A snap of my left arm whips the white-hot remnant of the spike out of my charring flesh, and there is a bleak red light shining up on her and from the smell and the pain I’m guessing that my hair’s on fire, and I don’t give half a mouthful of shit. That spike was grounded against my skull.
We’ve been joined by the Outside Power.
She’s looking down at me, and in those yellow eyes now is the greatest gift she will ever give me.
Fear.
Because we Know each other now. And the punkass bleeding heart who said “To understand all is to forgive all” wasn’t from my fucking neighborhood.
I grin up at her. “Shaikkak Nerutch’khaitan. .”
I roll her name around in my mouth.
“Skaikkak Nerutch’khaitan-” My left hand spasms with nerve shock from the burn through my forearm; I let the spasm beckon to her. “I believe this is my dance.”
Her stump and her left hand make an off-balance pinwheel when she tries to backstroke into the night sky. I throw my weight forward when her heel hits my nailed-together ankles, and my forearm spike comes free from behind her kneecap and I keep the momentum going forward so that I can roll up onto one shrieking foot and shove myself up her leg and hook my left arm behind her neck. My weight captures her balance, and she keeps on staggering backward.
Behind her is the perimeter wall and beyond that there is nothing but coils of black turd smoke spinning toward the sky.
Guess this is my star exit.
Finally.
Good-bye, fuckers. Good-bye all of you sacks of shit who’re watching at home with your dicks in your hand or a thumb up your snatch.
Hope you had a good time, and kiss my ass.
The perimeter wall hits her above the knees, crushing my nailed ankles into a snarling white flare inside my head, and the wall’s just barely high enough to hold her, so I crook my arm behind her neck and croon lovingly into her rumpled mass of ear-
“When you wake up in Hell, you festering slab of rat cunt, I’ll already be killing you again.”
— and I backhand the point of my forearm spike at her right eye.
Nothing wrong with her reflexes: she jerks her head back and away from the point-
— and so the spike-
— which I hadn’t really expected to get her eye with, y’know, anyway, so there’s no point in shitcanning my follow-through-
— takes her just under the cheekbone, above her upper jaw, into what on a human would be a savagely sensitive nerve cluster around the trigeminal-
— triggering a transcendently satisfying airhorn shriek and instant stiff hyperarch of her back—
Guess ogrilloi keep a nerve cluster there, too.
— and we topple over the wall.
With a kick that’s half convulsion I yank my ankles apart as we start our long slow tumble into the darkness.
Why not? Like our Garthan Hold personal combat Brother used to say—
Hurts now. Be over soon.
Gahh-
– ’d like to hear that fucker say it again with a fifty-penny nail behind his motherfucking Achilles tendon—
But I still swing my legs around and wrench her thrashing underneath me as we fall free, because I am for ass-raping sure gonna land on—
Wham.
— tumbling flailing clawing-
WHAMWHAMWHAM
. .
. .
.
.
stars in the dust
breathe
— whoop—
breathe goddammit breathe
— whoop—
stars
hrakchakh
stars come out like a window
dusty sand settles around me and
on me
into my eyes and up my nose and
fuck my bleeding ass I’m still
alive
One minor—
hrakchakh
— minor flaw. . in the whole sonofabitching plan. .
The vertical city isn’t exactly vertical, exactly.
More of a steep slope.
I’m in one of the houses. . still has walls. . hasn’t had a roof in a thousand years or so. .
With the kind of effort that would have gotten Sisyphus to the top of his motherfucking hill, I roll my head sideways.
The city above catches enough of the firelight from the camp that I can pick out Crowmane’s body crumpled on the rubble maybe ten feet away.
She looks worse than I feel.
That is to say: dead.
I figure that between my two half-working hands, I oughta be able to chopstick a big enough piece of rock to make sure. And I will.
I will.
Just—
Just as soon as I get my breath. .
Yeah.
Someday this week.
All right, fuck breathing. I’ll go. . I’ll go—
Just as soon as I can make my eyes work.
Because I can’t blink away those haloes-migraine-aura prismatic splinters of starlight crystallizing over the rubble, crawling Crowmane’s bloody face, shimmering along my hands and arms—
That’s not my eyes. That’s the fucking universe slipping out of focus. .
This isn’t happening.
This isn’t happening. .
But no denial can keep the stars in the sky.
No denial can stop the freefall sideways-inside-out
yank
that puts a ceiling of acoustic tile and recessed fluorescent tubing over my staring eyes-
— that replaces the rubble under my back with a Winston Transfer platform-
— and the crumbling millennial walls of the abandoned city with the white latex gloves and surgical masks and blue antimicrobial cap-and-gowns of Studio EMTs-
— who heave me onto a crash cart in a bone-wrenching hurricane of stat this and amp of epi and no narco, no narco, adrenocorts only and thunder me out into some corridor of anonymously sterile tile, and there’s only one guy among them with a real face, and I reach over to him and grab his arm with my right hand.
“Am I-is this for real-? I’ve been having this dream-on the cross, I don’t know how many times-this dream where you pull me-”
The guy with the face-a mid-thirtyish flabby pale kind of guy, with colorless eyes and too-fleshy lips, already losing his hair-can barely keep up with the EMTs pushing my crash cart while he stares down at the bloody spike through my wrist with a creepy revolted fascination, like it sickens him and gives him a hard-on at the same time. “Oh, oh, no, Entertainer Michaelson,” he says, “oh, this is entirely, ah, for real, I assure you. Really.”
“I’m home. .?” The new tears that find the crusted trails down my cheeks are hot enough to burn me. “You brought me, brought me home. .”
“I’ve been in touch with your, er, Patron, that is, mm, Businessman Vilo,” he says, jogging alongside the cart, already going breathless. “He underwrote your emergency transfer, and he has, mmm, authorized me to, ah, renegotiate your contract-once you’ve been stabilized, of course. .”
“I don’t care,” I tell him, “I don’t care. Just. . thank you, that’s all. . thank you. Oh, god. Oh, god, thank you. I don’t even know your name. .”
“Oh, I am. . ah.” He surrenders trying to keep up and stops with a little wave.
“Kollberg,” he calls after me. “Administrator Arturo Kollberg, Entertainer. Get yourself patched up. We have a, ah, great deal to talk about. .”
He waves again. “A great deal.”
PRATT AND REDHORN
The Pratt and Redhorn was a small but well-appointed hostelry of three floors and maybe twenty-odd rooms that occupied a lively corner of the Riverdock parish not far from the vigilry. I paid off the cartboy and tracked rain through the foyer.
A sign on the table in the tiny lobby advised me in three languages to ring the bell for service, so I did. Tobacco and meat smoke and considerable noise-voices raised in drunken song, accompanied by the planking of tuneless
metallic percussion-billowed through a half-doored archway, which was blocked by a sign that advised, with apologies in the same three languages, that the dining hall was reserved for a private function. My sigh was more than half growl when I rang the bell again, louder.
I was in no mood. For anything.
I don’t know what reaction I’d been expecting out of t’Passe. It sure as hell wasn’t a gleam in her hard bright eyes and a nod and a brisk I’ve been wondering how it might turn out.
I didn’t make a hassle over it at first; after all, she’d been still unconscious in the Monastic Embassy infirmary on the day I’d driven Kosall into the stone at the upstream tip of Old Town and let Ma’elKoth’s flame flow through my hands to destroy that fucking blade forever. But when I reminded the World’s Greatest Living Expert On Me of this detail of trivia, she just shrugged. “Destroyed? Not while you live, I suspect.”
She was making my stomach hurt. “You better explain what you mean by that.”
“It is so intimately linked with your legend that the two of you are inextricable. Think: this is the blade that killed you, Caine, on Assumption Day, and thus plowed the field for your rebirth into-”
“Except I wasn’t exactly dead.”
She shrugged again. “Seven years in what our hosts name the True Hell? Argue semantics if you like. This is also the weapon that slaughtered the goddess Pallas Ril-”
“Except she’s not exactly dead either.”
“We speak of legend. Of what is known. It is known that you used this same blade to bring her back from beyond even Hell, and on the Day of the True Assumption you-again with the sword-unbound the Ascendant Ma’elKoth to make Him Master of Home. Kosall and you are virtually one and the same. Even its name-I’ve done a bit of research on that-”
“Of course you have.”
“Do you want to hear it?”
“Would it matter if I don’t?”
“ ‘Kosall,’ ” she’d said with a slightly malicious smile, “turns out to be a Westerlicized corruption of the Lipkan Kh’Hohtsanjanell, which means, in their usual straightforward fashion, Blade That Cuts Everything.”
I’m not ashamed to say that I actually flinched. “Deliann-Deliann once called me that-”
“I know.” The malice in that smile had faded back behind the smug. “I was there.”
“But-that’s just a name-those are just stories-”
“You,” she said severely, “are fighting the hook. Are you-you of all men-trying to claim that names do not signify? That there is such a thing as just a story?”
I had plenty of wriggle left in me. “Are you claiming that stories count for more than what actually happened?”
“What ‘actually happened’ depends on whom one asks, doesn’t it?” She grinned at me. “And once you explain what ‘actually happened,’ aren’t you merely replacing their story with yours?”
“Fuck that.” I was getting angry all over again. “No story is gonna make something unhappen. No story is gonna turn a fucking pile of slag at the tip of Old Town back into a magick sword and drop it five hundred years in the past-”
“Unless,” she said, all seriousness now, shading into grim, “a god is telling it.”
I didn’t answer. She poked her goddamn cane at my chest. “You know it’s true. That’s what’s really been on your mind. That’s what has you at a rolling boil.”
“This is exactly the kind of shit Jereth and Jantho started killing gods over,” I said.
She nodded. “Using, if your intuition is correct, a sword that had already been and would someday be used to slay three gods anew.”
“Three-?”
“Pallas Ril, Ma’elKoth, and-”
I interrupted her with a maybe unnecessarily forceful “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
“Still. .” She got up and limped toward a stack of books on the floor by the inner doorway. “Are you certain it was Kosall? Could it not have been the black runeblade?”
“The what?”
“The one you found in the chamber. .” She opened one of the volumes and started leafing through it. “It was in your report. . I have notes on it, let’s see-”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
She looked up from the book. “The one you used to unleash the river.”
I shook my head, uncomprehending. “I used the bladewand.”
“No. Here it is: a hand and a half blade, polished blue-black, chased with silver runes-”
“I’m telling you, I used the bladewand. It’s the only reason I lived through it-through any kind of material weapon, feedback would have killed me-”
“Apparently not.”
“Let me see that-”
“The original report is at Garthan Hold, of course. But I have read it, and my memory is, I believe, flawless. You came across the blade in the chamber of the Tear of Panchasell-”
“Your memory is fucked.”
She cocked her head. “Though it is a curious coincidence-a black blade with silver runes-Kosall was a silver blade, and were the runes on it not black-?”
“Will you stop?”
But of course she wouldn’t, and the harder I argued the less sure I got, because pretty soon I discovered that I just couldn’t really remember if I had used the bladewand or if I’d found some motherfucking reversed-color image of Kosall, and my head was pounding like something was alive in there and chipping its way out with a ten-pound hammer and a railroad spike, so I just left.
Which is how I ended up in the foyer of the Pratt amp; Redhorn in a dripping-wet foul mood, jamming my hand down on the service bell like it was the top of t’Passe’s pointy fucking head.
After a moment a thin, pale, tired-looking man with a few scraps of hair plastered sideways over his sweat-dripping scalp slipped around the sign. He was drying his hands on a brown apron, which then went up to mop clean a swath across his face as he came forward, shaking his head. “I wish I could offer you welcome, my friend.” His accent was Ankhanan. “We’re full up for the night, and I’m afraid-”
“Why does everybody around here want to be my friend?”
The thin, pale man stopped, blinking. “Why, I–I don’t mean anything by it, goodman-”
“Forget about it. It’s not goodman, it’s freeman. I’m Dominic Shade. Somebody delivered my trunk.”
The man’s face cleared. “Oh, Freeman Shade! Welcome! I’m Lasser Pratt. Always good to welcome a countryman. Oh, this is fine. I’d become afraid you might’n’t make it. Lord Tarkanen’s order-and your trunk-got here just in time for us to get you into our last room tonight-it’s on the top floor, I hope you don’t-”
“As long as it’s dry.” I nodded toward the raucous dining hall. “Look, I can see you’re busy with the party. You think I can just get a plate of something hot to take up to my room?”
“Oh, not at all, no no no, not at all. Please, Freeman Shade, you’re welcome at the party-”
“I am?”
Pratt gave a nod that was half shake of his head. “Oh, yes, very much so-and not only because you are a guest of Lord Tarkanen. They, ah-customs on the Battleground-are. . well, I’m Ankhanan by birth myself, y’know, from New Bend, d’you know it? Just three days downriver-”
“Yeah, I’ve been there. Skip the blowjob, huh? I just want some dry clothes and a hot meal.”
“I, ah, well. .” Pratt’s grin deflated. He rubbed his eyes. “Sorry. Force of habit.”
“Forget it. I know what it’s like to work for a living.”
“But you really are invited to the party-”
“Maybe later. I have to go right out again.”
“On a night like this? You have business that won’t wait till morning?”
“You wouldn’t happen to know if that Tyrkilld character spends his nights in the vigilry, would you?”
“Knight Aedharr?” Pratt nodded toward the smoke billowing through the dining-hall door. “He’s right in there.”
“You’re putting me on
.”
“If only I were,” he sighed. “My eldest went Khryllian-he’s an armsman of this very parish, still has hopes of Knighthood some day. One of the fingers in his own fist was killed this morning. Braehew, his name was.”
“Yeah.” My too-empty stomach suddenly knotted, and a phantom stab brought my hand to my right side. “I was there.”
“I know you were.” Pratt made ushering gestures toward the doorway. “That’s why you’re invited.”
I stared.
Pratt spread his palms. “Like I was saying: On the Battleground, customs are. . different.”
I went to the half door and looked in.
The party must have been going on for a while already.
Tables and chairs had been shoved aside from half the dining hall’s floor, to make room for what looked like some cross between square-dancing and jujitsu. Other tables were piled with meats and bread and loaves of cheese, and everywhere were steel cups and tankards and schooners, most lying empty, tumbled and forgotten on tabletop or chair seat or kicked out of the way of the dancers.
“They don’t look too broken up about it.”
Pratt was at my shoulder now, looking past me into the dining hall. “It’s a celebration. A victory party.”
“Come again?”
The hosteler shrugged. “Braehew was killed in battle, discharging the lawful command of his superior. Falling with honor, he goes to join Khryl’s Own. From the Khryllian point of view, what greater victory can he hope for?”
I cocked my head. “Living through it?”
Pratt chuckled. “And that’s why Ankhanans never quite fit in around here. Well, from my angle, I’m told you played no more than the part Khryl wrote for you, if you know what I mean. They’ll be happy to make you welcome.”
“I’ll bet.”
Customs are customs-but the laughter was too loud and too sharp, the singing was too hoarse, and the smiles on too many lips left too many eyes too blank. Looked like there had been too many of these victory parties lately. I stared over the half door and let the loudest and sharpest of the laughter and the hoarsest of the singing draw my eye.
Dimly through the smoke I could make out the barrel shape of Tyrkilld, Knight Aeddhar, seated in the far corner on a vast chair set atop a table like a mockery of a throne. He was out of uniform for the second time that day, wearing only the wool-woven vest-over-belted-sweater, sheepskin breeches and boots of a Jheledi shepherd. In one hand he held a vast bucket of a cup, big enough he could have worn it as a helmet; the other hand was occupied by keeping a giggling twenty-something redheaded girl firmly attached to his knee. She was the only woman in the room not wearing the Khryllian crewcut and armsman colors; she had a slightly-too-short-for-modesty print dress gathered around trim thighs, and a somewhat longer apron belted too tightly around an also-trim waist.
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