Ma’elKoth said, “He is. Duke Toa-Sytell, you may explain.”
Toa-Sytell took a deep breath and looked away. “His name is Jaybie. I think you’ve met him once or twice. He was a captain in the Eyes.” Toa-Sytell studiously avoided looking at Jaybie’s slow rise and fall of breath, at the heartbeat that could be seen in the woven net of his intestines. “He is the man who tipped the artificer, Konnos, that he’d been denounced.”
“Indeed,” Ma’elKoth murmured indulgently. “And so I turned his treachery to a useful purpose: the Outside Powers with which I deal usually arrive hungry. I should be a poor host if I did not offer at least a . . . snack, shall we say?”
Berne nodded his understanding. “He’s still alive?”
“Only his body,” Ma’elKoth rumbled. “Now come.”
Once Berne joined them within the circle, Ma’elKoth laid a hand on each man’s shoulder and lifted his eyes to the bare limestone of the ceiling. In no more time than it takes to draw a breath and release it again, the solidity of the stone misted and faded to a ghost of itself. Through the stone itself Toa-Sytell could see the roll of oncoming clouds and the first strengthening stars of night.
An instant later, the floor fell away beneath his feet and the three of them rose in effortless silence through the ceiling. The stone beneath them regained its substance, and the three men now stood on the very parapet of the Dusk Tower.
This was another reason that Toa-Sytell feared Ma’elKoth; it was not only the stunning range of his power, but that he could summon it without a word, without a gesture, with no more than a thought. Toa-Sytell knew enough of magick to appreciate the level of concentration required for the simplest operation; even the finest adept could do only one spell at a time. Most depend on enchanted items to supplement their abilities. Not so Ma’elKoth; on him there seemed to be no limit.
It was not the cool of the night breeze that made Toa-Sytell shiver.
Ankhana lay spread below them like a carpet of jewels, from tiny diamond chips of lamps to blazing ruby bonfires. The freshening breeze carried snatches of song from alehouses and cries of newspages as they trailed back to their offices for evening accounting, the savor of meat stewing with onion and garlic, and the wild clean scent of the grassland that stretched to the sea.
Clouds built in the west and rolled majestically toward the city as the moon breasted the Gods’Teeth range far to the east.
Ma’elKoth spread his arms wide and threw back his head. He lifted his voice above the rising wind. “I asked of the Power to show Me who can pluck this thorn from My flesh, to show Me the man who can rid the Empire of this seditious Simon Jester. It dug its answer from the depths of My own mind—I had known this, without knowing that I knew. Now we ask the wind, and see it written on the clouds!”
He pointed at the wall of approaching thunderheads. “Look there, and see the face of My hound!”
Toa-Sytell followed the Emperor’s finger with his eyes, anticipating an image to appear on the cloud where Ma’elKoth pointed, like a drawing on parchment. The thunderheads rolled and boiled, swelling and pulsing as though they themselves lived, as though they were slaves cringing under the lash, and again Toa-Sytell felt that disorienting blur in his vision, that dizzying alteration of perspective as he realized that there would be no image on the cloud.
The cloud was itself the image.
Under the relentless knife of the Emperor’s will, the thunderhead that towered above the rest writhed and carved itself into the face of a man—a face larger than a mountain, framed with a fringe of beard and short-cropped hair. Its mouth was contorted into a snarl of fury, and lightning flickered within its eyes.
Berne breathed, “Fuck me like a virgin goat . . .”
Toa-Sytell coughed and said in a thin voice, “You couldn’t have drawn a picture?”
Ma’elKoth laughed like a drunken god. “Power unused is not power, Toa-Sytell. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“It’s, ah, yes,” Toa-Sytell said. “It’s beautiful.” He could only stare in awe.
Berne said harshly, “It’s Caine.”
“Oh, yes,” Ma’elKoth rumbled with bone-deep satisfaction. “Oh yes, it is indeed. He shall be in Ankhana tomorrow morning.”
“Caine the assassin?” Toa-Sytell said, both awe and fear vanishing behind sudden interest. “The Caine who murdered Toa-Phelathon?”
He studied the cloud face more intently, now; he had seen crude drawings of Caine in the past, but this modeling was so lifelike that he felt he might know the man on sight. Even as he looked, the face dissolved and became once again an approaching thunderstorm.
“Mmm, yes,” Ma’elKoth sighed. “That is another service he has done Me, though not at My direction. Your task, Toa-Sytell, and that of the King’s Eyes, is to find this man and bring him here to Me. Bend every resource to the task, and know that he may not wish to be found. He has both contacts and friends here. Perhaps some one or more of them will come to you, if they know—what would make an enticing sum, without being excessive?—if they know that, let us say, two hundred golden royals await their word. Also, set the Constabulary on collecting citizens for the Ritual of Rebirth—we may catch him by accident, where design might fail. I want him within the palace gates by sundown tomorrow.”
“Two hundred royals reward,” Toa-Sytell repeated, nodding. “Is he in the city already?”
“No. I do not know where he may be. But he will be here by two hours after sunrise tomorrow.”
“Prophecy?”
Ma’elKoth smiled. “Magick. I shall Draw him as a goat draws a panther, and he will come.”
“But—” Toa-Sytell frowned. “—if he is a thousand leagues away tonight—”
“It would not matter if he were a million,” Ma’elKoth said. “It would not matter if he were beyond the walls of Death. You, Toa-Sytell, are a blind man thrust stumbling along the narrow corridor of Time; I am a god who holds Time within his hand like a child’s rag ball. Reality orders itself to My convenience. If Caine were a thousand leagues away, months ago he would have begun his journey to answer My call. Should I choose, tonight, not to Draw him . . . then months ago, he chose to stay where he was. Do you understand?”
“Well, actually, no,” Toa-Sytell said. “If you, mm, Draw him so powerfully, why must we search for him like a thief? Won’t he come to you of his own will?”
Ma’elKoth’s smile became indulgent. “He may. It may also be that he must be dragged; that is why I have ordered your task. Either way, he will come; the call will be answered. The mechanism is irrelevant.”
Toa-Sytell frowned. “If this magick is so potent, why can you not simply Draw Simon Jester himself?”
“That is,” Ma’elKoth said, “precisely what I am doing. The less I know of a man—the less of him I can image within My mind—the longer and more complex becomes the Drawing. Caine is only the component, the focus, like a bit of crystal or a handful of sulphur. Once I have Caine, I will Draw Simon Jester into My grasp like a woodcock on a string.”
Through all this, Berne had stood with arms folded, staring off out over the city, lips pressed into the down-curved line of a sulking child’s. Now he finally burst out, “And what am I supposed to do?”
Ma’elKoth turned to his Count, and his smile faded. “Take the day off.”
“What?” Veins pulsed in Berne’s forehead, and his mouth worked as though he couldn’t decide whether to burst into tears or leap at the Emperor’s throat.
“Berne, you must,” Ma’elKoth said, his tone soothing but never suggesting the possibility of argument. “I know too well the history between you and Caine; I was the cause of some of it. I know too well that your next meeting may be fatal for one of you. Take the day, relax, enjoy the sun. Go to Alientown; gamble, drink, and whore. Stay out of the Warrens; he has friends among the Subjects of Cant, and he’ll likely surface there. Forget Simon Jester, forget the Grey Cats, the cares of state. Forget Caine. If the two of you meet while Caine is in My service, you will treat hi
m with the courtesy due another Beloved Child of Ma’elKoth.”
“And after?”
“Once Simon Jester is in My hands, Caine’s fate is of little interest to Me.”
“All right,” Berne said, breathing deeply but quickly. “All right. I’m sorry, Ma’elKoth, but you know . . . you know what he did to me.”
“I know what you did to each other.”
“Why Caine? I mean, what’s so special about him?”
Now Toa-Sytell recognized the tone in Berne’s voice, deeper than the petulance that usually colored it. He thought in wonder, Why, the man’s jealous! Although he kept his face carefully blank, he graved a note on his mental tablet to investigate the possibility of a deeper personal relationship between Ma’elKoth and his favorite count.
“I am not sure,” Ma’elKoth said. “He’s had a spectacular career, certainly.”
He shrugged massively and laid his huge hand upon Berne’s shoulder. “Perhaps his peculiar quality can be summed in this way: he’s the only man ever to face you in single combat, Berne, and escape with his life.”
A smile flickered onto Berne’s thin lips. “Only because he can run like a bastard jackrabbit.”
Ma’elKoth took Berne’s other shoulder as well, and looked searchingly down into the Count’s face. “I tell you this: you are not that same man. With the Gifts that I have given you, he will not escape you again.”
Berne reached up to stroke the hilt of Kosall; it answered his touch with a dangerous buzz, muffled within its scabbard. “Yeah. Yeah, I know.”
Ma’elKoth turned his head only far enough to fix eyes grey as steel upon Toa-Sytell. “You have much work ahead, My Duke. Fare you well.”
Before Toa-Sytell could answer, his feet sank through the stone beneath them. The tower’s stone was still solid beneath Ma’elKoth and Berne; expressionless, they watched him sink. He let out a startled yelp as he went down, and the last he saw, before the stone closed over his eyes, was Ma’elKoth gathering Berne’s head to his bare chest.
Whatever force it was that supported him let him down gently into the center of the mystic ring of the Iron Room. He brushed himself off, slapping imaginary grit from his sleeves while he looked up at the blank stone overhead.
He grunted once, softly, and shook his head. He went silently to the altar and looked down upon Jaybie, the man he’d—in effect—put there. He stared for a long time, watching him breathe; watching the pulse of his heartbeat in the tangled net of his guts; watching it stutter, race, then slow near to stopping.
Jaybie had been his friend—a good friend, a loyal friend. Loyal to a fault: Jaybie had been a friend to Konnos, too. He had chosen friendship over duty. The choice of a good man.
The choice of a dead man.
His loyalty had cost him more than his life. Toa-Sytell could still hear the echoes of his screams, the agony and terror that had baited the Outside Power, that had brought it close for Ma’elKoth’s binding. He wondered if whatever might be left of Jaybie lay here, within this dying body, or if it howled in uncomprehending pain in whatever unimaginable hell to which the Power had returned.
Whatever the truth was, this breathing corpse had served Ma’elKoth’s purpose; the Emperor had no further need of it. Toa-Sytell was not, himself, as good a man as the one who lay before him, but he was still a man; there was one mercy he could give his friend. The end was near, anyway, but he could hasten it this much.
Gently and very precisely, he pinched Jaybie’s nose shut while his other hand covered Jaybie’s mouth.
Jaybie didn’t even struggle. His chest heaved once, and again, and shortly he expired without a sound.
Toa-Sytell wiped his hands on his breeches and sighed. He had a great deal of work to do.
Before he left the room, he glanced again at the bare stone of the mystic ring on the ceiling and once more grunted softly.
He’d survived the last Lord of Ankhana. He wasn’t at all sure he’d survive this one.
7
THE COMMON FOLK in the great city of Ankhana, capital of the Empire, rarely look at the sky, especially after dark. On the north bank of the Great Chambaygen in the Warrens they are, as a rule, too concerned with who or what might be lurking within the next shadowed doorway or the mouth of a nearby alley. In Alientown, the wretched subhumans are too drunk or drugged, or too deep within their particular hustle upon whatever slumming purebloods might be spending the night. In the Industrial Park that separates the two, the manufactories belch smoke and flame that swallow the stars.
On the island of Old Town, honest folk are indoors after sundown, unless they’re on the Watch. Constables patrol the streets with lamps that are mainly used to light the cobbles, so that they don’t step in the occasional mound of horseshit that some lazy mucking-crew missed before curfew.
On the South Bank, where the houses of the wealthy and the noble surround the ducal estates, the servants are too occupied with their tasks, and their masters sleep the sleep of the just.
But here and there, folk do look up. A sailor, on a barge moored alongside the steelworks, smells the oncoming rain and glances at the sky. An elvish whore in Alientown wraps her shawl more tightly around her thin, translucently pale shoulders, and snarls a human obscenity at the approaching clouds. Two brothers, teenage sons of the Baron of Tinnara, hoist their pants after the casual rape of a kitchen girl they caught behind the garden of their father’s city home, and stretch their arms in satisfaction over the bleeding girl. One sees the cloud and nudges the other.
These and the others like them, who glimpse the snarling face carved upon the thunderhead, shudder once, briefly, at the omen. An instant later the cloud is just a cloud again, and they shake their heads and smile at their own superstitious imaginations.
8
THE CAB GLEAMED in the last of the sunlight, then winked out as it dove into earthshadow and swooped to a landing at the gate on the edge of the Abbey’s airspace. Hari was already there, waiting for it.
The door slid open, and Hari stepped in. He took a seat next to the minibar and tried to ignore the widened eyes and slack mouth of the driver within his armorglass compartment.
The driver’s voice sounded faintly metallic through the speaker. “Holy Christ, it’s you! I mean, you’re Caine!”
Hari nodded. “Yeah. You know where the Buchanan Camp is?”
“The prison? Sure, Caine. Jesus Christ, I mean, when I got the call, y’know, to the Abbey, but no name, I thought maybe, but I din’t wanna get my hopes up. With no name on the call, maybe you coulda been one a your girlfriends, like, or just a friend or something, but, holy cock, Caine—wait’ll I tell my kids!”
“Do me a favor?”
“Sure, Caine, anything.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Well, um . . . sure, Caine, whatever, you’re tired. I understand, no problem. But couldja sign my book, though?”
Hari squeezed his eyes shut. “Didn’t you hear me?”
“Come on, just sign the book. It’d mean a lot to my kids, y’know, they’ll never believe I really metcha if you don’t sign it, y’know?”
“If I sign it, will you leave me alone?”
“Sure, Caine, anything. It’s under the top of the bar, it folds up like the cover of a notepad.”
The cab lifted smoothly into the air while Hari located and signed the cabbie’s faded little autograph book. Hari grunted. It was real paper—must have cost a stack.
“So, ah, what’re you goin’to the Buke for?”
Hari swallowed anger; to lose his temper here would be humiliating. “Listen. I don’t want to talk with you. I’ve signed your book, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d just be quiet.”
“Sure, whatever.” The cabbie turned his head away from the glass, but Hari could still hear him mutter, “Yeah, what the hole, a fellow gets to be Professional, he forgets where he come from—”
Hari stared out the window at the sun setting behind the Pacific horizon. Not me, he thought.
I never forget. No one ever lets me forget.
Storm clouds built themselves to the southwest. The cab lurched a little on insertion into the slavelanes, and the cabbie leaned back in his chair and stretched. “Hope you don’t mind if I watcha little screen, huh?”
Hari didn’t answer. The cabbie touched a sensor plate, and the windscreen of the cab lit with a closeup of LeShaun Kinnison’s oversharp face on heads-up display. Hari winced—this would be DragonTales. The cabbie pressed his seat back to half-recline and tucked his hands behind his neck.
Kinnison’s bullshit nodding slopped over with played-for-the-camera sympathy. She was saying: “. . . could explain for my viewers what ammod really is, and why Pallas Ril is in so much danger?”
Hari closed his eyes again as the shot cut to his own face. It was bad enough to have to say the fatuous crap that the Studio forced on him; it was a level of magnitude worse to have to watch himself say it.
“Whoa, Caine! That’s you, there! Hole, right there with LeShaun. She’s a honey, huh? A honey.”
“She’s a fucking crocodile. After the show, I almost had to break her fingers to pry her damn hand off my crotch.”
“No, come on, really? Right there at the show? LeShaun Kinnison grabbed your dick?”
“Shut up.”
“. . . people in the world who really understand the physics of it, and you might guess I’m not one of them.”
(Audience laughs)
“But I can explain it to you—and your viewers—the same way it was explained to me. You see, Earth and Overworld are the same planet in different universes. Each universe, the whole thing, sort of vibrates in its own way—what they call the Universal Constant of Resonance. Now, it doesn’t really vibrate, that’s just the easiest way to think about it. We go from one to the other by changing our Constant of Resonance to match the other universe. Is everybody confused yet?”
(Audience laughs)
Now, on the screen, the shot would show him pulling an antique pocket watch from inside his vest; he couldn’t stand to look. Hari’s face burned with humiliation, and he ground his teeth together.
He could see it in memory: he held the pocket watch by the end of its chain, its bottom rim touching the palm of his other hand.
Heroes Die Page 9