Kierendal lay on the floor in front of him, her face white as though painted with ash. The club hissed through the air and banged his skull again; blood sprayed across the brown-spattered wall, and the room darkened.
The entire flash had happened in the time it took the ogrillo to raise her club.
Deliann tried to lift his free hand up to shield his head and neck, but he couldn't make his arm work, couldn't even hold up his head. "If you've hurt her, you mother—"
"Tchako," Kierendal said from the floor, her voice weak and shaken but strong enough to save Deliann's life. "Don't. Don't hit him. Help me up."
The ogrillo's coarse features twisted in a caricature of puzzlement, but she lowered the club and went to Kierendal's side, extending a scaly hand to help her mistress rise. Kierendal leaned heavily on her for a moment, and passed a hand over her eyes. "Get the keys. Unlock his manacles."
"Kier, you're not well—"
"Go, damn you!" the feya snapped, and Tchako could not bear her displeasure. She left, trailing a murderous glare at Deliann.
The door closed behind her.
Kierendal swayed, deprived of the ogrillo's support. She touched her face again, as though assessing a fever, and then she sank to her knees beside Deliann, heedless of the damage to her exquisite gown.
She placed her hands upon his lap in the ancient gesture of fealty. "I—I can't believe ... Deliann, I—"
"It's all right, Kier," he said kindly. "I know it's overwhelming. I've had two weeks to get used to the idea, and it still makes me want to scream and never stop."
She lowered her eyes, bending her long, graceful neck before him. "I am yours, my prince. What would you have me do?"
Deliann took a deep breath, and let himself believe that between the two of them, some lives might still be saved.
"First," he said slowly, "we need to catch an Aktir."
And each had his own role to play: the crooked knight defended the part-time goddess; the part-time goddess served the land; the acolytes of dust and ashes fed their master's hunger.
The dark angel made war.
He answered the call of the crooked knight; he used the part-time goddess to work his will; he named the god of dust and ashes his enemy. On that day, the dark angel broke his chains and went forth to battle.
FIVE
Hari sat motionless in his uncomfortable chair, the pain in his back forgotten, listening so hard he barely breathed around the knot in his guts. He knew the voice.
This weirdass-looking fey he didn't recognize, but he still had an Actor's ear for voices. This voice stirred old memories, half buried in passing years; he eased back in his chair and closed his eyes, shutting out the unfamiliar face, concentrating on the familiar voice.
":.. but this is what you don't know. At least, I hope you don't know. By all I hold sacred, I pray that even the monsters who control the Studio are not so evil that you would inflict HRVP on us intentionally . . ."
HRVP? On Overworld? His eyes jerked open and he jolted upright, staring at his deskscreen. He couldn't seem to get his breath.
"Remember that HRVP once came within an inch of destroying civilization, even with vaccines and quarantines and the finest medical technology that Earth could muster.
"Remember that here, on Overworld, the primary method of healing is the laying on of hands.
"Resist the Blind God. The greed of your worst should not be allowed to triumph over the conscience of your best. Fight it.
"You are our only hope.
"We are at your mercy.
"Save us."
Hari forgot about the voice; a tornado howled inside his head, and its silent roar drowned out every thought, save one nerveless whisper: HRVP.
It had to be a mistake. It had to be an accident. He must have heard wrong—he must have. On a nontechnological world, HRVP was the perfect weapon. It could wipe out every warm-blooded creature on the planet.
Except for us, Hari thought.
HRVP had been eradicated on Earth, brought to extinction by quarantine and vaccination, more than fifty years ago. The final outbreak had come somewhere in Indonesia, when a strain that had been preserved in an immunological laboratory had escaped. Someone had leaked news of the strain's existence to the local press, and the story sparked riots in which the laboratory had been destroyed, burned to the ground—but not quite thoroughly enough.
Worldwide, more than two million people died, roughly five hundred thousand of HRVP itself; the other million and a half were victims of the victims. The standard ratio, which had held roughly true for this one as it had for each large HRVP outbreak since the beginning of the twenty-first century, was that an HRVP sufferer killed an average of 2.8 people before either succumbing to the disease or being killed himself. The Leisure Congress in Geneva had acted with extraordinary swiftness: less than twelve hours after the outbreak was confirmed, the island had been sterilized by a series of minimum-residue neutron bombs. The deaths of one hundred and twenty-seven thousand islanders were buried in the disaster's total—and they died for nothing.
Before the worldwide network of slavelanes had gone online, it wasn't possible to quarantine any large area, even an island; thousands of people had fled in their cars at the first word of the outbreak. Within hours, the disease had reached every continent. This was why there remained a mandate of universal vaccination, even today.
Hari, like many of his generation, had grown up with occasional nightmares of seeing that neutron fireball blossom over his own head—but that was less terrifying than the disease itself. The bald elf with the weirdly familiar voice had said that HRVP came within an inch of destroying civilization; My father, Hari thought mordantly, would argue with that.
Duncan would say the inch was imaginary.
Everything Duncan cherished in the history of human thought, from the democratic franchise to those individual "rights" he so often insisted upon, had been marched up the chute in the slaughterhouse of the Plague Years and had taken the hammer square between the eyes.
The regional and national governments, who were the sole guarantors of those rights, had been completely helpless. A few nations adopted rational, progressive HRVP policies, but they could enforce them only within their own borders—what gains were made could be wiped out by an unlucky shift of the wind. The national militaries became a dangerous, unfunny joke; chain of command is a tricky thing, when one slip of an anti-infection protocol could transform a competent commander into a raving homicidal paranoid. Twenty years after the first outbreak of HRVP, there was no longer even the illusion of a sovereign nation left on Earth—but there was still government.
For centuries—dating back to the Dutch traders and the British East India Company—multinational corporations had pursued their interests globally, as opposed to the provincialism that made national governments so vulnerable. Even before the Plague Years, many of the zaibatsus and the megacorps had maintained private military forces, to protect their employees and interests in places where the local governments were unwilling or unable to do so; these giant corporations often had more claim on the loyalty of their employees than did the nations in which these employees chanced to live. After all, the corporation provided the employee's education, housing, child care, health care, income, and finally, as nation after nation collapsed during the Plague Years, the corporation also provided police and military defense. They had no choice; corporations that failed in any of these fundamental responsibilities swiftly found themselves unable to attract the high-quality workers they needed to remain competitive in the unregulated, purely Darwinian jungle of international business. When the nations collapsed, the corporations were already in place, holding the gap.
They were able to act with the ruthlessness that the ongoing crisis required, to act in ways that the merely national governments could not. A national government rules, finally, by consent of the governed; a corporation rules by consent of the stockholders.
By the time an effective, mass-
producible HRVP vaccine was developed, the three pillars of the current society—the caste system, the tech laws, and the Social Police—were solidly in place.
The caste system, the rigidly enforced social code that forbade cross-caste personal contact, ensured that any outbreaks of HRVP would spread laterally instead of reaching up to the really important people: the business directors, the investment managers, and the majority stockholders—later to become Businessmen, Investors, and Leisurefolk.
HRVP was thought to have been a partially developed bioweapon that escaped from a private laboratory; the tech laws, a loosely bound series of intercorporate treaties, were designed to prevent precisely that kind of dangerous research.
The Social Police enforced the caste laws; violation of a caste law was considered prima facie evidence of HRVP infection. Minimum punishment was isolation quarantine; more usually, violators were summarily executed.
Over the years, caste violation penalties had been relaxed, but the scope of the Social Police's mandate had expanded to include the defense of the social order in the broadest terms, from monitoring compliance with the tech laws to enforcing intercorporate contracts. Lower-priority crimes such as robbery, assault, and murder were handled by the understaffed, underpaid, and overworked CID.
Hari wasn't naive enough to long for the vanished pre-HRVP days; due to his semieducation under Duncan's direction, he was more aware than most that what had seemed to be the convulsive transformation of the Plague Years had, in truth, only codified and rigidified trends that had been evolving for centuries.
It would not be so on Overworld.
The elf had said, Remember that here, on Overworld, the primary method of healing is the laying on of hands.
The trends of centuries would be irrelevant; no one would survive to continue them. If HRVP could infect primals, it could probably kill stonebenders, treetoppers, ogrilloi—given HRVP's ability to mutate and adapt to new hosts, it could be a mass extinction on the scale of the Cretaceous die-off. Twenty years from now, there might not be a warm-blooded creature alive on Overworld—and the ripple effect on the ecosystem would destroy reptiles, insects, plants
The prospect crushed air from his lungs as though stones were piled upon his chest. No more lancers on lumbering destriers with armor shining in the sun; no wizards; no cheery innkeepers and gap-toothed stableboys; no primals or stonebenders; no treetoppers, griffins, trolls; no more Korish shamans raising dust devils in the Grippen Desert; no ogrillo tribals marauding the fringes of the Boedecken Waste; no more lonely wails of seniiane calling the faithful to prayer in the dusk of Seven Wells; no Warrengangs . . . And the numberless creatures now extinct on Earth, but surviving in the wilds of Overworld: no more otters playing in sparkling streams, no more wolves pursuing elk on the high plains, no whales singing to each other from oceans on opposite sides of the world, no condors wheeling on mountain thermals, no coughs of stalking cougars.
This can't be happening.
It made him want to stand up and howl.
Suddenly he comprehended Tan'elKoth utterly: he was being smothered. Choked to death. Earth had forced itself down his throat, and he was strangling on it. Overworld was the only place he'd ever been happy. Overworld was freedom. Overworld was life.
It was home.
This had to be some kind of mistake.
Viceroy Garrette was ruthless, a stone motherfucker, but he wasn't a monster
Hari recalled a story Duncan had pulled from a two-hundred-year-old hardbound book of Western history: a story of European colonists who'd deliberately infected natives on the American continent with a lethal disease called smallpox.
The monsters who control the Studio, the elf had said.
I'm one of the monsters he was talking about.
"Bastards," Hari snarled through his teeth. "Motherfucking bastards—" "Administrator? I'm sorry?"
He leaned toward the pickup beside his screen. "You're sure he's not an Actor?"
Actors can now speak English on Overworld, if they choose; they can even speak of being Actors. The crusade that Toa-Sytell had led to rid the Empire of Actors in the wake of For Love of Pallas Ril had turned the Studio conditioning, which once had prevented Actors from betraying themselves or each other, into the very means of that betrayal. Toa-Sytell had discovered that Actors could always be identified by what they were unable to say; the Studio's response had been to progressively decondition the Actors. Not a single conditioned Actor was now on Overworld.
And the elf thing—very, very few Actors had ever successfully played an elf, but Hari was pretty sure there were five or six currently active, out of other Studios.
"Pretty, uh, pretty sure he's not an Actor, Administrator," one of the techs answered him hesitantly. "We're running a transponder autoscan, but so far all we're getting from Rossi's vicinity is Rossi."
Hari nodded to himself. What the elf was doing was brilliant, in a pathetic sort of way. Somehow this elf understood that Actors are the Overworld eyes and ears of the wealthiest and most influential people on Earth. Faced with a crisis that could not be met by anyone on Overworld, he turned to the soft hearts of Earth's romantics. A few thousand Leisurefolk—a few hundred—seeing this, could pressure the Studio, even the Leisure Congress itself, to mount a relief operation, to find a way to distribute vaccine, to save at least some of the billions of lives that would otherwise be lost. Brilliant.
What made it pathetic was that he'd picked the wrong Actor. Rossi had no audience. No one who mattered was watching this—no one at all. Well, no, Hari admitted to himself. That's not quite true.
Rossi had an audience of one.
And just that simply, Hari knew who it was, the bald and sickly looking elf with the queerly familiar voice. How does an elf learn English? There's only one answer, curious as it was: he doesn't.
He's not an elf. But he's also not an Actor. A motto percolated up from the depths of some story Duncan had made him read as a boy: When one eliminates the impossible, whatever remains-however improbable—must be the truth.
Hari whispered,"... oh, my god ..."
He looked through the image on his deskscreen, out through Rossi's eyes, into golden eyes he had not seen in nearly thirty years. He remembered—He remembered the white plastic surgical mask, worn to protect the progress of the elving. He remembered the gift for intuitive solutions—He remembered the cold courage--He
He remembered the debt he owed.
He murmured, "Kris ...."
Kris Hansen looked into him now through Frank Rossi's eyes. Kris Hansen asked him, without even knowing it, for his help.
Hari felt something crack inside his chest; something broke and released a nameless flood that surged fiery and humming into his arms, into his head. You want my help, Kris?
"You'll fucking well get it," he muttered.
"Administrator? Is something wrong?"
Hari hissed softly through his teeth, gathering scattered thoughts into a semicoherent plan of action. "Don't do anything," he said. "I'm on my way down."
"What about his audience?"
"Fuck his audience, technician." He leaned on the word to remind the tech of their relative ranks. "Keep feeding to my desk until you hear otherwise."
"Acknowledged."
He pitched his voice to the screen's command tone and said: "Iris: initiate telecommunication. Screen-in-screen. Execute." A screen-in-screen box popped up that overlaid Rossi's POV feed. He began to enter the connection code for Businessman Westfield Turner, the Studio President, already rehearsing in his head what he would say. Listen, Wes, this is urgent. We need to get on this right away, I have an idea
He hesitated, fingers hovering above the keypad, one stroke away from completing the call.
The President wasn't known for his decisiveness. He might stall; he might kick the decision upstairs to the Board of Governors in Geneva. Days might pass before Hari got the authority to act as he knew he needed to act. Authority might never be granted at all.
<
br /> Sometimes it's easier to get forgiveness than permission.
He hit the cancel, then keyed in a new code. Another box popped up in a corner of his deskscreen, overlaying a close-up of maggots crawling from a blackened mouth. Within the box grinned the permanently youthful, professionally cheerful, recorded face of Jed Clearlake, managing producer and star of Adventure Update, the "Only Worldwide Twenty-Four-Hour Source for Studio News"—the number one rated news site in the history of the net.
The recording said, "Hi! I'm Jed Clearlake, and this is my personal message site. Begin recording at any time by pressing Return or clicking on the radio button below."
Hari hit the key and said, "Real time AV. Command code Caine's here." The image in the box wiped to a solid black screen. White letters scrolled across it:
PRESENT SAMPLE FOR MATCHING.
"He who lives by the sward shall die by my knife," Hari said softly. "That's prophecy, if you like."
CONFIRMED.
The image that came up now within the box had the grainy 1024 x 780 resolution of palmpad video, but Clearlake's smile was brilliant as ever. "Yeah, Hari, what's up? I'm in a meeting."
"I've got a hot one for you, Jed. A full POV from one of my ISP Actors."
"What, too hot to blip to my site? I mean, come on, Hari, there's only so many hours in the day, and I'm with a seven figure advertiser right now."
"This isn't something I can leave lying around in your message dump. I'm going to load it straight to your palmpad. Don't lose this, Jed. You'll understand when you see it."
"Hari, Jesus Christ, what did I just tell you?"
"And who are you talking to? If it wasn't for me you'd still be working for that Underwood buttrag as the fucking Ankhanan Affairs Correspondent. Whatever happened to `God bless you, Administrator Michaelson, I owe you my career, you goddamn weasel? You ever want to get another tip out of this Studio as long as you live?"
Clearlake looked like he had suddenly developed a terrific headache. "How long is it?"