The gatehouse was Earth-style: a small cinder-block box with windows all around. Gaslights were already on inside; clouds like sheets of granite cast gloom thick as dusk. Looked like five or six guys in there, which meant that some guys who should have been walking the wire had instead decided to hang out and grouse about being stuck here working while everybody else had the afternoon off.
He stopped at the gate, scuffed up a handful of loose gravel, and tossed it, not gently, against the gatehouse’s nearest window. Very shortly a door opened and a pissed-off gatekeeper stomped out, already yelling about not throwing shit at his gatehouse before he made it far enough out to see who was throwing.
He was pretty sure the guy would recognize him. A saddler in Riverdock had been so impressed by the unexpected appearance of Lady Khlaylock at his workshop that he had enthusiastically donated several yards of soft black leather. Kravmik was nearly as accomplished a seamster as he was a chef; he’d built the whole outfit from cuffs to collar in no more than an hour. A few minutes had sufficed to attach the various sheaths to hold his various knives. It didn’t fit very well, and it wasn’t comfortable—had his leathers ever been?—but fit and comfort weren’t issues. Not today.
He had ditched Jonathan Fist’s comfortably sturdy travel clothes at the Pratt & Redhorn, and left his name with them.
The gate guy jolted to a stop, squinting disbelief. “Sweet mother of crap,” he said. “It’s you.”
“It’s me.”
“Guys! Guys, you have to come out here—it’s fucking Caine!”
The guys piled out the door and very shortly they had reached a general consensus that it was, in fact, Caine. Immediately after that, they all wanted to know how he’d gotten there and what he was doing and what had he been up to these last three years and did he know they’d opened Earthside transit and—
“Yeah, thanks. I had no fucking clue what you people do here,” he said. “That’s why I came. Because I had no fucking clue. Open the gate.”
A couple of them jumped to it. Being a celebrity didn’t always suck.
While they rolled the gate door aside, he had a chance to look these clowns over. All six wore sidearms. Four were in clothing bulky enough to conceal body armor, and a couple went back and picked up the light assault carbines they’d leaned against the gatehouse wall.
Yeah: Actors. They all looked familiar to a greater or lesser degree, and a couple tried to remind him of some occasion or other when they had supposedly met. One, though, he knew by description—a tall slender guy with red hair and pale skin who wore his pistol in a breakaway holster strapped to his thigh. “Yeah, I remember you,” he said. “Your name’s … Dale, maybe? Frank? Help me out.”
“Deacon Tucker,” the tall redhead said. “Call me Deak.”
“Yeah, Deak. Sure. You played … an assassin? No, that’s not right. Some kind of killer, though …”
“Duelist,” Tucker said. “Blades, magick, bare knuckle, you pick. Choose your weapon and I’m your guy. Mostly contract work. Here on Overworld, people call me the Ember.”
“Right, sure, the Ember. Good to see you again.”
He nodded amiably. “I’m flattered to be remembered. And it’s great to see you. Everybody thinks you’re dead.”
“Not everybody. Listen, I need to get into your Earth Normal vault—there’s a report I have to deliver to management personally.”
Tucker nodded just as amiably as before. “Something you couldn’t tell them last night? When Tarkanen dragged in your naked bleeding ass and booted it Earthside?”
“I told you it wasn’t him last night,” somebody said to somebody else. “See? What did I tell you? I told you.”
Tucker fixed him with a level stare that didn’t look all that amiable anymore. “Maybe you could tell me who that guy was.”
“My evil twin. Who gives a fuck? I’m still on your detain-and-report list, right? That’s where you’re supposed to take me anyway, so they can tell you what to do with me.”
“That’s most of why I don’t like this shit anymore.” He took two steps back and pulled the pistol so smoothly it didn’t look fast. It looked magickal. There was nothing magickal, though, about the view down the inside of the barrel. “Toss him a couple strips.”
One of the other guys flipped two stripcuffs to the ground at his feet.
“Cuff yourself,” Tucker said. “Behind your back. The second cuff hooks the first one to your belt. Tight. Benson—stand behind and watch. Make sure he does it right.”
He picked up the cuffs. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”
“It has to be exactly like this. I haven’t shot you already only because I don’t want to carry your ass, old man. Hawk was a friend of mine.”
“You have shitty taste in friends.” He sighed and cuffed himself as directed. “Happy now?”
“I’ll be happy when you’re dead or Earthside. Until then, I’m figuring you’re about to kill me.”
He shrugged. “Maybe you should have been nicer.”
“Benson, you’re with me. The rest of you clowns spread out and get everybody onsite up and ready. Everybody. Caine wouldn’t be here unless shit’s about to get hairy. Clear the buildings. Get people in the hardpoints and snipers on the stacks. Faller’s Earthside. I’ll report to management.”
One guy scowled at him. “Who put you in charge, newbie?”
“You did. When you stood there with your thumb up your ass instead of doing your fucking job.” Tucker swung wide to keep his pistol and himself more than ten feet back while letting his prisoner pass. “Benson, cover him. Stay out of my line of fire and for fuck’s sake don’t shoot me. Let’s go.”
They made cautious progress among the hulking buildings. More and more people came out with more and more weapons. Eventually they reached the mine’s office complex. There was only one guy still in there, and Tucker told him to grab a rifle and head up high. They went through Faller’s office. The rug was gone, but the walls still showed plenty of fresh-ish bloodspatter. Benson picked up a gas lamp and lit it.
Beyond the office was a straightforward freight cage with two control chains running through the floor.
“Keep him away from the chains.” Tucker pulled one and the freight cage lurched into motion. Steam hissed somewhere above, and stacked counterweights clattered upward on braided chains as the cage descended.
They went down for a while. At the bottom, Tucker pulled a stiletto out of his sleeve and spiked the chain to the cage to lock it in place. “In case we have to leave in a hurry.”
The tunnels were lined with darkened gaslights. Most were short, connecting enormous low-ceilinged chambers, featureless save for huge hewn pillars left in place during excavation. The floors were level and clean. For short chamber-to-chamber transit there were stairs, or steel ladders bolted to the stone. Longer descents were slants. Down at the bottom of one long descending spiral was a large armored hatch. “Benson—make sure we got no guests down here. I don’t want any surprises.”
Benson set down the gas lamp, undogged the hatch, and went in. Light from inside was the coolly bluish color of modern fluorescents. A few seconds later he came back out. “It’s cool. Nobody home but Anders. It’s his watch.”
“Good. Thanks,” Tucker said, and shot him in the face.
Benson’s head snapped back and forward again like it couldn’t decide whether to tag along with the burst of blood and bone and brain behind him or run the other way. From inside the office came a shout of What the fuck? and the sound of knocked-over chairs and Tucker squealed, “Anders! Oh, holy shit, Anders—oh my god—”
From inside the office: “What is it? What’s going on?”
Tucker fired twice in very rapid succession. “Nothing.”
From inside the office: a dull sack-of-potatoes thud.
“Jesus Christ.”
“He liked little girls,” Tucker said darkly. “Really little girls. I couldn’t think of any reason he should live through this.”
“And Benson?”
He shrugged. “Cheated at cards.”
“He cleaned you out and you couldn’t figure how.”
“I said he cheated, not that I don’t.”
“What happened to the real Deak Tucker?”
“Couple years ago, he took a gimme—a duel with an aging, slightly dim-witted elder son of a Paqulan baron, who wasn’t as old and dim-witted as he pretended.” Tucker reholstered his pistol. “Wasn’t the baron’s son either.”
“Nice. Do him yourself?”
“Oh, he’s not dead,” Tucker said. “Seems somebody Earthside decided to cancel Actors’ deadman blocks. Amazing what you get out of people once you start them talking. Not out of any obligation to you for sparing my life or anything, but you should know some people argue you and Deak ought to be neighbors. Next-door neighbors.”
“What’s your opinion?”
“Well, I ain’t much for disputation, Jonnie—”
“Don’t do that, huh? It’s creepy hearing Tanner’s voice come out of your mouth.”
Tucker shrugged. “For what it’s worth, I keep telling everyone who’ll listen that we don’t want your kind of trouble.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s self-defense. I’m nervous just being on the same planet.”
“Look, Tanner—”
“Tucker.” He held up a hand. “Call me by the name of the guy I’m dressed like. And talk like. It’s only polite.”
“Nice accent you’ve picked up.”
“Figures you’d like it. It’s yours.” Tucker swung around behind him. “It was hard enough learning English. I don’t have time to fuck around with regional dialects. Hold still.”
He did. The cuffs went tight, then a single sharp report freed his hands. He rubbed his wrists and shook the knots out of his shoulders. “Good to be on the same side for a change.”
“I delivered your message to Damon,” he said. “How’s life in the witch-herd?”
“Tense. T’Passe read you in?”
“Some. Got actual business in this vault?”
“Some.”
“I’ll wait out here.”
“Okay.”
“Place gives me the creeps. Been making excuses to stay out of it all month. No offense, but it’s hard to think of any way in which Earth does not suck.”
“Plus I might see what you really look like.”
“Don’t insult me. Like I’d be working an Actor legend wearing nothing but a Seeming.”
“Seemings don’t work too well on me anyway. What is it?”
“Classified.” He nudged the corpse with his toe. “Drag this on in, would you? I can clean up out here.”
He picked up Benson’s pistol and stuck it behind his belt, then took the dead man’s ankles. “Back in five.”
BlackStone’s Earth Normal vault didn’t look like the one in Thorncleft’s Railhead, naturally enough. The Railhead office was powered by microtransfer imbalance, a source of energy that requires working Winston units; this one … hard to say. His first guess had been steam, but the turbine would have to be practically inside the room. Twelve screens distributed among five workstations, and not a single manual keypad among them—hard to believe this room was shielded well enough to make touch-screens reliable—and all of them seemed to be made of the same black composite material, almost like carbon fiber. And all of them appeared to be powered down, including the one the man’s corpse lay in front of.
To either side of the screens on each desktop were inset disks of what looked like the same composite, nine or ten inches in diameter. He brushed his fingers across one, to feel the texture, and the screen beside it lit up.
“Oh, like that, is it?” he muttered. He took his fingers off the inset—there was no one on Earth he really wanted to talk to, and actually if Earth found out he was here it would be a serious fucking problem in and of itself—and ducked under the counter to get a look at the workstation from below.
No power cords. Nothing like them. Instead he found a branching array of dark tubing—something disturbingly almost-but-not-quite random about their arrangement. Yeah: blood vessels.
Apparently shit gets weird in the vicinity of the gate.
He stuck one of his boot knives into one of the smallest tubes, about the same size as an I.V. line … and it came back out with its tip painted in black oil that was already beginning to smoke.
“Huh.” Scratch the apparently. “All right, then.”
A couple minutes later, he was back out in the corridor with Tucker. He swung the hatch shut and dogged it from the outside. “Time to go.”
“What about the office?”
“They’re about to have a fire.”
An only half-muffled boom emphasized his point—and it came with a shock they could feel through the stone, and the hatch buckled and smoke leaked out around the seal and he said, “Okay, more than a fire.”
“Now the gate?”
“Can we do it?”
“Hard to say. The gate area is NFP without a Social Police escort.”
“NFP?”
“No fucking people. And they’ve got a couple guys posted at an armored hatch to enforce it. Real armor, not this shit here.”
“Not much point hanging around, though.”
Tucker shrugged. “This way.”
The accessway to the gate itself was down another two and a half levels. The final thirty yards was a corridor-like tunnel, straight and flat and only six or seven feet wide. At the far end, Tucker reported, would be posted a pair of Social Police in full anti-magick armor, assault rifles, grenades, night vision, the works.
“That’s fucking inconvenient.”
“They’re not there to be easy.”
“What’s your plan?”
Tucker shrugged and handed him something round and heavy. “It may be that stealth has outlived its usefulness.”
It was a grenade. “Cool. I’m sick of sneaking around.”
“Which is why you’ll always be a better Actor than you are an operative.”
“So?”
“So nothing. Set down the lamp. It’s only another hundred yards.”
“Um, I can’t Nightsee. All I’ve got is Discipline.”
“I’ll point you in the right direction. After that, we can see by the light of burning Social Police.”
“Jesus, it’s like talking to myself.”
“Stop it. You’ll hurt my feelings.”
“I’m starting to get why nobody likes me.”
“Shh.”
It was darker than dark. After almost a minute of silently cautious creep, he felt a hand on his left arm. He stopped. His arm was directed to a corner just ahead. He explored it only with his fingertips. Then on his wrist: three fingers, then two, then one, then he triggered his grenade and whipped it sharply around the corner, then flattened himself against the wall and covered his ears with both hands as he felt Tucker do the same. One of the soapies had time to yell Grenade! before twin detonations blasted fire all the way back out the mouth of the corridor.
There was a less-welcome sound too: assault rifles on autoburst, suppressing fire. Slugs shrieked out the mouth and shattered against the corridor wall.
“I really have to get myself some of that armor,” Tucker said as he leaned around the corner and sprayed fire with his pistol on full auto—two seconds at ten rounds per—and the rifle fire stopped. Tucker slapped in a fresh clip. “Come on.”
Flames still licked upward from the residue of whatever the hell the incendiary had been. The two soapies lay like abandoned maquettes, every muscle locked in rictus so extreme that they didn’t even look like people—magickal Hold, or something like it. “Holy shit.”
Tucker flashed him a grin. “Custom ammo.”
“No, really?”
“How about you lend me one of those toadstickers of yours?”
He pulled one of the long fighting knives from inside his tunic. Tucker took it and slid its point unde
r one soapy’s helmet below his ear, then jammed it all the way in and gave a twist for good measure. He did the same to the other, then wiped the blade on one’s armor and returned it. “When Tucker disappears instead of coming back out, somebody’s gonna remember he didn’t take away your knives. Now if I need to be him again sometime, all I need is a harrowing story of my narrow escape.”
“So if you’re loading wildcat rounds that pop their armor, how come the grenades?”
“Knocking on the door,” he said. “It only opens from the other side, and I don’t know the passcode.”
“What if they’re not curious? Or too smart to go for it?”
“Hey, you don’t like my plan, take over.”
“Huh.” He looked down at the dead soapies. “Check it out.”
Their blood was on fire.
“What the fuck?” Tucker dropped to one knee, and tentatively sniffed the twisting coils of black smoke that came up from beneath their helmets and through rents in their chest armor. Even the swath where he’d wiped the blade was smoldering. “That’s not blood. It’s not oil either. Not any oil I’ve ever smelled. Aren’t these guys human?”
“More or less.” He bent down and put his hand to one’s neck wound. The fire went out, and when he pulled his hand back, his fingertips were painted with familiar black goo. “Shit gets weird near the gate.”
“What is that gunk?”
“Blood. More or less.”
“Like they were more-or-less human?”
“Yeah. It’s not their blood. It’s their god’s. More or less.”
“Um …”
“You might want to step back.” He stuck both hands back down into the oil, and leaned on the dead man’s chest to squeeze an extra couple ounces out. “This could get a little entertaining.”
“Yeah, good thing. I was about to doze the fuck off.”
He stood, raising his hands before him like a scrubbed-in surgeon, and let the black oil roll down his wrists toward his elbows. A couple drops spattered the floor, and instantly kindled greasy flames. Tucker turned kind of sidelong, leaning away as if he hadn’t quite made up his mind whether he should bolt. “How come it doesn’t burn when it’s on you?”
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