TWENTY-TWO

THAT FUCKING SWORD—

A steel crucifix, head wrapped in sweat-stained leather—

It swung like that—in exactly that gentle arc—through the waterfall’s spray below Khryl’s Saddle. Mist collected into droplets and trickled down the blade, and washed her staring eyes—

They wouldn’t even let me wash off her blood . . .

I can still taste it.

I carry the countervirus. She must have created it in her own bloodstream. Shit, it makes sense. That’s why nobody in the Pit has HRVP.

That changes things. That changes a lot of things.

Sitting around here waiting for somebody to come down and kill us is no longer an option.

“You.” I jab a finger at Toa-Sytell, who’s twitching like a panicked dog and whining through his gag. “Sit.”

The stupid fuck looks for a chair.

“Right where you are, shithead. Sit. Dinnie, get the leash.”

The nearest Serpent takes the prisoner leash, and Toa-Sytell lowers himself to the floor, slow and stiff like an arthritic old man. And who am I to criticize? He moves better than I do.

“Orbek.”

“Little brother?”

“Take ten guys and reconnoiter upstairs. Nobody armed but you.”

He looks a question at me. I answer, “You’re not going up there to fight. You meet any resistance at all, get your ass back down here. If the place is empty, see what your boys can scrounge for weapons and armor. Take one of them along.” I wave a hand at the six Donjon guards we captured, tied up near the foot of the stairbridge. “They’ll know where the emergency shit is kept.”

He nods. “Like you say, little brother.”

I dismiss him. “T’Passe, see what you can do for Raithe. At least stop the bleeding.”

She blinks at me, which is what passes on that bulldog face of hers for a gape of astonishment.

“Did I stutter? And be careful of that black shit on his hand—I don’t like the looks of that at all. Some of those wounds could be chemical burns.”

She nods, and kneels beside him, and her strong square hands go to work tearing the rags from my pallet into strips she can bind around his wounds.

“T’Passe—” She looks back at me. “Tie him up first,” I tell her. “That fucker’s dangerous.”

“He’s barely even breathing—”

“Do it.”

She shrugs, and the first of her bandages goes instead to restrain his ankles; then she pauses to consider how she can tie his wrists without getting that oily stuff on her hands.

And I can’t stop looking at the sword.

I keep seeing it sway above me in time with my breathing. I keep feeling its brain-freezing icicle spear me to the sand. I keep feeling it hum inside my spine while I pull Karl’s neck against its edge—

“Deliann?”

He lies still at my side, eyes closed, breath hitching, face dry and corpse-pale. “Kris, come on, man. Stay with me. I need you.”

His eyes don’t open, exactly; it’s more like they kind of roll forward from the back of his head. “Yes, Hari . . .” he murmurs. “I hear you.”

“You got something off Raithe, right? You flashed on him?”

“Yes . . .”

“I need to know. He’s out cold, Kris. I need to know what the hell is going on.”

“I can’t . . . It’s too much,” he says, faintly. “Words—I could . . . in the Meld, I could share—we can Meld—”

Christ, he’s raving again. “Come on, Kris, snap out of it. You can’t Meld with a human.”

Now his eyes do open, and a distant smile creases his lips. “Hari, I am human.”

Uh, right.

I roll my shoulders to untie the knots that are cramping all the way up the side of my neck. “Do it, then.”

“You won’t like it.”

“Shit, Kris, it’s a little late to start worrying about what I won’t like.”

“There are things—things about the goddess—”

“I’m not worried about the goddess. Shanna’s dead.”

His gaze drifts out of focus. “Mostly.”

A thrill trickles down my spine and congeals into an iceball in my guts. “You better tell me what you mean by that.”

“I can’t.” His voice is weakening; I can hear how much effort speaking costs him. “I can only show you.”

“All right,” I say solidly. “I’m ready.”

“No, you’re not. You cannot possibly be.” He takes a deep breath, then another, and another, gathering his strength. “Find mindview.”

It takes some doing, but in a few minutes I can pick out some of those black threads twisting insubstantially through the air; a few minutes after that, they solidify from mere imagining to actual hallucination. Another light gathers in the Pit, too, now: a soft but penetrating glow, like a full harvest moon. It draws in around us, until it seems to cradle Deliann’s head. That soft glow wells into his face from some unimaginable spring, brims him full of moonlight, then reaches out and stabs me through the eye.

The light eggshells my head and blows out my brains.

Then, into where I used to be, he sluices Raithe’s life.

Ah—

fuck—

fuck me . . .

. . . hhurrr . . .

2

A LOT OF it isn’t so bad.

Toa-Sytell’s chin against my knuckles . . . caustic oil leaching from the pores of my fist . . . flames on the dockside . . . drowning in Shanna . . . the logic of pain . . . the hum of Kosall, warm in my hand, there between the crates on the deck of the barge . . .

It’s the other shit I can’t take.

It’s the—

What they did—

What they’re doing—

I can’t even think it; the briefest flash of the image rips me inside out and slams me to the cold stone of the Pit floor, puking.

“Caine?” This from t’Passe, close by. “Caine, do you need help?”

Vomit claws out of me, slashing at my throat, drenching my mouth with blood. It takes a long time. A lot longer than I would have guessed. Dry heaves keep twisting my guts, and that’s okay.

Saves me from having to talk.

I manage to get my eyes open. The pool of my vomit spreads toward one of my hands. I don’t move. Compared to my hands, my vomit is clean.

I force myself to examine the black crust along Kosall’s blade. Dried blood. Her blood. Half of her falling away from the other half. The blade chopping into her face. That brief buzz as her life drains through the sword—

Drains into the sword.

I can handle this. I can take it. I’d rather look at these crusted remains of Shanna’s life than think about what those soulless shitbag child molesters are doing to Faith.

My traitor heart ignores my desire. I can hear her scream. I can taste her tears. Faith—

My god, Faith—

Whack

A sharp sting from my right hand: I stare at it numbly, for it has become a fist, and a thin line of blood trickles from my knuckles, and only then do I understand that I have punched the stone floor beneath me.

This is the kind of pain I can handle.

This is the kind of pain I like.

So I do it again.

Whack

The calluses that once protected my knuckles faded years ago, but my bone density must still be good; my knuckles don’t break. The flesh peels back over them, exposing red-streaked ivory like a pair of dice in sockets of raw meat.

“What is he doing?” t’Passe says. “Why is he doing that?”

Whack

“Hari, stop,” Kris says from the floor beside me.

I turn my head and meet his eyes. They brim with compassion. So much compassion that there’s no room for mercy. He won’t spare me this. He’ll hurt for me, hurt with me, but he won’t spare me.

Whack

I leave a couple bone chips behind in the pool of vomit.

“There’s something wrong with him,” t’Passe says. “He needs help. Make him stop.”

People come close, hands out to offer me aid, to offer me comfort. To offer me life. “Touch me,” I force through my teeth, “and I’ll kill you.”

Everyone stares at me. I lift my fist, and shrug an apology. Blood trails down my forearm and drips from my elbow.

“My daughter,” I say by way of explanation, and they seem, somehow, to understand. But they all keep staring; Deliann, t’Passe, the Cainists and Folk and Serpents, even Toa-Sytell—and slowly it gets through to me what they want.

They want me to be the guy who knows what to do next.

And I am.

I can see it: the smart move. The responsible thing. Slip away through the caverns. Run downstream. Defend the sword. Gather allies, fight a guerrilla war. Seek among the great mages of the Folk for a way to cleanse the blind god’s taint from the sword and from the river. I can see it, but I can’t say it. I can’t put words to it and make it into a plan.

Because to do that would leave Faith in the hand of my enemy.

Whack

I stare at the chipped bone of my knuckles. It’s starting to show hairline fractures of black scaling through the blood-washed ivory. It hurts. It hurts a lot.

Pain is a tool. Nature’s tool. It’s nature’s way of saying Don’t do that, dumbshit. My enemy is a universe away; I can’t get to him. But now I know who he is. What he is. And I can make him come to me.

Then I’ll let nature take its course.

Orbek and his detail tumble out of the Courthouse stairs onto the balcony in a Mack Sennett tangle. “Boss! Hey, Boss!” Orbek shouts. “Goddamn Courthouse’s full of fuck-me Monastics!”

I lift my head. “I know.”

The lunatic jumble Deliann poured into me clicks into place inside my head, faster and faster as I start to see how everything connects with each other and with itself: Shanna and Faith, Tan’elKoth and Kollberg, the Monastics who come at us from above and the Folk from below, the ring of Social Police troops that tightens around the city. Raithe. Deliann.

Me.

This has a shape.

Our lives ride an infernal tornado, a vortex that draws us, each and all, down to its single point of central calm. I can see it coming: the shape of the future. That shape gives me all the strength I need.

“All right,” I say, my voice hoarse and thick. I say it again, louder. “All right. Shut up and listen. You want to know what we’re gonna do? I’ll fucking tell you what we’re gonna do.”

I look at t’Passe, and twitch my bloody fingers at Raithe. “Wake him up.”

“Caine—”

“Wake him up,” I repeat. “I have something he wants—” I lift my hand and watch the gather of scarlet become a drop that falls into the filth beneath me. “And there’s something I want from him.”

I make that hand into a fist, and squeeze out a thicker flow, rich and round and red. I can taste it.

“I’m gonna offer him a deal.”

3

AT THE RECTUM of the Shaft, below the crusted gape of the sausage grinder, the iron grate that seals the sump is set into stone. A stonebender rockmagus did the work, under contract to the Imperial Constabulary. Her song had softened the stone to the consistency of warm tallow; once the grate had been pressed into place, the stone had closed around it like living lips, and the silent melody of the rockmagus had hardened the limestone to the solidity of granite.

In the Shaft, the human eye can find only darkness, but that is not because there is no light; eyes that see deeper into the lower frequencies of the spectrum might find the Shaft illumined with the dim thermal glow of living bodies, and the brighter plumes they exhale. Had such eyes looked upon the sump grate now, they would have seen stubby fingers wriggle upward through the bars like pale grubs twisting from black soil; had ears sharper than human listened, they would have heard a dark hum that pulsed with the millennial patience of the limestone itself. More fingers joined, and large hands pushed at the middle of the grate, and the iron squeezed free from the limestone’s softened kiss.

The grate was passed silently from hand to hand down the sump all the way to the underground river below; an altered hum rehardened the stone lips of the sump, and two rockmagi climbed out. They were followed by a pair of hulking lambent-eyed trolls, then more stonebenders, some primals, more trolls, a few clumsy night-blind ogres, and even some treetoppers who had made the long climb up the sump with their birdlances strapped across their backs.

Many had armor; all had weapons. Each of the primals carried a small griffinstone, looted from the secret caches of the Thaumaturgic Corps, and many had magickal weapons to use the power the griffinstones provide. One of the ogres took a long whiff of the Shaft’s wet stench and murmured that he was hungry; a troll replied that the place was usually lined with humans chained to the walls: a homophage’s dream buffet.

But the Shaft was empty.

Up the long, long step-cut slope, there was nothing to be found save shackles left open, discarded, dangling by their chains from the thick bolts that anchored them to the limestone.

One of the rockmagi said grimly, “Might be trouble, this. Get moving.” The rockmagus pointed the length of the Shaft. “Up there, have business, we.”

But when they broke through the door into the Pit, the Donjon was as deserted as the Shaft had been.

Treetoppers, primals, ogres, trolls, stonebenders, and ogrilloi ranged throughout the concentric rings of tunnels lined with private cells, searching every one. The sole inhabitants of the Donjon were the corpses stacked at the downstream end of the Pit.

The doors that led toward the Courthouse above could not be forced, even by the strength of ogres. Someone suggested the doors might be magically held, and for a time there was debate whether the doors should be chopped through with axes, burned through by griffinstone-powered flame, or removed by a rockmagus softening the stone in which they were set. While this debate grew more and more heated, tangles of demented illogic twisting like threads drawing violence from thin air, Kierendal arrived.

She’d gotten the news by treetopper, and she came through the Shaft door cradled in the arms of Rugo the ogre, who peered around nervously, tongue shooting up along the curve of his tusks, because he had a sick suspicion that maybe that little fey fucker, that Changeling, had survived the battle on Commons’ Beach, too, and he didn’t want to get in trouble again with Kier for letting him live. He was pretty relieved to find the place as empty as the treetopper had said.

Alongside Rugo paced Jest, at heel like a dog, eagerly obedient to the prods and growled commands of the armored ogrillo, Tchako, who guarded him. Blood still beaded from the tooth punctures on his lower lip, and when he looked down from the balcony at the stack of bodies against one wall of the Pit, his mouth hurt worse. He thought his friend Caine’s corpse was probably lying down there within that stack like a log in a rick of firewood, and reflected, Better him than me.

And when Kierendal and Rugo and Jest and Tchako came in, the primals and stonebenders and ogres and all started to jabber at once, everyone trying to explain why the doors should be broken this way, or that way, or some other way, and there came angry snarls, and shoving, and the rasp of steel on steel.

Some of the clouds of fever had begun to part within Kierendal’s mind; in the hours since Jest’s capture, she had even begun to doubt Caine’s guilt. She was unaccountably relieved to find the Pit deserted. This relief troubled her more than her fever had, and sharpened the edge of her Fantasy-voice as she hissed inside all their heads. “He is not here. We are too late. To force the door is fruitless—we cannot fight the whole army above. We have lost him.”

They fell silent while they considered the consequences of losing Caine.

As though the silence was itself a signal, the door to the Courthouse stairs swung open. In the doorway stood a huge, vicious-looking ogrillo with bandaged wrists, wearing a hauberk three sizes too small and carrying a Donjon guard’s club. His lip flaps drew back in an approximation of a human’s smile, and he waggled his tusks invitingly. “Hey, you fuckers,” he said. “You looking for Caine? There’s a party in the Hall of Justice, hey? Big party. Invites all around.”

“What?” Kierendal rasped painfully, surprise drawing a word from her throat instead of her mind. “What?”

“Come on,” he said, beckoning. “Don’t be late. Everybody come.”

Kierendal, naked and trembling, a half-dead, mutilated, spiderish thing, said, “Caine wants me to come to a party?”

“You gotta come, Kierendal,” the ogrillo said seriously. “You’re the guest of honor, hey?”

4

YOU GET INTO the Hall of Justice from the second floor of the Courthouse. It’s a vaulted auditorium, where the King—later the Emperor, and until a couple days ago the Steward—of Ankhana sat to try cases that came before his personal judgment. Its design dates from the days when some civil cases were decided by combat; the circular expanse of floor where the litigants stand is still walled, still traditionally strewn with clean sand. Still called the arena. One thing I can say about arenas in general: Better to be up here looking down, than down there looking up.

Believe me.

On a broad dais above the arena stands the Ebony Throne, brother to the Oaken Throne in the Great Hall of the Colhari Palace. Since the Assumption of Ma’elkoth, though, the Patriarch has passed judgment from a smaller, unadorned, unassuming chair—the Steward’s Seat—on a dais of its own, below and to the right: the proper place for he who is only a servant of the God above.

But the Ebony Throne has a better view.

It’s pretty comfortable, too.

I sit with the blade of Kosall naked across my knees, and survey my new kingdom.

The seating sweeps upward in a steep bowl, broken by an imposing prow of limestone that rises behind the Ebony Throne fully to the vault overhead. This big-ass wedge had once been carved with the figure of Prorithun, but now bears the current face of Ankhanan Justice, such as it is: Ma’elKoth. Only Ma’elKoth can look over the shoulder of whatever judge might sit below.

Big bastard always did like to kibitz.

Row after row of those cut-stone benches are filled with my people, sitting, watching silently. Waiting for the show to begin. Almost two thousand, all told, human and primal and ogrillo, from the Pit and from the private cells. A few from the Shaft. Of those two thousand, maybe five hundred really feel like they owe me something, like they owe each other something. Of those five hundred, there’s maybe fifty I can count on, when the shitstorm breaks. Maybe fifty, if I’m lucky.

Maybe twenty will actually fight.

The others just want to get the hell out of here. They want to live. I can’t blame them. I don’t blame them.

I don’t need them.

For fighters, I’ve got those guys on the sand.

A hundred and fifty armed friars, at least a quarter of them Esoterics. They bristle with swords and spears and carry short compound-recurved bows, and who knows how many wands and magicked crystals and crap like that. Shit, I’d match them against the Cats, and put three-to-one on the friars.

Cash.

The guy that Raithe speaks quietly with, down there in the middle—Acting Ambassador Damon—is twitchy as a street Temp on crank, but Raithe tells me he’s solid. They all are. That’s Monastic training for you: homicidal paranoia doesn’t really get in the way. Might even be an advantage.

You have to be crazy, to fight the Social Police.

Raithe mounts the steps of the dais slowly, a little unsteadily. He’s weak, shaky with blood loss, but his Control Disciplines keep him moving: biofeedback maintains his blood pressure, and he can mentally goose his endocrine system to release hormones that give him strength and suppress the pain. He can walk, talk, even fight, right up till he passes out again.

He gets close and nods to me. “They will perform as required,” he says softly. “Damon is a good man. He knows how to follow orders.”

I squint at him. “That’s your definition of a good man?”

His wintry eyes meet mine steadily. “What is yours?”

Instead of answering, I look down into the five-gallon tureen somebody snagged from the commissary. It sits on the side table to my right, half full of water, warm as spit, in which my right hand soaks. I work my hand into a fist and out again. Ragged flaps of my knuckle skin drift like scraps of jellyfish, trailing straw-colored billows of blood.

“All right,” I tell him, pulling my hand out. “Take it.”

On the dais at my left side, I have Toa-Sytell, still chained, a huddled ball of feverish misery. Every once in a while he writhes, or makes a little whimpering noise; sometimes a tear or two trickles down his cheeks. Raithe makes a complicated gesture, knotting and unknotting his fingers like a cat’s cradle of flesh and bone, and Toa-Sytell relaxes into unconsciousness.

Raithe unties the gag and gently frees it from Toa-Sytell’s slack mouth; slowly, almost reverently, he rinses the rag in the blood-tinged water of the tureen, then wrings it out before retying it between the Patriarch’s teeth.

I wave a hand at the tureen. “Here, take the soup down to your boys there. It’s time for them to get to work.”

Expressionlessly, he picks it up and carries it down to the arena. “Line up,” he says. “By rank. Damon: you are first.”

The Acting Ambassador steps up obediently. Slowly, with a kind of ritualistic solemnity, he cups some of the water in one hand and brings it to his lips, then steps aside to let the next friar come. Yeah, he’ll take Raithe’s orders.

Raithe will take mine.

Voluntarily.

Faithfully.

That’s our deal: his obedience for my blood. And he is a man of honor. What does that say about me, if I can trust my enemies more than my friends?

Raithe sits on the dais below me, pressing a hand against the wound in his side. “It is done, then,” he says, dark and doom-haunted. “It is done. I am yours.”

“Relax, kid,” I tell him. “It’s not like you sold me your soul.”

His gaze is bleak as tundra. “What is a soul?”

5

ORBEK COMES THROUGH the arch at the back of the Hall at the head of a gaggle of Folk. He flicks a tusk back toward the corridor behind and gives me a nod.

“Stay calm,” I say generally. “Let them come.”

Folk flood through the door: a spume of madness white-capped with the foam that trickles from their mouths. A lot of them are pretty far gone, so deep in the dementia that it’s jangling their nerves, making them twitch and limp, stagger and spastically jerk. It’s a testimonial to Kierendal’s leadership that they haven’t turned on each other; somehow she holds them together, somehow she directs their HRVP-spawned lunacy outside their group: toward the Imperials. Toward the humans.

Toward me.

And they smell: they carry a stink of bad meat and acid urine, of unwashed armpit and rotten teeth. It precedes them, an oily wave that flows into the Hall of Justice and fills it and closes over our heads. We could drown in this stench like rats in a rain barrel.

They smell like Dad.

Two weeks ago, that alone could have beaten me.

Funny how things change.

I lean to my right so I can see Kris in the Steward’s Seat below, a step above and to the left of where Raithe sits. “Showtime.”

He makes no answer. Only the irregular hitching of his breath shows he’s alive. “Hey,” I mutter. “Come on, Kris. The party’s starting.”

His eyes roll open, and he offers me a weak smile.

“How’re you doing?”

His answer has the spooky distance of mindview. “Better. Much better, Hari. Up here—” A limp gesture takes in the whole world outside the Donjon. “—I can draw Flow to manage my fever. I am . . . grateful . . . that you brought me out of there.”

“How’s the leg?”

“It hurts,” he admits with a wistful shrug, still smiling. “But only down in the bone, where it has always hurt. The flesh above . . . well—”

I get the picture. It’s ugly. “Can you fix it?”

“You see here—” He lays a hand upon the pus-soaked rag that serves as a bandage over the gaping abscess on his thigh. “—the result of my healing skill.”

“Hold your shit together. I need you lucid. None of this can work without you.”

“Frankly, Hari—” He coughs, and turns up his palm in a shrug of apology. “—I don’t see how it can work with me. You haven’t even said what you want me to do—”

“Too late to argue about it now,” I tell him, because here comes Kierendal, cradled like a bundle of sticks in an ogre’s bridge-girder arms. She’s naked, wasted, starved, smeared with filth. Her hair, her signature, that elaborate platinum coif, has become the straggled, finger-ripped wisps of a cartoon witch; what remains of it is plastered wet and greasy down the sides of her face. Her eyes like tarnished coins flick with foggy wariness. She didn’t expect to find me waiting for her, and in her world, there’s no such thing as a pleasant surprise.

Then I watch her eyes track the leash that stretches from the arm of the Ebony Throne to the prison collar, and I watch her squint, and blink, and bring a trembling skeletal hand to her eyes to see if she can wipe away the image of Toa-Sytell chained to my chair like a dog. Her whole body starts to shake.

That, right there, is a good sign: some rationality remains. She’s sane enough to be freaked out by how crazy this all is.

At the ogre’s heel comes Majesty, arms bound behind him, prodded along by an ogrillo bitch whose neck is bigger around than my thigh. Dried blood flakes across his chin. His eyes bulge and he mouths silently: Caine. Hot staggering fuck.

I acknowledge him with a glance, and squeeze my eyes into half a smile at Kierendal. “Have a seat, Kier,” I say. “Tell your people to make themselves at home.”

She glazes over like I hit her with a club. “Caine—” she croaks through the general rumble and mutter. “I don’t—how did you—why have—I don’t understand!”

“It’s not that complicated,” I tell her. “I’m doing some business in Ankhana right now, and I can’t get it done with you trying to slip a knife in me every time you see my back. We need to reach an understanding.”

I can read her lips. “You know—?” she breathes. “You know I came here to kill you?”

“You came to the Donjon to kill me. Here? You came because I invited you.”

“I—I don’t—”

“Look, it’s simple,” I tell her. “We’re all here. We have maybe half an hour to settle this shit. Before anybody leaves this room, you and I need to be on the same side.” I can’t feel the Social Police closing in around the city—not like Raithe can—but I know they’re there, closer every minute. Half an hour might be optimistic.

“You—you’re asking me to join you?”

“Asking, shit. We need you. We need your people. I’d be on my knees begging, but you might have heard my legs don’t work so well.”

“You think I will accept this? Are you so naive?” Her voice has lost the croak, taking on instead a weird echoic nondirectional resonance, as though she’s talking from inside my skull. She’s recovering her self-possession in a hurry, and her eyes rake the room disdainfully. “To join you would make me an accomplice to your crimes.”

“Let’s not start about my crimes, huh?”

“Is that why you have brought me here?” she resonates acidly. “To protest your innocence?”

“Fuck my innocence.” I’m losing patience with this; maybe I didn’t have much to begin with. “Are you willing to stand and listen to what we’re up against? Yes or no. That’s all I need out of you right now. Yes or no or shut up and fight.”

“Don’t think you can bully me, Caine. I know what you are. Murderer. Liar. Aktir.”

I can feel the blood coming up my neck. “As long as we’re calling names, why don’t you try traitor on for size, you fucking slag?”

This generates a warning rumble from the Folk she brought with her. “What are you talking about?”

“Treason,” I say. “Your treason.”

The rumble gets louder, but that weird voice of hers overrides it effortlessly. “Is treason really the word you want to use, Caine? When you have the Steward of the Empire chained like a dog?”

I shrug. “He’s not my king. On the other hand—” I nod toward Kris in the Steward’s Seat, who goggles back at me in open horror, mouthing Hari, don’t! “—Deliann, here, is yours.”

“You must be joking.”

“Yeah, that’s me: a laugh a minute. We could all use a chuckle. Go ahead and tell everybody how you tried to murder the Mithondionne.”

That warning rumble from the Folk thickens, but it’s met by a colder, darker growl from our guys, Folk and human alike: Kris is a popular guy. Kierendal’s nonvoice overrides the swell of anger. “He is no king. He’s a vile, murdering Aktir—as are you!”

“Yeah. So what? He’s also the Youngest of the Twilight King, and you fucking know it. You knew it then. You knew he was the last Mithondionne, and you ordered him killed.”

“He’s not even primal,” she snarls. “He’s a human in disguise!”

“You’ve got it backwards,” I tell her. “The human is the disguise.”

Deliann crumples on the Steward’s Seat as though something is eating his guts from the inside out and covers his face with his hands. “Hari,” he murmurs, lost and empty and for my ears alone. “Hari, how can you do this to me?”

“It’s midnight, Kris,” I tell him simply. “That’s all.”

He lifts his head and shows me the question in his eyes.

I explain, “Take off your mask.”

His eyes go wide and fill with sick pain. “They will never accept me.”

“Who gives a rat’s ass what they accept? You know what you are. Fucking act like it.”

His gaze retreats inside his head, and I lift my eyes to meet Kierendal’s disdainful stare. “I know you’re not yourself these days, Kier. I know you’ve been sick, and it’s hard for you to get shit straight in your head. This is your chance to make good. If you’re willing to help, we can use you.”

Her eyes shimmer like fish scales. “And what’s in it for me?”

I shrug. “Your life.”

“Is that all you have to offer?” she says with scalding contempt.

Raithe casts a surreptitious glance toward me from the arena floor. I give it back expressionlessly, then return to Kierendal. “I don’t know what the penalty for attempted regicide is supposed to be among your people, but you’re not among your people now. This is my court. You have a choice to make, Kier. Right now.”

“My people are ready to die for me, Caine. How many of these . . . creatures . . . are ready to die for you?”

And that, I guess, pretty much says it all.

“There’s one way to find out,” I say evenly.

Her hands coil. “I do not bluff, Caine.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that about you.” Then simply, coldly, finally, all I have to say is: “Raithe.”

He claps his hands together as though he dusts sand from them in her direction. A spray of black droplets falls before him. Kierendal tries to speak, but her voice becomes a thick gargling roil of bodily sounds. She gapes at me for half of one blankly astonished second; then a rusty hinge-squeal hacking comes from her throat. Her sides heave, and she vomits blood down the legs of the ogre who holds her.

“You bazztidz!” the ogre cries as though its heart is breaking. “You bazztidz—whaddid you do to Kier?” It falls to its knees and cradles Kierendal like an infant to its breast.

Throughout the hall, my guys are on their feet. Below me, Raithe issues soft-voiced instructions to the friars; they spread out, closer to the cover of the arena wall, checking their weapons. He mutters at me over his shoulder, “Have you ever done anything that did not end in violent death?”

“Sure, lots of stuff,” I tell him. “I just can’t think of any right now.”

This is gonna be one fucking ugly brawl. And maybe I knew it was gonna come to this. Maybe I was looking forward to it.

Maybe I am what they say I am.

But a new light grows within the Hall of Justice, paler, steadier than the lamp flames and the scarlet flicker of the fires outside: a softly penetrant moonglow that does not admit of shadow. It gathers strength, intensifies, and the hall falls quiet as it touches each and all among us here, and every eye turns to find its source.

It’s coming from Deliann.

He rises from the Steward’s Seat, slow with infirmity. In the throbbing quiet, his voice is soft enough to break my heart. “No. No fighting. Not among us. No killing. I can’t stand it.”

He sounds like he’s standing at my shoulder. I have a feeling he sounds like he’s standing at everybody’s shoulder. The light gathers itself into a shining cloud around him and wreathes his brow with cold coronal flame. Then that light from his face flares out and grabs us all by the brain.

For one infinite second that light drowns me with everything everyone else is feeling: pain and fear and bloodlust and anguish and fierce fighting joy and everything else, and the light makes them feel what I’m feeling, and all of us feel the lives of each of us and together we make a world of pain that he somehow draws out and ties together into a giant ball of misery, and he hugs it and holds it and that doesn’t make it okay—it’s not like that, nothing could ever make all this okay—but somehow it’s not so bad, now, because it’s spread out a little, shared a little, and no matter how alone we all are he knows exactly, exactly, what we’re going through, how scared and hurt we all are, and he kind of says—

All right, you’re scared and hurt. It’s okay to be scared, and it’s okay to be hurt, because your life is a scary, painful place.

Deliann says softly, “Rugo.”

The ogre lifts his head.

“She need not die,” Deliann says. “But there is only one hope of life for her. She must be restrained from any interference in the battle to come. She must be taken into the Donjon, and placed in a cell, and kept there until what is to come has passed over us all. Will you do that?”

Rugo turns his face away. “I do thizz, she lives? You promizz?”

“I have said so.”

Rugo’s neck bends, and tears streak the globular surface of his eyes. “I guezz—she can’t hate me more than zzhe doezz already.”

Deliann searches the hall like he’s expecting to see someone he can’t find; after a second or two, he nods to himself. “Parkk,” he says to a rugged-looking stonebender up in back, not far from where Majesty stands. “Save her. Stay with her in the Donjon, and tend her when she wakes.”

The stonebender holds his place sullenly for a long moment like he’s expecting a trick; then he shrugs and nods and makes his way to Kierendal’s side. Stonebender magick should work even in the Donjon.

Deliann lowers his head like he can feel my disapproval against the back of his neck. “Is it so wrong,” he says softly, “that I would not have my first act as king be the execution of a friend?”

“Did I say anything?”

“No,” Deliann replied. “But you were thinking very loudly. What do you want me to do, now?”

All her people are still standing, staring, waiting. I can still use their help, if Deliann can get it for me. “You could start,” I offer, “by telling everybody what the hell is going on.”

“Tell—?” he murmurs faintly. “How can I possibly tell? It’s so huge—there’s too much. How can I know what’s important, and what’s just detail?”

“You don’t have to know,” I say. “Just decide.”

His feathery brows pull together.

“I—” Pain twists his face, and it’s not physical pain. “I think I see—”

“Go on, Kris. You’ve got the floor, man. Use it.”

Suffering shines from him like the eldritch light from his face. He lowers his head, closing his eyes against his own light, and begins to speak.

6

HE STOOD IN the center of the arena. Fireglow that leaked down from the clerestory of the vaulted ceiling shaded his penetrant shine toward a pale peach. Though his voice had never been strong, and now was weaker still with his infirmity, all could hear—his meaning, if not his words.

All within that room were touched by his Meld.

The spider-tangle of black threads he could see flowing into Caine knotted together in a flare of white fire within Caine’s chest—white fire that Deliann could touch, white fire from which Deliann had drawn the power to tune his Meld in a wholly new way. His shine resonated with the Shells of primals, gaining strength and the colors of life; it flowed into the Shells of stonebenders, and out again to blend into ogres and trolls; the shimmer of ogre brought it to frequencies that might touch the ogrilloi, and the ogrilloi shaded it enough to slide within the consciousness of Flowblind humanity.

He neither orated nor exhorted, but merely spoke. “This is the truth,” he said, and through the Meld all knew it. He held on to what he knew was true, and let the story tell itself.

“Some of you,” he said, “believe you are here because you were imprisoned for the crime of thinking for yourself; you are mistaken. Some of you believe you are here because you were falsely accused of treason; you, too, are mistaken. Some of you believe you are victims of political oppression, or official misconduct, or simple bad luck. Some of you think you came to revenge yourselves on your enemies, or to stand by your friends.

“You are all mistaken.

“What brings all of us here is not Cainism, or human prejudice; it is not greed, or lust for power, or blind chance.

“What brings all of us here is a war.

“This is a war that is fought every day in every land; this is a war that began with the birth of life itself. This is a war the best of us fight in our hearts: a war against to get along, you go along. A war against us and them. A war against the herd, against the cause. Against the weight of civilization itself.

“This war cannot be won.

“Should not be won.

“But it must be fought.

“Here is the truth: We are offered a gift.

“That we are here this night is the gift of T’nnalldion—what in the human tongue is Home, or the World. This is the great gift of Home: that once in an age, she brings forth this secret, silent war into the full light of day. This gift is the opportunity to stand as her shield; to see plain our enemy; to strike a blow face-to-face and hand-to-hand.

“She held out this gift to my grandfather Panchasell, more than a thousand years ago. In accepting, he named himself Luckless, for he knew the doom he chose.

“This was the first engagement in our theater of this war: when Panchasell Mithondionne closed the dillin that joined us to the Quiet Land. He fought the war in secret for two hundred years; when Home brought the war into the open day, Panchasell the Luckless and House Mithondionne took arms and led the Folk Alliance against the Feral Rebellion.

“Almost nine hundred years ago, barely a bowshot from where we now stand, Panchasell the Luckless fell in battle.

“On the day my grandfather was killed, Home held out this gift to my father, T’farrell Ravenlock. My father refused, and named himself the Twilight King; he wished the bright day of the First Folk to draw slowly to a close, instead of suffering the sudden nightfall of extinction.

“He led our people away from the daylit war, ceding the open lands of Home to the enemy, and retired to the deepwood to preside over our long slow slide into history. This has come more swiftly than his darkest dream: We few, here today, may be the last of the Folk to stand together against our enemy.

“More than four hundred years were to pass before Home offered her gift again. This time it was to the race of the enemy, many of whom had come to love her as deeply as any of the Folk; this time the gift was offered to a human named Jereth of Tyrnall.

“Jereth Godslaughterer fought the enemy in each of its shadow-forms: as Rudukirisch and Dal’kannith, Prorithun and Kallaie, and in all the other names that humans give to the shared dreams that pool their collective desires. Like my grandfather, Jereth fell in battle—but it was a battle won: from it came the Covenant of Pirichanthe, which binds the human gods beyond the walls of time, and defends Home from their irrational whims of power.

“Now, five hundred years have come and gone since the days of the Godslaughterer, and Home once more offers her gift.

“Our enemy has struck already. He struck without challenge, as a poisoner strikes, against whom no armor may suffice. His blow has slain House Mithondionne, of whom I alone survive. Each of us in this room bears wounds from his hand. His weapon is madness, the same madness that some of us—here, tonight—feel coursing our veins. But against such an invisible sword, we now have a silent shield. T’Passe?”

T’Passe, pragmatic as a shovel, tromped down the aisle to the arena; Deliann gestured to Raithe, and Raithe put the tureen into her hands. T’Passe shrugged, and ducked her head toward the contents of the bowl. “A little drink, that’s all,” she said heavily. “Even a sip.” She handed the bowl to a human, one of the Cainists who sat on the floor in the aisle. Though already carrying the countervirus as did all the former inmates of the Pit, she dipped her hand, and brought it cupped to her lips; like all Monastics, she had a profound respect for the power of ritual.

The Cainist who held the bowl scowled down into the straw-colored liquid within. “What is it?”

She looked at Deliann, who gravely inclined his head.

“Water,” she said. “Water, with a little blood in it.”

Again, she looked at Deliann; his expression never altered, nor did the angle of his nod. She shrugged.

“It’s Caine’s blood.”

A general murmur stirred the room.

Deliann said, “Choose.”

The Cainist still scowled, but he dipped his hand and drank, and held the bowl so that those beside him could do the same, before he passed it on to a nearby woman.

“In accepting the gift of Home, you bind yourself to fight in our war,” Deliann said. “I know that many are without weapons, and more are without armor. Many—perhaps most—of you do not call yourselves warriors.

“But as Caine has said: There is fighting, and there is fighting.

“By this he means: It is not demanded of each of you that you take up a sword and slay. That is the task for warriors. Some may bind wounds, and comfort the injured. That is the task for healers. Some may cook food and carry water. Some may leave here this night, and never look behind.

“Let each of us fight in our own way, according to our own gifts. A cook who pretends to be a warrior endangers his comrades; a warrior who pretends to be a cook ruins food we need for the strength to fight on.

“Only this do I ask of you: I, not Home. Those of you who leave this place tonight, do not surrender to our enemy. Know that the shield of Home defends you, and can defend all whom you love. This shield does not move of its own. It does not grow unaided. It can truly defend only when passed from heart to heart, and flesh to flesh. To bring anyone or anything within the shield of Home requires only a kiss. Your choice can save more than you dream. It is the most important choice you will ever make.

“Some here do not have that choice.”

A vague wave of his hand might have indicated the Patriarch, bound and leashed to the Ebony Throne, or the friars who stood on the arena sand, or both.

“But we do.

“We can choose to stand against the blind god.

“We can choose to stand for Home.

“We can—”

He broke off, and for a moment lowered his head; when he looked up once more, he wore a small, melancholy smile, full of resigned self-knowledge.

“I should say, you can choose.

“My choice is made already. I have made the choice of Panchasell. The choice of the Godslaughterer.

“The choice of Caine.

“I am Deliann, the Mithondionne. Here I will stand. Here I will fall.

“I am Deliann, the Mithondionne. I set my name to this.”

He fell silent, and his light faded, and with it the Meld; after a moment he lowered his head.

7

THEY’RE ALL FILING out, the Cainists and the Serpents and the Folk. After a minute, some clever guy gets a bright idea, and brings the tureen up to the arch where everybody can take a sip as they go out. Pretty soon somebody’s at each of the other exits with a helmet upside down in their hands, holding a few cups scooped from the tureen, and the hall clears out faster. Most of them are heading for the Pit, where they’ll go back the way they came: down the Shaft sump and out, to scatter across the Empire, and beyond. Stonebenders to the White Desert and the northern God’s Teeth, ogrilloi to the Boedecken, treetoppers south to the jungles of lower Kor.

Primals to the deepwood, and whatever’s left of Mithondion.

And that’s it, then. Here, in this eerie muttering quiet, I’m looking at Shanna’s victory. She and I and Deliann—and Raithe, too, can’t leave that fucker out of it—we just beat HRVP.

Sure, the disease has a big lead, but it’s slow, and random. The countervirus is fast, and will be purposeful: with a few hundred people fanning out of here, spreading Shanna’s countervirus every time they sneeze, or piss in a river, or share a cup of wine, we’ll overtake it.

Score one for the good guys.

Which is all the enthusiasm I can muster; it’s kinda anticlimactic. I guess it’s because HRVP was just for openers—just a light jab to probe our defenses, and it too fucking nearly punched our lights out. Like Tan’elKoth used to say: You can win every battle and still lose the war.

On the other hand, Kris’ story was a good one; sometimes making a good story is winning, too. Spartacus. The knights of the Round Table. The Alamo. That’s victory, of a sort.

Shit, I hope so. It’s the only kind we’re gonna get.

A couple of feys who used to do healing for the rough-trade girls at Alien Games work on my legs a little, scraping out the jelly of dead muscle and infected pus, and run some Flow in there to pump strength into the muscle.

About the time they finish up, Majesty threads his way down to the arena. Somebody cut him loose after that ogrillo bitch went off with the ogre and the dwarf to look after Kierendal. He rubs the rope burn on his wrists, and he’s covered in filth, but he looks pretty cheerful: his smile cracks the dried blood on his chin, and it flakes away as he scrubs at it with the back of his hand.

“Damn, Caine,” he says as he vaults into the arena. “Fuck a goat if you don’t always find a way to come out on top.” He bounces across the sand and climbs the dais, right up next to Toa-Sytell, and grins down at him. “Hey there, you shit-crazy cock,” he says, and draws back his foot for a kick.

“Don’t.”

He looks at me and finds no room for argument in my eyes. He shrugs. “You’re the boss, I guess,” he says.

“Yeah.”

The feys give him hard looks as they pack their shit and go. He ignores them. “What now, buddy? What’s our next move?”

“My next move,” I tell him heavily, “is to send those friars down there out to fight some troops that are coming after me. Troops from my world.”

“Your world?” Majesty breathes. “Fuck me—it’s true, then. It’s true. It’s always been true. You are an Aktir.”

“Yeah.”

“Fuck me,” he repeats, but then he spreads his hands and smiles at me. “Hey, Aktir or not, you always knew who your friends were, right?”

“Your next move—” I nod toward the back of the hall. Toward the door. “—is to follow those guys up there. Clear your ass out of town.”

“Huh?” Wariness sparks deep within his eyes. “I don’t get you.”

“You’re not popular with the Folk, Majesty. I’d lay odds the only reason you’re still alive is that most of them aren’t quite sure who you are.”

“Hey, c’mon, Caine. Aren’t you the stag, here? You’re saying you can’t protect me?”

“No,” I tell him. “I’m saying I won’t.”

His smile cracks like the blood on his chin. “Hey—hey, Caine, c’mon—”

“You’re why Kierendal had to be locked up. You killed half her people. The only family she had. You and Toa-Sytell. Your fucking Caverns War.”

“But, but, hey, I didn’t have anything against her,” he says, licking his lips. “Shit, Caine. This whole Caverns War—that was Toa-Sytell’s thing. It was politics, that’s all. Business. It wasn’t personal—”

“It was for her.” I nod toward the door one more time. “You better go now, while I still remember how much I used to like you.”

He leans toward me confidentially. I can see sweat leaking out of his skin. “Come on, Caine. This is me. Even in the Donjon, didn’t I help you out? Huh? Didn’t I?” He reaches for my arm as though his touch will remind me of our friendship.

I brush Kosall’s hilt with my fingers. Its blade buzzes a rattlesnake’s warning against the arm of the throne. Majesty’s hand freezes, and he takes a cautious step back down the dais stairs. “Yes,” I say. “You did. That’s what buys you the chance to walk out.”

“But, but, hey, I mean, where am I supposed to go?” he says plaintively. If I didn’t know him so well, I could almost feel sorry for him. Majesty’s a weed; he’ll flourish wherever he falls. “Where can I go? What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t care,” I tell him, “so long as you don’t do it here. Go.”

He backs away one more step. “Caine—”

I point Kosall at him. The blade snarls. “Five seconds, Majesty.”

He turns and scampers down the dais, across the sand. He forces his way into the outgoing stream of humans and Folk and exits the Hall of Justice without looking back. I watch him go, remembering all the good times we’ve had together, but they don’t mean much to me right now. There was a time I considered him my best friend.

And I can’t remember why.

Down on the sand, Raithe gives his instructions—my instructions—to the friars, detailing them in squads to intercept and harass the approaching Social Police: just my way of saying hello. Pretty soon the friars go, and t’Passe heads off to coordinate the Folk and Serpents and Cainists who want to stay here and fight; Orbek takes Toa-Sytell’s leash and drags him off to keep his Patriarchal ass out of mischief, and in all the whole Hall of Justice it’s now just Raithe, and Deliann, and me.

From the arena below, Raithe stares after Orbek and Toa-Sytell with those deep-winter eyes. He’s wrapped pretty tight; he sizzles with the effort he’s expending to hold himself still and silent. “What are you going to do with the Patriarch?”

“Nothing you need to know yet,” I tell him. “Kris—?”

He stands in the center of the arena, lost in some infinite distance. “Kris—?” I say again, then more sharply, “Deliann.”

Slowly, his gaze gathers focus and finds me. “Yes, Caine?”

“Let’s do this thing.”

“Here?”

I nod up toward the titanic figure of Ma’elKoth carved into the wedge of limestone towering over us. “You got a better place?”

He thinks about it, his face alien, unreadable. Then his eyes close and open again in a motion too slow and deliberate to be called a blink, and he says, “No. I suppose I don’t.”

“What do you need from me?”

“I’ll explain as we go along,” he says, mounting the dais to stand at my side. “Find mindview.”

I breathe myself into it; it only takes a second or two, and then twisting corded nets of black ropes web the Hall of Justice like it’s the lair of spiders the size of horses. “I can see it,” I tell him, and I can. Even though I’m talking, I can hold the image.

“I know.”

“It’s easier now. Easier than it was even when I used to practice this. Back in school.”

He offers me a smile of sad understanding. “Among the First Folk, we are taught that the path of power is measured by self-knowledge. To use magick, one must know oneself, and the world, and the identity they share.”

I am at the center of that black and tangled web. It pulses into the base of my spine; strength and feeling swells in the muscles of my back and legs.

Deliann turns to Raithe. “Kneel here, facing him,” he says, indicating a spot an arm’s length in front of my knees.

Raithe looks at me.

“Do as he says,” I tell him, and he does.

A different kind of glow surrounds Deliann now, a bluish Saint Elmo’s fire kind of thing. That aura grows a limb—a pseudopod, an arm—and grabs on to something white in the middle of my guts. Lightning snaps back up that insubstantial blue and sparks it to a searing arc-welder blaze. It’d be painful, if I were seeing it with my eyes.

He reaches for Raithe, and Raithe gasps as the colors blossom around him.

“This will be a form of Meld,” Deliann says. “It’s a little like a Fantasy, except we will all be creating it together as we go along. Don’t be alarmed at what you might see; none of us might look like we do now, but we’ll know each other anyway. It’s a . . . metaphoric level of consciousness, like a dream.”

“And we can’t lie,” I murmur.

Deliann nods. “This is a state of consciousness where deception is impossible. Concealment, though, isn’t difficult. It is simply a refusal to share. It is the same as you should do if any of these Powers tries to join with you, or enter your body. They cannot do so without your cooperation—but they can be very persuasive.”

“Yeah.”

“What Powers?” Raithe says, staring raptly at whatever Deliann’s touch upon his mind is showing him. “You still haven’t told me what we are doing.”

I bare my teeth. “We’re gonna have a little chat with Ma’elKoth.”

8

A SOFT, HEARTH-WARM glow appeared, neither close nor distant, in no particular direction: near, far, before, behind, above, or below—

None have meaning in the infinite lack.

As patiently irresistible as gravity, the light drew her forward, or upward: in whatever direction from her that it lay. Without volition to resist its pull, she drifted toward it.

She came to understand that this light was the sun, and not the sun. It was a star, burning in the heavens of the lack, giving light and life and reason to the boundless nothing of her death—but it was also a man, with elven features and a mane of platinum hair that twisted outward in streamers of fire along the solar wind. The sun man held a bow of fusing hydrogen, and carried arrows of light.

Will gathered within her, strengthening with her approach as though she drew it from this man’s light; she exerted this will to slow herself, gaining in caution as her awareness congealed. Somehow she knew: This was enemy territory.

She said to the sun: I know you. You are Kris Hansen.

The sun replied: I am Deliann.

Far, far above her—for now, imperceptibly, up and down had come to the lack—circled a bird of prey, soaring upon gleaming wings, proud and lonely. A falcon—perhaps an eagle—

Perhaps the phoenix.

It struggled toward the sun, drawn forever by light and warmth—only to fall forever back, crippled by a wound to its wing. Its cry echoed in her heart, for it was she who had given that wound. She could feel the wound herself—her arm burned as though she held it in a furnace—yet she knew it was his.

Within herself, she said, You are the Caineslayer.

The bird replied, I am Raithe.

Now on fields that rolled forever beneath that sun she found others: a great dire wolf with dewclaws cut, limping in pain but still fierce and deadly; a woman of volcanic basalt thrust freshly up from the earth, sharp edges not yet rounded by millennial erosion. She found trees and flowers and cats and mice, snakes and toads and fish—

And she found a man. He sat on a rock, elbows on knees, staring at her.

She knew every inch of him.

The glossy black hair, sprung grey at the temple above the salted black of his beard: her fingers knew that texture. His darkly gleaming eye, the slanted scar across his twice-broken nose—she had felt these with her lips. Those hard and lethal hands had cupped her breasts and stroked warmth along her thighs.

He wore a loose black leather tunic open in front, faded and cracked, white salt rings of ancient sweat circling the armpits. His soft black breeches were covered with cuts and tears crudely sewn. Coarse brown thread showed like old bloodstains against the leather.

Her heart sang, and she flew to him.

Slowly, deliberately, his right hand went inside his tunic, and when it came out again it held a long, keen fighting knife.

“That’s close enough,” he said.

She stopped, puzzled, hurt sparking somewhere behind what on a mortal body would have been her ribs. Hari—

“Hari’s dead.” He pointed the knife at her eye. “So are you. Let’s skip the happy-to-see-you bullshit, huh?”

Hari, I don’t understand—why won’t you let me touch you?

He flicked the point of the knife toward the circling bird of prey. “Because I have too fucking good an idea what can happen if you do.”

I only want to share with you. To join with you.

“No.”

We can be one, here. We can truly share. We can love each other—

“Not like that.”

All I want is to be together—

“Tough shit.”

You treat me like an enemy.

His eyes glittered black and hard: chips of obsidian. “Yeah.”

Hari—Caine—Her mental voice roughened, and deepened; she tried to cough it clear, but instead it swelled within her chest to Ma’elKoth’s subterranean rumble. Caine, I love you. We love you.

“Hold out your hand.”

She hesitated.

“Come on,” he said. “We’re a little past playing shy, huh? Your hand.”

All right.

She reached out a hand that had the shape of her own, but the size of Ma’elKoth’s—and had Kollberg’s oiled-parchment skin and arthritis-knobbed joints. He shook his head and pointed to her left—her wounded, burning, all-too-human hand.

“That one.”

She drew back.

“Don’t you trust me?” His wolf-grin said he didn’t really care about her answer.

She found, astonished, that she didn’t—and at first she couldn’t say why.

She didn’t trust him; she couldn’t trust him. She had been deceived by him before, hurt by him, destroyed by him. He had lied and lied and lied to her, and his lies had savaged her life; he was the source of all her unbearable suffering these long seven years. He had threatened her, and mocked their lawful caste relationship. He had struck her: he had broken her nose, had kicked her in the balls—

In the balls? she thought. Hey, wait.

Before the other two of the three she was could stop her, she put out her hand. Faster than their eyes could follow, his knife flashed underhand and drove up between the bones to jut through her palm: a conjured apparition of steel, welling black blood from its base.

The searing ice-steel spike turned to white-hot iron as he twisted it to wedge the blade against the bone; then he used the blade to wrench their hand over sideways and pull them off balance. They gasped in shock that was yet too fresh to be pain, and gaped in astonishment at the blood of black oil that rolled down the blade and dripped from the point.

Where the black oil touched, the grass beneath their feet curled and blackened and began to smoke.

What are you DOING?

His wolf-grin answered. “Holding you steady.”

In the far black distance above, the sun drew an arrow of light back to his heart, and let it fly.

The arrow’s meteor-streak drove through the injured wing of the phoenix and struck her on the hand, where Caine’s knife had pierced her. It flashed into her and through her, through the god at her back and the god behind him, joining all of them with the phoenix along a dazzling line of blue-white Cerenkov radiation.

Power pulsed up the line toward the phoenix, and it gave a heartbreaking cry. From its injured wing, black blood sprayed like rain over all the world.

“This is a metaphor, you understand,” Caine said. “I imagine if you concentrate, you can feel what’s really happening.”

She felt—

From the spring near the crest of Khryl’s Saddle, a trickle of black oil joined the sewage runoff of the rail camp. In the great forest of the north, needles of spruce and aspen withered and blackened, and the amber that swelled from gaps in bark was black as onyx. In the Boedecken Waste, oil bubbled up out of the buried depths of the marshes and spread necrotic swathes through the living green.

Her horror spread to the others who shared her consciousness. Stop it—you have to stop it!

“No,” Caine said. “I don’t.”

Hari—Caine, please! Stop it now!

“No.”

She could feel the life draining from her already, deadness climbing her fingers like leprosy. Caine—you’ll kill me—

His wolf-grin widened, and lost any trace of humor. “You’re already dead. We’re killing the river.”

You can’t! You can’t do this!

“No?” He barked a harsh laugh. “Who are you talking to?”

Everyone—everything—will die! All of it—every living creature—

“That’s right. Then what good does your fucking link do you? You’ll have nothing. Shit, you’ll have less than you started with. Think about it, Ma’elKoth: How many Beloved Children are gonna survive this? What happens to your precious godhood when all your worshipers are dead?”

And that was when Pallas Ril understood. Imaginary tears poured from her imaginary eyes. Her eyes said Thank you, but only her eyes.

His wolf-grin thawed a little. “I told you to trust me.”

Other words held her lips. This is a bluff.

“Sure it is.”

You’ll kill yourself along with the river; this poison will slay you as surely as any salmon or hawk.

Caine’s smile warmed even more. “Ever play Chicken?”

Outrage gathered within her, but the outrage was not hers. The voice from her lips said, This is no game. Not when the stakes are the lives of all within the Chambaygen’s bound.

His smile went hot. “I wouldn’t have come to the party if I didn’t want to dance.”

It seemed then that a long time passed, in which the only sound was the distant, thin sobs of a young girl. We still have Faith.

“Yeah?” His tone was square and warm, but ice in his eyes froze his smile into a mask. “And what can you do to her that’s worse than what you’re doing right now?”

You are beyond ruthless. You are beyond criminal. You are a monster—

Caine’s presence solidified beyond his mask of ice: he became dark and gleaming, diorite in motion, absolute, unanswerable. “You should have thought of that before you hurt my daughter.”

Stop this. You must stop this!

“Make me,” he said, and vanished.

With him went the phoenix, and the sun, and the meadow, the world and all the stars.

She did not fall into the lack. The channel of venom pouring into the river was enough of a living connection to sustain her consciousness. She was herself the universe: vast and minute together, and empty of all save pain and creeping death.

And hope.

9

THE SOCIAL POLICE officer at the door to the surgery had stood so still for so long that when he finally moved, Avery Shanks flinched; a tingling shock from the middle of her back shot painfully out into her fingers and toes. She clenched her stinging fingers into fragile, futile fists and hunched her shoulders around the hammering of her heart. All this from the smallest gesture: the officer did no more than step to one side and open the door.

Through the door came Tan’elKoth, with two more officers behind.

Something—some subtle difference in his face, his bearing, something bleak and impersonal—brought a sick darkness to her chest. Her mouth tasted of tin. “Tan’elKoth,” she said, still uncertain enough to hope that she was wrong. “Is it over? Is it finally over?”

He loomed over her like a granite cliff. “Gather your belongings. We leave within the hour.”

“Leave?” she repeated stupidly. She made her aching joints move enough to let her sit up. “Tan’elKoth—?”

“Ma’elKoth,” he corrected dispassionately.

Avery trembled. “I don’t understand—”

He had already turned away. He stood beside the table to which Faith was bound, undoing her straps. A pair of Social Police officers pulled Faith’s IV and catheter-line relief bags from their hooks on the table and hung them on an odd device nearby. This device looked rather like a levichair, but instead of magnetic suspensors, it rode on wheels: two large spoked wheels in back and a pair of smaller ones in front. Tan’elKoth lifted Faith from the table and began to strap her into the wheeled chair.

And that was the subtle change: she saw it now. He no longer seemed aware of the Social Police, nor they of him, but both worked with common purpose in mechanical coordination, requiring neither word nor gesture.

“What are you doing? Tan’elKoth—Ma’elKoth—she’s too weak! You can’t move her, she’ll die!”

He reached her side in a single step, gathered her shirt into one hand, and lifted her to her feet, neither roughly nor gently—more with a kind of impersonal dispassion, as though she were so alien that he could not conceive what might cause her either pleasure or pain. “You will not let her die,” he said. “You will provide whatever care she requires.”

“I—I . . .” Tears gathered in her eyes, and she could not speak.

She was stretched too thin; she had lived in this tiny room before the silvered masks of the Social Police for too long; she had charred her heart with too many acid hours helplessly witnessing Faith’s endless nightmare.

She longed for the bottle of Teravil that was still in her bag; chemical comfort was the only kind of which she could still dream. But she hated herself enough already. If she were to give herself rest while Faith stayed there, stayed strapped to that steel table, stayed in the twilight fever dream of the drugs that dripped into her arm, she could never live with herself.

Would never live with herself.

She had already decided that when she could no longer resist the pull of the sedatives, she would use them all. When she could find any way out from under the inhuman silver gaze of the Social Police, she would share them with Faith.

Because she could never leave her here alone.

She said, finally, softly, “Yes. Whatever she requires.”

Behind him, the Social Police strapped a gleaming metallic harness over Faith’s chest.

“But—but, where are we going?”

“Home,” he said, and turned away once more to adjust the harness.

“Home?” she repeated, horrified. “Overworld? What has happened to you? Why are you acting like this? You can’t just move her like furniture—she won’t live a day!”

“A day,” Ma’elKoth said distantly, “will be enough.”

THE WAR OF the dark angel and the god of dust and ashes came to turn upon a question of battle.

Of the outcome, there could be little doubt.

The soldiers of the god of dust and ashes had weapons of unimaginable power. They were the best trained, most disciplined fighters this world had ever seen. Their officers were competent, and their morale was unbreakable.

The allies of the dark angel were starving and sick, wounded, disorganized, and distrustful of each other.

Yet there is fighting, and there is fighting: some weapons are more useful than others, and not all battles must be won.