Kollberg’s nodding along with you, his gaze directed inward, at visions of monitors lit with an imaginary Adventure. “Audience,” he mutters. “Audience. We can sell cubes, but you should really have first-handers for this-”
“That’s why I want you to call Marc Vilo for me.”
Kollberg’s eyes narrow to fleshy slits. “Eh?”
“Businessman Vilo knows people, Administrator. Lots of people. People with what you call exotic tastes.”
“I don’t get what you mean.”
“You’ve heard of him, right? You know how he makes his living?”
“Well-Vilo Intercontinental-”
“Is a front for organized motherfucking crime, Administrator. He can probably fill your firsthander booths just out of his own top boys.”
“Really?” Again, the light in Kollberg’s eyes fades to a frown. “Well-this will be exciting, to be sure, but I hardly think a rescue, even single-handed, can be called exotic-”
“Rescue?” Your laugh is dark as night on the cross. “Fuck rescue. Those people died when they passed their Boards.”
“Michaelson, really-” Kollberg tries to hold onto a disapproving frown while a smile fights for control of his mouth. “I mean, even Marade? Your promise-”
“Guys say lots of shit when their dicks get hard.”
Kollberg’s mouth opens. Then it closes again.
“I learned a lot about myself out there. I learned I’m not who I thought I was. I’m not who I wanted to be.”
Lips peel off your teeth. “Who I am is better.”
Kollberg blinks. “Michaelson-”
“This is the question, Administrator. You don’t have to answer. Don’t answer. Just think about it. What was the part that made you decide to pull me? To take this chance on me? What got your dick hard?”
Kollberg’s lips vanish altogether, and his eyes nearly do the same.
“I bet I can tell you what it wasn’t. It wasn’t when I was making that speech about being legends. It wasn’t when I sold everybody on the die fighting crap. It wasn’t even when I went out alone and fought Spearboy. None of that hero shit.”
“Heroes sell, Michaelson-”
“Sure they do. Hell, I like ’em too. What’s not to like? You can’t piss without splashing a hero in this business.” More of your teeth appear. “But you weren’t out pimping Marade’s clips, were you?”
Kollberg looks thoughtful.
“I’m not one of the good guys, Administrator. I am what I am.”
“This-” Kollberg still looks thoughtful. “-is not necessarily a problem.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“I believe,” Kollberg murmurs, “that I am beginning to understand.”
“That’s what’s wrong with the whole escape-and-rescue thing. Getting your friends out, saving lives, all that shit. That’s good-guy crap.”
“And you. .”
“I don’t care if they live through it. I don’t care if I live through it.”
Kollberg gives you a half-believing smile. “What do you care about?”
“I care about story.” The heat in your chest boils into your throat, but your voice stays low and hard.
Because now it’s your voice. Not Hari Michaelson’s.
“Remember what I said about story? I’m gonna teach those shit-rotten rat cunts a fundamental principle of real story.”
“Ah?”
“When you fuck with the bad guy-” Your true grin unfolds like a butterfly knife. “-the bad guy fucks you back.”
And I, as I did, as I do, as I will forever, say—
Yes, My Love. Yes.
Fuck.
RETREAT FROM THE BOEDECKEN (partial)
You are CAINE (featured Actor: Pfnl. Hari Michaelson)
MASTER: NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.
© 2187 Adventures Unlimited Inc. All rights reserved.
I take my time unwrapping the wire from the dagger’s hilt, smoothing each kink, stroking it long and straight. It’s good wire, flexible, copper maybe, eight feet or so; I double it, slip the dagger through the loop, and wrap off the ends to the dagger’s naked tang just below the guard. And that’s it.
Time to go.
I unfold myself from the Warrior’s Seat. Undoubling my legs brings a red snarl from the crusted spike-holes in my ankles. It makes me smile.
The blue sparkle has faded from the mud, and it has dried now, and I scrape it from my arms and chest and back with the dagger’s blade, shaving with it fear, and doubt, and the memory of pain.
I have no need to check the belts, or the gear I have taken from these ancient bones. Each piece is in its place, as I am in mine.
The mud falls away, and the blade touches scars I bear.
This is the axe from Kor.
This is the arrow from the Teranese floodplain.
This is the spike from the cross, and this the burn from Crowmane’s god.
This is the alley knife from home, and this the brick, and this my father’s fist. There are scars the blade cannot touch, but I don’t need them. The ones on the outside are enough to tell me who I am.
I am strong. I am relentless. I am invincible.
I bend now and lift from among the dusty armored bones the spikes I pulled from wrist and ankle. Dirt has caked my blood upon them. In the rose-pale glow cast by Panchasell’s Tear, I weigh them in my hand. Then I stick them behind my belt.
I grin at the runecut rose diamond the size of my head on its pedestal of gold, and the vast shadows of the cavern echo my black chuckle. “Think you’re the biggest tear ever shed?”
I thread the dagger through its doubled loop of wire. “That’ll change.”
››scanning fwd››
He hunches away from his partners and shuffles along the shadowed alleyway. At the ass end, he leans his spear into the corner so he can use both hands to unwrap his breechclout, and he squats.
Ogrilloi and humans aren’t that different. They’re pack hunters, we’re opportunistic scavengers, but the behaviors overlap enough that our evolutionary adaptations have a lot in common. Like, say, we both prefer a little privacy when we crap.
Has to do with diets heavy in protein and aromatic fats. We evolved using the undeniably fierce smell of our feces to mark off territory. And being top predators-or, in our case, smart enough to be dangerous to top predators-we don’t worry about fresh fecal reek attracting the wrong kind of attention.
Our shit says better keep the fuck off.
Loudly.
And it’s a hell of a lot louder to a scent-hunter like an ogrillo than it is to us poor nose-challenged humans.
Steam from one hard turd rises faintly into the slanting moonlight. Which is why that squatting buck over there has no idea I’m slipping over the lip of this ruined wall. He leans on the shaft of his grounded spear, grunting low in his throat, waggling his hips, trying to work the next turd out. Poor bastard’s crapping diamonds. Too much rich food.
But, y’know, I’m about to help him with that.
I slide through the moonshadow along the crumbled wall, bare feet feeling each step before I shift weight forward.
There are two contrasting styles of garrotte. The more popular is the cheese-cutter style: a single strand of thin flexible wire between a pair of handles. It’s pretty damned foolproof. Slices the external jugulars, crushes the trachea, and with the right kind of takedown there’s not much struggle either. The downside is that it takes a long damned time; a determined man can keep fighting quite a while with no fresh oxygen to his brain, and if you get a little careless on his back he can still kill you before he bleeds out. And if the wire’s too thin it can cut the trachea instead of crushing it, and then you’ve got a real fucking fight on your hands.
I favor the strangler’s noose.
Squatting, he’s put his head just at my chest height; the doubled loop of the dagger’s hilt wire slips down past his eyes, his snout, his tusks-the loop’s extra-w
ide; if it snags I’m a dead man-and in the nightshadow he can’t see it. The first he even knows it’s there is when my two-handed yank on the dagger snaps the noose tight under his chin. He jerks up standing, and I ride his rise, doubling my knees to put my weight into his shoulder blades.
One one thousand.
My weight captures his balance; we go staggering backward. He drops his spear to claw at his throat, and his cry of alarm doesn’t even make a hiss past the two strands of hilt wire that clamp shut his trachea.
Two one thousand.
His backward stumble takes us to the ruined wall. He hits it just above his knees and we topple over it. His weight crushes me into the rubble and flares splash the inside of my head and I don’t care.
Three one thousand.
He kicks and flails and rolls and tries to reach back over his shoulders to get at me with his fighting claws, but his own massive musculature betrays him; his arms won’t bend that way.
Four one thousand.
And now he finally remembers the spear he left on the ground over by his steaming turd, and he struggles to his knees and pulls himself over the wall again.
Five one thousand.
And he takes one step, and my weight drives him to his knees. He keeps trying-the bastard’s no quitter-but this is the thing about the strangler’s noose: properly applied, it doesn’t cut the jugular veins, it only squeezes them shut-and it doesn’t close the carotid arteries. Which is to say: it doesn’t stop blood from going to your brain. It stops blood from coming out.
The whole thing takes only a little more than twice as long as it takes to say massive cerebral hemorrhage.
He makes it to the spear at seven seconds, but his hand will no longer close upon it. At eight seconds, his will can no longer drive his collapsing body, and he crumples, twitching.
He keeps twitching for a while. Even after he’s basically dead. His sphincter never does let go. Poor bastard.
I take the wire off his neck before I skin him. I leave the flesh on his head, except for the musk glands under his jaw, which I have use for.
Last, before I go: I take from behind my belt one of the nails that had fixed me to my cross. I use the pommel of the dagger to pound it into his forehead.
Because they’re scent hunters. Because I want them to know.
Caine is here.
Caine is coming for them.
I AM THE SMOKE HUNT
I woke with the taste of raw human flesh still fresh and bloody on my tongue.
I rolled over and scrubbed at my face with one hand while my other groped for the pitcher on its stand beside the bed. I rinsed my mouth with stale water, then made a face and spat it on the floor. Fucking water tasted worse than the blood.
I hacked goo up the back of my throat and muttered, “Now, that was a party. .”
I poured water into a shallow terra-cotta bowl and splashed it on my face, softening the sleep gunk at the corners of my eyes before scraping it away with my fingernails. Dawn had paled the stars above the room’s slanted skylight. I sighed and shook myself till my ears rang. It’d probably be an hour before I could get breakfast. Or even coffee. After a soggy minute or two, I remembered ordering the Pratts out of town.
My head got too heavy to hold up. It sank into my hands. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
I pulled the chamber pot from under the bed and opened the lid, reflecting that somebody on this planet really ought to invent twenty-four-hour room service. As I settled my bare ass onto the night-chilled steel, I decided I could live without the room service. What Home really needed was a couple million union plumbers.
And plastic goddamn toilet seats. With heaters.
I spent a while staring at my hands. Soft and pink and small. Far too small: flimsy fingernails barely thick enough to crack a flea. Forearms smooth and bare where I still vaguely sensed that fighting claws should be. And clean. Too clean. No crust of drying blood, no shreds of ripped manskin-It could have been just a dream.
Sure it could. Really. It was possible.
I finished with the chamber pot, flipped the lid shut and shoved it over by the door. The day porter’d take it from there. If there still was a day porter. I sat on the bed and laced up my breeches. Left in its holster patch overnight, the Automag jabbed into the small of my back. I was about to yank it out and toss it on the bed, but I stopped with my hand on its butt.
A dream-echo of the drumming pounded inside my head.
This hadn’t been like the vision of being Orbek. That had been real as waking life. This was the gradual leakback of memory after a bad drunk.
But maybe just as real. I hadn’t been that drunk.
Some kind of ritual. I couldn’t quite tease it up to the surface of my sleep-fogged mind. Flames in a cave. Leaping and stomping and whirling. Chanting. A house-size bonfire and the savory tang of burning rith. A stone chalice, filled with blood.
Kaleidoscopic. Hallucinatory. The three D’s: drums, drugs, and dance—
Dad, wearing his anthropologist hat, would have called it ritual frenzy: a deliberate, systematic breakdown of self, of the ego’s defenses of recursive inhibition, shredding self-awareness to open a religious communicant’s mind to the infinite. Unreserved, unconstrained, enthusiastic pursuit of transcendant union with-What?
I had a sick feeling that I knew.
The textbook answer was a higher power. But this hadn’t felt like transcendance. Not like emptying myself into the infinite. Just the opposite.
It had felt like summoning.
I am the Smoke Hunt.
I still had that nagging presque vu. This should remind me of something. The Wild Hunt, maybe. I’ve always had warm shorts for the mythology of the Wild Hunt: a storm of chaos sweeping across the land, destroying all in its path. What’s not to like?
Reminds me of my Acting career.
But the Wild Hunt wasn’t it. At least not all of it. This was a different kind of hunt.
The dream or vision or whatever hadn’t stopped with the drumming and the dancing but had flowered into an effortless lope through moonlit streets filled with scents of piss and rainwater, spilled wine and human sweat-A sense of connection. . like the Meld the primals do, a sense of being more than one person. . or being one person spread through different bodies, all the bodies, so that in my pack I could look at myself through different eyes at the same time, and see myselves wreathed in flickering scarlet flames that cast no light, and the flame was the connection, and the connection throbbed thick and hot with shared werewolf lust.
Hitting a building. A door ripped from its hinges. Lamps shattering, flames licking wide: real flames here, crackling and scorching flesh. A casual punch splintering through a wall. Burying my jaws in soft screaming pink-fleshed humans tangled in bedsheets that leaked bright sweet blood into shredded mattress ticking.
More flames, and more terror, and more sweet copper blood.
Grey-fleshed fists crushing meat and bone with the same wet ripping crunch as the seven-bladed morningstars in the hands of men in chainmail that bore the sunburst of Khryl, the thunder of their long guns, the shirr of buckshot and the shree of rifle slugs, the clatter of steel-shod hooves on cobbled streets and no fear, no pain, just impact: blows given, blows received.
And draped over a crumple of ruined wall, shreds of corpse so battered it could have been ogrillo or human or pieces of both, freshly dead, sharp-slanting moonlight catching wisps of steam curling up from open gleaming meat—
Steam from the wounds. .
My dad, maybe forty years ago, had told me an anthropologist’s theory about the origin of the myth of the human soul: that water vapor rising from deep wounds might have been mistaken by ancient humans for the soul escaping from the body. Probably the origin of ghosts, too. The word spirit comes from a root meaning breath; in most traditions, ghosts resemble the curling fog you see from your own mouth on a chilly day. All the crap about the afterlife, about Heaven being in the sky. . all from nothing more than wisps of
condensing vapor, coiling upward like smoke-Like smoke.
I said, “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.”
Sure. That was it. Had to be. Had to be. Drummming. Dancing. Mind-altering substances. Ecstatic union with a higher power. . no fear, no pain—
Even bullets can’t hurt you. They can only kill you.
Take a pacifist Earth-human millennial religious movement, filter it through the consciousness of sentient pack-hunting carnivores, and what do you get?
The Smoke Hunt.
“They’re Ghost Dancers, for shit’s sake. Fucking ogrillo Ghost Dancers.
Crazy fuck my ass Horse and Jesus stinking bloody Christ on a stick.”
I ground my face harder into my hands. “Orbek-what the fuck have you gotten your stupid dog ass into?”
It was a rhetorical question. Because there had been more to the dream.
There had been her.
Armor like a mannequin of convex mirrors. Out from the shadows of a street’s mouth across the plaza, a massive two-handed morningstar propped casually over one shoulder. Reflected firelight dancing on facades. Three of me sprinting across the flagstones to meet her, smeared with the blood of the finest soldiers of Home. Casually removing her helm, shaking loose her hair. On her face, no fear. No anger. Only a reserved, remote sadness.
Her scent: human, female, thick with death. Red-smeared mirror-curves of armor rumpled with fist-shaped dents and pocked with bullet holes. Hair caked black with clotted blood. A morningstar rising with mechanical precision, falling in steel thunderbolts. Shreds of meat plastering cheekbones and forehead into unhuman texture around her vivid eyes.
Vasse Khrylget, they called her. I had a pretty good idea why.
“Yeah, okay,” I muttered. “What d’you want me to do about it?” Not that I really expected an answer. Or needed one.
I scowled at the pulse of orange dawnglow on the frame of the skylight. Too early for coffee for sure. Maybe I could snag some beans from the kitchen, chew them like aspirin. . which was another goddamn thing this world could use-the pounding in my head was turning out to be less drums than migraine again. .
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