It might have turned uglier—some in this crowd looked to be the sort to enjoy a casual stomping, and none of these could see any hint in this ragged, exhausted looking primal of just how lethal the attempt might turn out—but shouldering through the crowd came a tall man in a chain-mail byrnie of black and silver, and a thickly muscled stonebender in a scarlet-and-gold cloth kirtle.
"All right, all right, shove it over," the stonebender repeated tiredly, stepping on toes, elbowing ribs, occasionally giving this one or that an encouraging shove. Her short arms were knotted like cypress knees; when she shoved, people moved. "Break it up. Keep it moving — yah, you, shit-in-the-head. Get going."
The man came over to Deliann and sized him with a cold stare. "Got trouble, woodsie? Or looking for some? Either way, we're here for you."
"What I'm looking for," Deliann said slowly, "is the feya who used to run the brothel here."
"Here?" His brow wrinkled. "Don't think so. Ruufie--the fungist, here—he's been here, what? More'n eight years, I'd have to guess–since before I came on Patrol. Hey, Taulkg'n, you know of any brothel here?"
His partner snorted into her beard and muttered something Deliann half heard, that might have been a derisive comment on humanity's short lives and shorter memories. She gave the last of the onlookers a healthy shove down the street and turned back. "Yah, the Exotic Love, useta be."
"The Exotic? No shit." The man's eyes lit up, and a half smile canted his mouth. "Hey, Taulkie, this woodsie's looking for the Duchess."
The stonebender approached, her fists on her hips. She looked Deliann up, then down, then up again, and shook her head sadly. "Don't bother, woodsie. She won't see you."
"I don't know any duchesses," Deliann said patiently. "The feya I want went by the name Kierendal."
"That's her," the man said. "They just call her the Duchess because she's fucked better'n half the Cabinet."
The stonebender trod heavily on her partner's toes. "Mind your manners."
"Just tell me where I can find her."
"She runs Alien Games, now—"
"Alien Games? That whole-block complex, back on Khazad-Lun?" "Yah, but she won't see you, woodsie, I'm tellin' you. She's busy, you hear? She's an important—"
Deliann missed the rest of what the stonebender tried to tell him: he was already running.
2
Alien Games squatted at the center of the swamp that was Allentown like an immense, malignant toad queen, glistening with multicolored slime. Only eight years old, it had already grown until it swallowed every adjacent building; now the size of its footprint exceeded that of the Colhari Palace itself. Three restaurants, seven saloons, four casinos, two theaters, and dozens of performance booths of varying sizes and degrees of privacy—within that complex could be purchased anything from cigars to sudden death, with room charges prorated by the hour. It shone like a beacon that might be seen from the moon, ringed by a gigantic halo. The halo was the rainbow reflection that scattered from a stupendous bubble of force—a titanic Shield—that enclosed the entire structure, made faintly visible by the drizzle that collected on its surface and trailed to the streets.
Deliann leaned against a wall of rain-slickened limestone, within the mouth of an alley down the street. The soggy wool of his tunic dragged at his shoulders. The runoff that dripped onto his face from the eaves above had a faintly acid, chemical taste, and he stood just deep enough within the shadows of the alley mouth that his face picked up only dim highlights from the lurid scarlet, green, and golden glare.
Alien Games blazed even brighter in mindview than it did to normal vision. A gigantic vortex of Flow towered above it, impossibly vivid intertangling rivers of crimson and amethyst, ichor and viridian, azure and argent curling like party streamers down toward the roof. At the perimeter of the Shield bubble stood massed crowds of onlookers, peering at the nobles, celebrities, and society brilliants who alighted from each carriage of the endless train as it pulled to a stop at the purple velvet carpet that ascended the broad marble steps. The onlookers leaned on the Shield as if it were glass, pressing their noses against it as though they could will themselves from the chill damp darkness outside to the endless summer noon within.
A marquee the size of a riverbarge burned on the roof of the immense vaulted portico, proclaiming the Senses-Shattering World Premiere of some vulgar-sounding show featuring performers of whom Deliann had never heard.
He spent a moment studying the operation of the bubble. Clearly, it consisted of several overlapping Shields; Alien Games must employ six or seven thaumaturges, probably human, to maintain it. Whenever a carriage would approach along the street, its footmen forcing a path through the crowds, a gap would open, just large enough for the carriage and its attendants to pass; then the gap would close behind them like a gate to keep the rabble out. Some of the Shields would be semipermanent, charged in advance like those that sheltered the entire complex from the drizzle outside, maintained by stored power instead of the disciplined mind of a thaumaturge, but the ones that opened like gateways must be the work of men, not crystals. He could slip through one of the crystaled Shields without too much difficulty and without raising much of an alarm–but then he'd have to find some other way to attract Kierendal's attention.
He moved out into the street.
He forced his way through the press, ignoring the countershoves and curses that pursued him. When he reached the midstreet point where the carriages had been passing through, he wedged his arms between a large human and a small troll. "Excuse me," he said politely.
The human and the troll looked down at the ragged, bone-thin primal between them, then smirked at each other. The human said, "Piss off, elf. Find your own spot."
"I have," Deliann told them, and shoved them violently apart. They stumbled into the people to either side, neither remotely prepared for Deliann's preternatural strength. The troll wisely recognized that this fey had unknown resources, and faded back, muttering darkly to itself in its native speech of grunts and slurps; the human, less intelligent, decided to take exception.
"Hey," the man said, "hey, you little bastard, who you think you're shoving?"
Deliann stood still, waiting, feeling a little sick.
The man raised a heavy fist. "I'm gonna enjoy making—"
Deliann interrupted him with a stiff overhand right that smashed blood from the human's nose. The human's eyes filled with blinding tears, and Deliann kicked him solidly in the balls. While the man folded, Deliann stepped around him, put one hand on the back of the man's head and the foreknuckle of his other hand against the man's upper lip. The knuckle against the man's shattered nose was more than enough to stand him up and bend him over backward until he fell to the ground.
When he had the man arranged on the ground to his satisfaction, Deliann kicked him once more: the toe of his boot stabbed with exceptional precision into the man's solar plexus. The man curled into a fetal knot of pain, his breath coming in ragged, broken gasps.
Deliann straightened. He eyed the surrounding crowd expressionlessly. "Anyone else?"
No one offered themselves.
He bared his exceptionally long, sharp, carnivore's teeth. "Then back off.'
He turned away, unable to hide the twist of revulsion on his face. To do such things gently would require him to be clever, and he was too tired to be clever; it would require imagination, and that he dared not touch. For two weeks his imagination had given him nothing but the color of screams, the texture of dead children, the smell of genocide.
Inside the endless summer noon of the bubble, the ushers and footmen all wore livery of scarlet and gold; flanking the door were six sleepy ogres, up past their bedtime in full field armor, their steel enameled in the same colors so that it gleamed like glazed pottery. They held their blood-colored halberds extended at parade rest.
Deliann's mindview showed him no swirls of Flow around anyone on the street, except for a tiny whorl that brought a bright glow to the jewelry of the
beefy woman who descended from a carriage with the help of two solicitous porters. He nodded to himself. With any luck, all he'd have to deal with out here would be ordinary guards.
In mindview, he tuned his Shell to the shifting pattern of the Shield in front of him and took the measure of the thaumaturge who maintained it. The man was barely third-rate; this Shield was hard-pressed to hold back the rain, much less the crowd that pushed against it. Deliann gathered Flow, focused it into a lance of power, and punched through the Shield with the brisk efficiency of an injection. His Shell was tuned delicately enough to register the scarlet grunt of pain from the thaumaturge; with little effort, he swelled his lance of Flow until it forced open a door-sized hole in the Shield, and he stepped through.
The crowd at his back stared in silent wonder: to normal sight, he had effortlessly walked through the bubble that had resisted their best strength. They surged against it behind him, but he had already released his power, and the Shield was once again solid as a wall. The thaumaturge inside would have no illusions about what had happened, though; he should have already sounded some sort of alarm.
Sure enough, within the space of a single breath an elegant primal in formal evening wear detached himself from the group at the doorway and touched the shoulders of a pair of burly stonebenders in the scarlet footmen's livery; the trio approached him over the dry cobbles of the Shielded street as quickly as they could without appearing to hurry.
They met Deliann twenty yards from the entrance, arrayed in a loose arc that effectively barred his path without being so obvious as to be rude. The fey was tall and graceful, and his dark suit was immaculately tailored; his manicure gleamed like his buttons as he clasped his hands together and leaned politely toward Deliann. "May I help you, sir?"
"Yes, you may," Deliann said, brushing between him and one of the stonebenders as though they were not there. "Announce me."
"Sir?" the fey said delicately,. in an eloquently dubious tone that described, in one word, the tatters of Deliann's clothing, the wear of his boots, his hempen belt, and the unnatural creases that marked his face. He followed at Deliann's shoulder, and the stonebenders brought up the rear; Deliann could hear them cracking their knuckles.
Deliann said, "You may announce me as the Changeling Prince, Deliann Mithondionne, Youngest of the Twilight King."
The fey took this without even a blink. "Does the prince have a reservation?"
Deliann kept walking.
"Please, Your Highness," the fey murmured smoothly, well practiced in his technique of handling lunatics, which he clearly presumed Deliann to be, "this is not an insuperable difficulty. We have a section reserved for visiting royalty; if the prince would care to follow me?"
Deliann could guess exactly what awaited him if he did so: a savage beating in a darkened room, his unconscious and bleeding body dumped on the street outside the bubble as a salutary example for any other gate crashers. "That won't be necessary," he said. "I didn't come for the show. I'm here to see KierendaL"
"Please, sir; I'm afraid I must insist."
Hands as hard as the roots of a mountain seized his arms. The pair of stonebenders bent him forward with efficient leverage, making him look as though he'd half fainted and he needed their help to walk; in fact, his boots barely brushed the cobbles. For one moment, his exhaustion dipped him into unresisting comfort, the childhood ease of being carried, even though their grip hurt his arms—but they were taking him the wrong way. He got his feet beneath him, and he opened his mind.
Far above, the arc of the Shield shimmered in the mental light cast by the vortex of Flow. In one second, his Shell extended to fifteen times the height of a man and touched that Shield; in the next second, he had grasped its harmonic and tuned his Shell to it. Resonating perfectly, his Shell slid through the Shield's arc and touched an argent ribbon in the vortex above. In the next second, the lights went out.
Darkness fell like a hammer.
The sudden absence of those myriad colored lights stunned the crowd to an immobile silence, likewise the footmen, even the horses that drew the carriages—it was like being struck blind. For a second that stretched toward infinity, the street was utterly dark, utterly silent, held like the breath of a child looking for the monster under his bed.
Then Deliann burst into flame.
He burned like a torch, like a bonfire, like a thousand magnesium flares struck in a single instant; he burned as though every last foot-candle of the light that had blazed like the sun around Alien Games had become fire that roared from his flesh. The two stonebender footmen howled and staggered back from him, smoke billowing from the seared flesh of their palms. The primal in formal wear covered his face with his arms and screamed like a terrified child.
Deliann's ragged clothes burned to cinders in an instant, a puff of ash that whirled up into the night. His hair sizzled away. His bare flesh bore scars of recent wounds, badly healed: a curving scab crossed his scalp, like a shallow sword cut. One of his thighs was swollen, inflamed half again the size of the other, and the shin of the other leg had a slight bend in the middle; at the bend grew a knot on the bone the size of an apple.
Naked, bald, engulfed in flame, he paced the purple carpet to the entrance, trailing burning footprints.
Everyone gave way before him except one of the ogres, braver or more stupid than the rest: it made a tentative jab at him with its halberd. At the first touch of the flames that howled around Deliann, the blade melted and dripped to a pool of white-hot metal at his feet, and half the shaft flashed to broken coals.
The firelight reflected from their eyes came back the color of fear.
"I'm here to see Kierendal," Deliann said. "I don't have time to be polite."
A beige shimmer gathered in the air before him, and then a tall feya stepped sideways from nowhere, as though an invisible door had opened edge-on in the air.
Taller than Deliann and even thinner, draped in an evening gown that glittered as though woven of diamond, she was graceful as a soaring hawk. Her platinum hair coiled high above her upswept ears in an extravagantly complex coif, and her eyes glinted with flat reflections the color of money, like silver coins set in her skull. The teeth that showed behind her thin bloodless smile were long and needle-sharp, and the nail of the forefinger that she stretched toward him was filed and painted to resemble a raptor's talon made of steel. "You," she said, "really know how to make an entrance. Want a job?"
For a blank moment, Deliann could only stare through the flames; then he began, "Kierendal—"
"I beg your pardon, as an inconsiderate hostess," she interrupted him blithely. "How embarrassing; I've overdressed." And without so much as a hitch of her shoulders, her gown slid down her slender form and piled on the carpet. She stepped out of it toward him, as naked as he, perfectly at ease, opening her arms. "Is this better?"
Deliann's mouth dropped open. Her nipples were painted the same color as her eyes, and they looked as hard as the metal they mimicked. In that second of utter astonishment, the fire that sheathed him faded and winked out.
He hadn't even seen a flicker from her Shell, and in one sickening second, he realized why: She had never been here in the first place. What he'd seen had been a Fantasy, projected from some place of safety, probably into his mind alone. And while he'd gawked, she'd retuned the Shield overhead and cut him off.
He started to think he might have made a mistake.
Even as he began to extend his Shell, reaching in a new direction, someone threw a heavy net over his head; the weaving was thick and metallic, and as it closed around him, the image of Kierendal and her gown vanished as though wiped from existence by an invisible hand. A heavy fist knocked him to the porch, and he couldn't even pull enough Flow to enhance his strength and rip free of the net—some kind of scarlet counterforce flared over the net, blocking his best attempt. An ogre grabbed him by the ankles and yanked him off the floor, gathering the net around him to make a sack.
The ogre lifted him like
a bagged kitten. "Guezz you don' really keep up with the latez zztuff from the zity, when you're ou' in the forezz, eh there, woodzie?"
3
The chair was heavy, very sturdily constructed of hard maple, and bolted to the floor. The manacles that attached Deliann's left wrist to his right ankle were threaded through the support bars that connected the chair's legs.
It took the ogre something less than five minutes, after it unbagged Deliann within this tiny room, to demonstrate to him conclusively that he couldn't pull enough Flow in here to light a candle; some unknown quality of the room's construction cut him off as absolutely as had the weave of that net. The ogre had made this point by knotting its great horned fists and beating him into semiconsciousness with swift, passionless efficiency. Then it had affixed the manacles, and left.
The chair faced a blank grey wall that was stippled with faint brownish smears: probably old, haphazardly wiped blood. By twisting uncomfortably in the seat, Deliann could watch the door behind him, but his battered body swiftly stiffened into knots of bruise. He surrendered with a sigh and turned his face back toward the wall. The room was cold; the manacles were like ice against his wrist and ankle, and gooseflesh bunched his bare skin all over his body. For a long time, he did nothing but shiver and listen to himself breathe.
Finally, the door behind him opened. Twisting to watch Kierendal enter the room cost him a stifled groan. She appeared exactly as she had in the Fantasy; the way she moved wasn't quite gliding, but it was decidedly more stylish than an ordinary walk. At her side paced a thick-muscled ogrillo bitch dressed in loose-fitting coveralls, slapping her palm with a sort of flexible club made of tightly braided leather. The club was as long as Deliann's forearm and as thick as his wrist.
Kierendal had something small and roundish in her hand, like a nut, that she pretended to be interested in rolling back and forth between her fingers. "Didn't anyone ever tell you," she murmured distractedly, "what happens to little elves who play with fire?"