by Del Law
“Mr. Capone.” I say.
“Did you deliver my ship, Beast? Or are you back here with another fucking excuse.” He talks through a stiff jaw, and one side of his face looks slack.
“It’s time, Al," I say. "Time to go."
He takes a deep breath. “That’s Mr. Capone to you, Blackie.”
I tell him the plan.
The corpse road near Sartosh’s home in San Francisco will be our pickup point, I say, after he's talked with his men. He has more resources in Chicago, but it’s the best I can do—the Bay area is some sort of nexus, and the next closest road I know about opens up in Singapore.
I give him a date, three months into his future. I lay out the gold bars on his bed so he can see them. He picks one up and hefts it, thinking.
He sighs. “All right, Beast. I got nothing to lose, I guess. I got a guard here who’ll get the word out. I don’t know if Nitti and Ricca are going to think I’m fucking nuts or what. You come back for me personally in what, a week?”
“A week.”
“I’ll tell them.”
I step out of the cell and onto the road, and I sift through the openings to one a week ahead—something you can only do when working with another world's past, by the way. I’ve never been able to do this for my own world. I pick up the guy I brought along and squeeze back in.
Night again. Capone’s asleep. I wake him, and he sits up, blearily. He stands, and I place the guy into his bed in his place.
“Who’s the poor schmuck?” Capone says. I shake my head.
I take Capone’s hand and step back through into the road, and then we turn to watch. I need to pull him out of the timeline before the shift will happen.
I told Ercan that the timeline is pretty resilient. That’s a bit of an understatement. You can hang around the margins of it if you like, the way Sartosh does, but for the big stuff there’s no changing major world events. I couldn’t, for example, go into Earth’s past and kill Hitler when he was a boy—someone inconsequential would step in, grow a little moustace, and take over.
As we look on, the body in the bed becomes Capone’s body, down to the scar on his lower back, the matted hair, and the syphilis rampaging through his brain. The existing wounds heal and the good news is that the human will live now, at least for a time.
The bad news is he won’t actually have much of a life. Capone leaves prison for the hospital, and the hospital for his house near Mhiahmi Beach.
He’ll be insane from the syphilis and dead from a heart attack within ten years, and he’ll never remember he actually had another name, and came from another world.
“Jesus H. Christ,” says Capone. “Jesus H. fucking Christ.”
• • •
I get Capone back to Ercan’s house by lunchtime and pass him to the Kruks. He’s freaked out and disoriented, and coming face to faces with a Kruk in his first Kirythian hour doesn’t help things, but he’ll calm down soon, I suspect. I find Ercan asleep in the chair under the raised communication cage. There were are dark circles under his eyes from a lack of sleep, blood spots high on his scalp from where the wig feeds, and a plate of some green mushrooms half-eaten on a small table beside him.
I wonder how long Humans are used to staying awake at a stretch, but don’t want to ask. It might make them feel fragile.
I put my hand on the man’s shoulder and he startles awake.
“How did it go?”
Ercan sighs, and then stands and stretches. “Nadrune has Chancellor Aart now. We heard the news in Council. Privately, Chair Shoi is with me, but the other Kerul Council members have voted to sanction me for the podship and the preliminary assault at sea, so what’s that Earth saying? I’m up a shit creek without a boat? They told me to give the podship back, to send you back to Nadrune, and I told them to go fuck themselves. I’ve been specifically instructed to lay low, to do nothing, to take no further action the Family concludes all deliberations and sets final policy on the matter.”
"Mircada said you were good at politics."
"I'm fucking brilliant at politics. So is Nadrune."
“So what do we do?”
Ercan picks a mushroom up off the plate and chews on it. “We keep to our plan, I think. I did make contact with one of the City Councilors, and she’s agreed to meet with us. Is your gangster with us? Can we get the rest of Earth men through today?”
I nod. “Assuming they’re there, yes. I can bring them through at the same spot I brought Capone.”
Ercan offers me a mushroom, and I realize I haven’t eaten for a day. Sometimes you forget with the aether. I take it. It’s pretty bad, but I’m starving. I'm reaching for another one when the knife at my chest chimes.
I draw it and let it the transmission shape around me.
What I see makes my fur stand on end.
It’s Nadrune, standing on the steps of the Chancellor’s Residence. Semper stands off to one side with a Buhr, looking vaguely embarrassed, and behind them is a group of marines in formation.
But it’s Mircada that gets my attention. She stands beside Nadrune with her hands bound.
She looks battered and exhausted, and my heart leaps in my chest.
“Hulgliev,” Nadrune sends. “You cannot hide from me and still carry my sage’s knife. I require your attendance. Kindly join me in my new residence. And come alone, without any of those Kerul people with you.”
Nadrune reaches over, grabs Mircada by the arm and draws her closer. Smoke rises from Mircada's clothes.
“I have spent enough time speaking with these Kerul already,” Nadrune says with a smile.
31: Mircada
“He’ll come? You’re sure of it?” Bakron asks.
“He’ll come. I don’t know how or when. But he’ll come,” she says.
“What makes you so sure?”
Mircada studies the man in the light that comes in through the tall, narrow windows in the tower room. Down below, she can hear the sounds of the Tel Kharan army, running through another tedious drill—the electric crackle of a matrix snapping into place, the hard calls from each of the sergeants or whatever they were berating people into formation. The hiss and clank of their armor.
What would it be like to control all of that, she wonders. What could she accomplish? She absently rubs her arm, where Nadrune’s burns are still sore. She’d like to find out.
“You came to me, Bakron. What makes you so sure?” In the room there isn’t much—a few small tables, some leather chairs. There’s a fire in the grand fireplace and there would be more light, if Bakron’s men hadn’t been overeager in shutting down all of the power grids. What did that buy them, anyway, except inconvenience? They are high up in a tall, spindly tower of the elaborate Chancellor’s Residence, and with the elevator out it’s reached only by a narrow, winding staircase.
Granted, the view is incredible.
If she turns a circle, she can see all the way out to the Mercy in the open sea outside the mouth of the lagoon, the gleaming Alabaster Tower, all of Hadron’s Bane and Hadron’s Lie, the Stellar Downs, the flooding Old City, and a view of the seven residential districts and the ridgeline beyond it where all the super-rich live.
She wonders if Ercan and Blackwell are watching her in return, from one of those telescopes Ercan keeps on his terrace.
The Akarii marine grimaces, and takes another drink of wine from an antique silver goblet. It bends in his grip, and Mircada wonders if he ever takes off that armor of his. He has a ring around his head from where the helmet plastered his long, dark hair to his skull.
He doesn’t reply.
“I’ll tell you what I told Nadrune, then. Talk to your sage—the Hulgliev culture is all about their women. They have very few of them. They’re matriarchal, their whole religion is based around symbols of women, their whole patrimony revolves around ways to protect the female.
"I’ve worked hard to bind that creature to me, physically and mentally. I’m his woman now, Bakron, and he will come to protect m
e.”
Bakron snorts. “If you call that work.”
“I won’t say it’s without its…benefits.” She hates the way her voice sounds now, and how easy the words come.
She is good at negotiating, manipulating, at politics and she knows is, and yet there is a part of her that isn’t so dispassionate, so calculating. Part of her that's still human. For such a large creature with so many sharp edges, Blackwell was a surprisingly careful and delicate man. If she is completely honest with herself, she has to admit that—despite her initial intentions—the binding, if that’s what she’s calling it, has gone a bit both ways.
Even now a part of her wonders where he is and what he is doing. Was he watching? Was he thinking about her?
She puts that line of thinking out of her mind. She’s still her mother’s daughter.
Bakron studies her. From the frank, appraising look in his eyes, she can tell what he’s thinking. He didn’t take a great deal of insight—everything is written right there on his face for her to read.
“So you’ll bring him right to Nadrune’s side, and then you’ll be richly rewarded,” he says.
“Something like that.”
“How richly?”
Mircada studies Bakron, then. She doubles the amount Nadrune has promised, adds a little more, and tells him.
He blinks. Then he takes another gulp of the wine. It was very good wine, brought up from deep in the cellar at the Chancellor’s Residence, some of the Chancellor’s private stores.
Mircada doubts that Bakron is appreciating it just then, though.
“Half again as much.”
“For what, exactly?”
“All I’m asking is to be there.”
“Be there?” Mircada frowns.
“When that Beast shows up, I want to know about it. That’s all. Nadrune doesn’t need to know.”
It’s a little more than a small fortune. She’ll change her name and retire somewhere in the southern continent, she thinks. She’ll pay a someone to help her deal with herself.
Mircada’s family has been dirt poor for decades, despite being one of the older Kerul lines. Such a sum could buy them a mansion up next to Ercan’s. It could have paid off all of her father’s massive gambling debts and kept her mother in the latest fashions for years, if she was still speaking to her family.
If they were even alive, something she didn’t spend much time wondering about.
“What makes you think I won’t talk to Nadrune about this little conversation?”
Bakron smiles knowingly. It’s incredibly irritating. “You seem like a practical girl to me. I’m guessing you’re a little more enterprising than that.”
It bothers her that his assessment is accurate. “I will not have him hurt.”
“Your precious Meast.” He frowns and looked away. “Do you think I, too, am a monster?”
“I do.”
Bakron grins. “On Jhestet’s Tits, then, I will make it a fair fight. That is the best I will offer you.”
She figures the odds of Bakron and Blackwell. As aggressive as Bakron is, and as skilled a mage, she didn’t think the marine would be able to stand against Blackwell.
Not from what she’d hear about in that warehouse.
She knows she’s justifying it to herself. It really doesn’t matter whether Blackwell could take Bakron or not, her betrayal is the same. Bad enough she was using Ercan—she had been doing that since Nadrune’s people had approached her a year ago. Worse that she’s gone to Nadrune with the plan for Blackwell, but that was just trading one family for another—after all, hadn’t Ercan's idea been that she’d use herself to bring Blackwell to Kerul in the first place?
She’s just looking for the highest bidder, and that’s been Nadrune up until now.
But selling him to Bakron now is another thing entirely. Nadrune would use Blackwell for her own ends, much the way Ercan might have, though Ercan would be a lot nicer about it.
But Bakron will try and kill him.
Yes, she admits, since she’s being completely honest with herself. Yes, she does care about Blackwell. More than a little.
It was not just the physical side of things. It was the way he looked at her with those large liquid eyes, the way he held her carefully to him. The quick, easy way he laughed with her when they were alone. The simple, uncomplicated sincerity of him underneath all of that fur.
When was the last time she had seen that in a human?
She closed her eyes, finishes her wine. Then she agrees to Bakron’s price.
Her mother would have been proud.
Bakron makes his own pass at her at the door, of course. He draws her in with one metal arm, mashes his blunt face against hers, and sticks his tongue in her mouth. All of the hard angles of the armor press painfully against her and his tongue is the size of a cow’s.
She pushes away, and smacks him across the face.
Hard, but not too hard.
He just grins infuriatingly back at her.
32: Blackwell
Before I know it, I’m somehow already in the podship, trying to figure out the controls. I’m cursing and saying something about rescue and my idea is to take the podship and fly it right into the side of the Chancellor’s Residence, where Nadrune is holed up with Mircada. If I hit it hard enough, I’m thinking, maybe the whole crumbling thing will fall over and, hero that I am, I can jump in and pull her out of the rubble.
Like I’ve said, I’m not the best at planning these things.
Fortunately Ercan is smarter than I am. He talks me down. “We need to coordinate this, Blackwell. Do you miss Nadrune’s collar that much?”
“They will kill her if I don’t show, Ercan. You didn’t see the look on Nadrune’s face. I’ve got to go now.”
Ercan frowns. “Mircada can take care of herself for a few more hours. You’re doing exactly what Nadrune wants you to do right now. Don’t you think Nadrune has thought this through? Don’t you think they’re ready for you? We need to come at this a better way.”
“Let me guess. You want to go and talk with the rest of Kerul about what this better way is for a few more days.”
Ercan shakes his head. “We stick to plan. We get your Earth people. We get with Councilor Ghat and see what she’s planning. We coordinate an approach that puts Nadrune where we want her, and then we go and get Mircada.”
“But they’ll …”
He cuts me off. “Mircada is the only leverage Nadrune has on you right now. She’s using her because she wants you very badly, apparently. She’ll wait a few days before doing anything drastic.”
He’s right, of course.
At least I think he’s right.
I take a deep breath. “When can we start?”
“As soon as you get out of that pilot’s seat.”
“Who’s flying?”
Ercan calls over one of the Kruks, the same one who was working communications for him before—I recognize the bright greens and yellows painted across his flanks.
I raise an eyebrow. “A Kruk pilot?”
“I’ve seen the way you fly. How much worse can he be?”
I shrug. He’s got a point. We load up Capone, and we’re in the air in twenty minutes.
It’s night. The Builder’s moon and the Dancer’s moon drift slowly across the sky. We’re trying to stay out of sight, so we surf low over one of the Residential sections, where Festivaal parties are going on. Typical Tamaranth: people are out on rooftops in full costume, dancing and drinking and watching the not-so-distant pyrotechnics. I hear snatches of music playing, get glimpses of elaborate Festivaal masks and bowler hats. People raise up glasses and cheer as we float past them, and I know they have no idea who we are.
Then we’re over the Fan, the bunches of warehouses and commercial areas between the Residential areas and the Old City. Ghat’s district is on the far side of the city, and we have to cross both the Fan and the Old City to get there. Apartment buildings, offices, warehouses—most of these ar
e deserted since they’re likely next on Nadrune’s list. All the canals are flooding too, since the sea wall was blown, and many of the buildings are partially submerging. Some people are on rooftops here, too, though they're looking a lot less festive.
Capone is strapped into the seat next to me. He’s not saying too much, and I’m sure it’s all a lot to take in. He keeps eyeing the brightly-painted Kruk next to him, who’s acting as his nurse. The smaller Kruk, painted in blues and reds, fluffs her mane and eyes him back. I imagine she’s wondering if he needs an undertongue treatment to match the aether-bath she gave him awhile back.
Then we’re skimming over the Commons, which is a big flat lake right now from the flooding. A few Kruk bateaux pole their way across the rising water while humans and Talovians are moving from building to building, salvaging or looting shops—it’s hard to say which, but I can guess. A small spiked whale surfaces below us in the Stellar Downs. I can’t see it from here, but water must be pouring down into the Warrens, most of which is underground. I don’t want to think about how bad that must be. Where would everyone go?
It looks like the Tel Kharan have largely retreated from the streets as they’d begun to fill with water. But the Council Chambers and the vast Chancellor’s Residence are wrapped in bright Akarii warding, and wards shimmer around the gardens and the Alabaster Tower too.
I see another podship lift up into the air, over by the Alabaster Tower.
“Over there,” I say, and point. “Do you think they see us?”
No one answers, because it quickly becomes clear that it’s coming at us now. Coming pretty fast.
The Kruk pilot thrums his undertongue and laughs.
I gulp. “Hang on,” I shout, as the pilot grins wide and flips a switch. He leans over and punches something, an old iPod that’s stuck onto the console, and music blasts into the cockpit, an Earth band called the Sex Pistols.
Then the pilot fluffs up his mane and rockets us up into the sky, leaving my stomach behind.
I look at Ercan. Really, I want to say. A Kruk pilot.