“I may do that, even yet.” Ma’elKoth laid a hand on Berne’s shoulder. “The tale he brought to Me is a convincing one; it fits every fact, and he had an answer for every question. This alone would make Me suspicious: only fictions tally so neatly. Life is less orderly.”
He turned majestically, a ship of the line tacking against the wind, and drifted over to the altar. He looked down on the still, blank face of Pallas Ril, and his hand extended to absently stroke her eyelids closed.
“And I have reason to doubt the word of Caine already,” he went on. “His plan, however, suits My purposes so well that I wonder at it: a tremendous gain for no risk at all. It may be that he is true. I accept the possibility, but I do not rely upon it.” He looked up, and the sleepy cast of his musing cleared from his face; he fixed Berne with a stare of sudden intensity.
“Give me your knife.” Ma’elKoth held out his hand; Berne pulled his dagger from its sheath and handed it to Ma’elKoth without hesitation. The dagger was dwarfed by Ma’elKoth’s hand as he raised it to the level of his eyes; it looked like a pocketknife. “The net that I gave to Caine—as I lifted it from the floor I put my mark upon it.”
His eyes glowed green. He smothered the dagger in his fist, staring at it with transcendent concentration. The dagger shone with the emerald reflection of Ma’elKoth’s eyes. When the light faded from his face, the dagger still glimmered faintly. He handed it back to Berne, who cradled it gingerly, savoring the remnants of Ma’elKoth’s touch in the warmth of its hilt.
“Point this dagger toward Caine, and it shall grow warm within your hand and shine green to the eye. Follow him, and learn his purpose. Take a team of Cats with you. If you should see a chance to capture or kill the King of Cant or any of his followers, take it. Do not follow too closely. I cannot spare a Cloak, as all My energies must bend toward calling the thunderstorm.”
“I’ll do it, Ma’elKoth,” Berne said, clutching the dagger as though it were the symbol of his oath. “You know you can count on me.”
“I do know that, Berne. I rely upon it.” Ma’elKoth turned away, and Berne’s gaze slid onto the naked body of Pallas Ril. The vacant look in her eyes, the bruises that covered her slim form, the bloodstained bandage that bound her breasts, even the chains that tied her hand and foot to the altar—Berne had never seen anything so erotic in his life. He wanted her so badly that it squeezed the breath from his lungs.
“Ahh, Ma’elKoth?”
“Yes, My son?”
“When you’re done with Pallas, can I have her? I mean,” he said hastily, “I caught her, after all. It’s only fair.”
“Mmm, yes. Yes, it is: only fair.”
16
“CAINE’S BACK ON-LINE.”
Kollberg came bolt upright like a hound scenting game. “How long was he off?”
“One hour, seven minutes, Administrator.”
“Perfect, perfect.” He leaned forward with a glance at the soapies; they’d finally sat, a couple of hours ago, in the chairs he’d provided. Neither one was moving. For all he could tell, they might be fast asleep.
The POV screen at the end of the techbooth was lit with the view inside the iron carriage. No Soliloquy, yet. Caine spoke offhandedly with a man Kollberg recognized as that Toa-Sytell guy, the Duke. There were two other men inside the carriage; they wore the uniforms of Household Knights. Caine kept glancing out the barred window at the fires on the streets and the people that ran back and forth—some armed, many bleeding, some carrying boxes and barrels and jugs, some savagely attacking the thieves to steal their loot for themselves.
“This is good,” Kollberg whispered. “They’re taking him right through the middle of the riot. I’m loving this . . . Damn, Caine, I knew I could count on you. I knew it.”
Kollberg giggled out loud at the blank shock and horror on the faces of the Household Knights when Caine’s manacles dropped off. He produced a tiny blade from somewhere, a small hooked knife that he held to the throat of the Duke.
“Kill him,” Toa-Sytell snarled. “Never mind me. Don’t let him get away! That’s an order!”
“Yeah, go ahead,” Caine told them. “Then who’ll be left alive to tell Ma’elKoth it was an order? You think he’ll believe you? Open the damned door and step aside.”
The Household Knights were in no mood to take chances with their lives. They opened the door, and Caine dragged Toa-Sytell backward into the riot. The Knights who rode guard on the carriage shouted in surprise as the two tumbled to the street, but they were no more adventurous than the ones inside. Caine and his hostage were able to back into a nearby alley.
“Is this far enough?” Toa-Sytell asked softly.
“Yeah. I practically grew up here. They’ll never catch me.”
“All right.” Toa-Sytell suddenly started to struggle and shout. He wormed his way loose from Caine’s grip, yelling for the Knights. Caine kicked him to the ground. He stood over him with the knife raised, long enough for the Knights to see him there as they charged toward him from the carriage, then turned and fled into the red-shadowed darkness of the alley.
Kollberg chuckled to himself as Caine dodged through the riot. All his jitters, all his bitter determination to destroy Caine, all the back-of-the-neck pressure of the soapies in the booth, all was forgotten. This was shaping into a spectacular Adventure.
No corner of Old Town was calm that night; from everywhere came shouts, sounds of fighting, and the splintering crash of breaking glass and pottery. Trust Caine to find a way to stir things up—that was, on reflection, perhaps his greatest talent. He skipped around a storefront where an embattled platoon of regular infantry struggled to hold off a mob of several hundred rock-throwing citizens; even as he passed, someone set fire to the building where the platoon had made their fort.
Caine slipped inside a nearby pissoir and startled a miserably squatting townsman when he splintered the mucker-shaft door away from its locking hasp with a strong side kick. He slid down the mucker-shaft ladder and found the concealed door at the shaft’s base that let him into the caverns below the city. A moment of digging in a pocket produced Kierendal’s lighter; its wavering flame provided enough illumination for him to keep a steady pace.
He filled in backstory as he walked silently through the caverns, rolling out imagery with his usual skill. There was an odd note to it, though, and Kollberg sat up straighter and cocked his head like a spaniel, trying to listen more closely, trying to determine what the unfamiliar element was. Something just slightly strained, a tiny bit stilted . . . Ahh, that was it.
Kollberg smiled satisfaction to himself. Caine was overcontrolling his Soliloquy. That’s what had caused the change. He must be making a conscious effort to leave out anything that might be controversial, so of course it didn’t flow with his usual free-associating style.
Kollberg smiled in spite of the lessened quality of the entertainment: he smiled because he had Caine running scared. On the other hand, he thought, he might be leaving out something else, as well. . . Where had that thought come from? Did he really think Caine was concealing something? What could he possibly be hiding? Kollberg smiled at himself again: this was purely the natural paranoia of the perfectionist.
Here and there in the caverns, the flicker of firelight reflected on rock came distantly to Caine’s eyes. He circled wide of several such places where the murmur of distant voices blended with the blurred plash of water, seeping through the limestone and dripping into pools below. He crept past a couple more where going wide would have taken him into unfamiliar places. In the knotted three-dimensional maze of caverns below the city, a wrong turn could possibly have required hours or days to correct. Finally he came upon one toward which he walked boldly. Three men who looked like beggars and one in the painted mail of a Knight of Cant lounged around a small fire built on the naked rock.
They didn’t seem overly concerned at Caine’s approach. He identified himself and exchanged brief recognition signals with them, and they nodded him alon
g on his way. As he passed he said softly, “Could be unfriendlies on my tail. Be wary. You might even want to clear out.”
The Knight rose to his feet with confident ease, one hand on the hilt of his shortsword. “Want them stopped?”
“No. I don’t want anybody hurt. Just be alert, is all.”
He left them there and found a mucker shaft nearby; he climbed out of the caverns through a pissoir and into the firelit night of the Industrial Park.
He kept as close to the shifting blue-black shadows as he could and still move at speed. The streets could be deserted at one moment, then an instant later flood with shouting, struggling, looting mobs. At the mouth of an alley he tried to duck into, he was accosted by a pair of men brandishing broadswords. “Declare yourself!”
“Declare myself what?”
A sword point came perilously near his throat. “Are you for the Emperor or the damned Aktiri?”
“Loyalists, huh? You boys are in for a bad night, I think.”
While the loyalist tried to decide which side that meant Caine was on, Caine leaned around his point, grabbed his wrist, and twisted the blade out of his hand. His weight already shifted, he was able to stop the shout of the other with a whipping heel to the jaw. He let the momentum of the kick carry him around in a tight circle that ended by braining the first loyalist with the flat of his own blade. The blade quivered in his hand and sprang back straight, not bent: a decent grade of steel. “Huh,” he said. “Not bad.”
He held on to the blade as he dodged into the dark-shadowed alley away from the downed loyalists, even as they gathered breath to plead for their lives.
He loped through the streets, avoiding trouble and skirting crowds of any size or description, and finally arrived at a darkened apartment block that looked vaguely familiar to Kollberg. A quick glance at the on-screen telemetry assured him that this was Caine’s destination: his adrenal production had soared, and his heart rate was ramping up toward redline. A door hung slack from a single hinge. Caine went in and up two flights of darkened stairs.
At their top he called out a soft repetition of the recognition signal he’d given to the Subjects in the caverns and got a low-voiced response from the shadows beyond. He stepped out into the hall to find two Knights.
“Majesty sent me. He wants you both back at the stadium right now.”
The Knights exchanged a dubious glance. “I, uh, I dunno,” one of them said. “We’re supposed to stay here unless Majesty tells us personal, y’know?”
“He’s a little busy right now. Maybe you’ve noticed?”
“Sorry, Baron,” the other said. “He was pretty clear on this.”
Caine sighed and spread his hands in a gesture of surrender. “All right. It’s like this. I need to have a talk with our boy Lamorak in there. This’ll be the kind of talk that you don’t want to be witnesses to, you follow? Head back for the stadium and just pretend you believed me about the phony message. Majesty’ll understand.”
“But, but I don’t think—”
“I’m telling you, Majesty will understand. He wouldn’t expect you to, like, give your lives here,” he said with a significant twitch of the naked blade he held. He paused a moment to make sure they understood him perfectly. “You follow?”
They exchanged another long look and decided that absenting themselves would be the better part of discretion, but Kollberg was no longer paying attention.
Lamorak, he thought, oddly calm and obscurely pleased by his unexpected serenity. This is the safe house in the Industrial Park.
He made a fist and held it upraised, trembling above the emergency transfer switch; the chubby underside of his fist reflected an ominous red in the switch’s glow.
One slip, Caine. Just one—and it doesn’t even have to be from you. Let Lamorak so much as hint at a confession, and my fist shall fall like the Hammer of God.
His liver-colored lips quirked at the image, and he squirmed briefly in the stage manager’s chair, settling his weight in to get comfortable—but he couldn’t, not quite. He itched, here and there; he felt like ants crawled on his skin; and he couldn’t seem to relax his shoulders or slow the sudden racing of his heart.
Just a little while longer, he told himself. It won’t be long now.
17
WHEN I OPEN the door, he’s at the window, staring out, the light from fires in Alientown dancing red across his battered profile. As he starts to turn toward me I spring across the floor and lunge like a fencer; my fleche stops with the broadsword’s point a finger breadth from his throat. He freezes in the act of rising from his chair. I guess that splinted leg of his can now bear some weight.
“Don’t say a word,” I tell him softly. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
Slowly he takes his weight upon his arms and lowers himself back into the chair. Some thoughtful Subject has immobilized his broken jaw with a large bandage knotted on top of his head; he looks like a cartoon baby with a toothache. “Y’not?”
I sigh deep and long, then reverse the sword and offer him the hilt. “No. Try that Dominate, though, and I’ll break another bone in your face, you got it?”
He reaches tentatively for the sword, like a child for candy that it fears will be snatched away. Once his hand closes on the hilt, most of the tension drains out of his shoulders and neck. The relief that smooths his face is so strong I can almost feel it myself.
“Caine . . . Caine, I—”
“I know all about it.” I turn away to light a lamp and set it so its glow will be visible outside. “We’re gonna have words, you and me, back home, but that’s not important now. I know what you’ve done, and I know why.”
His eyes bulge, and the sword point twitches up toward my face as his other hand takes the hilt as well. “I, I, but I—”
“You don’t have to say a word. I’m telling you, I know, and I understand.”
His lower lip quivers. “I never meant for anyone to get hurt—”
“I know. Lamorak, believe me, I know what it’s like—the kind of pressure they can put on you. I’ve been there, all right? I’ve done the same, and I didn’t like it any more than you do.”
Now his eyes start to moisten, and the revulsion in my chest nearly chokes me with the effort to keep it off my face and out of my voice. “Her career . . .” he whines. “Her Adventure—”
I cut in strongly. “The only thing that matters now is prying her loose from Ma’elKoth, all right? Help me now. Help me save her, and nothing else matters. I’ll even make sure that Majesty doesn’t kill you for what you did to him.”
“Caine . . . Caine, that was—”
“I’m telling you, Lamorak, I understand.” What a fucking whiner. “I scared you back in the warehouse the other night. You thought I was going to kill you.”
I give him a shrug and a moderately sheepish half smile. “And I was. Without the recall, you’d be dead, but hey, that was temper, y’know? Once I had time to calm down and think it over, I understood. Listen, we don’t have any more time to waste on this. I need your help.”
“For what? I mean, anything, anything I can do, to make this right, Caine.”
I show him the net, and his eyes fasten on the griffinstones in its hem with naked lust. “I’m running a deep game on Ma’elKoth, and I think the Cats might be tailing me magickally. I need to know, one way or the other; if so, I need to know if the tag’s on me, on my clothes, this knife, this net . . . You get the picture. I can’t have them following me everywhere; it’ll blunt the hook.”
“Tailing you?” he says, alarmed; his gaze skates nervously back toward the street outside.
“Relax. They’re not close. They don’t have to be, if there’s a tag on me.”
“How would they tag you? Where did you get this net?”
“Ma’elKoth.” I chuckle dryly. “Ironic, huh? This morning you tried to get me killed by making Majesty believe that I was working for Ma’elKoth—and I was. I am. Or, at least, Ma’elKoth thinks so.”
&nb
sp; “Damn, Caine . . .” Lamorak says in a tone of awe. “Damn . . .”
“The point is, I have Ma’elKoth convinced that Majesty is Simon Jester, and that he can draw Majesty and the whole Kingdom out of the Warrens by performing a sort of public ritual on Pallas, where he’ll magickally wrench the true identity of Simon Jester out of her in front of twenty thousand people at Victory Stadium.”
“But why would Majesty—?”
“He wouldn’t. But I’ve got Ma’elKoth thinking that Majesty and the Kingdom will be on hand to take a shot at killing him, so Ma’elKoth and Berne are going to load the crowd with Cats and King’s Eyes and soldiers in mufti, to lay in wait for him—but Majesty and the Kingdom won’t be anywhere near the place.”
“So what’s the point?”
I show my teeth. “The point is, Ma’elKoth won’t be there, either. He’s going to run the ritual by remote control, using a Fantasy, to keep himself out of danger. Now, the reason for all these riots today is that Majesty and I, between us, have half the city thinking Ma’elKoth’s an Aktir. Put twenty thousand people in that stadium, and let them watch while I drape that piece of silver netting over Ma’elKoth’s illusionary double.”
It takes him a second or two, but then his eyes widen and his mouth hangs slack. “My god. . .” he murmurs. “My bleeding god . . . The net cuts off the image from the Flow, so it fades and vanishes exactly like an Aktir is supposed to. . .”
“Yeah,” I say warmly. “Nice, huh?”
“All the Cats, officers of the army, thousands of citizens—”
“All the King’s horses and all the King’s men. Yeah. Ma’elKoth’s government goes down in flames. It’ll be a matter of hours until he’s besieged in the Colhari Palace.”
“Caine . . . it’s brilliant. It could actually work.”
“It’s going to work. I have a couple more arrangements to make, and everything will be in place.”
“What about P-Pallas?”
“She’s as safe as possible, right now. Once the fighting starts, I can get her out.”
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