Berne spoke from behind him. “Not here yet?”
Toa-Sytell twitched his chin vaguely toward that approaching carriage. “On his way. It’s a long way around, you know,” he murmured blandly. “Perhaps you hadn’t heard that Knights’ Bridge is down—?”
For once Berne didn’t rise to the bait. He said only, “Ma’elKoth wants him in the Iron Room.”
“I’d like to see him in the Iron Room myself,” Toa-Sytell muttered.
“Any idea where he’s been?”
The Duke shrugged irritably. “He fell off the world. Then, this afternoon, he fell back on. Beyond that, I cannot say.”
He sighed within himself, waiting for Berne’s needles to begin their pricking. He couldn’t even retaliate: Berne’s Cats had done their job. Even though the Aktiri had escaped, Ma’elKoth knew where they were and could reach out his hand and take them when he chose, and the thaumaturge who had protected them was even now on the altar of the Iron Room.
The King’s Eyes, on the other hand, had uncovered no trace of Caine. It had been left to the elvish whoremistress of Alien Games to do his job for him. Berne was far too childish to resist such an opening, he believed, but now the Count surprised him. He took a place at the window beside Toa-Sytell, leaning with his palms on the sill and staring blindly out over the crowds that packed Gods’ Way.
“There aren’t any words . . .” Berne near-whispered. “There just aren’t any words to say how much I hate that man.”
Toa-Sytell stared at Berne’s profile—no longer flawless with the swollen bend of his broken nose, his face painted bloody rose by the setting sun—and was astonished to find within his breast a sudden flash of sympathetic fellow feeling. “Perhaps Ma’elKoth will let you kill him, now.”
“I hope so. I hope so. But . . .” He turned to Toa-Sytell and shrugged fluidly. “I don’t know. I’m worried, y’know? I have a feeling that there’s too much going on that I don’t know about. I have a feeling things are out of control. Not just for me: for us. For everybody.”
Toa-Sytell studied him for the millionth time, but it seemed as though he’d never really seen Berne before. Berne had come through the destruction of Knights’ Bridge without so much as a bruise—only a few now neatly stitched scratches from the knives of that girl he’d killed—a reminder of the power of Ma’elKoth that defended him, a reminder that here was the favorite of the Emperor. His masculine beauty, his powerful build and pantherish grace, all these were familiar to Toa-Sytell; new to his searching eye was this unexpected depth of concern for Ma’elKoth, perhaps concern for the Empire itself. Yesterday, even this morning, Toa-Sytell would have wagered his immortal soul that Berne was incapable of the very feeling that he now fleetingly displayed.
He had, during this week, wondered how much of Berne’s hatred for Caine might spring from jealousy, from the fear that the assassin might be replacing him in Ma’elKoth’s personal affections. Now he wondered how much of his own contemptuous malice toward Berne might have been prompted by the same petty emotion; after all, until Berne had been created Count and given command of the Grey Cats a few months ago, Toa-Sytell himself had been the Emperor’s closest advisor and confidant.
How peculiar, he thought, that I, who make a profession of knowing the minds of men, should be such a mystery to myself.
“I have felt this, even as you have,” Toa-Sytell said, coming to a sudden decision. “Berne, we have never been friends. I do not believe we ever will be. What I do believe is that we have spent too much time and energy bickering and backstabbing each other—jealous like rivals in romance—and the rift between us has given aid to the enemy. We each serve the Emperor in our own way; let us try to be content with that. Let there be peace between us.”
He held out his hand. Berne stared at it as though it were some alien thing, then shrugged and took it.
“All right,” he said. “Peace.”
Berne turned again to the window, staring moodily toward the sliver of sun still visible above the horizon. “But we have to do something about Caine. I thought, y’know, I thought that him disappearing like that . . . Well, I thought if he ever turned up again, Ma’elKoth would just let me take his head. But when I told him that sub bitch in Alientown had claimed his head-price, he laughed—that kind of rich-uncle laugh he has, you know what I mean—and told me to have him sent to the Iron Room, alone, as soon as he arrives. I think Ma’elKoth likes him, y’know? And maybe it’s more than that, too. There’s something between them that I don’t understand, something deep.”
Toa-Sytell nodded. “I agree. I recall Ma’elKoth saying only last week that he’d give Caine to you. I believe he meant it at the time, but now I do not think he’ll ever do it. Have you watched him at the Great Work?”
“All the different Caines he keeps trying to fit in there?”
“Yes. Since that night on the Dusk Tower, images of Caine have been his only subject. The first evening Caine spent here, Ma’elKoth spent the entire night examining him magickally. Since then, his obsession has only grown. Caine has taken over nearly his entire attention; it’s excessive, and inexplicable.”
“I should have killed him at Alien Games,” Berne said distantly, staring out the window.
“I agree,” Toa-Sytell said. “But it is too late, now. We must find some way to break this mesmeric hold he has upon Ma’elKoth. To do that, we must discover what it is. How much do you know of Caine’s past?”
Berne shrugged. “Only the same stories that everyone knows. But I’ll tell you where to go for more: the Monasteries.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You know my father’s Monastic? An Exoteric. Well, they’re a little crazy about records. They write everything down; I mean, everything.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that,” the Duke mused. “They’d let me examine these records?”
“Not ordinarily, no—they’re supposed to be secret. But, y’know, the Monasteries might be a little perturbed with Caine right now . . .”
Toa-Sytell leaned against the window to look down into the courtyard’s thickening twilight as he thought about this. Far below, five heavily armed Household Knights stood at ready while a King’s Eye unlocked the cage door of the iron carriage. Torches flared around the courtyard in the gloom. The tiny figure of Caine stepped nonchalantly out into the shadow of the Sen-Dannalin Wall, apparently unmindful of the manacles on his wrists and the steel bilboes that held his ankles.
“Any number of people,” Toa-Sytell murmured thoughtfully, “seem to be a little perturbed with Caine. Come. We’ll await him in the Dusk Tower.”
11
AT DUSK, A company of mounted constables started to sidestep their horses west along Gods’ Way, pushing against the rear ranks of the crowd to force it along from behind. Voices were heard to mutter and complain. Why should they be forced off Old Town just because it was getting dark? Whose rule was that, anyway? Ma’elKoth’s? Why were these vicious bastards pushing so hard?
The street, already crowded, swiftly became choked. Children cried out, crushed between larger adults. Men and women shouted at the mounted officers to ease off, people are getting hurt, but the constable captain was as nervous as any. He wanted the trouble that he knew was brewing to boil over on the north bank, not here in his own district. He ordered his men to press harder. The sooner the streets of Old Town could be cleared of this rabble, the better.
It wasn’t long until the crowd began to push back.
The horses came to a stop against a solid mass of living resistence—human, stonebender, and primal bodies forced together until they might as well have been fused into a single organism. An ogre pried up a cobblestone with its long hooked claws and shied it at the captain, missing widely but giving the rest of the surging crowd an idea.
Rocks began to fly, and the mounted constables now unlimbered stout clubs that rose and fell upon heads and shoulders with cracks like drumbeats.
Someone in the crowd shouted, “Why you beating on us? Why a
ren’t you off protecting us from the damned Aktiri?”
Someone else answered him, “They takes their orders from the damned Aktiri themselves, that’s why! Why not put assfuck Ma’elKoth to the question, eh?”
The captain snapped swift orders that this treasonous agitator was to be arrested at once, but no one seemed to have seen him. Now other voices joined a growing chorus. “Aktir! Aktir! Put Ma’elKoth to the question!”
The first two speakers, the questioner and the answerer, were Subjects of Cant. They elbowed their way toward the mouth of a nearby alley, well satisfied with their work, encouraging the crowd that they shoved through with a simple chant: “Ak-tir, Ak-tir!” Voices echoed them, then took over of their own accord as the two slipped away.
The chant of the crowd grew, swelled dangerously: “Ak . . . TIR! Ak . . . TIR!” and they pushed against each other’s backs, surging against the line of horses, forcing them to retreat step by step along Gods’ Way.
Once the crowd realized that it had the power to move in this direction, it became unstoppable.
The captain could have pulled back his troops in an orderly retreat and maintained some control of the situation. He could have ordered his men to attack full force, slain a few in the crowd with club and sword, and perhaps broken the rising spirit. He did neither. Young and inexperienced, he dithered, shouting at his men to hold the line, for it seemed to him that he had no other option. Retreat equaled disgrace, and he felt he could not order his men to slaughter the folk they were sworn to defend. He hesitated, and was lost.
One of the constables was suddenly pulled from his horse; he vanished under the fists and pounding feet of the crowd around him. A roar went up like a great carnivorous beast giving tongue at the scent of blood.
A simple shift in perspective, an epiphanic flash of a shared singleness of purpose, and the crowd was no longer a crowd, was no longer a mass of individuals who chanced to stand together on this street on this day. Each man, each woman, dwarf and elf, ogrillo and sprite, had all become single cells in some massive hive mind, almost a single organism—an organism that was hungry.
In seconds another constable was down, then another. And then the company had broken, and they turned to flee under a pursuing hail of flying cobblestones and jeers.
When full darkness fell, the mob owned the street. The flames of buildings would be its sun, and the stores of the rich would be its table.
It was hungry, and it had all night in which to feed.
12
TWO HOUSEHOLD KNIGHTS pushed him ahead of them into the Shifting Room, and one of them yanked the bellpull for the ninth floor before joining the others within. A whip crack came faintly up the shaft, followed by a slow-oiled creak of rope as the ogres below pushed against the donkey wheel and the Shifting Room began to rise.
Caine rode it silently, hands clasped behind his back, avoiding the eyes of the soldiers around him. For their part, they watched him intently, occasionally licking nervous sweat from their upper lips, hands moist on the hilts of their scabbarded shortswords. They knew him by reputation and were taking no chances. Once he jangled the chains of his manacles, just to watch them jump; they did not disappoint him. He chuckled dryly, without humor.
He felt too old to laugh.
Old and frightened: not for himself, not fear for his own life. He’d always known he’d die on Overworld. He’d had a few days to get used to the idea of dying soon, dying now, dying like Talann, like the priest of Rudukirisch at the Ritual of Rebirth; dying because he was utterly overmatched.
He was afraid he was going to screw up, somehow.
On the sand at the Brass Stadium he could act without hesitation because he’d seen his goal before him, solid in front of his eyes, and the path between where he was and where he needed to be was physical, was an actual expanse of dirt and stone.
But now, though his goal burned like the sun before his eyes—Shanna, safe on Earth—the path from here to there was only a thick fog of possibility. He was vastly too far from his goal to choose the safe path toward it, and deep within his chest he knew that there was only one that threaded through to Shanna’s life, one among a million choices. Even that single safe trail was lined with quicksand and pits full of sharpened stakes, and it was patrolled by monsters that hungered for her life.
Inch toward daylight, he told himself, along with his other subsurface mantras: Pretend you know what you’re doing. Never let them see you sweat.
The thick-beamed ninth floor slid down across the doorway of the Shifting Room and stopped; two more Household Knights met his keepers at the door. The first soldier to get out had to step up, but the room lifted a few inches when each man left it. By the time Caine came out they had to help him down. The steel bar between the bilboes that held his ankles wouldn’t let him take that large a step.
They exchanged passwords with the guards who stood by the door to the Dusk Tower, then stooped to remove the shackles from his legs. It was a long climb up spiral stairs.
Going up with two soldiers in front of him and two behind, Caine slowly became aware of a smell up there, an electric scent of charged metal that brought a bitter tang to the back of his throat. As they came closer to the top, to the open door, he also caught a whiff of sulphur and decay, like a corpse half mummified by the fumes from a volcanic fissure.
Two men stood in the room at the top of the stairs, sidelit by a languidly wavering lamp flame, watching him approach: Toa-Sytell and—
“Hey, Berne,” Caine said, faking cheerful mockery. “I wondered what the smell was.”
“Keep laughing, goatfucker,” Berne replied evenly. “Your turn’ll come.”
“That’s what my mother always said.”
Toa-Sytell spoke colorlessly to the lead soldier. “Unbind his hands.”
The soldier frowned. “You’re sure—?”
“Ma’elKoth wills it so. Free him and go.”
The soldier shrugged and unlocked the manacles, then he and the others trooped away down the stairs. Caine listened to them go while he made a show of picking the shreds of skin off his wrists, where they’d been scraped by the manacles’ rough edges.
“Where have you been, these past two days?” Toa-Sytell demanded.
Caine ignored him, walking to the window and peering out. Clouds had come in with the twilight, and now they took on a ruddy glow from the fires beneath. Far-off shouts came clearly on the wind, and in some of them he could hear the faint chant “Ak-tir . . . Ak-tir . . .”
The Subjects were holding up their end of the bargain; if only he could find a bare chance to hold up his own . . .
“Nice view,” he said.
“I want an answer,” Toa-Sytell said, with more heat than Caine had ever heard from him.
Caine turned and sat against the windowsill, regarding the shadowed, backlit faces of his enemies. “Here’s news, Duke. I don’t have to tell you shit. You can get your answers from Ma’elKoth, if he feels like giving them.”
Berne took a step forward, his hand creeping up his chest toward where the hilt of Kosall projected above his shoulder. “You little fuck. I should kill you right now.”
“You look kinda stiff, Berne. Did Talann cut you a couple times?”
Berne’s pale eyes darkened dangerously, but his voice came out light. “Was that her name? She died before she could tell me. Her last words were ‘Please, please, Berne, fuck me like an animal.’ ”
Caine shook his head and fought to make his snarling bared teeth look like a smile. “You’re such a baby. It’s a shame I can only kill you once.”
Berne took another step forward. Caine grinned and lifted his hands, turning them this way and that as though displaying jewelry. “Too late. You should have done me while my arms were still tied. You might have had a chance.”
He poised himself bonelessly against the windowsill. One wild lunge from Berne, and Caine was fairly certain he could topple the sonofabitch right out the window at his back. Let’s see how that Bu
ckler of yours works when you hit the street at terminal velocity.
Toa-Sytell laid a gently restraining hand on Berne’s arm. “Answers from Ma’elKoth?” he said. “Are you saying that Ma’elKoth knows? That my search has been a, some kind of a, an entertainment? Is this merely for amusement, or part of some larger game?”
Hey, why not? Caine thought, confusion to the enemy. “Don’t get pissy, Toa-Sytell. God, you may have heard, moves in mysterious ways.”
“He’s playing you,” Berne said. “Ma’elKoth doesn’t work like that. He’s always been straight with us, and you know it.”
Caine looked from one to the other. Berne and Toa-Sytell have suddenly become an “us”?
That alone was enough to twist his stomach even tighter.
He nodded toward the massive black iron door that dominated the north wall, its cold-worked surface incised with gleaming silver runes. “Ma’elKoth’s in there?”
Berne smirked. “He’s not the only one—”
Toa-Sytell hissed him to silence. “Let him learn for himself.”
Caine’s mouth went dry and chill as though he breathed a wind across an arctic desert. Blood sang in his ears. “Pallas . . .” he murmured, and for the stretching eternity between one thundering beat of his heart and the next, all the rational parts of his mind were driven off by the bloody imagery of half-forgotten tales of the Iron Room.
There wasn’t a tavern in Ankhana, maybe not one in the Empire, where you couldn’t raise a pleasing shiver and goose bumps on a warm night just by mentioning its name. The knots in his guts would have been far less tight if he’d learned they’d put her in the Theater of Truth.
On the other hand, the thought of walking in there himself didn’t bother him at all, not if going there gave him the shadow of a chance to help her.
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