“Yeah? You think he had a mother?”
Ma’elKoth chuckled. “Come now, Caine. I confess it: he was not My first choice. You were.”
“Hah?”
“Oh, yes. I was hoping I could find you in person; the Drawing that I have lately done upon you consumes entirely too much of My all-too-limited time and attention. Berne has proven an acceptable substitute. Ever since the business with the crown I have been most impressed with your tenacity and resourcefulness—not to mention your ruthlessness. I hope, even now, that you, Caine, will become My most trusted companion. You can hardly refuse ennoblement now, after all; I daresay the Monasteries can have little claim on your loyalties, not after last night.”
This would be a very bad idea.
“So, you want to give me Berne’s job, huh?” he said, trying to change the subject and still sound like he was considering it. “In a way, you already have. He’s hunting Simon Jester, right?”
“Oh, you won’t be taking over for him, Caine. I want you to operate independently. I have found that two agents, working separately—even in competition—toward the same end, achieve that end much faster and more reliably.”
“Yeah, kind of like . . .” Caine’s voice trailed away. —like me and Berne in Race for the Crown of Dal’kannith, he finished silently.
He said, “You’ve always worked this way, haven’t you?”
“That did not sound like a question.”
Caine swallowed anger. “It wasn’t. You did that to me, before. The crown,” he said evenly. “He was working for you, wasn’t he, working for you the whole time . . . You hired Berne at the same time you hired me.”
“Mm, not so. I hired him after your initial attempt had failed.”
“You know what he did? You know what that pig-fucking shit-sack bastard did to me?”
“I know what you did to each other.”
“But you got the crown, and that’s all you cared about.”
“Precisely. I know you find this upsetting, Caine, but I know also that had you been in My position, you’d have done exactly the same. Which, in the end, is more important, the power itself, or the method used to acquire it?”
Ma’elKoth smiled indulgently. “That’s a rhetorical question, dear boy. Now, be silent. I have only three more delegations, and then I shall begin the Ritual.”
“What’s this ritual?”
“You’ll see. They bring Me greater gifts than mere tribute or taxes, and the Ritual is how I accept them. Hush now.”
He dealt with the last three delegations neatly, justly, and with dispatch, and when they had left their clothes beneath the platform and joined the nervous crowd atop it, Ma’elKoth gestured, a lazy wave toward a captain of the Household Knights. The captain saluted, then turned and issued crisp orders to his squad. Some of them mounted the platform to chivvy the naked throng into a rough square, while the others opened a smaller door and led in more naked men and women.
Caine guessed that whatever this ritual was, there was a specific minimum number of people needed for it: these newcomers looked like they could very well be unwilling volunteers, just terrified townsfolk press-ganged in here to fill out the numbers. The echoes grew in the hall as they all tried at once to ask each other, ask the Knights, and ask the waiting delegations above, What the fuck is going on?
Ma’elKoth stood, and the babble took on a frightened edge. He raised his arms.
Silence dropped like a bomb.
An electric tension built in the hall, a yellowish breath-catching shimmer in the air like the light before a summer storm.
Into the silence, into the tension, Ma’elKoth began to speak.
His voice rolled out like thunder to match the lightning that shone from his eyes, long sonorous phrases metrical and unpredictable together, a slowly developing and growing rhythm like the plainsong of the elves: a long verse to love, to brotherhood, to hearth and family, the meter seeming to time itself to the beat of Caine’s heart, its sweeping rhythmic power washing away the individual words. Caine couldn’t follow the words, not exactly—they skittered away across the surface of his mind—but they hooked images out of the depths: his mother’s lap warm beneath him, the sweet huskiness in her voice as she read to him from a book spread wide before his uncomprehending eyes, the dry strength of his father’s hand on his arm as he frantically tried to balance on his first bicycle. He found unexpected tears stinging his eyes for what he’d left behind, and for the incredible promise of what he might find ahead.
Ma’elKoth’s upraised arms came to sway, gently at first, oak boughs in a freshening breeze, then they stroked the air like the wings of an eagle swimming majestically upward into the limitless sky. He turned first one way, then another, then his stance shifted and Caine’s breath left him.
The Emperor began, incredibly, to dance.
To only the spare, resonant music of his own voice, Ma’elKoth danced: a slow and powerful eurythmy of impossible grace, moving with the invincible elegance of a kabuki demon.
Caine knew enough of magick to have a fair notion of what was going on; with effort he tore his eyes away from Ma’elKoth. He was able to do so, he guessed, only because the ritual was directed not at him, but at the crowd on the platform. The guards below, he noted, kept their faces carefully averted; the crowd on the platform swayed in openmouthed awe, perfectly in time with the irresistible surge of Ma’elKoth’s dance. They began to moan softly, unconsciously, low and potent chords that beat in counterpoint to his rolling voice.
Ma’elKoth’s gestures became broader, his steps more sweeping, his voice charged with cresting energy until it hummed like a dynamo, everything building toward a shattering climax—and then he suddenly, shockingly, stopped.
Into the stunning silence a beat continued, a nearly subaural iambic rumble; Caine closed his eyes and filtered out the surge of blood in his ears. He listened: a’fum, a’fum, a’fum. . .
Breath.
It was the breathing of the hundreds of people on the platform, sighing in perfect synchronization.
When Caine opened his eyes again, Ma’elKoth was looking at him over one massive shoulder. The Emperor’s lip quirked toward a wry half smile, and one eyelid drooped in a sly, sidelong wink.
Some undetermined time later, Caine remembered to start breathing again.
Ma’elKoth turned back toward the mass of naked people, who waited openmouthed in spellbound anticipation.
“These are the words you shall say to bind your souls forever to Mine:
By this, my heart’s blood, I am baptized a Child of Ma’elKoth.
I serve the dream of One Humanity with all my heart.
I pledge the service of my body and my eternal spirit to the Justice of Ma’elKoth, the True and Living God, the Father Almighty.
By this passage to a new life, I am Reborn.
I am Reborn without stain or allegiance save to the Holy Church.
I proclaim now and forever that there is no God but Ma’elKoth, and I am his living Child.”
The guards on the platform passed out tiny golden cups to the throng, who accepted them mechanically. The straight handles of the golden cups had been sharpened into blades, and with these the soon-to-be Children of Ma’elKoth each opened a vein in his or her left wrist and caught the sluggish, brightening blood as it flowed down their wrists.
And shortly the guards pulled a man from the mass, and there was no blood on his wrist. Ma’elKoth nodded, as though to himself, and beckoned for them to bring him forward.
“You have not offered blood,” he said. “Will you not swear?”
The man had the shaved head of a priest and the bearing of a warrior. He stood naked and unafraid, not deigning even to struggle against the grip of the guards.
“My Lord Emperor,” he replied, “I serve Rudukirisch Storm-god, as I have since my naming day. No power can induce me to deny Him, and His glance shall strike lightning death against any who would do me harm.”
“Yes, yes, yes
,” Ma’elKoth said testily. He glanced over his shoulder toward Caine and muttered, “This happens from time to time, in the random sweeps. It’s convenient, in a way.”
He turned back toward the platform and spoke with his usual resonance. “I understand your reluctance, but I do not permit it. You shall be killed.”
The priest shouted some words in a Kirischan dialect that Caine didn’t speak, and a sudden clap of thunder sounded outside, while within there came a blinding flash of light; when Caine’s vision cleared, the Kirischan priest gleamed with fantastically baroque armor, and he held in both hands a warhammer with a haft nearly as long as he was tall.
The Household Knights who’d held his arms stretched their lengths upon the platform, and smoke rose from their armor.
The priest glowed with power—a crackling aura of blue-white lightning that stretched upward and outward into a flailing serpentine lash of electricity, casting reddish shadows across the faces of the spellbound throng.
“Now, learn what it means to anger the God of Thunder!”
“Yes, yes,” said Ma’elKoth, sounding eager. “Get on with it, then.”
The priest extended his hammer toward the throne, and the lightning lashed out. Ma’elKoth made no move or gesture of defense, raised no spell of warding. The lightning scorched a smoking hole in the breast of Ma’elKoth’s robe; the robe itself caught fire with more than natural intensity. Even through his little spyhole, Caine could feel the heat baking his eyes as the robe flared up around the Emperor.
Then it had burned away, and amidst its ashes stood Ma’elKoth, bare chested and barefoot, only a pair of leather kneebreeches protecting his modesty.
He had not so much as blinked.
Cords rippled in his forearm as he lifted his open hand toward the ceiling, then closed it as though grabbing power from above. He stroked his fist toward the priest below as though cracking an invisible whip.
The priest lifted his warhammer to ward the blow, and his lightning shield flared bright with his god’s defense. All his priestly power, his devotion to his god, his courage and his god’s love for him made no difference whatsoever: when whatever power Ma’elKoth had summoned struck him, the warhammer that he held, the very symbol of his faith, exploded in his hand like a short-fused grenade.
Blood fountained from the shattered stump of his wrist, and the shards from the hammer ripped through his flesh like shrapnel. Household Knights closed in around him, and they pulled him out of sight on the other side of the statue.
“Your courage earns you this honor,” Ma’elKoth boomed.
“You shall smooth the way for the faithful.”
Blood now began to drip from the statue’s stylized vagina, and Caine caught a glimpse of the priest’s legs as the Knights apparently upended him as though to force him headfirst into the statue’s belly; there must have been some kind of a channel cut through the torso of the statue, and the blood must have been the priest’s. The legs moved out of sight, and Caine heard a muffled grunt. Then the priest’s head and shoulders emerged downward from the statue’s vagina and he stopped there, held suspended while his blood flowed down his face and dripped onto the bronze slide beneath.
A tall, broad-shouldered man wearing the dark brown dress of an Ankhanan midwife stepped out from beneath the platform; in his hand was a short straight sword, thick bladed and single edged, and on his face was a smile of sexual anticipation.
It was, inevitably, Berne.
The priest caught sight of him and shouted, “I confess the power of Rudukirisch! I confess—”
His cry was cut off by the silver arc of Berne’s cleaver. The blade sheared into his neck, crunching through vertebrae and slicing out the other side. Berne cleared the blade of blood with a single, professional flick of the wrist as the priest’s head, mouth still wide open, tumbled onto the slide in a shower of blood and rolled down into the basin. His heart, far above, pumped furiously, fountaining crimson jets from neatly severed arteries, and it seemed a very long time until the fountain tapered to a trickle. Whatever held the body released it, and it slid smoothly down the blood-slick slide and lay limp in the basin.
And through this all, the spellbound crowd on the platform watched silently.
Now the Knights herded them into a queue at the statue’s side, and they each willingly followed in the priest’s path, pausing briefly to pour the small cups of their own blood over their heads, intoning their oath and then sliding headfirst into the statue’s belly and out through its vagina, down the slide and into the basin, from whence other guards would lead them away to wash away the blood and bandage their wrists.
Occasionally, for no reason and with no signal that Caine could see, one of them would be caught, head down; Berne’s blade would flicker, and another head and body would enter the basin separately. The twitching bodies were left there, a grisly cushion for the living ones that followed.
Ma’elKoth stepped away from the pile of ashes that had been his robes and seated himself again in the Oaken Throne. He sighed and said meditatively, “Well, then, what do you think?”
Caine was mesmerized by the endless flow of men and women down the slide. “It’s, ah, pretty gruesome, isn’t it?”
“As is any birth,” Ma’elKoth said.
“How do you decide who lives and who dies, down there? Who decides who gets caught and chopped?”
“Each decides for himself,” Ma’elKoth said, and now a smile grew slowly across his face.
“What do you mean?”
“I won’t tell you.”
“Huh?”
“I spoke clearly enough. It is not for you to know, not yet. If you survive it, you’ll understand.”
“If I survive it? You’re gonna make me go through that?”
Ma’elKoth answered with only a smile.
“How will you approach your quest for Simon Jester?” he asked thoughtfully. “I am certain you’ve already given this question some thought.”
“Some,” Caine said. He’d spent all of the night before thinking about it and had come up with a plan both simple and elegant, perfectly in character and, he hoped, daring enough to be irresistible. “I want to break your prisoners out of the Donjon.”
“Oh?”
“One of the accomplices of Simon Jester that Berne captured chances to be an acquaintance of mine, a minor adept named Lamorak. You get me into the Donjon, and I break him and the other one out. That should be enough to get me close to Simon Jester.”
“How did you know of this? That this Lamorak is in our custody?”
“You’re not the only one with sources,” Caine said, hoping that Ma’elKoth wouldn’t press.
Ma’elKoth’s mind was working along other lines. “I see problems with this. Isn’t it somewhat extreme? Won’t Lamorak be suspicious, to be suddenly rescued? Are the two of you so close that he will believe you’d risk your life for him?”
“Oh, he’ll believe it, all right.” Not that it matters a damn if he doesn’t. “We’re close enough. And I’ll tell him straight off that I’m doing this to get next to Simon Jester.”
“And for what?”
Caine glanced down toward the ongoing ritual, where Berne had once again just neatly decapitated someone.
“To get a shot at Berne.”
“Mmm,” Ma’elKoth said, thinking about it. “Mm, I think I see.”
“Lamorak is Berne’s prisoner, right? The whole operation against Simon Jester is Berne’s baby. Breaking him out will be a major embarrassment, and will put me in with Simon Jester, the perfect place for me to lay a trap to draw Berne out where I can kill him.”
Ma’elKoth chuckled. “And it will make a substantial addition to your legendary career. No one has ever escaped from the Imperial Donjon; if there is a man alive that folk will believe could do it, it would be you.”
“Nobody will dream I’m working for you; shit, nearly everybody in town knows there’s a warrant out for me. Just give out that I got away from Toa-Sytell a
nd the Eyes.”
“Will you be working for Me?”
A cold hand reached into Caine’s chest. “Of course I will. What’s that supposed to mean? After all this, you don’t trust me?”
“I remember . . .” Ma’elKoth mused, “I remember a Caine who’d rather kill a man than lie to him . . .”
“Killing’s simpler,” Caine said, with a thin laugh that tried to sound hearty. “You do it, it’s done, it’s over. A lie is like a pet—you have to take care of it, or it’ll turn on you and bite you on the ass.”
“Are you still that Caine?”
He made his voice as flat as his thumping heart would let him.
“I’m as honest as circumstances allow.”
“Hmpf. A truthful answer, that. Very well. Remove your clothes.”
Something seemed to catch in Caine’s throat; all he could say was “Hah?”
“You cannot serve Me in body unless you serve Me in heart, Caine.”
The Emperor waved a lazy hand down at the platform. Below, pages in livery ladled blood out of the basin into bronze bowls—the same bowls Caine had seen them carry in the Lesser Ballroom, to mix into the clay of the Great Work, and his stomach twisted.
What did you think, you fucking ninny, he snarled at himself. Where did you think that blood came from?
He said, “You seriously expect me to go down there and put my neck within reach of Berne’s sword?”
“I do. If you do not trust Me, Caine, how am I to trust you? Pledge yourself to Me, place your faith in My justice, and serve Me now. Or deny Me this honor, and never serve Me again.”
It wasn’t even really a choice. Echoing inside his skull he heard Shanna’s words: He doesn’t care what happens to me. And this might be his best, his only chance to save her life.
There was no reason to hesitate.
“Yeah, sure,” Caine said. “Let’s do it.”
5
THE RIVER BARGE was every bit as disreputable as its captain, a grizzled old rummy with drooping red eyes and a permanently dripping nose, but when Pallas inspected the barge’s bilge, a dark dank space full of an eye-watering stink of urine and decay—like a dead turtle sun-baking in its shell for four days while being pissed on by a succession of tomcats—she found something that made her smile: a little horned face with the familiar sly grin, scratched into the sloppily pitched bulkhead recently enough that the wood exposed beneath still showed blond.
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