Hari squinted at him again, narrowing his eyes to overlay his vision with the memory of this man as he'd been in the days he had ruled the Ankhanan Empire, as Emperor and living god. In those days, he had called himself Ma'elKoth, a phrase in Paquli that translates, roughly, as I Am Limitless. Ma, in Paquli, is the present nominative case of to be; tan is its past tense.
I Was Limitless.
"So that every time I hear my name—every time I see my reflection—" Tan'elKoth continued, "I am reminded of the penalty for underestimating you."
His tone was distantly precise. Well rehearsed. More and more, during these Earthbound years, Tan'elKoth seemed to be talking for someone else's benefit—as though he was playing to an audience that existed only in his mind.
Hari grunted. "Flatterer."
"Mmm. Perhaps."
"Is that why you've never Made a try for me?"
Tan'elKoth began walking again. "Revenge is an occupation of inferior minds," he said meditatively. "It is the shibboleth of spiritual poverty." "That's not an answer."
Tan'elKoth only shrugged and walked on. After a moment, Hari followed him. "Perhaps I have not destroyed you," the ex-Emperor murmured, "because it is more enjoyable to watch you destroy yourself."
"That's about right," Han said with a snort. "Everything I've done my whole life has been somebody's entertainment."
Tan'elKoth hummed a neutral agreement.
Hari rubbed the back of his neck, but his fingers couldn't loosen the knots that had tied themselves there. "Maybe that's part of what's so hard to take, at the end of the day. I've done a lot of shifty things in my life. I've done some pretty good things. But when you come right down to it, none of that matters. Everything I've done, everything that's been done to me—win, lose, love, hate; who gives a fuck?—it all only counts as far as it helps some bastard I've never met while away a couple idle hours."
"We are indeed a pair," Tan'elKoth mused. "Our wars long fought, our glories passed. Is it truly that your life was mere entertainment which troubles you—or is it that your life is no longer so entertaining?"
"Hey, that reminds me," Hari said. "I don't think I've invited you lately to go fuck yourself."
Tan'elKoth smiled indulgently. "I wept because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet." He nodded down the sidewalk, at a ragged legless beggar dozing in his ancient manual wheelchair. "Consider this man: I have no doubt he would give tip his very hope of the afterlife to walk—even so badly as you walk—for one single day."
"So?" Hari said. "So he's more crippled than I am. So what?" Tan'elKoth's smile turned cold. "You have a much nicer wheelchair." "Oh, sure," Hari said. He grunted a bitter laugh. "Rover's a real treat." "Rover?" Tan'elKoth said. One eyebrow arched more steeply. "You gave a name to your wheelchair? I hadn't thought you the type."
Hari shrugged irritably. "It's a command code, that's all. It lets the voice-control software know I'm talking to it."
"And Rover is a dog's name, is it not? Like Faithful—mm, Fido?"
"It's not a dog's name," Hari said, disgusted with himself. "It's a joke, that's all. It started as a bad joke, and I just never bothered to change it." "I don't see the humor."
"Yeah, me neither." He shrugged dismissively. "I know you don't watch a lot of net. You know anything about twentieth-century serial photoplays?"
"Little, save that they tend to be infantile."
"Well, there was one called The Prisoner. Ever hear of it?"
Tan'elKoth shook his head.
"It's kind of too complicated to really explain," Hari said. "Rover was a very efficient prison guard. That's all."
"Mmm," Tan'elKoth mused. "I think I see—"
"Don't go wise and philosophical on me—every time you pull that shit, I start to regret I didn't kill you when I had the chance."
"Just so." Tan'elKoth sighed. "Sometimes I do, too."
Hari looked at him, trying to think of something to say; after a moment, he just nodded and started walking again, and Tan'elKoth fell in at his side.
They walked together in silence for some time.
"I suppose ... the actual question is, What, in the end, does one want?" Tan'elKoth asked finally. "Do we want to become happy with the lives we have, or do we want to change our lives—into lives with which we will be happy? After all, to content yourself with your current situation is a simple matter of serotonin balance: it can be accomplished by medication."
"Drugs won't change anything but my attitude." Hari shrugged, dismissing the idea. "And changing? My whole life? This was what I was fighting for."
"Was it?"
"I won, goddammit. I beat Kollberg. I beat you. I got everything I goddamn wanted: fame, wealth, power. Shit, I even got the girl."
"The problem with happy endings," Tan'elKoth said, "is that nothing is ever truly over."
"Fuck that," Hari said. "I am living happily ever goddamn after. I am."
"Ah, I see: It is happiness which has brought you to these streets, at this hour, with me," Tan'elKoth murmured. "I have always supposed living happily ever after at four A.M. would somehow involve lying in bed, asleep, with one's wife."
Hari looked at the filthy pavement beneath his feet. "It's just . . . I don't know. Sometimes, y'know, late at night ..." He shook his head, driving away the thought. He took a slow breath, and shrugged. "I guess I'm not handling getting old so well, that's all. This is . Ahh, fuck it. Midlife crisis bullshit."
Tan'elKoth stood silently at Hari's side, motionless, until Hari looked up and found the ex-Emperor staring at him like he'd bitten into something rotten that he couldn't spit out. "Is this the name you give to your despair? Midlife crisis bullshit?"
"Yeah, all right, whatever. Call it whatever the fuck you want—"
"Stop," Tan'elKoth rumbled. He put a hand the size of a cave bear's paw on Hari's shoulder and gave him a squeeze that stopped just short of crushing bone. "You cannot trivialize your pain with nomenclature. You forget to whom you speak, Caine."
Tan'elKoth's gaze smoked; it held Hari as tight as his smothering grip did. "In this way, we are brothers; I have felt what you feel, and we both know that no mere word can compass and contain this injury. We are wounded, you and I: with a hurt that time cannot heal. Like a cancer, like gangrene, it grows worse with each passing hour. It is killing us."
Hari lowered his head. The pain in his chest allowed him no answer; he could only stare, grip-jawed and silent, at the faint bands of soft color across his knuckles.
Drunken voices slurred from behind them, "Hey, you flickers! Hey, shitheads!"
Hari and Tan'elKoth turned to find two men lurching toward them along the street: the pair of drunks Tan'elKoth had shouldered off the sidewalk. As they wove unsteadily through a pool of mercury-argon lampglow, Hari could see the length of pipe in one's hand. In the hand of the other, two decimeters of blade gleamed steel-bright.
"Who th'fuck y'think y'are?" the one with the knife asked owlishly; he turned his head from side to side as though searching for an angle that might clear his vision. "Who y'think y'r shovin'?"
The knife guy was in the lead; Hari took one step forward to intercept him. He could read this bastard like a street sign. The knife was for show—for intimidation, for self-respect: eight inches of steel penis, bright and hard.
Hari saw three ways he could settle this right down. He could apologize, maybe buy them a drink, cool them off a little, let them feel like they mattered—that's all they really wanted. Or he could pull out his palmpad and key the Social Police, then point out to these guys that he's an Administrator and Tan'elKoth's a Professional, and they were looking at life under the yoke if they didn't back off. Simplest would be just to tell them who he was. Laborers are as celebrity-struck as anybody else, and unexpectedly meeting Caine himself on the street would dazzle them.
Instead, he angled the right side of his body slightly away from the guy, presenting about a three-quarter profile, his hands boneless at his sides, a bright tingl
e beginning to sizzle along his nerves. "Y'know, you shouldn't pull a knife unless you're gonna use it."
"Who says I'm not planning to—"
Hari leaned into a lunge, his left hand becoming a backfist as it blurred through a short arc from his thigh to the guy's nose. It struck with a wet whack like the snap of a soaked towel, and tilted the drunk's head back to the perfect angle for Hari's right cross to take him precisely on the point of the chin.
Hari staggered a little, grimacing—his bypass's secondhand footwork left him off balance, open for a countering slash of the knife—but it didn't matter: the drunk fell backward like a toppling pole and stretched his length on the pavement.
"It's not about what you're planning," Hari said.
Both his fists burned and stung.
It was a good pain, and he welcomed it.
"Fuck my mother," the other drunk breathed, the pipe hanging forgotten by his side. "You—I know you you are, aren't you? I mean, aren't you Caine?"
"I used to be; Hari said.
"I'm a big fan—"
"Thanks. Take a fucking hike."
"No, I mean it, I really am—"
"I believe you. Now get out of here before I kill you."
The drunk stumbled off, muttering to himself, "Shit, holy shit, holy son of a motherfucking shit ..."
Tan'elKoth nodded down at the man who lay on the street. "Is he dead?"
"Maybe." Hari shrugged. "Probably not."
Hari's combat rush faded as fast as it had risen, leaving him bleak and bitter and slightly sick. His hands throbbed and his mouth tasted of coffee grounds. So, here I am, thirty years later: still beating up drunks in the Mission District.
Why not just go ahead and roll him for loose change?
"You asked me what I want. I can tell you ..." Hari said slowly. "I can tell you exactly what I want."
He nudged the drunk with his toe, not even really seeing the man anymore; in this drunken, bleeding Laborer lying in the street, his face busted up because he was too stupid to back off, he was looking at himself
"I want to find out who it is that keeps reaching down into my life and turning everything I touch into shit," Hari said. "I want to meet him. I'm not asking for much: I want to share a little bit of pain with him, that's all." He pressed his fists against his legs, and said through his teeth, "I want to get my hands on the motherfucker."
"Mm. This is a dream I can share with you, Caine." Once again, Tan'elKoth laid his hand across Hari's shoulder like a blanket, and through that physical connection sparked a current of understanding.
Hari pulled away.
Tan'elKoth kept his hand in the air, turning it over as though to read his own palm. He loomed over Hari, blank, impenetrable, inhumanly solid: a sarsen stone outlined against the dawn-lit clouds above.
"Be careful for what you wish," he said softly. "A very wise man of your world has observed that when the gods would punish us, they answer our prayers."
The god of dust and ashes had slept for an age, fitful in slow, infinite starvation, restlessly gnawing on the bleak cinder that had been its world.
Though the god slumbered, its merest dream maintained its dominion, for it was attended by priests who never guessed at its existence. It had a church that did not seem to be a church, had a religion that did not know it was a religion, and had followers that prayed to other gods, or to no god at all. Years passed while it awakened—but when it finally roused, men leaped to serve it, though they thought they served only themselves.
For this is the power of the god of dust and ashes: to weave the lives of its followers so that the fabric thus created has a pattern none of them intend.
TWO
As the crisp late-summer afternoon faded to evening, the shadow of the God's Teeth mountains stretched to the east and swallowed first the mines, erasing their billowing towers of smoke, then wiped across the Northwest Road and engulfed Thorncleft, the tiny Transdeian capital city.
The Monastic Ambassador to Transdeia, a young man the world named Raithe of Ankhana, sat in a straight-backed, unadorned, unpadded, and exceptionally uncomfortable chair, staring out at the shadow's grope with blank unseeing eyes.
Most unsettling, those eyes were: the pale blue grey of winter ice, set in a face as dark and leathery as that of a Korish desert tribesman. The startling contrast made his stare a disturbing, almost dangerous thing; few men could bear to match his gaze. Fewer still would care to try, if they knew just how deeply those pale eyes could see.
Late in the afternoon, five elves, had come to Thorncleft. Raithe had seen them first from this very window: dusty, in clothing travel-worn and stained, mounted on horses whose ribs showed even under their mantles of green and black. Those mantles had been embroidered with the star-browed raven that was the standard of House Mithondionne.
Raithe had stared at them, memorizing every discernable curve of shoulder and tangle of hair, every faded patch where the sun had bleached color from their linen surcoats, all the details of posture and gesture that made each of them individual, as the elves walked their horses up highsloping Tor Street. He had stepped from the shadow of the half-built Monastic embassy into the street, shielding his eyes against the lowering sun, had watched them answer the challenge at the vaulted gate of Thorn-keep, had watched as the gate swung wide and the elves led their horses within.
Then he went back into the embassy, into his office, and sat in this chair so that he could see them more clearly.
He held himself perfectly erect and controlled his breathing, timing it by the subtle beats of his own heart: six beats in, hold for three, nine beats out, hold for three. As his heart slowed, so did the cycle of his breath. He built their image in the eye of his mind, drawing details of their backs from his trained memory, since their backs were what he had seen most clearly: a spray of platinum hair pricked through by the barest hint of pointed ears, a diagonal leather thong to support a waterskin, the inhuman grace of stance, the way shoulders move when hands swing in small, light gestures.
Slowly, slowly, with infinite patience, he fed details into the image: the dark curls hand-tooled into their belts, the lace of scar tissue across one's forearm, the sideways duck of another's head as he whispered to one of his companions. These were details he had not seen, could not have seen; these were details that he created in his powerful imagination. Yet as he refined them, and brought them more vividly before his mind's eye, they became plastic, shifted, and finally organized into plain, visible truth.
Now ghosts of their surroundings materialized in his mind: the marble floor, deeply worn but highly polished, on which their boots made almost no sound, the long tongue of pale blue carpet that entered the doorway before them. He got a vague sense of huge, high-vaulted space, oaken beams blackened by years of smoldering torches below.
He hummed satisfaction under his breath. This would be the Hall of State.
He had been inside that hall many times in the few months since he'd been posted here from Ankhana; using his recollection of the details of the hall brought the scene inside it into sharper and more brilliant focus than he could have seen with the eyes of his body—from the glittering steel of the ceremonial weapons that bedizened the walls to the precise color of the sunlight that struggled through the smoke-darkened windows. There before the elves was the Gilt Throne, and upon it lounged Transdeia's lazy, spineless puppet lord: Kithin, fourteenth Duke of Thorncleft. Raithe could see even the stitching on Duke Kithin's shirt of maroon and gold; with that as a mental anchor, he swung his perception to see the room as Kithin saw it. Now, for the first time, he could get a good look at the faces of the elves.
He didn't trouble to study these faces too closely; elvish features lack the creases that time and care paint upon human physiognomy, and thus reveal nothing of their character. Elves, in Raithe's experience, looked very much alike.
He was rather more interested in what had brought them to Thorn-cleft, and so he studied the silent motions of lips and tongue;
though he spoke little Primal, they would be conversing in Westerling for the benefit of Duke Kithin, and lipreading is easy, when practiced through the pristine vision of his mindeye.
His mindeye had always been one of his most useful talents.
Raithe had been only a boy when he'd discovered his gift thirteen years old, barely into adolescence. One golden morning he had lain in bed, in his room above his father's tiny smithy, slowly awakening from a dream. In the dream, he'd kissed Dala, the raven-haired sixteen-year-old girl who sold sticky buns on the corner of Tanner and the Angle; as he lay in bed fingering the erection this dream had given him, he'd imagined her rising for the morning and pulling her nightdress off over her head, imagined her round, swelling breasts bouncing free, her nipples hardening as she splashed herself with water from the pitcher beside her bed. In his mind, he saw her stand naked before the mirror, braiding her hair in a new way, coiling it into a gleaming black helmet instead of the long strands she usually allowed to trail down her back; he imagined that she chose her oldest blouse to wear that day, the one he loved the best, its fabric so worn and supple that it clung to her curves and gave a hint of the dark circles of her nipples.
Sheer fantasy, of course: the vivid daydreams of an imaginative boy in lust.
But when he'd gone that morning to buy buns for his father's dinner, blushing so that he hardly dared even to look at her, he'd found that she was wearing that very blouse, and she had chosen that morning to coil her hair up in a new style, tight and shining around her head—exactly as he had imagined it.
That had been Raithe's first hint that he was destined for greatness.
Mastering his gift had not come easily. In the days and weeks that followed, as he spied on Dala's naked body at every opportunity, he found that his vivid imagination was more hindrance than help. Too often, his mental image of her would lift hands to breasts, to fondle and squeeze them as he wanted to do. Too often, he would fantasize one hand creeping down to the silky nest between her legs ... and the vision would scatter into the random eyelights of total darkness. He discovered that clear imaging required a certain coldness of mind, a detachment; otherwise, his sight became murky, clouded with his own desires, with ghosts of wish-fulfilling fantasies.