Well, y’know . . .
I know some gods. Better than I want to. Not one of them gives a shit about your heart.
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine wrote a book that was supposed to be the story of his lives. Or stories of his life, you pick. Anyway: he wrote that what your life means depends on how you tell the story.
If it makes you feel better to pretend I had some noble purpose, knock yourself out. If you’d rather pretend I was driven by guilt, or by personal obligation, or that I just finally grew up enough to want to clean up my own fucking mess, that’s fine too.
This is the story of what happened when I came to the Boedecken. What happened. Not why. The only why is that I made up my mind. I decided, and I went. That’s it. Anybody who needs to know more about why should go ahead and fuck off.
Reasons are for peasants.
My dead wife—the one who decided she’d rather go play goddess than be married—she used to like to say that not everything is about me.
Screw that.
Who’s telling this story, anyway?
I dragged the travel trunk bouncing down over the ribs of the gangplank. At the foot of the plank I took a couple steps to the side to clear the way for the passengers behind. I stood the trunk on end and sat on it.
*All right, you bastard. I’m here.*
I’ve been doing the Actor’s Soliloquy for so many years it’s mostly reflex: whenever my attention starts to wander, I find myself narrating my life in subvocal twitches of lips and tongue and glottis. I used to make a good living at it; back in the day, such subvocal twitches had been registered by a tiny device inside my skull behind my left ear and transmitted a universe away to Earth, where a sophisticated computer algorithm had translated them into a quasithoughtlike internal monologue for the amusement of tens of thousands of narcotized fans who’d paid obscene amounts of money for the illusion of being me.
My life always played better than it lived.
Those days are long gone, but I still monologue. Now I play for an audience of one.
*Dammit, I’m here. How about a hint? A clue? A pillar of cloud? A burning sonofabitching bush?*
I waited, but there was only dockside chatter and the rustling thump of cargo nets, whistles of distant birdsong and the ripple-slap from the river.
God doesn’t talk to me anymore.
“Fine,” I muttered. “Fuck you anyway.”
Maybe He’d decided to hold a grudge for that sword-through-the-brain thing. Which suits me fine, most of the time; I have a grudge or two of my own.
I shoved myself to my feet and dragged the trunk back into the line of passengers filing toward the customs barn.
The queue was minded by spearmen in cheap-looking hauberks, Khryl’s sunburst displayed on their chests in scuffed and faded yellow paint. Their helmets and the shields slung on their backs looked like quality work, though, the sunburst design inlaid in polished brass, and the half-meter blades that tipped their spears were conspicuously well tended. Hand labor on the docks was done by teams of ogrilloi, who wore light tunics in various degrees of stained disrepair. The tunics seemed to be some kind of uniform; each of the various work gangs had its own distinctive design.
They also had their fighting claws sawed blunt.
Each gang also had two or three grills in oversized versions of the sunburst hauberks, with helmets that bore flares of steel bars descending from their lower rims, fanning to guard the neck. These supervisors each carried thick hardwood staves maybe five feet long, their ends capped with steel and knobbed with nailheads.
More interesting were four humans who patrolled the dockside on the backs of heavily muscled horses. No cheap chainmail for them; theirs was so fine-linked it rippled like watered silk, and their sunbursts gleamed with gold leaf. Most interesting of all were their weapons: in addition to the traditional seven-bladed morningstar of the Khryllian armsman, each of them carried slung on a shoulder what looked like the most serious kind of riot gun, despite being filigreed with gold on the intaglioed walnut stocks and chased with electrum: under short straight no-choke barrels, their tube-mags terminated in foot-long, no-frills, cold steel bayonets.
Times change.
Some people blame me for that. Go figure.
I gave a sidelong squint to the nearest of the horses until my attention drew its gaze. And got nothing. The horse’s stare was bleak: dead as a chip of stone. Curls of foam dripped around the pivots of the curb bit wedged deep into his mouth. A martingale with straps an inch thick locked his head down. And spending all day hauling around two hundred fifty pounds of chainmailed pain-in-the-lumbar wasn’t doing the poor fucker any favors either.
It hurt me just to look at, and I don’t even like horses all that much. Horses in general. About all I can say for horses in general is they’re a hell of a lot better than people in general.
The dockside was eerily quiet, despite the crowd of passengers from the riverboat, despite the teams of sullen hulking dockers cranking donkey-wheel cranes to swing cargo nets off or onto barges, loading or unloading chockedwheel wagons that stood with yokes and traces empty, despite all the sausage carts, the pastry kiosks and the dozens of little freestanding market stalls thrown up in the shade of high warehouse walls. When the riverboat’s steam whistle shrieked noon into the silence, people all over the dockside jerked and jumped and then laughed at themselves—but even the laughter was subdued. Self-conscious. Nervous. People instinctively knew that the quiet here was no accident.
The dockside was quiet because the Khryllians like it that way.
It wasn’t a good quiet. It wasn’t library quiet, temple quiet, evening-by-the-fire quiet. It was lying in bed without moving because Dad’s drunk in the hall and you don’t want to give him the idea of coming into your bedroom quiet. When your authority comes straight from God, shit always turns ugly.
And these were the good guys. I’ve known my share of Khryllians. And they are good guys. Honest, upright, true-motherfucking-blue do-or-die parfit gentil knights of renown. That just makes it worse.
As long as I was just shuffling along in line, it wasn’t too bad. A couple of feet every minute or two, dragging the trunk, leaning on it when I had the chance, shading my eyes against the sun to watch the grills work the docks—
I could take it. Being there.
I didn’t have to do anything. Didn’t have to make any moves. Nobody got hurt. Nobody died. Nothing unlocked the black vault inside my chest. Not even the Spire, a thousand-odd feet of whitestone looming behind my left shoulder. The glare off its facing made a pretty good excuse not to look up at Hell.
The passenger queue snaked to one side of the customs barn; most of the smothering semi-gloom inside was full of cargo crates and livestock and whiteshirted human clerks with clipboards, charcoal pencils in stained fingers and behind blackened ears, damp seeping rings below armpits. Autumn sun heated the corrugated steel roof to a medium broil that cooked human sweat, cow and pig farts, machine oil, wood mold and rotting straw into a chewy stench, familiar, suffocating.
Smelled like civilization.
I passed the time reading an enormous poster of fading edge-curled parchment that listed in six languages the bewildering variety of items which nonSoldiers of Khryl were forbidden to possess or import into Purthin’s Ford. Some were understandable enough: a variety of impedimentia related to combat magick, edged weapons with blades longer than two-thirds handbreadth, that kind of thing. But others made me shake my head. Grapevine cuttings? Beverages of greater than 17 percent alcohol? Live mealworms?
The lower margin contained two vividly recent additions painted in doublesize brushstrokes of arterial scarlet:
CHEMICAL EXPLOSIVES
FIREARMS
A handful of customs inspectors worked their way among the crates and nets and cargo pallets. They wore circlets of what I guessed might be electrum strapped around their skulls; from those circlets depended an array of individually jointed mechanical arms, each of
which supported a lens. The lenses varied in size and color, and the inspectors would squint through each in turn while examining a suspect container. They looked bored, as did the inspector who stood beside the passenger queue, similarly scrutinizing hand luggage.
I smiled bland-friendly as the inspector examined me and my trunk through a succession of six different lenses. All I had with me were clothes, toiletries and gold. The inspector frowned. “You show positive for weapons.”
“Can’t help that.”
“Extend your hands.”
I did, palms up. Open. Empty.
The inspector switched lenses, then nodded to himself, muttering as he jotted notes on his clipboard. “Crimson, grade six—arms, legs . . . hmp. And head.” He looked up. “Monastic?”
“Used to be.”
He nodded. “Very well. Pass along. Be advised that Khryl does not recognize Monastic sovereignty. On the Battleground, you are fully subject to the Laws of Engagement.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“Be sure to examine the Laws in your visitor’s guide. Monastic training beyond grade four designates you an Armed Combatant at all times. Unarmed Exemption never applies.”
“Grade four?”
“Combat grades are detailed in your copy of the Laws. Grades beyond four involve the use of magick. Or, in your case, Esoteric Control Disciplines.”
“You seem to know more than most about Monastics.”
“I am a Soldier of Khryl. We know more than most about fighting.”
“Huh. Fair enough.” I leaned a little closer and lowered my voice. “You get a lot of trouble with that stuff?” I nodded toward the poster. “Firearms and explosives?”
“More every day. Ever see what a gun can do to a man?”
“Once or twice.”
The inspector shrugged down at the paper on his clipboard. “Bombs are worse.”
“I’d rather get blown up than a couple other things I could name.”
“Yes.” The inspector squinted up. “Know anything about the Smoke Hunt?”
The back of my neck tingled. Smoke Hunt. Like an echo of something I almost heard . . . Finally I shrugged. “Fuck all.”
“May Khryl grant you keep it that way. Pass along.”
I shuffled forward. This trip was turning interesting already. Not in a good way. But I hadn’t expected good.
The stamp clerk at the head of the line didn’t bother to look up. “Name and nation.”
“Dominic Shade.” I fished documents out of a worn leather purse that hung from my belt. “Freeman of Ankhana.”
The clerk took the documents from his hand and opened them, but instead of reading them he glanced to one side, where a mountain of blond human in glittering plate armor stood at parade rest, visored greathelm under his left arm. The mountain scowled faintly, staring.
I gave the mountain back the ghost of a smile. I learned twenty-five years ago that I can’t be read by the truthsense of even the most powerful Khryllian Lord. And nobody better than Knight Attendant—barely out of novitiate—gets stuck with shit duty like checkpoint verification.
Not that it mattered; I was telling the truth. I mostly do.
Dominic’s the name I’d gone by when I first came to Home, playing a promising novice at the Abbey of Garthan Hold. In the depths of the gambling hells of Kirisch-Nar, where men fight beasts barehanded in the star-shaped arenas called catpits, I am still remembered as Shade. I was granted the freedom of the Ankhanan Empire some three years ago—not long after I murdered the Empire’s god.
But let that part go.
The Knight’s lips tightened. The clerk nodded absently. “Welcome to Purthin’s Ford, Freeman Shade. I see here you are Armed grade six—impressive for an Incommunicant. Monastic?”
“Retired.”
“Ah. Very well.” He made a note. “Current occupation?”
“Business traveler.”
“Really?” The clerk sniffed and looked up through his brows. “We don’t often see Armed Combatants making careers in sales. What’s your line?”
“Wholesale weights and measures.”
“Indeed.”
I tipped a bland wink toward the Knight Attendant. “Prepare, lest ye be weighed and found wanting, know what I mean?”
The Knight Attendant’s left eyebrow twitched. Fractionally.
“Yes.” The clerk sounded less impressed than the Knight looked. “Duration and purpose of your visit?”
“A few days. Maybe a week or two.”
“And you’re here on business?”
Maybe it was worth telling the truth here, too. “I’m here to see my brother.”
“His name?”
“Orbek.”
“Orbek Shade?”
“No.” I deadpanned the scowling Knight. “Black Knife. Orbek Black Knife. Sept Taykar.”
The Knight’s scowl evaporated into blank astonishment. The clerk dropped his pencil, fumbled for it. Charcoal crumbled in his fingers. “Oh, very funny.” He brushed at charcoal crumbs, smearing black across his table.
“If you say so.”
“What’s his name?”
I nodded at the Knight. “Ask him.”
The clerk turned, mouth opening. The Knight’s astonishment had now given way to naked suspicion. “Our Lord hears no lie.”
The clerk pointed his gape back my way. “Your brother’s an ogrillo?”
“Is that a problem?” I turned a palm upward. “Other than for my mother?”
“I, ah, I ah, I—don’t know. I suppose not, er—”
The Knight’s eyes narrowed over a mouth gone hard. “You claim this socalled Black Knife as brother?”
“How many times do you want me to say it?”
“There are no Black Knives in Purthin’s Ford.” The Knight turned away, lifting a finger clad in jointed steel. A liveried page scampered toward him, and the Knight spoke in tones too low to be heard through the general bustle.
Couldn’t read his lips, either. Call it a wash.
The page headed for the cityside door at a walk with an eager tilt of the torso that hinted it wanted to be a run.
Call it a wash with dirty water.
I pushed a sigh through my teeth. “So all right, let’s go, huh?”
The clerk looked blank. “I’m sorry?”
“Is there a law against family visits? Is there some goddamn tax to pay? Do I need a dispensation from the friggin’ Justiciar?”
“I, ah, well—no, I don’t—”
“Then stamp my fucking papers, huh? It stinks in here.”
“Freeman Shade.” That mountain of Khryllian steel and meat loomed at my shoulder. “Soldiers of Khryl are treated with courtesy. And deference.”
“Yeah?” I showed teeth to eyes as blue and empty as a winter sky while I channeled the ghost of me at twenty-five. “Hey, sorry.”
I turned back to the clerk. “Please stamp my fucking papers.”
There came the metallic rustle that is the only sound well-tended armor makes when its wearer shifts his weight; it didn’t quite bury the strangled growl the Knight failed to lock inside his throat. “Soldiers of Khryl are not spoken to in this manner—”
“No? Then I guess just now we all must’ve, what, nodded off and had the same dream?” I showed more teeth. “Does this mean we’re in love?”
Cunningly jointed gauntlets creaked with the clench of fists. “Freeman Shade, you are Armed as you stand, and your manner constitutes Lawful Challenge. Must I Answer?”
The second half of my life leaked back into me with a long, slow sigh of old-enough-to-know-better. I jammed the monster back in its vault, but I still had to lower my head before I could speak. Even at fifty, I can’t make myself back down while looking a man in the eye.
“No,” I said. “I apologize. To both of you.”
The Knight glowered into my peripheral vision, waiting for an explanation, an excuse, a Fatigue from my long journey or an I was only joking.
But I just stared
at the floor.
“You apologize.”
“Yeah.” What do you want, flowers and a fucking box of candy? my young ghost snarled, but I fixed my gaze resolutely below the Knight’s chin and bit down till my jaw ached.
The Knight took a long, slow breath.
Then another.
“Accepted.”
“May I go now? Sir?”
The Knight lifted another finger, and another page scampered up. “Take the freeman’s trunk to the lucannixheril.”
“Hey—”
“Freeman Shade.” The Knight turned an open hand toward a nearby door of iron. It stood open. Down the hall beyond were more iron doors. They were closed. Each iron door had a head-high judas gate. “Wait in there. The page will direct you.”
“My papers—”
“You will not need them.”
“I said I was sorry—”
“And your apology was accepted. Wait in there.”
“Am I under arrest?”
The Knight inclined his very young, very blond head. “If you like.”
“For what?”
“Because it is my prerogative to declare you so, freeman.” His face could have been one of the walls. “As an Armed Combatant grade six, it is your right under the Laws of Engagement to Challenge my authority.” He nodded fractionally toward a sunlit opening on the far wall of the customs barn without shifting his expressionless gaze. “Should you wish to make such a Challenge, a sanctified Arena awaits through yonder archway.”
“Are you f—? Uh. You’re not.”
“The matter can also be settled here. You need only strike.”
“Strike.” I squinted at the Knight. The rules had changed since the last time I was in the Boedecken. Maybe because of the last time I was in the Boedecken.
The young Knight offered a bland smile that never rose past the temperate zone south of his arctic eyes. “If I have overstepped, Khryl will favor your cause; Our Lord of Valor is also lord of justice.”
“It’s a swell theory.” I lifted a hand to my face; a headache had begun to chew the backs of my eyes. “Have that page go easy on my trunk, will you? It’s new.”