Now she didn't even have hands anymore—the big nimbly man had squeezed them until they turned into just one wrist, like her arms were a big wishbone, and her one big wrist just connected right with the big wrist of the rumbly man and she could feel his blood pumping in through her arms and hers pumping out through his.
The big rumbly man bared his big sharp teeth down at her. Now, child: Where is the river?
Faith could only shake her head dumbly; she couldn't stop looking at where his big hairy wrist melted into her two little smooth ones. Something seemed to be caught in her throat, like she'd swallowed some kind of little rat and it was climbing back up out of her stomach with its little needly claws scratching little pieces out of her and making her taste blood like that time she fell down and her tooth went through her lip
The river, child, the big rumbly man—Tan'elKoth, she knew his name now, it flowed into her with his blood—said, louder. I have not come so far only to be denied.
He was getting angry, too, really angry, and the anger was hurting her, burning her wrists and her arms and scorching her chest and making the rat in her throat struggle harder and harder to get out.
WHERE IS THE DAMNED RIVER? WHY CAN'T I FEEL THE RIVER?
And he was so angry that he made her even more scared, and then the rat finally made it all the way up to her mouth. It pushed out through her teeth and it wasn't really a rat at all.
It was a scream.
Scream and scream and scream and scream.
Because she would never be alone in here again.
5
Faith's scream rebounded off the surgery's walls and reflected upon itself until it spiraled up like a feedback shriek. It made Avery want to cover her ears and crumple into a corner; instead she yanked on Tan'elKoth's arm. It felt like a concrete lamp pole. "Stop it!" she shouted. She could barely hear her own voice. "Stop! You're hurting her!"
He snarled an incomprehensible reply and made an impatient shrugging twitch of the arm that shook her off and sent her spinning against a wall with shocking force. Half stunned, she came back at him anyway, snarling, her fingers hooking toward his eye. He caught her arm absently—most of his attention was still on Faith—and held her with irresistible strength.
"Stop it!" Avery shouted again. "Hurt her again and I'll see you dead! You hear me? I'll see you dead for this!"
Controlling her effortlessly with his grip on her wrist, he could ignore her. Faith kept screaming, and he bared his teeth as he leaned over her, as if he wanted to bite her face. Avery struggled desperately, uselessly, until she realized that Tan'elKoth had caught her with his maimed hand. She made a fist and slammed it onto the bandaged nub that was all that remained of his little finger.
He gasped, and his hand sprang open. She swung her fist again, overhand like she was serving at tennis, right into the swollen mass of bruise over his eye. "Leave her alone!"
He didn't even wince. Before she quite understood what was happening he had her by the throat. He lifted her off the floor and held her at arm's length; she scrabbled uselessly at his iron fingers. His maimed hand became a fist. "I can kill you," he said. "Do you comprehend this?"
His grip on her throat choked off any possible response; she couldn't even nod. "How can you help this child if you are dead?" he asked in a simple and reasonable tone, and he held her there while he waited for some kind of answer.
Avery closed her eyes, and her hands fell to her sides.
If Tan'elKoth killed her now, at least this madness that had overwhelmed her life would end. Instead, he set her down gently and released his grip on her throat.
"Calm the child, Businessman. She may injure herself."
Avery summoned the strength to stay on her feet, to open her eyes and walk unsteadily to the table where Faith convulsed against the restraints. "Hush, Faith," she murmured, stroking the child's face. "Shh, girl. Grandmaman is here. Grandmaman is here, and all is well."
A tear rolled over her sharp cheekbone and dropped into Faith's hair.
Faith's struggles soon quieted, and when Faith slipped back into her silent unconsciousness, Avery's strength deserted her. She sagged against the stainless steel lip of the surgical table, but even with that support she could not hold her feet; she dropped to her knees, covered her face with her hands, and sobbed.
"Businessman," Tan'elKoth said gently, "please . . . Avery, please don't cry."
His huge warm hands took her shoulders and gently lifted her from the floor; he guided her to the surgery's single chair, and when she sank into it, he knelt at her side.
"Please, Avery," he murmured, sliding his arm around her. "There is enough of ... of Karl in me that I cannot bear your tears ..."
"What is happening to me?" Avery whispered brokenly through her covering hands. "This is not me. This is not who I am. I don't understand what is happening ..
"Where love advances, reason retreats," he said kindly. "It is not unusual to find the corpses of our illusions left to rot on that particular field."
"I won't let you hurt her," Avery said. She took her hands away from her face and met his eyes. "You can kill me. But while I'm alive, I'll do whatever it takes to stop you."
"I understand you. You must understand me." Tan'elKoth rose and went to the surgical table. His hand hovered an inch above Faith's hair, as though he feared to touch her.
"What you feel for this child, I feel for each of my Children," he said. "There are millions, Businessman. Each is precious to me in ways that surpass description. My dreams are filled with echoes from their future. Those echoes are of screams."
He turned back to her and spread his hands in appeal. "What would you not do, to protect your grandchild? What should I not do, to protect my Children?"
"I won't let you hurt her," Avery repeated.
His gaze shifted fractionally, as though his eye had been drawn to some movement in the room beyond. His face twisted through a brief, almost invisible spasm: loathing, disgust—and, shockingly, fear.
Avery trembled, suddenly chilled to the bone. What could frighten Tan'elKoth, she didn't ever want to know.
"It's not me," he said slowly, "who will hurt her, Businessman."
Hesitantly, afraid of what she would see, she followed his gaze.
Pressed against the surgery's window, face slack with the blankly ravenous desire of a starving Temp outside a butcher shop, was Arturo Kollberg.
6
"How long will he stand there?" Avery asked softly.
Kollberg had pressed himself silently against the window for hours, now; for how many hours, Avery could not say. She paced back and forth, hugging herself against constant shivering, though the room was not cold.
Tan'elKoth sat on the chair, facing away from the window, leaning over Faith in an attitude of concentration. "It is impossible to predict," he said, his tone distant, bleached free of emotion. "Sometimes he stays for a few minutes. Once for nearly a day. Laborer Kollberg comes and goes at his own pleasure; what may spark this pleasure is not only unknowable, but repellent to speculate upon."
"Are you making any' progress?"
He shook his head. "No. I had expected to find the link as soon as I established contact with her mind, but I did not. I presume that the trauma of her mother's murder caused her to wall off that part of her consciousness, not unlike the dissociative reaction that sometimes creates a splinter personality."
"You knew," she said. "You knew about the murder in advance." "You will recall that I tried to warn you."
"Did you try to warn her? Pallas? What did you say to her?"
"She and Caine both understood their risk," he said, then added in a bitter undertone, "—better, perhaps, than did I."
"What happens if you can't find this link of yours?"
"As I explained: the sole way we can protect this child is to make her useful to the creature that once was Kollberg. If we fail in that, then we, too, will be superfluous. Death follows hard upon that state, Businessman."
"T
here are worse things than death," Avery said.
"Indeed," he agreed. "And you will likely become intimately acquainted with several of them. I have recounted how Kollberg passes his leisure time."
Avery looked through the window into those empty, hungry eyes; she began once more to shiver. "Is there anything more we can be doing?"
Tan'elKoth shrugged dispiritedly. "I can only inspect the resonances of mind that might theoretically have produced her link to the river. You might say that I am searching for the link, but you must understand that the mind—even the mind of a child—is, metaphorically speaking, a very large place."
Avery nodded toward Kollberg. "Does he understand that?" "I cannot say what he does and does not understand."
"He doesn't even seem human anymore," she said.
"He is profoundly human," Tan'elKoth said. "He is humanity concentrated and distilled: refined to its essential core. What you mean to say, I think, is that he is no longer a man."
"You're saying he's more than a man."
"On the contrary. He's quite a bit less."
She thought about that for a long time.
Later, she asked, "And what happens once you find the link?"
Tan'elKoth turned his gaze aside from Faith's sleeping face, and he sighed. "That, at least, is no mystery. Life—existence itself—is a pattern of Flow; everything, living or otherwise, is a patterning of the primodial energy of the universe. We see things as discrete individuals only because we are trained so. All that exists is, in the end, knots within the weave that is the universe."
Tan'elKoth's tone remained dry and precise, but his face grew ever more grim. "Chambaraya is, one might say, a smaller knot of mind within the Worldmind: what the elves call T'nnalldion. Through Faith, the Bog can get its corporate fingers into that knot, unbind it, and tie it again in their own image."
Avery shook her head blankly, uncomprehending. Tan'elKoth's expression was bleak as an open grave. "They'll make of it a world like this one."
"Is that all?" Avery asked, frowning. "You make it sound like a catastrophe."
"It will be an Armageddon unimaginable; it will be genocide on a scale of which Stalin could not have dreamed."
"Wiping out magick doesn't seem like such a bad thing."
"Businessman," Tan'elKoth said patiently, "you don't understand. Magick has not been wiped out on Earth; it is a function of Flow, which is the energy of existence itself. But its state can be altered. And it has been. Once, Earth was home to fully as many magickal creatures as was Overworld: dragons and sea serpents and mermaids, rocs and djann and primals and stonebenders and all. But creatures such as these require higher levels of certain frequencies of Flow than does humanity; as the pattern of Earth degraded, these creatures not only died, but their very bones gave up their integrity. They vanished into the background Flow of your universe."
"You're saying magick works on Earth?" Avery said skeptically.
"Magick works, as you say, everywhere. But the manner in which magick works on Earth is a local aberration; the physics of this planet and its spatial surrounds have been altered to conditions that favor the ascendance of humanity."
"And what's wrong with that?"
"I did not say it was wrong. I do not debate morality. In my zeal to protect my Children, I once favored such a fate for my own world. But it is unnatural. It is both the cause and the result of the ugly twisting of human nature that we see around us, and of the society in which you force yourselves to live."
"Earth's not so bad—"
"How would you know?" Tan'elKoth said acidly. "It is only in these past few days that you have had contact with the actual realities of Earth. Are you having fun?" He waved toward the window, where Kollberg now had one hand openly kneading his groin while he leaned one cheek and the side of his open mouth against the glass. Avery flinched and looked away.
She hugged herself more tightly. "I don't understand. If you hate what they're going to do, why are you helping them?"
"I am not helping them!" Suddenly he was on his feet, towering over her, shaking an enormous fist. "I am helping you. I am helping Faith. I am ..." The passion drained out of him as swiftly as it had arisen. He let his fist open and fall limp against his thigh. "I am trying to go home."
Outside the window, Kollberg panted like an overheated dog.
"Well," Avery said finally. "I'm afraid you're out of luck"
"How do you mean?"
She shook her head. "You're such a man, Professional. That's why you can't find this link of yours."
"I do not understand."
"Of course you don't. That's what I mean: You're a man. You think this link is with the river. It wasn't. Faith spoke of it, in the car on our way back to Boston when I first picked her up. She was quite clear about it. Her link was never with the river. It was with her mother."
"Her mother-?"
"Her dead mother, now."
Tan'elKoth's eyes narrowed. "I have been a fool," he said. He spun and seated himself once again at Faith's side, bending over her with redoubled energy. "Power," he murmured. "All that is required is a usable source of power—"
"What are you doing? She's dead, Tan'elKoth. There is no link."
"Dead, yes—but the pattern of her consciousness persists, even as your son's does within me. It was trapped at the instant of her passing. It is powerless, yes—having no body to inform it with will. It is analogous to a computer program stored on disk, you might say: a structure of information that requires only a computer on which to run, and the necessary power to activate."
"What kind of power?"
From the doorway behind her, the soulless rasp of Arturo Kollberg said, "My kind of power."
During his years of walking the world, the crooked knight came to find himself bemazed within a dark and trackless wood. In this wood, all paths led equally to death.
The crooked knight did not lose hope; he turned to various guides for help and direction. His first guide was Youthful Dream. Later, he turned to Friendship, then Duty, and finally Reason, but each left him more lost than had the one before.
So the crooked knight gave himself up for dead, and simply sat.
He would be sitting there still, but for a breeze that came upon him then: a breeze that smelled of wide-open spaces, of limitless skies and bright sun, of ice and high mountains.
It was the wind from the dark angel's wings.
FOURTEEN
A few days before the Festival of the Assumption, a new report detonated like a suitcase nuke in the heart of the net. Actors in Ankhana had witnessed the riverboat arrival of a Monastic delegation, an entourage of dozens of functionaries, and servants, and heavily armed friars with the sword-edged eyes of combat veterans. The delegation had been met at the Industrial Park docks by an honor guard suitable for vassal kings and the entire capital army band; the assemblage had formed a huge parade, a processional that surrounded a large wheeled cart drawn by four hump-backed oxen.
The band had struck up a solemn hymn, "Justice of God," a standard of the Church of the Beloved Children of Ma'elKoth. The parade marched north up Rogues' Way, through the midst of the Industrial Park on its broadest boulevard, Artisans' Angle, then south along Nobles' Way, past the makeshift barricades that sealed the smoldering ruins of Alientown, across the rebuilt Knights' Bridge into Old Town, and on down Nobles' Way to the South Bank, west the length of Dukes' Street and north along Rogues' Way once again, crossing onto Old Town before turning east along the grand central artery of Gods' Way.
The entire circumference of this rough spiral was lined with cheering, jeering, hooting crowds, drawn by the thundering music and the triumphant proclamations of the heralds that preceded the parade, trumpeting the announcement of the capture of the Enemy of God.
On the cart was a tall platform; on the platform was chained a medium-sized, rather unremarkable-looking man with dark hair and a ragged tenday's growth of black beard. By midnight, nearly everyone on Earth had heard the news.
Caine was alive.
2
His Radiant Holiness Toa-Sytell, Patriarch of Ankhana and faithful Steward of the Empire, leaned on the chill stone of the windowsill and stared at the eastward sweep of Gods' Way. With the sun westering toward twilight, the shadowy room had grown cool. Only the lightest brush of autumnal ochre warmed the top of the Sen-Dannalin Wall, but the gold-leafed spires of the neighboring Temple of the Katherisi blazed like bonfires; Toa-Sytell shaded his eyes against the glare.
An occasional wind-shift brought twists of smoke past this window: smoke from buildings that still smoldered in Alientown. The Patriarch hated that smoke. It seemed to fill his head in choking billows that strangled his thoughts. And below the ruins of Allentown, the fighting still continued.
Thinking about it made him queasy. He had been troubled in both stomach and head of late, as though he had become the city that he ruled, and the conflict had given him fever. He was acutely, almost painfully aware of the fighting that might be going on now, in the caverns below the city—below, perhaps, the palace itself. Even after these several days of what the army had begun to call the Caverns War, he couldn't get used to it. It made the earth itself seem unsteady, temporary, dangerously frangible, as though any street where he walked was only a soap bubble, decaying in the sunlight, and at any second it might vanish and he would fall, and fall, and fall.
So he no longer left the palace.
Down on Gods' Way, an avenue so broad it was almost a plaza, the people of Ankhana crowded shoulder to shoulder in bright festival colors, a tightly woven carpet of knobbled heads and hats and hair planed almost smooth by range and elevation. No sign yet of the triumphal procession that brought Caine in public disgrace to the Donjon—but faintly to the Patriarch's ear came the distance-thinned strains of "Justice of God," and he allowed himself a slim smile as chill as the stone on which he leaned.