He stood, raising his hands before him like a scrubbed-in surgeon, and let the black oil roll down his wrists toward his elbows. A couple drops spattered the floor, and instantly kindled greasy flames. Tucker turned kind of sidelong, leaning away as if he hadn’t quite made up his mind whether he should bolt. “How come it doesn’t burn when it’s on you?”
“Same reason it didn’t burn those soapies from the inside out. The energy’s being used for something else.”
“Like what?”
“Shh.” He closed his eyes. “This is trickier than it looks.”
“It’d have to be.”
“Quiet.” He breathed himself into mindview. It didn’t take long. He’d been practicing.
Images swam into focus inside his head. “Four soapies farside—full enforcement squad, which means one capture-and-detain guy with stickyfoam and tanglefoot and who knows what else, a primary striker and a reserve striker, and one heavy support guy. Not to mention they’re behind two dedicated hardpoints.”
“Not the best news I’ve heard today.”
“They haven’t breached the door because they’re waiting for somebody.”
“Backup?”
“Front-up. Whoever it is, they’re scared. Hot staggering fuck. Make that whatever it is. They’re about to piss themselves, and I’m not making that up.”
And now inside his head, as he sought to slide deeper into the oil after the source of their fear, a vast and ancient consciousness tasted his mind.
And winked at him.
He withdrew with a lurch, and opened his eyes. “Know what it takes to frighten Social Police?”
“Not a clue.”
“Me neither. This looks like serious fucking trouble.”
“Can you—do whatever it is you’re doing—deeper in? Get a look?”
He shook his head. “It fought back. Whatever the fuck it is, it felt me going in, and it wasn’t happy about it. Not one little bit. It’s stronger than I am. A lot. It’s probably what they’re expecting.”
“You are a fountain of good news. Except not for us.”
“It gets better.” He had to take a breath and swallow to untie a knot of nausea in his guts. “It knew me.”
“Knew you as in knows you? This just gets better and better. Do you know it?”
Muscle bunched along his jaw. “Nothing on the short list will cheer you up. Listen, Tucker—Tanner, whateverthefuck your name really is—you can still make it out of here. You’ve done a great job today. Go live long enough to do others.”
“Now you’re having me on, and I don’t much admire your sense of humor.” It was Tanner’s voice.
“The Monasteries need people like you. Being human on the other side of this door is about to be a bad idea.”
“You’re going.”
“I don’t have a choice. You do. Make the right one.”
He rotated his shoulders, cracked his neck, and checked the loads in his pistol’s clip. “In the words of an old pal of mine—Jonnie, his name was, you’d like him,” he said through a lopsided smile. “He used to say ‘I wouldn’t have come to the party if I didn’t want to dance.’ ”
“Whatever.” He closed his eyes again. “Give me another couple quiet seconds. I’ll handle the Social Police.”
“Seriously?”
“Shh.”
Mindview came on instantly. The enforcement squad was barely perceptible now, three-quarters buried in imaginary trans-real muck. No time to be subtle.
Also no inclination.
He made his left hand a fist as if he could grab and hold his perception. Then he did the same with his right. The Social Police vanished from his mind. Something behind him made a muffled, raggedly wet fwaptch, and the greasy smoke thickened into a choking cloud.
Tucker yelped and jumped away to flatten himself against the wall. “Sweet mother of fuck my god’s asshole,” he gasped. “Whyn’t you warn a guy?”
He frowned down at the corpses of the two soapies. As near as he could tell, the fwaptch had been the sounds of their heads exploding inside their helmets. “Could have been worse.”
“Worse?”
“Could have taken off their helmets first. Stand back.”
There was still enough oil on his hands to make him look like he’d been greasing wagon wheels. He again made fists, and the edges of the steel door caught fire, eye-burning white.
“Holy shit.” Tucker stared. “Second coming of Lazarus fucking Dane …”
“Yeah, off by an order of magnitude or three. But thanks anyway.”
“It wasn’t a compliment,” he said with feeling. “I can’t wait to file my History. They will fucking lock me up.”
A swift side kick into the center knocked the door flat. On the far side, the helmets of four fallen Social Police belched billows of smoke. “Um, listen,” Tucker said faintly, “anything I have ever done that you don’t like—anything at all—I just want to say I’m sorry. I am very, very sorry. I apologize unreservedly—”
“Which way to the gate?”
“Weren’t you just down here?”
“Unconscious with a bag on my head, smart guy.”
Three archways opened into corridors. The only light came from the burning Social Police in the hall outside. No doors in this little chamber, just a table with black bags on it—he couldn’t help wondering if one of them still had chunks of his puke in it—along with some fruit, sliced meats and cheeses, and a plate of cookies. A watercooler stood to one side. Tucker saw him frowning at it. “What’s the matter?”
“Cookies,” he said slowly. “Somebody put out cookies for the Social Police.”
“Looks like they ate some too. What do you care?”
“I can’t explain. It’s just … I don’t know. Wrong.” He shook himself back to business. “Listen, this is your last chance to bail, Tucker. Go.”
“What part of ‘I wouldn’t have come to the party’ did you not understand?”
“Cut it out. You’re after the Butcher’s Fist.”
He took it without a blink. “If that’s true—and nobody’s saying it is—a chance to stuff the Hand of Khryl inside a Vault of Binding is worth more than both our lives,” he said easily. “However many you actually have.”
“You don’t get it. Everything I told t’Passe? Just a come-on. I’m not here to recover the Fist.”
“Then you won’t mind if somebody packs it off to Thorncleft, right?”
“Trying will get you killed. If you’re lucky. There are worse things than dying.”
“So I hear. If I ever come across one, I’ll let you know.”
“Fuck it. I don’t like you enough to argue.” He went to the closest archway. It ran straight and level as far as he could see. At regular intervals—every ten yards or so—a hand-size patch of the ceiling glowed pale green. “Huh. Elf-light.”
Tucker headed over to check one of the others. “So?”
“So Social Police helmets have built-in night vision. They don’t need elf-light. And these aren’t bright enough for regular people.”
“Ogrilloi,” Tucker said hollowly from the other arch.
“Yeah. We’re getting close.”
“Not what I meant. Um, the big nasty your playmates were waiting for—would it be coming from the direction of the gate?”
“Maybe. What do you have?”
“I think it’s the Smoke Hunt.”
He looked over Tucker’s shoulder. The hallway descended and widened as it went, fanning out in the far distance into what might have been some kind of large open chamber, and from what he could see there might have been firelight or torches, but mostly he was just looking at the giant crowd of bare-ass ogrilloi.
Every square inch was packed shoulder to shoulder and cock to butt-crack with naked ogrilloi. Just standing there. Those scarlet flames that cast no light flickered and played over them, and there were elf-lights here too, but there was no way to know if the ogrilloi down there needed them or not.
&n
bsp; They all had their eyes closed.
And they weren’t ogrilloi so much as they were a thousand-plus identically dough-faced manikins—ogrillokins—like full-size clay figures still only half-shaped. “Put your weapon down.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“They’re not Smoke Hunters.” A tilt of the head. “Not yet.”
“Then what are they?”
“Blanks. Ever do armoring? Like knife blanks, except they’re fetch blanks.”
“I get it—Black Knife blanks.”
“Yeah, funny. Put your weapon down, goddammit. Want to live through this?” He put Benson’s pistol on the floor and started pulling knives to lay beside it. “You used the pistol and grenades on the Social Police, so it knows what those are, if it didn’t already. Any spells you’ve used on the Battleground, ever—those have to go too.”
“You are batshit insane.”
“So?”
“So I’ve always admired that about you.” He knelt to disarm. Along with his pistol and three knives, he laid out a handful of differently shaped and colored crystals, several tiny metal figurines of unlikely-looking creatures, and three coin-size disks of dark wood inlaid with delicate traceries of gold.
“That’s everything?”
Tucker shrugged. “Everything you’ll find without a body-cavity search.”
“I’m sure you’ve still got enough shit stashed to perpetrate ten or twelve different flavors of stupid. Don’t. I mean it. Play anything but straight low and you will not walk out of here.”
“Ain’t I always been the brains of this team, pappy?”
“I told you cut it out.” He stepped forward to the front rank of the half-cooked Smoke Hunters. He touched one on the chest and said, “All right, I’m ready. Let’s do this.”
The fetch blanks pressed themselves back from him, parting enough to give him space to walk. Tucker said, “Um … you kind of said that like you know what’s happening.”
“Come on.”
The blanks pushed themselves against the walls as they passed, then filled in the corridor behind them.
He shrugged. “I still don’t have it all. But every step we take sharpens the focus.”
“That doesn’t tell me as much as you seem to think it does.”
“It’s not deep. Look, I don’t know how much t’Passe told you about my situation here, and I don’t have time to explain. I have detailed intelligence about this place on this day, but it’s not reliable. At all. For reasons I can’t really go into right now either. I have an idea of what’s happening, but it’s provisional. More than provisional. Probabilistic. Shit, if they taught quantum mechanics in abbey school, it’d be easier to explain. It’s close enough to say that nothing here is entirely real until I see it.”
“You’re talking about time-binding.”
He shot Tucker a sharp look. Tucker spread his hands. “After our last conversation, I was debriefed by the Thorncleft Inquisitor.”
“Figures.”
“He said you parted on friendly terms.”
“More so than most. So look: cutting What Might Be down into What Actually Is works kind of like analytic elimination. That you were t’Passe’s inside guy cut off a whole universe of possible. The Earth Normal vault was powered by the black oil; that carved away more. Social Police at the door to the gate told me a lot—and having more soapies inside than outside, and the inside having fucking defensive hardpoints, told me more. Then Soapy bleeds the blind god’s oil. Then Smoke Hunt fetch-blanks come from the gate. Then the blanks don’t attack. They wait.”
“Like they were expecting us.” Tucker’s eyelids fluttered. He nodded to himself, resigned. Suddenly tired. “Not us. You.”
“I told you to go.”
“I swear to you on any kind of sacred whateverthefuck you favor: if I live through this I will absolutely start taking your advice.”
“That’ll look nice on your headstone.” He sighed. “There’s one other thing you should probably know. When I was telling you about the big nasty monster that scared the fuck out of the Social Police? Some of that was less than entirely true. It was mostly to convince you to fuck off and live homicidally ever after somewhere else.”
“What, they weren’t scared? There’s no monster?”
“Oh, they were scared. There is a real monster. That’s all true.”
“So what’s the lie?”
He shrugged apologetically. “I said it wasn’t happy to see me.”
The corridor opened into a huge ovoid chamber. It was full of ogrilloi.
“Rint diz Ekt Perrog’k, Nazutakkaarik.”
“Oh, crap. Hi.” Caine waved. “And, y’know, fuck yourself.”
This could have been going better already.
“ ‘Welcome to our place, Skinwalker’? Seriously?” Tucker murmured. “You two know each other?”
“Shut up.”
The ceiling was a huge dome, deep enough to echo a raised voice. The floor was polished until it gleamed like travertine in the rain. The topmost level, where they stood, was at least fifteen yards deep; in the center of the cavern, the polished stone descended in shrinking steplike rings nine or ten feet wide and a couple feet high, ten levels down to a central disk like the bull’s-eye on a target. The bull’s-eye looked to be twenty-some-odd feet across, some kind of crystal, glowing with a soft yellow light of its own. The ceiling was a mirror of the floor. The walls were polished like the floor and ceiling, and were engraved with elegantly artistic renderings of ogrillo petroglyph clan-sign.
“Look at this fucking place …” Tucker breathed.
“Yeah, they’ve remodeled since the last time I was here.”
“You were here?”
“Long time ago.”
The uppermost floor was packed with the fetch blanks. He couldn’t guess how many. Two other archways spread wide as the avenue down which they’d come, and there was nowhere not full of half-made grills.
Two steps above the bull’s-eye stood fifty or sixty ogrillo bucks, clearly real, warts and all, scowling like they knew who he was. Across the dome from where he stood rose a stepped pyramid that appeared to have been carved out of the wall. Ten steps up. Every other step had been fashioned into seats. Below the apex sat three bitches. Two steps down sat nine more. Then what was probably twenty-seven, because the threefold thing seemed to be the order of the day, which wasn’t good news.
Asshole estimation: over three hundred and fifty bitches. The entire Black Knife priesthood, give or take. In their holiest sanctum. Instead of being out to watch Khryl’s Justice.
Sometimes shit just is what it is. Sometimes you do what you do, and let the rest go.
He walked toward the first ring. “Come on. Act like you know what you’re doing.”
“You look worried.”
He nodded toward the pyramid. “She’s not who I was hoping to find.”
“The top bitch? Who were you expecting?”
“Anybody else.”
He jumped down. Tucker dropped in right beside him. “If she’s a problem for us, I can drop her from here. Nobody’ll know. Looks like a heart attack.”
He kept moving. “Make a move on her and I’ll kill you myself.”
Tucker kept up. “What’s she to you?”
“My sister-in-law.”
“You are pulling my dick.”
“Do not harm her. Don’t even think it too loud.” He jumped down another level. “You think coming at me sucked? Wait till I come at you.”
“But—I mean, your sister-in-law is the head of the fucking Smoke Hunt? You have to be pulling my dick.” Tucker sounded distinctly offended. “Is there anything about you the Monasteries actually has right? One fucking thing?”
“Sure. Lots.” He jumped down to the next lower ring. “Probably.”
He came to the step above the one the bucks stood on. Christ, these bucks were big—he stood two feet up, and the grill in front of him still came up to his nose—and they didn’t
seem inclined to get out of his way. He looked up at the apex of the pyramid.
She scowled down at him for a second or two, then snapped an abrupt bark. The bucks parted to let him and Tucker pass.
He jumped down into the bull’s-eye and looked back. Tucker had stopped one ring up.
“You coming?”
“I’m good here, thanks.”
The bull’s-eye was smooth as glass. Hairs on his arms and the back of his neck lifted and crackled with blue sparks. “All right, goddammit, a hint, huh?” he muttered under his breath. “You didn’t Call me here to enjoy my fucking company.”
Kaiggez barked something in Etk Dag. He ignored her. “Tucker, make yourself useful,” he said, low. “There’s a Triple Aspect here. Somewhere.”
“A Triple?”
“Yeah, we hit the trifecta. Outside/Ideational/Natural. Find it.”
“Names might help.”
He took a deep breath. “The Natural Power doesn’t have a name. Call it the Blind God. The other two are Pirichanthe and Khryl.”
“Khryl, sure, the Fist and all. Who’s the other again?”
“Pirichanthe.”
“Somehow I’m not understanding you.”
Kaiggez barked again. He didn’t even look up. “You read my History of the Breaking of the Black Knives. The Outside Power that was Bound in the vertical city—the entity that maintains the dil T’llan. It’s Pirichanthe.”
“Sorry.” Tucker looked baffled. “I still can’t figure out what you’re trying to tell me.”
“Yeah.” Of course. That would have been too easy. “Listen, it’s the Smoke God, all right? The Power that animates the Smoke Hunt.”
“Whyn’t you say so? This Smoke whatever of yours—don’t you know its name?”
“Never mind.”
Kaiggez was leaning forward on her throne, and her barking had gone thick with anger.
Finally he looked up at her. “You know I don’t speak that shit.”
“Paggallo?” she said. “Paggannik ymik, paggtakkuni,” which he was pretty sure would be Etk Dag for Say what? See what you say in a minute, cockroach.
More or less.
“Kaiggez. We can stand here while everybody listens to you yammer and watches me get bored, or you can grow the fuck up and speak Westerling.”