TWENTY-THREE

THE FIRST AMBUSH was, in broad outline, representative of all the encounters between the friars of the Ankhanan Embassy and the Social Police. It came as the last boats of the Bauer Company of the 82nd Force Suppression Unit cleared Fools’ Bridge.

The boats had proceeded without haste but steadily, threading their way through the dead and burning trees that studded the river; a man in the lead boat of each lashed-together triad held a large canister of pressurized foam that could be sprayed liberally onto any burning oil that came too close. The rest crouched watchfully, weapons at the ready.

The friars who lay in ambush had no time to make a concerted plan, but what they lacked in coordination they made up for in firepower. The men in the lead boats had no chance.

As the first triad of lashed-together boats hummed silently toward Knights’ Bridge, close along the sheer Old Town wall, a shimmering blue-white plane of energy flared out from the dockside. This plane of energy fanned horizontally for barely a second, but in that time it sliced neatly through the heads and shoulders of several of the dozen riflemen in the first boat, and sheared exactly in half, just below the navel, the mage who guided the boat. His torso slid backward and toppled into the river, and the power he had been channeling through his staff exploded into a jagged ball of lightning that conducted well enough through wire-inlaid armor to roast several more riflemen.

Instantly the other three triads turned for the dockside, but the two remaining boats from the first triad drifted powerlessly while riflemen within them frantically pulled collapsible oars out from storage pockets. Before they could use them effectively, ionizing radiation made a laser-straight blue line from the arch of Knights’ Bridge to the surface of the river.

Spreading in a fan upstream from where that line touched, the water instantly congealed to frosted glasslike solid that looked like ice, but was warm to the hand. The boats stuck fast within it, and now nut-sized pellets streaked toward them from several directions. These pellets stuck to what they struck, and an instant later they erupted in gouts of flame intense enough to melt the plastic components of the rifles, set fire to the ballistic cloth that covered the riflemen’s armor, and ignite the flesh beneath it.

However, the thin line of radiation also marked its point of origin and gave the riflemen their first target.

Their reply was a stackfire volley from a double handful of Heckler-Colt MPAR-12 assault rifles. These rifles were a century and a half out of date, requiring manual sighting and carrying only sixteen stackfire cartridges in each of their dual magazines, but since a stackfire cartridge comprised a tube of eight 5.52 millimeter solid-block caseless rounds that fire sequentially in slightly more than a tenth of one second, a single volley proved adequate.

The friar who stood on Knights’ Bridge, whose staff flamed with the power that had gelled the river, was exposed over the low retaining wall from his groin to the crown of his head. The exposed parts of him vanished into a spray of bloody mist and bone fragments, and his legs fell in opposite directions. The detonation of his staff bit a buckboard-sized chunk out of the stone arch; the river below melted into ordinary water and flowed once more.

Before the lead boat of the second trio could reach the bank, it was seized as though by a giant invisible hand and yanked into the air. The adept and most of the riflemen bailed out, but a few unfortunate soldiers had gotten their gear tangled in the boats’ nylon-net storage pockets, or had foolishly chosen to hang on, and were hurled hundreds of yards up into the night sky.

As the boats fell, still lashed together, the rope that joined them caught on a bartizan of the Old Town wall; they swung down and slammed against the wall like clappers of a giant stone bell, crushing the men inside. Other men fell from the sky to their deaths on the streets; some landed on rooftops or in the branches of burning trees.

The Telekinesis that had seized the boat was invisible to ordinary eyes, but to an adept in mindview it blazed with furious light—as did the stream of Flow that poured through the hand sculpted of diamond that a friar, hidden around the corner of a warehouse, used to create it. The three surviving Artan adepts communicated his location, and a scant second later that location was the intersection of three expanding spheres, each comprising several thousand sewing-needle-sized flechettes, produced by three RG 2253A antipersonnel rifle grenades in simultaneous airbursts at an altitude of precisely 3.5 meters.

What remained of the friar was not recognizable as human.

The other two triads had reached the docks, and seventy riflemen fanned out among the burning trees that were the last of the unnatural jungle that still stood, here at the epicenter from which the fire had spread. Those riflemen who had bailed into the river were left to swim as best they could; they made inviting targets for the ambushers, and now each time magick flared the man who used it could be located and killed.

Bauer Company methodically and deliberately secured the dockside. They were in no particular hurry; they knew, as their opponents did not, that they were only the first of the 82nd’s reinforced rifle companies to enter Ankhana. The whole of their job was to spring ambushes and probe the strength of resistance, and they had done it well.

The surviving friars fell back individually, winding through the streets and alleys toward the Courthouse, harassing the riflemen at every opportunity. They, too, had done their job well.

2

EARLY ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN Ankhanan citizenry and the advancing elements of the Social Police 82nd Force Suppression Unit were bloody. So many voices shouted in the streets that even the fluent Westerling commands and curses of the irregulars went unheeded, and the various companies of the 82nd were forced to resort to nonverbal means of clearing their respective paths.

On Earth, the hammer of automatic rifle fire aimed over the head is universally understood, but Ankhanan citizens, inexperienced with chemically propelled projectile weapons, could not interpret the loud but apparently harmless noise and flashes coming from these odd broken-crossbow-like devices. By lowering their point of aim a few degrees, the Social Police undertook to educate them.

But each lesson sufficed only upon those near enough to see the blood spurting from shattered limbs and riddled torsos, and to smell the voided bowels; thus, the lesson was regularly repeated as the Social Police advanced. Through the streets and along the gutters, blood and oil swirled red and black, immiscible, tracing fractal geometries of turbulence.

It was one of the irregulars who suggested the use of concussion grenades. This was more successful; not only does the airburst of such a device resemble a mage’s fireball closely enough to send magick-leery Ankhanans diving for cover, these devices are so loud and so bright as to trigger the human animal’s instinctive panic response: run and hide.

The 82nd now made better time.

The various companies converged, following the lead of one or more irregulars, each of whom carried some variety of seeking item: graven crystals and divining wands, runestaves and silver stilettos, needles that swung on balance points, pendula of crystal, copper, gold, and iron.

Some of these items were sensitive enough to trace the path of Kosall back to the mountains; some were sensitive enough to indicate the location of every hand that had ever touched its hilt. These items had been tuned, detuned, and retuned to filter out the mutilated barge that had been the blade’s home, the rocks where it had rested on the river’s bed, the headless corpse of a man who had once borne it, now buried in the potter’s field southwest of the Cathedral of the Assumption.

Now, the seeking items all pointed toward the Courthouse.

3

ONLY MORGAN COMPANY—approaching from the southwest, through the stately homes of the South Bank—encountered resistance from the Ankhanan Army. When they reached the foot of Kings’ Bridge, a mailed officer ordered them to halt; his order was backed up by a triple row of shoulder-to-shoulder pikemen supported by archers farther up the bridge’s arch.

Invisible fingers poked dozens, then hundreds, of sudden holes in breastplates and helms, making a rattle like a bucket of stones emptied onto a griddle. Bloody wads of flesh burst from the Ankhanans as they danced to a clattered half rhythm of rifle fire. The survivors chose to allow Morgan Company to pass without further interference.

Once in Old Town, however, their progress became much more dangerous, as they came under magickal fire from a small contingent of friars who were somewhat more successful at keeping themselves under cover. Slowly, mechanically inexorable, Morgan Company beat back their attackers.

Morgan Company was the first unit to reach the Courthouse. Riflemen methodically began to disperse the crowds while the irregulars loudly announced that Kings’ Bridge was now open, which produced a tidal surge toward the east and south. A hastily assembled column of Ankhanan infantry was scattered by two grenades and several well-aimed bursts that shredded their standard and their officers. The panic of fleeing men-at-arms was sufficient to awaken the caution of the other infantry columns; their commanders decided to delay engagement with these invaders until the situation could be investigated.

Shortly, the survivors of Bauer Company suppressed the flames of Knights’ Bridge with foam spewed from handheld canisters and marched across. No one challenged them.

The Social Police owned Ten Street, and the balance of the 82nd was mere minutes away.

Those friars who had been cut off on their retreat toward the Courthouse now slipped away into the flame-smeared night, descending the mucker shafts alongside each public pissoir. At the bottom, they were met by the Folk who had waited below, and were led swiftly through the caverns.

4

DESPITE THE URGINGS of caution from the irregulars attached to his command, the 82nd’s brigadier ordered a standard attack.

Initially, all went as expected. A handheld launcher lobbed a shaped sticky-charge across Ten Street; the charge flattened against the Courthouse’s bronze double doors, and three seconds later detonated with a resounding whang! that blew the doors into twisted hunks of fist-sized shrapnel.

It also managed to ignite the black oil that painted the building, and set the Courthouse on fire. Antipersonnel grenades arced up through the flames to explode above the roof.

Several canisters of airborne nerve agent sailed through the doorway, to finish up whatever hostiles the shrapnel may have missed. Chemically propelled grapnels shot toward the roof from the street, the Old Town wall behind, and the roof of the nearby Ankhanan officers’ quarters. While their power-reels would not work in Overworld conditions, these soldiers were in superb physical condition, and teeth on their gloves meshed with the toothed cords to provide an effortless slip-proof grip. Hand over hand, they walked up the Courthouse wall at the speed of a moderate trot, while below fifty riflemen rushed the atrium.

This might have worked as a surprise attack; but the Social Police were part of the field of power that was the blind god, and Raithe of Ankhana could feel their every step.

They never had a chance.

The first hint that this operation may not go smoothly was the empty atrium itself. The riflemen found no bodies, no blood—only a stone floor littered with chunks of bronze, spent and flattened slugs, and chips of rock. The white vapor that served as a visual marker for the nerve agent hung in the air, swirling slowly; it had not dispersed farther into the Courthouse, nor did it eddy back toward the blown-open doorway.

The second hint was somewhat more dramatic.

As the riflemen who had reached the roof gathered themselves into order and approached the access stairs, some of the more sensitive among them noted a vibration—like a subaural hum—that seemed to come through their boots. Before they could call others’ attention to this, the stone beneath their feet softened, and sagged, then bellied downward like an overloaded trampoline, sweeping the whole group off their feet into a muddled pile at the bottom; the stone then ruptured and dumped them in an unceremonious tangle on the floor of a small room below. The roof continued to collapse, pouring into the room like mud down a funnel.

As this mud fell upon the riflemen and oozed under and around them, the humming rose in both pitch and volume as the four stonebender rockmagi sang the mud back into stone once more. None of the riflemen managed to stand up before the stone closed over their faces; they barely had time to scream.

The riflemen in the atrium found all the doors to be closed, and sealed, by some invisible force that prevented them from even getting their hands within a span of the handles. Further, they found the blown-open doorway to be sealed by a similar force. The same inlay of silver wire that rendered them resistant to many forms of magick also rendered most magick quite invisible; they could not see the Shields that trapped them.

Most primals can make light: it’s a simple enough conversion of Flow. As they become more skilled, they can make light in specific colors, from indigo far down into the reds; a mere extension of this ability enables them to produce electromagnetic radiation at a substantially lower frequency: that of microwaves.

Coherent beams of microwaves heated several earthenware pots that had been looted from the Courthouse’s commissary. Within these pots was lamp oil. As the lamp oil boiled, it released a considerable amount of aromatic volatiles into the Shield-sealed atrium. The riflemen, wearing self-contained breathing apparatuses to protect them from the nerve agent, had no warning at all before the team of microwave-producing primals turned their attentions to a small piece of wood that lay on the floor near the center of the atrium. The wood caught, sparked the oil vapor, and turned the atrium into a homemade, crude—but effective—fuel-air bomb.

Bits and pieces of the riflemen returned to the street riding a shattering blast of flame.

Having kept, as any good commander would, men in place to observe the results of his probing attack, the brigadier now decided it was time to enlist local aid. He instructed his irregulars to approach the officers of the encircling Ankhanan Army under flag of truce.

He needed troops who had more experience with magick: troops who had thaumaturges of their own.

5

FOR THE TABERNACLE: a Mylar dome tent of stainless white, standing in the fireglow of the Financial Court, stretched over gracefully arched poles of black graphite fiber.

For the congregation: the commanders of the Ankhanan army, met under flag of truce with Artan officers.

For the priest: an Artan adept stripped of armor and cloaked in cloth of gold, a bishop’s vestments from the Church of the Beloved Children of Ma’elKoth.

Within the tabernacle, the congregation knelt, for God was among them.

Taller than the moon, He stood upon a sapphire sky, and the stars played about His shoulders. His face was the sun: blindness threatened any impertinent stare. His voice thrummed in their blood; it spoke with their heartbeats; it was the voice of life itself.

LIVE EACH FOR ALL, His voice told them. EACH OF YOU BELONGS TO ALL OF YOU. LOVE EACH OTHER, AND AWAIT MY RETURN.

And His voice told each of them, severally and together: THOU ART MY OWN BELOVED CHILD; IN THEE I AM WELL PLEASED.

Within the tabernacle, Ankhanan commanders embraced officers of the Artan force that had invaded their city, that had slaughtered their men and the citizens those men had been sworn to defend. They received Artan embraces in return without shame; were they not, in truth, Children of the same Father?

Were they not brothers?

6

A SHEET OF flame fills the window—the oil on the outside of the Courthouse still burns merrily—but one of the two feys sitting on clerks’ stools has enough of a Shield going that the heat’s no worse than the sunshine on a summer afternoon.

The window’s tiny, not much bigger than a wallscreen. This drab little clerks’ chamber is grey and airless, and I can imagine the drab little grey and airless men and women who have occupied it over the centuries, hunched over the copying table, the only music in their hearts the scritch-scratch-scritch of ink nibs on vellum.

Are people like that born soulless?

Christ, I hope so.

Otherwise, it’d be even worse.

We all have our chairs gathered around the window, despite the heat. For a long time, we sit and stare out into the flames.

It’s what the fey on the other stool is doing that makes for such an interesting view.

Its name translates roughly as firesight; within the flames are red-gold shapes of buildings and soldiers and sundry weapons, from longbows to machine pistols; sometimes I can even see the Courthouse from the outside. It’s a hell of a lot more efficient for reconnaisance than taking a physical look around; the last guy to stick his head above a windowsill took a bullet through the eye.

Say what you want about the Social Police, but don’t ever try to tell me those fuckers can’t shoot.

They don’t seem too organized out there just yet; the fire shows me a lot of Ankhanan garrison troops holding off to either side of Soapy’s perimeter, but they don’t look like they’re about to start killing each other. There’s a couple squads on the wall already, too, and it looks like they’ve got RPGs on Two Tower as well as on the Knights’ Bridge gatehouse.

Deliann’s eyes open emptily, and he stares through the ceiling. He has to maintain mindview to keep our little game of Chicken going; he’s holding himself in contact with the river. He lies on the writing table along one wall, Kosall across his lap. The same two feys who cleaned up my legs had tried to work on his, but when they put their hands on that abscess, black oil like from Raithe’s hand came bubbling out and burned the living shit out of them; now they’re downstairs getting healing of their own.

“Raithe?” I say.

“It’s working,” he answers. “The Social Police have made an alliance with the army.”

“And?”

“Yes,” he murmurs. “He’s coming.”

I nod. “Everybody here knows which he we’re talking about, right?”

The grim looks I get from one and all tell me that seven years haven’t done any harm to Ma’elKoth’s reputation.

I lean back in my chair and fold my fingers over my stomach, and a contented sigh completes my portait of confidence. I meet their eyes one at a time: Raithe, Orbek, t’Passe, Dinnie the Serpent, and they all stare back, waiting, clearly calmed by my assurance. It’s a fraud, but they don’t know that: I’m showing them exactly who they need to see right now, and they’re eating it up. “So,” I start slowly, “here we are: in a natural castle closer to perfect than any in the history of warfare.”

They favor me with the patiently blank stare people use while they’re waiting for the punchline.

I’m pretty sure they won’t be disappointed.

“Think about it,” I tell them. “The Courthouse facade is our outer bailey. The inner offices and rooms are our killing ground—they have to come through there to get at us. With primals and rockmagi and a couple hours to prepare? Those poor bastards’ll never know what hit them. Our keep is the Donjon: the only access to our position is down a single flight of stairs cut into the rock. But we have sally ports everywhere: every goddamn public pissoir in Ankhana, and not a few of the private ones. Through the Shaft sump, we can get into the caverns, out any pissoir—or two, or five—and hit the enemy anywhere in the city, with no warning at all. The Folk here have spent days underground already, fighting this Caverns War of yours. If they try to pursue us down through the caverns, we can fuck them till they never walk straight again.

“Between the primals, the rockmagi, and the human adepts, we have the greatest concentration of magickal power on this side of the God’s Teeth. We have blooded fighters from the Pit, and we have over a hundred fully armed Monastics. Plus all the weapons and armor from the Donjon armory, food from the commissary, water from the Pit—

“We have everything we need to hold these fuckers off for a long, long time—and to chop them up every time they come for us. We can stand a long, bloody, expensive siege here, and still probably get away through the caverns when things finally go bad. I couldn’t have set this up better if I’d planned it for years.”

T’Passe nods. “A passive defense is a losing defense. To make this work, we should hit them now, before they’re in battle order.”

“No,” I tell her. “Let’s not.”

“No?”

“No. We’re not gonna fight them.”

She looks at me like I’m crazy. “Why not?”

“These guys aren’t the enemy. They just work for him.”

“So? They are his soldiers.”

“Yeah. But he has more. A lot more. We could kill a million of them, it wouldn’t hurt him. It wouldn’t give him a fucking itch.”

“Then what are we doing here?” she asks. “Why aren’t we running away?”

I fall back on good ol’ reliable Sun Tzu. “The essence of victory is the unexpected. To win without fighting is the greatest skill.”

Cryptic Chinese shit doesn’t, apparently, go down too well with t’Passe. “What exactly do you have in mind?” she says sarcastically. “Surrender?”

“Well, sort of. Yeah. We’re gonna surrender.”

Now everybody looks at me like I’m crazy.

I nod. “Yes, we are.”

7

JUST MORE THAN an hour before dawn, the flames that had enclosed the Courthouse finally flickered low enough that the 82nd could begin their final assault, in concert with the Ankhanan Thaumaturgic Corps. The brigadier turned to the commander of the city’s Southwest Garrison—as the ranking Ankhanan officer present—and offered him the honor of giving the order himself.

Before the commander could speak, brilliant white light burst from every window of the Courthouse, and a voice great enough to make the streets tremble beneath their feet demanded, in the name of the Ascended Ma’elKoth, that they withhold their hand.

A moment later, Patriarch Toa-Sytell stepped through the shattered gap where the Courthouse doors had once been.

“Rejoice!” he proclaimed. “I am saved, and the traitors taken! A new day dawns upon Ankhana! Rejoice!”

In the confusion of spontaneous celebration that followed, the Social Police had some difficulty, initially, determining what had happened. The story, as they eventually pieced it together, was this: The Patriarch had been kidnapped by a rogue Monastic, one Raithe of Ankhana. This Monastic had held the Patriarch hostage, to drive away the Eyes of God, while his confederates arrived from the embassy. Then, they had all descended to the Donjon to free the prisoners.

But the threat to the Patriarch had been their fundamental miscalculation. Even the oppressed former denizens of Alientown had too much patriotism in their hearts to sanction such an act; they had poured up from their hiding places in the caverns below the city to slay the prisoners, capture the Monastics, and seize the two ringleaders, Raithe and Caine.

The brigadier did not find this tale fully satisfying. First, there were not nearly enough corpses. Well over a thousand human beings had been in the Pit; he suspected that the vast majority of them had somehow escaped the slaughter, perhaps through the caverns themselves, though he received sincere assurances from the subhumans that this was impossible.

Second, there was the matter of the sword.

The sword had been seen in the possession of this man Raithe—several of the Eyes of God confirmed it—but it was now nowhere to be found. Scouring the Courthouse turned up nothing, even when the irregulars attached to the 82nd consulted their bewildering array of graven crystals and divining wands, runestaves and silver stilettos, needles that swung on balance points, and pendula of crystal, copper, gold, and iron. Eventually, all agreed that whoever held the sword must have carried it off into the caverns beneath the Courthouse and the city, the rock of which is well known to baffle and defeat such magick. A good deal of their urgency could be relaxed, however; if someone did indeed hold the sword down there, it could not be used, and if this person or persons unknown brought the sword back up to the surface, the seeking items of the irregulars would locate it instantly.

With this the brigadier was forced to be satisfied, for a certain amount of protocol must be observed. As emissaries of the divine Ma’elKoth, the 82nd Force Suppression Unit would be expected to join with the army in receiving the blessing of the Patriarch from the Address Deck of the Temple of Prorithun, high above the Court of the Gods, as soon as the Patriarch had a chance to change his clothes and have some of the bruises of his ordeal treated by his healers.

One possibility disturbed him, however. It was brought to his attention by a particularly subtle thinker among his irregulars that an adept of sufficient skill might be able to have the sword above ground, and use his power to conceal not only himself and it, but also conceal the fact of his concealment. Such an adept might hide in plain sight: the sole method of detection might be the naked eye, as shielded by the silver-meshed helmets of the Social Police.

For example, the irregular pointed out with uncanny accidental accuracy, an adept could be holding that sword right behind the Ebony Throne in the Hall of Justice, and no one might ever know.

8

WITH THE REFINED sensitivity of a mewed falcon, Avery Shanks felt the attention of her captors shift away from her.

She could still see her face in their silver masks, stretched and half lit by the fleshy glow of bonfires outside, but she felt the eyes behind those masks follow the stare of Arturo Kollberg, who had his face pressed against the window, misting it with the slow grey-pulsing pseudopodia of the fog from his breath.

For indeterminate hours she had sat, silently patient, refusing thought. Her watch did not work, and the clouded night beyond the armorglass windows of the limousine gave no hint of time’s passage. Her only clock was the occasional slow drizzle of urine down Faith’s catheter tube. In the faint reflected firelight, she could see that Faith’s relief bag was nearly half full.

She had hung that bag herself, a fresh and empty polyethylene sac, on its hook in front of one of the chair’s large, incongruous wheels minutes before she and Faith and the Social Police and the Kollberg-thing and the whole limousine had gone through the mind-twisting silent roar of nonexplosion that had blown away the Studio’s freemod dock and replaced it with the stinking gas-lit railyard. The limo’s soundproofing had not sufficed to close out the appalling clatter of the enormous mechanized crane that had lifted the limo in a freight sling and lowered it onto a flatbed car of what Avery could only assume—from her limited exposure to historical dramas on the nets—to be a train.

Every few minutes for what seemed like hours, the train had chugged and clanked and jerked itself forward a few meters, only to stop again, perhaps as more cars were loaded behind her.

One of the couches had been ripped out of the limo’s passenger lounge so that Faith’s wheeled chair could be lashed to eyebolts screwed crudely through the carpeting. Avery knelt beside her, mopping fever-sweat from Faith’s brow with a kerchief, giving the girl an occasional sip from a white plastic water bottle—a product of the SynTech subsidiary Petrocal—to moisten her mouth.

Finally the train had rattled out of the huge gas-lit dome of armorglass, through a forest of night-black buildings, under the startling walls of a medieval castle that had blossomed in moonlight through a chance break in the clouds, and finally up a long, long grade to stop here, in this meadow, overlooking a crater with five enormous bonfires spaced evenly about its rim.

Down in the crater, on a platform supported by spidery scaffolding, Ma’elKoth stood with arms upraised to the invisible stars. He was now Ma’elKoth unquestionably: the Ma’elKoth of old, the Ma’elKoth of For Love of Pallas Ril. His first act upon leaving the Railhead had been to summon the power of his Ascended Self, as he put it: his bruises shrank, and faded, and the stitched wounds across his brow and from the corners of his mouth consumed themselves and vanished. A beard of burnished bronze sprouted curling from his cheeks and jaw, and his eyes of mud brown became an astonishing emerald green. Now, in the crater, the air around him was the source of the new light: a globe half as large as the crater itself glowed with power, shimmering like a ghost-image of the moon in a rushing stream.

Deliberately, matter-of-factly, without any furtiveness of motion that might attract a suspicious silver-masked eye, Avery opened her shoulder bag and pulled out her bottle of Teravil caplets. She opened the bottle and shook three of them out into her palm.

But even that small motion was too much. “What is that?” a half-muffled voice hummed, sounding strange indeed without electronic digitization from the mask speaker—almost human.

The former Avery Shanks might have jerked guiltily; the former Avery Shanks might have ventured a bold lie. This Avery Shanks had been too far reduced. Instead, she extended them toward one of the Social Police officers at random, for she could not know which one had spoken, and she was not certain that it mattered. “Teravil,” she said numbly. “My sedatives. I need to sleep.”

“Very well.”

She could feel the patient stare of the eyes behind the mask as she put the pills in her mouth, and she opened her hands to show them empty. She bit down, wincing slightly at their alkaline bitterness. She chewed them well, and held the gummy saliva-pudding they became under her tongue while she pretended to swallow.

She picked up the white plastic water bottle and pretended to sip from it, as though to wash down the pills, while she instead spat the wad of half-dissolved sedative back down the straw into the water inside. Then she did drink from it, to rinse her mouth; the fraction of a pill she would ingest from this wouldn’t have the slightest effect on her high-tolerance system.

But combined with the hypnotics that dripped from the IV bag, a few mouthfuls of this poisoned water should more than suffice to kill Faith.

Sometime in this endless night, Avery had realized that she didn’t need to kill herself. Once Faith was dead, the Social Police would take care of that small detail. Slowly, tenderly, she again moistened Faith’s mouth with water from the bottle.

Outside, Ma’elKoth gestured, and the glowing sphere within the crater bulged and stretched forth an amorphous limb. When that haloed limb touched a vehicle on a flatbed railcar behind the limo, its running lights flared to life, and the vibration of its turbines hummed in her bones. Ma’elKoth’s limb of light swept along the train, touching vehicle after vehicle, and one by one the bulky shapes of Social Police assault cars roared to life and lifted into a sky now clearing of clouds, high above the mountains, becoming blazing stars themselves as they climbed out of the horizon’s shadow and met the first scarlet rays of the rising sun.

9

“HE COMES.”

Raithe’s voice is flat, and as chill as the chunk of blue ice that’s pretending to be the sky. The season’s changed overnight, and it’s colder than a gravedigger’s ass out here.

For a second or two I don’t take his meaning; I’m thinking, What is this, some kind of freaky sex joke? because the he I think he’s talking about is Toa-Sytell, who’s standing up on the Address Deck of the Temple of Prorithun in his nice fresh clean Patriarchal robes with that big pointy hat, flanked by a couple Thaumaturgic Corps officers and a brigadier in the Social Police, giving his speech to the army, describing his rescue from the Enemy of God—that’s me—and the evil conspirators of the Monasteries—that’s Raithe, Damon, and the rest of the friars—by the astonishing heroism of the subhumans gathered below.

The blackened stonework of the Fountain of Prorithun against my back gives off some residual warmth from the overnight fires—like the bricks we used to heat on the woodstoves back at the abbey school, and put on our bedcovers to keep our feet warm in the wintertime—and the stone under my rapidly numbing ass is warmer than the air above. The closest we get to clouds today is the coils of smoke that still trail upward here and there across the city.

In the unforgiving dawn, Ankhana is a wasteland of blackened stone, charred giant’s jackstraws of tree trunks and cornstalks and ashes and all kinds of shit everywhere. When the soldiers marched us here from the Courthouse—well, marched them, carried me—a lot of what people stepped on crackled like bone. Even from here, I can see six or seven bodies, curled into that burn-victim ball: the fetal contortion created by tendons shortening as they cook. Just across the street, beyond the Sen-Dannalin Wall around the Colhari Palace, the Temple of the Katherisi—once one of the jewels of Ankhanan architecture, its graceful spires topped with beaten gold, its high-vaulted walls supported by flying buttresses—is now a pile of smudge-blackened rock that half chokes Gods’ Way.

It’s hard on my eyes: they keep trying to see the city the way it was the first time I walked these streets, twenty-some years ago. I can only imagine what it must be doing to Raithe, who’s lived here his whole life.

But if it bothers him, that desert-prophet face of his gives no sign. He sits impassively at my shoulder, staring into the sky, his legs folded in seiza beneath him, while Toa-Sytell rocks on through his speech.

Toa-Sytell gives an impressive performance; I guess being the Patriarch sharpens your public-speaking skills. He even manages to get a little weepy, nicely choked up, when he recounts all the abuse that the elves and dwarfs and the rest have taken at the hands of the Empire, the terrible oppression inflicted upon them, and how great and true their patriotism and love of the Empire must be, to have overcome their perfectly natural resentment and risked their lives to save the Patriarch yadda yadda yadda horseshit.

Down here in the Court of the Gods, I can’t stop myself shivering, and the shackles on my wrists are burning me with cold. The friars around us look stoic, if not actually comfortable, huddled sullenly on the plaza flagstones—maybe they’re in better practice with the Control Disciplines than I am. The Ankhanan regulars who guard us shift and stamp their feet, restlessly trying to keep their blood moving. The dawn is so bright that the glare off weapons and armor slices my eyes—but it brings only light today, not heat.

Raithe stares to the east, his bleached gaze seeking blindly somewhere near the rising sun. “So fast . . .” he murmurs. “Faster than the wind . . . faster than a falcon . . . faster than the noise of his passing. He comes with swiftness beyond imagining.”

Now I finally understand who he’s talking about. “You can feel it?”

He rattles his shackles, which shakes loose a few droplets of the black oil that continues to leak through the skin of his left hand; his sleeve is black with it up above the elbow, and I can see a splotch soaking through at the shoulder.

I wince. “Doesn’t that hurt?”

“Yes,” he says expressionlessly. “It does.”

Fast. Faster than a falcon, he says. A fact floats up from the cesspit buried in the part of my brain where I leave useless trivia. A peregrine falcon can dive at something over three hundred kilometers per hour.

Oh, crap.

If Tan’elKoth’s got a way to make cars work in Overworld physics, this is gonna get ugly. I don’t even want to think about the other shit he might be able to make work. “How long do we have?”

Raithe shakes his head distantly. “I cannot say. They move with speed that baffles my judgment. They are so far—days away—yet they come so quickly that I cannot believe they are not already here.”

A second later, I remember that I’m supposed to be the confident one. “We’ll deal,” I tell him. “Somehow, we’ll deal.”

“Or we’ll die.”

“Yeah. Probably both.”

Toa-Sytell goes on, “And because these Folk—the folk we call subhuman—could so give of themselves as to accomplish what even the great warriors sent to us by Ma’elKoth from beyond the world—” A gesture toward the soapy brigadier at his side. “—could not: to save not only me, but through me the Imperial Church itself, I declare here, on this Assumption Day morning, the word subhuman to be banished from Ankhanan tongues. There shall be no more elves, but primals; no more dwarfs, but stonebenders; no sprites or goblins, but treetoppers and ogrilloi. Henceforward, these heroes of the Empire shall be known by the name they call themselves: the Folk. Hear me, Ankhana! Today, the Folk become our brothers, and we theirs: citizens all, Ankhanans all, equal before the law and in the eyes of God Himself.”

That part was my idea: a little nod toward Deliann, a seed for the future. If any of us have a future.

But—

“It’s Assumption Day?” I mutter at Raithe out of the side of my mouth. “Today?”

He shakes his head slowly. “I do not know. I have been further removed from the normal calendar than even a prisoner in the Shaft. But, if it isn’t—”

He turns his leather-colored face toward me, and his ice-pale eyes see me all the way down to the crud between my toes.

“If it isn’t Assumption Day,” he says, “it ought to be.”

Yeah.

Seven years ago today—

Seven years ago right now, I was asleep at the bottom of the latrine in the old gladiator pens at Victory Stadium. I remember opening my eyes in the gloom, down there in the fecal dust and petrified turds; I remember the toilet-shaped hole of daylight overhead. I remember monologuing, as I went up, that I seem to spend most of my life climbing out of other people’s shit.

Not today.

Today, it’s my shit. That’s progress, I guess.

I guess.

Christ, has it really been seven years? So much has changed, and so little; I can’t decide if it feels like yesterday or ten lifetimes ago.

Toa-Sytell’s winding up his speech: heading for the punchline of our little prank.

“And we have been tried, as our city has been tried, in the crucible of faith, tested by the Enemy of God, and by traitors from within—and we have not been found wanting.”

A chuckle sneaks past my lips before I know it’s coming. Raithe gives me a look of wintry astonishment, and I shrug at him.

“Toa-Sytell wanted an Assumption Day that Ankhana would never forget.” My nod takes in the blackened ruins of the city. “And this is how he thanks us.”

Raithe’s expression stays as cold and disbelieving as before. Some people have no sense of humor.

“And now, in gratitude to the divine Ma’elKoth for our deliverance,” Toa-Sytell proclaims, “let us now join together in one voice, one Folk, Ankhanans all, in the Imperial anthem.”

Here’s the payoff: he reaches up, and takes off his hat.

What puts the punch in our punchline is that he’s the Patriarch; as soon as his hat comes off, every single Ankhanan soldier is obliged to uncover his head in respect. They unstrap their helms and tuck them under their left arms, and everybody takes a deep breath while they wait for Toa-Sytell to begin the hymn.

Toa-Sytell, though, holds his tongue—he’s staring at the Social Police brigadier next to him. Expectantly. The brigadier, after all, is an “emissary of the divine Ma’elKoth.”

Slowly, with obvious reluctance, the brigadier takes off his silver-wire-inlaid helmet.

A brigadier of the Social Police—

Exposing his face—

Christ, I can’t look. I can’t not look—

He’s got kind of a moon face, large protuberant eyes, thinning mouse-colored hair, and I get a sick feeling from looking at him, as he blinks and squints and tries to shade his eyes against the dawn glare, which must be blinding, absent the smoked armor-glass face shield.

He’s so ordinary. It’s shameful.

I can’t look away.

A humiliated fascination has me hooked through the jaw. It’s like seeing your father naked for the first time—Jeez, he’s flabby, and he’s got a little knobby dick, and his chest sags, and what are these tufts of hair in embarrassing places?—and he’s not really much like a father at all anymore. There is something so peeled about the brigadier: now that he’s lost the power of his soapy anonymity, he’s been shucked like a fucking oyster.

It’s like the Patriarch said Shazam! and Captain Marvel vanished, leaving a middle-aged bookkeeper in his place.

The whole battalion follows suit—and now, as their helmets come off and they stand before us all with naked faces, they’re not Social Police anymore. They’re just a bunch of guys in armor with guns.

So the Patriarch starts in on the opening bars of “King of Kings,” and the army joins in, and up on the Address Deck, the brigadier decides to lie on the floor and have a little nap. Below, all the soapies yawn, set down their rifles, curl up on the ground, and fall right to sleep.

They do this because the adepts of the Thaumaturgic Corps, good as they are, can’t read Toa-Sytell’s Shell. They can’t read his Shell because a couple of primal mages—who have the advantage of a few hundred years’ experience apiece—built a Fantasy that the Patriarch’s Shell was 100 percent A-OK normal. They had to do this, because it’s not.

This Fantasy is powered by a little chip of griffinstone, in a technique once used by Kierendal to get the whole Kingdom of Cant into Victory Stadium. This means not only that their Fantasy pulls no perceptible Flow, but that it’ll keep right on going even if the adepts cover the Patriarch with a silver net or examine him using griffinstones of their own in a magick-negative room—both of which we guessed they might try, since Thaumaturgic Corps adepts are nasty and suspicious by nature—because the griffinstone in question is secreted on the Patriarch’s person.

We had some discussion on where to put the stone. My own suggestion was vetoed on the grounds that the Patriarch might have an unexpected bowel movement and give away our plan.

So he swallowed it.

He swallowed it because that chip of griffinstone is also powering another effect, and the action of that effect, roughly speaking, is to make Toa-Sytell willing to do just about anything—even swallow a griffinstone, even accept the Folk as full citizens of Ankhana, even get a whole rifle battalion of Social Police to take off their magick-resistant helmets so that a hundred-odd primals could hit them all with a shot of mental fairy dust—to please his new best friend.

While the whole Ankhanan army looks dumbly at the snoozing Social Police, Toa-Sytell beams a smile down toward us and gives Raithe a little wave.

I nudge him with an elbow. “Congratulations, kid. You just took over the Empire.”

“I have taken over nothing,” Raithe says. “We have accomplished nothing.”

His voice is bleak and fatal, so empty that the orders bawled by the Patriarch—bind these Aktiri traitors; disarm them; bind them hand and foot—fade into a background wash of white noise; while the astonished Ankhanan soldiers gradually bestir themselves to comply, I’m lost in the vast echoic hollow of Raithe’s stare.

“I wouldn’t call this nothing, kid. We took the city . . .” But the forced whistling-in-the-dark tone of my own voice muzzles me, and the words trickle away.

“Did you think He wouldn’t know?” Raithe asks. “Did you think we could surprise Him?”

“I have before.”

“No,” Raithe says, “you haven’t.”

Dark thunder rumbles in the east and becomes a buzzing whine that threatens a roar.

“He is no longer the man you defeated,” Raithe says, his voice mirroring the rising howl that curdles my stomach, because I know the sound, a sound I never dreamed could shimmer Ankhanan air.

Turbocells.

“He is no longer a man at all.”

He lifts his eyes to the east, and I follow his gaze, and the howl of turbocells becomes a shattering roar.

The sun weeps lethal titanium tears.

ALL TRUE STORIES end in death.

This is the end of the tale of the crooked knight.