by J. M. Frey
It’s easy, Writer. It is so easy to sweep a leg out, to trip her. She falls backward, eyes wide, whites showing all around, but she doesn’t land. I fist my hand in her shirt, right above her throat. With all the force of my rage, I slam her down against the cement floor. Her head bounces, there is a loud crack, and Ahbni convulses. I crouch over her, knees pressing her arms into the ground as her hands flail uselessly, like leaves in a strong breeze on the end of a fragile twig. So easy to snap.
The skin of her neck is silky—smooth to the touch, I note absently—when I wrap my hands around it and squeeze.
“Stop him!” Pip sobs somewhere behind me. “Kin! Stop him!” And then Pip is beside me, Elgar’s blood still warm on her hands as she scrapes and scrabbles at my wrists. “Enough! Forsyth, please!”
But my vision is hazed with red, with rage, with agony, and all I can see, all I want to see is the way Ahbni’s face is turning red, and puce, her tongue growing fat in her mouth, her eyelids fluttering, those pretty false lashes flicking up and down as her eyes roll in her head and her heels keep the tempo of her death, beating on the floor.
Pip shoves hard at my shoulders, but I will not be swayed. I will not. I am the Shadow Hand of Hain. I am the Lordling of Lysse. I am the arbiter of justice, of what is right, and I say that this loveless, heartless bitch must die.
Pip sways back, and then, balling her fist, cracks me hard across the jaw. Those months of preparing Pip for a physical fight, those hours in boot camps and martial arts classes all turn against me, condensed into a single blow. I am thrown off the girl. I lose my grip on her throat. I lose my grip on wakefulness.
Black swims up and over my eyes, stars dazzling in the periphery, and I feel a hard, crunching jolt as my right elbow slams hard into the concrete floor. And, just like that, I am down, on my back. I try to rise, hands curled into talons, determined to finish—I will finish—but a blow to my stomach lays me flat, knocks all the air from me, and I flop back, gasping and hacking and trying not to choke on my own vomit. Pip stands over me, her face like a thunderstorm, hands on her hips like a conquering giant. I try to kick her ankle, feeling petulant, wronged, but she shifts out of my reach. Horrible bully. Just like my brother!
How dare she stop me?
“How dare—” I hiss and cough, but I cannot breathe.
I roll onto my side, reach again for my prey, but Pip is between us. Her back is to me now, and she has Ahbni cradled against her chest, rubbing her back and helping the bitch breathe, the Writer-be-damned traitor. Ahbni is coughing worse than I am, sucking and struggling. Pip is pressing the fabric of her shredded scarf against a gush of red on the back of Ahbni’s head.
Ha! A touch for me, then, at least!
If I could just—but Kintyre steps between us, and I snarl at him, wordless and infuriated by my frustrated goal.
“Lay back, and do not even think of moving,” my wife threatens, craning her head around to meet my gaze. “I will not hesitate to knock you cold, Forsyth Turn. Don’t think that I won’t.”
My revenge stymied for the time being, I bare my teeth at her in a soundless threat, and lay back, hands out, belly exposed, subdued. I know very well how to play submissive to my brother, how to pretend contrition or acquiescence, how to portray one thing while plotting another. And Kintyre, thick-headed, trusting fool that he has always been, believes me.
Kintyre swings away to crouch beside Pip, the soft-hearted, softer-skulled, blasted buffoon.
“Have we not all learned our lessons about sparing the villains?” I snarl at them both, from the ground. When Kintyre makes no move to stop me, I sit up. “Have we not invited disaster enough?”
“You don’t get to say that after you tried to . . . after you . . . how could you?” Pip says, her voice harsh and graveled with her choler and disappointment.
“Pip,” I say, holding my hands out to her, wanting to pull her into my arms, to feel her warmth, to know that her heart beats and her lungs work because they are doing so right against my own flesh, where I can feel it.
“No,” she says,. “No. You don’t get to . . . not after you . . . oh my god, I am so angry with you I could . . . don’t you dare touch me right now!”
“End her, so that we may finish this!” I shout. “Come now! She is Bootknife! She is the sidekick that one must destroy to summon forth the final antagonist! Do not coddle her!”
“She’s just a confused kid who thought she was doing the right thing,” Pip insists.
“Pip, please,” I shout. “I know you want her to be good. I know you see much of yourself in her and are desperate that she be only misunderstood, but her eyes are not green! She entered into this venture of her own volition. She made this choice!”
“And so, what, you’ll kill her for it?” Pip asks.
“Of course!” I say. “Hainish justice dictates—”
“This isn’t Hain!” And her derision, her hatred is worse than a slap in the face, a punch to the gut, a crack across my jaw. My wife hates me, and it stabs, and stings, and burns. At first, I am indignant, filled with an incandescent righteousness, for how dare she judge me so harshly when all I was doing was avenging my creator, the man who would be my father, when she would do the same to anyone who harmed Martin or Mei Fan or wai po.
But the truth is, she did not. Pip did not try to harm Ahbni for hurting Elgar.
Kintyre, startled by Pip’s harsh words, stares at my wife. “She murdered Elgar Reed,” he says. “The punishment for murder is death.”
“Not in the Overrealm, it isn’t!” Pip says. “You can’t just—”
“Do you really think she’ll regret it?” I ask. “That she will meekly go to jail and become reformed? Pip, do not be a fool.”
“Overrealm justice for a crime committed in the Overrealm!” Pip insists.
“You cannot call to witness two people who do not exist!” I say, punching the air in the direction of Bevel, still guarding Elgar’s corpse. “And I will never support you in this. Let me finish what I started!”
“No!”
“Yes!” a voice howls, but it is not mine. It is not Kintyre’s, not Bevel’s, nor even Pip’s.
It comes from behind us, where the healer has stood this whole time. His white robes dissolve into black smoke, leaving nothingness in its wake. There is nothing there.
“Yes!” the healer’s voice echoes again, and I know it now. Know it for what it is. It is the Viceroy’s.
“Go on,” he says from nowhere, and everywhere. “Go on, Forsyth Turn. Kill her.”
“You want your protégé to die?” Bevel snarls, and the ray-gun is once again in his hand, aimed at the sky, waiting for the opportunity to fire it.
“My protégé?” the Viceroy sneers. “Surely not, Reader. Surely she was yours.”
Pip makes a horrible gulping sound, screwing her eyes shut and shaking her head once. A hit, for the Viceroy, and a palpable one. “She wasn’t,” Pip hisses.
“You already thought of her as such. Young, moldable, teachable. She wanted you, you know. Wanted to save you from your oafish husband, your chained existence as wife and mother.”
“I don’t need saving!” Pip snarls. “This is what I chose!”
“Is it?” the Viceroy chuckles. “Or is it where I put you? My little puppet. My little mole in the Turnish house.”
The scars on Pip’s back flare briefly, and she arches in pain, clenches her fists and jaw. “You like your little puppets, too. The trope is that the villain disposes of the sidekick the moment they stop being useful, but you held on to Bootknife for years and years. He was hot-headed and temperamental, and you kept him because you liked him.”
“Because I had put so much work into him. But her? What does she matter to me?” he challenges.
“After all the work you must have put into getting her on your side?” Pip counters, arguing for the value of a life that only she believes has any.
“Do you really think I’d need to coerce her?” the Viceroy sneers.
His tone is both invasive and intimate, and so very wrong. “The people in your world are so filled with hate. I barely have to lift a finger to incite them to fury and violence. They murder each other in the streets and call it policing. They threaten and stalk and harm each other in messages, and texts, and through avenues of communication that we couldn’t even begin to fathom trapped between our covers, in our neat little worlds. Do it, Lordling. Do it.”
“No,” I say, and stand, hands deliberately flexed at my sides. Empty. “No, I shan’t.” Not if it is what the Viceroy wants.
“Do it!” the voice shrieks, and the emergency lights flicker. “Coward!”
“I am not the coward! Why do you not show yourself?” I shout back. “Why sneak around us like this?”
Kintyre turns to blink oafishly at me. “Forsyth,” he says. “The Viceroy always sneaks. You know this.”
“He does?” I ask, staring goggle-eyed at my brother, floored by his insight. I shouldn’t be. I keep forgetting that my brother isn’t actually as much of a fool as I have led myself to believe.
“Yes,” Bevel chimes in. “He never steps in himself until he’s certain the day is his.”
“No, that’s not right,” Pip says, face screwing up in confusion. “The first time I was there, he came down the stairs into the Rookery. He showed himself. He fought Forsyth and I in person.”
“Then he only did so because he was certain he had already won,” Kintyre explains. “He’ll never show himself when he thinks there’s a chance he might lose. He waits. He sends others.”
Pip looks down at Ahbni, still unconscious, but breathing.
“Okay,” Pip says, more to herself than to us. “Okay, braniac. You’re the smarty-pants here. Figure it out. Enemy’s weakness revealed. What do we do with it.” She chews on her thumbnail for a moment, nervous, eyes flicking back and forth as she stares at nothing, lost in her own head, in her own internal, mental Excel. Then, suddenly, with a jolt and a gasp, she looks up, and straight into my eyes.
Again, that violet flare passes from the rim of her iris to the pupil, like arcing lightning.
“The Stations!” Pip hisses. “We’re at Station Six, the crisis point and the squeeze on the protagonists. There are seven in an Elgar Reed quest. The Viceroy won’t reveal himself right now, because he hasn’t won yet. We’re not at the end of his game. We’re not at the end of the . . . we’re not at the apex of the plot, the climax.” Pip lays Ahbni’s head against her thigh, and holds her hand slanted upwards in demonstration. “We’re only here.” She points to her knuckles. “He’ll come out here.” She points to the tips of her fingers. “But if we wait that long, we fall into his trap. Into the predictability.”
“Is that a bad thing?” Bevel hisses, and I can see his own mind racing to catch up with her. “We always win in the end.”
“Yeah, but this isn’t a story anymore. And the author is dead,” Pip says softly. “Does this make us free of authorial intent? The Viceroy can die now, because he was always meant to live? Can I finally escape what it means to be a woman in Hain? Is . . . the stasis cracked? Will what worked before work still? Can we rely on Kintyre winning the day because he always wins the day?”
“What do you mean?”
“Forsyth Turn is one of the good guys,” Pip says. “In the books, he has the capacity, the means, the motivation, the intelligence to go dark, but he never does. Why? Because the author wanted him to be a good guy. And yet, the moment Elgar . . . you went for Ahbni like a madman.”
“That’s not the same,” I protest.
“But it’s different enough. The narrative has changed. It’s fractured. You win, but he gets away. Every time. But this isn’t like the other stories,” Pip cautions.
“Isn’t it?” I ask, catching on to where her thinking is leading her. “Are we not still characters in a book? Are we not still beholden to how we were Written?”
“Yeah, but then you wouldn’t have attacked . . .” Pip begins, looking up into my face, and swallowing hard on the rest of her sentence at what she sees there.
“Would I not have, bao bei?” I ask softly. “I am a kind man, but I am also a just one.”
“I’m just saying that we can’t rely on this going our way this time,” Pip says with a sour, pinched look on her face, which means my comment will not go unremarked upon or un-discussed later. “This is the third book in the trilogy. We might defeat the Viceroy, yes, but not without someone else dying. Not without one of the heroes falling, to make the narrative more poignant. And you’d do that, wouldn’t you, Elgar?” She looks over at Elgar’s remains, her own body slumped with misery and grief and exhaustion. “We all have heirs. There’s a protagonist to take up our mantel and avenge us. Wyndam, and Alis, and the Lady Gyre, and Lewko Pointe. There’s a new generation ready to step in. Fucking trilogies.” The violet sparks again.
“So, one of us is going to die?” Kintyre asks.
“If we let the narrative play out?” Pip says. “Maybe.”
“What do we do?”
Pip turns to me, grinning. “We hack it.”
The violet has infused the whole of her iris now, like the green did when she was under the Viceroy’s sway. Whose power is this that shines out of her gaze now? Whose magic? Whose intent?
And just like that, I know. Yes, of course!
“Pip, yes,” I say, seizing her shoulders. “Elgar passed the series on to you. You are the Writer. You can change how the story goes.”
Pip blinks for a moment, startled, and then her mouth curls into a wicked, fiendish grin devoid of all joy.
“We get him now,” Pip snarls. “Get him to come out. Get him to break his pattern. Get him to fight for himself. And then we kill the motherfucker.”
“How?” Bevel asks.
“Threes!” Pip says. “Forsyth, it’s a trilogy! The third book!”
“Ah!” I say, understanding what she’s aiming for. “I see!”
“I don’t,” Kintyre grumbles. “What are you on about?”
Pip grins, but it is a knife slice of clever smugness. “His name.”
“Varnet, son of Edvane,” I call into the open air, lacing my command with Words of Compulsion, Words of Obedience, the kind of dark and dangerous Words that only Shadow Hands know. Pip grips my hand, gives my Words power and possibility, sends them into the air with a faint purplish curl of watercolor magic. “I compel you with your first name to appear before us, stripped of your glamour!”
The air around us shivers and tingles with ozone. The emergency lights flicker and crackle. A low chuckle builds like fog around us, echoing in the rubble. From the direction of the ballroom, I hear people begin to shout and panic once again.
Bevel’s eyes widen as recognition settles there. He places a hand on Pip’s shoulder, fingers brushing her bare nape. His own voice heavy with the Shadow Hand’s less savory Words of Revelation, Words of Dominance, and Words of Binding, he shouts: “Viceroy, former right hand of King Carvel Tarvers, betrayer and traitor, I compel you with your second name to show yourself, to come before us unarmed!”
Kintyre starts and looks around, eyes wide. “I don’t know his other name!” he hisses.
“I got it,” Pip says, and sets Ahbni’s head down on the ground gently to stand. Her chest is splotched with blood, a grim waistcoat to go with her elbow-length red gloves. She throws her head back and bellows: “Child and Heir of Solinde! By the Deal-Maker magic carved into my bones, put there by your own hand, I compel you to appear before us!”
The laughter careens up into an incredulous screech. “How do you know her name? How do you know?” the Viceroy squeals.
“Show yourself!” I shout.
The laugh condenses, tightens, crystallizes. Just over my left shoulder.
I spin around, snap the tie holding Smoke into its sheath, and heft the sword. Then I stumble back a step when the Viceroy wraps one gloved hand around the sword’s tip. “My dear Lordling Turn,” he hisses, “all you needed to do was ask.�
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CHAPTER 15
FORSYTH
I slash the blade at his face. The Viceroy dodges backward, laughing with a manic grin that is cartoonish in its grimacing horror. Pip bolts across the floor to intercept him, sword flashing, and once more, I am grateful that my wife enjoys exercise and jogs so often. But her sword work is clumsy, and she telegraphs her movements too easily. He dodges her, as well.
“Ah, Mrs. Turn! Where’s that implausible spawn of yours? Is she well?” the Viceroy asks conversationally, skipping backward, as if we had met on the street in passing instead of in the midst of pursuing him with blades drawn. His footsteps leave acid-green scorch marks on the cement, magic bolstering his retreat, making him fleet and nimble.
“You don’t get to talk about her,” Pip snarls, slashing at him again.
“Oh?” the Viceroy asks, eyebrow cocked, and he spins hard on the ball of his foot, doubling back and skidding to a stop over Ahbni’s supine body. He straddles her shoulders, hands on his hips, and giggles.
Kintyre and Bevel, who had been pacing us to try to find their own opening, spin quick to face him, weapons high. Bevel fires the ray-gun, but the Viceroy deflects it with a spluttering ball of phosphorescence.
“Ah, ah,” he says. “Mind yourself. You wouldn’t want to harm her, now, would you?”
“I thought you didn’t care about your new sidekick,” Bevel challenges.
The Viceroy sighs in delight, as if just looking at Bevel is as relaxing and refreshing as a hot cup of coffee on a chilly morning. We are all sweating and red-faced, stinking of adrenaline and desperation in this airless, lightless concrete box, but one glance at Bevel’s face and the Viceroy looks like he has just stepped out of the most pleasant springtime meadow.
“Oh, Bevel,” the Viceroy says, voice dropping to a seductive register, and it is close, intimate. “Hello.”
