She got up and reached through the bars for it. He followed her and slid an arm around her from behind. Her breasts were small, almost hard as muscle; his other hand slid down the back of her pants, and she shuddered. “That button by your thumb. That’s the clip release. Press it.”
She did, and the clip of tristacks clattered to the floor. “And now?”
“Give it to me and pull down your pants.”
She twisted to face him. “What?”
“Come on.” He gathered her to him and found her blood-smeared lips with his mouth. “Come on. It’s what you like, isn’t it? I’ll hold it on you while I fuck you. I can hold it to your head.” He slid a hand between her legs. “Or you can take it in your mouth.”
She shuddered against him and clung to him with arms that could crush his bones to powder. “But—but He—”
“It’s unloaded. He won’t stop you. Why should He?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. Unloaded.” She brought the barrel to her mouth, tentatively, testing. Then her tongue flicked out along the brushed steel. Her eyes drifted closed. “Oh, yes. Oh, Caine, yes—”
“Go on, try it,” he murmured against her neck. “Let me watch you try it.”
He took half a step back as she slid the muzzle in between her lips. Her other hand slid inside her pants, and she squeezed the trigger.
Her head exploded.
Didn’t even make much noise: a soggy handclap, no more. Her torso twisted and her legs buckled and she fell into a heap of white and scarlet and he stood over her corpse with shreds of her face dripping down his chest.
He said, “You’re welcome.”
Firearms were new around here, and autoloaders were unknown, and neither she nor her god had understood how an autoloader, once fired, carries the next round in the chamber. Live and learn.
Well: learn.
He knelt beside her, scrubbing blood and tissue from his face and hair onto her cloak. Then he took the Automag from her hand, slapped in a fresh clip, and racked the slide. By the time he stood again, her corpse was wreathed in blue flame.
“See you,” he muttered, and slipped out of the cell.
The shattered rags of flesh at her temples were already blunting and folding themselves back together. The larger hunks of skull and brain sprayed across the cell still looked fresh and solid, but smaller blood spatters disappeared and the larger pools shrank as though they were evaporating.
He pulled on his pants and slipped his tunic over his head and jammed feet into his boots without bothering with socks. He safetied the Automag, tossed it onto the leather wrap, and bundled his gear together, and even though he had some time before the god could Humpty Dumpty her head, he ran down the stairs, cut through the stable, and trotted away along the alley as fast as he dared.
This was shaping up to be a busy day.
He didn’t even make it a block.
He got to the alley’s mouth and stopped and stood, breathing harder than he had to. He stared out along the street, but what he was seeing was the inside of the subgarrison cell. What he was feeling was the warm plash of a woman’s tears on his bare chest, years ago, when she held him in her lap in a room dark beyond the memory of day, and spoke gently of people they thought they’d never see again.
He had to run. He didn’t even have time to be standing here. He sure as hell knew better than to go back.
He had to leave her. Had to.
He was still telling himself that while he was trotting back up the alley.
He turned aside for a moment into the subgarrison’s tiny stable. Only two horses were still inside. One had a bloated gut that read as borderline colic, and the other was trying to keep his weight off his right hind.
He pulled open their stall doors. “You’re free. Go if you want. Stay if you want. You pick.”
Neither seemed inclined to leave; like most professional cavalry, Khryllians take good care of their horses. He went into the stall of the lame one, stepped to his left side, and looked deeply into his eye. “Change of plan. I’m not waiting. I can’t. I have to go for it. Today. Sometime around sunset.”
The horse’s eye had clouded over, turning pale and milky as late winter ice.
He wished he could somehow reach out and touch her now, but words were all he had. “Tell Faith I need her mom. And have her get Deliann, because I need Ma’elKoth here too. And Raithe. Raithe of Ankhana—the Monastic Ambassador to the Infinite Court. You remember. If everything goes well, I’ll see you tonight. If it doesn’t …”
And now even his words ran out. “Take care of yourself,” he said softly. “If you get a chance to take care of me, I hope you’ll do that too. I have to go.”
He left the stall doors open.
He slipped back inside the cell and lowered himself to the floor beside Angvasse Khlaylock’s corpse, and he hugged her shoulders and her blue fire-crowned head to his doubled legs, and when the god had healed her enough that she began to breathe, her first few whooping gasps settled into quiet choking sobs, and by the time she had eyes she was already crying, and for a long time she clung to him and wept into his lap.
“So, y’know,” he said gently, “this was the other reason I didn’t shoot you.”
Later, still lying across his lap, she was calm enough to remember her duty. “Khryl’s Justice …” she said faintly. “I’m late …”
“Khryl’s Justice can wait. You have till—what, sundown, right?”
“Yes. Sundown. As Knight Accusor, it is my duty.”
He stroked her hair. “We might be able to manage that.”
“We?”
“You and I have some things to talk about. Like, the ogrillo you were gonna fight? That’s not Orbek. Not really.”
“Who else could he be?”
“Someone like you.”
“Like—” She sat up slowly—probably some uncertainty in function with her newly regenerated motor nerves. Just as slowly, she twisted to face him and squinted her eyes into focus. “Who—what—do you think I am?”
“Not human.”
Her lips pulled into a thin flat line.
“You must have suspected,” he said. “How many times can you wake up from getting your skull bashed in before you figure out you’re not like other people?”
“I don’t—” She lowered her head. “Whatever I am, it is what Khryl has made of me.”
“And what you’ve made of yourself. Mixed in with your parents and schoolmasters and probably your uncle.”
“Then—”
“It’s not that you’re not you. It’s that you’re not the you that you think you are.”
“Is there any way in which any of this makes sense?”
“Technically—in Monastic jargon, at least—you’re what is called an autotheurgic proto-Aspect fetch.” He raised a hand. “I know, that doesn’t help. Look, it’s simple enough in concept. A fetch is a created duplicate, all right? It can be a duplicate of a living thing, like how Dal’kannith Thousandhand could make himself into an entire army. Or it can be a duplicate of something dead, like Deliann—the Ankhanan Emperor. Ma’elKoth built him out of a big pile of shit—not literal shit, just, y’know, stuff—that people brought from all over the Empire. Hell, Ma’elKoth was a fetch too, technically—He created that body for Himself with the power of Da’Kannith’s Crown. It takes the power of a god to pull it off. So he wasn’t the duplicate of a living creature, he was the duplicate of His fantasy-self, but it’s the same general thing. With me so far?”
She nodded silently, still staring at the planks on which she sat.
“An Aspect is what we call a body created or taken by an Ideational Power—a god like Khryl—to express his will. Autotheurgic is just a fancy way to say that you are the answer to your own prayer.”
Muscle jumped along her jaw.
“Just a guess,” he said. “I imagine there was a full Tourney under way, and all you wanted was to do well, right? So you prayed that Khryl might make you … oh, y’know, tha
t He’d lend you His Strength and Skill of Hand and Eye and shit. Something like that.”
“Yes.”
“And when you won, nobody was more surprised than you were.”
Fresh tears spread splotches below her bowed head. “I was unworthy,” she said faintly. “Was and am.”
“Khryl doesn’t agree.” He laid a hand on her shoulder. “Neither do I.”
She shook him off. “Your word means nothing.”
“You’d be surprised what my word means.” He offered her half a shrug. “You think you were the only Knight praying to Khryl that day?”
“I—of course not. We all pray. It’s traditional.”
“And you were the Knight He chose.”
“And how far I have fallen …”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think you can fall.”
“What I did to you—”
“Almost did.”
“Almost only by grace of your cleverness.”
“Listen, it’s not like I forgive you. It was a shitty thing to do. To yourself as well as me. It was an act unworthy of you, and of the office you hold … but I understand too, that’s all. Making somebody kill you isn’t easy when you can’t come right out and ask for it. Especially when you’re, y’know, you. And if you could be killed by a mortal weapon, you’d be dead now.”
She shrugged off his hand. “And thus my unworthiness is compounded by cowardice—to hazard battle when I cannot be slain—”
“You can be slain. I can do it. A couple other people I can think of might manage it too.”
“But not with any weapon I have yet faced in battle or tourney. Cowardice. Worse than cowardice: concealing sin beneath a mask of virtue.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Angvasse. Get over yourself.”
Her head came up. Her face turned toward him, and her eyes were raw. “You dare?”
“Sure I dare. That’s what people like about me.” He drew up his knees and swiveled to meet her bloody gaze square on. “I know you feel bad about yourself. People who don’t suffer from self-loathing are people who should. Doing one rotten thing doesn’t make you a villain any more than doing one good thing makes me a hero.”
She looked down again. “Hero is no word for either of us.”
“Without getting too far into more mystic technical shit, all the training and praying and all—even Khryl’s Law and your Knightly Code and shit—that’s what we call Theophanic attunement. It’s to make you as much like Khryl’s ideal as you can be. He chose you. It takes the power of a god to create a living fetch. That means you are closer to His vision of a Champion—His image of Himself—than any living creature. Probably ever.”
“Is that a compliment to me, or an insult to Khryl?”
“If you can’t say something nice about yourself, shut the fuck up.” He lurched to his feet. “I’ve known more than my share of Knights. I’ve only met two I didn’t despise,” he said, harsh. Flat and brutal. “One of them was Marade.”
He held out his hand. “The other’s you.”
She drew back. “Now you mock.”
“Usually. Not now.”
She still refused to look up.
“Marade was a hero. A real hero. I cared about her. Even loved her, as much as I could love anybody back then. Enough that I’ve never gotten over how bad I treated her. She was a truly great Knight and a fucking magnificent human being, and she wasn’t a tenth of what you are.”
“How can you say that—?”
“Oh, you know, lips and tongue and shit. The usual.”
She pressed her head lower. “Why do you even care?”
“Well, it’s not out of the goodness of my fucking heart. I need you.”
Now she did look up. “You … need me—?”
“Not like that. Not that I wouldn’t, y’know, want you,” he amended hastily. “You know I would. I do. You saw. I’m not gonna deny it. But I’m with somebody.”
“A woman? A human woman?”
He decided she wasn’t trying to insult him. “You should meet her. Seriously. She could do you some good. You need her. I need you.”
“But why? And what? What do you expect of me?”
“I need a hero,” he said simply. “You’re the only one I know.”
“And why would … a hero … help you?”
His lips stretched until his teeth began to appear. A lot of them. “What if you could take back the worst thing you ever did?”
She stared at him. For a long time. Expressionless. Finally she blinked. She gathered a long, deep sigh that lifted her chest and brought her shoulders up and then down, and then she took his hand.
“Cool.” He pulled her to her feet and clasped her hand to his heart. “I know your truthsense doesn’t work on me. Which makes us like regular people. You can choose to trust me, or you can choose not to. All I can do is ask you to look in my eyes and believe I will never willingly do you harm.”
She did look in his eyes. For a long time. Then she touched his cheek. “For the memory of Lady Tarthell. For the honor of Marade Sunflash.”
Better than he deserved. “Now we need to get you cleaned up.”
“What do you hope to do?”
“We.”
“Very well. We.”
“We,” he said, the spark of a smile igniting his eyes, “just might change history.”
“We were at war, Caine. We both fought for what we most loved.”
— HOME (AKA T’NALLDION, THE ASCENDED MA’ELKOTH, ET AL.)
Blade of Tyshalle
It’s snowing again, except on the horse-witch.
For the others, snow falls in fairy-tale flakes, light and beautiful and carrying only enough chill to be refreshing. The day has turned to night, and no fire has been lit, but around them and out some ways into the whispering white is a soft and gauzy illumination that casts no shadow. When he’d inquired about it of the man who looks like his son, Caine had only shrugged a nod toward Khryl. “Sun god.”
“Oh, of course. Sure. I should have remembered.”
“Never really dark when He’s around.”
“Must make it difficult to sneak up on people.”
“You have no idea.”
Not long after this, Caine became restive, shifting his weight, clenching his jaw and frowning even more than usual. Shortly he rose and stalked off toward the darkness. Now he is only a shadow that gathers and dissolves and gathers again as he paces at the limit of visibility.
Duncan looks at the horse-witch. “He seems worried.”
“He is worried. Whenever he has time to worry, he worries. It’s who he is. What should worry you is when he stops worrying.”
“I think I actually understand that. So what’s wrong? He seemed to be in control of everything.”
“It’s an act. He’s an Actor.”
“He was.”
“He doesn’t control. It’s against his nature. When he tries, things break. People bleed. Usually him, but sometimes others. Mostly they die.”
“Ah.”
“He doesn’t want you to be one of those others.”
“I thought he has a plan.”
“He does. But he knows his plans never work the way he hopes. Mostly, things turn to shit. Deep shit. But he’s an excellent swimmer.”
“I recall. Why doesn’t it snow on you?”
“I don’t like snow.”
“I love the snow,” Duncan says. “I always have.”
“That’s probably why it’s snowing.”
“He’s doing this for me?”
She shrugs. “It’s hard to say for sure who’s doing what for whom. Especially here. Might be you.”
“How would I control the weather?”
“That’s harder to say. If you’re making snow, you’re doing it some time that isn’t now. Can you think of why you might do it, if you could?”
He lets his head fall back into its cool cushion of fairy-tale snow, and now he has tears.
“Ah.” The horse-
witch nods. “It reminds you of your wife.”
Duncan’s eyes drift closed. “Everything reminds me of my wife.”
“That’s sad for you.”
“Sometimes. Usually. It was snowing the day we admitted to each other we were in love.”
“Sad and happy together, then.”
“A writer from Earth said there is no greater grief than to recall, in misery, times when we were happy.”
“Dante Alighieri.”
Surprise opens his eyes and lifts his head. “How do you know that?”
“A man who looked like you told me once. I don’t forget.”
“Someone who looked like me?”
“We met before their son was born. I also met the man’s partner—the woman he would marry. She was very beautiful.”
“Yes,” he said faintly. “She was. Very beautiful. Lucky that Hari favored her more than me. Did wonders for his career.”
“Your son must be very handsome.”
“He was. He is. Probably. Whoever he actually is.”
“You’re proud of him.”
“Very. But I can’t tell him that.”
“He can’t bear to be admired.”
“You know him well.”
“Very.”
“I am also, well … I’m in awe. He’s killed people, and saved people. He’s fought monsters, and he’s fought men who became monsters. He’s saved kingdoms and toppled empires. Now he has set himself against the gods to save a universe … and I used to change his diapers. I used to yell at him to make his bed.”
“You used to beat him so hard all he could do was lie there and bleed.”
Some few moments passed before he could respond.
“He said you know right where it hurts,” he said, slow and thick. “I should have believed him.”
“He told me once that every time you look at him, you see only where you hurt him. Is that true?”
He laid one hand over his eyes. “Why would you ask me that? And why would I answer it?”
“It’s what I do. Answer, or not, for whatever reasons please you, or for no reason at all.”
“Then not. I can’t talk about this.”
“You should know: you’re not here because you beat him.”
“He’s here because I beat him.”
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