Businessman Turner slicked his snowy hair back with one palm and took another deep breath to steady his voice; his barely restrained tears picked up the glare of the klieg lights and made his eyes sparkle like tiny daggers. "In closing, I would like to urge Leisurefolk the world over to support the Studio's petition before the Leisure Congress. In the name of the Studio, I ask that Chairman Administrator Hari Khapur Michaelson be posthumously awarded Earth's highest civilian honor: the Medal of Freedom.
"And finally, on behalf of all the peoples of Overworld, and all the people of Earth
"Good-bye, Caine. Thank you. You will be missed."
Finally overcome, Businessman Turner waved aside all questions and left the podium, mopping at his eyes; he was seen weeping openly as he was led away by his aides.
The newsworks had obviously been prepared for this announcement they had an array of recorded reactions from a variety of Michaelson's friends and associates. Of them all, perhaps Leisureman Marc Vilo—in his own rough-hewn way—said it best. "Hari was always the guy you could count on to do what had to be done. Sure, he loved her; everyone remembers his final Adventure. But she crossed the line. Like he always said: 'A man's gotta shoot his own dog.' When you come down to it, l guess that's what he did."
2
There were too many loose ends, and the Studio's PR line was too convenient, too neat; competing stories ran wild through the net. The Studio fell officially silent, and that silence only fed the flames—if they're not talking, the theory ran, there must be something they're not talking about. It was generally agreed that the "something" was most likely the full extent of the HRVP outbreak. Within days, hundreds of netsites were filled with speculation; the first hint of hard news came, unsurprisingly, through Adventure Update, when the show broadcast a leaked internal Studio report that HRVP had been identified in the Ankhanan capital. Eventually, the Studio confirmed these reports.
The Ankhanans, on the other hand, seemed to believe that the spasm of random violence that had overtaken the capital was part of a concerted terror effort by Cainists, in response to recent mass arrests and detentions. Patriarch Toa-Sytell had declared a state of martial law, and the army was currently engaged in rounding up the remaining Cainists and their sympathizers and collaborators—and apparently anyone else that someone had taken a particular dislike to—all in preparation for a barbaric autoda-fé that was planned for the fast-approaching Festival of the Assumption. It hadn't been difficult to locate a suitably large number of victims; this was not so different from the reign of terror in Ma'elKoth's final days. As many of the commentators gleefully pointed out, Ankhanans had developed a certain taste for witch-hunts.
More disturbing were reports that came from Actors in the capital, along with some spectacular recordings. Open warfare had erupted in the subhuman ghetto of Allentown, pitting the Ankhanan constabulary and some elements of the imperial infantry against a large paramilitary organization of subhumans, most likely members of the transplanted Warren-gang known as the Faces. When the mundane Ankhanan constables found themselves overmatched by the potent magicks of the subhumans, they had responded by summoning the Grey Cats and the capital contingent of the Thaumaturgic Corps.
The battle raged for more than a day through the streets of the ghetto, leaving nearly a sixth of the city in rubble and flames, but it had ended with the Imperial forces firmly in control. Mop-up operations were being directed by the Grey Cats, and commentators on the nets spent several days shaking their heads, tsk-tsking the savagery of the conflict, and arguing whether blame for the massacre lay with the "semicivilized fringe elements and squatters" or with the "small faction of irresponsible witch-hunters driving public policy."
Public interest in Studio affairs hit a seven-year high; not since For Love of Pallas Ril had a situation on Overworld so captured the public's imagination. The Studio's in-house profit projections were so outrageously positive that representatives of Studio President Turner publicly announced he would be entering binding arbitration on a new contract, expected to nearly double his current salary.
Amid all this furor, it was—perhaps inevitably—Jed Clearlake who scored the journalistic prize of the year: a live interview with the former Emperor of Ankhana himself.
"It is clear," Tan'elKoth said darkly, turning slightly so that the light would properly halo his magnificent profile, "that the Studio has not told the entire story. Consider: less than seven years ago, Caine destroyed my government—sparking a bloody war of succession—to save the life of Pallas Ril. I do not believe he would act against her, no matter what the provocation.
"That she was mad, and a threat to every living soul on my world, I do not deny; as you may recall, I fought her hand-to-hand—and mind-to-mind. I knew her better than did even her husband, I believe. But nothing I could say would ever sway him in the least, not when it touched upon Pallas Ril. He claimed once that to save her, he would burn the world.
"This, I believe, is precisely the truth.
"He is that wayward, that selfish, that scornful of the needs of society and civilization.
"And this drivel about his request to be buried in Ankhana? It's ridiculous. Ankhana was not his home; it was where he worked. He loves it no more than a clerk loves his cubicle."
At this point, Clearlake smoothly picked up on something that the viewing public might not have noticed: that Tan'elKoth still spoke of Chairman Michaelson in the present tense.
"Of course I do," Tan'elKoth said with his characteristically suave cool. "I do not believe that Caine is dead."
Clearlake sputtered like a faulty datacore; Tan'elKoth only smiled into the video pickup. When Clearlake finally managed to stammer out his question, Tan'elKoth replied without hesitation.
"Certainly President Turner lied. Studio executives always lie; it is for this that they are paid. The question is, What was it, precisely, that he was lying about? If Caine is dead, where is the body? `Lost in the cliffs below Khryl's Saddle,' indeed," he said scornfully. "Is it truly Khryl's Saddle—or is it Reichenbach Falls?"
He turned and faced the entire world through the netcamera pickup. "Until I see Hari Michaelson's corpse with my own eyes—until I hold his cold, unbeating heart in my own hand —I will never believe that Caine is dead."
He opened his hands before his face, not an appeal but a conjurer's flourish. "Show me the body, President Turner. Show the body to us all. Either show us the body, or admit the truth: somewhere, somehow, Caine lives."
Entertainer Clearlake was no stranger to controversy; some said that he had built his dream home within the eye of a hurricane. There is, however, a clear difference between riding out a storm and twisting a dragon's tail. Wisely, he let that line of questioning drop, favoring instead a neutral wrap-up: "And what now for you, Professional? Back to work in your own private studio?"
"I think not. My people—my world—are still threatened by the disease this madwoman inflicted upon them. The elimination of Pallas Ril does not save my world. The Studio and the Overworld Company have begun a massive containment operation, putting at risk thousands of lives and costing billions of marks, with every probability of failure, while they ignore an option that is obvious, effective and inexpensive.
"They can send me back.
"Back to my world. Back to my people, who cry out for me in their anguish. I can do in truth what Pallis Ril only pretended: wipe out HRVP on Overworld—at a cost to the Studio of precisely zero."
He turned to the video pickup, speaking again to the whole world. Some trick of the light made his eyes seem to burn from within, as though a crust of stone had broken to reveal an unexpected flow of lava below. "This is your choke: Spend billions and fail, or save the world for free. If Caine is dead in truth, can you so insult his memory? Let him have died in vain? Do not make his sacrifice go for naught. You know what must be done. "Send me home."
3
The doors of the Social Police riot van opened onto full night on a rooftop landing pad, flo
odlit a pale frog-belly white. Tan'elKoth shook a fist-sized knot of tension from his massive shoulders and stepped out onto the weather-cracked asphalt.
He breathed slowly and deeply, consciously forcing himself to stay loose, relaxed, ready. Mental preparedness was the key: he must be ready to react smoothly and naturally to any eventuality. Though this would be easier, he reminded himself mordantly, if he had one bloody idea what he might be preparing for.
The riot van had been waiting for him on the landing pad outside the Adventure Update soundstage, where he had expected to find a Studio limousine; now, looking back on it, he found ominous the manner in which Entertainer Clearlake had wished him luck before signing off the live interview. That slight squint before he had spoken, that faint glazing of the eye—had a warning come over his earpiece? Had some whispering tech hinted that Tan'elKoth had fallen afoul of Soapy?
A cold suspicion settled onto the back of his neck. He had watched on a security monitor as Kollberg and the Social Police had ambushed Caine.
This landing pad was on the roof of a low building surrounded by looming residential domes. The riot van rested squarely at the crux of a large cross of paint that had once been red, but now had faded to a scuffed and dirty pastel pink, within a wide circle of sooty grey. This was some kind of hospital, then.
Had been some kind of hospital, Tan'elKoth corrected himself The rooftop was now ringed with Social Police riot vans identical to the one in which he had arrived, turrets bristling with cannon that pointed outward and below, fanned to coverall approaches.
Or, perhaps, all exits.
One of the faceless officers gestured toward an open access door across the rooftop, and Tan'elKoth started toward it, sliding his thumbs beneath the bandolier straps of his ammod harness. It must be binding him up, somehow, or perhaps he had fastened it too tightly over his heavy sweater; he was having a certain difficulty drawing breath.
The access door opened onto an unlit stair: a dark rectangular reces sion into oblivion. It exhaled a breath of acid sweat, ammoniac urine and bubbling green decay, as though the stairwell were the throat of a scavenger slowly dying of some awful necrosis of the bowels.
Tan'elKoth paused. Hannto the Scythe—Hannto the timid, the weakling, the coward—had somehow struggled to the very gates of Tan'elKoth's mind. Or perhaps not so much the coward: Hannto urged Tan'elKoth to turn upon the Social Police officers beside him, to attack, to crush and kill them, and to be cut down in turn. Better a clean death, up here in this gritty smog-choked simulacrum of open air, than to be swallowed by that unimaginable throat.
Nearly all the lives within him wept with fear; Ma'elKoth, the god himself—even He counseled caution. Lamorak had nothing to say; that dark shade huddled in wordless terror in some black and forgotten corner, for the breath of the stairwell smelled of the Donjon, of the Theater of Truth.
It smelled of the Shaft.
One of the soapies reached toward him, and Tan'elKoth tensed, expecting a stroke from a shock baton; instead, he was astonished to find that the soapy only touched his arm with one gauntleted hand and leaned toward him to speak softly through his digitizer.
"Go on in," the soapy said, with as close to a human tone as Tan'elKoth had ever heard from one of them. "It's better if you don't keep him waiting."
The other soapies turned helmets toward each other, nodding infinitesimal agreement; their gauntlets twisted upon their weapons as though their hands ached too much to find a comfortable grip. That transitory brush with the humanity behind those silver masks, so unexpected, turned the twist of nerves in Tan'elKoth's stomach into an icy dread that settled into his bones; it was terrifying to imagine that Social Police might feel some kinship of apprehension.
As though what awaited him below frightened even them.
With a deep, shuddering breath, Tan'elKoth descended the stair, and was swallowed by darkness.
4
Below, he found a nightmare of baffled, terrified Laborers and Adminstrators and Physicians, of blood and sobs and shit and screams, of silver-masked Social Police standing robotic guard. Within, the only light came from the bleached wash of emergency floods. The acid stink of human fear mingled with the mildew that leached from the filthy carpet beneath his feet, nearly overpowering the sweet metallic earth-smell of blood and shit.
He moved through the reeking shadows of a long, narrow corridor, and out into an open space that had been some kind of office; the wreckage of several desks lay among the tumbled carpet-covered panels that Tan'elKoth assumed had once been cubicle walls. Here and there were knots of wretched people in the tattered remnants of Laborer dress—some clutched desperately at each other, some sobbed softly, and some merely stared blankly at the brown stains on the walls.
Also among the wreckage were pieces of what had probably been at least three people: a severed hand here, there a head pulped like a hammered watermelon, a tangled knot of intestine looped over the remains of a water cooler. The ferric slugs from power rifles littered the floor, and one office wall was now only a tattered framework of slug holes. More corpses, here and there, were half buried in the broken ruin of office furniture; something had been chewing on them, gnawing at their flesh—not to feed, but rather out of some restless urge to use its jaws: a dog mindlessly worrying a marrow bone.
An infant, teething.
The shootings had been only the beginning. Someone had been playing among the corpses: someone had braided their guts into tangled ropes, had popped out their eyeballs and disjointed the mangled bodies like a bored child pulling apart its dolls. Tan'elKoth had no doubt who this bored child was. He could see him.
In the middle of the floor, his dungarees down around his knees, buttocks pulsing between the thighs of a woman with empty eyes and a mouth like a smear of blood. His pitted scalp was unmistakable.
Kollberg.
The woman's only clothing was a brown-crusted bandage that covered the flat wound where her right breast had once been. Even as Tan'elKoth watched, Kollberg lowered his face to her one remaining breast and sank his teeth into her nipple. Blood spurted up across his eyes. The woman only grunted, likely near death from shock. Kollberg dug his face in, chewing deeper and deeper into her, and Tan'elKoth had to lower his eyes.
The other chewed-upon corpses . . . those that were female, the breasts had been torn away. Each corpse that had been male now had only ragged bite wounds in place of its penis. With their equally flat chests and equally empty groins, the corpses bore a gruesome, crudely chopped resemblance to each other: they had been surgically homogenized by a blunt scalpel of rotten teeth.
And this, Tan'elKoth thought emptily, is what I chose for an ally, against Caine and Pallas Ril.
0 abandoned gods, what have I done?
Kollberg looked up from the shuddering death spasms of the woman and caught Tan'elKoth's eye. He stretched his neck ophidically: a snake basking in warm tropic sun. "Welcome to my home," he said. "Do you like it? I furnished it myself."
Tan'elKoth held his silence.
Kollberg pushed himself up to his knees, off the woman's corpse; he stuffed his penis back inside his dungarees without so much as wiping off the half-clotted blood that caked it. "You," he said thoughtfully, still squatting, "are not a team player."
5
He rose, and approached Tan'elKoth closely enough that the ex-Emperor had to turn aside from the reek of his breath. "I think your heart's mostly in the right place, you understand, but there are one or two things that you don't seem to understand."
How much does he know? How much does he know about Faith? The myriad that populated the ex-Emperor's mind gibbered and cringed, but he was more than they: he was Tan'elKoth, and he would not flinch. "I understand this: You dare not harm me," he said firmly. "I am no common Laborer, who can be made to disappear without uproar and alarm. Your best hope of life is to release me and pray that I hold my tongue."
Kollberg stretched up onto his toes, until the top of his head nearly reached Tan'elK
oth's chin; he swiveled his head and angled his face so that his fetid breath wafted upward as he spoke. "You still don't understand."
Tan'elKoth took a step backward—no amount of fortitude could enable him to stomach that stench—and he would have taken another, but that first step had brought his back into solid contact with one of the soapies who stood immovably behind him. "I have friends and admirers upon the Leisure Congress itself, do you understand? I can no more be detained or harmed than could Caine. Your own Board of Governors oversees my welfare—and I imagine that they would be ... disturbed ... by your lifestyle."
Kollberg took a step back, still on his toes, his head cocked, squinting at the ex-Emperor so tightly that it pulled up the corners of his rubbery lips into a humorlessly acquisitive smile. "Let me explain."
A sharp stroke from a shock baton across the back of Tan'elKoth's neck he collapsed into the bloody muck that covered the floor, twitching spastically. One of the Social Police officers kicked him precisely in the groin, another in the ribs, and a third in the kidneys while the fourth went to work on his head. He could do no more to defend himself than writhe; the charge from the shock baton had shut down his peripheral motor nerves, and his limbs would not obey his will.
Tan'elKoth gasped with every kick, and his gasps might have been sobs, if he'd had strength to cry. A shock went through him at each blow, a wave of impact that carried the impersonal malice of the Social Police through his every defense. Helplessness wriggled in through his skin, into his blood, between the cords of his muscle like screwworms digging down to the bone.
The Social Police facelessly inflicted a dispassionate, thoroughly professional stomping. One of these soapies had, only minutes ago, touched him as one man does another; in a way, that made it worse.
Blade of Tyshalle Page 46