Kollberg directed Hari to the chair with a butler’s one-hand sweep and said, “Don’t bother with the comfort hookups; this cube only runs twelve minutes. And there’ll be no hypnotics. I, ah, assume that you can tolerate direct induction without any chemical suppression?”
Hari shrugged. “I’ve done it before.”
“Fine, then. Please be seated.”
“Are you gonna tell me what this is about?”
“This cube is, ah, self-explanatory,” Kollberg said, his mouth twitching as though he tried to suppress a smirk. “Please,” he repeated, and it was not a request.
Hari lowered himself into the simichair in the grip of a dizzying sense of unreality. He’d never even seen the Chairman’s private box before; now he was sitting in the Chairman’s personal simichair. This was tantamount to putting on the man’s underwear.
He reached behind his head to grasp the helmet and found that it was already moving into place. The shields covered his eyes, and he snugged the regulator over his nose and mouth, breathing deeply of its tasteless, neutral air supply.
He brushed the arms of the chair with his palms, searching for the tuning switches, but the Chairman’s simichair already had begun the process. Light flared inside his closed eyes as the induction helmet stimulated his brain’s vision center; the shapeless blurs within the light slowly resolved into simple shapes: lines, squares, circles, gradually gaining depth and solidity as the helmet’s feedback circuits monitored the flow-patterns of his brain activity and adjusted the inducers to fit his individual characteristics.
Similarly, the simple bell tone that began faintly in his ears split into chiming melodies that gradually developed into Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. The melodies expanded into shimmering chords, added instruments and voices, became the chorale of Beethoven’s Ninth; before his eyes was the late-summer view from atop Copper Mountain in the Rockies. He felt the crisp breeze on his skin, felt the rough texture of a hemp rope coiled over his shoulder and the pressure of boots, smelled the scent of the tiny yellow and white wildflowers and the faint musk of the marmots that live in homes on the mountain.
At the same time, he was aware of the kinesthesia of being seated in Kollberg’s simichair. While adjusting the induction feed, an ordinary chair would have also been dripping chemical suppressors into his bloodstream, hypnotic medications that would have dampened his sense of self and opened his mind to pure experience, unfiltered by his own consciousness. The Chairman’s chair was not equipped with a hypnotics feed; he couldn’t afford the luxury of being someone else so completely that his own responsibilities were forgotten.
The Rocky Mountains faded into a slow cross-dissolve with a scene already in progress.
Sight came first, a room flooded with sunlight that is warmer and yellower than the sun of Earth. Coarse wool blankets over palliasses prickly with straw, and huddled on them a man and a woman who cling to each other, two young girls beside them, all four wearing what look like beekeeper’s nets of some dull-gleaming metal.
Scents and sounds followed; smells of distant horseshit baking in the sun and bodies sweating under armor, the shouts of drovers in tangled traffic and the splash of nearby water, voices—
“. . . why? I cannot understand, I have always been loyal,” the man was saying in Westerling, the predominant tongue of the Empire. “You must understand how frightened we all are.”
The simichair was connected to the Studio mainframe, which ran an AI translation protocol on it so that the sense of the words registered in English. Hari didn’t need it; he spoke fluent Westerling, as well as Paquli and Lipkan and smatterings of several other tongues, and the AI’s translation differed just enough from his automatic comprehension to be distracting.
He ground his teeth and concentrated on the kinesthetics of the Actor he rode.
Slim, not muscular, but very fit; body armor of light, flexible leather, cape, bracers, boots; perfect and constant awareness of body position, like that of a dancer or an acrobat—no codpiece on the armor, nor need of one, none of the male’s instinctive and permanent consciousness of external genitals.
Hari thought, It’s a woman, even as he became aware of the pressure on his/her breasts, tightly constrained by the armor.
And the package came together: his awareness of the precise curve from breast to hip, the slight tilt of the head to shift the hair away from the eyes, the rotation of one shoulder in her unmistakable shrug. Before she ever spoke, before he heard her voice through her own ears, he knew.
“We’re all frightened. But I swear that we can save you, if you’ll help.”
It was Shanna.
3
“OF COURSE I’LL help,” he snaps. “Think you I want my wife and daughters given to the Cats?” His wife flinches; the two girls don’t, but they’re probably not old enough to understand what that means.
“Not at all,” I tell him through my best smile. It’s a good one; he’s already softening. “Konnos, there’s no need for you to explain anything if you don’t wish to, but I’m wondering how you got this far. You were denounced four days ago; how have you avoided capture? Anything you feel you can tell me might help me save others. Do you see?”
I fold my legs beneath me to sit on the splintery floor. Konnos casts nervous glances at the others in the room, and I follow his eyes. “You trust me—you’ve trusted me enough to send for me; I trust these men. The Twins”—a matched pair of brawny youths, golden haired, with eyes much older than their faces, stolidly sharpening identical broadswords—“escaped from the gladiatorial pens; you can believe they have no love for Imperials. Talann, here”—a woman, legs folded in lotus on the floor, muscular under loose linen tunic and pants, her eyes a manic violet glitter within a ragged halo of platinum hair—“there’s an Imperial price of a hundred royals on her head. As for Lamorak there by the window, well, you’ve probably heard of him already.”
Lamorak? Hari thought with an uncomfortable twinge of surprise. Lamorak was an Actor. Son of a bitch! I knew Karl and Shanna were friends, but . . . Jesus. How deep does this go?
Lamorak mutters a short phrase under his breath, and I feel the pull of his magick as a small flame springs from the palm of his hand; he draws it up to the rith-leaf cigarette between his lips, and soon the sharp scent of burning herb drifts over from the window.
*He’s showing off,* Shanna’s subvocalized Soliloquy runs, *he should know better than to do a magick here, even a tiny one that probably can’t be felt outside this room.*
The Soliloquy—the tiny motions of tongue and throat that the translation protocol transformed into quasi-thoughtlike internal monologue—would ordinarily fade behind the screen of hypnotics that would drip into the bloodstream of a first-hander until it became indistinguishable from actual thought; without the hypnotics, the Soliloquy was nearly as distracting as the AI’s imperfect translation of Westerling. Pallas’—Shanna’s—voice whispered constantly in his ears. Hari shifted in the chair, gritted his teeth, and reminded himself that this cube only ran twelve minutes. For that long, he could stand anything.
Lamorak winks and turns back to watch the street, one hand on the leather-wrapped hand-and-a-half hilt of his sword Kosall. Sun-glow backlights his perfect profile with a golden halo, and as usual I can’t quite get mad at him; it’s an effort to turn my attention back to Konnos.
“I’m not political,” Konnos says, pulling the netting away from his face so that he can mop his mouth with the back of his hand. “I never have been. I’m a scientist, that’s all. I’ve spent my life in research into the fundamental nature of magick—the nature of reality, because, y’know, they’re the same thing. This netting? Silver, you see? Silver is a nearly perfect channel for magickal force—gold is better, but I’m only a poor researcher; whatever gold which found its way to my purse always went to feed my family. But, you see, nearly all charged amulets, floating needles, pendulary indicators—all that run of seeking items—detect a characteristic pattern of es
sence that emanates from their targets: the Shell you adepts like to talk about. These items are charged, after all, by contact with our homes or personal items that would resonate in our own unique pattern. This silver net turns our patterns in upon themselves, making us effectively invisible to items of this sort, and it also serves as an admirable defense against compulsions. In fact, if one can connect the net itself to a Flow source, such as a griffinstone . . .”
He keeps babbling, but his words fade behind my admiration for the elegance of his defense. *He’s invented a variant of a Faraday cage; that means he’s been doing some pretty basic scientific-method-style research. Natives aren’t supposed to be able to look deeper than the immediate magickal surface of an effect. Our social scientists have been saying for years that the operation of magick stunts the “scientific sense.” By that theory, he should only be able to think of blocking a spell with another spell, instead of taking advantage of a general principle underlying a whole branch of magick. Hah. I’m impressed.
*And I’m going to get myself a few of those silver nets.*
“. . . of course without the griffinstone they’re hardly proof against a determined effort by a powerful thaumaturge,” Konnos continues, “but for that eventuality I have this little friend, right here.” He pats the knob of a polished ivory scroll case that pokes out from a pouch on his belt. “I wrote it myself; I call it the Eternal Forgetting. It’s the most powerful nondetection spell ever devised, but very much a last-resort kind of thing—”
“Let’s hope you don’t need it,” I cut him off. We might not have time for another lengthy explanation. “Now, I must ask you to remove the netting. Only temporarily,” I add hastily, when he gasps a wordless protest. “The King’s Eyes try to send spies to us from time to time—”
“I am no spy! Would a spy bring wife and daughters with him to do his work?”
“No, no, no. You don’t understand. I know that you are a good and honest man,” I lie gracefully. “That’s not the issue. But there are enchantments that can be put on a man to make him betray himself against his will, and there are others that may call out to a searching mind to reveal a place of hiding. I must examine you now, to ensure that none of these have been laid upon you without your knowledge. Others, who are hunted just as you are, also wait where I am taking you, in a place that I have made proof against all kinds of seeking magick. It is they that I protect by examining you, as well as ourselves.”
Konnos looks at his wife, she looks back at him fearfully, and before either can speak Lamorak says from the window, “Trouble.”
I’m at his side in an instant; behind me come faint rustlings as Talann and the Twins rise and prepare themselves.
The sun-washed street outside looks utterly normal, crowded with ramshackle tenements, its center still churned mud from the rains two days ago. Traffic is light, mostly on foot, day laborers picking across the rotting boardwalks toward a chance of work in the Industrial Park across Rogues’ Way.
I frown; what’s wrong with this picture? I’m about to ask Lamorak what he sees when I realize that it’s what he doesn’t see that alarms him: our stooges are missing.
The alley mouth half a block down that should have sheltered a sleepy drunk yawns emptily; the stoop where a ragged leper should have been sunning himself sports a wetly gleaming splotch of blood.
My heart stutters. This is bad.
“How?” I say numbly. “How is this possible? How could they get so close?”
No need to say who they are; we both know it’s the Grey Cats.
Lamorak shakes his head and mutters, “Some kind of spell; I don’t know. I didn’t see a damned thing.”
“But I should have felt a current in the Flow . . .”
“We knew this could happen someday,” he says, taking my shoulders and gently turning me toward him. He looks down into my eyes with that glorious crooked smile. “We knew when we took this job that we couldn’t beat the odds forever. Maybe I can lead them away, give you a chance to get Konnos and his family out.”
“Lamorak—”
“No arguments,” he says, and stops my mouth with his lips.
The kiss stabbed Hari like a knife in the balls—not just that Pallas let him kiss her, not just that she liked it. She wasn’t surprised, and she wasn’t tentative, and this wasn’t even nearly the first time.
Hari thought in sudden toneless blankness, Lamorak’s been fucking my wife.
Shanna’s audience—all her first-handers, every person who would ever rent the secondhand cube—they’d all know it. They’d all experience it.
Hari’s heart smoked within his chest.
I push him away gently; his reflexive heroism catches at my breath, even though it’s futile—I’m not ready to sacrifice him uselessly. We’ll save heroism for a last resort. I turn to the others.
“It’s the Cats,” I tell them shortly, brutally. Konnos and his wife clutch each other, and one of the girls begins to cry; she sees how frightened her parents are, and she doesn’t need to know more than that. “They’ve taken our stooges. That means we’re already surrounded and they’re closing in for the kill. I’m open to any brilliant ideas.”
The Twins exchange an identically grim glance; they shrug and one of them—probably Dak, he does most of the talking—says, “We can hold the room—fight them off until the Subjects of Cant can mass against them.”
I shake my head. “The Subjects aren’t ready to come open. And with the stooges gone, they don’t even know we’re in here. Talann?”
She stretches like a cat and pops the knuckles of both hands in swift succession. Her eyes spark with an uneasily familiar fire. “What would Caine do?”
I wince. “He wouldn’t ask stupid questions,” I snap.
Talann the groupie—at least half the reason she’s with me is she hopes she’ll meet Caine someday. Somehow his shadow still darkens my life. Now I know why I recognize that spark in her eye—it’s the look Caine used to get when we were cornered, when the thread of our lives spun through our fingers. It’s the closest he ever came to being happy.
On the other hand, I do know what Caine would do: attack. Crash their line, somewhere in tight quarters where they couldn’t use their crossbows. Smash through and run like hell—but that would be almost certain death for Konnos and his family, and protecting them would slow us until we couldn’t protect ourselves. I glance at Lamorak, at the noble resolution on his face as he waits for my answer. Sure as death, Caine wouldn’t sacrifice himself in a gesture like Lamorak proposed—but Caine also wouldn’t stand there and wait for me to give him permission.
They’re all looking at me. For an empty second I wish that someone else would make this decision.
“All right,” I say heavily. “The Twins and I can hold this room. Lamorak, head east.”
“Over the rooftops?”
I shake my head. “Through the tenements. Kosall can cut through. Talann, go south into the river. If you get clear, either of you, head for the Brass Stadium and tell the—”
“Oh, crap,” Lamorak breathes. He’s looking out the window again. “I think . . . Gods, that could be Berne.”
“Count Berne?” Talann says, her eyes on fire. “Himself?”
I crowd close to Lamorak and follow his gaze and there he is, leaning insolently against a grey-weathered wall across the street, holding a flame to a hand-rolled cigarette.
The recorded chill that Hari felt shooting down Pallas’ back at the sight vanished in the surging fury that blazed up his own spine. Berne. His hands knotted into convulsive fists, and he cracked his wrist painfully against the simichair’s swingarm. Berne, you vicious shit-sack bastard, if I was there . . . Oh gods, oh gods, why can’t I be there?
It’s Berne, all right; I recognize him instantly. He’s not wearing his Court rags, the slashed-velvet blouse and leggings he’s made fashionable again. Instead, he’s in scuffed and faded heavy serge that once was scarlet but now has the patchy strawberry-cream shade of
a half-washed bloodstain. His slender, gently curved sword hangs in its scabbard from a handsbreadth leather belt. The planes of his face are so sharp they should gleam like metal in the sun, and now his toothy grin cracks them like a mirror.
My heart plummets; I know him too well. Worse: he knows me.
It’s wrong, I shouldn’t feel this way . . . but right now I really wish that Caine were here.
“Change of plan,” I say quickly, turning back toward my friends, the faces that ride the lives for which I am responsible. “Lamorak, you and Talann take the Konnosi—” I point at the south wall of the tiny apartment. “—that way, and down. Stay off the stairs and out of the corridors. The Twins and I will rearguard the retreat.”
Lamorak stiffens. “Pallas—”
“Do it!”
He still hesitates for one naked second, and his eyes speak poetry to mine.
Then he draws Kosall, grasping it by its quillions and clearing the blade from its scabbard before activating its magick by taking the hilt, and the enchanted blade comes to life, its high buzzing whine making my teeth ache. Its edges waver like heatshimmer off a sunbaked sidewalk, and I can feel its pull on the currents of Flow.
Lamorak stands at the south wall and puts Kosall’s point to the wall at head height; he leans on the pommel, and Kosall slides smoothly through the planks, its whine dulled to a hum. He draws the blade downward in an arc, not sawing, just pressing it through the wood as though the wall were soft cheese. With this sword he can cut his way through the tenements all the way to the river, if need be; Kosall can cut stone, or even steel, given enough time.
Time is what I have to provide.
Below us, Berne gestures.
Men in the dove grey leather jerkins and breeches of the Cats stream from alleys and sprint toward our tenement.
I take a deep breath, let it trickle out from my lips, and take another; my hands flit over my clothing of their own will, from pocket to pouch, from scabbard to sheath, checking all of my graven gems and intricately worked knots of precious metals, my wands and my wires, bits of glass and packets of powders, while my breath-control technique shifts my vision to mindview.
Heroes Die Page 5