The crystal caused trace magick to fluoresce at a range of only three to four meters; she had no fear of alerting Majesty, and the trace magick was visibly fading even as she began to follow it. When necessary, Pallas could move like a river, fast and smooth, and with only as much noise as her surroundings could absorb and cover. Moving at speed, she cleared the stadium in seconds and glided onto the streets of the Warrens.
Blessedly the clouds above parted, and the moon shone through. She could see him now, only forty or fifty meters ahead of her, moving at a steady lope. He’d picked up a hooded cloak somewhere along the way, but he must have been telling the truth to Paslava when he’d said he was late—he was moving too fast to conceal his natural gait, which was as distinctive as his voice. He didn’t appear to worry about being followed; why should he? He’d hear the boots of anyone who’d try to match his pace.
Pallas smiled grimly as she put away the detection crystal. She slipped off her ankle-high boots and held one in each hand as she ran after him lightly, springing along silently on the balls of her bare feet, staying close to the buildings at her side; the hard-packed dirt of Warrens streets was substantially higher and drier along their edges than in their centers, and the litter of stones, wood scraps, and potshards tended to drift downhill toward the streets’ centers. Along the side, she could sprint barefoot with little to fear.
Ahead, Majesty slid into the darkness of a doorless arch. Instead of following him within, she slipped back into her boots and slowly worked her way around the building. There, near a corner of the third floor on the far side from the arch Majesty had used, a sliver of lamplight leaked through weather-sprung shutters, the only light showing on the faces of this darkened hulk.
Controlling her breathing, she summoned mindview and scanned the twisted alleys around her, the faces of the buildings and what she could see of their roofs. The tangled lace of Flow drifted undisturbed, and no aureate Shells larger than those of rats shimmered in the shadows.
This meant that there were no stooges to watch this place, no guards to protect it; this meant that secrecy, even from his own men, was more important to Majesty than safety.
The distant surf of fury that rumbled in Pallas’ears drew closer.
But she held on to mindview and the surf faded. Of their own accord, her nimble fingers found the tiny model of a Chameleon in a pocket of her cloak. The beautifully sculpted platinum shone in mindview with complex whorls of power. These whorls spread into her mind, then downward across her body; to an observer, her skin and clothing would take on the grey-black moon-dappled appearance of the wall against which she stood. She paused a moment longer, to fix the image more strongly in her concentration, then she faced the wall and scampered up it with the ease of a lizard.
She hung effortlessly from the wall beside the splinter of light, and listened.
“. . . before Berne catches him. This is vital,” an unfamiliar voice was saying. “Berne has, already, entirely too great an influence over Ma’elKoth, and I believe that Berne is a deeply sick man—sick within his mind. It’s vital that Berne does not succeed, here, and that I do. Don’t try to tell me you’re not involved: three of the five dead lookouts were known Subjects. The other two probably were as well.”
“If I had him to give, he’d be yours, Your Grace.” Majesty’s voice was oddly humble, even obsequious. “I don’t ask the Subjects for full accountings of their actions, only of their incomes. If some of them have chosen to supplement their incomes by stooging for Simon Jester, it’s really none of my affair, unless they fail to pay their full tithe. They were my people, though, and I expect compensation.”
*Your Grace? That’s probably Toa-Sytell himself!* Pallas monologued, a sickening dread sinking into her stomach. Suddenly it was all too clear why this particular, private hour had been chosen for this meet. *So it’s him. The King of Cant betrayed us all. I should have suspected: he’s Caine’s best friend. But . . . ahh, gods, I was really hoping he’d be innocent.*
The blood-smeared faces of Dak and Jak, of Lamorak and Talann rose up before her eyes.
*I could frag them both. Right now. Right here. Trigger a fireball and poke the buckeye in through this gap in the shutters. I could drop to the ground, be well out of the blast radius. I wouldn’t even have to hear them scream as they burn.*
She shook the image out of her head. I lived with Hari way too long, she thought. She understood too well the trap of fury to give in to it here; that it was a righteous fury made it more dangerous, not less.
She monologued, *But I won’t. I’ll wait, and I’ll listen. If there’s killing to be done, I can do it after I understand what’s going on.*
“I don’t think you understand the gravity of this situation,” said the unfamiliar voice, as tonelessly as a man ordering breakfast. “Simon Jester has already embarrassed the Emperor. Not only does he seem to operate with impunity, even here in the capital of the Empire, but this graffito of his has appeared on walls within the Colhari Palace itself.”
*Hah. I’ve become a fad.*
“I’m doing everything I can, Toa-Sytell. No one seems to know who Simon Jester is, or where he’ll appear next.”
*And I can thank Konnos and his fancy spell for that.*
“I believe,” Toa-Sytell said, “that these accusees are still within the city limits of Ankhana. They number seventeen men, and many of them have taken their families—as many as thirty-eight persons altogether. Perhaps your energies may be more profitably spent searching out their hiding place?”
Pallas swallowed and hooked a buckeye from her hip pocket.
She couldn’t see the sigils of power that scribed its surface, not being in mindview, but she seemed to feel them scorching the flesh of her palm.
She might have to frag these men after all.
*Majesty knows where they are; Konnos’spell wouldn’t have altered that at all. Take two lives, to save thirty-six.* She drew in a deep breath, preparing physically, while she clamped a mental hand down upon her emotions.
Majesty said apologetically, “It’s a big city.”
*Hah?*
He went on, “I’ll put my people on it right away, but I can’t make any promises. There’s lots of places to hide, and more than a few of them aren’t open to the Subjects.”
“Do what you can on this. There is vastly more than money riding on it, as you might understand. If the Barons of the outlying marches see that defying Ma’elKoth is easily and safely accomplished . . . I believe you can imagine the possible consequences.”
“Yeah. Another civil war, we don’t need.”
Pallas found herself panting, white-knuckled fingers crushing the buckeye within her grip. What kind of game was Majesty playing? And she’d almost killed him, almost killed them both; only by the grace of some kind god had she waited long enough to hear this last . . .
She barely half listened while the two men went on to other, less pressing business, dealing with the day-to-day politics of the Warrengangs and tidbits of rumor that Majesty had picked up from the Subjects. This Chameleon that held her to the wall wouldn’t last forever; she’d begun to move away when she heard Majesty say, “One last thing. I need to know what this warrant on Caine is about. What’s he wanted for?”
Caine? Pallas’ heart thumped painfully in her chest; she stopped moving, stopped breathing, and squeezed her eyes shut to listen harder.
“I do not believe that this is any of your concern.”
Majesty’s tone of nonchalance sounded faintly forced. “He’s a friend of mine. I don’t want this . . . arrangement between you and me to get in the way of that friendship. I also don’t want that friendship to get in the way of our arrangement, you follow? I don’t want to turn him in without knowing what he’s in for.”
Turn him in? Hari’s here? He’s here now? Pallas’ mouth went dry and her stomach clenched and her heart skipped into a trip-hammer beat. Her fingers tingled uncomfortably, as though she’d just slapped someone.
“Don’t concern yourself with this. I took Caine into custody earlier this evening, but he’s not in any sort of trouble. Not from us, at least; although I do believe that the Monasteries might be a wee bit upset with him. In fact, I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that Ma’elKoth plans to hire him.”
“Hire him? For what?”
“What else? To find Simon Jester and kill him, of course.”
Of course, Pallas thought disconnectedly. Why else would he be here, if not to fuck up my life again?
She missed the two men’s friendly leave-taking while images and thoughts whirled scattershot across the surface of her mind. Caine would know, of course—he’d know who Simon Jester was and where Simon Jester was and where the tokali were—the Studio would have simply shown him her cube. And she knew, too, that he wouldn’t really hunt her down; not even Caine was that low. It was clear, it was all too fucking clear exactly what was going on.
The Studio had decided she’d bitched it up, this time. They’d decided that she couldn’t do this on her own. They’d decided they could make a bigger bang by sending in The Mighty Caine to save her useless, incompetent, female ass.
With Caine to ride in at the last moment and save the day, they’d make a hundred million more than they would if she somehow managed to pull this off on her own.
All her stifled rage roared into her chest like a waterfall. Didn’t they understand that this wasn’t some stupid game? That this wasn’t just entertainment? That lives rode on this, real lives, lives of real people who loved and grieved and laughed and bled?
And he had to be just loving this; she knew that too. Hari must be grinning right down to the scurf between his toes. She could almost hear his smugly patronizing voice say it: See? You can’t make it without me. Why even try?
And she heard her own response, too, or rather her lack of one, her inarticulate rage at being treated like a bit player in her own life, like a sidekick, nothing but a motivation for someone else’s Adventure. They weren’t going to give her the chance to have a story of her own.
The light had gone out behind the shutters.
She pattered sideways around the building, moving across the wall on all fours at the speed of a fast walk. Down below her, at the archway where Majesty had gone in, she could see the top of the hood of his cloak as he stood by the wall. He worked his tinderbox to light a cigar, little scrrting sparks drifting down toward the street. No one else was in sight; Toa-Sytell must have left by a different door.
She waited until the cigar was well lit, then she canceled the Chameleon and fell on him like an old building.
Her feet slammed into his shoulders and he went down hard; she bounced off and rolled into a low, balanced stance. Stunned by the unexpected attack, Majesty couldn’t do more than shake his head dazedly before she put her bare hand against his cheek and said, “You know me.”
This was how Konnos had told her she could cancel the effect of his spell.
First the haze cleared from his eyes, then she watched amazement grow there as her canceling of the Eternal Forgetting allowed the different things he knew about her to slowly relink themselves within his mind.
“P-Pallas,” he gasped, “great stinking Curse! What did . . . How did . . . And Caine . . . Caine—”
She crouched over him. “I know all about it. This is a dangerous game you’re playing, Majesty.”
“I, I, uh, shit . . . What did you hit me like that for?”
“I had to hit somebody,” she said. “You were available. Now listen while I tell you what we’re going to do.”
He sat up and began dusting himself off. “You know, I’ll take a lot from you. But you’ve really pushed this too far. Nobody lays a hand on me—”
Pallas interrupted him with a forehand slap on his ear. “You mean like that?”
Half-stunned again, he could only shake his head in disbelief.
She held her open hand up in front of his face. “You don’t like being touched like that? Just imagine what kind of touch you’ll get from Caine, after he finds out you’re in bed with Toa-Sytell when you’re supposed to be helping me.”
She crouched there and let him think about it.
It didn’t take him long. “Hey, uh, hey,” he said hastily, “I’ve been helping you all along; I’m even juicing Toa-Sytell to keep him out of your way.”
“Maybe I understand that,” she said. “You think Caine will?”
“Well, but, yeah, but . . . you don’t have to tell him, do you?”
“Maybe I don’t. But I want you to understand that I’m kind of angry about this.”
He rubbed his ear and slowly nodded. “I guess I can follow that. But it’s got nothing to do with you. It wasn’t me that fingered you to the Cats, don’t you see?”
“No, I don’t see. What I see is that you’re holding me in the bag until you get a better price from Toa-Sytell.”
“Pallas, I swear—!”
“Don’t swear. You know what I’ve been doing these last forty hours or so?”
“I, uh—”
“In between staying a step ahead of the Cats and the King’s Eyes and generally trying to stay alive, I’ve been examining an innocent family, probing them in some ugly and extremely uncomfortable ways, to make sure none of them was a spy, or had a telltale planted on them—or in them. The father’s name is Konnos. You’d like him, Majesty. He works for the government.” She leaned close and bared her teeth. “Just like you.”
“Pallas, hey, Pallas—”
“Shut up.” She found herself suddenly short of breath and sweating, and her heart thumped inside her chest as she imagined pulling the bladewand from her wrist sheath and just slicing his damned head off. She shivered with cold fury, and she wondered fleetingly if this is how Caine felt, just before he killed someone. “I trusted you, Majesty. I trusted you, and you lied to me, and people I care about died.”
“Think about what you’re doing, Pallas,” Majesty said, licking his lips, shifting his legs to scoot back from her.
“You,” she said, “will never lie to me again.”
“Pallas, really, this isn’t necessary—”
“I think it is. I have no one left to depend on, Majesty, and I have thirty-six people counting on me to save their lives. There were some people, three or four, that I knew I could trust. They’re dead now. I’m taking no more chances.” She shut her mouth abruptly. Why tell him any of this? She was only talking to herself, really, trying to justify to herself what she was about to do.
She dipped into a pocket on the inside of her belt and brought out a prism-shaped crystal of quartz, slightly smaller than one of her fingers. It rode within a platinum cage, attached to a platinum chain from which it dangled; she twirled the chain between her fingers to make the crystal spin and splinter off shards of moonlight.
“Don’t do it,” Majesty said hoarsely, trying to sound fierce. “Don’t put magick on me, Pallas. Nobody puts magick on me.”
A single breath slid her into mindview and kindled the glow of the force-pattern within the crystal; the briefest caress of her Shell triggered the Charm. The moonsplinters off the planes of quartz took on a phantom solidity in mindview; the splinters shot outward, carrying the force-pattern of the Charm like poison upon a blade. They pierced Majesty’s Shell, and the shining net of the Charm spread over his Shell’s dangerous yellow-shot orange like oil poured upon rippling water. One scant breath later, the shades of anger and fear faded into the greens of serenity and the warm, solid earth tones of absolute loyalty.
“You’re sure?” she asked lightly, surfacing out of mindview. “It’s just a little spell.”
Majesty took a deep breath, visibly steeling himself. “All right,” he said. “I trust you. Do what you think is right.”
I deserved that, she thought, wincing. It made her feel a little sick.
Forget that she didn’t really have any choice. Forget how many lives depended on her—and on him. She had reached into his heart and mad
e herself the best friend he’d ever had, closer than a sister, closer than his mother. It was a terrible thing to do, even to an animal; to do this to a man—how had she come to this, all of a sudden? The woman she had been, only a few days ago, would never have considered such a thing. She’d enchanted that crystal against an emergency, a desperate situation, where she’d have no other choice. Did this qualify?
She shook herself; she’d worry about hypothetical erosion of her morals after the people in her care were safely away from Ankhana. “Come on, Majesty, get up,” she said. “We have some work to do.”
Majesty rose obediently and gazed at her like a loving puppy. “Whatever you say, Pallas.”
2
THE STINGING YELLOW glare of the Ankhanan sun stabbed through Caine’s eyelids like the flash of a bomb and brought him bolting upright out of the chair where he’d finally slept.
For a second that stretched toward the infinite, he struggled with the gluey mess inside his head, trying to fit together where he was and what was happening; then his eyes finally focused on the six men in the livery of the Household Knights who formed a sort of human wall between him and His Grace the Imperial Duke of Public Order.
Toa-Sytell stood by the window, his hand still on the curtain that he’d just now thrust aside. Sunlight streamed past him, filled with swirling motes of dust. “How are you feeling?”
Caine scratched at his tangled hair. “That depends. Did you bring coffee?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Then I feel like shit.” Caine squinted at the Duke, who now moved away from the window into the light. Purplish smears trailed downward from the Duke’s eyes, which were themselves bloodshot and puffy. “You’re not looking too well yourself. Late night?”
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