Caine Black Knife

LORD RIGHTEOUS

Light found me on something soft and knobbly that rose along my side and under my head and feet: a brocaded sofa, maybe.

I discovered I could open my eyes.

The plaster ceiling my blank stare found had been painted a tasteful ivory not long ago, and somebody had come by with a feather plume within the last day; the deep curls of the ornate crown molding showed no hint of dust. A cobweb would have died of loneliness.

I tried to sit up, but my gut spasmed and wouldn’t lift me. No pain, just weakness: like I’d trained past muscle failure. Way past.

But no bandages. No blood.

Somebody had dressed me in a plain linen tunic and pants. My hand shook a little as I pawed back the right-side hem of the tunic and rolled my head over to find four ragged pink coins of fresh scar pocking my side, neatly bracketing the flattened diamond of age-browned keloid where an Ankhanan Household Knight had put a broadsword through my liver about fifteen years ago.

I fingered the fresh ones. Big enough to be something in the range of 00 buck-maybe 7mm, maybe bigger. Who knows what Khryllians load? Lucky I didn’t take it in the face. Lucky old man.

Lucky to be getting older.

There was another new scar, long and thin and curving from my short ribs up toward my nipple, too smooth to be a wound.

Surgery.

Rubber-band muscles shivering with echoes of trauma, I managed to roll myself onto my side. Then I had to rest.

Seated in a severe chair by a severe window was a severe man in severe armor.

The chair was no more than a stool with a back. The window was an arch in the wall, plaster giving way to white stonework open to the westering sun beyond. The man was thin, even in armor, with the long narrow head and extravagantly arched nose and cheekbones of Lipkan nobility. His hair was the color of his armor and cropped to the uniform length of a fingerbreadth. His armor was starkly brushed and oiled carbon steel, lacking entirely the ostentation of polish and design that is the hallmark of the Khryllian Knight. Its sole ornament was a stylized hand-the symbol of Dal’Kannith, Lipkan god of war and father to Khryl-inlaid in electrum upon the upper left of his cuirass, fingers open and palm facing forward, and on that palm the golden Sunburst of Khryl.“

Freeman Shade.” He inclined his head fractionally. “I am Markham, Lord Tarkanen-Lord Righteous in service to the Champion of Khryl.”

“And I am-” I strangled a groan as I forced my legs over the edge of the sofa and sat up. “-almost impressed. Where are we?”

“This is the invaliddarium of the Riverdock Parish vigilry, freeman.”

“Knight Whatsisdick’s place? Is that a good idea?”

Markham’s lips thinned. “Khryl’s Love has Healed your wounds-”

“Yeah, I noticed. Get all the slugs?”

“The single pellet still in your body was successfully extracted, freeman. And your ribs have been renewed through Khryl’s Love.”

“Thanks for taking care of it while I was out. Khryl’s Love, I recall, feels a lot like having a handful of red-hot barbwire shoved up my ass.”

The Lord Righteous didn’t seem to hear. “Your clothing is being laundered and will be repaired, should you wish; otherwise, it will be destroyed for rags, and we will replace it without cost to you.”

“You do this for everybody you beat the shit out of?”

His eyes were the color of his armor. “Only the innocent.”

“So that means mostly yes, huh?”

Those lips thinned more. “Freeman Shade-”

“Y’know, I’m liking the sound of that more and more. Freeman. Free man. Because that’s, y’know, what I am, right? By right of-what do you call it in Lipkan? — Terranhidhal zhan Dhalleig? The Declaration of Valor, something like that? Khryl Himself has declared you have no right to hold me.”

“Yes.”

“Then keep my fucking clothes. I’m out of here.”

“Your other wounds, freeman-”

“I feel great.”

“Khryl’s Love treats only wounds taken in battle. There may be internal injuries-”

“From what?”

“From the-” Markham’s lips went even thinner. “From Knight Aeddharr’s inappropriate, unlawful, and despicable abuse of your person, freeman.”

I found myself smiling. “Now, that I like. Inappropriate, unlawful, and despicable abuse of my person. Must sting, huh? Just saying that.”

Those lips disappeared altogether. “You are owed an apology on behalf of the Order of Khryl, the Civility of the Battleground, the Riverdock Parish, and Tyrkilld, Knight Aeddharr.”

“Fucking right.”

“Knight Aeddharr is unable to proffer formal apologies at this time-”

“What, did I kill him?” My sigh would have been more convincing without the grin. “Shit, in the old days Knights were tough.”

“He lives.” Markham’s face was stiff as his cuirass. A subtle flick of his finger directed my gaze toward another door. “Your use of the armsman’s weapon destroyed a section of his thighbone, which must be reconstructed if he is to walk properly again-”

“So all he gets out of this is a limp? My heart’s pumping pisswater for him.”

Markham’s amazing vanishing lips took with them all the color from his cheekbones and around his eyes. “Should you wish to make another attempt upon his life, Knight Aeddharr has assured me that he will place himself at your convenience as soon as Khryl’s Love completes his Healing.”

“Huh. Easy to be brave when you’ve got Khryl to kiss away your boo-boos.”

Muscle rippled along the Lord Righteous’s jaw. “The apology, freeman-”

“What about that poor bastard armsman? Khryl’s Love won’t do much for what’s left of his spinal cord.”

“Armsman Braehew,” he ground out around his locked-down jaw, “perished of his wounds.”

I stared at the Lord Righteous. The Lord Righteous stared back. Neither of us blinked.

“Braehew.” Another name on a damn long list. “Braehew.” Hadn’t meant to kill him. Didn’t even know him. Didn’t matter. Wrong place, wrong time, with a shotgun aimed at the wrong guy’s balls. End of story.

I have a lot of those stories crowding the back of my head. “What, all the Knights around there had something better to do?”

“The armsman refused Healing.”

“He what?”

“Armsman Braehew is survived by a wife and two young daughters. As you said: Khryl’s Love would save only his life. He would have required specialized care for the remainder of his days. The pension from the Order will be better spent providing for the comfort of his family than for the care of a cripple.”

I carry a scar just below my navel that matches one in the small of my back. I also carry a device implanted along my spine near that scar. That device-along with some specialized powers of concentration, and a bit of magick, that have become habit over the past three years-is the main reason I can now walk. For some years I had done without it; for some years it had worked only intermittently, if at all.

I said, “That’s fucked.”

Markham sat at attention, as though the Justiciar himself was in the room.

“He died with honor. You would not understand.”

“Does his wife understand? Did anybody ask his daughters whether they’d rather have money than a father?”

“It is not our way to burden a Soldier’s loved ones with such decisions.”

“And I bet right now they’re crying tears of gratitude for your thoughtfulness and consideration.”

“I suspect,” Markham said, “that they weep only with pride that Armsman Braehew fell in battle, as all Khryllians fondly hope.”

“Yeah, all right. Whatever.” I looked around for my boots. “Are we done here?”

“There is still the matter of the apology, freeman.”

“I’m not much for forgiveness. Let me out of here. I gotta line up a place to sleep.”

“Lodgings have been secured for you at the Pratt amp; Redhorn; it is a small hostelry in this parish.”

“Maybe I want to stay somewhere else.”

“You will stay in the Pratt amp; Redhorn.”

“Will I?”

“To disobey the lawful order of a Knight of Khryl is a serious offense; it is an offense to Khryl Himself. Am I entirely understood, freeman?”

“Better than you want to be, maybe. Where the fuck are my boots?”

“Freeman, please.” Markham looked actively pained. “If we might beg your further indulgence on this one small matter.”

“We?”

“I and the Champion.”

“You and the Champion?” I shrugged. “What exactly is it you want me to indulge?”

“Since Knight Aeddharr is. . indisposed, the Order of Khryl, the Justiciar, and the Civility of the Battleground all humbly request that you will deign to accept the aforementioned apology, offered in person by the Champion of Khryl.”

I blinked. “What?”

“Since Knight Aeddharr is-”

“No, no, I heard you. . I mean, I think I heard you.” I put a hand to my head, but I didn’t feel any major lumps, and shaking it didn’t bring back any dizziness or blurring. “The Champion wants to apologize? The Champion of Khryl?”

“Yes.”

I shook my head again. “It’s like getting offered a handjob from the pope.”

Markham’s brows pulled toward a hint of a grey frown. “What is the pope?”

“Never mind. All right, bring him in.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Let’s have it. I’m a busy man.”

“Freeman Shade, you misunderstand. The Champion does not come and go at your bidding; I am tasked to deliver you into the Champion’s presence.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Freeman?”

“Tell your Champion thanks for the sentiment, but I’ve got shit to do.”

“Freeman, you still misunderstand-”

“One of us does.”

“I am tasked to deliver you-”

“And I’m telling you I’m not going.” I let my friendly grin go less friendly. “Unless you’re also tasked to tie me up and drag me there.”

Markham went very still. Still like a lizard that feels the approach of a mouse. “Tie you up, freeman? Not at all. I am tasked only to deliver you; my duty unto the Champion, and to Khryl, requires that I fulfill all lawful tasks. The Champion did not specify that you be willing. Or conscious.”

His expression never flickered. “Or alive.”

“You’re a friendly sonofabitch, aren’t you?”

Markham’s lips were so far gone it was amazing he had a face at all. “This will be difficult only if you choose to make it so.”

I looked at him long enough to remember how old I am.

“What the fuck, huh? Let’s go.”

A stonefaced armsman brought me my trunk and stood by while I fished out a tunic, vest, and pants and shook traces of bug powder out the window. My boots were damp. Even through the bitter saddle soap, they still smelled of blood.

I wadded up the white linens and underhanded them at the armsman. “Give ’em to the beggars, along with my other stuff.”

The armsman let the linens bounce off his chest and didn’t even glance at where they fell on the floor. “There are no beggars in Purthin’s Ford.”

I shrugged. “Then stick ’em up your ass.”

Markham was waiting for me under the sally gate of the vigilry. Though my guts still spasmed and my noodle legs were still way overcooked, I dragged the travel trunk over the courtyard flags in my best imitation of brisk, and I bit down on my voice to make sure I didn’t wheeze when I joined the Lord Righteous at the wide stone archway. “You cocksu-uh, guys-still go everywhere on foot, right?”

“We bear the weight of Khryl’s Armor with our own strength, yes.”

“Your own strength, yeah. That’s what I meant. But for someone without Your Own Strength, this trunk isn’t exactly a feather pillow, you follow?”

“Of course, freeman.” Markham stepped into the street and pointed at a passing dogcart.

The cartboy-a sweaty grill pushing sixty, barefoot, in a homespun vest and shapeless pants ragged at the ankle, smelling of ass and cheap booze-dropped the dogcart’s draw shafts and threw himself into submission: knees on the street, hands behind ankles, forehead into the cobbles alongside the Khryllian’s instep. “Will dhe Lord do dhis poor ellie dhe honor’v acceptin’ service?”

“The freeman will ride, Eligible,” Markham said. “Load the case.”

The grill scrambled to his feet and lunged for the travel trunk with as much alacrity and enthusiasm as arthritis-knobbed joints allowed; I saw the cartboy’s grimace at the trunk’s weight and said, “Hey, let me do that-”

“No, no, kwatch-no, I goddid, sure.” The cartboy kept his head ducked, eyes fixed on the cobbles, forcing his spine into an awkward half crouch to hold his crown ridge below my chin. “You please go climb up, kwatch. Do my job, I godda, hey?”

I found my lips pulling back and I couldn’t unlock my teeth. “Don’t call me that.”

The cartboy ducked his head even lower and his shoulders hunched around his ears. “Hey, don’ mean nuddin’, kwatch-kwatch don’ mean nuddin’, bud, like-”

“I know what it means.” Sudden cords in my neck drew down my head.“I’m not your fucking kwatcharr.”

“Hey, I-hey, I don’. . I don’-”

“A man has spoken, Eligible.” Markham’s voice was soft and bland, entirely matter-of-fact, but it stopped the stammering like he’d cut the grill’s throat with a silken knife. “Freeman Shade? Will you ride?”

I didn’t answer. I was staring at scar-puckered stumps, dark and skin-cancer rippled, on the cartboy’s forearms. Stumps of his fighting claws.

Guards in the Ankhanan Donjon had lopped off Orbek’s fighting claws at that same joint. With bolt cutters.

click clack, he’d said. click fuck-me clack.

For trying to help Caine. That is: me.

Then.

you understand what they do to me? do you? they do to me what you do to black knives, all those years ago: cut off what makes me me. now I never get a bitch. never get pups. what good’s being safe? a good death is all i got left. a good death. honor on my clan.

I found myself trying to swallow around that familiar fist tangled in my guts.

“Eligible? What’s that mean, eligible?”

“Sure, kwatch-er, boss. Sure. Godda be ellie, hey?” The cartboy swung the travel trunk into the dogcart’s cargo cage. He displayed his maimed forearms proudly. “Betcha I am. Don’ wanna ged messing wid ’dacks, boss. Sdick to ellies. We dake care a you good.”

The cartboy shuffled back between the draw shafts and picked them up. “Good hey, climb up, hey? Where do I run you?”

I looked at Markham. “Eligible for what?”

The face of the Lord Righteous looked harder than the cobbles of the street. “Will you ride?”

I chewed on the inside of my lower lip for a second.

“Shit.”

I dug an Ankhanan silver noble out of my purse and flipped it to the astonished cartboy, then stepped to the back of the dogcart and reached for the trunk.

“I’d rather walk.”

The Spire gave me the creeps.

It reminded me of the Washington Monument. I posed at the monument once for promo shots, and it’s something you never forget: the psychic weight of that monstrously blank neo-stele looming behind your back. A giant white cock, fucking the sky.

Except the Spire was bigger. A lot bigger.

I kept my head down. *Never did things by halves, did you?*

God, as usual, did not reply.

It wasn’t just the illusion of looming threat-the way it leaned over me as though I were about to be crushed by God’s Own Hard-On-it was that the Spire really was, in a sense, God’s own hard-on.

Fucking Ma’elKoth.

A stalagmite of whitestone-faced granite piled on the lowest arc of the vertical city, studded with embrasure-pocked battlements, its bleached immensity commanded the whole of Purthin’s Ford and the face of Hell. Six arching sally bridges, staggered in a quarter-spiral, joined it to the tiers of the vertical city. Its uppermost reach overtopped the lip of the escarpment by nearly thirty meters; the five-spired cap caught the sun in a brilliant white-metal blaze that could be seen, on clear days, all the way to the Rymedge Mountains beyond.

And that wasn’t enough either. Impossibly huge and impenetrably strong just wouldn’t properly demonstrate the big bastard’s infinite genius-the goddamn name he chose for himself is a phrase in Paquli that translates as I Am Limitless-and I guess even in those days he felt the need to prove it with every move he made.

The Spire was also the spillway and control center for Home’s original hydropower dam.

I’d seen guesstimated specs on it in a Monastic Threat Estimate from about fifteen years ago. The river is the outlet of the Fist of God reservoir, far upland on the plateau. The Fist of God is a vast crater-meteor impact, maybe, or some ancient volcanic hiccup-that went deep enough to penetrate the bedrock water table that fed the river. My river. Now it’s a great big pool, because Ma’elKoth corked the entire fucking river down here with this immense goddamn fortress.

Those sally bridges-light and graceful as they looked from down here-were actually immense high-pressure enclosed aqueducts. The highest joined the escarpment where the river used to be a waterfall. The lower five channeled some of the water back to the face of Hell, making five little rivers that spilled down through the vertical city for the grills to drink from and crap in; most of the river’s water churned down through the center of the Spire in a series of columns that hydraulically powered all manner of the vast fortress’s inner workings, from internal gates and portcullises to water cannon on the sally bridges to elevators big enough to shift entire companies of armored cavalry.

And then the river was graciously allowed to boil out from beneath the fortress and wind its way through the canal system into the city and the estates beyond, and frankly, the whole thing made me a little sick to my stomach.

Because that was where we were going. I knew it from the very steps of the vigilry. “Straight to the Spire, huh?”

“The Eternal Vaunt of the Order of Khryl is our destination,” Markham affirmed stiffly. “Only the vulgar name it the Spire.”

“The vulgar name it some other shit too.”

Markham’s selective deafness still seemed to be working just fine. “It would serve you, as an Ankhanan, to show reverence; you may not be aware that the Eternal Vaunt was created for us by your own patron god Ma’elKoth, after our Glory at Ceraeno-”

“Before he was a god, even. Yeah, I know.” I couldn’t help but know: the story bubbled to the surface of my mind like a fart in a bathtub. “ToaPhelathon had him build it for the Order to keep you out of the Plains War. Biggest bribe in the bistory of Home.”

Markham’s nearside eyebrow arched a millimeter. “The Prince-Regent gifted the Order with the Eternal Vaunt out of gratitude for the Order’s role in crushing the Khulan Horde-”

“Yeah. Sure. Toa-Phelathon gets Jheled-Kaarn, Harrakha, and Ironhold, and the Order gets the most spectacular fortress on Home. Smartest thing the old bastard ever did; probably won the war for him.”

“If so,” Markham murmured with a sidelong glance, “it is a pity he did not live to enjoy it.”

“Yeah. Pity.”

“There is a persistent rumor,” he said consideringly, “that the Prince-Regent’s death did not come at the hands of agents of the disaffected nobility hoping to control Tel-Tamarantha-that he was, in fact, assassinated by a Monastic Esoteric.”

My voice went as empty as Markham’s eyes. “I wouldn’t know.”

“The rumor goes that the First Ankhanan Succession War was actually engineered by the Council of Brothers for the express purpose of placing the Incarnate Ma’elKoth on the Oaken Throne.”

Behind my blandly disbelieving smile, I monologued to my audience of one, *Somehow it’s always about you and me, huh?*

An edge of uneasiness shaved away the irony. I don’t often let myself think about the fractal web of destiny that interweaves my life with Ma’elKoth’s. Examining it too closely only makes me queasy. And fucking pissed. There’s a reckoning I owe, there.

One of these days. .

“For my part, I find it an unlikely tale,” Markham said. “The Monasteries would hardly be interested in increasing the power of a god.”

“He wasn’t exactly a god at the time.” Which is part of what made me a little sick. Still does. He’d built the fucking Spire while he was still human. More or less.

“A god is a god, always and entire, incarnate or no. To the gods, time is a dream.”

“It’s a swell theory.”

Markham sniffed. “I will not debate theogony with an Ankhanan.”

“Good thing, too. On this subject I can kick anybody’s ass.”

The sinking sun cast bloody shadows across half-empty streets. Humans made way for us with inclined heads and tugged forelocks. Ogrilloi crumpled into instant submission and kept to their knees until the regard of the Lord Righteous had passed them by.

The whitestone approach to the Spire’s main gate was a maze of interleaved sandbag berms, piled chest-high; every fold of the long winding queue was exposed to the silver-chased barrels of rifles that made sunset flames along the first rung of battlements, and to the black gapes of cannon above. Mounted armsmen paced their snorting horses around sandbag-walled paddocks, long guns propped on hauberked hipbones. Wagons and carts drawn by yoked teams of ogrilloi inched through inspection at a single checkpoint staffed by two Knights and a scurrying crew of examiners who wore metal-framed goggles that looked like simplified versions of the customs officers’ loupes. Wagons passed through by the inspectors were walked to a broad parking area. Gangs of ogrilloi unloaded them case by case and barrel by barrel and box by box, hand-carrying each piece into the Spire.

I got it when I finally caught sight of the main gate. What was left of the main gate.

A shattered gape in the Spire’s face. Blackened and empty.

Desk-size blocks of dressed stone stood in huge stacks to one side. Some had been fitted already to mend the walls and build again the missing archway. The join of new stone and old was clearly visible, despite what must have been a week or two of scrubbing; the older stone bore brownish ghosts of scorchmarks.

Must have been one serious bomb.

I sidled close to Markham and nodded at the gate. “A wagon, right? Maybe a carriage. No driver. Just horses. A runaway, right up the street-”

“Freeman Shade-”

“That why ogrilloi haul your wagons?” I admired the efficiency: hostages as draft animals. And the reverse.

“Freeman, the Champion awaits.”

I was still looking at the shattered gate. “What’re you gonna do once they decide it’s worth dying to take a chunk out of you?”

The Lord Righteous squinted down at me as though something had unexpectedly come into focus, but he made no reply.

That was answer enough.

Berms and bunkers. Checkpoints and sharpshooters.

More than enough.

Fading echoes, inside my head-

a good death.

honor on my clan.

“All right, shit. I am a dumbass.” My wave took in the desperately screweddown antiterror fortifications. “Orbek figures into this somewhere, doesn’t he?”

Markham didn’t answer.

My mouth had gone dry, and the fist in my guts had turned to brick. “Markham?”

Markham only kept walking.

“Hey, goddammit, I’m talking to you-”

“And I am not answering, Freeman Shade. I am tasked to see to your wounds and deliver your person unto the Champion. And no more.” The unsubtle emphasis was accompanied by a quickening of his already brisk pace.

“Come on, give me a hint, huh?”

Markham stopped. His oiled-steel stare followed his long Lipkan nose. “Why should I?”

“Maybe to not be an asshole one day of your life?”

“Freeman, you are rude, disrespectful, and vulgar. Not to mention foulmouthed. Where in your manner will I find an inclination to do you a favor?”

“Shit, if I said something like that to you, we’d have to fight now-”

“If you said anything like that to me,” the Lord Righteous replied in a tone that could freeze beer, “you would be a liar.”

“Ooh, good one.” I rolled my eyes. “So this is because I haven’t sucked enough butt? Shit, why didn’t you tell me? Hey, nice armor, Markham. You make that yourself? And I really like your fucking hair. .”

I was talking to his retreating back.

“Y’know,” I muttered as I dragged the travel trunk clattering after, “maybe there is something in the goddamn air.”

If there was, it was getting into my head: the headache was ramping up again. A hot swollen mass of hurt gathered behind my eyes, thumping in time with my heart. I winced with its pulse as the Lord Righteous turned away from the berm-baffled gatewalk toward the face of Hell. “What, we’re not going in?”

“The Champion awaits on the Purificapex atop the Eternal Vaunt. You will require transport.”

The hot throb inside my head when I tried to lift my gaze up the thousand feet of whitestone behind wouldn’t let me argue. I shut the hell up and followed the Lord Righteous across the whitewashed flagstones toward the jitney landing.

A thin misting drizzle had ridden into town on the dusk. Watch flames hissed and spat atop single-foot braziers. Lanterns swinging from half a dozen jitneys’ overhead lighthooks splashed shadows across the landing. Near the first tier’s face stood bulky freight carts, ogrilloi wrestling crates and casks up onto their beds. Heavy-linked chain served the carts for traces, hooked through yokes of eight. Ogrilloi chained in the traces sat quietly, heads down, breath smoking in the evening chill.

The twin thoroughfares that laddered either side of the face of Hell in vast switchbacked zags had been widened and repaved since my time: four lanes of ogrillo-drawn traffic could grind up or down the ten-percent grade without locking wheels. The thoroughfares’ long folded slant emptied onto a broad plaza crowded with bundle-laden ogrilloi, returning from jobs or shopping in the city below, waiting to load their burdens onto the jitneys, silent and patient in the rain.

Mounted armsmen made sure they stayed that way.

One of the water wranglers saw us coming. The grill dropped his cask on the flagstones and fell to his knees. “Knight!”

Then another, and another. Water cart drovers jumped down from their seats and cracked urgent whips at the heads of the dray-gangs. Bundles and sacks fell unheeded to the wet stones. Water casks rolled as the wranglers threw themselves down.

And for some reason, this had me thinking about Marade whittling the splinters off a broken shinbone.

I saw her in my mind as if she were doing it right now: planing the shinbone down with a little knife to make a kind of flat toothpick about two fingers wide, then using it to scrape the joints of her sabatons free of black mashed-potato muck. Sticky black mashed-potato muck that smelled like meat-

Rock dust and sand and clotted blood.

I stopped and shook my head, looking up and around to ask the wet twilight what the fuck had reminded me of that right now, and the shape of Hell above and the angle of the lamp-sparked cliff face snatched memory-

And I stopped breathing too. All I could do was blink.

Here. Right here. The Khryllians had built the jitney landing over it. The gateway.

The ambush.

Fire and spears and arrows and screams and the schannk of short swords licking along steel rims of linked shields and Marade’s morningstar showering shredded flesh-

Whatever the earth remembered of that clotted mush of sand and blood was under these whitestone flags. Right here. Right now. Where these hundreds of ogrilloi knelt in submission to a single Khryllian Lord.

The last of my breath hissed out in a shuddering Holy crap, and when I breathed in again, I inhaled more headache.

“Freeman Shade? Are you unwell?” Markham sounded like he hoped so.

“I, uh-no. No. I just-I forgot something, that’s all.”

“Is there some emergency?”

“What?”

“This matter you recall-does it require attention?”

“I, uh-”

I looked down. My boots shone in the rain, the whitestone flags beneath them grey with damp. In an open joint, a tiny anthill: mounded crumbs of the black earth beneath.

“Yeah. Yeah, it probably does.” I scuffed the anthill into a smear of mud. “But it’s too fucking late to do anything about it now,” I said, and walked on.

My headache got worse when we reached the jitney queue. As near as I could guess, I was standing right on top of where Pretornio had buried the porters. The two who died springing my trap on the Black Knives. I wondered if anyone had ever found the bodies.

I didn’t think so. Somehow I didn’t think so. Somehow I could feel them down there: tangles of worm-scoured bone an arm’s length beneath my soles. Perry? Pivo? Something like that. One of them had started with P. I was sure of that much.

Pretty sure.

The other-?

The deepening throb in my head drove off any hope of recall. My eyes drifted closed and I put the heel of a hand to my temple, rubbing in small circular motions that didn’t touch the pain, but also didn’t make it any worse. I kept doing it. It was something to do.

“Freeman Shade?”

Christ, my head hurt. “What?”

“Please embark, freeman. You are delaying the queue.”

I opened my eyes. The five grills in the jitney team knelt against their yokes, traces taut, their breath coming harsh and slow, arms slack and trembling: primly fascist autoerotic asphyxiation. They weren’t locked in: not convicts. This was a job. Four grills yoked in tandem, with a bitch single-yoked in the lead. Maybe watching her ass helped keep them trotting. The lead bitch had her forehead pressed to the insteps of Markham’s sabatons.

The Lord Righteous didn’t seem to notice. “Freeman Shade?”

i give myself to you.

I watched drizzle trickle like spit across the back of her grey-leathered skull.

fuckbitch

I shook my head and had to look away before I could speak. “Y’know what? I think I’d rather-”

But ogrilloi knelt everywhere, beside and before and behind, and the only direction I could look away was up. . and up was the third tier, and I followed with my eyes a walkway I had once followed afoot toward wet strangled moans and porcine grunting in a black bloody midnight, and from down here I could see the angle just above the shattered chamber where I found Black Knives rooting into Stalton’s belly. . bagged in his own armor, hauberk over his face like a rape victim’s skirt. .

“Fuck it anyway.” I waved a hand. “Make sure the bitch takes it easy with my trunk.”

I rode. Markham walked-well, jogged-alongside, one hand on the cart’s bed rail like he belonged in a Social Police LeSec detail. The jitney team trotted around the steep switchbacks of the thoroughfare fast enough that just watching them made me tired. We weaved up the slope, overtaking other weather-splintered grill carts with their sullenly dead-eyed dray teams and ignoring the grills on foot; they’d scatter at the rattle of Markham’s sabatons on the stone, dropping their bundles into the drizzle-churned muck to take to their knees and lower their heads.

Off the thoroughfare the levels of Hell slipped down around us, each shabbier and more crowded and more throat-choking with the overpowering stench of grill shit than the one below, as if the ogrilloi had organized themselves into instinctive castes. Down at the first level, they at least had clothes and lanterns and roofs over the ancient walls. Higher, the open gutters were packed with gnawed-down bones and rotten greens and sick yellow turds that melted slowly away in the rain; the only general improvement I could see that the Khryllians had made was to carve drains that emptied the gutters into sluices channeling the solid waste away from the river.

Even all those years ago, I remember being puzzled why the First Folk would have built a city without sewers.

Of course, now I pretty much know.

By the time I stepped off the jitney at the fifth tier vault, I was whipped. Wrung out. The beating was barely half of it. This was worse. This was more. I’ve been beaten before. This was being beaten down. Beaten down by age, and by memory.

Everything looked too different. Nothing looked different enough.

The switchbacked thoroughfare still threaded high-arched tunnels to end at the vast almost-Gothic vault carved from the escarpment’s heartrock, but now, twenty-five years later, there were none of the shadows and dry must and sand, none of the lichen and gnawed-clean bones of small animals. The mica-flecked stone of the vault was scrubbed and spotless and polished to a mirror finish that threw back the light of dozens of lamps. Dual gates of filigreed iron closed both the lower entrance and the arch of the broad ramping tunnel that led to the surface of the escarpment above. The whole place had the air of a busy railhead, full of armsmen, clerks and porters, wagons, and chain gangs.

The last time I’d been in this vault-

I didn’t let myself think about it.

“From here you walk,” Markham said. “You may safely leave the trunk anywhere you like. I will have it sent on to your hostelry.”

“Shit. You could’ve done that back at the vigilry-”

“Yes,” Markham said. “I could have.”

The jitney bitch had her team backing the cart down the thoroughfare almost before my feet hit the rock. An attentive page was instantly on hand to take charge of the trunk. Markham directed me toward a new tunnel, broad as the thoroughfares, that had been cut the dozen meters or so through to the face.

It opened onto a cargo aerie: a broad oval cliff of cut-smooth rock, twilight sky, and the creak of oiled hemp as three massive cranes lifted whole wagons and their loads over the lip of the plateau above, swinging them wide over the half-kilometer drop. On my left the escarpment fell away down the levels of Hell to the twilit map of Purthin’s Ford and the flat indigo snake of the river, and ahead-

Ahead the Spire jabbed another hundred and thirty feet of swollen whitestone god-cock into the darkening sky.

To my right the world was eclipsed by the buttress wall that supported the final sally bridge. From the city below, those sally bridges looked delicate as rainbows; up close, its arching buttress was a cliff of rain-slick whitestone too vast for comprehension.

The whole thing was just way too fucking big.

I tried to remind myself that I’m not exactly educated-that really, I know a grand total of dick about materials science. I tried to remind myself that for all I knew, maybe granite and whitestone really could support the stress of a fortress fifteen hundred feet tall. Maybe it could hold up open spans of bridge a couple hundred yards long. Not to mention however ungodly many bazillion gallons of water under whatever hellish pressure must be inside. Maybe Ma’elKoth just knew a lot more about engineering than anyone else. Anywhere. Ever.

Maybe it was magick.

Maybe that magick wasn’t going to unexpectedly decay while I was way too fucking close to that fucking thing.

Markham led me along the cliff face toward a stone command house that had been built out from the base of the buttress. Like all official Khryllian structures, it was immaculate, all clean white lines and perfect white angles, and looked like it could double as a bunker. The outer room held regimented copying tables staffed by regimented Khryllian clerks making regimented lines of notes on the regimented contents of every wagon going up or down above the aerie; the back office held a pair of standard-issue back office types, distinguished only by their Soldier of Khryl crewcuts and the sunburst blazons on their blouses.

“I require this office,” Markham said, and the back-office types gathered their papers and their charcoals and vanished without a word. Without so much as a glance. At either of us. Or each other.

“They don’t ask why? Who I am? They don’t even ask how long?”

“It is not their duty to know.”

The door closed behind them. He moved to the rear wall of the office, which was tiled with the same brilliant whitestone that made the whole Spire shine-probably was the buttress wall itself. He ran the flat of his hand over the stone in a long smooth curve that could almost have been a caress.

He said, “Phy’nyll tin Pinesh,” and the sunset around his hand took on a faint wash of blue that flowed from his outstretched fingers. A rectangular section of wall swung backward into darkness. From within came a subterranean thunder, almost subsonic: a slow permanent earthquake in the absolute black: my river rumbling past.

Oh, for shit’s sake. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“Please follow me.” Walking through, Markham was instantly swallowed by night.

I squinted into the darkness. “What am I, a fucking bat? How about a lamp?”

“The way is straight and smooth, with hazard to neither head nor foot.” Markham’s voice echoed with the patience of the stone around us. “If you like, I will carry you.”

The way my head felt, I was tempted to take the bastard up on it. Instead I only sighed. “Anybody ever tell you you’re a funny guy?”

“No.”

“There’s a reason for that,” I said, and followed into the night-shrouded passage. As soon as I entered, the panel swung shut behind me and the way was dark as a cave.

Even this took me back. Walking along smooth flat stone in absolute black, left hand brushing polished wall cold and dripping with what I hoped was just rock sweat, I was twenty-five again with Marade at my side, walking out cold iron calm from midnight into screaming bloody dawn. .

I could still feel the spring steel of muscle under the velvet skin of her thigh. I could still smell my blood on her hand, feel her tongue between my lips. .

Sometime later another panel opened onto lamplight. Markham stepped aside to let me pass first through the doorway.

It was the first place in Purthin’s Ford that didn’t smell clean. It was also the first Khryllian place that wasn’t white. Some kind of Roman-style bath, tiled in brown terra-cotta-a long curving pool of rusty-looking water lay flat and still below a shallow flight of steps. The steps continued into depths invisible in the rusty murk. The room smelled stale and old-far too old for a place built less than twenty years ago-thick with must and decay, lampblack and a meaty butcher-shop funk.

Three steps led up to a narrow walkway that hugged the inner curve of the wall above the pool. The light in the room came from lamps hung on chains above this walkway; there were no windows. The wall near the steps was hung with clothes hooks, the first three holding towels and the rest empty. An array of armor racks stood nearby, all empty save one, and that one was hung not with chain or plate but with ordinary clothing, a tunic and pants that might have been of raw silk.

Markham had stopped in the passageway. “This is the Lavidherrixium. From here,” he said from the half light, “you will continue alone.”

I shrugged and turned for the walkway stairs.

“No,” Markham said from behind me. “You approach the Purificapex of the Lord of Valor.”

I looked over my shoulder. The Lord Righteous pointed at the pool.

“Oh, come on.”

“You may disrobe here, and hang your clothing. You will find a robe on the far side.”

“What am I supposed to do, swim? In that?”

“Yes.”

“You are batshit insane.”

“The taints of Cowardice and Compromise must be washed from you before you may approach.” Upper-case emphasis was clear in his tone. “You must be made Clean.”

“That’s gonna make me clean? Are you pulling my dick? It smells like-” I squinted along the curve of the wall and saw the robes hanging on the far side, and the robes weren’t white either; they were terra-cotta brown. The same brown as the tiles. The same brown as the rusty tinge of the water.

The butcher-shop funk finally got through to me.

“Oh, for shit’s sake.” My head pounded. I rubbed my eyes. “I remember this from Abbey school-that fucking Khryllian Sanctified by the Blood of Heroes crap. . it’s supposed to be just a metaphor-”

“Freeman, the Champion awaits.”

I looked at the water for a long moment. I tried to imagine so much as dipping in a toe. My stomach churned.

I turned for the door. “Tell the Champion I appreciate the sentiment and thanks very much for the Healing and the three-peasant tour, but this is a little bit way too motherfucking much, and I am out of here like a-”

I came to a sudden stop. The doorway was full of Khryllian. The Khryllian said, “No.”

“Markham, get out of my way.”

“You may make the attempt to move me.”

“I’m telling you I’m not doing this-”

“And I am telling you, Freeman Shade, that you are.”

The Lord Righteous’s stare was full of cold possibility.

“You pull this swim-in-the-blood shit on everybody who comes up here, or is this something special just for me?”

Something flickered through Markham’s eyes then, something I hadn’t seen before: something cold and hot together. Something angry, and frightened. Wounded.

Dangerous.

“Fuck me.” I suddenly had a little trouble getting my breath. “There is no ‘everybody who comes up here,’ is there? That’s the going up Hell instead of inside the Spire, the secret passage, the no introductions, all of it. It’s so nobody starts running around yelling there’s a non-Khryllian desecrating Our Holy Pukinsuckmydick or whateverthefuck you call it. You’ve never done this before-”

“I am tasked to deliver you to the Champion.” Markham’s voice had gone as dangerous as his eyes.

“You don’t know what’s going on either.” I jabbed a finger at the Khryllian’s petrifying face. “You don’t have a fucking clue.”

Markham’s jaw worked like he was chewing rocks. “It is not my duty to know.”

“And it’s killing you. It’s eating you alive.”

The progress of his self-control could be traced by the slow drain of flush from his cheeks down into his neck. He wrapped himself in supercilious Lipkan disdain. “It is not my duty to know.”

So I turned away and stripped off my tunic. I threw it to the floor under the clothes hooks with a short dark laugh. “Gonna be here on my way out?”

“Perhaps,” Markham said warily to my back. “Why?”

“Maybe I’ll fill you in,” I said as I kicked off my boots and unbuckled my belt, “or maybe-”

I dropped my pants. “Maybe I’ll just give you one more chance to kiss my ass.”