She became curiously aware of her own breathing. “Then,” she said softly, “you let the stonebender girl go on purpose—you planned the confusion, to cover you . . .”
His answering smile looked as cold as the others, but now Kierendal began to suspect how much heat the furnace doors of his control held shuttered within. She said, “And you haven’t killed anyone . . .”
“Not today. Although the only reason your sprite friend’s still alive is that I’m a little rusty with the knives.”
“You leave a lot to chance, Caine.”
“It is better to be rash than timid,” he said, his smile becoming oddly distant, “for Fortune is a woman, and the man who wants to hold her down must beat and bully her.” From his tone, he was quoting someone, although Kierendal had no idea whom.
“Why, Caine,” she said, faux-coy, sensing an opening, “are you making a pass at me?”
His reply was a derisive snort. “One last question—”
“I know my reputation,” Kierendal said, looking up at him from under her impossibly long lashes, “but I’m not really homosexual. It’s just that I don’t enjoy having foreign objects jabbed into my body; I’m sure you can understand that.” She arched her back to give him a good look at her inflated breasts; maybe he’d be as easy to manage as Berne was, in the end. “This doesn’t mean we can’t have fun together.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t. But there are plenty of other things that do. Last question: that warrant on me—you’ve heard about it. What do they want me for? And how did they know I’d be in town?”
“This is a mystery. The word went out on the street at sundown yesterday, that’s all I know. And that they want you alive.”
“You can’t do better?”
She shrugged and offered him a cynical half smile. “Hey, if you’re that desperate, Count Berne’s on the floor right now playing knucklebones. Maybe you could ask him,” she said pointedly.
“Berne?”
Kierendal’s growing insouciance vanished like smoke before a gale; the black and lethal fury that flooded Caine’s face when he spoke that name terrified her more than had his earlier threats. It was as though all of those ghost-Caines that had filled the imaginary air suddenly turned and whipped faster than thought back within his body, to make him so ferociously present that he seemed to burn with a scarlet flame.
“Berne is here? Right now?”
He slowly lifted his hands up before his face and stared at his fingers as they curled into fists, his eyes burning red in the lamplight.
“Yeah, maybe I will ask him. Maybe I will do exactly that.”
And again without the faintest shift of shade in his Shell, without any hint of anticipatory breath, he moved: he was gone from the room, an inhumanly swift rush of absence like the darkness that closes in around a snuffed candle. A briefest flicker of brighter, yellower lamplight—the door opened and closed with the speed of a single blink.
Kierendal sat quite still for a long moment, as she tried to catch her breath and stroke away Tup’s trembling.
“I hate him,” the treetopper said, her voice muffled against Kierendal’s breast. “I hope Berne kills him!”
“They could kill each other,” Kierendal said softly, “and I don’t think the world would be any less for their passing.”
She gently touched the pink-rimmed rent in Tup’s wing. “Can you fly?”
Tup lifted her tearstained face and rubbed at her cheek with a tiny fist. “I think so. I think I can, Kier, but it will hurt.”
“Fly, then. Go to Chal. He will tend your wing. Have three of your folk fly with the word that Caine is here: one to the garrison, one to the constable post, and one to Count Berne’s townhouse, for the Cats.”
“You’re turning him in? I thought . . .” She snuffled back more tears. “I was thinking you sort of liked him.”
Kierendal smiled distantly. “I do. But he’s about to reveal himself in my casino, and we can’t have the King’s Eyes thinking we’d shelter a fugitive. And the world is dangerous enough already, without men like Caine in it. Once he’s dead, we’ll all sleep easier.”
She looked around the room. “Besides, the sonofawhore stole my lighter.”
14
ARTURO KOLLBERG SQUIRMED wetly in his simichair. At last, some action, he thought, as he/Caine skidded down the two flights of stairs and sprinted past the startled guards in the corridor. He/Caine had gotten enough details from that dwarf whore to know which turns to make, and he was at the service door before anyone could possibly know he was coming.
Kollberg’s heart pounded with anticipation. Only four hours into the Adventure, and already Caine was about to confront Berne. It might make up some for the plodding dullness of this first day so far; Studio-sponsored focus groups had determined that an average of 1.6 lethal combats per day was optimum for a Caine Adventure, and Caine had barely thrown a punch, yet. Dropping the houseboy, knifing the pixie, big deal. Beating up a whore had a certain old-fashioned charm, but it hardly qualified as actual combat. Confronting Berne, on the other hand . . .
He licked his already moist lips and smiled into the face shield.
Live or die, this was going to be great.
15
I PULL THE service door closed behind me and lean against it. No one on the crowded casino floor seems to be paying any attention to me, yet. One of the little leafblades from an ankle sheath should serve to slow down the guards who are coming after me along the service corridor. I lean casually on the door, gazing blankly out into the casino, while I work the leafblade into the crack between door and jamb alongside my thigh; I pound the knife in tight with the heel of my hand. The muffled thudding this makes is barely audible, even to me, over the music and babble that fills the seething room.
Damn good business she does here: it’s only noon.
The bones pit, that’s what she said. The knucklebones . . .
And there he is, warming dice with his breath, his brush-cut hair shimmering above his classic profile. That’s a new sword he’s got—Berne never favored the shoulder-draw before; it’s slow and desperately clumsy. And what’s with the clothes? A slashed-velvet doublet and magenta hose, for shit’s sake.
The scenarios spin out of my subconscious:
I walk deliberately, grim as death, across the room; a hush falls as heads silently turn. Scuttling crablike, gambler’s hands scrape coins off tables. Whores slowly take cover behind the bars.
Berne knows something’s happening—the floor goes too quiet too fast—but he’s too cool to look. He pretends that his attention is on his pass of the dice.
I stop, ten feet away. “Berne. Long time. I’ve been looking for you.” He doesn’t turn, doesn’t even blink; of course he knows my voice.
“I’ve been waiting for you to find me, Caine. Time for one last roll.” He tosses the dice: snake-eyes.
He shrugs and draws his sword as my fists come up . . .
Or:
He doesn’t even know I’m there until he feels my arm go around his throat for the choke. He freezes, knowing I can kill him before he can move. I whisper in his ear: “Funny how shit works out sometimes, isn’t it? Now, tell me what I want to know, and this won’t hurt.” And he pretends he doesn’t know what I’m talking about as his hand creeps toward the dagger in his boot . . .
Or: . . . anything I want . . .
These sweaty macho fantasies take almost no time: this isn’t something my mind creates, these are scenes that live there, permanently circling just below the surface like curious sharks, waiting only for features to be painted on the blank faces and names to be wedged into the dialogue. I could stand here all day, stretching time by enjoying the endless play of ROM scripts patterned into my brain by too many books, too many films and plays and Adventures and DragonTales teasers—but now a huge shadow darkens the wall at my right, and I look up into a pair of protuberant yellow eyes that are each the size of my fist.
It’s an ogre, maybe nine f
eet of one, and he’s got shoulders about equal to my elbow-to-elbow wingspan. He’s wearing some expensive chainmail, a nicely painted hauberk that makes only an autumnal rustle like dry leaves as he comes up—too close to me. The morningstar in his hand has spikes that are as long as my little finger and not much sharper.
He rumbles, deep in his throat, “I’m sorry sir. This area is staff only. You have to move on.”
His breath smells of old meat.
“All right, I’m going. Don’t push.” The floor trembles faintly beneath my boots—those guards must be running right up to the door. The ogre squints at me like he’s suddenly remembered my face, and a breastplate-sized hand lowers like a drawbridge toward my shoulder.
Guards hammer on the other side of the service door behind me, and their shouts come thinly through it. This draws the ogre’s eyes for the fractional second I need to duck aside from his hand and run like hell.
I could make the street door—sunlight shines its golden freedom only twenty meters to my right—
But, on the other hand, Berne has his back to me.
I’m nimble enough, even at a flat sprint, to dodge around the bigger men on the floor, and I’m strong enough to flatten and overrun the smaller. I trail a spreading wake of shouts and confusion, but I’ve gone hypersonic, as it were: I outrun the noise of my passing.
Berne has warning enough only to barely begin the turning of his head before I reach the brass rail around the bones pit and launch myself over it like a javelin.
I stiffen my neck in the air and spear him, the top of my head to the side of his jaw. My arms tangle in his, and we tumble over the bones field scattering gold and dice in all directions. The other players scatter, shouting incoherent surprise, and the table goes down in splinters. By the time we skid off what’s left of it to hit marble steps on the other side, I can hear the pit boss’silver whistle piping a shrill alarm that’ll bring the ogres at a run.
I don’t care: I landed on top.
The edges of the steps crashing against his spine had to hurt like a bitch, and his muscles loosen into stunned slackness. I lock up his legs with mine and get a forearm under his chin to force his head back and cut off his wind. His eyes go from glaze to focus almost instantly, and he mouths: You, and the half-buried flicker of fear that passes over his face calls to something elemental inside me, a volcanic surge up from the base of my spine that thunders in my ears and shades my vision scarlet.
“You bet your fucking ass it’s me.”
I create additional emphasis with a hammer-hand that crushes and spreads his perfect nose wide across his cheekbones. Blood sprays; it’s on my fist, all over his face, it’s on my lips, I can smell it and taste it and I no longer care if I die in the next breath so long as I go to my grave with my teeth in his throat.
So I hit him again.
He struggles beneath me, but I’ve got him now and there’s no way I’m gonna let him go. I slam his head into the curving step, and again, and again and again; the purple-veined marble is now artistically spattered with the crimson of Berne’s blood.
But he’s still conscious, and now he’s smiling up at me with those smeary lips and reddened teeth, and I have to choose between continuing to beat on him or just cutting his throat because those ogres will haul me off him in about ten seconds, and having to make that choice brings me back to something resembling rationality.
At about this time I realize he’s been pounding the side of my head with his doubled elbow. He can’t get any force behind it, lying down like that; he’s doing it mostly to distract me from his other hand, which is sliding up my neck to hook a thumb toward my eye.
As he swings again I rear back out of his elbow’s path and grab his upper arm, twisting him on around so his back’s to me now, pinning his scabbarded sword with my chest. The hair on the back of his head is matted with blood from a single cut where his scalp split against the edge of the step. I lock my legs around his again and roll us both over faceup just in time—the pair of ogres, who were winding up for free shots at my back, lower their morningstars uncertainly.
My left arm snakes around Berne’s face, over his eyes, to pull his head back while my right hand draws one of the long fighting knives from its sheath along my ribs. I put its point against his external jugular; it’ll take a single second to drive it straight in the side of his neck and slice out though the front, parting carotids, external and internal jugular, and windpipe. He has no chance to survive, and he knows it.
I whisper in his ear, “Tell them to back off.”
“Back off,” he croaks. He coughs a wad of blood out of his throat, and his voice gets stronger and more confident. “Caine’s an old friend of mine. We’re not really fighting—this is just how we say hello.”
I murmur: “You got a nice sense of humor, for a dying man.” The shoulder-twitch of his shrug feels careless against my chest. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
He extends his hands blindly in front of him and wiggles his fingers. “Pretty, aren’t they?”
“What happened to Pallas Ril?”
“Your bitch? How should I know? I’ve been busy with this Simon Jester asshole.”
“Berne, Berne, Berne,” I whisper in his ear like a chiding lover.
“There’s no reason to lie: Think of this as a deathbed confession.”
He chuckles. “Then there’s also no reason to tell the truth. But I am, anyway. You’re not worth lying to.”
I believe him, even though I have Pallas’ memory of their confrontation. I’ve been figuring that the outripple of that spell she did—the information threshold that spread outward at whatever-the-hell the propagation speed of magickal energy is—sort of randomized everyone’s most recent memories of Pallas, or something like that. But Berne and the Cats must have had some contact with her after the spell was cast—they had surrounded her, after all. If he still can’t remember, the spell must still be operating somehow. And if the spell is still operating . . .
Pallas is still alive. She might be one of the captives in the Donjon, after all; but for now, at least, she’s alive.
This certain knowledge spreads such warm and fuzzy feelings from my heart out into the whole world that for almost half a second I’m tempted to let him live.
“Last question: What am I wanted for? And who tipped the Eyes that I was coming to town?”
His tone is mocking. “That’s two questions.”
I don’t really need to know these answers badly enough to make listening to his shit worth my time, so I jam the knife into his neck.
The knife’s point skids off his skin as though his flesh has become tool-grade steel.
Stupidly I try to stick him again in the same place—I just can’t believe it didn’t work—and when it skids off again I waste a full second staring like an idiot at this blade that has betrayed me.
I begin to understand why he’s not scared.
I think I’m in trouble.
Berne says in a voice bright but silky soft, “And now, for my next trick . . .”
He reaches back and takes my left shoulder with one hand in a grip so crushing it doesn’t even hurt: my whole arm goes numb. Then he peels me off him with irresistible strength—no art involved, just a long, smooth yank—and he comes to his feet and holds me dangling in the air.
“I always was better than you,” he says. “But now I’m the favorite of Ma’elKoth. He’s made me faster, vastly stronger—and invulnerable. Ma’elKoth created the spell just for me; he calls it Berne’s Buckler. You like it?”
I kick him in the face, a short Thai-jab that smacks the ball of my foot into his broken nose, and he laughs at me. He catches my crotch with his free hand and lifts me flailing up high.
And he throws me over the heads of the crowd.
Up, out of the bones pit, arcing high—he must be stronger than the ogres that stand staring dumbly at my flight. I tumble through the air while people try to duck out of my path.
My body
can sort out the landing on its own; my full attention is consumed with how I’m going to beat him.
By the time I crash into a knot of gamblers and we all go down to a surprisingly soft landing, I’ve come to a couple conclusions.
One, strength alone won’t help him for shit against my knives, and—
Two, if this invulnerability of his was all he’d like me to think it is, I wouldn’t have been able to break his nose.
I can still beat him; I just have to alter my tactics to meet a changed situation. I have a hypothesis about this magick that protects him—and like any good scientist, I have an experiment in mind to turn this hypothesis into a theory.
The people I’ve landed on thrash away from me in a tangle of limbs, knocking me around a little, so I’m still fighting to gain my feet as the crowd parts and Berne vaults the rail of the bones pit. He wipes his bloody lips with the back of his hand and stalks toward me.
“You’re a lucky man, Caine,” he says. “I made a promise—”
The best time to catch a man off guard is while he’s talking—too much of his attention is on what he’s going to say next. Still on my knees, I cross-draw my throwing knives from the sheaths on my thighs and flip them both spinning backhand.
There’s no force behind this kind of throw, but force isn’t what I need. The one from my numbed and weakened left goes high, toward his face, and he slaps the whirling blade irritably aside—but it doesn’t cut his hand because that’s where he’s instinctively focused this defense of his. The other knife, that’s the one that warms my homicidal heart: it hits his leg an inch above the knee, slices his magenta hose, and cuts the skin beneath.
It’s only a little cut, a thin line of swelling crimson droplets, a hardly noticeable scratch—but he looks down at it, and I look at him, and when his eyes come back up I see the faintest perceptible twitch of uncertainty at their corners.
That unlocks a rushing within my mind, a waterfall of wind like God sucking in an endless breath, as the entire universe narrows down to Berne, me, and the three meters of open floor between us.
I stand.
I draw my one remaining fighting knife.
Heroes Die Page 17