He pushed a filled shotglass along the bar at Ka'an. "So tell me. If being immortal is such a pain in the ass, how come you're so keen on coming back?"
"Why should I explain myself to a mortal?" Ka'an sneered.
"Okay, you need to get over that. Because obviously you can't just squish me, like you thought you could. I'm as tough as you are. My guess is that I'm a lot tougher. See, you had all that ammunition, you had all that skill and time, you did this a bunch of times before, and I came into it totally raw. But here I am. And there you are."
"If you count stalemate as such a victory --"
"Nah, we can fire it up again anytime. I'm just curious. Aren't you curious?"
"No." Ka'an spat the word contemptuously.
"Point for me: reason to live. Oh, now you're mad at me."
"I am rage, Ghost. You will learn that soon."
"Point for me. Kept my cool. What are we playing to? Three? You wanna drink that, gin's nasty when it's warm."
Ka'an's eyes narrowed. "Very well. You've chosen the game. My move: I submit that you're too weak to survive the power you seek. Your mortal mind can't possibly encompass the immensity of pain and pleasure that is my lot. It would break you."
"Doubt it."
"You tasted just the merest hint of what I --"
"You're bluffing. I got into that pretty deep. I think I saw the whole thing. What do you want, you want me to feel sorry for you?"
The air rippled around Ka'an as the god's anger swelled. "Pity is also a weakness," he said, tight and low.
And Kieran suddenly understood. "Shit, you do want that."
"I'll waste no more time here!" Ka'an pushed, but could not change the dream.
"You do want someone to feel sorry for you. Poor pitiful critter, he's had such a hard ten thousand years. Oh poor me, nobody loves me. Look at you getting pissed at me, you're just proving I'm right!"
"I am holy," Ka'an hissed, swelling larger, glowing. "I am sacred. No one may touch me!"
"You know what? You don't deserve my sympathy! In all those bazillions of lives you showed me, you never had the balls to break loose. You believed your own press. You made slaves of people, and then you feel all put-upon because no one could comfort you. And you're still doing it. Look, here I am right in front of you, the only person who could possibly know you for who you are, and you're trying to kill me for it. And then if you managed that, you'd just go on with your pity party. 'Oh I'm so lonely, oh I'm so high above everyone.' It's your own damn fault, Ka'an. Fucking get over it."
The god was all teeth and eyes now, snarling. "You have no concept of what true pain is."
"Yeah?" Kieran felt his own face going feral too. "Try this on."
His hand shot out and grabbed Ka'an's head, driving a path through between them, and down that connection he poured his life.
Ka'an cried out in disgust, then in anger, then in dawning fear. Kieran sent him image after image of squalor, degradation, and pain. But he didn't send it to show how sad his life had been.
There was no self-pity in it. After each beating, each rape, each hungry day and freezing night, each trick, each loss, he got up and kept going. Out of pure stubbornness, pure lust for life, he pushed himself onward. And bit by bit, he forced his way from defense to offense. He made himself strong. He made himself hard and cruel. He took what he needed, got rid of whatever blocked him. He was very close to being evil, when he first met a pair of pale blue eyes behind smeared glasses.
Ka'an's struggling weakened, uncertain. This was not pain. The hurts that came after this were small compared to much of what he'd suffered before. He didn't understand why he was being shown this.
Then he began to think again that it was all about pain after all, when Kieran dragged him through being shot, the sickness and festering wound, helpless under the shadow of death. And then came the memory of dying. When the two of them together looked down on Ash's grief, Ka'an ready to leave the body behind, Kieran unwilling to abandon the one person who had ever come anywhere near knowing him.
And Kieran had won. They wouldn't be here now if he hadn't.
Kieran released his enemy, watched the spirit's image reel and clutch the imaginary bar. "Get it now?"
Pulling himself upright, Ka'an glared, speechless. Lost.
"Do you know why I won, that first time?"
In a growl, Ka'an said, "I suppose you'll tell me it was because someone loved you, and no one loved me."
"You've got it backwards. I won because I love someone, and you never loved anyone. Not even yourself. That's why I'll always win. Because I give a damn, and you don't. You'd surrender the first chance you got, if you could get past your pride."
"You don't know what I want." Ka'an's voice faltered.
"Actually, I do. You've been waiting all this time for someone to say: You're done now, kid. You don't have to be holy anymore. You did your job, it's time to quit."
"And you'd take my place? You'd do my work? No one will thank you. They don't understand that they need me."
"They don't need you, Ka'an. They don't need me either. Doesn't mean I can't help without being asked. No, I won't be the Prince of Pain. The Dreamer can rest now." He offered his hand.
The former god's voice was thinner now, his shape fading. "What will you be?"
"Human."
"My enemy..." Just a whisper.
"I'll get him. Trust me."
Ka'an's form was just a blur now, the hand he reached to Kieran's little more than a wisp. The murmur of his voice was almost inaudible. "I was beautiful..."
"Yes. You were."
With a sound like a sigh, the last resistance gave way. The fragment of smoke that was all that was left of Ka'an flowed over Kieran. For a breath's time it clung there. Then it was gone.
--==*==--
He took a deep breath, waking. Aches washed over him; heat, thirst, hunger. The sun stood overhead, burning down hard. There was no wind. The sterile lake was smooth as glass.
But he could feel the power inside him. So much power. All marshaled and ready to do whatever he wanted. It was exhilarating. He could almost see how having this power had made up for Ka'an's misery, made him hang onto it through life after life. For a moment he regretted it, a little
-- having killed something that old, that strong.
That full of pride and malice.
No, he didn't wish he hadn't done it.
He closed his hand around the bullet that hung at his throat. Gave it a little power and felt it pull.
Pretty much due east. I'm coming, Ashes. Don't you worry about a thing.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
"Quit worrying and hold still."
"They're very busy out there, Ash." Chaiel kept twisting his head around as if he could see.
Maybe he could. It wasn't helping, though.
"And I would be very busy in here, if you would hold still. And control your hair, would you?
Tie it in a knot or something."
With a wordless grumble, Chaiel tried to obey. In the process, he threw them both off balance.
Ash curled up as he fell, to avoid a repeat of the incident that had given him a bloody nose a few hours back. As a result, it was Chaiel who got an elbow in the eye. Chaiel reacted by howling and thrashing for a while. Ash was getting really tired of this. He believed he'd punch the kid out if he didn't need him for a stepstool. He considered that maybe it was time to voice this thought.
"I'm not really a violent person," he said quietly into a lull in Chaiel's tantrum. The lull didn't last, but he kept talking. "Normally, I'd try to calm you down in a much nicer way. But Kieran is on his way here. From what you said, Thelyan is more than ready for him. Which means he's going to need my help. Is this making sense to you? There are things going on that are a lot more important than your stupid eye. So if you don't pull it together here, I'm going to give you a matching shiner, and then I'm going to hurt you some more after that. Are you getting this at all?"
Cha
iel's complaining turned into laughing. "You know we don't have a chance. Nothing can get out of this thing, don't you understand? Nothing can get in or out. Thelyan had a long time to design this -- this torture device -- and you think you're going to break it in a matter of hours."
"Yes, actually, I do."
Chaiel laughed harder.
"Look, it's just math. You've heard of math, right? It's that stuff you do with numbers?"
"It's not math, it's magic!"
"Same thing. You don't have to understand it, okay? Just trust me."
"Trust. Trust? Trust you!" The kid's laughter was increasingly hysterical. "Why should I trust you?"
Ash felt his face harden. Though it took some doing, he collected Chaiel's wrists in one hand and a fistful of hair in the other, and brought the thrashing creature to a halt.
"Because," he said carefully, "it costs you nothing to do so. If hope hurts that much, be bored.
Stand there smiling your superior little smile and telling yourself how funny it's going to be when I give up. Now do something with your goddamn hair and give me a lift again."
Calmer now, Chaiel sniffled and met his eyes. "You don't get it. I do think you can do it. I just don't think you can do it in time. And when Ka'an dies --"
"Kieran won. I felt it."
"Then when Kieran loses to Thelyan, you're going to give up. Then I'll be stuck here knowing you could get us out but you won't try."
"That's the kind of person you think I am? Let me explain how you're wrong. Thing one, Kieran's going to win. Thing two, I am going to get it in time, if you cooperate. Thing three, if Kieran loses and I don't get it in time, I'm going to bust out anyway so I can take it out of Thelyan's hide.
And finally, you could do this yourself if you'd just pay attention to what I'm telling you. This magic is math. It all is, if you look at it right. I just have to figure out what kind."
"And then you'll, what, subtract it?"
Ash sighed. "If you like. Here, let me do that for you, you're just getting yourself tangled." He spun Chaiel around and collected the ridiculous length of his hair. It was too matted to braid, and too long; he couldn't separate the strands with his arms at their full stretch, there was that much of it. So he settled for twisting it into a rope so he could tie knots in it. As he worked at that, he sensed Chaiel calming; apparently more visions were coming, and these weren't incoherent enough to set him off. "What are you seeing?" Ash asked, more to keep him present than because the answer mattered.
"Oh, he's figured out how to go invisible. That's sort of clever."
"Who has?"
"Who do you think? The Dreamer, whatever you want to call him now."
"Invisible? I didn't think that was possible."
"Not invisible. You can still see him. But they can't sense him. They don't know he's coming."
"Who can't sense him?"
"Watchmen. It looks as if Thelyan sent them out to the end of the line to get near the Burn, but I guess he's recalled them now because they're getting back on the train."
"There's a rail line that goes there?"
"Didn't I just say there was? Within a dozen miles anyway. Oh bugger." Chaiel bit the base of his thumb as a stutter of confusion ran through him. The visions had switched.
Much as Ash would have liked to keep hearing what Kieran was up to, it sounded as if things were well in hand on that end, and there was the little matter of the null sphere to deal with. He tied one more knot and let go of the now more localized mess of hair. "Okay, let's get to work."
Chaiel sighed unhappily, but he cooperated. They put the soles of their feet together and slowly, carefully stood up. It was a very strange feeling, the way the sphere pulled them together. It made them topheavy, and every movement swung and spun them around their common axis.
Reaching their hands above their heads, they stretched out until they could press their palms against the sphere's surface. That stabilized them a little.
It was slippery as a repelling magnet, though. Ash couldn't give it his whole attention, because he had to keep adjusting his posture to keep in contact with it. This would be a long piece of work even if he'd been able to concentrate fully. Seeing it as a cipher had been a simplification. The math used to break code was fairly elementary, once one knew the methods. This was a deeper kind of equation. It balanced inside and outside so perfectly that from within it seemed there was no outside. Almost as if it declared that the whole of the universe was inside the bubble.
Presumably, from outside, the inside was the part that didn't exist. But from its own point of view, the skin of the bubble didn't exist, which was why it couldn't be affected, at least not directly.
What gave him a hope of breaking it was the fact that it had intermediate states. Thelyan had left it in one of these, so that light could pass. Currently, the defining equation was ignoring light.
From what Chaiel had said, it had variables for sound as well, and for objects to pass through. It also had a repelling effect, which accounted for the way they were pushed toward the center.
Ash had read a theory once, in a book about fluid dynamics, that sound propagated through air by means of vibration. Following that thought, he supposed that in order to pass sound, the sphere wouldn't have to allow air through, provided it acted as a resonating membrane.
Which meant that the sphere itself was an object. It didn't have mass or thickness, but because it could be made to transmit vibrations, it could be treated as a solid object in some cases. Because it didn't have a thickness, it was a two-dimensional object, despite being spherical. Ash wished desperately for something to write on. He was starting to think that resonant effects were going to be the key, though. That and the fact that in order to do its job, the sphere had to balance its input and output exactly.
"Well?" Chaiel sounded impatient.
"Can you analyze a deterministic system?"
"A what?"
"Then I suggest you shut up and let me work."
Chaiel gave a haughty sniff, but didn't reply. Narrowing his eyes, and his field of mental vision as well, Ash dived back into his task.
--==*==--
Crouched behind a pile of broken ore carts, Kieran examined his options.
There were Watchmen swarming all over the place. He'd crunched his pattern down small to keep them from sensing him, but they'd certainly see him if he came out. Which was a problem, because he'd have to come out if he wanted to get on the train.
A number of methods of transport had occurred to him. He could do the really fast running thing again, but he didn't like it. The sun was high now and the air shimmering hot. He wasn't sure he could keep from overheating. It had crossed his mind to summon another storm, let the rain cool him, but he wasn't sure he could get one together in under a day. Whatever he'd done before seemed to have undone itself.
Stealing a horse would be worse than useless; it would mean confronting these Watchmen, for one thing. Powerful as he felt, he hadn't lost sight of the fact that every fight was a gamble. Then he could ride the horse to death within a dozen miles if he was unlucky, which would leave him right back at square one.
So he'd hit on the idea of hopping a train. A train would be ideal. Faster than the other options, with the added benefit that rail interference would hide his approach. The Splitwood mine's spur was the nearest track to the Burn -- or the place where the Burn had been -- and he guessed that there must be a regular run from there to either Burn River or Trestre. The right direction, anyway. Once aboard, it wouldn't be hard to stick a gun in the engineer's face and make him go take the Churchrock loop instead.
But there were these Watchmen. They'd corralled the mine workers and shunted all the mining company's engines off on a siding. They had an engine of their own, a handsome sleek thing with nothing behind it but three passenger cars, but even if Kieran could manage to steal the thing he'd have to pick up its crew as well. He had no idea how to drive a train.
He ruefully examined hi
s gun. Removing the jammed round was easy enough, but poor thing was just a mess, what with mud and water and dust, and he didn't have anything to clean it with.
Not to mention how he didn't trust his ammunition. And while he'd managed not to lose his spare magazines, his pockets had been full of mud.
Crouching down, he peered through a space between two of the rusty carts. After a moment he cautiously poked his head up for a moment to confirm what he'd seen. Most of the Watchmen, a couple dozen of them, were getting back on the train. A few still stood outside, conferring. Under the direction of one of the officers, a mining company engineer was throwing switches.
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