Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  “What is it, though?” one of the coverts asked. “Are the Rats coming against us? The Serpents?”

  “Worse.” She swallowed through a painfully dry throat. “I think it’s Caine. Now move.”

  They scattered at a run.

  She rubbed her hands together and found that her palms were damp and her fingers slightly tremulous. A drink, she decided.

  That’s what she needed, a drink to steady her nerves and smooth her roiled consciousness, then more time spent in study of the book. She strode upward toward her apartment, taking steps three at a time, wondering urgently if she had time to charge a Shield.

  She reached the door of her apartments and knocked lightly, twice and then once again, and waited for Zakke to open the door.

  She knocked again: two, one. The intricately silver-inlaid door had no external keyhole, and she herself had laid the wards that prevented it from being magically opened. The lazy shit was probably asleep, and she had no time to waste. She hammered the door with her clenched fist.

  “Zakke, you worthless prick!” Her shout resounded in the empty hallway. “If this door isn’t open in ten seconds you are one dead dwarf!”

  Finally she heard the rasp of the bolt being drawn. When the door cracked open she stiff-armed it back with a thump and strode into the room, heading straight for her private dry bar next to the huge stone fireplace. The heavy brocade curtains were tightly drawn, and every lamp was dark; the pungent odor of smoldering wicks hung heavily in the gloom. “You were sleeping, you shit! I’ll skin you for this!”

  The closing door cut off the last of the dim light from the corridor. Kierendal, nearly blind until her eyes could adjust, slammed her shin into an errant footstool hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. She hopped about on one leg, cursing and trying to keep her balance while holding her throbbing shin with both hands. “And get some light in here!”

  The only response was the dry, rasping click of the door bolt locking home.

  She stopped. She put her foot down gingerly, testing her weight. There was another smell underlying the thick smolder and the tang of lampblack: old sweat—a sharp, goaty odor of unwashed human.

  Kierendal stood motionless, not daring to breathe.

  “Zakke?”

  “He’s out.”

  The voice was flat and lethal.

  Every joint in her body turned to water.

  Kierendal, like any primal, had exceptional night vision and could move as silently as a ghost, and she was in her lair. If this had been anyone but Caine, she might have made a try for him—but he’d been in here who knew how long, he was dark-adapted and probably ready for anything she could do. And from the sound of his voice, he was no more than a long stride away from her.

  “Don’t take a deep breath,” he said softly. “If you do, I’ll think you’re about to yell. I might kill you before I realize my mistake.”

  She believed him.

  “I . . .” she said thinly, breathing only from the top of her chest, “. . . ah, you could have killed me when I came through the door.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then I’m not your target.”

  The darkness gave no answer.

  She could see his outline now, a blacker shadow against the black-shadowed wall. Still she could not see his Shell—and this absence terrified her. How was she to know what he intended if she couldn’t read his Shell?

  Slowly the glittering points that were his eyes came clear.

  She said, “I’ve . . . I know I’ve said some things about Ma’elKoth, but, but I’ve done nothing—nothing that the Monastic Council would want me dead for! Have I? Tell me, you have to tell me! I know the Council supports Ma’elKoth, but, but, they don’t have to kill me . . .”

  His response was a dry, hollow chuckle, then: “I can neither confirm nor deny the presence or absence of any policy or viewpoint of the Council of Brothers, or the several and individual members thereof.”

  “Then it’s the King of Cant, isn’t it? I know you’re hooked into the Subjects—”

  “You have a nice place, here. A lot of knickknacks. Mementos.” From the darkness came a slow scrrt of steel on flint; an amber flame grew from a shoulder-high fist, red-shading a high-cheekboned face that might have been carved from ice. The flame touched the end of a thin cigar—stolen from her desktop humidor, like the lighter.

  Now she could see his Shell: it was black, smoke-dark, without any color she could read.

  “Caine . . .” Kierendal’s hoarse whisper sounded to her ears uncomfortably like a plea for mercy.

  “Nice lighter.”

  “It was a gift,” she replied, a little stronger now, “from Prince-Regent Toa-Phelathon.”

  “I know. Says so right on the side, here.” He touched the flame to the wick of a lamp on a small side table, then turned the lamp down to a bloody emberous glow. “We both know what happened to him, don’t we?”

  He pinched the lighter’s wick between his thumb and forefinger, and the flame extinguished with a fading hiss.

  She had never given a lot of credence to the rumors that Caine had been involved in Toa-Phelathon’s assassination; it had smelled of an in-palace affair. Now she believed without question. In his presence, it was impossible to doubt.

  He pointed to a chair. “Sit down.”

  She sat.

  “On your hands.”

  She tucked her hands beneath her thighs. “If you’re not here for me, what do you want?”

  He stepped around the sofa, only an arm’s length from her. He crouched before her and stared into her eyes. The silence stretched until she had to consciously restrain herself from babbling just to break it.

  She forced herself to silently return his regard; she studied him with the profoundly detailed attention that came of staking her life on her ability to observe.

  She found herself comparing him inevitably with Berne: each had made his name and fortune spilling blood for pay. Caine was much smaller, less heavily muscled, and carried an array of knives instead of a sword—but the differences went far deeper than that. Berne had a feral quality, a wildness of lust and dangerous unpredictability that went with the loose and relaxed jointless way he walked and held himself; he was potently, almost fiercely, alive at all times. Caine, too, had a quality of relaxation, but there was nothing loose about it; instead it was stillness, a meditative readiness that seemed to flow out from him and fill the room with capacity for action, as though all around him ghosts of imaginary Caines performed every movement that was possible within the space: every attack, every defense, every leap or flip or roll.

  He watched her watch him with concentration that equaled hers, and he was as full of potential violence as a shining blade fresh from the forge. There was the difference, in a nutshell: Berne was a wildcat.

  Caine was a sword.

  “You done?” he asked quietly. “Don’t let me interrupt.”

  Her eyes flicked up to meet his, and she found no humor there.

  He said, “I’m looking for Simon Jester.”

  The relief that flooded through her unstrung her nearly as much as had her earlier panic; she had to struggle not to laugh out loud.

  “You and the King’s Eyes. Not to mention the Grey Cats and the entire Constabulary. What makes you think I know anything?”

  He went on as though he hadn’t heard her. “Just about this time yesterday, the Grey Cats ran a game in the Warrens. How’d it come out?”

  She licked her lips. “Really, Caine, you can’t imagine that I have sources within the Cats themselves—”

  “I ask you again. I’m not a patient man, Kierendal.”

  “I, ah, but—”

  There came the barest whisper of wings, and Caine moved.

  He gave no warning of any kind, no hitch of breath, no preparatory tensing of muscle, not even a shift of his eyes. Kierendal had been watching for those signals with seamless concentration, those indicators that any creature gives before violent actio
n. In one instant, he was perfectly motionless; in the next he spun and his hands blurred and a silvery flash sped through the gloom and struck wood with a humming chunnk.

  Tup gave a fluting cry of pain and despair—she hung from the lintel of the doorway, Caine’s throwing knife pinned through one wing. A yard-long birdlance of needle-pointed steel slipped from her hands and chimed faintly as it bounced on the parquet threshold.

  Kierendal surged to her feet with a cry that was instantly stifled by Caine’s hand on her throat. The thin cigar clamped in his teeth came perilously close to her eye as he yanked her toward him. She couldn’t see what he was doing with his other hand, but she assumed it was something potentially lethal.

  And his Shell still pulsed a smoky, seamless black.

  “You might have difficulty believing this,” he said through his teeth, “but I don’t want to hurt you. Or your little friend, there. All I want is to hear what you know about Simon Jester. That’s the easy way to get me out of your living room and out of your life.”

  He let go of her throat and the unseen other hand poked her just below the navel, gently but firmly, not hard enough to hurt but exactly the right amount of pressure to fold her in the middle and sit her back down in the chair.

  “All right,” she said thinly. She couldn’t even look at him; her eyes were consumed by struggling, weeping Tup pinned to the lintel. “All right, but please, first, please get her down from there. She’ll shred her wing—please, you’ll cripple her!”

  Caine said, “Hands.”

  She hastily tucked her hands once more beneath her thighs. Caine gave her a long look, his lips faintly compressed; then he breathed a sigh out through his nose and turned to free Tup.

  “Touch me and I’ll kill you, you bastard,” the little treetopper shrilled. “I’ll cut out your eyes!”

  “Yeah, whatever,” Caine said. He took her head and shoulders in one hand, her neck between his first and second fingers; his hand wrapped around to pin her arms but avoided her delicate wings. He carefully, even gently, worked the knife loose; Kierendal shuddered at the faint squeal of metal in wood as the blade came free. Tup kicked at his forearm again and again, but he didn’t seem to notice. Pale rose-colored blood leaked from the gash in her wing.

  “One hand,” he said, holding the treetopper toward her. “Keep her under control.”

  It wasn’t until she actually had Tup’s firm warmth within her hand that she really believed Caine was doing this: that it wasn’t some sort of cruel trick, that he wasn’t pulling the knife from Tup’s wing so that he could snap her neck, or something even worse, something unimaginable.

  She gathered Tup to her breast, and the treetopper bent her head and moistened Kierendal’s nipple with crystalline teardrops. “I’m sorry, Kier, I’m so sorry.” She gulped sobs back into her throat. “He, he came through the window—and Zakke, he killed Zakke . . .”

  “Hush now,” Kierendal told her softly. “Hush, everything’s well.” She looked at Caine, and her eyes asked him to make this true.

  He shrugged irritably. “If she’s talking about your dwarf, he ought to be just fine, once he wakes up. He might have a headache for a couple days, but he’s alive.”

  She met his cold, flat stare with dawning wonderment; perhaps those eyes were neither as cold nor as flat as they appeared. Perhaps they were only veiled . . .

  She said, “You’re different than I thought you’d be. The stories, they make you sound so . . . well, rather—”

  “Simon Jester,” he reminded her.

  “Yes.” She stroked Tup’s curly hair. “That game in the Warrens was expensive: six Cats killed, and a lot more wounded. I don’t know how many of Simon Jester’s men might have been killed, but the Cats captured two of his followers.”

  “Two?” Something kindled in his expression, some emotion that Kierendal couldn’t name for sure, because it made no sense; it looked like the wild hope-against-hope of a prisoner expecting a rescue on his walk to the gallows. “Their names. Who are they? Is one of them—”

  He said something, finished the sentence, but she couldn’t quite make it out—a sudden current in the Flow distracted her. She snapped back to herself. “I’m sorry—I’m sorry, I missed that. Could you repeat it?”

  “Pallas Ril.”

  She frowned. Pallas Ril? Wasn’t Pallas Ril some human thaumaturge? What did she have to do with . . . whatever they’d been talking about? That current in the Flow was back again, swirling around her, and she found she couldn’t quite remember what the subject had been.

  “I, I guess, I think I heard that she’s in town. Is she important?”

  His reply was as solid and definite as a word carved in a slab of granite. “Yes.” He leaned closer. “Is she one of the prisoners?”

  “What prisoners?”

  Caine sighed in a way that hinted he might be struggling to keep his temper, and Kierendal’s throat closed with swift new fear. What if she didn’t have the information he wanted? What would he do then?

  He said something else, and again she missed it.

  “What?” she asked thinly, flinching against an imagined blow.

  “Those two prisoners the Cats took in the Warrens yesterday, Simon Jester’s followers—was one of them Simon Jester himself?”

  She shook her head, praying he’d be satisfied with her half ignorance. “I don’t know; all I’ve heard is that it’s a man and a woman. Perhaps they’re not quite sure themselves who it is they’ve captured; there’s been no announcement from the pages.”

  His voice tightened. “Where are they held? The palace?”

  “I think—in the Donjon, below the courthouse.”

  “Can you get me in there?”

  She goggled at him, leaning back away from the flame that seemed to light his face from within. “What?”

  “Come on, Kierendal. Bloody Hamman got me into the damned palace; if you’re not better at shit than he was, the Faces would never follow you. Get me in there.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “The palace—that was a long time ago. Things are different, now. And the Donjon—Caine, it’s carved into solid rock. If you have a few hundred royals to spread around in bribes, we might be able to get you in within a week or two. It’s the best I can do.”

  His eyes smoldered. “Maybe you can do better with the right kind of encouragement.”

  She struggled to keep herself calm. “It cannot be done, Caine. No one has ever been broken out of that place; the only way is to bribe a judge or suborn the guards. That takes time, and money.”

  She let him search her face; she was telling the truth, and soon enough he saw it.

  He looked away from her. His disappointment was so palpable that she almost felt sorry for him. In some subtle way their relationship had shifted. She found, with surprise, that she was now much less frightened, and more than a little interested.

  He said, “I don’t want to be your enemy, Kierendal. I might need your help, sometime soon. You should realize that I can repay any favors fivefold.”

  “All I want from you, Caine, is the assurance that you’ll never trouble me again.”

  “I could make that promise,” he said with a shrug. “But it would be meaningless, and we both know it. Let me instead offer you a piece of information: somebody high up in the Subjects of Cant is an informer for the Eyes.”

  The lift of her eyebrows was sufficient to feign surprise. “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Here’s another: the Subjects are supporting Simon Jester.”

  This time the surprise wasn’t feigned. “Now,” she said, “that I didn’t know . . .”

  “I think it was the informer in the Subjects who fingered Simon Jester for the Cats. If you can find out who it is, I’ll more than make it worth your trouble.”

  She snorted. “Why don’t you ask His Majesty the King?”

  He stared at her, unmoving, unspeaking, as expressionless as a death mask.

  Now it was her turn to look away. She clutched T
up’s trembling form more tightly to her chest.

  “I don’t have evidence. I don’t even really have rumor. All I know is that the Eyes are looking hard at me, at the Rats and the Dungers and the Serpents, but they seem utterly blind to the Subjects of Cant. Maybe His Majesty will explain to you why that is.”

  “Yeah,” Caine said, low and harsh. “Yeah, maybe he will.” He said nothing more for a long moment, then he shook his head with the manner of a man deliberately turning his mind aside from unpleasant contemplation. He nodded toward the waist-high bronze statue and the darkened votive candles in the shrine corner of the room. “What’s the story with that?”

  Kierendal shrugged. “It’s a shrine to Ma’elKoth. What of it?

  Everybody has them.”

  “You worship him? Like a god?”

  “Me, personally? Be serious, Caine.”

  He nodded distantly. “Mm, yeah. I’m surprised you’d have one in your house, though. I hear he’s a little down on the subs.”

  Subs, indeed—if it weren’t for us, you humans would still dress in skins and bay at the moon, she thought, but she let it pass. She spread her hands and shrugged again. “There’s a proverb, perhaps you’ve heard it: to get along, you go along.”

  His eyes went farther away. “Yeah,” he murmured, and said no more.

  Kierendal finally broke the silence. “If you truly wish to make peace between us, you might start by telling me how you got in here.”

  “That’s no mystery. Your boy—Zakke, that his name?—he’ll tell you all about it when he wakes up. A third-floor window isn’t secure when the alley it opens onto is narrow enough to jump across. You should have bars put in.”

  “I have two men in the opposite apartment.” She realized what she’d said, and her eyes widened. “Maybe I should say, I had.”

  Caine shook his head. “They’re all right. The alarm you put out drew them out of the apartment. I didn’t touch them. They never even saw me.”