Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

“Out of the Victory Stadium? How do you figure?”

  “She won’t be in the stadium; she’ll be in the Donjon.”

  “Holy shit—”

  “Yeah. It’s the only place Ma’elKoth can keep her, where she can’t pull enough Flow to blow his lights out.”

  “But . . . you think you can bring her out?”

  I give him a solid nod. “I know the way in,” I remind him, raising my right hand. “In all the confusion, it shouldn’t be too difficult. And to get out, all I need is to get within arm’s reach.”

  He gives me a sharply speculative look that the bruises from his broken nose and jaw make kinda comical; I beckon to him. “Now, come on. She’s running out of time. So get started. Check me over and find the tag.”

  I keep a close eye on him as he breathes into mindview. If he tries, even now, to turn that Dominate on me, he’s a dead man; I’ll find a different way to make this work.

  A minute or two of under-breath murmuring as he examines me, then he nods and looks up, his eyes clear of mindview. “You were right. It’s this net. They can track it somehow. I don’t know the spell, but there’s definitely some sort of patterned power here, not just the leak-over from the griffinstones.”

  Huh. Ma’elKoth must have tagged it in the instant that he picked it up, before he tossed it to me. He’s pretty smooth, that one.

  Come noon tomorrow, I’ll show him what really smooth looks like.

  I step over to the window and peer out. I can’t see anyone outside watching the place, but if they’re there they can see me. “Thanks, Lamorak. I gotta go now, but I won’t forget this. I’ll square things with Majesty, all right? He won’t lay a finger on you.”

  “Caine, I . . .” He sounds all choked up. “Thanks, uh, thanks for not killing me, y’know?”

  “Don’t mention it. We get back home alive, maybe I’ll get you in a ring somewhere and take it out on you then.”

  “It’s a date.” He holds out his hand, and I force myself to shake it without breaking his wrist.

  “See you later.” I bundle up the net again and go.

  18

  THE DOOR EXPLODED in a shower of splinters. Lamorak leaped from his chair with a shout through his tied-shut teeth, and his blade snapped up to guard; without hesitation he lunged from his splinted leg, and the first Cat through the door took a foot of steel through his thigh.

  Lamorak was a fine swordsman, able to compensate for his immobilized leg and recover his balance before the following Cat could swing past his falling comrade. But even as Lamorak whirled his broadsword back up to guard, another Cat crashed through the window at his back and kicked him in the spine with stunning force. He spun hard to the floor but held on to his blade, rolling onto his back and hacking at the legs of every Cat in range. He said nothing: there was nothing to say. With grim, silent desperation, he fought for his life.

  The blade’s edge hit a leg that it didn’t cut, that made the blade spring back and ring like a bell, made it sting Lamorak’s hand. Not a leg in grey leather; a leg in heavy serge that once was red, but was now faded to the blotchy shade of an old bloodstain. Lamorak lost his breath, and for an instant his grip slacked; before he could move the blade again, a boot heel came down hard on his wrist, and the matching boot kicked his sword away.

  He looked up without hope, even the grim determination to survive bleaching from his face.

  “Berne . . .” he murmured. “Berne, don’t . . .”

  “Don’t speak,” Berne said, his amusement colored with deeply satisfied malice. “I heard about your little trick with Master Arkadeil.”

  He reached back over his shoulder and pulled free Kosall. Its whine sighed a freezing breath up the back of Lamorak’s neck as Berne took its hilt and whirled it singing through the air. “You know, I never really properly thanked you for the gift of Kosall. Sure did a job on that fighting girl of yours: spilled her guts all over Knights’ Bridge. I hope you weren’t too attached to her.”

  He dangled the blade point downward over Lamorak’s crotch. “You think if I drop it, its magick will fade before it cuts off your dick?”

  “Berne, wait, Berne—”

  “Shut up. I don’t have time for your treacherous little cock right now. I have to keep up with Caine.”

  “Berne,” he began again, but the Count wasn’t listening; easily, casually, he reached over and tapped Lamorak’s mouth shut with the flat of Kosall’s humming point, and held it so. The blade’s song made his teeth buzz and fuzzed his hearing like a storm wind.

  “Carry this sack of shit back to my place—no, don’t. If he can fight, he can fucking well walk. March him back and lock him in the den. I’ll make time for him later.” He looked down at Lamorak, and his smile pulsed wide into a grin, growing like a stiffening penis. “Mmm, yeah. I will make time. And, if he tries to talk to you? Kill him.”

  He pursed his lips and made a smooching noise. “It’s all the same to me, so long as I make it back before you’re cold.”

  He spun Kosall back into its scabbard and stalked off before Lamorak could summon the words to stop him, stepping over the Cat who sat pale on the floor, clutching his spurting thigh. “Pero, tie off Finn’s leg before he bleeds to death, huh?” he said, and was gone.

  The other Cats he’d cut had only scratches, the wire that reinforced their leggings having mostly withstood his weakened blows. Without bothering to bandage them, the Cats prodded him to his feet at sword point and marched him, limping and in great pain, out the door. He drew breath to speak, not to Dominate, just to beg them to carry a message to Berne, that things were not as they seemed—

  “Don’t,” said the Cat behind him and enforced this order with a jab of a sword point hard enough to slice skin over Lamorak’s kidney. “Talk, and you don’t live to cross the river, get it?”

  Lamorak started to answer, caught himself, and nodded miserably. The Cat jabbed him again, and he lurched forward toward the stairs.

  19

  THE KING OF Cant, attired in a fashionable slashed-velvet singlet and satin pantaloons of matching silvery grey, strolled through the crowd around the knucklebones pit that dimpled the floor within Alien Games, one hand on the decorative scrolled hilt of the short blade at his belt. He shifted and bumped around shoulders, admiring the magnificent dark walnut of the dice table, its blond burled maple inlay that caught the light like brushed gold under what must have been several coats of buffed lacquer. “Nice,” he muttered under his breath. “Wonder how she got it here so fast. I heard Caine busted the shit out of her old one.”

  “This is the old one,” came the whispered reply from inches behind his ear. No one in the push of the crowd around the bones pit could have heard it; and no one in any of the pits, at any of the bars, on the stage, or seated for dining could have seen the man who spoke.

  “It is magicked, even as I am,” whispered Abbal Paslava, who walked at his king’s shoulder, fully Cloaked and using a pair of crystal-lensed Truesight spectacles to pierce the illusion of opulence. “Everything here is magicked; this is why I need fear no detection of my Cloak’s pull. This room, this entire building pulls Flow constantly. Nothing in this room is truly as it appears.”

  “Huh,” Majesty grunted, a grim smile baring his teeth. “Including the customers.”

  No windows allowed moonlight onto the gaming floor, where a view of the sky might have reminded the gamblers of the hours that passed in the outside world, but the ruddy glow of burning buildings angled through the street door. Alien Games was crowded, astonishingly so considering the rioting that still flared here and there across the city. Well-dressed South Bankers mingled with trickles of workmen coming off shift in the Industrial Park; for some, the pleasures of drink and dice come before all else, even safety.

  Far from diminishing these pleasures, the riots added something, a certain zest in the cast of dice or the slap of a card. Everyone seemed to laugh a bit louder, talk a bit more. Here and there across the floor, knots of spontaneous danci
ng would suddenly break out and just as suddenly fade. The riots outside gave the evening’s gaming a festive, insular atmosphere, a carnival spice, as though nothing done here tonight could have any relation to everyday life: a sense that here was a small island of brightly indecent pleasures in the midst of a huge and bloody ocean of night.

  There were a few faces, here and there, that the King of Cant did not recognize. He mentally estimated their number, coming up with a total of only fifty or so. Of these probably fifteen were covert guards in Kierendal’s employ—human Faces.

  He ambled off the gaming floor to one of the bars, passing an appreciative hand over the glossy, hard wax finish. “Y’know, it’s a shame that I didn’t come here before,” he murmured. “This woulda been a nice place to relax, once in a while.”

  “Pity,” came the whispered reply.

  “Yeah. Don’t know what you got till it’s gone, huh? And, y’know? I’m kinda looking forward to meeting Kierendal. Should have paid a call under social circumstances.”

  “Too late now.”

  “Yeah.”

  He beckoned to the bartender, a short and slender elf, ageless as they all were, who mixed drinks and measured narcotics with a speed that made him seem to have an extra arm or two. The elf narrowed his eyes at him, a fleeting frown passing across his feathery, translucent brows; then he stepped lively toward Majesty, his face now a mask of neutral cheerfulness.

  “Does he see you?” Majesty muttered.

  “No,” Paslava whispered, “but he may see an odd eddy in the Flow around you. He will know there is magick at work here.”

  “Hey, so what?” Majesty said. “That’s not a secret.”

  The bartender leaned on the back rail in a friendly fashion and gave him a professional smile. “First time in AG, sir?”

  Majesty nodded. “You have a good eye.”

  The bartender took this as a given. “It’s what I do, sir. You look like an alcohol man, am I right, sir? I have a very fine Tinnaran brandy, if you’re interested?”

  “Mmm,” Majesty said, pretending indecision, “not exactly what I had in mind . . .”

  The bartender nodded back over his shoulder at the rows of bottles and phials and baskets of herbs stacked up behind him. “If you want to try something and you don’t know its name, feel free to just point. If you’d like something you don’t see here, please ask and I’ll bet I can get it for you.”

  “Bet? For real?”

  The bartender’s grin became more honestly friendly. “Why not? This is a gaming establishment, sir. Shall we say, for a royal?”

  Majesty gave him an ugly grin. “Sure, all right. I’d like a skinny fucking elf bitch dyke, about this tall. Goes by the name of Kierendal.”

  That trace of a frown flitted across the bartender’s brow once again, as his smile congealed into a flat chilly stare. “Be assured that she is already on her way, sir,” he said coldly. “And you may find it wise to reconsider your tone.”

  “Yeah? Or what?”

  “Or the fellow behind you might open your skull—to adjust your attitude from the inside, sir.”

  Majesty turned to find himself nose-to-sternum with a chest roughly the size of a river barge, and he slowly lifted his head until he stared up into the protuberant fist-sized yellow eyes of a troll, a nocturnal cousin of the ogres that worked here in daylight hours. Those huge lambent eyes spread a rich golden cast onto the brass-capped tusks that thrust up through slitted gaps in its upper lip. The troll wore chainmail painted in the scarlet and brass motif of the Alien Games uniform and carried a morningstar the size of Majesty’s head. It snorted down at him, its breath the exhalation of a late-summer slaughterhouse.

  “Yeah,” it rumbled thickly. “Adjust y’attitude.”

  “You’re ugly, and you stink,” Majesty said precisely, “and I think you should be falling down, now.”

  “Huh,” the troll huffed, blowing a blinding gust of stench into Majesty’s face. “I don’t think—”

  Its voice cut off an instant after Majesty heard the faintest of whispers, the rustle of the cloth on Paslava’s sleeve as the Cloaked thaumaturge reached past his ear and touched the troll with a spell that caused all of its skeletal muscles to lock into maximum contraction. Majesty fancied he could hear the creaking of the beast’s oversized joints as they took the stress; the troll swayed like an unmoored statue. Majesty placed a palm flat on the creature’s chest.

  “I repeat,” he said, with a gentle shove that sent the troll toppling like a felled oak. It hit the floor with a thunderous crash that drew every eye in the room.

  Majesty grinned into the sudden silence, waiting only a second or two for the last faint pitter of dice and clatter of numbered wheels to fade away. “I’m here to see Kierendal. Anyone else want to get stupid with me?”

  Paslava whispered behind his shoulder: “She’s coming.”

  “Where?”

  “I can’t see her. I can feel her. She’s here.”

  Three more liveried trolls converged on their fallen comrade with the ponderous threat of warships at full sail. They stopped a pace short of the one on the floor, their massive backs forming a wall against the crowd that pressed curiously around, and each held in his two clawed hands a morningstar with a haft as long as Majesty was tall. They glared at Majesty, growling low thunder-rumbles, but made no further move.

  As though an invisible door opened edge-on in the air, a slender female elf stepped from nowhere into view. She bent down and stroked the face of the fallen troll, and the creature relaxed into unconsciousness with a sigh like a fresh-bunged keg of beer. She straightened and stepped around her fallen bouncer, coming near enough to Majesty that he could smell the curious spice of whatever unnameable dish she’d been eating.

  She was taller than Majesty, and she hadn’t troubled to put on her human face. Her halo of platinum hair framed features that were purely alien: huge golden eyes slitted vertically, high chiseled cheekbones that swept back to ears as pointed as the carnivore teeth that gleamed through her pack-hunter’s fighting grin. “Why have you come here? Why do you assault my staff? Why shouldn’t I kill you for this?”

  “I am the Ki—”

  “I know who you are, cock. Answer my question.”

  Majesty was tempted, just for a moment, to match her aggressive tone, but instead he only shrugged and offered her a friendly smile. He’d have a chance to play interpersonal power games on their next meeting; for now, he had to tend to business.

  “Your problem, Kierendal,” he said slowly, “is that you’re not Warrens. You run a Warrengang, sure, but you’re not from there; you don’t know how things are done. If you have a problem with one of my people, you come to me, we work something out. That’s how things are done. You don’t give them up to the Imperials. That’s how wars start, y’know? People get hurt. Places get burned.”

  “This is about Caine?”

  “Your fucking ass,” Majesty said. “That’s what it’s about. Caine is a Baron of Cant, you stupid bitch, and you sold him to the Eyes for a lousy thousand royals. I’m cutting you slack for this, you understand? Instead of slashing your fucking dyke throat and torching this shit-hole with you and everybody else in it, I’m going to let you slide a little, because I figure you don’t know any better.”

  “You don’t understand—”

  “You’re the one who doesn’t understand!” Majesty roared her down. “You got five minutes to get your people and your customers out of this fucking whore palace. After that, it’s gonna be too late, and they’re gonna die in the fire, you follow?”

  “If you would only listen to reason,” she said mildly, stretching forth a gently supplicating hand, her palm turned up, her fingers curving in a precisely defined pattern.

  Paslava whispered, “Spell.”

  Kierendal went on, “We don’t have to be enemies. Caine came to me as a favor; he owed me some money, and this was his way of paying it back. Let’s work something out, can’t we? You and I?”<
br />
  “Some sort of Charm,” Paslava whispered. “I grounded it off.”

  Majesty met Kierendal’s yellow stare; her expression never altered, only momentarily froze as she watched her spell fail.

  “We might have had a chance to work out something, I guess,” Majesty said. “Too late now. Anybody ever tell you what I do to people who try to put magick on me?”

  Kierendal drew herself up, and her gown swirled around her like smoke. “Then the time for explanations has passed,” she said.

  Paslava whispered, “She’s signaling with Flow.”

  The charged silence in Alien Games suddenly sparked with the scrape of weapons being drawn from scabbards. Every bartender bore a club, every waitress a knife. Some of those unfamiliar faces among the customers now grinned as they moved through the crowds, advancing on Majesty with swords in hand.

  He took all this in with a bored glance and gave Kierendal a contemptuous snort. “Rookie,” he said, then raised his fist and shouted, “One!”

  Fully a third of the sumptuously dressed South Bankers slid daggers from their sleeves as they drew pragmatic, razor-edged swords from scabbards that had appeared purely decorative. Now all the armed waitresses, bartenders, and covert guards had at least three blades leveled toward their throats, and six men with knives stood at the backs of the three armed trolls.

  Majesty chuckled. “That’s half of us,” he said warmly. “Wanna go for Two? And maybe you can guess what Three’s gonna be.”

  Kierendal’s eyes blazed. “You invite a massacre.”

  “Yeah. But it’s your call,” he said. “Nobody has to get hurt.”

  She measured him for a moment, and Majesty sighed to himself. She was going to cave. He was almost sorry; he kinda liked her style.

  “Another signal,” Paslava murmured.

  Now a new rhythm underscored the restless silence: thumps of window shutters closing and scrapes of doors being barred. The distant shouts of rioters faded to muffled mumbling as the building was sealed.

  “Now. Have your people sheathe weapons and exit through that door,” she said, pointing. “If anyone starts anything, I shall burn this place myself.”