The arresting officer said, “What about his stuff? This flail is made of gold, and has an energy signature that turns a watchglass black. If I put it in the evidence locker, that means drawing up a horoscope, and the Astrologer on watch for the precinct, and then the Astrologer responsible for ordnance has to be notified. Every time the locker is opened, it must be noted in the log, sir.”
“Just chuck the gear in the officer’s mess cloak room for now. I’ll decide how to deal with the paperwork later.”
3. Six Hundred Paces
Two men wearing leather coats sewn with brass scales and small round brass caps on their heads took charge of me. I did not see their faces, since they stuck a bag over my head. One had a voice like gravel being ground; the other had a voice like glue dripping.
Glue said, “We need to check manacles out of supply, and chain him up?”
Gravel said, “To haul him six hundred paces, you want to go fourteen hundred paces to the supply master? Just cut the tendons in his arms.”
“Might bleed to death.”
“So what?”
This was done, and it hurt, and warm blood was dripping down my arms, which they then grabbed like they were handles made of dead sausage, and just hauled me along.
They chatted. It was just a normal workday for them.
Glue said, “How come the Sarge don’t want to question this meatloaf? Find his accomplices; drown his children, that sort of thing?”
Gravel grunted. “You got a head like a Blem on you! You know the new junior forensic Astrologer assigned to the western annex of the Servile Crime, Disturbances and Disobedience Department?”
“Lordling Burumameru.”
“He’s good with figures. He also got a pretty daughter with a good figure. Sarge likes to go see him, because hospitality means the daughter has to come out and offer him a cup of tea, on account of a second son of a second son of a minor lord can’t afford a proper serving girl, but he can’t be inhospitable.”
“If I’d ha’ been fated to be a star-reader, I’d throw the Sarge asswise down the Great Stairs, if he came a sniffing around my daughter’s skirts!”
Gravel made an ugly noise that served him for a laugh. “The highborn, they ain’t like us, no more than the wolf-skulls or the blood-quaffers is like us. They’re different.”
“That’s a word and a half!” Glue agreed.
“Anyhow, the highborn’s got their rules and their fates same as we got ours. Nobles got to be hospitable even to those they hate, because, hey, ain’t we all One? And the Sarge represents the Crown of Nimrod, on account of him taking the Great King’s Coin, and the Stars can’t throw the Crowns down no stairs.”
“I’d do it nohow, send his butt bounding and bouncing down the stairs, if’n I were a lordling, and could do figuring, and read stars and all.”
“You’re a dolt. So if the Sarge gets itching about this meatloaf or his accomplices or whatnot, he’ll use the excuse to nip up to Servile Crime, and have the lordling tally up the fate-numbers on the death-date if there is any follow-up needs to be done.”
“So we got to make a note of the execution time?”
“Execution, says he! Execution is what warlords does to generals after losing battles. This? This is hauling out the trash. We get all the trash jobs.”
“That’s a word and a half!” Glue agreed.
And one of them kicked me in the leg hard enough that I had to hop and limp all the rest of the six hundred paces to the place where I was killed. I don’t know which one it was.
4. Drudge Closet
The chamber I saw when the bag was yanked off my head looked like a small storage room or a large broom closet, with mops and brooms, and chests and shelves of supplies. A coal bin was along one wall, with coal dust darkening the deck and the overhead with a layer of permanent black smears, and along the other were washbuckets or jugs of ammonia. Everything was labeled with a little scrap of paper with the circular designs of horoscopes on it, which I assume was to show when the broom or bottle or bucket was to be used, or by whom or for how long.
The chamber had that same round hole in the center of it which my cell once had, and the same whistling sound of wind came up from it, but this hole was black, and the wind sounded like a woman sobbing.
Then I was kicked in the other leg, hard enough that I thought I heard something crack, and Glue and Gravel forced me to my knees. They then proceeded to force my head to the cold metal floor, so I did not see much more of the room at that time.
I heard the door opening and the footfalls of two more people entering the closet.
Gravel and Glue released my arms and stepped away from me. I raised my head in time to see the mouth of the weapon held in the hands of one of the newcomers — I got a nice, long, good look at it, business-end first.
The firearm itself was a brass tube about a yard long, decorated with angular dragons, with a set of rings like electromagnets ringing the mouth, and powered by a spinning generator turned by what looked like a miniature steam engine the man carried in a backpack, complete with smokestack.
This was in the hands of a tired-eyed harquebusier who chewed on a toothpick while he did his work. The second person who had entered with him was his squire or powder monkey, a lad wearing a lead vest. With tongs, he put a glowing slug that might have been uranium into the backpack engine, topped off the water, checked the pressure dials, and gave the thumbs up. The bored-faced harquebusier raised the machine to his shoulder.
I was shot twice through the chest and once through the head.
The projectiles the weapon spat looked like crossbow bolts made of red-hot iron. When he cocked the weapon for the second and third shot, the triangular cylinder (like that of a sixgun but with half the ammo) rotated to bring another shot into the nail gun or rail gun or whatever it was.
The shots left a trail of smoke and sparks behind them like little comets, but the sound was much quieter than a rifle would have made. They hit the dented metal plates of the far wall, leaving little burn-marks to match dozens of others just like them. A lot of people were shot here, I suppose.
I threw myself backward when he shot me, and I tried to splash as much blood around as I could. Now that I was a corpse, the harquebusier and Gravel and Glue were unwilling to touch me. I did not hear the conversation, nor did I hear them leave the room, because my ears were not working then. Having a white-hot needle of iron go through my brain no doubt messed up some of my nerves for a little while.
I was getting better with practice at this recuperation and regeneration stuff. I had done my fair share of meditation for my martial arts practice, and I had done plenty of regular praying before Mom was lost, and a lot more (this time more like I meant it) after. There was a drifty, floating sensation you can get if you achieve a certain state of mind, and this time, I could actually feel my blood and brains in the pools they made around me, and it only took an effort of calm, clear, strong will to pull my scattered body together. It was way cool. Like something from a horror movie. I opened an eye without getting up, and found myself alone.
Eventually a janitor or cleaning slave came in to clean up the blood spill. I watched through slitted eyelids as the janitor drew out a long dark-stained cloak or poncho from a chest, threw it over his robes like an apron, and bent himself over his mop and bucket. I had not been able to call all my blood back into my body, after all. There was still plenty for him to do.
When the janitor left, I stood up, and found a long brown cloak with a hood from the same chest, stained and patched.
I picked up a mop from the rack of a dozen mops and tried to look busy when I heard a noise at the door.
A small man with brown skin and brown hair dressed in a long green-and-black striped tunic slouched in. The tunic was wrapped around his body, and the fringed hem was drawn over his head, so that a curtain of strands hung before his face, partly obscuring it. He looked left and right, and bowed.
“Pardon me, my master,” he said
whining, cringing. “There was to be a dead corpse here. I was to put it down the hole.”
I assume he was a corpse-handler, an untouchable. I remember Abby said she had been raised by members of this caste. Apparently, he was lower rank than a cleaning slave. Jeez.
I said in a haughty voice, “No, no, not here, silly slave! It is in the cloak room of the officer’s mess. Lead me there, and I will show you.”
Now he did look at me, and there was doubt and suspicion in his eyes, and he looked at my dark skin and jutting jaw and thickset, rough features of my face, and he heard me speaking in what was clearly a language from another world, so he could not have been fooled for a moment. And the look on his face slackened into one of pure terror.
He turned and scurried out of the store room. I did not know if he were running to go turn me in, or to go where I had told him, and so I did not know if it were wiser to follow him or to flee the other way as fast as my feet could carry me. If I followed him he might lead me where I told him, and I might, just might, recover that twilight flail which was my only hope of escape from his hellish world; whereas if I fled, that flail was lost, and so was that hope.
It turned out he was leading me right where I wanted to go.
5. Mess
The corpse-handler led me through narrow crooked corridors and through a large kitchen paved with stone. Franklin stoves lined one wall, and copper cauldrons big as bathtubs, sitting in walk-in chimneys, lined the other. Hocks of ham and strings of onions hung from the roofbeam, and melons and cucumbers in net bags. Leeks and garlic were gathered in jars and odorous bundles.
He was not willing to step over the threshold, but bowed and pointed toward the narrow servants’ door leading from the kitchen into what was evidently the officers’ mess.
I stepped into a chamber floored with brightly polished golden wood and roofed with gold-blazing lampwood. Statues of fat gods stood at the corners, and mosaics of stern warriors and kings adorned the walls. Long trestle boards stood in ranks as orderly as soldiers on parade, and a trestle board coated with linen stood on a dais overlooking them. These tables had couches rather than benches. The Ur-men ate reclining, like Romans. Three large doors led out, but all three were barred from this side.
There was exactly one man in the chamber: the dark-eyed and dark-bearded sergeant. He was sitting on the edge of a couch at the linen-covered high table, and before him on the tablecloth was my twilight flail, gleaming gold and red under the lampwood light as if with inner fire of yellow and scarlet. The mantle and loincloth were neatly folded to one side. I had not been carrying anything else.
The dark-bearded sergeant was toying with the golden flail, a look of care and concentration on his features, twisting the ruby-red rings clockwise or counterclockwise, and listening to them click, and watching the shimmering eye-blurring darkness reach out from the arms of the flail, or draw back in.
I came in holding the mop and bucket. The sergeant spoke without looking up, “Out! Come back later to clean up.”
But he looked up at the sound of me leaping atop his table, and he was fast enough to be halfway to his feet with his sword fully from his scabbard in time to parry the descending mop handle which would otherwise have dashed out his brains.
I was holding the mop like a shinai, although my feet were not properly set in a kendo stance. My weight was too far forward and the sergeant was a veteran fighter. He was able to chop the handle in two against the tabletop before I could recover from my lunge. Then he lifted the table under my feet as he rose, and it elevated suddenly like the deck of a ship tossed in a storm.
By reflex, I leaped at him and hit him shoulder-high in a flying tackle. We rolled and tumbled on the ground like two wild dogs tearing at each other, sending trestle legs and boards, linens and couches toppling this way and that with a huge clatter.
I managed to seize him from behind and threw him on his face, my weight atop him. But he got his knees under him somehow, and reversing the grip on his short blade, he drove it behind him with both hands. No sooner had the blade entered my sternum than he twisted it hard, cutting and tangling my guts and vital organs. He seemed to think it was a deadly stroke, and I felt him relax, waiting for me to die.
But we Deathless do not die so easily, of course. Instead of dying, I slipped an arm around him, pulled myself further up onto his blade, trapping his sword arm between my chest and his back. Then I reached out, wrapped my other arm around his throat, and began to methodically choke him out. His feet kicked against the wood floor and his free hand clawed uselessly back over his shoulder, trying to dislodge me.
The sergeant called out in a wheezing, halting voice, using the ragged last gasps of his life’s breath. He waved with his one free hand at the untouchable, who was cowering at the servants’ door, peering in, only his nose and eyes visible around the doorframe. These poor, sad eyes were wide and wet like he was about to cry, trembling like a dog who expects a cruel whipping.
“Get help!” gasped the sergeant. “Call for help! Get the men!”
“Stand still!” I called to the bewildered untouchable. “Don’t call anyone. Just stand there.”
The sergeant gasped, “Qall! I’m a good master …been good to you …if you don’t… Astrologers… will know… punish you…find you … cannot hide…”
Tears of fear started running down the face of the little man. He took half a step into the mess hall, staring at me strangling his master. He was clutching his head with both hands. His eyes were wild, and his mouth sagged like a torn pocket in an old jacket. He took a trembling step toward the large door, the one leading to the officers and men. But it was tentative, and he looked over his shoulder.
I called out to him as firmly and authoritatively as I could manage.
“Qall! Qall! Listen to me, now!” I called him by name, if that was his name. The word mean ‘boy’ or ‘slave’ or ‘insignificant thing.’ He stopped, frozen. I announced: “I am Ilya Muromets! Ilya the Barbarian; Ilya the Abomination. I cannot die and I am here to tear this Tower down!”
The slave said softly to himself, “Knock … the Tower… down? How? How?”
“I have no idea,” I grunted, gritting my teeth. Choking a man to death is harder than it sounds, and it takes longer too. “But I’ve made up my mind. Are you in? Or out?”
The sergeant gasped, “Obey! Obey! The stars … watching you…see you…”
I laughed at him. “The stars are blind! You didn’t see this coming, did you?”
And Qall just stood there, watching quietly, while I choked the life out of the sergeant. It was a little brutal, I suppose, but I figured the sergeant was an enemy in uniform and this was a time of war. Once someone invades your planet, that gives you the right to kill him. Maybe even the duty.
He stopped moving, stopped breathing, and I assumed he was dead. Also, I was in a whole lot of pain. So I rolled him off me and stood up, a little wobbly on my feet, and I drew out the foot-long length of curved bronze blade from my stomach, and dropped it clattering and splattering to the floorboards. The whole weapon was covered with my blood, all the way down the blade and up the hilt, and it made a splashing, sticky sound when it hit.
I was busily pushing my lower intestines back into place with one hand, and with the other I was picking up the golden flail, so I did not have a hand free to catch myself when the sergeant suddenly coughed and grabbed my ankles with both hands. He jerked my feet right out from under me! My jaw hit the table with a loud thwack and then hit the floor with a crack even louder and my vision went black for a moment from the pain.
And it did not hurt half as much as my inner drill sergeant calling myself an idiot. It is harder to kill a person than you think. A person will sometimes get up after being in a coma when even doctors would have sworn he was dead.
The sergeant was on top of me before my eyes uncrossed, and he caught up my arms in a wrestler’s hold, and was in the act of twisting them out of their sockets when he stiffened and looked
down in surprise at the bib of red blood gushing from his opened throat. There was a weird whistling, whispering noise bubbling from his lungs, but he died without a word, without a scream. Qall was standing behind him, with the sergeant’s dropped sword in hand, trembling and smiling a lunatic little smile.
6. Free Man
“Just like cutting the throat of a chicken,” he said in a dreamlike voice. “Wish’d I’d ha’ done it long ago, back when my Abtudu was alive. She’d ha’ liked to ha’ seen this.”
I said to him, “I am not sure why my actions are not being predicted by the Astrologers, but one of the foreverborn —”
“Know all about ’em. Wash up in magic water, or somewhat, eh? Says it rinses their old fate away. Just tales, so as I heard it, like a wish-fish: Seen in the wet, never in the net.”
“— They’re real. One of them sprung me from jail, and told me that any acts of mine built on her acts would be unforeseen, but only if I obey my higher nature. Your act of helping me is built on my act, I suppose the same applies.”
“The same what?”
“The same rule. I suppose it works the same way. If you use your unpredictability to commit crimes or get away with crooked acts, you’ll become predictable again.”
“Just killt my master. That’s treason against my betters. Worst crime there is: so says the Great King’s law, and it’s written on the sides of the Tower in letters cut into adamant deep as a two-edged sword is long. So I already done a crime, but, look around! You can see no one ain’t here to do for me.”
“There is a higher Law, and a Heavenly King greater than your Great King, who has written his law not in iron, but in your heart, and deeper than any two-edged sword. I am talking about your conscience. You saved me. You risked your life when my life was not in danger. Whatever voice you listened to which made you do such a selfless act of heroism, listen to that voice alone. You understand me? I am trying to save you from getting caught. You got any place to go?”