The voice that answers is exactly the opposite: though the words are dry and precise, it thrumms like a plucked bowstring. Yes, of course. I will see to him. As for the sword, this is a relic of Saint Berne, and is the rightful property of the Church of the Beloved Children of Ma'elKoth. It shall be extremely well cared for.
I open my eyes and roll my head toward them to tell them both to shut the fuck up, and I see that suede-faced Ambassador motherfucker squared off with one of the fake secmen.
Between them, in the rainbow spray from the waterfall above, Kosall's hilt swings back and forth like the arm of a metronome counting off the measure of all the empty noise the world has become. The spray condenses into a trickle, a tiny rill pale pink with her blood, channeled by the rocky cleft away from the stream to dry in the sun upon the barren stone.
Her eyes, split by the blade that cleaves her forehead like a horrible Athene-in-reverse, are still bright and clear. The spray has washed away the dust that would settle there, and they still sparkle like gemstones, and I can't understand why I am still breathing.
Raithe turns his own stone-gleaming eyes on me. "What do you say, Caine?" he says with playful mock deference. "Are you ready to go?" Speech is beyond me.
Raithe shrugs at the fake secman. "You have my thanks. Convey the warm regards of the Monasteries to your superiors in the Overworld Company. Tell them we apologize for Administrator Garrette's death, but you yourself can testify that it was unavoidable."
"Agreed," the fake secman says. "The embassy will be notified of the new Viceroy as circumstances demand."
"We stand ready to welcome him, in the spirit of true brotherhood," Raithe says smugly. "Fare you well."
The fake secmen don't answer; Soapy never says good-bye. They silently about-face and march off along the ledge.
I was hoping they'd kill me. But that would be redundant.
I'm still breathing, but that doesn't mean I'm alive.
So it is when Raithe yanks Kosall free by its quillons, bracing Shanna's face beneath his foot to scrape the blade out of her skull, I feel nothing.
So it is when he leans over me, his blue-white eyes sparking with the same hunger that had been reflected in the glass marbles in the sockets of Berne's dead face, and says
"I am Raithe of Ankhana. You, Caine, are my prisoner, and you will die."
—I am unsurprised to hear my own hollow voice reply, "I'm not Caine. There is no Caine. Caine is dead."
And somehow this fills him with exaltation. He stands, his brow aflame with glory, and spreads his arms like he wants to hug the whole world. He throws back his head and cries to the limitless sky, "This is the day! This is the day! I AM!"
I have the strength to wonder dully what it might be he thinks he is, but I don't have the strength to care about the answer. Right now, I can only think of Faith.
I can't even imagine what this has done to you.
My god, Faith . . . I know you can't hear me, but
My god, Faith.
I'm sorry.
The crooked knight, as with all knights errant, had a path to follow and lessons to learn; each turning upon his path was another lesson, and each lesson led to another turning.
The crooked knight slowly, gradually, and painfully discovered some of the truths that his life had undertaken to teach him: what the road to hell is paved with, that there is nothing pure in this world, and that no good deed goes unpunished.
He learned these truths too late, of course; for he was, after all, the crooked knight.
TEN
The knock sounded friendly enough—not too loud, a brisk double tap like a cheerful hello—but when Deliann opened the door he got only a brief glimpse of a big, square-bodied human with kindly eyes and a face roughly the color and topography of a dishful of overcooked yams. He saw no more than this, because his view was obscured by the human's large fist, which got larger much too fast and hit Deliann's nose so hard that he didn't even remember falling; without a discernable interval, he found himself lying on the carpet, brilliant white sparks curling through his peripheral vision and the taste of blood in his mouth.
"Hiya," the human said cheerfully as he short-stepped to Deliann's side and let him have the reinforced toe of his big square boot in the ribs just above the kidney, hard enough to spring a couple loose with crisp but utterly silent pops.
Deliann doubled up, spitting blood. The human said, "Rugo," as though it was someone's name.
An ogre wearing chainmail painted in the scarlet and brass motif of the guardstaff at Alien Games stepped through the door, shaking out a large silvery net that looked sickeningly familiar. A flick of the ogre's wrist spread the net over Deliann; then he latched one enormous paw around Deliann's upper arm and hauled him up to dangle above the floor. Deliann was bagged and slung over the humps of muscle that rippled across the ogre's broad back by the time he'd managed to convince himself that any of this was really happening.
"Guess what?" the human said. "Kierendal's awake, and she wants to see you."
2
A bouncing, jarring, disorienting ride through the private corridors of Alien Games ended with the ogre unslinging the net like a nine-foot-tall yellow-tusked Santa Claus and dumping Deliann, bag and all, on the floor in Kierendal's bedchamber. He landed hard on his butt in an awkward twist that hurt his ribs worse than the kick had.
Slowly, with patient caution, he tried to untangle enough of the net that he could at least come up to his knees. He made no move that might be interpreted as a struggle to free himself the ogre's other hand held a morningstar as long as Deliann's leg, with spikes longer than his fingers and about as sharp.
Kierendal lay propped on brightly colored silk cushions piled up on her enormous canopied bed; her steel-colored eyes had black rings beneath them, and her metallic hair splayed in greasy tangles over her shoulders and across the pillows. Her skin was the color of a catfish strangling in a drying mudpool, and her lips hung like raw meat draped over her sharp predator's teeth. The room smelled like a half-filled bedpan that had been topped up with vomit.
"I had an idea," Kierendal said thickly, as though her mouth didn't work very well, "when I sent them for you, that I'd say something witty. You know: about how I wanted to give you my personal thanks for saving my life."
"Kier—"
"Shut up!" she shrieked, ragged and raw, half lifting herself from the pillows; but then she fell back as though the effort of anger had exhausted her. "But I don't want to. I can't. I can't even be bitter about it." She rolled her face away, so that he could not see her expression.
Grief clamped down on his heart, and he could not speak.
"Now they tell me we don't have to die," Kierendal went on, still facing away, looking toward the dark brocade of the curtains that shuttered the bedchamber's window. "They tell me this disease of yours might not kill me. That we might all live through it."
"Yes," Deliann said.
"All but Pischu," she said. "All but Tup."
"The goddess—"
"Don't talk to me about your goddess. I know all about her. She's a fucking Aktir. Pallas Ril."
Deliann said, "She looked like a goddess to me."
"You know," Kierendal said distantly, as though she had not heard, "there are already rumors. There've been killings, a lot of them. Not all in Alientown. Probably your barge crew. But the story is that it's the Cainists—that it's the start of a terror campaign, reprisals for the mass arrests, trying to fuck with the government's plans for the Seventh Festival. You and me, we know better, though, don't we? Don't we? I thought I did, anyway; but then I got to thinking about it, and now I'm not so sure."
"What are you talking about?"
"I knew Caine. Does that surprise you? I was part of it, the whole Assumption of Ma'elKoth—and it didn't go quite the way the Church says it did. I was there. The Church is right about one thing, though: he was an Aktir, Caine was. Pallas Ril was his woman. Both Aktiri. Like you, Deliann."
"K
ierendal—"
"There's this thing about Caine—you can always sort of tell when he's mixed up in something, because everything starts to spin out of control. You can even see it, sometimes: black Flow, a current that comes out of everywhere, and goes nowhere. You'll know when you see it. Nothing ever turns out the way anyone expects it to. Usually for the worse. Just like this."
"All I know about Caine is what everybody knows," Deliann said, lifting his hands in a helpless shrug that made the net rustle like chainmail. "Mostly just what the Church says. All I know about Pallas Ril is that she promised to help. And that she saved your life."
"Saved my life?" Kierendal rolled her head so that she could face him again, and her eyes were bloody and raw as a half-incubated egg cracked into a cold skillet. "Yes. I should thank her. I should thank her for letting me wake up and find out that ..." Her voice broke. ". . . Pischu . . . Tup .. . they died. And I get to live, knowing I killed them. For nothing."
"I'm sorry, Kier," Deliann said with simple honesty. "I wish it could be different."
"Do you? Do you really?" She looked up at the ogre and waved a trembling hand. "Take it off him."
The ogre grabbed a handful of the metal net at the top of Deliann's head and yanked, tumbling him out of the net to the floor. He landed hard on his swollen thigh—the one with the internal infection—and sudden pain made him gasp. Instinctively he sought mindview, to ease his burning leg with Flow; Kierendal gestured, and the human clouted him on the side of the head.
"Don't," she said. "I'm watching you, Changeling. That was just a warning. Reach for the Flow again and he'll kill you. Understand?"
"No," Deliann said thinly through a mouth held tight against a whimper. "No, I don't understand. I don't understand how you can treat me like this. Like an enemy."
"Maybe I can explain," Kierendal said. She lifted a finger-thick rod of polished wood as long as her hand. She turned it this way and that in the pale lamplight; its polish had a distinctive iridescent sheen that made it impossible to tell what color the wood actually was. "You know what this is?"
"Of course I know what it is," Deliann said, frowning. "I've been a Mithondionne prince for twenty-five years. Where did you get a message stick?"
Message sticks were the original records of the First Folk, dating back to the misty millennia before the invention of their alphabet. A trained mind could imprint the semicrystalline structure of the plant itself with a Fantasy; a Fantasy thus encoded into a properly prepared message stick was permanent, so long as the message stick itself remained undamaged. It was a laborious process that had fallen into popular disuse thousands of years ago. Message sticks survived only for the formal matters of state, and even there were rarely used for anything less than a royal wedding or declaration of war. Deliann might never have seen one, save that House Mithondionne was the hereditary tender of the small shrubs that were used to make them; "message stick" was the Westerling translation of mithondion.
"It came by bird just a couple hours ago," Kierendal said. "Didn't you ever wonder how I know what's going on halfway across the continent? Have a look" She tossed it to him; he caught it instinctively.
It had an unreasonable solidity, a weight to it, as though it were made of gold instead of wood. Deliann turned it over in his fingers, and it awakened in him a dread that chilled his guts.
The message stick could only have come from Mithondion. From home.
"Go ahead," Kierendal said. "Dream it."
"I, ah ..." The message stick had become so heavy it made his arm ache with strain; his mouth had gone dry, his tongue a numb lump of muscle.
Torronell would have headed straight to the Living Palace.
Deliann raised his eyes; he could not even look at the stick. "I don't want to, Kier," he said humbly. "Why don't you tell me what's in it? Please."
"That wasn't a request, Changeling. I'll tell you one more time: Dream it. If I have to tell you again, it'll be after Rugo's morningstar makes porridge out of one of your ankles. You got me?" Her eyes were dark, dead flat, lusterless, as though dust had settled upon them.
Deliann looked down again at the message stick in his hand; its iridescence became somehow obscenely repulsive: a growth on the lips of a whore.
But how bad could it be, really? He had seen Mithondion in ruins a thousand times in his dreams already; this couldn't possibly be worse than his dark imaginings. He opened his Shell to caress the faintest breath of Flow into the patterns of the message stick; color swirled around him, joined by forest sound and scent. Soon they organized into a coherent Fantasy, and he discovered just how wrong he was.
He couldn't possibly have imagined anything as bad as this.
3
Deliann knelt on the floor, images screaming inside his head. Kierendal had lain silently upon her bed while the Fantasy had fed unimaginable horror into Deliann's brain.
He saw the Living Palace in flames, fire eating away the very heart of the deepwood. He saw primal corpses by the dozen, the score, the century; he saw feral creatures roaming the forest with blood upon their teeth—feral creatures beneath whose masks of filth and madness could be recognized the features of courtiers and ladies of fashionable society.
He saw the corpse of the King, his father, lying half rotted upon the floor of a closet, where he must have crawled to hide; the corpse had been found there by two starving, maddened feyallin, young males who had torn his uncooked flesh with their own teeth, only to vomit it forth again in great bloody pools across the richly woven clothing the King had pulled from the shelves above to make a rude bed for his dying.
He saw the bird-picked shape of a fey who wore Torronell's favorite vest; he could not know if this was his brother's corpse. It hung high above the forest floor, a broken branch impaling it from crotch to gullet.
"Not easy to watch?" Kierendal finally asked.
Deliann barely heard her.
"So this is how I've got it recked," Kierendal said; without transition, her voice had hardened to a rasp like a knife drawn across a whetstone. "You're an Aktir—"
He could only see the image scored into his memory, of an eye—that might have been Torronell's—being gulped by a crow, its head thrown back as though in ecstasy.
"—and Caine was an Aktir. Shit's gone completely out of control. Pallas Ril is sniffing around. You're all hooked together somehow, you and Pallas Ril and Caine. I think those rumors are closer to right than they know: somehow, this is all something to do with the Cainists." She pulled her bloodless lips back over her teeth in a pack hunter's fighting grin. "I've been lying here since I woke up, trying to figure what I could have done to make things different, and all I can come up with is this: I should have had you taken out and killed the night you showed up."
Deliann looked at her then, but still had no words.
"Tup," she said harshly, "was the only creature I have ever known who really, truly loved me."
Deliann lowered his head.
Staring fixedly at the cold dark brocade of the curtains, she looked like she was hugging herself under the blankets, trying to suppress a shudder. "Take him to the white room and beat in his skull. Throw his body in the river."
Deliann knelt unmoving as the ogre covered him once again with the silver net, slung him over its massive shoulder, and carried him away.
4
Deliann twisted himself inside the netting as he bounced against the ogre's back on their way down to the white room; pretty soon his neck uncramped enough for him to speak. "You can't do this," he said.
"Soor I can," the ogre replied cheerfully. "Thass why I got thizz." The ogre underhanded his enormous, blunt-spiked morningstar to give Deliann a little tap with it through the net, just a friendly nudge that punched a couple of spikes into the swollen muscle of his badly healed thigh. "See? Eazzy"
Deliann bit his lip until he tasted fresh blood. The pocket of infection within that thigh made it brutally sensitive; the tap from the morningstar hurt worse than had breaking t
he leg in the first place. "No, you don't understand," he said, once he was sure he could control his voice. "Kill me if you want. But you can't dump my body in the river. In the river, Eyyallarann alone knows where I'll spread the disease—it could kill thousands before the goddess' cure catches up to it."
"What, you think it's not in the river already?" said the ugly squarebodied human who ambled alongside the' ogre, thumbs hooked behind his belt. "I'm no healer, but I hear things, y'know. Always payin' attention, that's me. I figure you already give it to people who's dead by now, and most dead folks hereabouts end up in the river sooner or later."
"Yes:' Deliann said softly. The ache in his chest threatened to choke him. "Yes, you're right. I wasn't thinking."
"Don' know nothing about no diseazze," the ogre said. "Kier sayzz crack your head, I crack your head. She sayzz dump you in the riffer, I dump you in the riffer. Eazzy."
"Yeah, Rugo's got a pretty straightforward outlook, huh?" The human leaned around the ogre's broad back to give Deliann a ruefully companionable smile. "Kinda makes you jealous, don't it? Ever wish your life could be simple?"
Deliann let his eyes drift closed against his grief. "For a long time, I thought it was."
"That's cuz you wasn't payin' attention," the human said sadly.
The white room turned out to be the small chamber with the brown-stained walls in which he'd been chained to a chair upon his arrival. The ogre dumped him rolling out of the net. Deliann lay where he fell, staring at the ceiling that was also spattered with brown splotches--a sort of kinetic record of the backsplash that arcs away from a mace or a morningstar when you reset for another swing. He could see—barely, in his peripheral vision—the faint outline of the Shells of the ogre and the human, but the room was closed to Flow. He would be helpless to resist.
Not that he had any intention of resistance.