She jerked a thumb at it. “Simon Jester,” she said. “You know, you can buy some trouble, flying that particular flag.”
The captain wiped his nose on the back of his grimy hand. “Can’t say as anyone’d find me responsible. I crew this thing temporary, y’know? Can’t say who mighta scratched the little face.”
“I’d bet there’s any number of things you can’t say,” Pallas ventured.
The captain shrugged. “I mind my manners, if that’s what y’mean.”
“I’d bet you can’t say why that scratching’s a couple of weeks old, and it’s still there.”
“You’d lose that one, girlie,” the captain growled. “Gave passage to Baron Thilliow, him of Oklian, and his whole family, fifteen year ago and more, when days was better for us both. And he was a good man, and no bloody Aktir, no matter what th’Emperor says. Nothing against th’Emperor; I figure there’s some as is tellin’ him some lies, and puttin’ good folk to the axe, and I’d just as soon Simon Jester gets ’em away as see ’em dead. And that—” He reached up and touched the crude little carving. “—that’s just to remind me, that’s all. Don’t really mean nothing.”
Pallas extended her hand, and a shining gold royal appeared between her thumb and first finger. She flicked her hand and another appeared, then another flick and another coin. They gleamed like the sun in the steady lamplight.
She’d gotten his attention with the first one; by the time the third appeared, it was all he could do to keep the drool behind his lips.
“You can use these for provisions. Forty people for a week. Don’t buy it all in one place. Use the rest to crew up. Whatever money’s left over, keep for your trouble.”
“I, ah . . .”
Flick. Now there were four. “This charming little family has relatives downstream. Forty of them. One for each of my friends who’ll be riding here in your bilge, provided they make it safe and healthy down to Tinnara, plus a few extra. A gratuity for exceptional service.”
He mopped at his face furiously, until the grease and dirt on the back of his hand was streaked with snot. “That’s, ah, that’s tricky work. Maybe a bit more up front would, ah, steady my nerves . . . ?”
“You’ll have to trust me,” she said with a quick shake of her head. “We’ll have to trust each other. If I don’t come through with the gold, there’ll be forty people wandering around Tinnara that’d be worth a noble or two apiece to any Eye or army officer.”
“Forty royals, though . . .” he murmured. “Could really fix up m’old lady, here, get a real crew again . . .”
“We’ll call it a deal, then.” She handed him the four royals.
“We will, that,” he said, and followed her up the ladder into the warm afternoon sunlight. “Gimme two days to crew and provision, and get your friends here by midafternoon on the second—we’ll wanta be a few miles downstream by sundown.” He accompanied her to dockside and held out his arm to help her up the ramp.
“Do you,” he murmured softly, hesitantly, with a furtive look around at the busy docks to make sure no one was within earshot, “d’you really work for the Jester? Is he really, y’know, really real?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, he’s really real.”
“Is he really wantin’ to bring down Ma’elKoth, like they say?”
“No. No, that’s not it at all,” she said gravely. “He’s only trying to save some lives. These people aren’t Aktiri, Captain. They’re just people, innocent people, who have to get out of the Empire, or they’ll be killed. Killed because Ma’elKoth doesn’t like them.”
“Well, then . . .” He dropped his arm and looked at the deck beneath his feet, then spat into the sluggish brown waters of the Great Chambaygen. “Well, then, power to the Jester. And power to you, lady.”
Pallas forced a little smile and touched him on the shoulder. “We both thank you. Look for me in two days.”
She walked away along the dockside, past the steelworks and the long rows of warehouses that accepted river cargo from all across the Empire.
This should be easy; she’d seen no flicker of betrayal on the captain’s Shell, and even though she’d never tried to move this many tokali at one time before, she was confident.
This spell of Konnos’ had become so incredibly useful—she could pack all thirty-six of the tokali into the bilge and Cloak the whole lot of them. Any suspicious Imperial, even an adept, would see only dirty water and black-pitched wood, and the Eternal Forgetting would prevent this hypothetical suspicious adept from connecting any pull he might feel with the possibility of a Cloak. To make it work, she’d have to ride with them all the way to the coast to get them past the toll points on the river, but that was all right.
She could use the rest.
The important thing, right now, was that she could do it, she’d get them safely out of the Empire by herself, and those greedy bastards back at Studio Scheduling could just screw themselves.
And when this was over and she was back on Earth, she and Hari were going to have a little talk about staying the hell out of her life. She should never have let him talk her out of filing divorce; this separation was foolish. It wasn’t doing either one of them any good, just drawing out the pain, that’s all, their own little improvised Death of the Thousand Cuts. She should have trusted her instincts and gone for the clean break, all at once, like ripping away a bandage.
Or amputating a limb.
And that’s what this really was, she told herself, this ache that seemed to poke low into her belly when she thought of him looking for her, when she thought of how she would ditch him and head downriver: phantom-limb pain. There had once been a part of her that had tied her to Hari’s life, that was now cut away; the twinges she felt from it once in a while were only psychological revenants of the amputation.
And Hari was part of why it was so easy to be ruthless with the King of Cant; Majesty was one of Caine’s best friends. He made a pretty good surrogate when she couldn’t hit back at Caine directly. As she’d continued to use him, though, she’d surprised herself with a growing sense of contempt; she’d caught herself thinking that this man was only a thug with a gimmick, after all, really just a street punk like Hari once was—but Hari had grown into something more, she’d grant him that much. Hari or Caine, neither would have let anyone treat him like she’d treated the King of Cant; Caine would have gone for her throat the second he caught a glimpse of the Charm crystal.
On the other hand, she wasn’t blind to herself: she knew that part of her contempt for Majesty was a reflexive self-justification for using him so badly. But still . . .
Caine had a peculiar integrity, a stubborn attachment to his self-respect, however misplaced it might be. Integrity wasn’t a word that came to mind when one thought of Majesty; the man was a weasel on two legs. Useful, even necessary, but a weasel nonetheless.
As twilight drifted down through the deepening blue of the sky, she made her way toward the warehouse beneath which she’d hidden the tokali. Her mind wasn’t on the crowds that thickened around her as curfew neared and folk of all descriptions flooded across the bridges from Old Town; she was absorbed with the melancholy realization that even now, she still compared every man she met with Hari.
Shaking her head sadly at this sentimental foolishness, she walked into the expanding shadows of the Industrial Park’s side streets.
She rehearsed for the millionth time all the reasons that they would never be able to work it out, all the fights and the jealousies and suspicions. They should never have married in the first place; they’d been great as lovers, their affair was passionate, tempestuous, consistently unpredictable, thrilling—but all the things that had made them great lovers made them shitty as husband and wife.
Opposites attract, but similarities bind.
They were the opposite poles of Acting, for one thing. She’d gone into Acting in the first place because on Overworld, she could have the kind of power that would be forever denied her by her Trades
man subcaste in Earth’s remorselessly rigid social system: the power to help people, to make a real difference in people’s lives, a positive difference. She could truly say that her career had helped make Overworld a better place, and she was justly proud of it.
Caine, on the other hand, was just in it for the blood.
She saved lives; he took them.
And his Adventures outsold hers three to one.
In her honest moments, she was able to admit that this was part of the problem, too. She wasn’t proud of it, but she couldn’t deny it, either.
She sighed and tried to haul her attention back onto the problems at hand. She’d deal with Caine later, when he could no longer be avoided. It was the fatigue, the endless hours of running and hiding and fighting, that made it nearly impossible for her to keep her mind on business; but now, as she neared the bolt-hole where she’d stashed the tokali, a lapse in concentration could be fatal.
The tokali were hidden beneath the rotting, treacherous floor of a fire-gutted warehouse; it stood in a block with a number of other warehouses in states of similar disrepair. Dry spots here and there—where slanting remnants of charred rooftops leaned against a sturdy wall to keep off the rain—had become shelter for a number of families of squatters.
She’d posted no stooges here who might betray it, had left no sign. The dry, cavelike basement here was her third fallback; she’d prepared it with the help of the Twins and Talann and Lamorak, enchanting sigils across the walls and doors to divert seeking items and other magick of that sort. Majesty himself, in disguise, had helped her move the supplies inside; though he despised physical labor, her Charm had ensured that he’d work without complaint and would die before he gave up its location. Pallas believed that everyone else who knew of its existence was dead.
The entrance was concealed within a former interior office; getting to it required threading through a maze of collapsed walls and treacherously rotten flooring. At the last moment she turned aside instead of entering, drifting past its charred facade as though still lost in thought.
Something was wrong here.
The trickle of day laborers heading home was steady as ever, no more nor less than usual. Glancing at their faces and clothes gave Pallas no explanation for her sudden nerves, but she trusted those nerves, her instincts; they were all she had left to save her life.
She found a solid-looking piece of wall to lean casually against and scanned the street. What’s wrong with this picture?
There was no smoke.
The squatters . . . There were two families in particular, one across the street in what once had been a grain store, and one further down in a former smithy. Now, here, at twilight, they both should have had small, protected fires burning, heating up whatever scraps they had scrounged for their dinners. The intermittent, almost daily rains that came with late autumn in Ankhana would have dampened all the scrap wood there was to be found—but there was no smoke.
It might be nothing. They might both have moved on to some drier and more windproof shelter.
Or: they might be tied down, even dead, while Grey Cats crouched beside them, watching her through fire-sprung chinks in their borrowed walls.
Not for nothing did they identify themselves with cats; they might have been there for hours, slowly creeping into position, watching intently for any sign of movement around the mouse hole where the tokali huddled. But they couldn’t know that both these families cook at twilight.
She kept moving, kept drifting, until the spire of the Colhari Palace swung into view through a gap in a collapsing wall. She breathed herself into mindview, and the twisting lace of Flow filled her vision, slowly stirred by the dim Shells of the passing townsfolk. She saw no beam of channeled Flow from the Palace, but this was no assurance that she was safe; the Cats themselves wouldn’t attack her on sight, having no idea who she was, but if Berne was here with them . . .
The Imperials knew that Simon Jester was a thaumaturge; this was proven by the spell that frustrated their search. In seeking to trap him, Berne and Ma’elKoth wouldn’t hold that channel open; it’d be like sounding a trumpet and waving a flag to any adept in mindview.
But Berne, he had reasons to pounce on her unrelated to his hunt for Simon Jester. If he was there, coiled to spring from one of those buildings, and he saw her on the street and recognized her, his own cupidity, his lust for blood, for any way to injure her or Caine, would probably drive him to—
And there it was: from the spire of the Colhari Palace that shaft of crimson power sprang to instantaneous life.
She had only seconds to live.
Surrounded. Alone. The Subjects would help her if they knew she was in danger, but there were no Subjects here to be found.
Alone, but not helpless.
If Caine were here, he’d quote Sun Tzu: “On deadly ground: fight.”
From a pocket at her breast, her hand pulled a lovingly carved model of itself in miniature: a tiny hand of the same glittering quartz she used for her Shields.
The lines of power shone upon it and spoke to her mind.
The shaft of channeled Flow ran straight as the beam of a laser from the palace to the crumbling warehouse across the street: there was no way Berne could hide from her.
The lines scribed upon the hand of quartz spread like a net, spun like a whirlpool, a massive vortex of Flow that made her flesh shimmer with power. No matter how much power Berne channeled from Ma’elKoth, he was himself no thaumaturge: without mindview, he had no way of knowing the depth of trouble he was in right now.
On her lips was a feral grin that Berne would have recognized, as she extended her hand and made a fist, and the invisible force of her Teke crushed the building like an eggshell.
It fell in upon itself with an avalanche roar and a spreading cloud of choking dust. If Berne wanted her, first he’d have to dig himself out.
The flat whacks of firing crossbows sounded from all around her, but Pallas was already moving, diving away deep into the screening dust. Quarrels sang by her, spanged off cobblestones and thrummed quivering in wood. Shouts and screams from the city folk filled the air as they scattered, running for their lives.
Pallas rolled to her feet and flicked her hand, doing the same trick she had for the captain of the river barge; instead of coins, what appeared between her fingers were her charged buckeyes—one, two, three, four.
Blood hummed in her ears, and a savage exaltation filled her chest. Teeth gleamed through her happy snarl as she triggered a buckeye and fired it along the street with her Teke, directly into the building from which most of the crossbow fire had come. Flame roared out though shattered windows; the building front crumpled and collapsed.
That, she guessed, should be enough to get their attention. She turned and sprinted away at a dead run, heading toward the Warrens.
Come on come on come on, move it, you bastards, she chanted inside her head. It’ll take all of you to make sure I don’t get away.
Come on!
And come they did, breaking from cover—ten, fifteen, thirty hard-eyed men in grey, running behind grimaces of fury, pursuing at a ground-eating lope as she led them away from the tokali and into the Kingdom of Cant. Behind her, the building she had crushed, the building she had brought down on Berne’s head, began to pitch and heave and bulge in the middle like a caterpillar carcass birthing a brood of wasps.
Berne was coming.
She put her head down and ran.
DAY FOUR
“You have no principles at all.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.”
“No, it’s true. You’re a contrarian. You have to have your own way, but you define it by what people tell you not to do.
The problem is that underneath all your macho crap there’s this sneaking suspicion that everybody else is right. It has nothing to do with principle—you reject authority because it’s fun to break rules. You’re like a little kid, being naughty with a grin on his face.”
“D
o we have to talk about this now?”
“You’re not for anything, you’re just against everything.”
“I’m for you.”
“Stop it. I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
1
SERGEANT HABRAK HAD been in the Ankhanan Army for more than twenty years, so he instantly recognized the look in Berne’s eyes as the Count came to the steel bars of the gate; he’d seen it too many times on the faces of officers about to order suicidal charges, on foot soldiers who’d been pushed to the point of bloody mutiny, on peasants about to run screaming against ranks of armored Knights, scythes and pitchforks upraised to avenge rape and slaughter. The sergeant sprang to his feet, fumbling for the jingling hoop of keys at his belt.
Berne rasped, “Open this fucking gate before I cut it down.”
“Only a second, m’lord, only a second.” Habrak managed finally to shove the key into the lock, and he swung the gate back.
Berne stalked past him, and Habrak coughed wetly: the Count stank, reeked like a closed stable on a hot summer’s day—and what was this filth that caked the heavy strawberry serge he wore? He looked—and smelled—like he’d spent the night rolling in manure—!
At Habrak’s cough, Berne stopped and looked back over his left shoulder, his face bisected by the long diagonal hilt of his shoulder-slung sword.
“You got a problem?” Berne asked, his voice low and lethal. “Maybe you smell something?”
“Oh, oh, oh, oh no, no, my lord. Not at all.”
“That’s peculiar, considering I’m covered with shit.”
“I, ah, ah, my lord, I—”
“Never mind. Open the fucking door.”
“Your, ah, your weapon, er Count . . .” Habrak said hesitantly.
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