"So? What then? You want me to just shrug and grin? Okay, I'm crippled. Okay, Shanna was butchered. Okay I had to lie in her smoking blood? Okay my father's dead, okay Faith is gone, and o-fucking-kay I don't fucking care? I'm supposed to just get over it?"
"No," he insists, urgently, shaking his head like he's rattled his brain loose and he's trying to roll it back into place. "No no no no no no no! No one gets over anything, don't you understand? Everything that happens in your life—every single thing—leaves a scar. A permanent scar. You're not supposed to get over it. To get over something—to erase the mark it left on you—erases part of who you are."
He leans close and grabs my arm with both hands. He's shaking with fever; his eyes roll above a twitch in his cheek. "Scars are the key to power," he says. His breath smells of acetone and rotten fruit. "Scars are the map of beauty."
He's close enough to kiss me when he whispers: "Each of us is the sum of our scars."
The floor detail starts marching down the stairs.
I shake off his grip and push him back. "They're coming. You better dodge out while you still can."
"What if," he says, "it's Hari Michaelson who is the fictional character? What if the middle-aged paraplegic is just a role that Caine plays, so that he can get along on Earth?"
The floor detail leaves the stairbridge behind. They prod prisoners out of the way with their clubs and breast toward me. The floor detail officer has a swagger that I know too well: he's expecting a fight. He just doesn't have a fucking clue what kind of fight.
"No more talking, Kris. Dodge out," I snarl, and enforce my advice with a sharp shove that sends him staggering sideways to collapse on the floor. I have to shut my eyes against the hurt that cascades over his face.
When I open my eyes again, the floor detail is standing in a knot in front of me. Orbek and his boys are ten feet from the foot of the stairbridge. T'Passe stares expectantly at me from a few yards away, her signal hand motionless at chest level, waiting for my nod. The floor detail officer flips up his visor, shakes out a pair of rusty manacles, and says, "We're getting reports that you're a potential problem down here."
Oh. Oh, shit, I get it.
I understand, now.
This isn't about the Festival of the Assumption; that's still days away. This is about me. I'm a potential problem, they say, and to tell you the truth, I can't really argue with them.
Problems from the Pit go into the Shaft.
This is gonna make my life fucking complete.
I look at Deliann.
If his wounded eyes whisper.
And all around stand people who are ready to die for me
I hold my arms out and turn my wrists up, and sigh as the floor detail officer locks the manacles around them.
"Yeah, all right, whatever," I say. "Let's go."
8
With a guard holding each shoulder, their hands jammed hard into my armpits, they haul me up the stairbridge. I can hear my dragging toes slap each step, but I can't feel them.
The Pit watches me go, echoing with stunned silence. Nobody can believe I'm letting them take me away.
I've always been full of surprises.
Up to the balcony: I start talking while everybody can still hear me. "Keep your shit together," I tell the prisoners. The guards drag me along a catwalk, past the long, long file of men cradling crossbows. "Keep working—keep dancing. Stay alert. All three rules still go."
I say this generally; to address Orbek or t'Passe directly would mark them for the guards, and they'd end up chained next to me in the Shaft. "When I come back, you all need to be ready to party."
We stop in front of the Shaft door. The crack beneath it exhales madness and corruption and lunatic screams.
The detail officer picks up a lamp from the lightstand by the door and touches its wick to the standlamp's flame, and a couple of his men do the same. The officer smirks at me while he unbars the door. "You're pretty tough, huh?"
I don't bother to answer.
"Y'know what?" he goes on. "Lotsa guys are pretty tough, up here in the light."
He swings the door wide. The air that rises from the Shaft is wet and sloppy and so thick it's like the tongue of a week-dead cow jammed into my mouth. It's not just old meat and bad air down there; it's the breath of people who've gone so crazy they eat their own shit until their teeth rot.
The Shafters chained to walls on either side squirm and hide their faces against the weak light leaking in from the Pit; farther down the dark throat of the Shaft a few still have enough energy to scream. The walls are beaded with the condensation from their breath: the beads themselves are grey with the filth the Shafters exhale. The step-cut floor slopes down into infinite black, and it's wet and slick with human waste.
I remember the last time I was here. I remember the people who had lined the Shaft as Talann and I picked our way down the treacherously slippery stairs to the sump, carrying Lamorak on my back. Most of them were too far gone even to beg. They had been reduced to objects, not even animal: mere bundles of shattered nerves and dripping gangrene, whose sole remaining function was to experience the slow shit-slickened slide into death.
Just walking by was as much as I could take—and I was younger then, and a hell of a lot tougher.
Now I don't walk anymore.
It's a good thing I don't have to go down here under my own power. I'm not sure I could make it.
As they drag me in, all I can think about are the festering burns on my legs, and what they'll look like after a few days of lying in other people's shit—but when we pass the door there's a dark notch, just about two fingers wide, on its latch edge.
I remember:
The throwing knife from between my shoulder blades will serve perfectly. I pull it out and feel for the crack of the door, slip the blade within it, and pound it home with the pommel of my fighting knife. It's just like pennying shut a door in the apartments where I grew up. It won't stop the guards when they come for us, but it'll slow them down and give us a little warning—we'll hear them pry it open.
I lift a hand over a guard's shoulder and brush that notch with my fingertips as we pass. Seven years soaking up the dank fungal exhalations of the Shaft have darkened it to the same greenish black as the rest of the wood, but that's the mark that Caine put there.
That I put there.
The detail officer scowls. "What are you grinning at, asshole?" I turn the grin on him. "Fuck off."
He whacks me one: a looping overhand right that splits my lip, loosens a couple teeth, and shoots stars down into the black abyss before me. I keep smiling. Smiling hurts, but so what?
It always did.
"When I come back," I tell him thickly through my smash-numbed lips, "I'm gonna teach you Rule One."
He snorts. "When you come back, shit," he says. "You ain't comin' back. You're gonna die down there."
"All right." I twist my head far enough around to catch Deliann's eye, far below. I remember sitting across a table from him in the cafeteria, more than twenty-five years ago. I remember him saying Forget whether you think it's possible. What do you want? Like the monkey's paw, he took my answer and gave me more than I asked for.
I give him a nod: my oldest friend. Like him or not, the best friend I ever had.
"All right," I say again. "If I come back."
The part-time goddess thought she was dead. She was right.
She was dead right.
But this was a time of unquiet dead, when spirits and corpses walked the earth, separately and together. Among gods, death and rebirth is a natural cycle. When the man who had been a god called upon her spirit, he was sure she would answer.
He was dead sure.
He commanded the power of legions: at his back stood the myriad that he encompassed, and all the billions of the god of dust and ashes, and the power of the goddess herself.
Against them all stood one solitary man, and he said, "No."
With all their power, the gods coul
d not break him. They could only hope to transform that No into Yes.
They were deadlocked.
SIXTEEN
Time.
Long time.
Long, long, long time.
Awareness.
Awareness of a lack something was not there.
Everything.
Everything was not there.
Everything with a name, everything that had a word to describe it, was not there. Not even darkness. Not even nothingness. Not even absence. Only awareness.
At play upon the field of awareness, one random thought
When I got there, there wasn't any "there" there.
With that thought came understanding, and with that understanding came memory, and with that memory Pallas Ril wished she had a mouth, because she really, really, really needed to scream.
But a mouth and a scream both have words to describe them, and there were none of such things.
2
Overnight, a new immersion game had sprung up like mushrooms, suddenly appearing on sites all over the net. Called SimRiverTM', it was an extension of the classic world-building series, with a couple of original twists. At its heart, it was very straightforward: The player takes on the persona of the overseeing god of an Overworld river valley. The goal was to promote the growth of a high civilization among the tiny simulated farmers and miners that form the valley's population base. The path to that high civilization was fraught with dangers, however, from simple drought and flood cycles to natural disasters such as tornados, earthquakes, and even volcanoes; from crop disease and equipment failure up to marauding dragons and invasions by hostile elves and dwarfs. The player accessed the game through a second-hander sim helmet, the same one used to replay recorded Adventure cubes, and so the immersive experience was very intense, detailed, and realistic. None of that was particularly original, or very different from dozens, if not hundreds, of similar games.
The original twists, however, brought the game to a whole new level of popularity. One was that this game was interactive: Every person logged on worldwide played together in real time, all participating in pursuing their collective goal. The actions of the river god represented the average of their intended moves. Further, the more people who were logged on at any given time, the more powerful the god became—this was the trade-off for the reduction of individual choice in the specific moves.
Finally, the game was based on reconstructed Studio Adventure files, taken from the Adventures of a real Overworld river goddess, Pallas Ril. More than simply watching its effects, a player could feel the power of being a god.
It was overwhelmingly addictive. In only a few days, the hardest-core of the hard-core players had adopted a nickname: they called themselves godheads.
Everyone played it. Marc Vilo played it while he recovered from the implant surgery that had linked him with the electronic group-identity that was the Board of Governors. Avery Shanks would have played it, even through her Teravil-induced haze, had her Social Police guards allowed her into the Earth-normal areas of the Curioseum. Perhaps even Duncan Michaelson might have played it, save for the cyborg yoke that shorted out his higher brain functions; he now existed only as an organic switching nexus for the net lines hardwired into his brain's sensory cortex.
The creature that had been Arturo Kollberg played it, though he had no need to; it amused him to pretend to be only a peripheral part of a grand mass-consciousness, instead of its focal node. He, alone of all the players on Earth, actually understood the game's true function: to gather and concentrate the attention of billions of people at once. To make them all think about the same thing, in the same terms, at the same time—to align and synchronize the patterns of their consciousness into a single shared intention—and to feed all of that mental energy into the net, structured in a way that made it extremely convenient to use. He, alone of all the players on Earth, could feel the progress of the game without resorting to technological resources.
He had only to close his eyes.
He was not the recipient of that energy, however. The energy of concentrated attention is essentially magickal; use of magickal energy is best left to an expert. The energy was directed precisely, surgically, for a single purpose: to enhance and strengthen a tiny white pinpoint of a star upon the brow of Tan'elKoth's mental image of Faith Michaelson.
Channeling the energy through the boundary effect between Earth-normal and Overworld-normal fields had originally presented something of a problem; Tan'elKoth had to remain in the Overworld-normal sections of the Curioseum for his personal powers of magick to function, yet to receive the energy coming to him, he must also be linked to the net.
And so, as Tan'elKoth knelt in a meditative posture beside the bed into which Faith Michaelson had been strapped, he would occasionally rub the shaved-bald patch on his skull, just behind and above his left ear, and finger the neat arc of stitching that held the flesh closed. Beneath that stitching was a thoughtmitter: proprietary Studio technology originally designed as a data and energy link between the differing physics of Earth and Overworld.
For days he sat, motionless in concentration; he would not allow mere mortal exhaustion to limit him. The child, lacking his resources, was kept continuously medicated. A cycle of stimulants and hypnotics maintained her in a dreamlike state of semiawareness. Periodic injections allowed her to enter REM sleep for half an hour or more—the REM state was close enough to waking consciousness for Tan'elKoth's purposes—but to allow her to fall deeper than that would risk all they had so far gained.
She never achieved real rest, but neither did he.
All would be worthwhile, if he could only touch the river's power. The irony of so extending himself to summon back the shade of Pallas Ril made him occasionally smile; but, in the end, were they not both gods? He had spoken of this to no one; he did not dare even think it too clearly. But he knew, within his heart of hearts, that once he joined with the rivergod, all would be different. There would be no more beatings, no more torture and humiliation at Kollberg's hands.
Kollberg, he told himself with a trace of contempt, believed Pallas Ril would be trouble.
That vile little man had no conception of what real trouble was. Once the link to the rivergod had been completed, Tan'elKoth would undertake to teach him.
3
She remembered the point of Kosall ramming between her eyes, remembered the sound when the frontal bone of her skull splintered around it, remembered the brief instant of humming buzz that made her whole body burn as oblivion swallowed her.
But something had changed. Something had touched her within the vast lack that was her death; something must have, or she wouldn't have recovered awareness. Perception filtered through her, slow and pure as springwater through limestone: She was not alone.
A body, living breath and blood and bone—a body that was hers, but not hers: hard and lean, tanned suede and knotted rope, a hand that clutched steel wrapped in sweat-damp leather, a shaven skull
She clutched at that body, poured herself into it, howling. But this was no empty vessel; an ego held this body already, an ego with an identically fierce need to exist—a mind disciplined and directed, that struck back at her with the force of absolute terror: a rejection so utter that her grip upon the body burned her like the heart of the sun.
But she could not let go.
Even agony was welcome, after the lack.
She shrieked pain and rage, and the other shrieked pain and rage, and the battle was joined.
4
A decker finally found him there among the cargo crates, two days downriver from Ankhana. This particular decker had been troubled ever since the barge had undocked with a peculiar, intermittent buzzing in his ears. He could hear it only when he chanced to be on watch in the quietest quiet of night; even the faintest breeze would bury the sound, to say nothing of the daylight chatter of deckers and crew, and the sonorous chanteys the poleboys used to keep themselves in step.
Finally, half t
hrough his watch in the small hours of moonless morning, the decker reached the end of his patience; he took his lamp, left his post, and began to explore. It was neither a swift nor an easy search, especially since his natural initial assumption was that the humming buzz must be coming from within one of the crates; he spent nearly an hour pressing his ear to the splintered slats of one crate after another.
Finally, his wavering lamp flame picked out the shape in its cramped tunnel, deep within the least tidy of the stacks. One look at the rigid body of the young man lying on the deck, corded tendons standing out from collar to jaw, both hands locked around the hilt of a sword—the edges of whose blade seemed to fade into a shady nonexistence—and he went right back out and woke the afterdeck second.
The afterdeck second was less cautious. He crawled in beside the young man, scowling at him. He sat, and scowled at the way the young man's back was arched, bridging above the deck. He scowled at the rictal terror locked onto the young man's face, and he scowled at the bands of white across the knuckles of the young man's hands. "Maybe I should give him a kick or something," he told the decker. "See if I can wake him up."
The decker shook his head. "What if he don't wanna be kicked?"
The afterdeck second's scowl darkened. "What's that friggin' noise?"
He was referring to the peculiar sizzling hum that seemed to come from the young man's vicinity, the same hum that had finally drawn the decker within. "I think," the decker answered hesitantly, "I think it's the sword ..."
The afterdeck second pushed himself back, pressing against the crate behind him. It was an open secret, whom they'd carried from Harrakha down the river to Ankhana. The decker could be right. This could be the Sword of Saint Berne.
"Get a poleboy down here," he said. "Right now. Get a couple of pole-boys and shift some of these crates. But quietly, for the love of fuck—wake the captain, and you'll be swimming to Terana."
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