"How do you know this?"
"I am who I am, Businessman."
"What kind of trauma?"
Shanks' glare was so direct and levelly hostile that Tan'elKoth felt an absurd desire to apologize for the implausibility of what he was about to say. He set his teeth and spoke with the full conviction of truth. "You have had the child for two days. Surely, by now, you are aware of her connection to the river?"
"I am aware of the ridiculous, pernicious fantasy with which her parents have poisoned her mind, yes. She is forbidden to speak of it."
As though that will make it go away, Tan'elKoth thought. Typically Business. "Hardly a fantasy, Businessman," he said smoothly. "Tomorrow morning, her mother will die."
The Businessman's eyes sharpened like a knife, but she said nothing.
"Faith will experience her mother's death in a fashion so intimate as to defy description. I cannot predict with any precision what form her reaction will take. I can say only that it will be extreme, certainly irreparable. Possibly fatal. You will want my help."
Shanks' eyes drifted closed for a moment, as she appeared to think this over, but when they opened again he read nothing but flat rejection. "Neither I nor my granddaughter have any need of your help," Shanks said, crisp as winter's first frost. "Do not use this code again. It will be canceled within the hour. Do not attempt to make contact with me, her, any member of my clan, or any Shanks affiliate. If you do, I shall file stalking and caste-violation complaints with the Social Police. Do you understand?"
"As you will," Tan'elKoth said with an expressively liquid shrug. "You know where I can be reached."
The corners of Shanks' mouth drew down, and her voice went even colder. "You're not getting this, are you? You will never speak to me or my granddaughter again. You think that I don't know about your . . . prank .. . the other night—the call, the picture. But I do. I'm not a damned idiot. The only reason I haven't had you arrested for impersonating a Businessman is that you handed me a stick I could hit Michaelson with. And this is the limit of my gratitude: I have let you use me to take your own revenge. Because it suits me. I enjoyed it. You gave me the chance to hurt him almost as badly as he hurt me, so I let you get away with it. Don't push your luck."
"Businessman," Tan'elKoth began, but the screen was already blank.
He shrugged at his dark reflection in the midnight grey of the screen. This particular branch of his fractal world-tree was growing precisely in its predicted curve. He had successfully planted the idea; now it would grow, watered by Faith's coming distress and the ferocious mother-tiger instincts that were the very core of Avery Shanks' being. Lamorak had schooled him well in the art of dealing with his mother; Tan'elKoth had not the slightest doubt of eventual success.
The god within him throbbed with desire. Soon, he promised Ma'elKoth for the thousandth time. Soon you shall live again, and our world shall be saved.
For Faith could touch the river; through her, he could touch it, too. Once he tapped the river's power, not all the Kollbergs and Governors and Studios in the world could stop him from going home.
He turned away from the bank of screens, and only the massive exercise of a level of self-restraint not accessible to lesser mortals enabled him to suppress what might otherwise have been the leap and snarl of a startled panther when the screen behind him crackled to life, and Kollberg's voice called his name.
His heart thudded like punches against his chest. He strangled a suicidal urge to stammer out a hasty explanation for his presence in the atrium. All this passed in the merest blink; he, was, after all, Tan'elKoth. "Yes, Laborer?" he said with magisterial dignity. "How may I be of service to the Board?"
"How goes the work with the blade?"
"It is prepared. Prohovtsi is ready, as well. I will send the blade with him to the docks as soon as I return. All is precisely as I have agreed with the Board."
"I'm not calling for the Board," Kollberg said in a friendly enough tone—though there was something undefinably strange in his voice, as though he spoke words memorized phonetically in a language he could not comprehend. "The Board doesn't need you right now,"
The Laborer gazed from the screen without expression. Slowly, he tilted his head to one side, as though abstractly curious about how Tan'elKoth might look from a different angle. Kollberg seemed reduced, refined, somehow less even than he had on their initial meeting two days ago, as though some inexorable erosion continued to scour away what little humanity had survived his downcasting. His unblinking eyes, with their cold unquenchable hunger, reminded Tan'elKoth of a dragon's. And yet, Tan'elKoth thought, I have faced a true dragon with more ease than I feel right now.
"In fact," Kollberg said with eerily disconnected cheerfulness, "I called to offer a service. We have a transmission coming through that I think you'll find, ah, entertaining."
In a single lightning-strike flicker, every screen in the atrium flared, from the public screen banks to the touchscreen infopods to the towering jumbotrons hung like canopies from the ceiling. Every screen showed the same scene—something perhaps from one of those motion picture entertainments of which Caine was so fond—a Western, possibly: the interior of a railcar, low mountains passing outside, beyond a window stained grey-brown with coal smoke.
But none of the five visible passengers wore guns or broad-brimmed hats or any of the other standard appurtenances Tan'elKoth had come to expect from such fare. In fact—Tan'elKoth realized with a mildly disorienting shock—four of them wore the customary dark robes of Monastic ordinaries, while the fifth wore the gold-stitched scarlet of a full Ambassador.
He frowned. "What is this?"
"This," Kollberg replied, "is what the Studio is currently receiving from Hari Michaelson's thoughtmitter."
An epithet borrowed from Caine thumped inside Tan'elKoth's skull: Holy freaking crap . . . It stole his breath; clutching at his chest as though in pain, he murmured, "Through his eyes—you can show me the death of Pallas Ril through his eyes—"
"Oh, yes," Kollberg agreed, and there was an ugly suggestion of mutual lust in his voice, like a dealer in child pornography warming up a potential customer. "Wouldn't you like to watch?"
The prospect stunned him; for a moment, he was closer to speechless than at any time in his entire life. "I, ah, Laborer, perhaps—"
Tan'elKoth told himself that he should be above such things; he told himself that he had done what he had done not for revenge—not to injure the enemies who had destroyed him, not to satisfy any of the myriad such base urges that Ma'elKoth had buried along with the eidolon of Hannto the Scythe—but to save his world.
And yet
Kollberg might as well have reached into his chest and taken hold of his heart. The force that tugged him toward the nearest screen was far beyond any concept of resistance. He found himself leaning against the glass, staring hungrily, almost panting.
"Laborer," he said thickly, "I wouldn't miss it for the world."
There is a cycle of tales that begins long, long ago, when the human gods decreed that all their mortal children shall know sorrow, loss, and defeat in the course of the lives they were given. Lives of pure joy, of perfect sufficiency and constant victory, the gods reserved for themselves.
Now, it came to pass that one particular man had run nearly his entire alloted span, and he had never known defeat. Sorrows he had, losses he had taken, but reversals that other men would call defeats were to him no more than obstacles; even the worst of his routs was, to him, merely a strategic withdrawal. He could be killed, but never conquered. For him, the only defeat was surrender; and he would never surrender.
And so it soon followed that the king of the human gods undertook to teach this particular man the meaning of defeat.
The king of the gods took away this man's career--took away his gift for the art that he loved and that had made him famous—and this particular man did not surrender.
The king of the gods took away this man's possessions—took away his hom
e, his wealth, and the respect of his people—and still this particular man did not surrender.
The king of the gods took away this man's family, everyone that he loved—and still this particular man did not surrender.
In the final story of this cycle, the king of the gods takes away this man's self-respect, to teach him the meaning of the helplessness that goes with defeat.
And in the end—the common end, for all who contend with gods this particular man surrenders, and dies.
NINE
The autumn shower we rattle through leaves the window streaked with diagonal swipes of darker black, bordering swaths almost clear where the rain has washed away some of the collected soot. Now as the tracks curve around another switchback, I press my face against the cool glass and try to get a glimpse of the Saddle through the backbent plume of coal smoke that makes a contrail of soot behind the locomotive.
High, high above us, the twin mountains—Cutter and Chopper, what you might call the incisors of the God's Teeth—soar up through the orange-tinged night clouds, but the gap between them, the pass called Khryl's Saddle, is hidden behind a pall of smoke and rock dust. The sedan chair shifts slightly with the rocking of the railcar, and the steel on steel clicking of wheels over expansion joints has me drowsy as a baby, but I still wish I could see the Saddle.
I've been here before. Twice. Once as Caine—many, many years ago—trekking through the aspens from Jheled-Kaarn to Thorncleft, on my way to Seven Wells, the distant capital of Lipke . . . And once, only about five years ago, back when we still thought I might someday walk again, riding in a sedan chair not quite as nice as this one my best friend gave me. That time, I was with Shanna, and she took me way up Cutter Mountain to show me the tiny spring, high on the western slope above the pass—a little washtub-sized gap through which bubbled hundreds of years of rock-filtered snowmelt—that was the ultimate headwater of the Great Chambaygen.
But the image of Shanna walking beside my chair hurts too much to think about, and I force myself sideways into a different memory.
I can see the Saddle in my head as clearly as I ever saw it with my eyes: a place of beauty so intense it robs breath from the lungs, a broad spine of earth and rock buried in forests of aspen, stark snowbound teeth of stone rising sheer to either side. She stood next to me that morning, holding my hand, while we watched the sun climb out of the distant Lipkan plains. The white-capped peaks above us caught the first direct light and burst into silver flame. Down their slopes the rock shaded from yellow to orange to deep emberous red, which became a loamy brown where it brushed the tops of the shadowed aspens in the pass below.
I put my fist against my mouth through the kerchief, and cough. Like ,the four bearers of my sedan chair, I've got a kerchief tied across my face against the coal smoke and furnace smut. That cough might be lung damage from the fire last night, I guess. I kind of hope it is. I guess I'd really rather have roasted lungs than find out I'm coughing because of the damn air below Khryl's Saddle.
Things change. Shit, I can see why she went nuts.
We wind upward. All around the railway, the eastern slope of the pass has become an open wound. The aspen forest has been chewed into gaping open-pit mines. Thick fogs of coal smoke and rock dust overhang every valley. Through the dark mist, I can see grimly threatening silhouettes of huge machines at work upon the land, belching smoke and flame as they chop and grind and scoop away the earth. It's the ugliest goddamn thing I've ever seen; it makes my stomach hurt, and brings a bitter acid to my throat that probably isn't just from the sulphur fumes. "Christ," I mutter. "They've turned this place into Mordor."
A warm hand squeezes my shoulder, and the voice of my best friend murmurs in my ear, "Beautiful, isn't it? Magnificent."
And somehow the sound of his voice opens my eyes to the rich red of the flame from the steam shovel's smokestack, deeper and more pure than the sun's—and more special, more beautiful, because it was made by the hand of men. The ruddy gleam it brings to the steel curve of the bucket's sawteeth is no mere accident of nature, but is intentional, deliberate, the result of an act as expressive as the stroke of a painter's brush. As far as the eye can see, men and women work side by side—even now, far into the night shoulder to shoulder against the inanimate resistance of earth and stone, stamping this entire blank mountain, this random upcrumpling of the insensate earth, with the sigil of Man. Looked at through his eyes, it's a triumph.
"Magnificent .. Yeah, I guess it is," I say slowly, turning to smile at my best friend. He always seems to do that—adjust my whole world with just a phrase, the touch of his hand. That's why he's my best friend.
That's why he's the best friend I've ever had.
"Yeah, Raithe," I tell him. "I guess I just never looked at it that way before."
Raithe takes my hand, and the glittering smile that sparks the corners of his winter-ice eyes tells me that everything is going to be all right.
2
As the train chugs to a stop at the Palatine Camp station, Raithe pulls an enormous clockworks chronometer from a pocket within his scarlet robes and ostentatiously snaps open the cover. "Eleven oh nine," he announces with the kind of self-important snobbery that you can only get from being a kid in your twenties with the most accurate timepiece in town. "Six minutes late, but we've plenty of time left."
He closes the cover, but he's so obviously reluctant to put it away that I take pity on him, finally, and ask him about it.
"A gift," he says with a distant, slightly grim smile that stays closed over his teeth. "From the Viceroy. He's mad for punctuality."
"Garrette." The name is foul in my mouth; it's all I can do not to spit on the floor. Raithe—sensitive as always—picks up on it instantly. "I thought you and he were friends, Caine. He said he knows you quite well."
"Friends? I guess you could say he's a certain kind of friend," I admit. "He's the kind of friend I'd like to stick in a pit filled to his lower lip with vomit, and toss buckets of shit at his head to see if I can make him duck."
A couple of the chair bearers snort, and one laughs outright—then muffles it to snickering behind his hand when he sees that Raithe doesn't get it. Raithe's eyes go hooded, and his face tightens toward a painful grimace that's probably supposed to be a smile: the look of a kid with no sense of humor, who's not sure if he might be the butt of the joke but wants to look like he's being a good sport about it, just in case. "What if he just moves to one side?" he offers lamely, trying to play along.
"Then I get a bigger bucket," I tell him, smiling, and he finally feels pretty sure that it's okay to laugh, so he does.
He's so eager to be liked—from anybody else, it'd be pathetic, and annoying—but Raithe is such a great kid that I can forgive him anything. "The Viceroy is on our side in this, Caine," he says seriously. "He's the one who decided to bring you here, to see if we can save the elves from Pallas—"
"Don't remind me," I tell him. Something twists inside my guts. "I can do this, but only if I don't think about it too much."
Raithe's lips stretch like he's stuck a pencil in his mouth sideways, and his pale eyes gleam. "You still love her. Even after what she's done—and what she will do, if we don't stop her."
My mouth tastes of ashes. "It's not that easy to stop loving someone, kid. I can do what we have to do. But I can't make myself like it."
He nods. "Let's go see the Viceroy. The ritual must begin at midnight, and he wants you to be there."
"That's another thing I'm not gonna be able to like."
My fingers dig into my numb thighs; I can feel a suggestion of pressure though the leather. With the bypass shut down by the inarguable laws of Overworld physics, I have the faintest ghosts of sensation in my legs—in fact, there's a sudden, surprising pain, and when I release my thighs I find dark wet splotches on the leather of my pants, and the palms of my hands are sticky where I touched them. I lift my hands and scowl at them, trying to get a better look at the guck on my palms in the lamplight. "What the
fuck is this?"
I'm pretty sure I didn't piss myself—the partial regen on my spine left me with reasonably reliable sphincter control front and back, so long as the goddamn bypass isn't fucking things up—and the guck smells kind of medicinal, like some kind of antibacterial creme. I offer my palms to Raithe. "What is this? Who put this shit on my legs? Some kinda goddamn practical joke, while I was asleep?"
Now pain starts to announce itself from other parts of my body as well: my arms, my back, down my ribs along one flank—a lot of pain, hot crackling pain like deep burns, the kind that feel like you're still roasting inside. And with the pain, seeping in, comes some kind of primitive unreasoning horror . . . feels like somebody's piling red-hot rocks onto my back while an ice-cold anaconda of slime crawls down my throat and curls up in my belly.
I twitch my hands, trying to flick the gunk off them, trying to keep from retching a few yards of that snot-covered snake back up
And Raithe again rescues me with a touch and a calm word. "No, it's all right, Caine. You have a few little burns, that's all. Nothing serious. When you rescued M—that is, Tan'elKoth, remember? But they've been treated and they don't even hurt anymore. Remember?"
"I, uh . . . yeah, okay, I remember." I put a hand onto my forehead and squeeze my temples between fingertips and thumb. The pain fades as quickly as it rose.
All in my head, I guess.
"It's weird . . I can't quite get shit straight in my mind," I say slowly, a little thickly. It's hard to make my lips work right. "It's like I couldn't really remember if the fire really happened, or if it was just a dream. I mean, sometimes it seems real, but just now, I couldn't remember ..."
"Oh, it was real," Raithe says. "It's all been recorded." His voice has a strange edge to it—creepy, almost like lust but at the same time he sounds a little smug, a little satisfied. Like he's looking forward to some-thing that's gonna get him off in the worst way. I frown at him, but he ignores me.