“I wouldn’t,” Fist said. “Get close enough to touch it and he’ll kill you.”
“Hah?”
“I’m serious.”
“He’s not dead? He looks dead. He smells dead.”
“He’s really, really good at faking.”
Orbek rolled his eyes. “More fuck-me Monastery crap-ass.”
“Also why he’s not bleeding much. He would have killed me already, except he knows that if he moves you’ll shoot him again.”
“Maybe I shoot him anyway.”
“Let’s try talking one time.”
“You can talk him back from being dead?”
“Could be.” Jonathan Fist cocked his head. “So when you chew down to the gristle, Brother Whogivesashit,” he said, “this is all about the girl, isn’t it?”
After about ten seconds of motionless silence—long enough that he began to wonder if he might be wrong—Tanner released a long, slow sigh, and said, “Fuck.”
“Fuck the city. I’d burn the world to save her.”
— “CAINE” (PFNL. HARI MICHAELSON)
For Love of Pallas Ril
“If you move very, very slowly, he probably won’t shoot you again,” Jonathan Fist said to the dying assassin. “That can’t be comfortable.” Very, very slowly, Tanner rolled himself off his crossbow. “You’ll excuse me not getting up.”
The front of his tunic glistened with blood, black in the moonlight. “What do you fuckers want to know?”
Orbek leveled the rifle. “How about one reason we shouldn’t torture you till we get bored, then shoot you in the head?”
“Please yourself,” Tanner said. His voice was cold as the stone he lay on, and had the flattened urban whine of Seven Wells. “There’s nowhere I have to be.”
Fist sighed. “I liked you better folksy.”
“Well, whatever suits you just tickles me plumb to death.”
“Yeah, like that.”
“Maybe start with your name,” Orbek said. “Also why you’re trying to kill my little brother.”
Tanner lifted his head and frowned at Fist. “Did he say brother?”
“It’s a long story.”
“It would have to be.”
The young ogrillo took a step forward and peeled his lips away from his tusks. “Your name, fucker.”
“Orbek. You’re too close.”
He looked at Fist. “What’s he gonna do? Bleed on me?”
“Well, shit, Orbek, what the fuck would I know about it? It’s not like I know shit about fighting or anything. You want to put your grey leather ass inside the reach of a guy who just now came within an ace of beating me to death while armed with nothing but an empty crossbow and a bad attitude, you go right the fuck ahead. I’ll just sit over here with my broken wrist and my broken ankle and cheer you on until my fucking eyes swell shut, huh?”
Orbek glowered, but took a step back. Then another. “Guess it’s no trouble to shoot him from over here.”
“It was no trouble to shoot him from a hundred yards uphill. Which is where you need to go back to,” Fist said. “Really. Right now.”
Cords bulged in Orbek’s neck. “First he says his name.”
“Y’know, I was lying there wondering why a grill would carry knives. Didn’t make sense,” Tanner said. “But now I see you favor long sleeves, and that pretty much answers—”
Orbek snapped the rifle to his shoulder. “The next you say that ain’t your name—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Fist said. “Don’t you assholes realize you want the same thing?”
They looked at him. He was too tired to make a joke out of it, and some of the pain had begun to trickle through his Control Discipline. “He wants to shoot you. You want to be shot. Both of you need to back the fuck off and give me some room to work.”
Tanner looked skeptical. “What’s in it for me?”
“If you want to find out, quit fucking around.”
“Is that how you always play it?”
“Only with you. And only when I’ve got you bleeding out. Orbek, take a fucking hike. If you spot the horse-witch, let her know where we are.”
“Easy peasy. I tell my horse.”
“Your horse?”
“You don’t know this? What you say to the herd, she knows.”
“Huh.”
“You be careful, little brother.” The big ogrillo backed his way into the darkness, rifle still covering Tanner.
Jonathan Fist watched him go, then nodded to the fallen assassin. “If it’s any consolation, you are better than anybody I’ve even heard of. Not just better than me; you’re better than people think I am. I feel like I should know who you are.”
Tanner’s snort sounded more like a wet cough. “Only fuckups get famous.” He flicked an apologetic hand. “No offense.”
Fist waved it off. “Listen, I don’t care what your real name is—”
“You can call me Heywood, Lord Jablohmie, Marquess of Jammit and the Eleventh Earl of Upyourass.”
“Yeah, okay, what are we, twelve years old?”
“How’s your wrist?”
“Broken. How’s your sucking chest wound?”
“Oh, serve one up, why don’t you,” he wheezed. “Let’s just say I’ve got things under what our folks call Control.”
Fist nodded. “Like I was saying: I don’t care about your name, or what abbey you’re from. I’m not even going to ask about your mission, because, let’s see, we’re already through the revenge-for-your-friend story. Next would be a freelance bounty.”
“Grateful as the Young Faltane is for all your help in this difficult time, you did smoke his father.”
“And the one below that is probably a Council of Brothers shoot-on-sight for Aktiri.”
“Damned gentlemanly of you to take out Dane and Blackwood for me. And once you’re over, I get your thousand royals too.”
“Three layers of story is standard. You’ve probably got six more. Forget that shit. The only story that interests me is something like the truth.”
“Good luck with that.”
“It’s the girl. The horse-witch. You’re the one who put together the outfit—you just let Dane run it because it kept him and Blackwood occupied. Out of your hair.”
Tanner closed his eyes. “You know I won’t tell you.”
“Rounding up the witch-herd would have been your idea too, though I bet you had the Count thinking it was his; we both know the late Count didn’t have many sharp spears on his rack. Which got you an excuse to bring an assload of hardguys into the hills to watch your back while you hunted down the horse-witch.”
“She’s right about one thing,” Tanner said. “You talk a lot.”
“The legend of the horse-witch centers in the lands around Faltane’s county; the farther south I went, the more people knew about her. The shoulder wound worked out good for you—got you out of the red work, which left you plenty of time to talk to the people down there. About the horse-witch.”
“You’ve got a thing for her,” Tanner said. “I get that. Me, I like mine extra-curvy, but whatever waxes your banister, you know?”
“You didn’t make a mistake at the notch. You wanted me to know somebody was on my track, because you knew I’d make for someplace quiet where I have backup and you don’t. You figured that place would be somewhere in the vicinity of the witch-herd, and once my pet sniper and I were out of the way, there’d be no one between you and her.”
“Charmin’ story.”
“Hangs together pretty well, given my recent guided tour through your festival of blunt force trauma,” Fist said. “Notice how I worked through that whole story without asking any questions you won’t answer?”
“And nicely worked it was.”
“I know there’s no way to force information out of you. But I’m getting to a question. I know you’re going to lie. But while you come up with your lie, there’s some shit I want you to keep in mind.”
“You must be the talkiest
damn killer east of the Teeth.”
“I came up through the Monasteries, same as you. Trained for and entered the Esoteric Service, same as you. And I swore, without deception or mental reservation, our oath to uphold and advance the Human Future. Same as you.”
“Except I never broke mine.”
“Yeah, well, if I were as good a man as you are, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“This ain’t a conversation, it’s a goddamn filibuster with occasional sardonic commentary.”
“Do you get that you and me, we might really be on the same team?”
Tanner stared at him. Muscles bulged at the hinge of his jaw, and Fist could see a tightness thinning the skin around his eyes, and decided he’d better jump to the kill, because it looked like Tanner could lose his concentration sometime in the next few minutes. Once his Control Disciplines slipped he might bleed out in seconds.
“If we’re enemies … well, it’s not complicated. The Monasteries will send other guys. I’ll kill them. They’ll send more guys. I’ll kill them too, then I’ll kill the men who sent them. If I have to, I’ll kill the entire Council of fucking Brothers. I will burn down every fucking Monastery in the world and salt the earth on which they stood. Look in my eyes and tell me I’m just kidding.”
Tanner didn’t. He turned his face away, and whispered into the night. “The Monasteries are … aware … of the facts surrounding the True Assumption of Ma’elKoth.”
“If we’re not on the same side, you’ve lost nothing. If we are, you’ve won everything.”
“You have the damnedest way of interrogating a person I ever heard of.”
“I know who you’re after. All I want to know is why. What is it about her that the Monasteries want her dead?”
“It’s …” Tanner scrubbed weakly at his face with one hand. He pressed the other to two of the holes in his chest. “Look, it’s a capture, not a kill. The arrows, the quarrels, they’re all charged with Hold. Even the one I shot at you. Nonlethal.”
“Which was why you just about put it through my heart.”
“You startled me.”
“And then you decided to open my skull with the lath.”
“Look at it from my side,” he said. “Here I am trying to creep my friend Jonnie Fist and give him a nice nap—just long enough for me to get in, get the girl, and blow. Then all of a sudden there’s flashes and thunderclaps and something hits the rock so close to my face that my hair’s still full of granite chips, and my friend Jonnie’s around the corner telling me he’s not Jonnie at all, he’s the single scariest motherfucker in the entire recorded history of scary motherfuckers, and he wants me dead. Except he wants to hurt me first, and hurt my family after. What would you do?”
“Lie my balls off, just like you,” he said. “Get the girl and blow where?”
“Someplace dark and quiet would be my guess.”
“She’ll die first.”
“I know.” Tanner tried to settle himself into a less uncomfortable position, apparently without success. “I’ve killed her twice myself.”
Jonathan Fist tried to think of something to say more intelligent than, “Huh,” with a similarly unsatisfying result.
“Hence the nonlethal, you follow?”
“Is it a coming-back-to-life thing?”
“She doesn’t. It’s more like replacements. We’ve got remains of at least five of her already.”
“Five.”
“Five confirmed. Verified kills. A couple dozen probables. As near as we’ve been able to tell, there’s only one of her at a time, but somehow the world never seems to run out.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Me neither. It’s not my end of the business.”
Fist rubbed his forehead, which reopened a cut, and Control Disciplines or not this was all starting to really fucking hurt. “So what is she?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
Fist nodded, which made his head hurt even more. “Have you tried asking her?”
Tanner stared.
Fist shrugged. “Unless you’d rather lie there and bleed while we guess some more.”
“Well, when you put it that way …” He shrugged. “There’s a guy on the Council of Brothers who’s pushing a crazy theory, but at least he’s got a theory. Damon of Janthogen Bluff.”
“I know him. He’s not the crazy theory type,” Fist said. “He’s probably the sanest guy I ever met.”
“He thinks it’s spontaneous theogony.”
“Come again?”
“Spontaneous theogony. That’s when—”
“I know what it means, goddammit. Seriously?”
“She is nothing like an ordinary person.”
“She’s not much like a god either.” He tried to shrug. It hurt. “That’s an informed opinion.”
“So I hear,” Tanner said. “Things do start to get strange in her vicinity, though. In the vicinity of any of them.”
Any of them. Fist let his head tip back to rest against the rock wall. “There’s more?”
“Looks like it.”
“Horse-witches?”
“Nah, other kinds of nothing-like-ordinary types—you know, a jack-o’-the-green here, a Wild Hunt there. It’s raining weird all over the damn place.”
“Has anybody correlated timelines?”
Tanner shrugged. From the spasm of pain that crossed his face, his shrug had been a mistake too. “That’s not my end of the business either. They tell me tales of the horse-witch predate the Deomachy. They tell me we’ve got an unsourced Lipkan translation of the West Branch of the Danellarii Tffar that claims she was here already when the damn elves got here. That’s, what, like thirty thousand years?”
Fist scowled. “Was she human then?”
“Is she human now?”
“You know what I mean. That long ago, there weren’t any humans. Not on this world.”
“You want to go argue with a ten-thousand-year-old elf saga in person, I can tell you where to find it.”
“What happened to the fucking Covenant of Pirichanthe?”
“You happened,” Tanner said. “That’s what Damon thinks, anyway. You and your pal Ma’elKoth.”
“Bullshit. Who’s doing the counterfactuals?”
“Supposedly Damon’s got Inquisitors and Reading Brothers all over the world working the Vaults through a timeframe of three or four tendays. A few months shy of three years ago. That date strike a gong, pappy?”
He let his eyes drift shut. “Fuck me inside out.”
“Can’t be that much of a surprise, can it? You had to at least suspect, considering you hooked Ma’elKoth a physical Aspect your own self.”
“I guess I’ve been kind of hoping the Covenant doesn’t apply.”
“Then hope crashes into reality and people get hurt.”
“Too fucking right.” He shook his head and sighed a time or two. “If you’d told me what you were really up to a month ago, you wouldn’t be dying here right now.”
“And if you’d told me who you really are a month ago, I wouldn’t be dying here right now either. Because instead of me coming up this mountain, it would have been ten or twelve Esoteric strike teams. And maybe a dragon or five.”
“Stop. You’ll make me blush.”
Tanner stared, squinting through the moonlight like he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. “You don’t know, do you? You really don’t.”
“So these, whateverthefuck, sorta-kinda-demi-semi-gods—the horse-witch and all the whateverthefuck others. They have anything in common outside of being basically impossible?”
“Probably should ask yourself that question.”
“How the fuck would I know?”
“No reason, I guess,” Tanner said. “Except you’re one of them.”
His back against the cold, night-damp stone, he waited for the horse-witch.
He’d pushed himself farther upslope, away from Tanner. No sense taking chances. The unconscious assass
in lay where he had fallen, his breath hitching and shallow, his eyes rolled up until only white slits showed in the moonlight. He was pretty sure Tanner wasn’t faking this time, but it’d suck to be wrong.
While he waited, he tried to fit it all together in his head, but he just couldn’t. This had somehow become something so much more than he’d ever guessed. Than he could have dreamed. He got lost in it. In what and why. When. Even how. Who, on the other hand …
Then came a clatter of rock, closer, and then there was someone at his elbow. In a flicker, faster than thought, an arm was seized and yanked even through the screaming of broken wrist and a head wedged against rock and a knife in a hand stopped just short of gutting a torso, then dropped free to clank on rocks.
“Goddammit, don’t do that! I could have killed you,” he snarled. “Say something when you’re coming up blind. Anything. Hey, dumbass, I’m here would work.”
“Hey, dumbass,” the horse-witch said. “I’m here.”
He sagged back down to the ledge. “Jesus suffering Christ.”
His knife lay where it had fallen, a dull smear of reflected moonlight. He couldn’t pick it up. He couldn’t look at it. He couldn’t look at her. “Orbek says you’re mad at me.”
“I am.”
“So you punish me by making me kill you?”
“I’m not here to punish you, dumbass.”
“You say that like it’s my name.”
“It isn’t?” The cloud-filtered moonlight made her witch-eye shimmer like a snow opal. “Do you want it to be?”
He shook his head, cradling his wrist. “And all this time I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted to see you again, and now I can’t remember why.”
“I could tell you—”
“—but I wouldn’t believe you, yeah, I remember. Except that’s not it. Just the opposite.”
“I was going to say,” she murmured, “I could tell you, but you don’t want to know.”
And just as he opened his mouth to remind her—in the most colorfully emphatic terms he could devise—how incredibly fucking aggravating she was, the last of the clouds parted around the moon and he could see her smile then, her sly sidelong look-how-much-fun-we-have-together smile, and some stopcock inside him finally twisted loose, just a little bit, and some of his permanent sick black rage began to trickle out, as if it might just drain off and wash away.