach inside my tunic for my other fighting knife and between my shoulder blades for my wedge-pointed thrower.
And Kosall flashes down toward my head.
I throw myself to the side out of its path, but I feel an impact on my boot as I dive away: half my boot heel and a thumb-sized chunk of my own heel are sliced away in a fraction of a second. I scramble back, and Berne comes for me, snarling his agony with every step.
I can’t believe he can even stand, let alone walk, and now, beyond reason, he breaks into a running fleche—!
Again I throw myself sideways and roll away. My god, my god, that was my best shot. Any normal man would have fainted from the pain, and this would have been over . . .
“Run, Caine,” he rasps, hoarse with agony. “I can still catch you. I can still kill you. Go on, run.”
I believe him. Despite the knife blade scoring the bones and slicing the cartilage in his hip joint—causing what kind of pain I can’t even imagine—he doesn’t seem slowed at all.
I’m gonna have to take him inside.
Kosall is a heavy weapon, and Berne’s magickal muscles don’t entirely compensate; swinging a blade that size shifts your balance in ways that have nothing to do with strength. He’s not lunging this time—maybe that knife blade in the joint has that much effect.
He slides his feet forward, keeping his weight perfectly centered as he lifts the blade in a short semicircular arc.
“That fighting girl, that friend of Pallas’,” he says, straining for a conversational tone, “she was better than you are.”
I shrug. “She was worth both of us, Berne.”
“Pretty, too. Did you fuck her?”
I let him think it’s working, the cretin: I force heat into my voice. “You sonofabitch, I’ll—”
And that’s all I have time for as he comes for me again. He thought he was taking me off guard, but in fact it’s the other way around. I slip Kosall’s lethal humming edge and step into him, knife blades reversed along my forearm. There are a couple things that you just can’t learn in abbey school. One of them is kali.
Suddenly I’m close enough to kiss him. As he tries to step back and slice with the sword, I stay right with him, my body against his, blocking at his wrist with the blade of my knife while the other one slices at his neck. His Buckler turns my blade from his neck, but the other cuts deep into his arm.
He snarls into my face, but he’s nothing if not adaptable. When I try the same trick again, only this time at his face and his heart for the death stroke, he drops Kosall and gets his hands in close, taking the cuts on his wrists. We stand nose to nose for one eternal second while our hands fly in lethal flurries; blood sprays, and it’s not mine, but he’s faster than I am and he slips a short hook onto the side of my head that shoots stars across my vision, follows it with a twisting roundhouse knee to my side that breaks a couple ribs with dull internal pops, and the next thing I know he’s got hold of my head and he’s gonna break my neck. He’s too fucking strong, I can’t hold him but there’s Kosall upright in the sand—I get my hand on the hilt and feel the buzzing tingle. I can just barely drag it across his foot, and his toes fall away, and I’m flying one way while Kosall goes another.
Flying, tumbling through the air, I land skidding through the sand.
He cast me aside like a bored child throws a doll.
I struggle up, coughing blood—the sharp ends of those broken ribs must have ripped into my lung—but he’s not coming after me. He’s got Kosall again, and his back’s to me because he’s limping over toward Pallas.
She shines above us, a star against the storm, the center of a firestorm of lightnings and energy bolts that fly freely, seemingly from all directions. Berne, Tyshalle damn his rotting heart, has somehow matured enough to get his priorities straight.
Once she’s gone, I’m no threat at all.
He’s too strong; he’s too fucking good. Nothing I do seems to matter to him.
I couldn’t beat him on my best day.
I have one trick left, an old one from my childhood, from long before there was a Caine, from a bootleg video my father showed me once. It’s just that I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to do this.
Ahh, what the hell: after this one, I won’t be in any shape to care, anyway.
I drag myself to my feet, my feet that seem a mile below me now. I can’t even really feel them as Toa-Sytell’s poison spreads through my body. I draw my last two knives, the little five-inch leafblades from my boot tops, and check my grip on them. I hold them as tight as I can, the one in my right tanto style, the other reversed, its blade flat against my forearm.
I have to lean forward to get myself moving, because my legs seem to belong to somebody else. Whoever he is, though, he’s still letting them operate instinctively to keep me upright. As I lean farther and farther forward they finally break into a clumsy, lumbering run.
Even over the earthshaking roar of the battle above our heads, he hears my boots on the sand at the last second. He whirls, instinctively leading with Kosall’s point, which enters my belly as smoothly as a hot knife into butter.
It slides in just below my navel, and he continues the thrust until its humming point comes out the middle of my back.
It doesn’t hurt, but it’s very uncomfortable, a buzzing ache I can feel in my teeth.
Our eyes meet. His face goes slack in astonishment: after all these years, he can’t believe he’s finally done it.
For one stretching second, his mind whirls back through every time he’s dreamed of this, a cascading flutter of his dreams of revenge. In that slack instant I lean forward, forcing my body onto the blade until its hilt at my stomach stops me, and I stab him below the solar plexus.
My knife doesn’t go in as smoothly as his sword did, but we stand there, locked together, our blades within each other’s bodies.
I work the blade, sawing upward to slice muscle, using the feel of the knife to search for the beating of his heart. Suddenly the blade locks in place; I can no longer move it at all—he’s shifted his Buckler down into his torso. Our eyes meet again, for one last instant, because he knows he’s about to die.
The other leafblade, held reversed in my left, I windmill overhand into the top of his head.
The blade crunches through his skull into his brain. The bone crackles as I jerk the hilt back and forth, taking Berne’s life, all his memories, his hopes, his dreams, his lusts, and his joys and twisting them into scrambled eggs.
An instant ago he was a man. Now he’s just meat.
His eyes roll up and he convulses. He finally releases Kosall’s hilt as he falls at my feet, and the buzzing blessedly stops.
I stand in the middle of the arena, the sword sticking through me. I try to step away, just a few steps, anything to get me away so that I don’t die on top of Berne, but I can’t feel my legs at all anymore. I can’t tell if it’s from the poison in my bloodstream or if Kosall went through my spine.
My knees buckle, and I twist toward the ground.
Spine, I guess—the buzzing in my teeth said it hit bone in there.
I splay my arms so that I fall faceup. A foot and a half of Kosall is forced out of my belly by the impact with the sand.
Pallas’ star still shines above me, and it’s all right.
I don’t mind so much, so long as I go out with her light being the last in my eyes.
THE TECHBOOTH STILL thundered with the sounds of the battle playing out on the POV screen, but within, all was still.
Kollberg tried to control his shaking, but he couldn’t. His whole body trembled and itched, and one eye winked spastically.
“My god, my god,” he kept repeating, over and over again. “He did it. He finally did it.”
One of the techs murmured, “I’ve never seen anything like it. This ought to be the biggest seller since the Caste Riots. The biggest ever.”
Another tech, of a more thoughtful bent, murmured in reply what a privilege it was to be present, how he’d be able to tell his grandchildren that he sat in the booth and watched Caine die.
Of everyone there, it was—surprisingly—Kollberg who prayed for Caine to hold on, to keep drawing breath.
His reasoning was simple: Pallas still fought Ma’elKoth in the skies over the Stadium. If Caine died too soon, he wouldn’t have any recording of the outcome.
The subvocal murmur of Caine’s Soliloquy whispered in the techbooth’s speakers.
*I understand now. I know what he meant. My father told me that knowing the enemy is half the battle. I know you, now. That’s right.
Kollberg blanched at the words. It was as though Michaelson spoke directly to him. He mopped his mouth with a trembling hand and eyed the emergency recall switch. He could do it; he could pull Caine right now, out of the middle of the battle, and he’d goddamn well do it, even now, if he got the first hint that Caine was straying into forbidden territory.
But an instant later he made himself relax. How much could Caine really say? His conditioning would stop his mouth before he could say anything really damaging. He squirmed in his chair, trying to get comfortable, trying to find a position from which he could give Caine’s death the attention it deserved; he’d been waiting a long time for this, and he intended to enjoy it.
IN THE SKIES above Victory Stadium, two gods met in battle.
The water of the river discomfited Ma’elKoth only in that it interfered with his vision. Within the sphere, he called upon the love of His Children and stretched forth his hands, and lightning from the sky danced to his gesture. The fire of his body boiled the river around him, sending clouds of white upward to meet the rolling grey above.
A holocaust of lightning and fire together struck that small part of the Song of Chambaraya that was the body of Pallas Ril and passed through as though her body were a lens, striking outward at Chambaraya itself—and harmed the god not at all. Fish died, trees withered, grass burned black away from its bank; an otter and its family choked and died in a boiling pool, and a scalded deer fell into the current. In all, the extreme power of Ma’elKoth could not affect Chambaraya as much as could a single brushfire, or an early frost below the mountains.
Pallas sang with the Song, and the Song flowed through her, and the Song was her; she was transparent to the Song, just as she was to the power of Ma’elKoth.
And through her, Chambaraya struck back: not with fire, not with lightning, but with the power of the life that it served.
Boils festered instantly upon Ma’elKoth’s perfect skin, and algaes flourished within his lungs. Leprosy ate away his flesh. The tiny symbionts that still lived deep within his guts suddenly grew and grew, swelling his belly, swelling his chest, and would certainly have burst him from within—but Ma’elKoth, like Chambaraya, was as much an idea as an entity. The powerful love that he drew from the lives of his Children burned within him; soon his guts, his skin, his lungs, his blood, all were as sterile as the face of the moon.
As the two gods strove together, they conversed. Ma’elKoth’s voice was a choir of thousands, from the cries of newborn babies to the whimpering rattle of consumptive old men: Why do You not strike at My Children? By this you know you can weaken Me: shake the earth, topple their buildings, flood their homes. Is not this where Your true power lies?
The answer came in the roar of a waterfall, the trumpeting of geese, the ice crack of a shifting glacier: THEY HAVE NOT OFFENDED ME.
And Ma’elKoth understood: Pallas Ril was more than a simple conduit for the power of the god. Her will colored its Song; they were one . . .
He didn’t have to defeat Chambaraya, only Pallas. Concerns that would be less than dust motes to the river might loom large indeed for the woman through which its power flowed.
Come then, you and I. Let Us finish this.
He spread wide his mighty arms and poured power at her; not fire, nor lightning, nor wind, but power. Pure power, raw Flow that he drew from the lives of His Children, focused and sluiced into her without end.
She accepted it all. It passed into her and through her, and as it came, she felt within it the source from which it sprang: she felt the lives of the Children of Ma’elKoth, one by one, wink out like fireflies in the frost.
NOW THAT IT’S too late, now that I lie here dying on this bloodstained sand, I finally get it.
I understand. I know what he meant. My father told me that to know the enemy is half the battle. I know you, now. That’s right.
All of you who sit in comfort and watch me die, who see the twitch of my bowels through my own eyes: You are my enemy.
Corpses lie scattered around me, gleanings left in a wheat field by a careless reaper. Berne’s body cools beneath the bend of my back, and I can’t feel him anymore. The sky darkens over my head—but no, I think that’s my eyes; Pallas’ light seems to have faded.
Every drop of the blood that soaks into this sand stains my hands and the hands of the monsters that put me here.
It’s your money that supports me, and everyone like me; it’s your lust that we serve.
You could thumb your emergency cutoff, turn your eyes from the screen, walk out of the theater, close the book . . .
You are my accomplice, and my destroyer.
My insatiable blood-crazed god.
Ah, ahhh, Christ . . . it hurts.
WITHIN THE SONG, Pallas’s heart broke. As the power of Ma’elKoth flowed into her and through her, she knew the men, the women, the children whose lives were snuffed by its drawing, knew each and every one of them as a mother knows the lives she brings forth from her body. Each death lashed her with the world-ending grief of a mother who watches her children die, one by one by one.
Perhaps if they had come in a mass, she could have borne it; a single shattering extinction could have blended these people into some huge and abstract mass, a Stalinist statistic; but instead she knew the individual tragedy of each and every one.
Her soul sagged beneath the weight of clasped and loving hands, and sudden weeping, and despairing last glances exchanged through closing eyes.
What had brought her here was her devotion to innocent lives; the inmost core of her being was the defense of innocence; to withstand this grief would have required that she be someone other than Pallas Ril, other than Shanna Leighton.
Even the aeonic serenity of the river could not carry away this pain.
Though she knew it would cost her life, and Hari’s, she could not allow this distant and passionless slaughter to continue; their two lives for thousands—thousands that were as close to her as family, thousands that resided permanently within her heart. This was a bargain that she was prepared to make.
Slowly, with searing regret, she muted her melody within the Song.
Ma’elKoth sensed the change within the Flow, and his attack dwindled as the water of the river deposited him upon the sand of the arena. It withdrew, flowing away along its bended arm above the stadium wall, and returned to its place within the banks.
Pallas stood facing him, across the blood-soaked sand.
“You win,” she said simply. “I surrender.”
He sprang forward and seized her, holding her limp and unresisting arms in his mighty hands. He looked down on her with disdain.
“Compassion is admirable, in mortal man,” he said in tones almost kindly, but then his voice sharpened into cutting contempt. “In a god, it is a vice.”
He looked about himself, compressing his lips as he surveyed the carnage and the men and women who now began fearfully to look up. He raised his eyes to the heavens, and the skies cleared and the sun shone down brilliantly upon the earth.
“This has been no more than a delay,” he said. “An amusing diversion, but the end is the same.”
He hummed to himself, distractedly muttering, “Now, where is Caine?”
She saw him first, lying with back bent over a corpse that could only be Berne’s. A double span of Kosall stuck out of his belly like Excalibur in the stone.
She felt that sword stroke herself, punching into her guts, and her breath left her.
Ma’elKoth followed her eyes and hummed his satisfaction. “So, he lives yet. Excellent.”
Through the tears that flooded her vision, she saw: Kosall’s hilt shifted back and forth, swayed above his body in a hitching, ragged rhythm that could only be Hari’s breath.
Ma’elKoth’s grip was oddly gentle as he dragged her across the arena to where Caine lay, and the noonday sun was warm on her river-moist skin. He cast her to the sand beside the corpses.
Hari’s eyes rolled toward her. “Pallas,” he murmured faintly. “Dark . . . It’s cold . . .”
His arm twitched, lifting his wrist an inch from the sand, dropping it again. “Take . . . take my hand . . .”
Pallas held his hand; she folded her legs beneath her and cradled his precious head on her lap. “I’m here, Caine. I won’t leave you.”
Her tears had dried; they had come from the stinging realization that he was still alive—that at least she’d have a chance to say good-bye. Now as she knelt upon the sand with his wet hair cold on her bare thighs, she had no tears, no agony of grief, only a deep, calm melancholy.
She had been here too many times in her career, had held the hands of too many dying men; she had only the acute perception of something unique, a single irreplaceable life, leaving the world; and the world becoming less, in its absence.
I believed he was indestructible, she thought, gently stroking his beard. Everyone did. But wherever it is he goes to, I’ll be with him soon enough.
I’m sorry, Hari, she thought and could not say. If I’d had strength like yours, we wouldn’t be here now, soon to die.
“Ahh-hh,” Ma’elKoth said abruptly, above her, a hitch in his voice that approached a sob. She looked up. His face was tragic, skin still flecked with the marks Chambaraya had left there, blood that streamed from his broken nose painting scarlet into his beard.
“Ah, Berne,” he murmured. “Ah, My Child, you deserved better.”
He became aware of her regard and mastered himself instantly, drawing up to his full height.
“Now.” He walked in a slow circle around Pallas and Caine, and his hands worked, clenching to fists and opening again. “Now,” he repeated. “Now, indeed. I shall learn . . .”
“The mystery of Caine,” he muttered softly. “How you have held Me, these past days. When I Drew you here, you Drew Me; you reversed My grip and used it to chain My own hands. But now, it is I that have you, again, and I shall have you wholly, as I did your foul Aktiri servitors. I shall extend My power and taste your mind as it fades within your dying brain, as a hound might scent a passing breeze. I shall read your memory as though it is a book; I shall have every bit of you. I shall know the truth, and that truth shall break your hold forever.
“Lll . . .” Hari said, cords bulging in his neck as he struggled to speak against some unimaginable resistance. Ma’elKoth stepped closer and leaned down politely to hear.
“Mm, yes,” he said, straightening. “Yes, indeed. Thank you for reminding Me. Lamorak is himself one of you vile Aktiri; his memories are likely instructive, as well.”
He scanned the arena, looking almost cheerful. “Now, where has he gotten himself to?”
The Emperor strode off across the field of corpses and moaning wounded. A lancer officer who’d managed somehow to keep hold of his horse cantered up to him, asking for instructions—Pallas couldn’t hear what orders he gave. The officer in turn relayed orders to his men. Through the broad tunnel gate now marched a column of armored infantry bearing pikes and crossbows. The lancer officer gave them instructions as well. They spread out across the arena, helping the wounded, and up into the grandstands, keeping order, disarming demoralized combatants, and keeping the terrified citizens in their seats.
Hari’s back arched once. His eyes rolled and he forced out words once more.
“Lamorak,” he said clearly, “is the one who betrayed you to the Cats.”
Arturo Kollberg’s voice cracked like a whip.
“That bastard!” he raged. “That slacked-jawed piece of Labor trash! How dare he!”
He stood in front of his chair and shook his quivering fist at the POV screen.
“You rotten shit! This is going out live!”
The techs stared at him, at the sweat that poured down his face, at the white foam that flecked the corners of his rubbery lips. A digitized voice said from behind his shoulder, “Why so upset, Administrator?”
If only this buzzing in his head would subside, let him think! Was there anything else Michaelson could say, anything that his conditioning wouldn’t prevent—oh god, the Board of Governors were watching this right now—could he say anything that would implicate the Studio?
His skin crawled with trembling, and large muscle twitches began to distort his face. He stared at the red glowing recall switch as though it were the muzzle of a gun pointed at his forehead.
PALLAS GAZES DOWN at me out of the gathering darkness. “Yes, Caine. I know.”
The world blinks—I think I passed out for a little bit. We’re still here, though, still in the arena.
I came all this way . . . I gave my life to reach this instant . . .
I guess I should have known better than to think that sack of maggots would keep his word.
It’s getting cold, really cold, freezing for this time of year in Ankhana. I try again, searching for the words that’ll bring us home.
“He had to,” I push out. “Ordered to . . . contract, his contract . . .”
“Shh,” she says, stroking my hair. “It’s all right. Shh.”
I swim back up into the world of light again.
If anyone had ever asked me how I wanted to die, I’d have told them: exactly like this, with my head on her lap and her hand stroking my hair.
Something’s going on, here, though.
It’s gotten quiet, and it seems that we’re in some kind of spotlight. Lamorak’s here, right beside Pallas. Ma’elKoth’s got all three of us together for this. There’s Ma’elKoth; he’s talking to the people in the grandstands . . . That rolling, reassuring thunder of his beautiful voice . . .
Darkness, and when the light comes back he’s beside me, right here beside me. His voice is warm and gentle, and he’s telling me to just let go, to relax and let it go.
He stops talking. His face blanks out into that thousand-yard stare of mindview.
I remember now . . . I remember the spell.
And strength comes into me from somewhere.
I roll back my head and search the murk. “Lamorak . . . Lamorak—”
Pallas leans close, an angel from a fairy tale. “Shh, Caine, I know. It’s all right.”
I gather more strength, I focus it. Concentrate. When I concentrate I can move my hands—don’t need to be strong, but I have to be able to move, do it all with surprise . . .
“Lamorak . . . Lamorak, please, I have to tell you . . .”
His broken face resolves out of the gloom; I whisper nonsense to make him lean closer, closer. That’s right, you shit, right there . . .
“Lamorak . . . no Iron Room . . . no Theater of Truth . . . you have to take care of Pallas . . .”
“It’s all right, Caine,” he says. “I will. I promise.”
“Promise, do you?” The surge of adrenaline clears my vision and pours strength into my arms. “How do you figure to keep that promise without your fucking head?”
His eyes go slack in surprise. In a single unstoppable instant, I place one hand on the hilt of Kosall above me to awaken its sizzling magick while I tangle the fingers of the other in Lamorak’s long blond hair and yank his neck against Kosall’s edge.
His head comes off, zzzip, like a sheet of paper torn from a notepad.
Blood fountains; Pallas jerks beneath me and cries out; Lamorak’s mouth works soundlessly; he stares at me in horror, still alive within his brain.
I flip his head like a soccerball, right into Ma’elKoth’s lap.
Ma’elKoth grasps the bloody head instinctively. His whole body jerks, his eyes go wide, and a cry of shock and despair bursts from his lips.
Not Ma’elKoth’s shock, nor his despair, but Lamorak’s.
“My name,” Ma’elKoth gasps, his eyes still wide and blank. “Karl Shanks, my name is Karl Shanks! I’m Lamorak . . .”
“Lamorak,” I snarl with all the sharp strength I have left, “who ordered you to betray Pallas Ril?”
“Kollberg,” he says, dazedly but clearly. “Chairman Administrator Kollberg . . .”
Before the words can even fully leave his lips, the halos of crystalline rainbow color outline the world.
And in the half second of recall, I reach out—
KOLLBERG’S FIST SLAMMED down again on the recall switch, and again. His screamed “No! No! No!” kept time with the impacts; he beat the switch until his flesh tore, and his blood sprayed the interior of the techbooth.
The tech flinched away from him and stared. The two soapies exchanged a blank, mirror-masked glance. “I think we’ve seen enough,” one of them said.
“But it’s a lie,” Kollberg said with wild desperation, “I swear it’s a lie! He can’t prove it, he can’t even testify!”
One of the soapies seized his wrist. “You recalled Pallas Ril in front of native witnesses; by exposing her as an Actor, you’ve willfully damaged her career. You’re under arrest.”
He tore himself free and jumped to the techboard, stabbing at the mike switch. “Michaelson!” he howled. His own voice echoed back through the booth speakers: Caine was still on-line, down in the muddle of bodies that lay on the transfer platform.
“I’ll see you dead for this! I’ll see you dead!”
As the soapies finally restrained him and dragged him away, he heard Caine’s Soliloquy whispering in the booth.
*Yeah. And pretty soon, too, I guess.*
THE HARSH, UNFORGIVING stage lights that frame the transfer platform break into a prismatic halo through Ma’elKoth’s mane. Silhouette that he is, I cannot see the expression on his face, and I’m glad of it; the choking horror in his voice is bad enough as he looks out at the row upon row of faceless induction helmets, the reclining zombied sweep of first-handers that are stacked to the ceiling of the Cavea.
“Your world,” he whispers. “Oh, abandoned gods, you’ve brought me to your hideous world . . .”
And this is not an instinctive xenophobia, not the helpless terror of an unsophisticated native; it’s not the alienness of Earth that is choking him.
These are Lamorak’s—Karl’s—memories he’s correlating within his massive brain; he sees that his world, Overworld—that place of brutality and pain and sudden death—is the dreamed-of, soughtafter paradise of this one, where now he’s trapped.
I’ve brought him with me into hell.
I cannot imagine the horror he must be feeling, and I can’t bring myself to care very much.
Kosall, quiescent now and probably forever, still sticks up out of my belly. Berne’s corpse lies on the transfer platform beneath my legs.
He bends his mighty neck to look down on me, on us.
“You have destroyed me. Why, Caine?”
His heartbreak cracks in his voice. “Why have you done this to me?”
I shrug. It hurts. “Because you had the bad luck to be on the wrong side of Pallas Ril.”
There’s a slam in the back, high up. It’s the doors to the Cavea. The medics’ crash cart is coming for me; some on-the-ball tech had the presence of mind to call them.
Warm salt rain splashes lightly upon my cheeks; it’s Shanna’s tears.
“Hold on,” she says. “Please hold on.”
I try to squeeze her hand, but the darkness is closing in again. “Don’t leave me.”
Ma’elKoth sounds lost and helpless and very, very young. “What comes next? What will become of me?”
I don’t answer; that’s not my problem.
I guess I’m still on-line; nobody’s thought to cut the feed. You’re all coming down with me, into the night.
Shanna bends close and puts the warmth of her cheek against the chill of mine. She whispers in my ear, “Hold on, Caine.”
“Fuck Caine,” I tell her painfully. I fight off the darkness for one closing line: “Forget that asshole. Call me Hari.”
And the shuttering night turns slowly to dawn, and I inch toward daylight.