SEVEN
TAN’ELKOTH SAT ALONE in the stony gloom of the Curioseum. Motionless, his eyes glittered in the flickering glow from the mirror that served him as a deskscreen. His fingers were steepled before his impassive face. The ground floor of his apartment had no windows; though it was late afternoon outside the Curioseum, black shadows crowded close around him. He was consumed with the task of waiting.
He had been waiting for this moment for nearly seven years.
The mirror on his desk glowed with a special edition of Adventure Update. Tan’elKoth had watched the recording that Clearlake played for a worldwide audience. With his usual canny political touch for self-preservation, Clearlake had seamlessly edited the recording to eliminate every suggestion that the Studio itself might be somehow responsible for the outbreak, thus protecting himself from any charge of corporate slander; other than that, the recording ran uncensored, and unrelievedly gruesome. Tan’elKoth stabbed the cutoff. He’d seen enough.
“One supposes the Bog has, as well,” he murmured.
He composed himself to wait.
Seconds ticked by more swiftly than the beating of his heart.
He waited.
Then he waited longer.
And longer.
Still no chime from his annunciator.
Those fractal tree branch world-paths replayed within his mind. No new flowering, no unexpected crook or twist presented itself: this sprouting future was precisely as it had been, in the moment he laid his will upon it.
But still they did not call.
That he had miscalculated was impossible. Even an idiot could now see how easily they had been outmaneuvered; even an idiot could now see that they had only one choice. Even the stupidest fish can feel the hook when it’s lodged in its throat.
He thrust himself to his feet and prowled the limits of his cage. He paced up the broad curve of stairs that led through the light trap to his personal quarters, humming distractedly to himself. The voices of the men within him murmured that there was something he’d overlooked.
He climbed the final flight, up to his studio. The skylight showed only the low bloodlit gloom of night clouds over the city. This was where he’d spent most of the past six years—now nearly seven—molding in clay and casting in bronze the interior shapes of his private reality.
It had been a brutal, bitter, soul-searing struggle, teaching his hands to bring forth the shapes within his heart; every time a casting cooled unevenly and cracked, every time he scraped thin grey curls of clay from beneath his fingernails, every time he so much as touched a knife or a trowel, he was forced to confront memories of being Ma’elKoth, of constructing His Great Work: memories of ordering reality with nothing more than the power of his mind. Memories of how far he had fallen—
And yet, working with his hands had taught him things that working only with his mind could never have: had taught him that materials are not infinitely malleable, nor should they be—that to overwork a piece is to destroy it. Materials have shapes of their own. True art is a negotiation, a struggle, even a dance, between the will of the artist and the intrinsic form—the physical properties of strength and balance, the fundamental possibility—that defines his chosen medium.
He passed a study for his most famous sculpture, The Passion of Lovers. Passion was not his best work; it was merely the most accessible to the limited tastes of his audience. Cast in monumental bronze, two men stand tangled in an intimate embrace, their forms stylized, abstracted into the essence of their desire for each other until they flow together and join as one. One holds a sword that pierces the other through the groin, its blade emerging from that one’s back; the sword-pierced figure holds smaller blades in each hand, one seeking his lover’s heart, the other buried in the top of his lover’s skull.
Obvious. Even trite.
He turned aside from Passion and pulled the shroud from his current work, his David. He had finally allowed himself to attempt a full figure in marble, a material far more exacting than bronze. Larger than life-size, to the same scale as Michelangelo’s, the half-completed sculpture rested on a large reinforced dolly with swivel-mounted wheels—locked now—so that he could at need shift the tons of stone to examine it in differing angles of sunlight.
The figure had begun to emerge from its prison of creamy stone. Tan’elKoth surveyed it critically, walking around it, sighing; he struggled to live through his eyes, to forget his tension, his frustration. Even to pick up a chisel in his current emotional turmoil would be an invitation to disaster. He was not unmindful of what historians termed Michelangelo’s Struggle series—each tortured and twisted figure abandoned after a single flawed stroke.
Tan’elKoth’s David would be greater than Buonarroti’s; instead of the perfection of masculine beauty sought by the Earth artist, Tan’elKoth had taken for his model an older, more seasoned man, a man on the descending curve of his life—a man whose face and form would show in every line the soul-crushing burden of being the Beloved of God, and yet would also show pride, tempered strength, unbendable will. One would see the beauty of the youth he had been, and see that the scars etched by time’s acid had made him more beautiful still.
But now, as he examined the emerging figure, he could see that it would develop not precisely as he had envisioned it. Already the gestural line of its stance had diverged from his intention, as though its form was becoming a vector of two convergent images. As though there is already at work here a will that is not my own.
Tan’elKoth’s eyes went wide and round, and he lost a moment in sheer marvel. Somewhere, somewhere within this revelation was the fault line that had shifted beneath his certainty—
He had always been a composite entity. Any memories of having but a single mind had been relegated to the ghost-forms that peopled his inner world. From the moment of Ma’elKoth’s self-creation in a flare of power from the crown of Dal’kannith, he had been the master of a choir of interior voices. Through the years that choir had swelled to a symphony, of which he was the conductor: many voices, many minds, many lives, but a single organizing will.
He was Ma’elKoth no longer; his latest act of self-creation had reduced the god he had once been to merely the greatest of the shades in his internal Tartarus. Despite the self-deprecation of his new name, Tan’elKoth knew that he was more than even Ma’elKoth had been: more human, more connected to the currents of time and flesh that rule the lives of mortals. And a better artist—which may, in the end, have been the most important difference.
Art had always been his ruling passion.
Hannto the Scythe had been an obsessive collector from his earliest years; he had in truth become a necromancer in service to this obsession. The skill of necromancy consists primarily in coaxing forth the remnants of the patterns that consciousness imprints upon the Shells of corpses—capturing the fading echoes of the mind that had once been expressed by the meat. A skilled necromancer can temporarily tune his own mind, his own Shell, closely enough to these residual vibrations that he can access the occasional tatter of the memories they represent.
Many artists conceal works that they do not feel are up to their personal standards; many of these works may be lost forever if the artist leaves behind no record. Hannto had used his power to summon forth memories from the very bones of the great, and eventually his personal collection had swelled with uncataloged works by major artists. He could provide no provenance for any of them, and thus could never receive the full value of a painting or sculpture in a sale, but what mattered that?
He had never intended to sell them.
Hannto had his own feelings about art. Art was not merely the creation of beauty, for him; neither was it merely a reflection of reality. It was not even the depiction of truth.
Art was the creation of truth.
It is a truism that when one is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The glory of art is that it can show this proverbial hammer how everything looks to a screwdriver—and to a plowshare, and to an earthenware pot. If reality is the sum of our perceptions, to acquire more varying points of view is to acquire, literally, more reality.
Hannto had wanted to own the universe.
The precise point where he had passed from collector to creator was a mystery. Perhaps truly passionate collectors are always artistes manqués: perhaps they choose to buy what they have not the gifts to create. Perhaps touching the minds of all those countless artists had molded him in some way; perhaps seeing the world through the dream-eyes of artists had given him, over time, some vision of his own.
Tan’elKoth was more than the sum of his experiences; he was the grand total of the sums that were the men who lived within his mind. For fifteen years and more he had lived by his absolute control of these self-created shades. What will could possibly have touched this sculpture, other than his own? What will could have altered the curve of his David’s stance, could have angled the line of his David’s jaw down toward resignation and defeat? What will could possibly drive his mallet to his chisel without his consent—without even his awareness?
Faintly, distantly, muffled in the depths of his apartment below, the annunciator on his deskscreen chimed.
2
TAN’ELKOTH FAIRLY FLEW down both flights of stairs into the darkness of the ground floor; he skidded to a halt in front of the desk, then spent a bare moment to order the lights on and straighten his clothing.
The Adventures Unlimited logo flashed in the message box of his screen.
With ponderous dignity, he lowered himself into his chair. “Iris: Acknowledge,” he murmured. “Audiovisual.”
“Professional Tan’elKoth. You are instructed to remain at your current screen. Hold for voice communication from the Adventures Unlimited Board of Governors.”
The screen wiped to the Adventures Unlimited logo: the armored knight upon the winged horse, rampant.
“Professional Tan’elKoth.” A subtle change in the voice: where before it had been purely mechanical, now it had the faintest hint of self-awareness, the consciousness of power.
There came next from the speakers deep in the floor beneath his desk a recording of Tan’elKoth’s own voice. “Tell your Board of Governors this: in exchange for certain considerations, I shall undertake to solve their Michaelson problem.”
Tan’elKoth smiled.
The voice of the Board of Governors said, “What considerations?”
So: no preamble, no throat-clearing. Clean and direct without a wasted word. Tan’elKoth nodded to himself. He could do business with men such as these. “An alliance, gentlefolk. Return me to my land. Leave the Empire and my people to me; you may use the rest of my world as you desire. Within the Imperial bound, your interests will be better served by the power of Ma’elKoth than by the weak minds and wills of your Earth-bred satraps. We have a common goal, do we not? To ensure the future of humanity, both here and on my world.”
“And in exchange?”
Tan’elKoth shrugged. “As I said: I shall undertake to solve your Michaelson problem.”
“Our Michaelson problem is hardly worth such a price.”
He snorted. “Come, gentlefolk. This protest is fatuous; were the problem in question so insignificant, we would not be having this conversation.”
“Michaelson is no one. We created him. He is exactly what we made him: nothing. A cripple, wholly owned by the Studio.”
Tan’elKoth let a smile creep into his voice. “And yet, within a handful of hours, this wholly owned cripple has ripped your plans asunder and cast their shreds to the winds of the Abyss.”
“You are overdramatizing. This is no more than a public-relations gaffe.”
“You,” Tan’elKoth replied with clinical exactitude, “are fools.”
Only silence greeted this pronouncement; apparently, the Board of Governors was unused to hearing the truth. “Caine is against you, now,” Tan’elKoth said. “Without my help, you are lost.”
“You fear Michaelson so much?”
“Bah.” How do men of vision so limited come to wield power so vast? “I fear Michaelson not at all. Michaelson is a fiction, you fools. The truth of him is Caine. You do not comprehend the distinction; and so he will destroy you.”
“We are gratified by your concern for our welfare.”
“I care nothing for your welfare,” he said through his teeth. “I want my Empire back.”
“This seems a steep price for so small a service: to crush a powerless cripple.”
“Doubly fools,” Tan’elKoth said. They were repeating themselves; redundancy is the hallmark of muddy thinking. “He does have power. One power: the power to devote himself absolutely to a single goal, to be ruthless with himself and all else in its pursuit. It is the only power he needs—because, unlike the great mass of men, he is aware of this power, and he is willing, even happy, to use it.”
Tan’elKoth leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers before his face; he had been a professor for enough years that he fell into his lecture mode without thinking. “Men like Caine—and, if I may say so, myself—exert a certain pressure upon history; when we set ourselves a goal and extend our energies to achieve it, the force of history itself organizes into a current at our backs. You might call it destiny, though that is an inadequate word for a power of this magnitude. On Overworld, one can even see it: a dark stream in the Flow that organizes the interplay of historical necessities—the interplay which the ignorant call chance.”
“Then we need do nothing at all; he is one, we are . . . several; if what you say is true, we can think him to death.”
Tan’elKoth clenched his jaw. Could they possibly guess how this sophistic jabber wore on his nerves? “Will without action is mere daydreaming; it is as useless as the blind spastic twitching that is action without will—which, I might add, accurately sums up your efforts so far.”
He leaned toward the screen and lowered his voice as though sharing a friendly confidence. “You are helpless before him. He demonstrates this even as we speak. You would have stopped that broadcast if you could; I know that your machines monitor the net, and intercept even private messages that might so much as hint at what that recording explicitly spells out. How, then, did you come to fail? Do you think that recording reached a worldwide audience by chance?”
“Coincidence. A meaningless blip of probability.”
Tan’elKoth forebore to point out that coincidence is only another name for bad luck: the eternal excuse of the loser. “You may scoff at the power of Caine,” he said, “but there is one whose power demands your respect: one who can stop you with a mere gesture. I speak, of course, of Pallas Ril.”
“Pallas Ril—Shanna Michaelson—is merely a woman, while here on Earth. She can be easily dealt with.”
“Mmm, true,” Tan’elKoth said slowly. “And you could have done so, had you not awakened Caine. Pray, tell me now: Where is this mere woman at this moment, as we speak?”
“She is appearing at a convention in Los Angeles.”
“Is she? Are you certain?”
“What are you saying?” For the first time, Tan’elKoth thought he might even be able to detect a hint of expression in the digitized voice—and the emotion thus expressed warmed him inside. “She is on Overworld? Impossible. Her next shift isn’t until September twenty-first.”
In answer, Tan’elKoth gave them only a tiny smug smile.
“She must be found. She must be stopped.”
“And how, precisely, will you do this? She is already beyond your reach; there, she is a goddess, and as near to omnipotent as any living creature has ever been, including myself. You have been completely outfought,” Tan’elKoth said. “Caine is too fast for you; your corporate groupthink is slow and innately predictable. But your difficulty is by no means insoluble.”
“What solution do you propose?”
He straightened again, and let a gleam of his passion flash into his eye. “You must submit yourselves to a single organizing will—give over the direction of your campaign to one lightning mind. To put it bluntly: Your only hope is to call upon me.”
“Why you?”
“I am, false modesty aside, Earth’s leading expert on Caine and Pallas Ril. I have in my library every cube either of them has ever recorded; the primary use of my ammod harness is to allow me to leave the Curioseum long enough to review their Adventures. I daresay I know more about their abilities—and their psychologies—than they do themselves.”
“Knowledge is meaningless without power.”
Tan’elKoth sat silently for a long moment, staring fixedly at the mirror as though some message could be read between the reflected pixels. Finally he said, “Indeed.”
He shifted his weight and allowed some of the fire in his heart to reach his eyes. “To amend my previous statement: Pallas Ril is beyond your reach—but not yet beyond mine. I can stop her for you, gentlefolk. Give me the opportunity, and I shall.”
“At what price?”
“Her I would kill for free; I despise her. Breaking Caine, however—that will be expensive. Caine’s innate ruthlessness makes him extremely dangerous. In his limited fashion, he is frighteningly resourceful, and an exceptionally flexible thinker. In any situation that he can frame in terms of combat, he will not lose.”
“A substantial claim.”
“Is it? Let me provide a salutory example: one that is—I think pardonably—still fresh in my heart. Once, not so long ago, he set his will upon the life of Pallas Ril. Though a living god stood against him on one side—” He modestly placed his palm against his chest, then opened it toward the screen. “—and the most powerful bureaucracy this world has ever known stood against him on the other, he—one single, solitary man—overcame us both.”
“There were special circumstances—”
“Puffery. Mere details. When saving the life he willed to save required that he defeat in single combat the greatest warrior of his time, he did so. Forget that this man was Caine’s master in every form of battle; forget that Berne, even unarmed, could have killed him in his sleep without breaking the rhythm of his snoring. Remember that Berne wielded a weapon that was legendary: Kosall, the unstoppable blade. Remember that Berne was Gifted with Strength far beyond human, and defenses that could make his skin impervious as steel. Remember that when Caine faced him he was bruised, and battered, half crippled—and poisoned—and still . . .” Tan’elKoth let his voice trail away significantly.
“Luck.”
“Luck.” Tan’elKoth spat the word with vehemence surprising even to himself. “Luck is a word the ignorant use to define their ignorance. They are blind to the patterns of force that drive the universe, and they name their blindness science, or clear-headedness, or pragmatism; when they stumble into walls or fall off cliffs, they name their clumsiness luck.”
“We can settle for removing Pallas Ril; perhaps a median price can be negotiated.”
Tan’elKoth snorted. “Clearly, you surmise that killing her will save you and your plans—but the truth is precisely opposite. I stand before you as a testament to this. You wish to interfere with Pallas Ril? Destroy Caine first.”
“And again, why do we need you for this?”
Surely even men as dense as these should see a simple truth, when it is painted before their eyes. “Because,” he said patiently, “there is no one else who truly understands what Caine is. Without me, you will learn, but too late. He himself will teach you—but it is knowledge you will carry to your graves. You will die cursing your own foolishness, should you reject my offer. Hmp. You wish to understand the fate of those who set themselves against Caine? Ask Arturo Kollberg.”
“Arturo Kollberg?” There came a long, long considering pause—far too long in response to a rhetorical question.
“The perfect choice,” his interlocutor said. “We will.”
3
ARTURO KOLLBERG CLUTCHED the melamine surface of his work space, sweat trickling from the scars that pitted the remains of his hairline. His skin had gone to paper these past years: age-yellowed pulp, dry and crumpled over the bones of his face. Only his spoiled-liver lips retained their rubbery thickness, and the teeth around which they tightened were traced with carious brown.
I am dreaming, he thought. This can only be a dream.
A shining disk blinked in the mailbox corner of his screen. Within the disk, an armored knight rode a winged horse, rampant. A message from the Studio.
This must be a dream.
But it didn’t seem like a dream. The cubicles here—in Patient Processing—were crystal clear, and bitterly familiar. The moaning of patients in the examining rooms came thinly through the walls, and someone sobbed with endless psychotic monotony in the lobby. A pair of enormous houseflies, grown fat and clumsy on a diet of blood, buzzed lazily across the fluorescent bands of ceiling lights.
He risked a glance to either side, after first checking that his supervisor wouldn’t catch him looking away from his work. At their adjoining cubicles, the clerks beside him hunched over their keyboards, ticking frantically away. Here in the Mission District Labor Clinic, the data entrars were paid by piecework: one-tenth of a mark for each completed form. They stared with manic fixity at their screens, and the room reeked with their acid, frightened sweat.
His years in the Temp ghetto had sucked the meat from his dead-stick arms and twisted his once-nimble fingers into arthritic claws; he barely recognized the hand that he moved to shift the cursor into his mailbox, because for this single, long, achingly sweet moment, he remembered what he had once been.
What he had once been—
He remembered sitting in Corporate Court, watching the evidence mount against him, watching the parade of Actors and technicians, Social Police and rival Administrators as they each came to throw their handful of earth into his living grave. He remembered watching Ma’elKoth testify against him; he remembered the imperious disdain, the impenetrable dignity, the thundering moral righteousness of the ex-Emperor’s denunciation.
During those endless hours of humiliation, Kollberg had been able to do nothing save sit at the defense table, numb and hopeless. He’d known full well he would be destroyed: the Studio—the power that could have saved him, that could have stood by his side, could have rewarded his devotion and selfless service—had turned against him. To save itself, it had savaged him. Raped him. Gutted his life. It had stripped away everything that gave his existence meaning, and had cast him into the gutters of a Temp slum.
He keyed the icon, and a dialog box unfolded in the center of his screen.
LABORER ARTURO KOLLBERG: YOU ARE INSTRUCTED TO REMAIN AT YOUR CURRENT SCREEN. HOLD FOR COMMUNICATION FROM THE ADVENTURES UNLIMITED BOARD OF GOVERNORS.
Kollberg could no longer breathe.
They remember. They’ve come for me, after all these years. A progress bar flicked into existence in the center of his deskscreen, filling slowly from left to right as something large downloaded from the net. They’ve come for me at last.
Six years—nearly seven—on the Temp boards. Six years.
Six years of standing in line at a public access terminal, begging for work, lucky to get four or five days a month; six years of standing in line at slop kitchens, to act grateful as his bowl was filled with his daily share of the befouled swill that he must choke down quickly or gag on the taste of rot; six years of being shoved and jostled and pawed by people who stank, whose breaths reeked of cheap liquor and tooth decay, whose clothes had the barnyard odor of days-old sweat and imperfectly wiped assholes; six years of hot-bunking at a Temp flophouse, time-sharing a single bed in eight-hour shifts with two other Laborers, sleeping on sheets damp with their polluted sweat and the stains of their diseased bodily fluids.
Kollberg’s ragged fingernails scritched across his work space, and his lips curled into knots against his teeth.
The progress bar was nearly full.
If this is a dream, Kollberg decided, it will end when the progress bar fills. That’s how I’ll know.
Soon—too soon, bitterly soon—he would be jerked or slapped awake, to find himself in his tiny cubicle at the Labor Clinic, facing his flickering, blurred deskscreen. He’d have to look at one of the Labor trash who were his coworkers and shrug apologetically, would have to smile sheepishly and mumble something about insomnia last night. Or, worse yet, he might wake up to find his office manager leaning over him, that stuck-up Artisan bitch with the plastic tits, the cracks in her face spackled with the makeup she troweled on every morning. That vicious cunt would dock his pay an hour for sleeping, even if he’d only nodded off ten minutes ago.
For this was his life.
After five years of enduring the soul-killing humiliation of the Temp boards, Kollberg had found a job, a real job. It paid less per hour than Temping, but it was steady; over the course of the sixty hours he spent each week inside his cubicle entering patients’ data into the Labor Clinic’s main core, he made enough to rent himself a room at an SRO only three blocks from the clinic, to rent a netscreen, and even to buy private food three or four times a week. He was, in the brutally limited way only another Temp would really understand, making something of himself.
But now, he somehow knew, he was entering a new world: a world of dream, where all his hopes and his childhood imaginings might still come to pass.
He remembered getting stiffly out of his bed, throwing the bedclothes on the floor, dressing leadenly in yesterday’s shirt and pants. No shower: freshwater showers at the SRO cost three marks for ten minutes, and he could only afford two each week. Salt water was cheaper, but it came untreated straight from the Bay; it made him itch and stink worse than he would if he didn’t bother to wash at all. He’d used a cream depilatory to smooth his stubbled cheeks, and only then had he realized he’d overslept by half an hour. He’d raced to the clinic without breakfast, and had been able to slide into his cubicle and log on with a full minute to spare; this had allowed him the luxury of answering the Artisan cunt’s fisheye with a slightly smug smile.
“Arthur,” she’d begun sternly.
Kollberg had hunched over his keyboard, drawing breath for his automatic correction, but he saw the lift of her eyebrow and the compression at one corner of her mouth that said she was waiting for his correction, hoping he would remind her that his name was Arturo, purely so that she could call him Arthur again: another demonstration of how easily she could trample on whatever little dignity he thought to retain. He’d refused to give her the satisfaction. Instead, he had closed his eyes for a moment, gathered his composure, and said politely, “Yes, Artisan?”
“Arthur,” she repeated heavily, “I know you’re aware that Clinic policy requires data entrars to be on the premises fifteen minutes before log-on. Don’t think that you’ll be able to sneak away for coffee or to use the bathroom before your 0930 break. You should have arrived early enough to take care of that before you sat down.”
“Yes, Artisan.”
“I’ll be watching you.”
His cheeks flamed; he could feel the sneaking stares of the other clerks even through the cubicle walls; he could picture them paused, holding breath, leaning slightly, fingers silently poised above keypads, heads cocked as they listened raptly to his humiliation. “Yes, Artisan.”
Kollberg suffered in the ringing silence.
Finally, the Artisan cunt had swept her eyes around at the other clerks, and the muffled thuttering of keystrokes had begun to spread throughout the terminal suite, and he had been able to breathe again. It was at that point, Kollberg decided, that he must have fallen asleep; up to then, it had been a perfectly unexceptional day.
The progress bar filled, and vanished.
For an instant the screen flashed pure white, as though its crystals were breaking down. The flash hurt—hurt his face, his temples, hurt his ears, hurt like it had reached inside his skull and squeezed his eyeballs together.
Kollberg gasped, for from the pain blossomed a vision, unfolding as though it downloaded directly into his brain: he saw himself recasted as an Administrator, returned to the arms of the Studio in triumph, carried through the iron gates on the shoulders of cheering undercastes.
Flash—
Not only recasted, but upcasted: Businessman Kollberg, at the podium in One World Center in New York, accepting the Studio Presidency from Westfield Turner.
Flash—
Leisureman Kollberg, retiring from the Studio to his private island in the Ionian Sea, to finish his alloted span in a life of sybaritic comfort and satyric pleasures unimaginable to the undercastes . . .
And that was when he knew. This was more than a vision: it was an offer.
And it was a test.
He had been seven years in the desert, and now he was being offered dominion over all the kingdoms of the Earth. There was more here than any burst-feed from the net into his brain. This was an offer of power unimaginable: the power of a god.
He muttered, through teeth clenched hard enough to make his gums bleed, “Get thee behind me, Satan.”
Where the progress bar had vanished, in the middle of his screen, now stood a menu box with two radio buttons:
SERVICE SELF
Kollberg set his jaw and straightened his spine. With pride in himself and in his calling, with pure, unshakable determination, he moved the cursor to SERVICE, and hit RETURN.
His annunciator chimed, and the menu box disappeared. His screen wiped to brilliant, eye-piercing white that cast black shadows behind him and fogged his vision as though he stared into the sun.
His breath caught and his stomach twisted: something huge and foul forced its way into his mouth, into his throat—tears swam in his eyes, and his face burned with agony as the light charred his flesh. But still, somehow, through the blinding light and the unbearable pain, he could read one last message, written in stark black upon the blazing white.
THOU ART MY OWN SON, WHOM I LOVE.
WITH THEE I AM WELL PLEASED.
Then it entered him with power: into his eyes, down his throat, in through his nose, his ears, ripping open his rectum and jamming up the length of his shriveled penis, forcing into him with howling lust; it filled him to bursting, swelling him from within, stretching him thinner and thinner like a weather balloon expanding toward destruction, while it dissolved and digested his guts, his heart, lungs and bones, everything within the stretching membrane of his skin. His eyeballs expanded, threatening to burst from his face, to explode from the pressure that built within them.
He screamed in pain as he squeezed his eyelids shut, trying to keep his eyes in their sockets by sheer strength—and as though that sudden shriek had broken the spell, the pain vanished without even the faintest twinge to mark its passing.
He opened his eyes again. Everyone was staring at him, leaning out of their carrels or peering meekly over the dividers, showing nothing but greasy hair and curious eyes. The Artisan cunt looked distinctly alarmed.
“Arthur,” she said severely. “I hope there is some explanation for this . . . for this breach of discipline. If you’re ill, you should have reported to the Physician before your scheduled log-on. If not . . .” She let the sentence trail off into unspecified threat.
His screen was dark. It gave back a faint reflection of his face, and he could see that nothing of this ordeal had marked him: he looked exactly the same as he had one minute before. But now he felt suspended, floating at equilibrium, airy and filled with light. He understood now: yes, he was dreaming.
This was a dream, all of it.
It would always be a dream.
He would never have to wake up.
“Marie . . . ?” He murmured languidly. Marie was the Artisan cunt’s name. “I think I’m going to fuck you.”
One side of her mouth spasmed down toward her hard jaw as though she’d suffered a paralytic stroke. She backed away from him, making guttural uhm, mm, erm noises deep in her throat; then she said something unspecific about a breakdown, and something else about calling a Physician.
Kollberg slid the tip of his tongue in a slow meaty circuit around his slack lips. He became aware, looking at her, that she and he were not truly distinct individuals; that, in fact, he was a more potent expression of an energy that they both shared. She was a leaf, but he was the tree . . . No, that wasn’t right. The concept continued to organize itself within him—or, perhaps, he around it. More like: she was a building, and he was the city.
She was human, and he was humanity.
He saw where she fit into him, and he into her, and now he could feel the lives of the Laborers around him: their cool firefly sparkles fed his landscape of light. He knew them thoroughly, inside and out, their petty hungers and their pale lusts, their tiny pathetic hopes and their private niggard fears. The wave front of his expanding consciousness outrippled with geometric acceleration, swelling the more with each mind that he swallowed: through the building, through the block, reaching out into the city. Here and there he tasted lives that were familiar: the fetid swamps of the useless on the streets of the District; the ugly fantasies of his SRO roommate, masturbating at a public urinal; the smug self-righteous timidity of his onetime secretary Gayle Keller; the blank wirehead dedication of Studio techs and the delicious devotion of Worker secmen.
And perhaps this wasn’t a dream, after all; perhaps the life of Arturo Kollberg had been a dream, from his childhood disgraced by the miscegenation of his mixed-caste parents, through his spectacular rise to the Studio Chairmanship and his still-more-spectacular fall.
Perhaps he was only now waking up.
He touched the scattered sparks that were the individual lives of the Board of Governors. He gifted them all with a small portion of his gratitude and gave them each the interior warmth and satisfaction of seeing a well-done job come to its fruition. They, in turn, gladly gave up the devotion that he required of them. His loyal priesthood had brought him forth in the body; he loved them for it, and they him.
With echoes of power ringing in his head, Kollberg wondered what he should do now—and the answer was obvious.
Whatever I want.
Joined with that vast sea of human minds, the choice of service and self vanished: there could be no difference between them. His gaze fell once more upon Marie, and sharpened its focus, and he offered his carious teeth to her in a shit-colored smile.
“You stay right there,” she ordered, pale as milk. “Take one step out of your cubicle, and I’ll call the Social Police.”
“No need,” Kollberg said, drawing out the word into a drawl of happy lust. “They’re already here.”
The office door slammed open as though kicked, and Social Police flooded the room, a riot platoon in full combat gear: twenty-five mirror-masked officers in ballistic armor, power rifles slanted across their chests, shock batons dangling from their belts. Everyone but Kollberg froze in place at their desks; in a sudden accession to their ancestral herd instincts, the data clerks understood that to move was to set oneself out from the crowd. To set oneself out from the crowd was to be marked.
They knew: the Artisan supervisor, she had been marked.
Kollberg moved to the center of the room, seeing his own face reflected in every single one of the mirror masks. Those reflections smiled upon him, and he upon them. The nearest officer inclined his head, just a trifle. “At your will,” his digitized voice confirmed flatly.
“Seal the room,” Kollberg murmured. Then a better idea floated up from the hollow core of what had once been his brain. “No—seal the building.”
The officer crossed his arms to tap out orders on his suit’s forearm keypads.
Kollberg turned, his movement graceful and effortless, a weightless ballet. He met the eyes of the Artisan cunt, and his penis stiffened so suddenly that his breath came thick and hot. His testicles burned. “Her,” he said, pointing.
She made a gagging noise, deep in her throat, and turned as though to bolt toward the inner offices. Two soapies sprang after her and tackled her to the floor. She moaned, and cried, and begged. Kollberg stepped over and stood above the three of them.
“Her clothes.”
One of the officers held her pinned, grinding her face into the filthy polyester shag of the carpet, while the other unfolded a pocket knife and sliced away her clothes. Her flesh was pale and slack, pockets of fat bulging across her ass, down the sides of her thighs. Kollberg opened the fly of his dungarees, and his penis sprang out. “Turn her over. She has to kiss me when I come.”
The officers rolled her onto her back, and one of them forced her legs apart. Her breasts spread huge and limp along her ribs, her nipples like used condoms pointing toward her elbows. Hmp, Kollberg thought. Not plastic, after all. He lowered himself between her knees.
He had to spit on her crotch for lubrication.
His penis slid into her, and he humped her thoughtfullly, dispassionately, regarding her anguished sobbing struggle with a detached interest as she thrashed under him, held by the relentless grip of the Social Police. Fucking her was interesting, in an abstract sort of way; because they were one, he was also fucking himself—and he was watching himself fuck her through the eyes of his stunned coworkers. Like masturbating while looking in a mirror.
This, he felt, was the ideal way to get up in the morning.
“And, you know what?” he said. “I woke up hungry.”
He lowered his head and sank his teeth into her breast. Her flesh was tough, stringy and old, and she struggled harder and screamed more, but after a bit of work he managed to tear a chunk free. He chewed it slowly, interested in its delicate flavor and rubbery texture, but in the end it meant no more to him than if he’d bitten off a hangnail. He licked her blood from his lips, nodded to himself, smiled, then bent his head for another bite.
3
THE LIVE SPECIAL report of Adventure Update gleamed and flickered in the mirror on Tan’elKoth’s desk. Jed Clearlake had caught up with Hari Michaelson at a convention in Los Angeles and was now conducting a live interview from the convention floor—giving Michaelson a worldwide audience to make his case about the “HRVP crisis on Overworld”—while in the background hundreds of bizarrely dressed fans capered and cavorted for the video pickups.
Though the spectrum of costumes reflected admiration for hundreds of Actors active, retired, and dead, the majority of those picked out by the cameras advertised Caine’s continuing popularity. Dozens were costumed as Caine himself, many as Pallas Ril, some as Berne or Purthin Khlaylock or the Khulan g’Thar; some few—generally poorly groomed and enormously fat—had costumed themselves as Ma’elKoth.
Tan’elKoth gave only a fraction of his attention to the report; mostly, he studied his visitors.
Arturo Kollberg sat at the ex-Emperor’s side, staring at the screen with monomaniac fixity; his rubbery piscine mouth hung open, and he made half-audible panting noises like a tomcat in rut. He had arrived in the company of a four-man enforcement squad of the Social Police. The four officers boxed Kollberg and Tan’elKoth, standing at riot-ready around them, hands on shock batons and power pistols. The mirrored face shields of their helmets glinted with the reflections of the Adventure Update report, and with pinpoint distortions of Kollberg’s and Tan’elKoth’s screen-lit faces.
So far, Tan’elKoth had been unable to determine if they were Kollberg’s jailers, or his bodyguards.
The call from the Board of Governors had come only minutes before Kollberg’s arrival. You are acquainted with Laborer Arturo Kollberg. Laborer Kollberg has our full confidence in this matter. Treat with him as you would with us.
He knew that dangerous forces interacted here below his level of perception, like predatory sharks jockeying for position around a sinking boat. The Social Police officers did not defer to Kollberg, nor did they seem to direct him; in fact, Kollberg had spoken only to Tan’elKoth since their arrival, and the soapies had remained facelessly silent. He also couldn’t guess if any of them realized that their powered weapons were perfectly useless in the Curioseum’s ON field; without its nerve-tangling discharge, a shock baton was no more lethal than a whiffle bat.
As Tan’elKoth studied them, he flicked his vision into mindview now and again; this he could do as effortlessly as an ordinary man blinks. When he did so quickly enough, cycling back and forth with ordinary vision, he could sometimes catch glimpses of some strange energy that surrounded all five of them. Not their Shells—they didn’t even seem to have Shells in the ordinary sense—but rather a strange colorless distortion. This odd energy or distortion would vanish as soon as he fixed his gaze upon it; he saw it only as fleeting twists of reality in his peripheral vision.
Kollberg had changed beyond recognition in the six years since his trial. Had Tan’elKoth not been told to expect him, he would have had no idea who this thin, somnolent, ill-looking man might be. Their arrival had brought with it a smell: blood and more than blood, thick and meaty and sweetly rank: the fermenting shit of a carnivore. In the near darkness of the apartment it was difficult to tell, but Tan’elKoth thought the bloody stench might emanate from Kollberg himself—what remained of the man’s hair seemed to be caked with something, and his face bore either some kind of birthmark or a smear of filth.
“The ultimate goal of your masters has never been a mystery to me,” Tan’elKoth said by way of a preamble. “It was instantly clear that this release of HRVP was a ploy to increase the Earth presence on Overworld.”
“Was it?” Kollberg said tonelessly. His voice was thick and meaty, inhuman, as though the choking stench that cloaked him had itself somehow spoken aloud. “Clear?”
“Of course. That’s why you target the elves: They’re cute. Cute creatures dying horrible deaths are ideal tools to mobilize public opinion. Once a few thousand elves die, the entire Leisure caste will clamor for a massive relief effort; the staunchest rock-ribbed Hands Off advocates on the Leisure Congress will be the first to insist that hundreds of thousands of your people should be shipped to Overworld to combat the disease. Within days, weeks at most, your people are fully in place across the entire continent. It is easy enough to invent excuses to remain, once there—and suddenly, Earth is no longer restricted to a tiny mining colony in the mountains. Suddenly there is cropland, forests for timber, uncontaminated fisheries, billions of tons of coal, crude oil, and space—simple space, to relieve the pressure of fourteen billion lives on Earth. This is how I know that HRVP is merely a dodge; in fact, I anticipate that your epidemic will mysteriously blow itself out, not long after your relief effort reaches its peak. It’s clear that your Bog must have some method for controlling the infection—uncontrolled, it would destroy too many profitable ecosystems. The Board of Governors would not damage something as valuable as the Studio System, did they not anticipate decades and centuries of ever-increasing returns.”
“You’re very perceptive,” Kollberg murmured.
“I am Tan’elKoth.” And yet—a niggling worm of doubt slithered through the back of his mind—he did not say I was correct.
“What do you propose?”
“An alliance. As I told your masters,” Tan’elKoth said, “we have a common goal. Humanity has been locked in a struggle against extinction on my world for a thousand years; we vie with elves, dwarfs, krr’x, and ogrilloi for living space; we struggle against dragons in the mountains and leviathans at sea. In the midst of all this, we continue to war upon each other, giving aid to our enemies. With the power of Earth, we could overwhelm our enemies and ensure our survival—ha, I would not even need your technology: send me ten percent of your Labor caste and I could drown our foes with sheer number.”
“So,” Kollberg said flatly. “It’s clear what we can do for you. Make me understand what you have to offer us.”
That worm of doubt began to wriggle through the gates of Tan’elKoth’s mind, as though Hannto were trying to gain his attention; there was something about the way Kollberg spoke, something eerily familiar about his affectless voice and academic diction. Tan’elKoth stepped on that worm and ground it beneath his mental heel; he had no leisure for second thoughts.
He spread his hands. “In my role as the rightful ruler of Ankhana—who is also a citizen of Earth—I can petition the Leisure Congress for the aid of the Overworld Company. I can invite you into the Empire. I can ensure that your bleeding hearts, as you call them, support your occupation, instead of oppose it.”
“You may perhaps be useful, after all.”
“I am more than useful. I am necessary. Without me, your plans cannot even be initiated.” Tan’elKoth gestured to the mirror that flickered upon his desktop. “Have you forgotten Caine?”
Michaelson was saying, “Of course, that recording was never intended for public release. We didn’t want a panic. I’ve directed Studio Security to open an investigation into the source of the leak. There’s been a lot of outcry already, but it’s important for your viewers to understand that—thanks to an immediate, aggressive response by the Studio itself—the crisis is already under control.”
“And what was the Studio’s response, Administrator?”
“Well, I guess I can take some of the credit for that myself. When you’re married to a goddess—” He gave a brief, self-deprecating, professionally charming chuckle. “—a lot of problems just aren’t as impossible as they might look.”
Kollberg grunted wordlessly at the screen.
“Do you understand yet how thoroughly your masters have been outfought?” Tan’elKoth asked. “You cannot even retaliate; not only is he once again a public hero, he is surrounded by thousands of his most devoted admirers—anything that happens to him will be witnessed by all Earth. By the time this convention has ended, it will be too late. Pallas Ril will have utterly destroyed your plan.”
Kollberg only grunted again. His shoulders flexed, and his hands worked back and forth across the front of his pants. Tan’elKoth noted with swift distaste that the man had an erection—and he was rubbing it through his dungarees.
Clearlake continued to lob Michaelson his lines with clean-cut good nature. “Did you ever consider that this might have been nothing but a hoax?”
“Sure. Sitting here, on Earth, we can’t possibly know the truth. It could be a hoax—or it could be a catastrophe. Sending Pallas to Overworld is a measured response—if this is a hoax, it hasn’t cost anybody much. If this is a real crisis, she can handle it. Speaking strictly for myself, I believe that elf was telling the truth. Look at him. Listen to his voice. You’ll believe him, too. You know my philosophy: hope for the best, but plan for the worst.”
“There’s been some public speculation that this outbreak might not have been an accident,” Clearlake said, “that it was deliberately inflicted on Overworld by a terrorist group, or some kind of psychopathic personality within the Overworld Company, or even the Studio itself.”
“I’m inclined to doubt it,” Michaelson said seriously, “but the possibility must be investigated. I’m told the Overworld Company’s Internal Security unit is already looking into this, but I believe that a situation as potentially grave as this one requires a response by the Studio itself. I’ve already spoken with Studio President Businessman Turner and offered my own services as a special envoy for a fact-finding mission to Transdeia. I’ve, ah, offered to go over on ammod. As you know, my thoughtmitter is still in place; on ammod, everything I see will be transmitted and recorded instantly on Earth. There’d be no possibility of mistake, or question of concealment—I’d be like a Registered Witness. The whole world would see how committed the Studio—and the Overworld Company—is to the welfare of the natives of Overworld.”
Clearlake had given one of his familiar suave, knowing chuckles. “Ever the man of action, eh, Hari? Showing a little of that old Caine spirit?”
“Well, Jed—” An answering chuckle. “—sometimes a little of that old Caine spirit is exactly what we need.”
Another chuckle from Clearlake, this time less knowing, more openly appreciative. “Well, I for one would certainly pay a mark or two to see Caine back on-line. How can the Studio resist?”
Tan’elKoth allowed himself a grim smile.
Michaelson went on, “And an investigation should be opened here on Earth, as well. We need to know how this happened. We need to make sure it can never happen again.”
“Do you see?” Tan’elKoth said to Kollberg. “Do you see the avalanche as it descends upon you?”
Kollberg nodded. “He must be stopped.”
“You must understand that you cannot simply kill him. Not now. His energies have already been directed against you and your masters; his sudden death—even by accident or ‘natural causes’—will result in an explosively destructive release of those energies.”
Kollberg’s head swiveled as though mounted on gimbals, and his gaze met Tan’elKoth’s with the blank incuriosity of a lizard’s. “Expand on this.”
Tan’elKoth compressed his lips. “Consider only the most obvious, surface level of the effect: Anything that happens to Michaelson will be taken by Caine’s admirers as hard evidence of a sinister conspiracy—and there are many admirers of Caine sitting on the Leisure Congress itself. The best you could hope for would be a public investigation into the practices of the Studio and the Overworld Company. You would bring about precisely the events that you hope to avert.”
“I do not see how this is related to Michaelson’s so-called energies.”
“I am not responsible for the limitations of your vision,” Tan’elKoth said sourly. “Those energies have little to do with Michaelson. They are Caine’s. It is not Michaelson who is beloved by a billion fans and more. And even that love is the merest iceberg tip—but how can you comprehend the enormity that lies below the surface, when you are blind to the decimus in plain view?”
“What solution do you propose?”
That worm of doubt wriggled beneath Tan’elKoth’s mental heel, and suddenly grew into an icy serpent: he realized why Kollberg’s manner was so eerily familiar. He spoke exactly like a meat-and-bone version of the Board of Governors.
A premonition of disaster rose up in his throat like vomit.
“The key to the successful solution of your Michaelson problem is analysis,” he said briskly, to cover his momentary lapse. “Reduce the problem to its components, so that the necessities involved in successful resolution become clear. The Michaelson problem breaks down neatly into two components: dealing with Pallas Ril, and dealing with Caine. Dealing with Caine also breaks down into two components: the public and the personal.
“The public side of the Caine component is his popularity: the attention—and even love—he commands worldwide. This is more susceptible to resolution than it may at first appear; one must simply be conscious of what it is, after all, that Caine’s fans love. It is not Caine himself, despite what they may claim, and even believe. What they value so highly is the myth of Caine: the drama and adventure he has brought into their dull workaday lives. Thus: the necessary resolution of the public component must have a certain high drama—a sort of poetic thunder that will satisfy his fans.”
Kollberg said flatly, “They won’t mind that he dies, so long as he dies well.”
“Precisely. It must have every necessary element of a Caine tale: villains and heroes, a struggle against hopeless odds, and an apocalyptic denouement.”
“This can be done?”
Tan’elKoth met his blank gaze without hesitation. “It can. Most of these elements are already in place; success is only a matter of the proper orchestration. It requires, if I may extend the metaphor, the proper conductor.”
“This being you.”
“This being me.” He nodded to himself; he liked the way this was going, now—despite Tan’elKoth’s misgivings, Kollberg seemed eminently pragmatic and accessible to reason. “Caine’s public energies are not the only energies at his command. The private component deals with his will itself—one might call it his rapier, by contrast with the more public bludgeon.”
Tan’elKoth rose restlessly and began to pace: a tiger prowling the limits of a cage marked by the silent, motionless Social Police officers. “The successful resolution of the private component—blunting, as it were, Caine’s rapier—involves diverting him, scattering his energies, overwhelming him with multiple problems until he cannot focus on any single one. It is insufficient to defeat him objectively—we must beat him subjectively. We must demonstrate to him beyond any shadow of dispute that he is helpless. We must teach him to think of himself as a defeated man.”
A hint of a smile began to twitch the corners of Kollberg’s thick, dead-meat lips. “You want to break him before you kill him.”
Tan’elKoth halted his pacing and met Kollberg’s empty eyes. “Yes.”
“Is this a true necessity? Or is this revenge?”
“Does it matter?” Tan’elKoth shrugged. “In this case, the concatenation of necessity and pleasure is fortuitous—which is to say: yes, we must do this . . . and yes, I shall enjoy it.”
The liver-colored tip of Kollberg’s tongue circled his lips. “I approve,” he said.
Tan’elKoth gave him a slim smile. “Now, we turn to the Pallas Ril component. This breaks down neatly into another pair, as well: the mystic and the physical. The physical difficulties are obvious, I think. Pallas Ril is a creature of nearly unlimited power, able to sense—and theoretically to affect—every living thing in the entire Great Chambaygen watershed; she can act at nearly any distance. She can stride the length of the Empire in a single hour; even granting the ability to defeat her, she cannot even be located unless she wishes to be found.”
“You make her sound invincible.”
“No one is invincible,” Tan’elKoth said darkly, “as I have learned to my eternal shame. It is a matter of selecting the proper weapon.”
Kollberg’s eyes were flat and dull as chips of slate. “Go on.”
“The mystic component is still more parlous. To simply slay her is not enough; she has imposed her will upon Chambaraya to the extent that the death of her body would do far more harm than good, insofar as the success of your plans is concerned.”
His great hands knotted behind his back, but his tone remained dry, precise, clinical: the clipped delivery of the professional lecturer. “Consciousness is a patterning of energy; infused with the power of Chambaraya, her consciousness cannot be overcome by a merely physical death. Will is expressed through a body, and is to some extent limited by the body that expresses it. To merely destroy Pallas Ril’s body would release her consciousness—and that consciousness could pattern the river itself, the entire Great Chambaygen watershed, as its body. We would have made of our enemy a god in truth, instead of a part-time Actress playing with unearned power.”
He turned and regarded Kollberg with a trace of a smile. “On the other hand, she is the only part of Chambaraya that cares a whit whether the races of Overworld live or die. To Chambaraya, life is life: the maggots that would feed upon their corpses are every bit as precious as elves and dwarfs and even human beings slain by your disease. So the solution is obvious: we must separate her from the river. In this fashion—only in this fashion—can the Pallas Ril component be successfully resolved.”
Kollberg’s reptilian gaze never wavered. “How will this be accomplished?”
“Not by me personally, you may be assured,” Tan’elKoth said. “She would become aware of me with my first breath of Home air, and would be on her guard. No more must Caine be aware that my hand is against him—to give him a clear vision of his enemy is to hand him victory.”
Tan’elKoth allowed his smile to sharpen to a razor edge. “The components have been analyzed; the true measure of success shall be the elegance of their solution. We have regarded them individually. We must resolve them simultaneously.”
“You say you can do this,” Kollberg murmured tonelessly.
“I can.”
“Then do it.”
Tan’elKoth leaned comfortably back in his chair, taking a deep, slow, easeful breath. He glanced at the four distorted reflections of his face in the mirror masks of the Social Police, then let his gaze slide back to Kollberg.
“First—as Caine would say—let’s talk deal.”
4
VINSON GARRETTE, VICEROY of Transdeia, leaned forward onto the table, holding his cut-crystal wineglass before his eyes, examining the way the rich cabernet shaded to rusty earth tones at the intersection of wine and glass. “What if we—the Artan rulers—as a gesture of good faith,” he said slowly, meditatively, “to cement our . . . relationship . . . with the Monasteries, were to give you something that you want? Hypothetically. Something of small value to us, but substantial value to the Monasteries. To you personally, Your Excellency.”
Raithe folded his skeletal hands and stared past his own wineglass, untouched on the table. “What—hypothetically—would we be talking about, Your Highness?”
“What would it be worth to you, for example—” Garrette leaned back into his ornately carved chair at the head of the table. “—to get your hands on Caine?”
Raithe sat motionless as a lizard for a very long time; he did not even blink.
Then he reached out and grasped his wineglass, and raised it slowly to his lips.
5
AS HIS RADIANCE Toa-Sytell, Patriarch of the Ankhanan Empire, stared at the image of Ambassador Raithe in his Mirror, he wondered if the young Ambassador had any idea how much the Empire was already learning of the inner secrets of the Monasteries.
In only a month, the Artan Mirror had revolutionized communication in the Empire. Now there were at least one or two Artan Mirrors in every major city and not a few of the minor ones; each major military outpost had its own. Only three days ago, a young thaumaturge in the service of the Eyes of God had reported that he had discovered a way to eavesdrop on Mirrored conversations without the knowledge of the speakers at either end.
Toa-Sytell used his free hand to mop faint beads of sweat from his upper lip; he’d been feeling a bit under the weather for a day or two, and now it seemed he might be developing a fever. His discomfort made it difficult to fix his attention on the young Ambassador’s words.
“—as you know,” the Ambassador was saying, “the Council of Brothers supports fully the Empire and the elKothan Church. The gesture we are prepared to make, we offer without any expectation of return.”
Toa-Sytell flicked a glance at the Eye Mirror-speaker, whose hand he held. The Eye nodded, indicating that the Ambassador was telling the truth as he knew it. This was another of the innovations from the Eyes of God researchers: the Eye would have heard the untruth of any lie. “All very heartwarming,” the Patriarch responded with his characteristic dry irony, “but I was told this is some sort of emergency?”
“What is urgent, Your Holiness, is our need for reassurance that our gift will be put to its proper use.”
“And that use would be?”
“It is a gift for the Festival of the Assumption, Your Holiness. A very, very special gift, to honor the Empire, and the Church.”
Again, the Mirror-speaker nodded.
“Yes, yes,” Toa-Sytell said testily. “Go on; what is it?”
“What, if you had the power,” Raithe said with a secretive smile, as though he already knew the answer, “would you do with Caine?”
Toa-Sytell jumped, and his eyes took fire. “Caine . . .”
“Caine was never officially sentenced for his murder of the late Ambassador Creele. He is, insofar as the Monasteries are concerned, a free man, innocent of any crime,” Raithe said. “However, I believe his status with the Empire is rather different.”
Toa-Sytell barely heard the words; he found himself on his feet, trembling, crushing the Mirror-speaker’s hand until the poor man blanched. “You can give me Caine?”
Within his head roared the flames of a Festival auto-da-fé; in his nostrils the scent of Caine’s burning flesh; in his ears the cheers of Beloved Children around the world; around his heart coiled the old, cold serpent that whispered sweet revenge.
Raithe smiled. “If I can?”
“I swear—We swear, I and God Himself—” Toa-Sytell said, forcing the words from his breathless chest, “you will not be disappointed.”
6
THE FACE OF the woman on the screen was attractive, even without makeup, even puffy with interrupted sleep, even though past seventy without ever indulging in the vanity of cosmetic surgery. A long straight nose, planar cheeks, strong jaw, eyes the crystal blue of a Nordic winter sky; her hair was cut to a uniform half inch, a skullcap the color of steel. Only her mouth marred her classic beauty: it was a thin, lipless gash like a hatchet wound in her face.
Tan’elKoth allowed himself to study her. His video was refused; on her end, she glared with sleepy antagonism into a blank screen. Past her shoulder he could see a wrought-iron bed-stead, and he could glimpse the curve of a young man’s back half buried in tangled bedcovers at her side.
Tan’elKoth glanced up at the Social Police; they stood in an arc behind him. Kollberg pressed close to his side, his breath bloody and rank.
“I don’t know who you are or how you got this code,” Businessman Avery Shanks said, her voice thick and clumsy, the way it always was when she was unexpectedly awakened—the sedatives she’d been using intermittently for forty years always left her a bit dazed. “You should know I have no tolerance for pranks. SynTech security is tracing this call.”
There it was: that tone of generalized threat he remembered so well. He let the sound of her voice call forth Lamorak.
Overpowering love swelled within his captured memory, leaving him breathless; one enormous hand came up to touch the unfamiliar curve of his face, as he remembered being smaller, blond and graceful, a master swordsman—and smaller yet, coming in tears with scraped elbows and knees to this woman’s hard, unforgiving lap. She had never been comfortable—but she had always been protective, and vengeful as a dragon.
Her hand came up, reaching for the cutoff, and Tan’elKoth whispered, “Mother . . . ?”
Her hand froze, suspended weightless in midreach, and her face went utterly blank.
“Mother?” Tan’elKoth said softly, gently, lovingly, in Lamorak’s voice. “Mother, it’s me. Don’t you know me?”
The hard, cold lines of her face crumbled like a glacier breaking up into the sea. “Karl . . . ?” she whispered, sounding suddenly sixty years younger. “Karl, is that you . . . ? Am I dreaming?”
“Mother, I need you. Please. Help me.”
Astonishment glistened in the corners of her ice-blue eyes. “Help you? Karl . . . oh Karl, oh my god, Karl . . .”
A single keystroke uploaded the file from Tan’elKoth’s personal datacore: a digigraph of a snapshot he’d downloaded from the Studio security-video archives, when he’d been considering using Faith as a model for a sculpture he’d been planning. He’d never done the sculpture—but he’d also never erased the digigraph. The frame-in-frame showed him a small version of what Avery would be seeing on her screen right now: a beautiful golden-haired child with a sunny smile and pale blue eyes.
“Do you know who this is, Mother? It’s Faith Michaelson.”
“Michaelson?” Avery’s face iced over, and her voice congealed. “The Michaelson? That’s his daughter?”
“No, Mother,” Tan’elKoth whispered. “That’s Pallas Ril’s daughter.”
Her eyes widened.
Tan’elKoth said, “That’s my daughter.”
“Your . . . Karl, what—?”
“Mother, please,” he whispered, letting his voice fade. “Please help me . . .”
“Karl—”
He stroked the cutoff.
He looked up. Lit by the cool glow of the blank screen, Kollberg leered at him, wiping something from his chin with the back of his hand.
Tan’elKoth said, “It has begun.”
AND THERE CAME a day when the god of dust and ashes raised up its hammer against the dark angel.
The hammer was lifted piecemeal, and each piece was a person, and to each person the god of dust and ashes whispered: This do for me, and receive in payment your fondest desire.
Each person, each piece said yes, and in so saying became the hammer of the blind god.