"... no reason to bother showing you what you already know you're doing to us, here on the borders of Transdeia: the murders of our people, and the rape of our land by your mining machines ..."
The mikes on the techs' screens in the booth were sensitive enough that Hari could hear them both whisper Holy crap in perfect unison. Yeah, he thought. That about sums it up.
The mysterious dialect spoken by the bald, sickly looking elf with no eyebrows was easy to understand.
It was English.
The sole defender of the part-time goddess was the crooked knight. He was the reflection of knighthood in a cracked mirror, and what he did, he did backward.
The crooked knight wore no armor, and he did not care for swords. He was small and thin, ugly and graceless. He could not ride a warhorse, and no squire would serve him. He was a deceiver, a manipulator, his life built upon a lie.
His strength was the strength of ten, because his heart was stained with corruption.
FOUR
Ankhana spread like a canker across the valley floor, a rank and oozing fester that drained its sewage and manufacturing waste into the river that men called the Great Chambaygen. As the barge lumbered round a riverbend far to the north and east of the Imperial capital, the city coalesced out of the pall of smog that covered it: a ragged blot upon the earth, washed by the haze of intervening miles to the necrotic grey of dead flesh.
At the bow of the riverbarge stood a fey in woolen clothes tattered by time and hard travel. He looked as though the clothes may have fit him once, long ago—he had the frame for it, broad shouldered for one of the First Folk—but now they hung on him as though on a rack. His face had been carved into deep lines: scars of privation and grief deeper than any a true primal ever shows. His hair stuck straight out from his scalp around his sharply pointed ears: a platinum brush the length of the first joint of his thumb. His boots might have been fine, if they were not so battered; for a belt, he wore a thick-braided hemp throwline, tied around his waist. He bore no purse, and in place of a gentleman's weapons he had only the mop on which he leaned.
He stared downriver at Ankhana, and his knuckles whitened on the mop's handle. His lips pulled back over teeth sharp as a wolf's, and his great golden eyes, their pupils slitted to razored vertical lines in the afternoon sun, burned with barely controlled desperation. Once, not so long ago, he had been a prince.
His name was Deliann.
"You workin', decker?" the foredeck second rasped behind him. "Or you fuckin' off?"
The primal gave no sign that he heard.
"Hey, shitsuck, you think I'm not talkin' to you?"
Thunderheads spread like a hand extended to grasp the towering twin-bladed spire of the Colhari Palace; they grumbled and spat lightning at the earth. He could see, even from this distance, that the threatened rain held off the black-brown coal smoke of the Industrial Park still hung thickly over the northern quarters of the city. No rain had yet come to drive it down from the autumn sky and wash it into the river.
Another storm, another fishkill: the runoff from Ankhanan streets slew river life wholesale. Deliann shook his head bitterly. You have to go a week downriver before you can drink the water again. And my brothers like to remind me that I am one of these people.
But I'm not. I'm not.
What I am is worse.
For more than a thousand years that city had fouled these waters, from its very birth as a river pirates' camp on the island that was now Old Town. Panchasell Mithondionne himself had laid siege to the city, more than nine hundred years ago, leading the Folk Alliance against it when the city was a haven for feral humans during the Rebellion. He had fallen there, killed in his final failed assault, passing the lordship of his house, and all the First Folk, to the Twilight King, T'farrell Ravenlock.
This is where we lost, Deliann thought. The Folk had fought the ferals for decades beyond the Siege of Ankhana, but this had been the turning point of the war. Now, nearly a millennium later, even feys who were themselves veterans of the Feral Rebellion, who had fought the ferals hand-to-hand, no longer called them ferals. Everyone called them what they called themselves: human—"of the humus."
The Dirt People.
"Hey" Now the voice behind him was accompanied by a rough shove on the shoulder and a short rrrip of tearing cloth—the foredeck second's fighting claw had tangled in Deliann's shirt. He turned to face the foredeck second, an aging ogrillo with a rumpled mass of scar where his left eye used to be and a broken ivory stump where his left tusk had once jutted up from his undershot jaw. The foredeck second kept his snout canted slightly to the primal's right so that he could look down at him with his remaining red-gleaming eye.
"You know the only thing I hate worse'n fuckin' lazy-ass deckers tryin' to scam their passage?" The ogrillo leaned close enough to hook out Deliann's eye with one twitch of his tusk. "Fuckin' elves, that's what. Now: You moppin'? Or you swimmin'?"
The primal barely glanced at the second; he looked up, beyond the ogrillo's shoulder, at the twin teams of ogre poleboys that now jammed their thirty-foot lengths of oiled oak hard into the river's bed. The teams—each made up of six ogres nine or more feet tall, weighing over half a ton apiece—leaned into their poles in slowly counted cadence, pitting their massive muscles against the barge's momentum, their clawed feet digging furrows in the barge's deck cleats.
"Why are we stopping?" he asked tonelessly.
"You stupid, shitsuck? Ankhana's top port on the river—our slip don't come open till afternoon tomorrow." The foredeck second grunted a laugh as ugly as he was. "You think 'cause we a day early, you don' gotta make you full passage-work? Fuck that. You work, elf. Or you fuckin' swim."
"All right. I'll swim."
Deliann opened his hands to let the mop handle drop to the deck. Expressionlessly, he turned and gathered himself to leap into the water, but the foredeck second was too quick: his heavy hand closed around the primal's arm, the fighting claw below the thumb digging into the primal's ribs, and hauled him roughly back to the deck. "Not fuckin' likely," the ogrillo snarled. "You owe one more day's work, shitsuck. What're you, some kind of Cainist? Think you can do what you fuckin' want?"
"I'm not sure what a Cainist is," Deliann said. "But you should let me go."
"Fuck that. No fuckin' elf scams me."
He yanked Deliann's arm upward, inflicting a little preliminary pain and pulling him off balance. He expected a struggle or even a fight, and was more than ready for either-but instead, the skinny, haggard primal went absolutely still. "You want to take your hand off me."
The ogrillo's hand sprang stiffly open, and his fighting claw flattened back against his forearm. He frowned at his hand in disbelief. "What the fuck?"
"I've endured you for five days," Deliann said distantly, "because I had no swifter course for Ankhana. Now I'm leaving, and you can't stop me."
"My ass," the ogrillo said, lifting his other hand and making a fist to curl his fingers out of the way of his fully extended fighting claw. There was no law on the Great Chambaygen save what the barge crews made for themselves and no one would task a deck officer for the maiming or death of a mere decker. "I'll gut you like a fuckin' trout."
The creases that hunger and hard travel had etched into the primal's face deepened now, and transformed into something like age—impossible age, as though Deliann looked down into the world from some millennial distance—and the ogrillo's fist dropped limply to his side.
The ogrillo snarled, his vented lips pulling back from his tusks, and wrenched his shoulders as though his arms were held by invisible hands that he could shake off—but they weren't. They swung freely, but not under his command. Both arms hung dead from his shoulders.
"I'm elfshot," he muttered with growing amazement that swiftly became righteous fury. "Fucker elfshot me! Yo, carp!" Along the entire length of the barge, heads came up at the foredeck second's yell.
Though the river is a lawless bound, there are a few traditions that the
barge crews honor above their lives, and none more than this one. In seconds, all twelve ogres had shipped their poles; all the cargoboys had dropped their bottles, set down their cards, and put away their dice. Even the deckers, the poorest of the river scum who worked for nothing more than food and transport, set aside their buckets and their brushes and mops and picked up belaying pins and cargo hooks, and every one of them came running full tilt toward the bow.
Deliann watched them come with only a slight tightening of his feathery brows. The nearest ogre-then another, then a third—pitched forward and slammed thunderously to the deck, howling and clutching thighs knotted in convulsive cramps that crippled them as effectively as a knife to the hamstring.
The rest of the crew had to slow their headlong rush to pick their way around and over the writhing ogres; before they could, a sheet of flame twenty feet high sprang up from the deck to bar their path.
"It's just a Fantasy!" the ogrillo yelled. "It's just fuckin' elf magick, you morons! It can't really hurt you!"
Apparently some of the crew knew, as the foredeck second did, that most of the magicks worked by the First Folk operate on the mind of the victim only; braver than their fellows, they leaped through the fire and staggered screaming across the deck, clothes and hair blazing, trailing smoke and flame as they dived for the river.
The foredeck second's good eye blinked, and squinted, and blinked again. "Elf magick can't really hurt you," he repeated numbly.
"That might be true," Deliann said, "if I were really an elf."
He reached up and grabbed the foredeck second by his one good tusk and hauled the ogrillo's face down to his own with shocking strength. He put his lips against the ogrillo's ear-cavity and said softly but distinctly, "I don't like violence. I don't want to hurt you, or anyone else. But I'm leaving. I don't have time to be gentle. If anyone comes after me, I'll kill them. You understand? And then I'll come back here, and I'll kill you. Tell me you understand."
The ogrillo stepped back and tossed his head, trying to rip his tusk free, but this skinny, almost fleshless fey had astonishing power in his hand and arm. He yanked the ogrillo close once more, and now smoke leaked' from within his grip, smoke that reeked of burning ivory as the tusk scorched against his palm; the ogrillo gave out a low moan that rose toward a despairing shriek.
"Tell me you understand," he repeated.
"I, I, I--I get it," the ogrillo whimpered. "Go just go!"
Deliann opened his hand, and the ogrillo staggered, his tusk blackened where the primal had held it. He nearly fell into the flames, but as he stumbled back the fire died as though smothered by an invisible blanket, leaving only a broad line of smoldering embers across the deck.
Deliann turned to the bow and looked down, to be certain none of the crewmen who'd sought the river were in his way below, then he dived in and swam strongly to the bank. He pulled himself from the water and struck out running along the river without so much as a bare glance back at the barge: running hard for Ankhana.
Manblood, he could hear his brothers sneer. It was their favorite jab. Always must be doing; never can be being. That manblood—like a human, you throw time away. Like a wastrel who finds a pouch of gold in the street, you have so little that spending what little you have means nothing.
Maybe so, he answered them inside his head, but right now, I have more time than you do. And he wanted so desperately to be wrong about that; the ache of his wish that this was not true burned his heart like the fire he'd set on the barge's deck.
Ankhana's outskirts lay three miles ahead along the flat floodplain, and night lowered upon the city with the rain.
He had an ugly, stumbling run, as though his legs belonged to someone else—as though both were half crippled, and his natural gait was the average of two conflicting limps. Despite this, he ran hard and fast, pulling Flow to power his overworked muscles, and made the shantytown that surrounds Ankhana's Warrens in a quarter of an hour.
The storm swung out to meet him, and soaked him thoroughly in rain that reeked of sulphur. Without slackening his pace, he turned up the road that circled northward around the Warrens and the Industrial Park.
Even the empty-eyed human dregs that crowded these outlying slums had a moment to spare to spit at him as he passed; to hurry past humans as though he had someplace to go was disrespectful. Ankhana was the heart of the human lands, and the only Folk who had ever been welcome here were those who knew their place.
Finally he reached Ankhana's Folk ghetto, Allentown, and he released the swirl of Flow that had given him strength. He needed more attention than mindview could spare him, if he wished to negotiate these narrow, crowded streets, jostling and being jostled by countless shoulders of primal, stonebender, ogrillo, and human alike.
As night fell, even some trolls took to the streets; now and again one would pause to speculatively watch him pass, and to make hungry sucking noises as it inhaled the drool that leaked around its curving tusks. The stench stole breath from his lungs; the noise and sheer restless energy of this place made his head swim. The filth, the waste, the emptiness he saw in the eyes of the Folk here—Ankhana had been the reason he'd left humanity behind for the deepwood.
Alientown had been transformed in the twenty-odd years since he'd last walked these streets. Then, it had been a tiny cramped ghetto, jammed with primals, stonebenders, treetoppers, ogrilloi and their giant cousins—all scraping out bare livings on the fringes of the capital, selling their strength and the use of their bodies to their human masters, losing themselves in narcotics and drink, snarling and snapping at each other like rats in an overcrowded cage.
In the old days, human constables had kept order in five-man patrols, their brutal tactics and free use of their iron-bound clubs earning them the nickname headpounders; now, it seemed that the pounders had been replaced by teams of two—one human and one Folk, usually primal or stonebender. The humans wore black and silver, the Folk scarlet and gold. Again and again, Deliann saw these pairs shouldering through the streets, breaking up fights, forestalling arguments, opening the crowds before the carriages of the wealthy. He could only shake his head in wonder.
Twenty years ago, wearing those colors had announced membership in two of the powerful Warrengangs, the Subjects of Cant and the Faces—but neither of those gangs had had territory in Alientown, and the Faces had certainly never extended their membership to include Folk. And those gangs had been criminals the Faces had been peddlers of flesh and illegal narcotics, and the Subjects of Cant had been pickpockets and beggars, with strong sidelines in protection and extortion. How they had been transformed into a public constabulary, he could not imagine.
The ghetto had tripled or even quadrupled in size, bulging outward like a colony of fungus, and now, at night, it bloomed like a pitcher plant, sticky-sweet and dangerously inviting. A riot of colored lights clashed into muddy rainbows on the wetly glistening cobbles: light cast from blazing coronal signs that wreathed hulking hotels and casinos.
These signs proclaimed the entertainment to be found within: games from knucklebones and roulette to cockfighting, bearbaiting and human/ Folk/ogrillo cross-species pit-fighting; food from the most exquisite imported tophalmo wings to all-you-can-eat spiced-pork-and-cornmeal buffets; drink ranging from grain alcohol to Tinnaran brandy; narcotics from simple roasted rith to exotic powders that make one's darkest fantasy feel as sharply real as a poke in the eye; whores to suit any species, sex, age, experience, and taste, from delicate pederasty to the kind of action where the price includes on-site postcoital medical care.
Twenty years ago, when somebody wanted something special in Alientown, something that he just couldn't find anywhere else—it might be illegal, or seductively dangerous, or simply too repugnant for widespread popularity—he'd go to an establishment called the Exotic Love. The Exotic Love seemed, to all appearances, to be a small, well-appointed, rather exclusive brothel, just off Nobles' Way; but once a man became a regular, once he had shown he could be trusted??
?that is, once the proprietor had acquired enough blackmailworthy evidence that this fellow dared not take a breath without permission—he would find himself ushered into a sensual world of literally infinite possibility. At the Exotic Love, nothing was out of reach; it was merely expensive.
But now, it seemed that all of Alientown had been transformed into a street-bazaar version of the Exotic Love, and the place itself could not be found. Deliann stood in the street, staring blankly up at the sign of the fungist who had taken over the building just off Nobles' Way. He read mechanically down the list of stimulant, narcotic, and hallucinogenic spores for sale within; this was a futile self-deception, a dodge to briefly postpone the moment when he would realize that he had no guess what to do next.
He had come so far
Light fingers brushed his flanks, where most Folk carry their purses. Deliann's hand flicked almost too fast to be seen, and he hauled the owner of those fingers around in front of him: a dirty-faced human child. "Sorry, fey, sorry—I just tripped," the boy said hastily.
"This place," Deliann said heavily. "This place was once called the Exotic Love. What happened to it?"
The boy's eyes went wide and round, then closed to streetwise slits. "Hey, I don't whistle that tune—but I gotta sister, she's eleven, never done nothing but the once awhile blowjob—"
"That's not what I asked for."
"Right, right—truth: she's thirteen, but I swear—"
Deliann shook him once, hard. "The Exotic Love," he repeated.
The boy's eyes rolled, and suddenly he screamed with shocking, painful volume, "Short-eyes! Short-eyes! Get this Cainist buttfucker offa me!"
The boy kicked him in the shin—it hurt less than his shout—and wrenched his arm free. He dashed away and vanished into the crowd, many of whom now stared at Deliann with gathering hostility, muttering darkly among themselves. One took it upon himself to express the general sentiment: "Short-eyes motherfucker . . . Wanna stick a kid, y'oughta pay for it like decent folks!"