He flicks his fingers at the bearers—four burly friars from the Thorncleft Embassy—and they hoist my chair onto their shoulders. Raithe opens the double door of the railcar, kicks the extensible stairs so that they unfold to the platform, and all six of us head down into Palatine.
Even now, close to midnight, Palatine is jumping. Two years ago, this place had been only the Palatine Camp, nothing but a cluster of tents and a couple of big-ass corrugated steel sheds—the central camp for the mines that spider out across the eastern approach of the pass. Now, it's turned into an honest-to-shit boomtown, Old West style, with two hotels, a double strip of saloons and whorehouses, stores and stables; even the rail station has tripled in size. Rail spurs web the hills for miles around. Next to the station is a small clapboard building with a huge sign declaring it to be the offices of the Overworld Company newspaper, the Palatine Tribune.
I can just imagine tomorrow's headline:
ROGUE GODDESS SLAIN BY CAINE
Returning Hero Helps Artans Save World
It makes me more than a little sick.
The streets blaze with hissing gaslights, painting the faces of the miners and the whores and the general townsfolk all with identically eerie green-white corpse pallor. My bearers slog across the main street, a churn of black mud and horseshit a stone's throw wide; coal smoke and furnace smut coats my skin with greasy brown-black dust before we can get halfway to the hotel. The air tastes of brimstone.
Inside, Raithe leads us past a very old-movie-looking front desk, through a small, cramped saloon where a lonely bartender reads a copy of the Tribune, a real old-fashioned newspaper of bleached wood pulp and ink. He doesn't even look up as we pass by. Through one more door is a private party room, with some crude but comfortable-looking sofas covered in leather, and a wooden dining table big enough to seat maybe six.
At the far end, behind a wide arc of papers scattered across the table, sits Vinson Garrette. He looks up as my bearers maneuver my chair through the doorway, and he nods toward Raithe with a grunt of welcome. "Excellent," he says softly, then lifts his head and his voice toward me. "Thank you so much for coming, Hari. As you know, I don't believe we could save this place from your wife without your help. We'll go straight from here to the ritual, if it's all right with you."
I rub my face some more—I have that bad-dream dissociative thing going on again, where I can't seem to make this make sense, although I'm sure it all hangs together in some way I can't quite remember. "This feels kinda strange," I say. "Being here. I don't know why."
"Of course you don't," Garrette says kindly. "I think we'll be able to cut here, and pick up the recording again at the ritual."
"What? Cut? Recording? What are you talking about?"
Garrette nods toward Raithe, and Raithe instructs the bearers to set me down at the foot of the table and wait outside. "Close the door," he says shortly. "You do not want to hear what is said within this room." The four friars touch fingertips to brows in the gesture of Obedience and file out. They shut the door.
Garrette's lips thin to a horizontal slash beneath his long hooked nose, and he rises with the sinister gracelessness of a predatory wading bird. "Restraints, I believe, would be in order," he says, moving around the table with his head cocked as though one eye scans the shallows for fish.
Raithe produces a couple of white plastic stripcuffs. "Sit still a moment, Caine." Moving so slowly and deliberately that it doesn't even occur to me to resist, he uses one to strap my left wrist to the arm of the sedan chair and pulls it tight.
"Hey, c'mon, Raithe," I say, frowning. "Friends are friends, but even my wife doesn't get to tie me up ..." I try to make it sound like a joke, but some of that slime-snake feeling is crawling back down my throat. It's pressing on my lungs now, making my breath come short. I'd like to laugh, but it might come out a kind of nervous bleat—then I'd know that I really am as frightened as I'm afraid I might be, and I'm nowhere near ready for that.
He loops the other stripcuff around my right wrist and chair arm and pulls that one tight as well. Now Garrette picks up a pile of small white cardstock rectangles from the table and consults the one on top. "All right," he murmurs, nodding to himself He looks at me. "I believe we're ready to begin."
I find myself compulsively testing the strength of the stripcuffs. "What the fuck is going on here?"
Garrette hefts the stack of cardstock. "I have some very specific instructions here, Hari, which I intend to follow as precisely as possible, as is my way. I confess that I don't see the use of most of them, but I suppose it's not really important that I should. The primary instruction is that I should make you comprehend your position fully and clearly."
"You're off to a goddamn running start."
He exposes a mouthful of teeth that seem too big and square and white for his thin-boned face. "Your Excellency?"
Raithe opens a small knapsack that I don't remember seeing him pick up. From inside it he pulls a shimmery wad of wire that he then shakes out into a net. With a dull shock, I realize it's made of silver mesh, just like the one I used on Ma'elKoth at Victory Stadium, all those years ago. He says, "Do you know what this is, Caine?"
I shrug; it gulls my wrists tight against the cuffs, so I stop.
Raithe's smile looks like the edge of a knife. "Do you know what I'm planning to use it for?"
"Should I care?"
Now it's Raithe's turn to shrug, and it's his breath that's coming a little short. He looks like a virgin getting his first glimpse of nipple. With a matador flourish, he casts the net over my head.
The net splashes over me like a bucketful of ice water, a stunning shock that hits too fast to be cold or hot or anything other than a spastic convulsion of gasping. I go rigid, making ukh ukh guh noises, and the room blazes white like somebody lit a magnesium flare inside my head and now somebody else has more of those flares and he's using them to light the napalm that's spread down my legs and up my back and I'm on fire, all over, burning with fresh crackling agony and the thick reek of roasted flesh and the icy stab of alcohol sluiced over charred skin
And the stranger who's standing in front of me in the scarlet robes of a Monastic Ambassador, face like suede glued in patches to his skull, he's got a light in his blue-white eyes that looks like it's the reflection of the flames that gave me these bums.
"Who—" I force the words out through a snarl of pain. "Who are you?"
"Don't you know me, Caine?" he says through teeth exposed by a predator's smile. He leans toward me like he's gonna take a bite out of my face, then he shoves a hand into my side, eagle-claw style, pinching the flesh through net and leather, scraping the tunic across the burned flesh beneath, making me shudder with fresh pain. His voice is low, and savage, and it smokes like his eyes.
"I'm your best friend."
3
"Remember ... I remember—" My voice is as ragged as ripping cloth. "I remember waking up .. '. on the train, and you ... and you—"
"A Charm patterns the energy of your Shell. You don't have to be conscious," he says through that knife-edge grin. "Your mind, like your Shell, is a patterning of Flow. In the instant that I remove this net from you, the Charm pattern on your Shell will gather Flow, and you will love me as a son, and trust me as a father."
"Why... have you . . done this to me?"
"I believe I can answer that question," Garrette says. He rounds the corner of the table and leans his butt against its edge, giving me one of those Compassionate Looks that Administrators practice in the mirror and save up to use on somebody they're about to shitcan. "But before I do, I want you to understand something, on my part. I have never liked you, Michaelson. You are a disgrace to our entire caste—you have always pushed our company to serve your ends, instead of properly serving it; you are selfish, egotistical, and rude. You presume to set your own judgment above that of your betters. I know, too, that you dislike me, and always have. That being said, however, I would like to assure you that I take no joy i
n this task. This is not personal, Michaelson."
The pain-sweat beaded on my forehead rolls into one eye, stinging, and for a second that tiny increase of agony nearly drives me over the edge. It's all I can do not to howl like a wounded dog; instead I grit my teeth and pretend to smile. "You're only . . . following orders, right?"
"I try to honorably acquit the duties that are assigned to me; Garrette agrees stiffly. "Nothing personal, yes?"
"Fuck nothing personal ... Everything's personal." I point my chin toward Raithe, at that dark hunger that fills his face as he watches my pain. I don't know why, or where he gets it from, but I can see the hate rolling off him like heatshimmer off sun-baked asphalt. "Ask him. He knows. I can see it."
Raithe's gaze never wavers; he's drinking me in like he's a desert and I'm a storm. He says, "Get on with it"
"Well, then. All right." Garrette clears his throat and consults the top card again. "The first thing you need to know, Michaelson, is that we are going to kill your wife."
I knew it was coming, but it still hits me like a kick in the balls. I keep smiling; what the fuck, why not? I can barely feel my balls anyway. "You're gonna try."
"Mmm, yes. And succeed. And you are going to help us."
"And then you woke up."
"You will be taken to the Cutter Mountain spring, and washed in its water. This will attract the attention of Pallas Ril. When she arrives, she will die."
"She's not that easy to kill."
"You will, I believe, be surprised."
He looks at me for a little bit, like he's expecting an answer, but all I do is stare at the pulse throbbing alongside his windpipe, and show him my teeth.
He coughs delicately into his hand, then goes on. "You will also be interested to know that in dying, she will assume full culpability for the HRVP outbreak. The story is already planted: the outbreak was a terrorist action by Pallas Ril herself, intended to inflame public sentiment against the Overworld Company."
"Bullshit. Nobody's gonna believe that."
"Of course they will. We have documents proving that she had a .. . prior relationship--a romantic entanglement, I believe it will be called, with one Administrator Kerry Voorhees—"
"The head of Biocontainment? But Voorhees is a woman—"
"And," Garrette says with a professorial gleam, "a lesbian, yes. This was thought to be a particularly salient twist. Ms. Voorhees will be, shall we say, overcome with guilt? And her suicide note will contain a full confession that implicates Pallas Ril. Ms. Voorhees—with the collusion of some convenient eco-terrorist group which we will credibly create—also set the trap which nearly took the life of Tan'elKoth and yourself. Which you escaped in such a superlatively gripping fashion—I've seen the recording already. It will make arresting entertainment."
"It doesn't make sense," I tell him. "Why would—"
"It doesn't have to make sense,' Garrette says clinically. "In fact, it's better if it doesn't make sense, especially if it is sufficiently dramatic—you should understand that as well as anyone, Hari. This way, dozens of conflicting theories will dominate the netshows for weeks, months, or even years. And some of those theories will be more reasonable, more probable—will make more sense—than the truth. This is the actual social purpose of conspiracy theories. If someone does happen to uncover the truth, the truth will be relegated to the ranks of the crank conspiracies, no more likely than any of the rest. The perfect camouflage."
"But Pallas' fans will never accept—"
Garrette waves all objections aside. "Pallas Ril has gone insane, don't you see? The pressures of her enormous power have driven her over the edge into madness. It is a cultural tradition: Men of great power become gods; women of great power go insane and become destroyers—who must in turn be destroyed by the men who love them. The public is primed already to believe it; this has been a running theme of a certain type of popular entertainment for three hundred years."
"Nobody's gonna believe it," I repeat, but I don't sound so sure anymore.
He turns his palm upward, purses his lips, and sighs with a hint of mild melancholy: a man who's seen it all, and is somewhat saddened by how ordinary it was. "Most people will believe any tale, no matter how silly, unlikely, or outrageous, so long as it agrees with stories they were told as children," he says apologetically.
The sickening truth of this leaves an ugly wormwood taste in my mouth.
"And in the end, they will believe"—Garrette goes on slowly, with a kind of mincing, sadistic delicatezza, as though he can hurt me more by breaking it to me gently—"because you believe."
I spend a second or two trying to swallow the clot of cold oatmeal that used to be my heart; before I can gag it back down into place, Garrette goes on. "I suppose," he says with the salacious smile of someone about to share a bit of particularly juicy gossip, "you haven't yet realized that you're on-line."
Another of those mag flares goes off inside my head, and the room begins to white out around the edges again. I did know—I must have known, somehow; I was monologuing without even thinking about it.
Shit, I still am.
"Don't worry about your audience, Hari. You have no audience. I daresay the Studio has learned its lesson about allowing you a live forum."
He lifts a black valise-sized case from behind the table he's using as a desk. It has a couple of handles that look like they're brass, or maybe gold-plated. He sets it on the table and turns it around so that a black glassy rectangle like a deskscreen faces me. "I don't think you're familiar with the device that this unit is based on," he says. "The locals call it the Artan Mirror. It's remarkably similar in concept to a palmpad, but it's adapted to work on Flow instead of quantum electromagnetism. The point is that this particular unit is powered by a griffinstone; as long as the griffinstone remains, mm ... charged, I suppose the word would be ... this unit will record transmissions from your thoughtmitter. This is something of a refinement on the Long Form; since the recording takes place in a separate unit, we won't have to worry about recovering your head after you are executed. In fact, this unit is magically resonance-locked to a similar one back in Thorncleft, at the Railhead, so that, even though you are on freemod, a certain select group of Earthside—shall we say, auditors?—can follow these events in real time. Including, I believe, your former Patron, Leisureman Vilo."
The flares in my skull get brighter, and their hissing pushes Garrette's voice out to where it sounds thin, metallic, like he's talking from very, very far away, with his head in an aluminum garbage can. "You may say and do whatever you wish; the appropriate material will be spliced with the security video of your rescue of Tan'elKoth—which will open the tale with a bang, as they say. Anything of which the Board doesn't approve will be edited out of the final version."
Edited .. .
The final version
Garrette and Raithe both lean back, arms identically folded, while they watch me begin to understand. They're gonna use me to bait out Shanna, so that I have to watch her die. They'll make a recording.
And they'll sell it.
Both of them disappear into the white blaze behind my eyes, and for a time there is nothing but rage.
4
"That must have stung a bit, but your burns are feeling better now, aren't they?" Raithe folds up the net and puts it back into the little purse it came from.
I nod. "Yeah, Raithe. Thanks."
My best friend leans toward me and puts his warm hand on my arm, while with the other he cuts away the white plastic stripcuffs that bind my wrists to the arms of my chair. "Now, we wouldn't want to talk about anything that's happened in this room, would we? That would only upset you, and everybody else."
"You're right," I tell him, nodding again. He's really perceptive, that way; he seems to understand things about me even before I do.
"And you don't even want to think about that. You'd better just think about the job you have to do; you should forget about everything said here, until I let you know it's
all right. I mean, all that thinking—that would only upset you, too. And we don't want you to be upset, do we?"
"No, Raithe. We sure don't want that," I say, giving his shoulder a grateful squeeze with my now-freed hand. "Thanks, kid. You're the best. I sure am lucky to have a friend like you—that's the best luck I've ever had."
A thin smile flickers through his ice-colored eyes.
"Luck? No. Not luck," he says. "It was destiny."
5
The crater is maybe a hundred yards across, a circular depression near the top of a hill only a quarter mile beyond the lights of Palatine. I'm thinking it might be an impact crater from something like a meteorite; I'm no geologist, but I don't think these mountains are volcanic, and anyway, I don't think a volcanic crater would be this regular—it's shaped like a parabolic reflector.
Stars shine down on the barren crater. All the trees and bushes and grass and shit have been burned to twisted crusty bits of char, scorched down to the bare black dirt—and recently, too, maybe just this afternoon; the whole place still reeks of kerosene.
Down in the center of the bowl is some jointed steel scaffolding a few yards high, supporting two platforms, one under the other. On the lower platform is the guy who's doing the ritual; he's got an altar there, and some chickens and goats and other small cheap bits of living sacrifice: the opening acts. He's naked, but sweating tonight—even in the midnight chill of the mountains—because on the ground underneath him is a broad pit of glowing coals where he tosses the animals once they've been cut and bled.
I can see the grimace on his face. He's new at this, and I think the blood has him a little weirded out. He keeps on chanting, though; the kid has heart. I can barely hear his voice over the nervous clucks and frightened bleating from the animals; and what I hear I cannot understand. This chant is not exactly language—at least, not a human language.
Also beside him on the lower platform is another young man—about the same age—who is only now starting to stir and wake from a drugged sleep to find that he is naked, and that his hands and feet are bound with thin slicing twists of unbreakable wire.