Berne had been raised to be his father’s weapon in the war against the subs, trained from birth to be the perfect warrior—but somehow, in all those years, his father had never bothered to ask what Berne wanted to do, if he wanted to be the ultimate weapon.
Berne had always known what he wanted to do.
He wanted to live, really live, to fight and screw and eat and drink and gamble and do every single thing he could cram into one lifetime. He knew well that this was the only life he’d ever get, and he was determined not to miss anything.
At the age of seventeen, he’d finally shown his father how well his training had worked. He beat the old bastard into unconsciousness, took the old man’s sword, all his gold, a jug of wine, and his best horse and headed for the city. He’d quickly discovered that there were few men who’d even care to stand against him with a blade, and nearly none that could survive to the count of ten; he’d never had any difficulty putting his hands on money.
It had been a good life for more than ten years, but the one he had now was better.
Now, as he splashed within the waters of the Great Chambaygen, he wondered idly if his father knew of his service to Ma’elKoth, wondered if his father appreciated the irony. After all, now that he served Ma’elKoth, he fulfilled his father’s dreams for him better than he ever could have if he’d followed his father’s path. Berne wondered if his father would think it funny; Berne surely did. He could raise a chuckle just thinking about it.
He went to the wall and pulled himself up out of the water, climbing the wall easily, fingers and boot toes finding the mortared joins between the stones. When he reached the battlement, both sentries still lingered, nervously standing watch over his sword. Berne thanked them with a grin for guarding it as he slung it on; then he shrugged and untied the purse that hung from the sword belt. Why not? He tossed a golden royal to each of them; as they fumbled eagerly for the coins—more than a week’s salary apiece—he gave them a lazy salute and jumped back off the wall, retracing his upward path from rooftop to rooftop and finally to the street.
He hummed happily, tunelessly, as he jogged toward the Colhari Palace. He played out the scenario in his mind:
I swear, Ma’elKoth, he just came at me. It was like the other day inside Alien Games. I went to his room to make peace, you know? That’s all. I even brought some brandy, a couple of cigars . . . And he berserked on me. I had to kill him—it was him or me, Ma’elKoth, I swear it!
Easy. Neat and clean.
Even as Berne was, himself, now—clean.
Still kinda horny, though—shame that there’s no way he could justify fucking Caine’s corpse. He rubbed the front of his breeches as he jogged along—mm, horny indeed, horny enough that maybe he should do something about it before he went after Caine. His story would become vastly less convincing if he stood before Ma’elKoth with an enormous erection.
And then the gods gave him a gift: as he paced past the mouth of an alley, he heard the familiar sucking hiss of a whore’s come-on. Standing within was a thin, frail-looking elvish girl clutching a tattered shawl around her translucent shoulders.
Berne gave her a friendly smile. “Missed the curfew, did you?”
She nodded submissively and looked up at him from beneath long silver lashes. “I must leave the street. Give me shelter for the night, and I will teach you—” She rotated her hips suggestively. “—primal secrets . . .”
“All right,” he murmured, “but show me some here, first.”
He joined her in the alley, and when he left, sated, only moments later, her broken corpse still twitched like the legs of a half-crushed spider on the cobbles behind him.
There was a curfew, after all, and as a Count of the Emperor, it was his duty to enforce the law.
Then to the palace, for a quick change into dry clothes; he sent a servant for a jug of good brandy and a box of cigars—these would be the peace offering that would buy his way into Caine’s room for the kill.
Humming to himself, he tripped cheerfully along the halls to the chambers that had been set aside for Caine. His hand was on the very grip of Caine’s door when Ma’elKoth Spoke to him.
BERNE. WHATARE YOU DOING?
Berne winced; this Speaking—Ma’elKoth’s ability to roar into the mind of any of his Children, anyone who’d gone through the Ritual of Rebirth—thundered inside his head like the voice of a god and made his skull feel as though it might burst at the next word. He barely managed to hang onto the jug of brandy.
“Nothing,” he said to the empty air. “I’m visiting Caine. You know, to make peace—”
WHY IS LAMORAK IN THE THEATER OF TRUTH?
Berne pressed the heel of a hand against his eyes, as though to keep them from popping out of his head. “I, ah, just wanted to get rid of him, you know? He’s no use to us anymore—why spend the money to feed him?”
THE MONEY IS NOT YOURS TO SPEND OR SAVE; NOR IS LAMORAK USELESS. EVEN AS WE CONVERSE, CAINE IS WITHIN THE DONJON TO PRETEND HIS RESCUE AND THAT OF THE WOMAN, AND THUS ENTER THE CONFIDENCE OF SIMON JESTER.
“Enter the confidence . . . ?” Berne stared at the closed door in front of him and thought as fast as his blade had ever moved. “Ma’elKoth, I can countermand the order—on horseback I’m only five minutes away.”
NO. LETHIM DIE. TO REVERSE YOURSELF WOULD CAUSE SUSPICION AMONG THE GUARD, AND POSSIBLY WITH LAMORAK HIMSELF. SIMON JESTER HAS SOURCES EVERYWHERE; NO ONE MUST SUSPECT OUR PLAN. THE WOMAN WILL BE SUFFICIENT—BUT BERNE, KNOW THAT I AM MOST DISPLEASED WITH YOU.
“Ma’elKoth, I’m sorry, please . . .” Berne murmured, but the Presence was gone from his mind.
Berne took a deep breath and carefully set the brandy and the cigars down at the threshold of Caine’s door; then he burst into a sprint and ran like the wind, leaping down stairs and skidding around corners, racing to the small stable where the Household Knights kept their steeds.
He couldn’t tell Ma’elKoth what he suspected, what he knew, about Caine—Ma’elKoth was obviously infatuated with the fucking little snake—but Berne could, right here and right now, save the Empire.
He could get Caine: get him killed without a drop of blood on his own hands.
That was the unfortunate part, that he’d have to leave Caine’s death to someone else, but in times like these, all true patriots must be prepared to make sacrifices.
He wasted no time saddling his horse, just buckled on his bridle. A golden royal apiece bought him the silence of the guards at the Dil-Phinnarthin Gate, and Berne galloped bareback off toward the courthouse.
So Caine dies at someone else’s hand, so what? With any luck at all, Berne would get to do Pallas Ril in a day or two—this would be a satisfying consolation prize, much more satisfying than that elvish whore.
With Pallas, he could take his time and really enjoy himself.
2
“ ’STRATOR? ’STRATOR!” A tentative hand on his shoulder prodded Arturo Kollberg awake. He batted at it gummily, smacking his lips against the ashtray taste in his mouth. “ ’Strator, Caine’s back on-line!”
“Whuh—?” With a buzzing, humming rush, the world flooded back into Kollberg’s brain. The 270-degree point-of-view screen that formed a wall of the techbooth spread before his eyes; he’d fallen asleep here, in the stage manager’s command chair, waiting for Caine to emerge from the Colhari Palace.
“Zhe hurt? H’longza been?” He shook his head sharply and massaged his face with both hands, trying to drive alertness in through the skin.
He was acutely, painfully aware of the diode-lit fist button of the active emergency transfer control, shining there on the console before him like a radioactive toadstool; he was painfully aware of the responsibility it implied.
“No, he doesn’t seem to be hurt,” one of the techs replied. “It’s been a few minutes short of twenty-seven hours. He’s on foot, heading west along the backstreets of Old Town. He is, ah, has apparently been rearmed, somehow, and he’s carrying a heavy coil of rope slu
ng across one shoulder.”
“Get them up, then!” Kollberg barked. “We’ve got a hundred and fifty thousand first-handers in sendep all over the world! If something happens, and they all sleep through it—!”
There was no need to complete the implied threat; every man in the techbooth understood. For minutes, the only sound was the muted thuttering of fingertip keystrokes and the whispering rumble of Caine’s Soliloquy.
“For Christ’s sake, somebody get me some coffee.”
A tech bolted out of his chair and scrambled toward the urn while Kollberg scanned Caine’s telemetry with a critical eye: Caine’s adrenal production was soaring, and though his heart rate was barely above one hundred, it was climbing steadily. He clearly wasn’t injured—he moved smoothly through the backstreets, easily slipping into deep shadows to avoid the passing constable patrols.
The tech pressed a cup into his hand, and Kollberg sipped the scalding coffee expressionlessly. This coffee was hardly enough for his needs: he couldn’t take the chance of drifting off again. He scribbled a brief note on the armpad linked to the chair’s electronics and clicked send. In five minutes or so a Studio porter would arrive at the techbooth with the carton of amphetamine sulphate that he normally kept by the simichair in his private box.
Caine’s soliloquy ran continuously as he artfully filled in the story line for the missing twenty-seven hours. Kollberg nodded his admiration for Caine’s technique; the man really was brilliant at this. He knew he’d been off-line, and now he wove the story in images so vivid that the first-handers would almost believe they’d gone through those experiences themselves, while at the same time maintaining a sense of free-associating disorder to uphold the illusion that the Soliloquy was actual thought.
So . . . he’d massaged Ma’elKoth into hiring him to find Simon Jester; this was lovely irony. It would let Caine save Pallas and kill Ma’elKoth virtually simultaneously, provided Caine worked the plot with the sort of skill Kollberg knew he had.
But what was he up to now?
Caine’s POV flickered dizzyingly as he scanned the street before gliding across Noble’s Way in the black moon-shadows under Knight’s Bridge. He still filled in back-story, with some babble about a giant statue and a blood oath, but he hadn’t yet breathed a word of why he was creeping into the west end of Old Town at two A.M.
It was a suspense technique, an old one, one that Caine would have learned at the Studio Conservatory, and it was certainly working on Kollberg. He chewed on a corner of his lower lip and wiped sweat from his palms onto the arms of the chair.
Caine’s POV crept toward a hulking structure that loomed as a barely blacker shadow against the thin, moon-silvered overcast, a blocky building taller than the sheer curtain wall that surrounded Old Town.
“What is that?” Kollberg murmured. “Where’s he going?”
One of the techs checked Caine’s telltale on the virtual map. “I’d have to say that’s the courthouse, ’Strator. God only knows what he thinks he’s going to do there.”
Even as Kollberg frowned his agreement, Caine reached a corner of the courthouse and slid along it into ink-painted shadow: his fingers and toes found the mortared cracks between the huge limestone fascia, and he climbed the wall with the ease and speed of a man going up a daylit stair. In slightly more than a minute he gained the guardwalk that surrounded the courthouse’s sloping roof and crouched there in the shadows while he caught his breath and counted chimneys in Soliloquy.
*One two three up, two over, there it is.*
The chimney Caine watched now belched a thick, white, steam-laced smoke that caught a reddish glow from the lantern of an approaching guard. *That puff of steam came from a cauldron of gruel being dumped on a cookfire about sixty meters straight down,* Caine monologued.
Sixty meters? Kollberg frowned, puzzled. The courthouse was barely half that tall.
*Now, for the guard.*
The guard had no chance. He rounded the curve of the guardwalk and never saw Caine slip over the wall behind him and overtake him on cat feet. To Kollberg’s surprise, Caine didn’t cut the man’s throat; instead he unstrung the guard’s knees with a silent and efficient elbow to the neck, just below his helmet’s back rim. The guard pitched forward while Caine caught the lantern in one hand and the guard himself with the other; he lowered them both to the guardwalk in absolute silence. Before the guard could recover himself enough to so much as moan, Caine had looped his cord belt around the guard’s neck in a simple garrote; in seconds, he silently strangled the guard into deep unconsciousness.
Another twenty seconds were required to bind and gag him, then Caine padded up the slope of the roof toward the chimney he’d picked out.
*The King’s Eye who dumped that gruel is the only man down there who knows something’s up, and even he doesn’t know what it is. All he knows is that Toa-Sytell wants to question the prisoner who preps the morning meal, and that Toa-Sytell wants that gruel dumped on that fire. That’s all he knows; that’s all he needs to know.
*The rest of it, I’m handling myself.*
On reaching the chimney, Caine pulled from his belt a bar of blackened steel with a long, long hank of coiled rope tied to a notch in the middle. He laid the bar across the mouth of the chimney and let the rope uncoil into the choking smoke-filled darkness below. He pulled out a pair of thick rawhide gloves and slipped them on as he climbed into the chimney.
*Fifteen minutes until the trusties who do the morning cooking arrive. Fifteen minutes to get two friends out of durance vile. Longer than that, and I blow the game—which might cost me my life, but that’s not important. If I screw this up, Pallas dies down here.*
He leaned out from the chimney for one last good breath, inhaled, then held it and slid down the rope fast enough that the gloves smoked and began to burn the palms of his hands.
*I’ve gotta get this right the first time.*
Lamorak, Kollberg thought in sudden panic. Lamorak’s down there—he’s going for Lamorak and Pallas! But no, he wouldn’t waste his time on Lamorak, would he? He’d best not. Didn’t I warn him about that?
His fist twitched and raised unconsciously over the emergency recall switch; an effort of will was required to lower his fist without striking. He couldn’t do it, not yet, not without justification; his dealings with Lamorak were somewhat too delicate to bear the weight of an emergency recall—the Board of Governors might not approve.
As Caine slid down into the smoldering embers of the cookfire in the cramped, darkened kitchen of the Imperial Donjon, Kollberg’s eyes were fixed on the pulsing toadstool of the emergency recall switch.
This was no longer a matter of if, he realized—only a question of when.
3
TALANN STRUGGLED UP from twisting fever dreams, some of the clouds clearing from her mind, and returned to the world of darkness and pain.
She couldn’t recall how long it had been since her last interrogation; didn’t know how many days she’d been chained here, naked skin rubbing raw against the chill limestone floor. Iron shackles bolted to the floor encircled her ankles; a length of rusted chain joined her wrist manacles to the same floor bolt, too short a length to allow her to stand erect or lie flat. Wetness and soft slime beneath her told her that she’d again voided her bladder and bowels while she’d slept, curled fetally around her restraints; her sense of smell had long ago overloaded and could tell her nothing.
Gasping, she pulled herself into a sitting position. Her various pains announced themselves gleefully in ascending ranks: torn flesh where the iron manacles cut into her wrists and ankles, the oozing sores across her buttocks and flanks that lying in her own filth had opened, the carelessly stitched sword cuts she’d taken from the Cats, now swelling with angry infection, and the sledgehammer of fever that pounded dizziness into her brain. She suspected that the pulpy swelling over her right ear, souvenir of being clubbed into unconsciousness with a steel pommel, probably concealed a skull fracture.
Great
Mother, she thought, half in prayer, don’t let me end like this.
The interrogations, she’d done right. She was sure of that. She’d held the line, held her tongue, kept to her ideals: they hadn’t been able to pry so much as her name out of her. They’d even dragged her away from the Flow-choking walls of the Donjon, to the palace, and the Emperor had interrogated her personally.
She had felt the prying fingers of his will struggling for a grip on the doors of her mind; but she’d resisted as the abbey school had taught her, concentrating her entire meditation-sharpened attention on her surroundings, counting wood grains in the molding of the door, the iron-grey hairs in Ma’elKoth’s beard, listening for the melody in the buzzing wings of a trapped housefly.
After Ma’elKoth understood her strategy, his own had shifted, and he had magickally dimmed her senses, leaving her blind, and deaf, without smell or taste or kinesthesia, floating in endless featureless nothingness, with only the pressure of his questions beating like surf upon the seawalls of her mind. Still she had resisted, filling her consciousness with nursery rhymes and scraps of song and half-remembered recitations of Monastic history.
After this had come again the easier task of resisting pain—once again to the Theater of Truth and Master Arkadeil’s silver needles. Even then, she might have broken and told them the truth, but the truth could not have helped her.
The truth was that she had no idea who Simon Jester might be, what he looked like, or what his plans were.
She had a vague sense that she had known these answers as recently as a few days ago, but now they had slipped from her mind like water through cupped fingers. All she remembered was sticking close to Pallas Ril, because she had been Caine’s woman, because her life was linked with Caine’s, because Talann knew, in her most passionate heart of hearts, that someday she herself would grip Caine’s hand, would catch his eye, would fight by his side and perhaps, in dreams so precious that she could only peer at them from a distance and then flick them aside, perhaps lie in his bed.
Heroes Die Page 29
