There was, in being brought to this particular room for execution, an ironic symmetry that he found poetic.
The ogre let his huge morningstar dangle from his wrist by its leather thong as he carefully shook out and folded the silver net; apparently such devices were expensive enough that he didn't want to risk damaging it when he crushed Deliann's skull. The ogre laid the folded net on the seat of the maple chair that was bolted to the floor in the middle of the room, then flicked the haft of the morningstar up into his hand: killing position.
Deliann wondered, for one stretching instant, if he would see a flash of light when it hit him, or if the flash that goes with being hit on the head was an artifact of memory—something you don't see at the time, just remember seeing when you wake up, a sort of neuronal default to cover the scramble made by impact. He was abstractly curious; since he wasn't going to wake up, he couldn't guess what the actual moment of impact would look like. It seemed important, somehow.
At least as important as anything else you could be thinking about, one second before you die.
The morningstar went up, and up, and up, and the human said, "Hey,
Rugo, hang on a second, will you? I'm not sure I'm all right with this."
The morningstar paused at the top of its arc, and the ogre said, "Huh?" "Changed my mind," the human said with a shrug. "Let's not kill him." "But Kier zzaid—"
"You don't have to do everythin' Kier says, do you?"
"But she's the bozz ..." he murmured. "So?"
The ogre lowered the morningstar, frowning as he chewed over the unfamiliar concept. "I don't get it," he decided.
The human shrugged again, this time uncomfortably. "I dunno if I can explain, exactly. See, I guess I got it figured like this: If this character told. Kier and everybody the truth about the goddess, Pallas Ril is gonna be back here in a day or two to fix things up, and everythin'll be all right, y'know? And if he's wrong about the goddess, we're all gonna be dead pretty soon—Kier first, prob'ly. So she won't really care one way or the other, and neither will we. So, I figure, why kill him?"
"Causs Kier zzaid zo," the ogre insisted.
The human looked profoundly skeptical, and more than a little troubled.
"You don't understand," Deliann said, licking his lips. "I'm a carrier—" "Yeah, whatever," the human said. "Big deal. If you're givin' it to people, I prob'ly already got it, right?"
"Don't do this for my sake—"
"Who says I'm doin' it for you?"
"I never said I want to live."
"Nobody ast you. You wanna die, you can do it without our help." "Kier'll get mad," Rugo said dubiously. "Really, really mad."
"She don't have to know." The human spread his hands. "C'mon, Rugo. We'll turn him loose and tell her we dumped him in the river. Whaddaya say?"
Rugo scowled as though all this thinking was giving him an ogre-sized migraine. Finally, he shook his huge head. "Nah. Kier'zz the bozz. We gotta do what she sayzz." He lifted the morningstar again, and the human stepped over Deliann to put himself in the path of the downward swing.
"Don't do it, Rugo."
"Aw, c'mon," the ogre said plaintively. "You're gonna get uzz in trouble..."
"Nope; you're gonna get us in trouble, if you yap me out to Kier. What she don't know won't hurt us." The human turned his back on Rugo and offered Deliann his hand. "C'mon, get up. We're outa here."
Deliann bemusedly took the offered hand; it was warm, and dry, and very, very strong. The human lifted him to his feet seemingly without effort.
"Maybe I s'ould crack you one, too," the ogre said ominously; he took a step forward, towering over the human, tusks curving up to frame his globular yellow eyes.
The human looked over his shoulder at his partner and cocked his head curiously. "How long we worked together? You really wanna bust my skull? What kinda friend are you, anyway?"
"But . . . but . . . c'mon. Let me kill him. Pleazze?"
"Nah. Made up my mind. Sorry, Rugo. Guess you're gonna have to kill me, too." The human gently turned Deliann around and gave him a little shove toward the door, following close behind him.
"I could call more guardzz," Rugo said, bright with sudden inspiration.
"And tell 'em what? How y'gonna explain you didn't take care of this yourself?" The human pulled open the door. "We're leavin, Roog. You can come if you want."
Deliann didn't hear a response from the ogre, nor could he see one as the human propelled him out the door. The human led him through the corridors of Alien Games, to a narrow door that opened onto a dark alley that pattered with slow drizzly rain like the piss of old drunk men. The human stepped out and beckoned Deliann to follow with a jerk of his head.
"C'mon. You hungry? Let's go get somethin' to eat."
5
Behind the counter, a fat stonebender in a dirty brown apron spun a plate of greasy eggs, blood pudding, and some kind of unidentifiable meat into place between Deliann's elbows, and a certain color began to return to the world. This was the first time he'd even been outdoors since the night he came to Alien Games; he was as damp as the mud-churned street, cold in his light cotton tunic and pants, and what little sunlight filtered through the grey bruise of overcast was barely enough to show him a hint of yellow in the scrambled eggs.
He perched on a rickety stool next to the human who'd saved his life, and leaned on a splintered wooden counter just a little less greasy than the food before him. The counter made a squared-off ring with a large grill, griddle, and enormous wood-fired kettle fryer in the middle, tended by a pair of stonebenders who acted like husband and wife, but resembled each other enough to be brother and sister. Deliann didn't ask.
An awning kept off the drizzle. Between the counter, stools, and awning, the establishment occupied a good third of the right-of-way of Moriandar Street. Other similar stalls were scattered along the street; the rain kept most of them nearly as deserted as this one. Other than Deliann and the human, the only customer at this stall was a fat treetopper with tattered wings who lay stretched out on the far countertop, face in the crook of his elbow, snoring like an asthmatic bloodhound.
The human shoveled eggs into his mouth and chomped on them noisily. Deliann could only stare and wonder; he could not remember the last time he'd had an appetite.
"You're not eatin'?"
Deliann rotated one shoulder in a diffident shrug.
"Best friggin' eggs in Alientown. Eat, dammit. I paid for the goddamn things. Don't make me sorry I saved your life." The human snorted a friendly chuckle around his mouthful of food and gave Deliann a nudge with his elbow as though they shared a joke.
Deliann turned his stool to put his back to the counter and leaned on his elbows, watching the occasional passersby scuttle from shelter to shelter, shoulders hunched and necks turtled against the rain.
"Maybe you should have let the ogre kill me," he murmured. "It's only justice."
"Justice? What's that?" the human said with an amiable smile. He turned his palm upward. "Here. Put some justice in my hand. No? Then just tell me what it tastes like, huh? What's it smell like? What color is it?" He shook his head and scooped another forkful of eggs into his mouth. "Don't talk to me about justice. We're both grown-ups here, right?"
Are we? Deliann thought. I've never been quite sure I am.
After a moment, he asked, "Aren't you worried about your job?"
His companion shrugged. "Aw, nah. Rugo's maybe dim as hour three of a two-hour candle, but his heart's in the right place."
"He's a killer."
"Shit, so'm I. Just not today."
"This could cost you more than your job," Deliann said.
He shrugged again. "So? My choice." He hit the word choice with an odd, subtle emphasis.
"I don't understand why you wanted to help me."
"Well, I guess it wasn't to hear you say thanks."
Deliann looked away.
"Heh," the human said. "That wasn't a shot. Save a guy who's tryin' suicide, y
ou don't expect thanks. Guess you learned that one from Kier just now, huh?"
"Yes, I did," Deliann agreed softly. "But I still don't understand."
The human sighed and set down his fork. "It's not real easy to explain. I don't always got a real good reason for the shit I do. Sometimes I just sorta make up my mind, y'know? And once I'm set on somethin' I don't fuzzle around with second thoughts."
"All right. But why?"
"Dunn. I just got thinkin, up in her ladyship's chamber up there, when she was talkin' about Caine and all. She was talkin' about how she knew Caine, and how shit always goes wrong when Caine's around, and all that. And how she figures you're hooked in with Caine, somehow."
"Caine," Deliann murmured. "I don't really know anything about him."
"Well, I do. Knew him pretty good. Wasn't exactly friends exactly, but we was—I guess you could say—friendly acquaintances. He broke my arm once."
"Some friend."
"Hey, it was that or kill me. Shit, I was grateful. Still am. Saved my life, that broken arm, most likely. He broke it the day before the Assumption of Ma'elKoth. See, I useta be a Knight of Cant; not for that arm, I woulda been in Victory Stadium that day, and I probably woulda been killed. Most of my buddies were. Point is, I met my Neela because of that arm; she took care of me for a while—cuz I got a little fever from the break and all—so with the break and the fever, that whack from Caine not only kept me out of the Stadium but out of the Second Succession War. Now I got a home, wife, kid—and a pretty good job just cuz I knew Caine well enough that he'd rather break my arm than kill me. See?"
"No, I don't see," Deliann said. "What does this have to do with me?"
"The thing is, Kier was wrong. Shit don't go bad because Caine's around. Most of the time, shit goes bad by itself. You can usually find somebody to blame it on, if you look hard enough. Just like she was blamin' shit on you. She don't have the guts to face up to what the world was bringin' her. That's what killed Tup and Pischu, y'know: gutlessness. But she can't face that, so she's gotta hang it on you." He gave half a shrug, a silent apology for his employer's weakness, then took another bite of eggs.
"But I don't have to play along," he went on, chewing with his mouth half open. "I say: You never know how shit is gonna play out, not really. So you do the best you can, pay attention, and maybe somethin' happens to make everythin' turn out all right. That's what I did. Why should I kill you for somethin' that wasn't your fault?"
"It was my fault," Deliann said.
"Horseshit."
"No, it was. I should have known. I should have let myself die back in the mountains. Now you're infected, for sure; when you die, that'll be my fault, too."
"So what? Why kill somebody over somethin' that's already done? Mt
me, only good reason to kill a man is over what he's gonna do, you follow?"
"You don't know what HRVP infection is like," Deliann said. "You'll go crazy. You'll start to think everybody hates you, everybody's trying to kill you, even your best friends, your wife, your child—"
"Shit, I get that from a bad hangover."
"So you kill them first. If you live long enough, you will murder everyone who means anything to you. And when you die, you will die in agony."
The human sighed again, picked up his fork, and took another big bite of the eggs. "Yeah, that's gonna suck."
Deliann gaped. "That's it? That's all you have to say?"
"What do you want me to say? The goddess might come back and fix everythin' up. Then, no problem, right? If she don't, well, who knows? Shit might work out. You never know."
"I know," Deliann muttered darkly. "I can feel it. Something's gone wrong. The goddess won't come."
"Maybe. But now look at it the other way: she might. If you never came to Ankhana, you can bet this disease of yours would have made it here anyway. We're downriver from where you got it, right? So if you'd died up there in the mountains, all this shit could still be happenin' here, except nobody would've got the goddess into it. So friggin' relax, pal. You mighta saved the world after all."
"I still feel like it's my fault."
"Yeah, fault." The human shrugged, chewing a fresh mouthful of blood pudding. "That's another one of those things like justice. Don't talk to me about fault until you can spoon me a mouthful of it and let me chew it up. I don't believe in fault."
"What do you believe in?"
"You wanna know what I believe?" The human leaned in and lowered his voice. His kindly eyes took on a conspiratorial twinkle. "This is what I believe: There Are No Rules."
The capitals were clear in his tone, and he searched Deliann's face for a moment, as though this were a recognition code to which he expected some cryptic answer. When he didn't get one, he shrugged and grinned. "Well, there's one rule, maybe. My rule: You don't eat those eggs, I kick your skinny elvish ass and stuff 'em down your throat. You better get started."
After a long, slow, considering moment, Deliann couldn't come up with a reason why he shouldn't, so he turned himself around, and took a bite of the eggs. Even lukewarm, they were delicious: buttery and golden and delicately peppered, slightly crisp around the edges. As Deliann chewed and swallowed and took another bite, the knot that had strangled his guts for weeks began to unclench itself like an opening fist.
He said, "My name's Deliann," and held out his hand.
"Yeah, I know," the human said when he took it. "I'm Tommie. Pleased to meetcha."
"Likewise. Uh, Tommie?"
"Yeah?"
"Well ... I guess—thanks, that's all."
Tommie laughed and gave him another nudge in the ribs with his doubled elbow. "Yeah. Don't mention it. Listen, eat up. It's gettin' dark, and we gotta be goin."
"Going where?"
Tommie winked at him. "I wanna introduce you to some friends of mine."
6
Fire sputtered within a low ring of heat-cracked clay in the center of the room; the chimney hood above it was built of mud brick and stood upon three stout pillars. The room had no windows, and its only furnishings were a crude plank table and a scattering of chairs like the one on which Deliann sat, wrapped in a damp but drying blanket.
He stared into the flames and thought how fire was a living thing.
Fire takes in food—in this case, dried clods of shit, probably bought off one of Lucky janner's muck carts this afternoon—and processes it with oxygen in a chemical reaction that releases the energy that gives it life. Fire does not evolve, though. There is no mutation, no natural selection of survival traits. Fire has no need of these; it is perfect already. Fire is simply fire: though hotter here, redder there, white or gold or transparent as heat shimmer in the desert, flame is ineradicably a single individual, forever born again whenever conditions favor its existence. Kill it, and it resurrects itself elsewhere; itself immutable, it is the very symbol of change.
Small wonder that fire was humanity's first and most persistent god.
The chair in which Deliann sat was almost comfortable, despite its rude construction. The wool blanket he held around his shoulders prickled his chilled, damp skin like nettles, but he didn't mind. He felt disconnected—floating, drifting away—and nothing really mattered too much right now. He'd put himself entirely in Tommie's hands; drifting along in someone else's wake was surprisingly calming.
Deliann was pretty sure that the room to which Tommie had led him was somewhere in the Warrens. He guessed he should have been paying closer attention, but walking head down through the bone-chilling rain, he had needed all his concentration to maintain mindview; only by continuously puffing Flow could he dull the pain from his legs.
The crooked streets of Alientown had given way at some point to the broad blank facades of Industrial Park manufactories and ware-houses, and eventually Tommie and he had threaded twisting alleyways between sagging tenements of moldy plaster framed with rotting, warped timbers. Many of these timbers still showed streaks of blackened char; in the Warrens, little ever went entirely t
o waste. Even a building that burns to the ground will have a few surviving timbers that can still bear weight.
Tommie squatted by the fire, rubbing his hands together and grimacing against the heat. Deliann watched him blankly while his own shivering gradually subsided. Soon, Tommie dragged a chair over to the fire, reversed it, and straddled it with his back to the flames. "Gotta dry my ass," he said apologetically. "Sittin' around in wet pants'll gimme the piles somethin' fierce."
He settled himself in, squirming as though his rear didn't quite fit on the seat, and rested his chin on the chair's back. "These friends of mine, they're gonna be here before too long. You're gonna tell them your story heh, I could stand to hear the whole thing, myself. Then we're all gonna talk about what we want to do about it."
"There's nothing to do about it," Deliann said dully. "It's beyond anything you or I or anyone but Eyyallarann herself can do."
"Sure it is, you take the whole thing at once. I don't know all about it, but like I was tellin' you, I pay attention, so I got a pretty good idea. Trick to dealin' with the big problems is to chop them down into bite-size pieces. Like, all right, I can't save the city. If you're right, I can't even save myself, huh? I've got it, and I'm gonna die. But maybe I can save my wife and my boy."
Deliann looked away. "I hope so."
"Yeah, thanks. Savin' my family: this is what I want. Talkin' to you, this is part of what I'm doin' to get what I want, you follow? If anybody can give me a clue how to save my family, it's you."
"I, ah ..." Deliann coughed harshly, to force the tightness out of his throat. "I'll do what I can to help you, Tommie."
"I believe you. And that's why I'm tryin' to help you."
The firelight behind him haloed his thinning hair, and a pool of red-rimmed shadow crawled across his face.
Deliann squinted at him, but his eyes were lost in the shadow. "Help me do what?"
Tommie chuckled. "Well, that's the question, huh? Listen, somethin' else I learned from Caine—wanna hear it?"
Deliann shrugged.
"It's this," Tommie said "There's only really two things about a man that matter: what he wants, and what he'll do to get it. Everythin' else we pretend is important—whether you're tough, or good-lookin', smart, stupid, honorable, whatever—that's just details."