“Don’t keep me in suspense.”
“The question?” The Reading Master gave an infinitesimal sketch of an apologetic shrug. “How did you survive?”
Fist stared. He blinked. He stared some more.
Blank. Numb.
Empty.
He should be arguing, or mocking, or raging, or interrogating, or doing basically anything other than sitting like a boil on his own ass. All the ways in which his life was fucked had become too tangled for him to comprehend, much less formulate any idea of an appropriate response.
“Ah,” said the Reading Master. “I see you haven’t been asking that question either.”
“No.”
“You can appreciate the issue.”
“You think I didn’t. Survive. You think I’m not really me. That I’m some kind of fetch.”
“It is difficult to formulate–”
“A plausible alternative, yeah.” He squeezed his eyes shut, scratched his head, and scraped the broadcloth robe across his eyes. “I have another question.”
“And that is?”
In his other hand was now the matte black pistol. “How many people do I have to kill to get out of this place tonight?”
Both Masters froze. The Reading Master said, “You don’t want to do that.”
“Oh, I really think I do.”
A wisp of fleeting frown passed over the Master’s face. “You want to put the pistol on the table,” he said with gathering force. “You want to put it down. Now.”
“There are some kinds of magick that work on me,” Jonathan Fist said. “That isn’t one of them.”
He rose and backed toward the door. “A nice line, about the research team. You’re pretty smooth, you know that? You tell me about Inquisitors so I won’t notice the fucking Inquisition is who I’m talking to already. Smooth. Really. A better interrogator than I ever was.”
“Interrogation wasn’t your specialty,” the Reading Master said equably. Though neither Master moved or even altered expression, the heavy bolt on the kitchen door behind Jonathan Fist clacked into place.
“Wait, what was my specialty? Oh yeah, I remember.” He pointed the pistol at the Reading Master’s forehead. “Do you really want to do this with me?”
“Your pistol isn’t loaded.”
“And you know that because your truthsense works so much better on me than your Dominate.”
The Reading Master accepted this with a sigh. “I did say that you wouldn’t need your weapon.”
“And my truthsense would be all over that. If I had one.”
“Everything I have said to you has been true.”
“If nobody tries to stop me—or follow me—there’s no need for killing, which would be nice. It’s worth remembering that if nice is not the option, I don’t really mind killing. Both of you. Everybody in this embassy.”
“I apologize for the misunderstanding,” the Reading Master said quietly. “I have advised the Council of Brothers—and generally the Inquisition—that it’s better to be your friend than your enemy. Especially now. No official decision has yet come down, but I believe in taking my own advice.”
“That’ll be more reassuring after this door’s unlocked.”
The Reading Master inclined his head and the bolt clacked open. “And in the spirit of this friendship, I see no reason to mention, in my report, that you fabricated a confrontation in hopes that a dramatic exit might obscure the fact that you’re considerably more adept at interrogation than you pretend. So adept that neither of us noticed how you learned a great deal while revealing nothing we didn’t already know.”
“Never kid a kidder. You told me what you want me to know. The pistol—” He shrugged. “That’s in case you don’t like how I took the news.”
“Ah. You may trust we’ll do nothing so rash as an attempt to restrain or harm you. As I said, our archive on you is extensive, and liberally planted with accounts of such attempts, each of which seems to bear painfully bitter fruit.”
“Maybe anyway we should get the Ambassador down here to walk me out, huh? Just to make sure nobody gets stupid.”
The two Masters exchanged a glance, and Master Ptolan gave an okay you caught me bob of his head. “Oh, I’m the Ambassador too,” he sighed apologetically. “We really are a very small embassy.”
“So the private kitchen thing was just a dodge.”
“I’ll see you out,” the portly Master said. “Please keep the robe; the evening has turned cold, and it’s begun to snow.”
Jonathan Fist almost asked how he knew, but then decided his luck had been pushed enough for one day. For one lifetime. Or two. Or however many he was actually living.
He found Orbek waiting down the street from the embassy, tucked into a shadowed corner, shoulders hunched against the spit of sleet on bitter wind. Spring comes late to Transdeia, and later still to Thorncleft, high upon the eastern reaches of the Gods’ Teeth.
“Ain’t you cold? Holy shit,” the young ogrillo muttered, low and surly. “No point having balls if I freeze ’em off, hey?”
Fist put a hand to his eyes and brought it away, a sleepwalker awakening. “It is cold,” he said. He hadn’t noticed. “You have the gear?”
“Right in front of you.”
He looked down. It was.
“Where else do I put it? Since you don’t bother to tell me which inn.”
“I didn’t think it’d take this long,” he said. He hadn’t thought a lot of things. He wished he could have kept it that way. “They fix your arm, huh?”
He looked at his right wrist. It looked to him like it belonged to somebody else. He flexed his hand and made a fist. “As a courtesy. No charge.”
He picked up his pack and began climbing the steeply rising street. “Come with me.”
Orbek came after him, puffing. His pack was six times the weight of Fist’s. “You know there’s these new inventions, hey? Porters. You pay them. They carry shit.”
“I don’t have money.”
“What happened to your thousand royals?”
“In your pack.”
The ogrillo stopped, frowning. The man kept climbing. After a moment, the ogrillo shook his head, his frown darkening, and followed.
The air got colder. The wind trickled to nothing. The sleet became snow, a shroud of white falling silently on the stoneworked streets and gathering on eaves and garden gates. Orbek stopped again. “Tell me where we go, hey?”
“Keep up.”
Orbek sighed and climbed faster. “I hate when you get like this.”
“Me too.”
They climbed into what once had been called Lower Thorncleft, though now it was the center of a much larger city; it had become a bleak gaslit tangle of railroad tracks that spidered out from the Thorncleft Railhead: a vast dome of glass, stained black by coal smoke, built over and around the formerly fashionable homes that now housed the offices of Transdeia Rail.
Orbek’s scowl deepened when the structure came into view. “We taking a trip, little brother?”
“You are.”
He stopped. “Alone?”
The other kept walking.
“Don’t like traveling alone,” the ogrillo said. “Maybe I don’t go.”
“You’re going.”
“Maybe you give me a reason. And take your reasons are for peasants horseshit and pack it in your ass.”
He stopped. “Orbek, goddammit—”
“No. No, fucker.” Orbek unslung his pack and threw it on the ground. Veins twisted in his neck. “You say carry me around the Pit. I carry you around the Pit. You say come with me. I come with you. You say stay with the girl and I stay with the fucking girl. You tell me stand in the fucking street and wait for you, and where do you fucking find me? I’m assbitch to you three years. You want to send me away by myself, you fucking well talk me into it. One time, hey? One fucking time.”
The man unslung his own pack, dropped it and sat on it, leaning into his hands, massaging his forehead. “Y
ou don’t understand.”
“Make me understand.”
“Yeah, good plan. Except I don’t understand either.”
“Then what problem we got, hey?”
“It’s not like that, big dog. Since the fight with Tanner. Since we met the horse-witch. Something’s going on. Something’s not going on. I can’t tell which. But if it’s going on, it shouldn’t be. If it’s not, it should. All I know is that whatever it is, it’s wrong. It’s been wrong for a long time.”
“And how come you and nobody else gotta fix it?”
“I’m not fixing it. I am it. Part of it. Something chose me.”
“Chose you for what?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. All I know is that it’s gonna suck. For everybody. You remember Assumption Day?”
“No, shit-for-brains. Remind me.”
“Everybody within two hundred yards of me died. Everybody. You would have too if Raithe hadn’t pulled you off that rooftop. They found me at the bottom of a twenty-foot-deep crater, for shit’s sake. Ma’elKoth fucking vaporized. There was nothing left but me and the sword.”
“So?”
“So what do you call a guy who stands at ground fucking zero of a nuclear shit bomb and walks away with just some new scars and a limp?”
“I give up.”
“You call him Caine.”
The ogrillo’s eyes narrowed, and he did not reply.
“I think whatever chose me, that’s what it chose me for. Everybody else dies. I go off to the next pack of fucking idiots who don’t have enough sense to run like hell when they see me coming. Jesus, Orbek, if you could have seen Faltane you’d be running right now.”
“So what do you do about it?”
“All this time, it’s been like … like I knew all this, but I couldn’t actually think about it. It’s like a Cloak—the thaumaturge is right there in front of you, but he’s stopping your mind from registering that your eyes can see him. This is like a Cloak for ideas. For concepts. Dad used to tell me that the next best thing to knowing something is knowing who to ask. But you can’t ask anybody anything when you don’t even know there’s a question.”
“And your horse-witch, she got answers?”
“Maybe. If I figure out how to ask.”
“This don’t have to do with her looking tasty, even if on the lean side, hey?”
“It might.” He offered half a shrug. “If everybody around me gets killed, and the only everybody in the neighborhood turns out to be a nice-looking lady who can take getting killed and shrug it off with a nod and a wink, well … you get what I’m saying.”
“Sure.” Orbek shrugged equably. “Pallas Ril probably gets it too, hey? Not to mention Ma’elKoth.”
“Sure. Cheer me up.” He sighed and heaved himself to his feet. “Let’s get out of the goddamn snow.”
He shouldered the smaller pack. Orbek lifted the other. “You got some candidates? For who’s maybe choosing you for his nuclear shit bomb?”
“Yeah. I do.” He started walking toward the Railhead. “Your sire lived through the Breaking, right? The Horror?”
“Yah. Why ask?” he said to the man’s retreating back.
“Because there’s some shit we need to talk about. About who the Black Knives used to be.”
The wind kicked up. Sleet began to sting. Orbek only faintly heard the rest.
“About the Black Knife god.”
“What if you could take back the worst thing you ever did?”
—CAINE
Caine looks even more worried as he tramps through the snow back toward Duncan and the others. “Angvasse—Khryl, whatever—if Ma’elKoth shows, I need you to distract him. I just need his attention elsewhere until I can figure out why Kris isn’t here yet.”
Duncan says, “Ma’elKoth? He’s not dead?”
“He’s kind of God now.”
“He was kind of a god before.”
“Not a god. God.” He makes a face as though the word stings his mouth. “It’s complicated.”
“Apparently everything is. Who is Kris, and why do you need him here?”
“An old friend from school. Kris Hansen.”
“I remember the name—killed on his freemod training, wasn’t he?”
“He’s the current Ankhanan Emperor. And he’s the Mithondion.”
Duncan can only shake his head. “He’s fey? How could he have gone to school with you?”
“That’s complicated too.”
“I met the Mithondion—must be fifty years ago now. T’ffarrell, his name was. The Twilight King. He bore an epithet—the Ravenlock, for a streak of black in his hair, very rare for feyin. Davia and I interviewed him at considerable length for Tales—he was exceedingly gracious and patient with us, and seemed quite determined that we should depict his culture accurately. Do you know, he mentioned that we were only the second meeting he’d had with humans since the Deomachy?”
“I’ve heard that.”
“If your friend Kris Hansen is the Mithondion …” Duncan sighs, captured by memory of brighter days and regret at how swiftly they had passed. “T’ffarrell was well beyond a thousand years old, of course, but still youthful and strong. Something terrible must have happened.”
“It did,” said a soft and unfamiliar voice from beyond his head, where he could not see. “It was us. We happened.”
At this, all Caine’s tension washes away and leaves no trace of its passing. “Kris. Damn, it’s good to see you.”
When Kris steps into Duncan’s field of vision, he looks like a man with the face of a fey; he is dressed only in a simple shirt and pants of white linen. He wears no shoes and bears no weapon, and his platinum hair spills unbound to the middle of his back. “Hari. It’s been too long.”
Duncan reflects privately, and somewhat sourly, that apparently Kris can call him Hari without getting stabbed for it.
Caine gathers him into a hug, then releases him again and looks him up and down with a smile that, astonishingly, looks like he’s actually happy. “Yeah, well, whenever it hasn’t been too long, it’s been too fucking short. So, what, you were hiding?”
“Some. I’m having a little trouble with a death cult, and just because a Call sounds and looks and feels like you doesn’t mean it is. Especially once I get here, and find you standing around a man with a big black sword through his chest.”
Caine nods. “Deliann Mithondionne, meet Duncan Michaelson.”
“Duncan Michaelson,” Kris says thoughtfully. He crouches on Duncan’s right and offers his hand. “I’ve been told you’re dead.”
“I’ve been told that too,” Duncan says, and shakes Kris’s hand. “Deliann Mithondionne—wait, are you the Changeling Prince?”
“I was. How have you heard that name?”
Duncan smiles. “I had a lot of time on my hands and nothing but a net reader for company. Feature stories about prominent natives.”
“When you were in the Buke. Hari told me.”
“So, the Changeling Prince wasn’t a changeling at all, but an Actor?”
“I was born on Earth, but I am not an Actor. I never was.”
Caine says, “And this is the horse-witch.”
“Ah. A pleasure.”
“Thank you. He speaks highly of you, and thinks of you more highly than he speaks,” she says. “He also doesn’t want to tell you that he knows the Eyes of God have been checking up on him.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Caine says. “Now they’re gonna be twice as hard to spot.”
“Not for us.”
“Well … yeah, okay. Just for me. Not for us.”
“Then what are you complaining about?”
“You see what I have to deal with every day?” He waves a hand. “Her over there? That’s Angvasse Khlaylock, give or take.”
She nods greeting to him. “Emperor.”
He returns the nod. “Lord of Battle.”
Caine blinks. “You know him?”
“You mi
ght recall how acute my perception can be.”
“I sure as fuck recall now. What’s this death cult problem of yours?”
“One you should stay out of.”
“Sure. It’s just, y’know, somebody started a death cult and it’s not about me? I’m insulted. I think my feelings are hurt.”
“It’s about you enough,” Kris says heavily. “It’s a cult of Berne.”
“You’re pulling my dick. What do you call them, Bernies?”
“Bernites. It’s not a joke. Sacrifices to St. Berne are gang-raped and tortured to death.”
“Jesus Christ.” He looks entirely disgusted. “So, what, I’m too tame for them? Starting wars and murdering gods just isn’t, y’know, transgressive enough anymore?”
Duncan stares up at this man who looks like his son, and reflects that his feelings apparently really are hurt. He takes pride in the strangest things …
“Hari, we’ve got it, all right? Don’t give it another thought.”
“Ever change your mind, say the word. Anytime. Anywhere. I’m your guy.”
“I’m hoping we can manage this without anything so … catastrophic.”
“Hey, Ankhana was not my fault—”
“Ankhana?” Duncan asks. “What happened in Ankhana? Or did it happen to Ankhana?”
Hari and Kris give him identical glances and say in perfect unison, “It’s complicated.”
“I only ask because I’m trying, and failing, to imagine an event so monstrous that even Caine refuses to take any blame for it …”
“Yeah, funny. Shut up.” He turns back to Kris. “Look, I know you’re busy, y’know, running the Empire and shit, but I need you to do this one thing.”
“If it lies within my power, and doesn’t violate my obligations to the Empire and to Home.”
“We’ve got bigger problems than Bernies.”
“Bernites.”
“I need to show you something that never happened.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s the past, but it’s not our past. Not yet. The point is, we can make it our past.”