EIGHT

A PERFECTLY ANONYMOUS digitized voice cut through the dully roaring babble on the convention floor.

“Administrator Michaelson.”

Hari looked up from the autograph book he was signing and saw his own face, fisheye distorted and reflected four times over in the mirror masks of a Social Police enforcement squad.

He couldn’t breathe.

That instant stripped away Caine’s success and fame; stripped away the thousands of fans who crowded around him in this immense overheated room; stripped the power of the Administrator caste and the status of the Studio Chairmanship; stripped every part of him that lay over his most fundamental baseline. The baseline of his soul was Labor.

Every Laborer knows that trouble with Soapy is the last trouble you ever have.

“Administrator Hari Khapur Michaelson. You are under arrest.”

The crowd of fans drew back, muttering to each other and exchanging awed glances. He couldn’t even tell which one of the soapies had spoken.

The exhibition hall flattened around him, ironing the stalls and the booths and every fan into painted images of themselves, as two-dimensional as cheap cover art; only the soapies still had solidity. The rumble of voices and music and the blare of PA announcements all settled into an insectile buzz that sounded like he had a housefly trapped inside his skull.

He coughed once, harshly. He wanted to ask On what charge? but the words stuck in his throat like a chunk of half-chewed meat. He stood nervelessly, unresisting, as one of the soapies turned him and bound his wrists behind his back with plastic stripcuffs. Two held his arms; another kept a shock baton at the ready.

The last of them extended a palmpad. “Where is this child?”

The screen of the palmpad showed a bright, cheerful image that he recognized: it was a souvenir photo, a couple of years old, from a visit to the Studio Curioseum. “Faith?” he said stupidly. “She’s right over—”

He shut his mouth and clenched his teeth till his ears rang.

He had met with his fans right next to the KidZone, the huge complex of intertwined climbing tubes and game pods that dominated an entire corner of the exhibition hall. The KidZone swarmed with children; supervised by a double handful of Artisan au pairs, it was the place where offspring were deposited so their parents could visit the convention unencumbered. Faith was in a Leisure Call pod with a dozen or so other kids—Faith was the Caller, and half of them were already out, having either failed to follow an order or taken an order that wasn’t preceded by “Leisure Calls.” Two more were counted out even as Hari glanced up there. No surprise; Faith was lethal at Leisure Call.

What stopped Hari’s mouth was a tall, slim woman with an iron-grey crewcut and a jaw like a fire axe. She stood at the chest-high fence surrounding the KidZone, her teeth bared in what might, on a human, have looked like a smile. She scanned the children inside with eyes cold as security cameras. She wore full Business dress, and four bodyguards with SynTech logos on their shirts kept the crowd from pressing too close to her.

Avery Shanks.

The soapy shoved the palmpad at him again. “Where is this child?”

Hari said through his teeth, “Ask my fucking lawyer.”

But even as he spoke, Shanks lifted her hand and pointed right at Faith up high in the game pod, and three of the SynTech guards moved through the gate of the KidZone.

“Shanks,” Hari snarled. The ice that had lodged in his chest became instant flame. “Shanks! Leave her alone! You leave her the fuck alone!”

He lunged for her, but the soapies yanked his arms back painfully. The one with the shock baton moved its business end closer to his ribs, and he made himself stop; if he didn’t, Faith would see the soapies beat him—maybe beat him to death. He couldn’t do that to her.

At his shout, Shanks turned and gave him a good view of her shark-toothed grin. She came over, her bodyguard a muscle-bound shadow at her shoulder. “Hello, Hari,” she said in a soft mockery of cheer. “Enjoying the convention?”

“If you touch my daughter, Shanks, I swear to you—”

The false cheer vanished instantly, revealing furious black triumph inside her gem-blue eyes. “She’s not your daughter,” Shanks spat. “That’s exactly the point.”

Hari went numb. He couldn’t feel his legs—either his bypass had shut down, or he was about to faint; he couldn’t tell which.

“You see, I can touch her,” Shanks said. “It’s you that can’t. A simple DNA test will show she’s a Shanks. She’s Business. You understand what that means, Michaelson? Do you?”

Hari couldn’t answer; he couldn’t draw breath enough to speak.

“She’s too young to give consent. That means every single time you have ever touched her, you have committed Forcible Contact Upcaste.” She bared her teeth, savage as a panther. “If I’d known about this six years ago, I could have had you broken and sent to a social camp for so much as changing her diaper.”

He found his legs worked, after all. He lunged at her. But the soapies held him tight and the shock baton triggered against his ribs. They were almost gentle with him; instead of throwing him twitching to the floor, the charge from the baton only shot fire up his spine and made him sag. “Good, good,” Shanks said. “Try again. I will enjoy watching these officers kill you.”

“You can’t hope this’ll stand up,” Hari said desperately. “I’m married to her mother—her mother can give consent—”

She looked at the soapies. “You heard.”

“We heard.”

“You’ve just established foreknowledge, Michaelson. You knew she’s a Shanks. You’ve always known it. I’ll see you under the yoke for this.”

“My wife—”

“Yes, where is your wife? Is she available to testify?”

“She’s on Overworld,” Hari ground out between his teeth. “You know she’s on Overworld. That’s why you’re pulling this shit now.”

“Mind your tone, Michaelson. Unless you liked that tap from the shock baton?”

“Where did you get the image?” There was only one copy of that shot: it was framed on his office desk at the Abbey. “Who gave you that picture?”

Shanks’ eyes went distant and soft, and for a moment she did not speak. “It was sent to my message dump . . . ah, anonymously,” she said finally. “Yes, anonymously.”

Hari was coldly calculating whether he could yank free and get his teeth into her throat before the soapies could pull him down when he heard Faith say, “Daddy? What’s going on? Where’s Gramma?”

One of the SynTech bodyguards led her by the hand. She looked up at the Social Police with wide eyes that slowly filled with puzzlement and hurt. “He said Gramma was here,” Faith said, a little petulantly. Gramma, to Faith, was Mara Leighton, Shanna’s mother. She looked up at the bodyguard who held her hand. “You shouldn’t lie to a kid, Art’san. That’s really, really bad.”

Avery Shanks turned, six full feet of regal calm. “He didn’t lie, child. I am your grandmother.”

And seeing them together—the shape of their faces, even the way they both stood, looking at each other—even to Hari, the family resemblance was unmistakable. It went through him like another shot from the baton.

Faith frowned, and bit her lip. “Mommy’s really upset.” She looked up into Hari’s eyes and said gravely, “She’s coming home. She’s really, really, really upset.”

For one slack second, Hari was grateful—Oh, thank god, she’ll straighten this shit out in a second—but then he realized what was at stake. He realized what would be lost if Pallas Ril left Overworld with her job unfinished. She would never get the chance to go back.

“No,” he said. “No, Faith, no—she can’t come home. Tell her I can handle it. I can handle it. Tell her to stay and finish her work. Stay there until I send for her.”

Faith shook her head. “She’s really upset.” She turned and looked up into Shanks’ cold blue eyes. “Mommy thinks you’re a bad person.”

Shanks pursed her bloodless lips. “What kind of sick fantasy have you spawned in this child’s head?” She met his gaze for a full second of undisguised loathing, then nodded to the bodyguard. “Take her to the car.”

“Faith—Faith, don’t be afraid,” Hari said. “I’ll make it right—no matter what it takes, I’ll make things come out right. I promise.”

“Make things come out right?” Shanks said. “They already have.”

“Shanks,” Hari said, just above a whisper. “Shanks, don’t do this.”

“Businessman Shanks.”

Cords in his neck winched Hari’s head down. “Businessman Shanks.”

She smiled. “And that is how you will address this child, should you ever see her again.” She waved to the SynTech goons. “Go on.”

“Daddy?” Faith’s puzzlement turned to flat-out fear as the bodyguard picked her up. “Daddy, make him put me down!”

“Businessman . . .” Hari ground out, “Please.”

“Much better, Michaelson,” Shanks said delightedly. “Let’s have it again, a little louder. I want all your fans to hear you beg.”

“Daddy, please—Daddy!”

The soapies parted the crowd, and the goon carried her toward the door. Shanks said, “Don’t be shy, Michaelson. At least you have the chance to beg—which is more than you gave Karl.”

The words forced their way out through his locked jaw. “You will suffer for this, you hatchet-faced cunt. You hear me? You got no fucking clue how deep this shitpool is. I will fucking drown you in it—”

“A threat?” Shanks interrupted, smiling. “Am I dreaming? Did you actually just threaten a Businessman in front of an entire Social Police enforcement squad?”

Faith began to struggle, but the bodyguard only held her tighter as he walked away. “Daddy, ow! He’s hurting me! Daddy! Daddy, help!”

Hari threw himself blindly against the grip of the soapies. For one instant their hands loosened and he thought he might pull free, but the one with the shock baton gave him a shot right over his heart, and this time it wasn’t gentle at all. Hari collapsed to the floor, twitching spastically. Faith didn’t call to him anymore; now she just screamed like her world was ending.

Shanks knelt beside Hari’s head, and he had never thought a human voice could carry so much hatred. “Every night for seven years, Hari Michaelson, I have cried myself to sleep. I’ve worn out three different cubes of For Love of Pallas Ril; I have watched you murder my son two thousand times. I want to quote you, now.”

She leaned down as though to kiss him; her lips brushed his ear as she whispered, “Did you really think I’d let you live?”

2

AVERY SHANKS FELT warm all over; she felt a satisfaction that another sort of woman would have called sexual. A kind of benignity rose within her as she looked down upon the lovely blond hair of Karl’s daughter. If she wasn’t careful, she might begin to smile.

Faith sat calmly and quietly beside Avery in the passenger cabin of her Cadillac limousine. Her initial fussing about being separated from Michaelson had stilled almost immediately upon liftoff; Avery had looked upon this display of self-control so extraordinary in a child of six and thought that blood will tell, after all. This girl was unquestionably a Shanks.

“I will call you Faith,” Avery instructed her, “and you shall call me Grandmaman. We are going to Boston together, where you shall live in a proper home, with proper servants, and shall attend a school proper to a young Businessman. Do you understand?”

Faith’s eyes met hers, huge but level and unafraid. “Yes, Grandmaman.”

She’d even captured the nasal whine of the antiquated French pronunciation. This child was so astonishingly apt—but she maintained her regal sternness with the ease of a lifetime’s habit. It would not do to show any sign of warmth or weakness.

“You,” she said, “are very well behaved.”

“Thank you, Grandmaman.”

Avery turned away to the window, muttering her surprise that a downcaste thug like Michaelson had managed to rear an even half-civilized child.

An interval passed in silence.

“Grandmaman?”

“Yes?”

“What is a hatchet-faced cunt?”

Avery’s left eyelid drooped as though she’d bitten into an impossibly sour pastille, and for one long moment her mouth clamped shut like a locked ledger—but then her thin, almost invisible lips bent into something close to a smile. “I suppose: I am,” she said. “Give me your hand.”

Faith dutifully offered her hand, and Avery took it. “That is not a proper word for young ladies of the Business caste,” she said, and gave the back of the child’s hand a brisk, stinging slap with two of her fingers, producing a sharp smack and a glitter of shocked moisture in Faith’s eyes.

Faith bit her lip and took one deep, shuddering breath that threatened tears, but that was all. After a moment, she said, “You shouldn’t hit me.”

“It is also improper for a young lady of the Business caste to lecture her Grandmaman on propriety.”

“You better not hit me again,” Faith told her seriously. “Mommy wants me to behave while I’m with you. She told me to always mind you until Daddy comes for me. I’m s’posed to do whatever you say. But if you hurt me, she’ll hurt you worse.”

So. Here it was: the first clear evidence of the possibly irreparable harm done to this child by her degraded upbringing. Avery allowed a sigh to trickle from her long, straight nose, and nodded to herself. “First,” Avery said precisely, “the man you call Daddy is not your father; he is—if he has any legal standing whatsoever, which is questionable—your stepfather.”

“I know that,” Faith said dismissively. “Did you think that was a secret? I know all about that.”

“Do you?” That sour taste was back in her mouth; she had been entertaining fantasies of instructing this child on her true parentage, and on Michaelson’s murder of her real father.

“Course. Mommy doesn’t do secrets with me. She can’t.”

“Well. In any case, the man you call Daddy will not be coming for you,” Avery continued. “In fact, you will never see him again, except in court, and perhaps on the net. Do not expect him, and you will not be disappointed. Your mother engaged in criminal conspiracy with that man to deny you your birthright. Thus, her wishes and intentions are irrelevant; she has surrendered her parental rights. Do you understand this? They wanted to hurt you. They do not love you.”

Faith’s only response was a patient silent stare.

Avery sighed again. “I understand how cruel these truths must seem, but truth is usually painful, Faith. Understanding this is the first part of growing up.”

“You’re the one that doesn’t understand,” Faith said serenely. “Mommy’s with me right now. I can feel how much she loves me. And Daddy will come for me. If you do anything to hurt me, Daddy will hurt you worse than Mommy would. He’s a mean bastard, that way.”

She said this in a dry, childishly innocent way—clearly quoting her foul-mouthed stepfather without any real understanding of the words. “He will fuck you up.”

Avery’s eye got that sour-pastille droop again, and she went on. “Finally, threats of this nature are declassé. I know that you are . . . disadvantaged . . . by having been forced to live in a household with Actors, but be aware that in real life there is nothing that either of your parents can do to cause me the slightest discomfort. Insisting that your Grandmaman must beware of these undercaste creatures is indulging in fantasy—which is not only declassé, but dangerous, in a Businessman. You will never again repeat these ridiculous threats, nor will you make any mention of this pernicious fantasy that you have some—” Her mouth twisted distastefully. “—mental connection with your mother. You must put such childish notions behind you, and prepare to enter the full bright day of Business life. Do you understand, Faith?”

“Yes, Grandmaman.”

“Good. Give me your hand.”

Faith offered up her hand with such unhesitating readiness that Avery—impulsively, on the spot—decided to hold it, and give it a squeeze, rather than strike it.

Blood will tell, after all.

3

HARI SAT ON the edge of the expanded foam mattress, its ragged edge making the steel struts of the cot frame almost comfortable beneath the numb half-ache that always lurked inside his legs. He stared at the featureless white plastic of the opposite wall.

The Social Police had him in their jaws, and they were gonna chew him up good before they spat him out.

They had taken his clothes, his watch, his palmpad, his boots. They had given him a disposable cellophane dressing gown and stuck him in a cell. Every time he saw a soapy, he asked for a chance to call his lawyer. None of them ever responded. They spoke only to give him orders.

Every once in a while, an enforcement squad came by his cell and marched him out at baton-point. The first time was just a standard identity check by DNA sampling. The next time was a high-pressure wash from a cold-water hose, leaving him bruised and chilled till he couldn’t stop shivering. The third time was a manual body-cavity search, gloved fingers forcing themselves into his mouth, his nose, his rectum. And through it all, the only face he ever saw was his own, distorted and leering in their silvered masks.

He’d begun to fantasize that he could detect some kind of expression in the masks, as though some unknown cue of body language—maybe the subliminal angle of a shoulder, or the turn of a head, or even just the slow pace of a gesture—was letting him see into them a little bit: was letting him feel something from them.

The specifics? He couldn’t get there, and they never said anything to give him a clue, but he was sure they wanted something—the feel he got from them was kind of like lust, almost. Or maybe hunger.

It was giving him the fucking creeps.

He kept seeing the look on Shanks’ face as her goon had carried Faith off: that bleak triumph. Maybe there had been something there, too—she had wanted something from him, too, and he didn’t know if she’d gotten it. Was taking Faith enough for her, or was she really going to try this bullshit legal maneuvering with the criminal Forcible Contact charges? No way to know where Shanks would stop. She seemed almost like one of Ma’elKoth’s Outside Powers from the old days: like she wanted to feed on his pain.

Just get me out of this cell, he thought. She might be out of his reach, but Businessmen don’t rule the world. One screencall to Marc Vilo—Leisureman Marc Vilo: his upcaste had been sponsored by the late Shermaya Dole five years ago—and Shanks would have some fucking pain of her own.

She probably wouldn’t actually do anything to harm Faith. It was him she wanted to hurt. Taking Faith away from him was the worst damage she could do without breaking the law herself. People that high up the caste ladder don’t have to break the law; they can use the law to break you.

We’ll see who breaks who. We will goddamn well see.

But fantasies of beating Shanks to death quickly dissipated in the blank white plastic silence of his cell. Sitting hour after hour in that box of featureless petrochemical, he kept thinking about Kris Hansen, and what he’d said about the blind god.

Some of what he’d read came back to him, slowly, in little dribs and drabs over the slow-ticking minutes of his confinement. He was pretty sure that this blind god was something specific, a title in capital letters: the Blind God. He seemed to recall that Duncan’s book referred to it as some kind of elvish cultural bogyman, like the Devil, sort of. The Blind God was supposed to be the most powerful god of humanity, but somehow kinda invisible; even though nobody knows about it, everybody does what it says anyway. You could only see it by looking at the things people do—

Like put on silver masks and shove their fingers up your ass, Hari found himself thinking.

Something about those masks—he couldn’t quite pin it down, because he couldn’t quite remember exactly what this Blind God thing was supposed to be all about—but whenever he thought about the Blind God, he found himself picturing the Social Police. And whenever he thought about the Social Police, he found himself picturing the Blind God. Like Soapy was the Blind God’s face. And Soapy’s face is a mirror.

He didn’t want to think about that one too closely.

Eventually, his lawyer arrived. He’d never had to call him at all; Hari’s arrest had been the lead story on the newsnets worldwide. His lawyer had been trying to get in to see him for hours, and the news he brought was not good.

Because of the caste-weighted rules of testimony in legal actions, Avery Shanks’ affidavit that Faith was her granddaughter became presumptive evidence, unless Hari could establish otherwise. In addition to the Forcible Contact Upcaste charges against him, she had filed kidnapping charges that named Shanna as co-defendant. The court had already awarded her temporary custody of Faith until the case could be brought to trial.

And there was more bad news: Hari’s bail was set at ten million marks.

“Ten . . . million?” Hari repeated, stunned.

His lawyer shrugged unhappily. “It’s a punitive bail. Businessman Shanks knows you can’t afford that much, so she’s expecting you to pay a bondsman.”

“Ten percent, straight out of pocket,” Hari said grimly. “One million marks to get out of jail.”

“It’s the threat, Administrator. You threatened her in front of the Social Police; all four of them recorded it.”

Hari nodded to himself. “All right. Do this for me: Make them let me use a screen. Or get my palmpad back. I need to make a call. Right now.”

His lawyer shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Whatever the lawyer did, worked: within a few minutes, he’d been led out to a screen, allowed to dial a private priority code, and was on the line with his Patron, Leisureman Marc Vilo.

“Hari!” Vilo said, bluffly cheerful around the thick butt-end of a smoldering cigar. “What news, kid?”

Hari scowled. “I guess you haven’t been watching the nets.”

“No, I saw it. You’ve dug yourself a deep one.” There was something disturbing in Vilo’s expression: a kind of cold distance that had settled in around his eyes, a patient reserve as though he was hiding: waiting in ambush behind a screen of cigar smoke.

“Yeah,” Hari said. “It’s time to start digging back out.”

“Sure, okay,” Vilo said. “But what do you want me to do about it?”

“What do I want?” Hari said, incredulous. “I want you to step on her like a fucking cockroach. What do you think I want?”

“It’s not that simple,” Vilo said, frowning regretfully. “Her legal position sounds pretty strong. Y’know, I warned you years ago that concealing Faith’s real identity was a bad idea—”

“The hell you did.” What the fuck was going on, here?

“—I always said it’d come back and bite your ass someday.”

“Bullshit,” Hari said. “Marc, that’s a load of shit—you never said a goddamn—”

“Hey,” Vilo said warningly. “I know you’re upset, but watch your mouth.”

“What’s wrong with you, Marc? Why are you doing this?”

“Sorry, kid. I just don’t think there’s much I can do.”

“All right, fine, whatever,” Hari said desperately. “I’ll handle Shanks myself. How about my bail? Can you put up my bail?”

“I don’t think so. As serious as these charges are? I don’t think so.”

“Marc—”

“I said no, kid.” Vilo stuck his cigar back into his mouth. “Sorry.”

“Yeah?” Hari said. Tendons stood out in his neck. “You don’t look sorry.”

Vilo frowned, squinting through the smoke.

That high insectile whine was back in Hari’s ears, thickening toward thunder. “What did they give you, Marc?”

“What are you—”

“You’ve been my Patron for thirty years. How much did you get for me, Marc? What was my price?”

“I didn’t want to hit you with this when you’re already down, kid, but I’m not your Patron anymore,” Vilo said coldly. “This afternoon I submitted an Order of Severance. We have no relationship, you and me.”

“What did they give you? Money? Christ, Marc, you’re richer than God already.”

“Nobody gave me any money,” Vilo said, waving his cigar impatiently. “I don’t give a shit about money. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What was it then, stock? Voting stock.”

For one second, Vilo didn’t move. “That’s it, isn’t it?” Hari said grimly. “Let me guess: you sold me for goddamn voting stock in SynTech.”

“That’s ridiculous. What would I want with SynTech?”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Hari said slowly. “That’s not real power. You’d go for the real power. Voting stock in the Overworld Company. In the Studio.”

Vilo didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to; Hari could read the truth in his eyes. The real enormity of what was happening to him roared within his head like a funnel cloud dipping toward his life. Numb, stunned, Hari said, “No, I got it: They gave you a seat on the Board. You’re on the Board of fucking Governors.”

“Hari, these paranoid fantasies—”

“I hope it’s worth it, Marc. I hope you think it’s worth it. I hope you still think it’s worth it on the day when you and me, we meet somewhere dark and quiet. When I show you exactly what it is you just bought.”

“Hari—”

Hari hit the cutoff, and the screen went dead.

Look on the bright side, he told himself. Shit can’t get much worse.

4

HARI STEPPED OUT of the cab at the Abbey’s front lawn. He moved away, to be out of the cab’s backblast as it lifted off, and the unfamiliar weight of the Microsoft Mantrak bracelet around his ankle made him limp a little more than usual. The Mantrak was designed with similar circuitry to a palmpad: as long as he wore the bracelet, the Micronet satellites could track his position to within a meter anywhere on Earth. As the soapy had dispassionately explained to him when it was locked around his ankle, to deactivate or attempt to remove the Mantrak would automatically register a forfeit of his bail and make him liable to further charges of flight from justice. The cab lifted off in a stinging cloud of sand, and Hari stood for a moment, looking at his bail.

The Abbey loomed over him, a black hulk against the stars, every window dark except for the kitchen’s.

By pledging every asset he had—all his savings, his investments, Faith’s education fund, the cars, all his Caine memorabilia, the royalties from all of Caine’s Adventures, and the Abbey itself—he had covered the ten million marks. Barely.

He looked up at his house—this house he had built twenty years ago, just after Caine had cracked the Top Ten. He remembered standing in this very spot and watching its timber skeleton rise from the knoll; real wood in the Abbey’s walls had cost an extra million, but he’d never regretted it.

He remembered walking through its empty rooms, remembered the echoes its bare walls had reflected, remembered how it had seemed like a palace, a fairy-tale dream castle of happy endings. He remembered the satisfaction of registering its name with the San Francisco Entertainment Commission, so it would be listed on their star maps. He remembered the day Shanna moved in—and the day she moved out—and all the laughter, the sullen sulks, shouting matches, and sweaty sex in between.

He remembered coming home after For Love of Pallas Ril, before his bypass, floating across the threshold in his levichair, finding the moving company there to load all of Shanna’s possessions back into the house once more. He remembered the day his father’s sentence had been officially commuted, and Duncan had been released from the Mute Facility at the Buchanan Social Camp—the day his father came home to the home he’d never seen.

He remembered thinking that he’d finally found his happy ending.

He shook his head and walked toward the spill of yellow light across the side lawn. His stomach was a little shaky, and he felt unsteady in his balance, as though a mild temblor shifted the ground beneath his feet. Psychosomatic, he told himself, just a reaction to walking without Rover whirring at his heels. The Social Police couldn’t be bothered to transport his wheelchair; it was still down in L.A. Funny—much as he’d always hated the goddamn thing, he really missed it right now.

It’d be nice to have something waiting to catch him as he fell.

Bradlee, Duncan’s nurse, was waiting for him at the kitchen door. Before Hari could even get inside, Bradlee started yammering about the Social Police and SynTech security and how they’d barged in and taken all of Faith’s clothes, and her toys, and impounded all the photoprints and vacation cubes, and rifled the office, and pulled all the books off the shelves and taken backups of all the memory cores and this and that and every other goddamn thing until Hari wanted to smack him one just to shut him up for half a second. When he finally stopped for breath, Hari said, “How’s Dad?”

Bradlee blinked. “He’s fine,” he said reflexively. “Well, you know, not fine, but about usual—”

“How’d he take it? You kept him away from the soapies, didn’t you? You didn’t let him talk in front of them?”

“Please, Admin—uh, Hari,” Bradlee said. “They searched his room, but I took away his digivoder until they left. I’m not a fool.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s why I hired you.”

“I think he’s still angry with me,” Bradlee offered confidentially. “He really wanted to give the Social Police a piece of his mind.”

“Yeah, no shit. And they would have taken it. All of it. His fucking body, too,” Hari said grimly. “Thanks, Brad.”

Bradlee accepted this with a nod, as if to say he’d only been doing his job. “Are you hungry? I’ve put Duncan on his drip, and I was about to have a snack; it’s no trouble to make extra.”

Hari shook his head. “Is he lucid?”

Bradlee shrugged noncommittally. “He’s been in and out all day. The drip should help. You’ll look in on him?”

Hari nodded.

“Good. He’s a little shaken up.” Bradlee coughed apologetically into his hand. “We both are.”

“Yeah.”

Duncan’s room was just off the kitchen, small and dark like a cave, with the flickering screen on his traveling bed’s armtable for a campfire. Hari stopped in the hall. Going into Duncan’s room was never easy—that powerful back-of-the-throat scorch of antiseptic couldn’t quite cover the fermenting shit in his relief bag, or the dark rot that seemed to ooze out of his pores.

The only light in Duncan’s room was the screen’s cold shifting glow. He lay in his traveling bed like a broken puppet, head lolling bonelessly, veins twisting across his hairless scalp. One arm lay limp on the rumpled sheet; the other was strapped along the armtable to keep his hand in the digivoder. The convertible bed was raised, and he was strapped into it to hold him up in roughly a sitting position. An IV bag hung from a rack over his head, its line plugged into the socket that had been surgically installed in the hollow of his collarbone. The only indication that he was alive was the slow roll of his eyeballs, back and forth like lopsided marbles.

Hari couldn’t make himself go in. He couldn’t make himself speak. What could he say? What could he tell his father that wouldn’t come out of his mouth as a raw scream of pain?

Oh, Faith . . . Hari sagged against the wall and covered his eyes with his hand. Something rose in his throat that felt dangerously like a sob; at the last second he forced it to become a cough. Ah, gods, he thought helplessly. How am I gonna live through this?

In the same instant, he hated himself for a selfish bastard; here he was, whining about how much he hurt, while Faith was trapped by people who thought of her only as a weapon against him—

He gritted his teeth and clenched his burning eyes shut, determined that no tear should leak through to his face. Shit, Faith’s probably handling this better than I am, he told himself. She’s not alone. As long as Pallas Ril walked the fields of Overworld, Faith was never alone.

The mechanized voice from Duncan’s digivoder croaked,

“Hari. You. All right?”

Hari took a deep, shuddering breath and rubbed his eyes. Duncan’s face had rolled toward him, and his glazed eyes held a hint of sanity. Funny how much more human Duncan’s digivoder sounded, once he’d had a chance to compare it to the voices of the Social Police.

“Yeah, Dad, I’m okay,” he said slowly. “I’m just kind of tired, that’s all.”

A thin line of drool trailed from Duncan’s slack lips. The muscles in his strapped-down forearm rippled; the digivoder glove that enclosed his hand translated the nerve impulses into digitized speech. “Tough. Day. Remember. Keep. Your head. Down. Inch. Toward daylight.”

Hari smiled with a sort of nostalgic melancholy; this was the best advice he’d ever gotten. “Yeah. You should make that a macro.”

“I. Will. Come in. Sit. Talk.”

Hari sighed. He wished he could confide in his father; wished he could tell him everything that seemed to be happening; wished he could ask him for advice more pointed and specific than keep your head down and inch toward daylight.

But Hari couldn’t say what was on his mind. Those SynTech goons had probably seeded the entire fucking house with microrecorders, and even if they hadn’t, there would be a lot of Social Police traffic through here in the next few weeks. And Duncan had nearly ended his life under a sedition sentence in the Mute Facility of the Buchanan Social Camp for one overpowering reason: he had never learned to shut up.

But there was something Hari had wanted to ask his father about, he reminded himself. It should be a safe enough subject.

“Yeah, y’know?” Hari said, forcing himself to walk into the room, breathing shallowly as though that might keep the stink of madness at bay. “Somebody was talking about the Blind God today—you know, that elvish bogyman? Didn’t you write something about it, once? It’s in Tales, isn’t it?”

“Chapter. Twelve. Or thirteen. Why?”

“It’s kinda hard to explain. It stuck with me, that’s all. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

Duncan’s gaze twisted out of focus, and his mouth twitched spastically, releasing another foamy wad of drool. Hari pulled a tissue from the nightstand box and gently mopped his father’s chin. At his touch, the focus in Duncan’s eyes returned. “Was this. While. Soapies. Had you?”

Hari jerked like he’d been stabbed with a straight pin. “How—how—” he stammered incredulously. “How did you know?”

Duncan looked up at him past his hairless eyebrows. “Crazy,” his digivoder rasped. “Not. Stupid.”

“Yeah, Dad, I know, but—”

“Nets. All day. Been. Watching. Overworld. Shanna. HRVP. Social. Police.” He snorted as though his nose might be dripping. “Makes. Sense.”

“Not to me.”

“Get. Tales. Read. Know. Your. Enemy.”

Hari leaned over the bed to turn the screen toward him. “Here, I’ll just call it up.”

Duncan lifted his strengthless free hand and let his arm fall across Hari’s. “Not. Netbook,” the digivoder rasped. “Book book book. Netbook. Edited. Stupid. Kid.”

He waved his twisted hand toward a small bookshelf under the window seat, pointing with the back of his wrist. “Book book book.”

“All right, all right, I get the picture.” Hari circled the bed, sat, and pulled the hardbound Tales of the First Folk off the shelf.

He skimmed through the chapter, through all the different stories about the Quiet Land and the Blind God; with just a phrase here and there to spark his memory, he found the stories came back to him more powerfully than he’d expected. He hadn’t read the book in probably thirty years—not since school. Who’d have guessed this crap would stick with him?

The Quiet Land read like a version of an Eden myth: a land of peace, where the elves could live without fear of dragons, where there were no savage ogrilloi or krr’x hives, no vampires or demons. All the creatures of the Quiet Land were without speech or magick; the elves used it as a sort of nursery school, a playland for their children, since even the most rudimentary command of magick rendered them godlike by comparison.

The elves could go to the Quiet Land from Home—T’nnalldion, the “Living Place,” the elvish name for Overworld—through dillin, which roughly translates as gates. The dillin apparently were certain hills, certain ponds, some caves, occasionally grottoes or even forest glades where the physical terrain of the two lands was precisely identical; no matter how different the surrounding topography, the dillin matched. The dillin were said to be part of both places at the same time, and in the vicinity of a dil, an elf could still draw upon the Flow of Home.

In the Quiet Land, the elves found a coarse, brutish race of “wild elves”—short-lived creatures who had no skill with magick, who could not even see the Flow. These ferals, as they were called, became popular pets and work animals; they were very strong, and clever, and could even learn to speak. Though they could become dangerous if badly handled, they were extremely loyal to masters who treated them well. Many were brought back to Home, and inevitably some ran away and formed packs in the wilderness. Because of their brief lives, they were exceptionally fecund, breeding by the million in just a few short centuries; soon the ferals had become powerful in their own right.

Hari nodded to himself. This was all familiar territory: the elvish myth of how humans came to Overworld.

He began to come across the references to the Blind God. It was never represented directly; there was never a description of its appearance, or its powers, or its motives. As near as Hari could make out, it seemed to be some kind of shadow force driving everything the ferals did that elves didn’t like, from clearing land for farms to building roads, from raising cities to waging war. All this kind of stuff was called “feeding the Blind God.”

It was the Blind God that had chased the elves out of the Quiet Land a millennium ago; as the feral population burgeoned, the Blind God had become a power the elves could not counter. They fled the Quiet Land and closed the dillin. Hari came to the end of the chapter and shrugged. “I don’t get it,” he said. “This’s got nothing to do with HRVP and the Social Police.”

“Yes. It does. If. Quiet Land. Is. Earth.”

Hari sighed. “Are you gonna start that shit again?”

He knew from public records on the net that Duncan had published a monograph just over forty years ago claiming that Overworld was in fact the place that human legends call Faerie, and that the humans of Overworld are descended from changelings. The monograph claimed that Westerling was an Indo-European language derived from Frankish, Middle English, and Old High German; it claimed that the human culture of Overworld so closely mirrors late medieval Europe because it was created by men and women who’d been born there, or who were descended from people who had. That monograph was regarded in academic circles as having been the first overt sign of Duncan’s fast-approaching breakdown.

“Not. Shit. Read. Commentary. Read.”

“Dad—”

“Read. Stupid. Kid.”

Hari sighed again, and opened the book to Duncan’s end-of-chapter commentary.

Hari gave a low whistle. “You published this? I’m surprised Soapy didn’t bust you on the spot.”

“Before. Your. Birth. Things. Were. Looser.” He sagged for a moment, and his eyes drifted closed, as though the effort had exhausted him, but the digivoder’s impersonal tone never changed. “Keep. Reading.”

Hari reopened the book.

“Holy crap, Dad,” Hari said incredulously. “How did I miss this? How did Soapy miss this?”

“Edited. Out. Not. In netbook. Never. Trust. Electronic. Text.”

“You got that right.”

Hari closed the book and weighed it in his hand. He felt a little breathless, as though the world pressed in upon his chest. He thought of one of Duncan’s sayings, one Duncan must have repeated to him a hundred times when he was a kid:

A religion that teaches you God is something outside the world—something separate from everything you see, smell, taste, touch, and hear—is nothing but a cheap hustle.

Now, for the first time, he thought he had some clue what Duncan had been talking about. The elves had a different way of looking at things, no question about it—“But all this, it’s just a metaphor, right?” Hari said. “I mean, you wrote it yourself: the Blind God is a metaphor.”

Duncan’s eyes rolled madly, but the digivoder’s voice was relentlessly steady. “Maybe. A powerful. Enough. Metaphor. Grows. Its own. Truth.”

“Huh,” Hari grunted skeptically. “So where do the Social Police fit in?”

Duncan made a dry hacking sound that might have been laughter. “Inquisition.”

“You mean, like the Spanish Inquisition?”

Duncan didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. After what Hari had been through this afternoon, he didn’t need much convincing. “So, you’re saying this Blind God has like, polished off Earth, and now it’s hungry for Overworld?”

“Studio. Like. Sense organ. Find out. If Overworld. Tastes good.”

“That’s another metaphor, right?” Hari asked. “Right?”

“Probably.”

Hari sat in that chair by his father’s side, weighing the book in his hand, for a long, long time.

Finally, he said, “But why HRVP? It’s kind of a blunt instrument, huh? Why do something that . . . catastrophic?”

Duncan grunted wordlessly, and the digivoder chanted, “Because. It worked. So well. On Earth.”

Hari rubbed his stinging eyes. Any other day, he would have laughed this off and gone to bed. Duncan was crazy; he’d been getting progressively crazier for forty years. Here’s crazy for you: he sounded like he really believed this shit. I’d ask him if he does, Hari thought, but what difference would the answer make? He’s either crazy and he doesn’t believe it, or he’s crazy and he does.

Either way, he’s crazy.

His internal debate was interrupted by the low murmur of the Abbey’s house computer, its hidden speakers digitally phased to sound like it spoke from just behind his left shoulder. “Hari: perimeter alert. An unauthorized vehicle is landing on the front lawn.”

Hari’s stomach dropped like his whole life had gone into freefall. “Abbey: identify unauthorized vehicle. Execute.”

“Hari: the unauthorized vehicle self-identifies as a Social Police detention van.”

Hari looked at the book in his hand, and flinched like it had burned him. He stuck it back into the bookcase spine-first.

On the other hand, he thought numbly, being crazy doesn’t necessarily make him wrong.

5

HARI LEANED NERVELESSLY against the jamb of the Abbey’s front door, staring blankly out into the sky while the Social Police prepared to load Duncan, traveling bed and all, into the back of the detention van. Bradlee said something from beside him, but Hari couldn’t hear him over the roar in his ears: the sound of his life going down in flames. His hand opened, and the crumpled hardcopy of the warrant fluttered to the marble-slab floor.

He should have seen this coming.

Fucking Vilo—

The bastard had ratted him out.

He’d turned over Hari’s books to the Social Police, the sensitive ones he’d kept in his vault on his Sangre de Cristo estate. As a Leisureman, his affidavit certifying that he’d received the sealed boxes from Hari with no knowledge of their content was weighted heavily enough to be accepted prima facie by a Social Court judge. So Hari now had an added charge of possession of Banned material.

The secondary effect of this, Vilo probably hadn’t even anticipated: it had only taken the Social Police a couple hours to find a judge who would reinstate Duncan’s sentence for sedition. Hari couldn’t blame Vilo for that; it was no one’s fault but his own. He should have burned those fucking books. Duncan wouldn’t go to the Buke this time.

He would go under the yoke.

The Buchanan Social Camp required upkeep payments for its inmates, with a hefty deposit. They wouldn’t accept Hari’s pledge, and he had no credit, no asset he could offer; every goddamn mark he had was tied up in his bail. “How long?” he murmured. “How long do you think he has?”

Bradlee shook his head. “He probably won’t even survive the cyborg conversion.”

“Yeah.”

“If he survives the operation, though, who knows? He can’t do anything physical; they’ll probably hardwire him for data processing. He might live for years.” Bradlee coughed apologetically. “Not that you’d, uh, want him to, y’know. Not like that . . .”

“Yeah,” Hari said. “Yeah, I know.”

He leaned on the doorjamb, paralyzed. He couldn’t decide who to kill first: Shanks, or Vilo, or himself.

Out on the lawn, Duncan rolled his head toward Hari. He couldn’t speak—his digivoder lay in splinters on the floor of his room, crushed under a soapy’s boot heel—but he could wave his twisted, crippled hand. He touched it to his head, made a weak patting motion, then he walked his fingers arthritically along the gleaming chrome bedrail. Hari got the message: Keep your head down, and inch toward daylight.

His vision swam with tears.

The van’s doors closed around Duncan like jaws. The soapies sealed the doors and climbed into the cabin, and the van lifted off; Hari watched it shrink to a rippling liquid dot in the night sky. “Good-bye, Dad,” he whispered.

I guess I’m kind of invulnerable, now, he thought numbly. There just isn’t anything left for them to take from me, except my life.

My life? They can have it.

“I, uh . . .” Bradlee began uncomfortably. “Can you give me a few days, a week, to find a place?”

Hari frowned at him, and Bradlee dropped his gaze uncertainly. “I mean,” he said slowly, “I guess I’m kind of out of a job, huh?”

“Yeah,” Hari said. He had no room left in his heart for Bradlee’s problems. “I guess you are.”

Head down, Bradlee walked slowly back toward the kitchen.

Hari hissed at himself, softly through his teeth. No reason to take this out on the nurse; Bradlee had looked after Duncan for years, had really cared for him. Hari called after him, “Brad—stay as long as you need. I mean, shit, I’d hire you to look after the house, but—” He spread his hands helplessly, and shrugged. “—I just realized I can’t pay your salary.”

“Thanks,” he said softly. “Thanks, Hari. You sure you don’t want something to eat?”

Hari closed his eyes; the thought of putting food into his mouth clenched his stomach like somebody had reached into his guts and made a fist. “Not tonight. I’m gonna go upstairs and get friendly with a bottle of scotch.”

Bradlee nodded silently and disappeared into the kitchen.

Hari stood in the Abbey’s front hall for a long time, listening to the silence. Bradlee might as well have been already gone; everyone else was.

Faith. Duncan. Shanna.

Caine.

Cold marble-slab floor, classically austere sweep of stair to the second-floor balcony, rich burgundy runner—everything here he knew so well; he’d dreamed this place for so many years before he’d built it that it was forever engraved into his brain. He’d never dreamed it would be so empty.

It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours, he thought in blank awe. A day ago, his worst problems had been a cranky bypass, creaky legs, and a bad attitude.

My god—

He wondered if his chest would implode into the stark unforgiving lack inside.

My god, what have I done?

From behind his left shoulder the Abbey murmured, “Hari: priority screen call.”

Hari walked reflexively to the nearest wallscreen and hit the acknowledge. He never considered refusing the call; he felt a strange, abstract gratitude to whomever this might be, for distracting him from the wreckage of his life.

It was Tan’elKoth.

Probably calling to gloat, Hari thought dully.

The ex-Emperor wore a black sweater, over which gleamed the metalized straps of his ammod harness. “Caine,” he said darkly, “you must come to me immediately, here at the Curioseum.”

“This isn’t a good time for me.”

“There will be no better time for you. There will be no time at all. Come. Now.”

“I’m telling you . . .” Hari let his voice trail off, and he frowned. “Did you say, at the Curioseum? If you’re at the Curioseum, why are you wearing the ammod harness?”

“For the same reason that you must come here now. You conscripted me for your war, Caine. I must speak with you before I become its latest casualty—and I have little time.”

“What . . . ? I mean, I don’t get it,” Hari said. His brain felt like an old rusty engine, groaning as it tried to turn over.

Tan’elKoth’s eyes smoldered darkly. “How much do you want me to say over an open line into your home?”

Hari thought of the crowd of Social Police and SynTech security that had tramped through here this afternoon, and he nodded. “I understand,” he said, “but—”

“No,” Tan’elKoth rumbled. “Come now. It is a matter of life and death. Mine—and Pallas Ril’s.”

Hari squeezed his eyes shut and took a long, slow, painful breath. “I’m on my way,” he said. “I’ll be at the South Gate in ten minutes.”

6

STARKLY SIDELIT BY the emergency lights, the exhibition halls of the Curioseum had become eerie, alien caverns of moon-black shadows and bleaching glare. Tan’elKoth paced ahead of him with the ponderous threat of a hovertank, his thick-soled athletic shoes silent on the polished floor tiles. The only sound was the click of Hari’s boot heels, echoing crisply from distant walls of cement and stone. His arms prickled with gooseflesh.

This shit was creeping him out.

It gnawed at the pit of his stomach: everything looked so wrong, here. And it wasn’t just the stippled wash of emergency lighting through the dirty armorglass panels; it wasn’t just that none of the displays activated when they passed through the halls; it wasn’t even the blank silence, deeper than you could ever really hear on Earth, left behind by the absence of the ventilation system’s constant whisper.

He’d never seen the inside of the Curioseum from the eye-level of a standing man.

The simple fact that he could, for the first time in his life, walk through these rooms left him breathless with irrational dread.

At the South Gate, he hadn’t been able to make himself come in. He’d stood in the doorway, shaking his head. Sure, Tan’el-Koth said the ON field was off—he said his mindview showed not even the trace amounts of Flow that should have been visible—but Rover was still down in fucking Los Angeles. Shit, the Fancon people had probably already auctioned it off. “Why would the field be off?” Hari had asked. “And what’s wrong with the power?”

Tan’elKoth’s reply had been an exasperated glower. “You are the damned Chairman,” he’d rumbled savagely. “If you don’t know, how should I? Follow me.”

Hari had a lot of trouble convincing himself to step into the gate. He knew, he just knew, that when he took one more step into the Curioseum he would collapse, crippled and helpless, at Tan’elKoth’s feet. Tan’elKoth had been as sympathetic as Hari had come to expect. “Fine, then. Let her die,” he’d said coldly, then had turned and walked away.

A second later, Hari had followed him. But still he could not get comfortable with walking where he had always rolled.

Ahead, Tan’elKoth turned down the gallery that led toward the Caine Hall and his own apartment. Hari paced in his wake, listening to the echoes and rubbing his forearms to make the hairs on them lie down again. “Are you ever—” he began, whispering instinctively. He caught himself and coughed—some bitter, chemical tang tickled his throat—then repeated loudly, “Are you ever gonna tell me what this is about?”

Tan’elkoth stopped, his back a wide black wall that seemed to half close off the gallery. “Can you not smell it?”

That chemical smell, the one that coated the inside of his nose, his mouth, his throat—he recognized it. It was the preservative gas from Berne’s display case . . . but thicker, stronger, far more dense. Until now, he’d never smelled it until he was right up next to the case. The back of his neck prickled.

He leaned out so he could peer around Tan’elKoth’s broad back; he dreaded what he knew he would see, but he had to look.

Berne’s case was empty. It stood on its pedestal in the archway of the exhibition hall, vacant as a corpse’s eyes.

Hari’s bowels dissolved into ice water that drained into his legs. He couldn’t move, couldn’t speak—he was afraid to turn his head, because he knew with irrational certainty that as soon as he looked, he’d find Berne waiting for him, standing in the shadows with Kosall poised to strike, and he’d collapse and start to scream like a stolen baby.

Dead is dead, Hari told himself. He’d jammed a knife through the top of Berne’s skull and scrambled the bastard’s brains. You don’t get any deader than that.

After repeating this to himself a few times, he found that he could breathe again. When he finally decided he could trust his voice, he said, “All right. I’ve seen it. Now tell me what it means. Who would steal Berne’s body?”

Tan’elKoth turned, half his face bleached white in the emergency lights, the other half lost in shadow. “Studio security. Your own secmen, Caine.”

Hari winced. He didn’t like this already, and he knew it was going to get worse.

Tan’elKoth went on. “I was engaged in my usual research this evening after closing, developing a new lesson for my Applied Magick seminar, when I heard the noise of what turned out to be five secmen opening this case. I enquired what they were doing—perfectly innocently, I might add, I had assumed they were acting upon your orders. Their response was to place me under arrest and hold me incommunicado in the security office detention center until perhaps half an hour ago.”

“When you called me.”

“Yes.”

Tan’elKoth moved slowly, almost meditatively, down the long gallery and stopped in front of the empty case. He pressed one enormous hand against the armorglass, like a lover waving good-bye through a car window, and bent his head for a moment as though weary, or in pain. As Hari joined him there, Tan’elKoth turned and seated himself on the case’s pedestal, leaned his forearms on his knees, and folded his hands.

“My first thought,” Tan’elKoth said, “was that this was some stroke of yours—some plot to wound me by a further desecration of the corpse of my most faithful servant. As if what you had done to him already were not enough.”

“Hey, don’t try to splash me with that shit,” Hari said. “Putting his body on display was Wes Turner’s idea.”

“A puerile evasion,” he said darkly. “This crime was an act of the company that employs you. You cannot exculpate yourself by claiming the boss made me do it. The nature of your masters has never been a mystery to you, yet you have continued to take their money and enjoy the borrowed status they lend to you. You are as guilty as they.”

“You’re gonna debate morality with me? You? You’re the only sonofabitch I ever met who’s murdered more people than I have,” Hari said through his teeth. “What about the body?”

“Yes.” He met Hari’s gaze with a level stare. “No long interval passed before I realized this could not be your doing. You are a walking catastrophe of Biblical proportion; this type of petty, emotionally wounding revenge has never been your style.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass how you knew it wasn’t me. I already know it wasn’t me, goddammit. Who was it?”

“This is not the central question; the thieves were Studio secmen, acting upon orders from above. Who gave those orders is peripheral—a mere detail. The central question is for what would they want it?”

Hari ground his teeth together and resisted the impulse to break the bastard’s nose again. “Tan’elKoth,” he said tightly, “on my best days, I’m not a patient man. This is not one of my best days. Drop the fucking games.”

“Just so.” He rose, towering over Hari, starkly outlined against the emergency floodlight. “I can tell you precisely why the Studio would take Berne’s body.”

“Christ, I hope so.”

“They intend to use him to kill Pallas Ril.”

Looking up into Tan’elKoth’s black-shadowed face, Hari could feel the strength leaving his knees as though it trickled out a pair of spigots on his heels. “I don’t understand,” he said numbly.

“I found it obvious.” Tan’elKoth walked away again, into the Caine Hall, heading for his apartment door. “Berne was stolen by the Studio. Pallas Ril is the only obstacle to the success of the Studio’s plans for my world.”

His voice boomed off the walls of stone. “Berne was the finest swordsman of his age—perhaps of any age. Combat skill—like any other physical skill, even walking and talking—is a matter of reflex conditioning. An animated corpse of Berne would still have the skills of a superior swordsman, even without the higher cognitive functions that govern tactics. And, of course, they also took Kosall.”

Hari, following, had to stop suddenly: his back ached fiercely at that name.

The scene, the wax-figure diorama in the middle of this hall, was of that moment on the sand of Victory Stadium, on that hot Ankhanan noon seven years ago. High above, figures of Ma’elKoth and Pallas Ril were locked in deific combat. In the center of the display, Caine brandished a pair of knives while he leaped onto the unstoppable point of the sword in Berne’s hand.

If the Curioseum had had power, the scene would have been lit by the white blaze that would radiate from the figure of Pallas Ril. Here in black-shadowed semidarkness, the scene had an eerie, nightmarish life. Darkness hid the wires; for a disorienting, hallucinatory second, Hari wasn’t sure whether he was the one standing out here looking at the display or if he was the leaping figure within it.

—and for a moment he could feel again that harsh buzzing in his teeth from Kosall’s vibrating edge when the blade had slid, smooth as butter, through his spine—

He rubbed his head as though he could massage meaning in through his skull, and he snarled at himself to pull it together. “An animated corpse—?”

Tan’elKoth stopped at his doorway and sighed like an exasperated professor. “Must I forge every single link in this chain of reasoning? Here then, simply: Pallas Ril—Chambaraya—is a god of life. No living thing can approach her undetected, however it may be concealed. If, on the other hand, a potent magickal weapon is borne by, shall we say, an unliving thing . . . ?Need I say more?”

The face of the wax Berne above him seemed to shift in the black wash of shadow. The glass eyes glittered with malice; they seemed to turn from the figure of the wax Caine before it and fix upon Pallas Ril high above. In that final instant—the most famous sequence of the most famous Studio Adventure of all time—Caine had thrown himself upon Berne’s sword, for that was his only hope of saving Pallas Ril.

Hari’s chest ached with helpless rage.

Sure, he thought. Sure, that makes sense.

The people behind this could have chosen any random corpse for their weapon; they wouldn’t even need to dig one up—they could lease one from the Working Dead in Ankhana’s Warrens. But instead, they took Berne. So Hari would know it was coming.

So he’d know there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Back in the bad old days, when he and Shanna hadn’t been able to open their mouths to each other without sparking a shouting match, she had constantly accused him of being obsessively self-absorbed; she liked to tell him that something or other isn’t about you. Not everything in the bloody world is about you!

Yeah, maybe not, he thought. But this is. I don’t know why, or how, but you can’t get away from it. This is about me.

He’d been told: the greatest skill of the successful Administrator is to know when to do nothing.

Just like Dad: I can’t fucking learn to shut up.

“I am no great admirer of Pallas Ril, as you know,” Tan’elKoth said as he fished out his keys—the ON field disabled palmlocks as efficiently as it did Hari’s bypass; all the Curioseum’s interior doors had Overworld-style manual locks with physical keys. “Nonetheless, she is the sole shield between my Children and the masters of this . . . this death cult you call a Studio. Is there anything you can do?”

Hari shook his head, mouth twisted against a taste of metal and bitter ash. “If I can get a message to her, somehow . . . She can handle pretty much anything if she knows it’s coming.” He turned up his palms helplessly. “But the Studio is gonna be ahead of me on this, too.”

He could taste defeat already. He had been hit too hard, from too many directions at once. He’d lost already.

She would die.

Standing at the freemod dock: You get in trouble over there this time, I can’t come and bail you out.

How had he ended up so useless, and so guilty?

His head hammered; he pressed the heel of his hand to his temple and squeezed shut his eyes. It felt like a steel band ratcheted tighter and tighter around his skull: at any second the bone would crack and his brains would squirt out his eye sockets.

“I shall do what I can, but first—” Tan’elKoth circled a hand at the particolored light and shadow of the power-dead Curioseum. “—I must find a place to stay. The power cells in these harnesses of yours are not inexhaustible. Amplitude decay is—as you have reminded me many times—an ugly way to die.”

“Where will you go?”

Tan’elKoth shrugged. “My art has garnered admirers among the Leisurefolk—some few of them have ON vaults not unlike the one you maintain at the Abbey, only larger, to hold collections of artifacts brought to Earth by Actors that they sponsor. I am certain one or more can be persuaded to accommodate me until this—” Again, the circular gesture. “—situation can be resolved.”

He turned to the door to his apartment. “Once I have my spare harness, I will be off.”

He pushed the door open—and every light in the Curioseum burst to life.

Hari jumped as though the sudden glare was a stroke of nearby lightning. Overhead, the figure of Pallas Ril blazed like a fusion torch, and the simulated power of the simulated Ma’elKoth became a jet of fire that joined them breast to breast. Hari clenched his teeth until the stuttering of his heart settled into a steady rhythm. “Looks like you won’t have to move after all,” he said.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Tan’elKoth said as he disappeared within his apartment.

Hari went to the door. “But with the power back on—”

Tan’elKoth stood at his desk, his back to Hari. “You’re still walking.” His voice was rich with dark-roasted contempt.

“Huh.” Hari scowled thoughtfully as he paced through the door. “That doesn’t make any goddamn sense.”

The Curioseum’s ON field generator was hardwired into the Studio grid—which was energized by the Studio’s transfer pump. It should have been impossible for the power to be on down here without the field returning as well.

In fact, there was no reason why the damn power should have been off in the first place. There were backup generators, and as a third failsafe the Curioseum would self-connect to San Francisco’s civic grid—the Curioseum’s collection was irreplaceable, and much of it would vanish into amplitude decay in goddamn short order if the field didn’t come back up. If he hadn’t been distracted by all the shit that had hit him today, he would have seen it already: the only reason to turn off the power was to turn off the ON field.

But why would somebody want to do that? Was he just being paranoid, or did this smell of enemy action? It’s not whether I’m paranoid, he thought. It’s whether I’m paranoid enough.

Now, with the power back on, but still no field—

Hari frowned down at the floor. “What’s this crap?”

Tan’elKoth’s athletic shoes had left tracks, faint but definite, even across the area rug that defined his “living room”—slipper shapes where his tread had disturbed some kind of fine silvery dust that was spread all over the floor and the furniture, like pesticide left behind by a careless exterminator. “What the hell is this dust?” Hari asked Tan’elKoth’s back. “You working in marble these days?”

“Mmm,” Tan’elKoth agreed distractedly, while he thumbed through an old-fashioned bound-paper address book he’d pulled from a drawer of his desk. “But this is not marble dust—my pneumatic chisel has a vacuum hose that’s vented to the outside. There are several fairly serious varieties of lung damage, as well as systemic disturbances, that are caused by the inhalation of marble dust; even with the hose, I wear a self-contained breathing apparatus while I work. Ah, there he is,” he said smugly, holding his place in the address book with one sausage-sized finger. “Rentzi Dole. He has several of my pieces, and has invited me to Kauai on any number of occasions. And—most important—he is no friend of this Studio.”

Hari’s answering nod was equally distracted. He knew all about Leisureman Dole—his late aunt had been Shanna’s Patron for many years. Rentzi Dole was one of Hari’s least favorite people; the Leisureman had defied the explicit terms of his aunt’s will and terminated Shanna’s patronage.

Hari had something else on his mind: a thought that was beginning to take shape, still misty around the edges, kind of foggily inchoate as it organized itself—his brain wasn’t accustomed to doing this kind of work anymore. “Uh, Tan’elKoth?” Hari began uncertainly. Why would someone have the power on but the ON field off?

Clearly, they wanted to run some kind of equipment that requires both power and Earth-normal physics. Something electronic. Like a deskscreen. “Tan’elKoth,” Hari said, “don’t make that call.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. What choice do I have?”

No electronics work in the ON field—not even, say, the voice-recognition chips built into palmlocks.

“I’m telling you,” Hari said, stronger, more urgently, “don’t do it. You have to listen to me.” He started toward the ex-Emperor, his hand out as though to grab the bigger man and haul him away from the desk by force.

Voice-recognition chips aren’t restricted to operating palmlocks or controlling access to netsites; they can be used to trigger almost any kind of device—

“Nonsense,” the ex-Emperor said, thumbing the mike key next to the speaking tube.

—like a detonator.

“Don’t do it—”

Tan’elKoth continued, “Iris: initiate telecommunications. Exec—”

A shattering roar obliterated the rest of the word.

7

THE BLAST HURLED Tan’elKoth backward into Hari, flattening them both like they’d been hit by a freightliner. Hari might have lost consciousness for a second or two; he found himself on his hands and knees, shaking his head, thunder rolling on and on in his ears, joined by a high, singing whine that made his teeth ache. Some kind of thick greyish chemical smoke burned the back of his throat and punched hacking coughs out of his lungs. All that was left of Tan’elKoth’s beautiful rolltop desk was a knee-high bonfire—the oil- and varnish-impregnated wood pumped out black smoke of its own, but that didn’t worry him.

What worried him was how bright it was in here.

White as lightning, the glare hurt—and it grew brighter and brighter until he felt like somebody was driving nails into his eyeballs. With the light came heat: searing radiance like a sun-lamp strapped onto his face.

The whole apartment was on fire.

Even the stone of the floor burned: outspreading rings of white flame hissed sparks at the ceiling. In the center of each widening ring was a smoldering splinter of wood—pieces of the desk, flaming, blown everywhere by the bomb. And the hissing, spark-showering rings of fire grew slowly, spreading like ripples in a pond of molasses, and the stone in their wake glowed red-white like slag from a blast furnace.

That fucking dust—

Somebody’d sprayed it all over the goddamn place. Thermite, maybe a magnesium compound, maybe something new he’d never heard of—it didn’t matter. What mattered was getting out of here.

Holding a fold of his tunic across his mouth and nose against the smoke, he snaked over to Tan’elKoth. The big man lay on his back, limbs splayed bonelessly, out cold. His black sweater had been blown to rags, and the chestplate of the ammod harness looked like the front end of a car after a disagreement with the pylon of a suspension bridge. His face was scorched, his eyebrows burned off; embers still crawled through his hair, making it crinkle and spit smoke.

Hari spent an eternal five seconds feeling for a pulse between the windpipe and the massive cords of Tan’elKoth’s neck; he wasn’t sentimental enough to get his ass cooked trying to rescue a corpse.

One, two, three, four—son of a bitch if the big bastard wasn’t still alive after all. Now all Hari had to do was figure out how a 170-pound middle-aged man who was not in the best shape of his life was gonna get out of here hauling this fucking behemoth who was way too goddamn close to three times his weight. This, Hari thought concisely, is gonna suck.

He grasped Tan’elKoth’s ankles and started dragging him toward the door, but as soon as he stood the smoke blinded and choked him; he had to sit down and push himself across the floor crabwise, and his soft boots could get little purchase—slow going, at best.

That high, singing whine began to overpower the rolling thunder in his ears, and he recognized it now: muffled by his stunned eardrums, he was hearing the blare of the Curioseum’s alarm—but it wasn’t the rising wail of the fire alarm.

It was the tooth-grinding screech of the intruder alarm.

“Motherfucker!” Hari threw himself backward into a shoulder-roll that brought him up in a low crouch facing the door—

Just in time to see the security gate ratchet down the last few inches and lock in place.

The intruder alarm kept on screeching, and no fire alarm sounded at all—which meant he couldn’t expect any help from the Curioseum’s fire-suppression system. Or from San Francisco Fire and Rescue. The security gate was a flex-linked grid of half-inch hardened steel bars: no getting past that without a cutting torch or a hydraulic jack, and the second-floor windows would be gated by now as well. “Okay, I was wrong,” he muttered, hacking on the smoke and wiping at tears that streamed from his stinging eyes. “This already sucks.”

Though the rings of flame grew wider, growing toward intersection, the smoke didn’t seem to be thickening at all—in fact, now that he’d noticed, he could see that the smoke was being drawn upward along the broad sweep of stairs, as though the light traps in the middle of the second floor and the third formed an accidental chimney.

Yeah—there’d be ventilators up there, to clear the area of solvent fumes and marble dust. They would be useless for escaping: the Curioseum’s outside vents were less than a foot in diameter and heavily baffled—something to do with maintaining the ON field—

The skylight, Hari thought. No need for a security gate: the armorglass skylight was fused with the stone of the roof. It’d take tools to cut it open—but the third floor was Tan’elKoth’s sculpture studio. Full of tools.

It was also two goddamn tall floors straight up through a column of toxic smoke, and Hari’s sonofabitching legs only half worked.

A new swirl of that smoke choked him, and when he coughed he tasted blood. Tan’elKoth had said something about a self-contained breathing apparatus; that was all he needed to make up his mind.

He grabbed Tan’elKoth’s ankles again, took a deep breath and a glance to orient himself, then squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath as he stood up and leaned against Tan’elKoth’s weight, dragging the huge man toward the stairs. Heat knocked the strength out of him like a blow from a club. He could barely pull the ex-Emperor along the floor; how in the name of Christ was he supposed to haul this 400-pound gorilla up three fucking floors?

Hari left him half on the stairs, head at the bottom to keep him below the worst of the smoke, and sprinted upward empty-handed.

The smoke scalded his eyeballs, blinding him with tears before he’d made it halfway to the second floor. He sagged against the railing—gagging, spitting blood—but shook himself and kept on, driving his failing legs up the steps, hauling himself hand over hand along the rail. When he reached the second floor, he fell outward into the clearer air of Tan’elKoth’s bedchamber and lay there, gasping, just long enough to catch a breath that didn’t make him convulse, then pulled himself back to his feet.

He shut his eyes again and pounded up the last flight of stairs, holding his breath. He staggered into the sculpture studio; hypoxia made his head swim and turned his knees to jelly, but right next to the wheeled hydraulic scaffolding that surrounded a sculpture in progress, he found Tan’elKoth’s respirator mask and slapped it over his face.

He spent a grateful ten seconds just breathing; air came hard and slow through the regulator, but it was clean enough to taste like wine. The faceplate cleared, and now he could see, as well.

A quick glance around the smoke-filled studio gave him half a solution: a crane was mounted on a pivot so that it would swing out over the light trap, bearing a pulley and cable attached to a hand-winch, for lifting Tan’elKoth’s raw materials—steel, bronze, and enormous blocks of marble—up to here from the ground floor.

It was half a solution because there was only one respirator. Hauling Tan’elKoth slowly up through the ascending column of smoke would suffocate him; if Hari left the respirator on Tan’elKoth, he didn’t think he could make it up the stairs a second time to crank the damn winch—and the growing heat that blasted up through the light traps might roast Tan’elKoth anyway. What I really need is speed, Hari told himself. Speed is what I really need.

That thought rang in his head like a mantra by Dr. Seuss, and then he had it. The enormous half-finished marble statue within the hydraulic scaffolding . . .

The idea came to him whole, perfectly formed, audacious enough to make him laugh out loud: because the marble statue stood on a low, square dolly with swivel-mounted wheels.

He swung the crane arm out over the light trap and knocked loose the winch’s ratchet gear so that the cable twisted downward. He let the cable spool out—he couldn’t see the first floor through the smoke, and he didn’t want to get down there and find out he hadn’t left himself enough slack. Tan’elKoth—Mr. Efficient—had marked the cable with a big piece of colored duct tape; when that reached the pulley, Hari figured he’d let out enough.

Tan’elKoth’s pneumatic chisel, pressure tank fully charged, rested on one of the scaffolds; Hari ripped the vacuum hose off the chisel and pulled the scaffold over to the winch. A couple of chisel strokes neatly parted the cable strands a few meters back around the spool. Hari hauled the free end over to the statue; then he looped the cable under the marble arms and tied it off to itself with a simple loop knot. He skirted the statue once around, unlocking each of the dolly’s wheels, and everything was ready to go. He stood back for one moment to look it over and reassure himself that this was gonna work—and found himself staring, mouth hanging open within the respirator mask.

The figure that struggled free from the block of marble was that of a middle-aged, rather ordinary, conservative-looking man. Something in the texture of the sculpted hair suggested a scatter of grey, and jowls were beginning to soften his jawline. But what held Hari was the look on its face: the sad knowledge within its eyes, a sort of settled melancholy that wasn’t even potent enough to be dignified as despair. The statue looked like a man who knows too well he has lost the promise and possibility of youth, who has found nothing with which to replace them—and who doesn’t seem to mind all that much. It was the image of a man who’d settled into a comfortable failure.

Holy crap, Hari thought. It’s me.

The block of marble was labeled in black wax pencil on the side, in Tan’elKoth’s bowl scrawl: David the King.

I don’t get it.

Was he wrong? Was it an accidental resemblance?

No—on the scaffolding that surrounded it were dozens of black-and-white printouts of digigraphs, everything from Caine’s first publicity headshots to stills from Studio security cameras showing Hari from every conceivable angle and in every possible posture. What the fuck is going on here?

And with that mental question, another tendril of smoke drifted before his eyes and reminded him of the immediate answer. He’d worry about Tan’elKoth’s goddamn art after he’d saved the bastard’s life.

He sprinted to the stairwell and threw himself into it, sliding down the railing with exhilirating speed. He hit the second floor and sprang to the next flight—the flames below crept closer and closer to Tan’elKoth’s side as he stirred now, dazedly—and Hari swung himself onto the rail again and skidded down to stop beside him. Tan’elKoth couldn’t even look at him; he was too busy coughing blood and trying to wipe smoke from his eyes.

The cable hung down the middle of the light traps; a few meters of it were coiled within one of the spreading rings of flame—some of it had melted from contact with the white-hot floor near the rim. Hari sprang high over the spitting flame, hooked the cable with his elbow and sprang back again, letting the cable slide through the crook of his arm so he wouldn’t take up any slack.

Even that brief instant in contact with the heated stone was too much for his boots: they burst into flame. He kicked them off, but they had already ignited the dust that impregnated the fabric of his pants; an instant later his shirt had caught as well. He swore and held the cable with his teeth while he wildly ripped away his burning clothes; they shredded in his hands and he threw them aside, but not before they’d seared his skin. Smoke rose from his flesh like overdone barbecue. That’s okay, he told himself. So long as I get out of here before I go into shock.

Naked now, he brought the cable’s hot end to Tan’elKoth. The ex-Emperor was trying to sit up, mumbling something about all this being wrong, that this wasn’t what was supposed to happen. “If we start worrying about what’s supposed to happen,” Hari shouted through the mask above the fire’s roar, “we’re both gonna die in here? Hold still!”

“Your clothes . . .” Tan’elKoth said blankly. “You’re naked.”

“Now I know why everybody says you’re a genius,” Hari told him. “Don’t move.” Working swiftly, he looped the cable under Tan’elKoth’s armpits.

“What . . . ? What are you doing? This fire—what? This hurts . . .”

Hari grinned as he tightened the knot. “Yeah.”

The ex-Emperor coughed, spraying blood; tears streamed down his face. “What are you doing?”

“Saving your life. You ever hear of a guy who called himself Batman?”

“Batman?” Tan’elKoth frowned dazedly, as though he couldn’t quite make his eyes focus. “I don’t understand.”

“You will,” Hari said, and leaped into the air. Past the top of his leap, already coming down, he doubled his legs up under him and grabbed onto the cable.

High, high above, through the pulley on the crane, the cable pulled David the King rolling on its dolly toward the light trap.

It reached the railing at the rim, and tipped. For one awful moment, Hari feared he’d mis-estimated the statue’s center of gravity—but then it tipped farther, and farther, leaning over like a toppling drunk. For half a second it hung there, balanced on the rail . . . then it slid out into space.

Hari said: “Going up!”

The statue came down like a boulder off a cliff.

Hari and Tan’elKoth shot upward.

The statue swung wide, jerking and bouncing, raking across the light trap and threatening to tangle the cable upon itself. Hari swore as he watched the statue hurtle down at his head like a giant’s flyswatter. Okay, so I didn’t really think this through—

He swung his legs high, like a pole vaulter, and met the rim of the descending statue’s dolly with the soles of his feet, kicking himself and Tan’elKoth wide—and it gave him a twinge, it really did, seeing his middle-aged self in marble sail into the depths of the column of smoke below.

Then they were past, yanked up onto the studio—Hari let go of the cable to catch the crane arm—and the statue slammed into the ground floor far below and shattered. One arm hooked over the crane, Hari grabbed frantically for the cable, expecting Tan’elKoth to drop like a stone, gritting his teeth against the anticipated pain of having the cable slice to the bone of his hand as Tan’elKoth’s weight pulled it through—

But Hari’s kick off the statue had set the two of them swinging like a pendulum; as the statue pulled the moment-arm of their pendulum short, the angle of their swing increased—like a yo-yo going Over the Falls—and swung Tan’elKoth just barely wide enough that he could latch onto the rail of the light trap with one massive hand. He slammed hard into the cutaway floor, but managed to hang on while Hari scrambled down off the crane and got there to help him over the rail.

Coughing convulsively, tears streaming down his face, smoke still spitting from the embers that crawled through his hair, Tan’elKoth roared furiously, “You are . . . incapable . . . of doing anything . . . the easy way!”

“Shut up and haul in that fucking cable!” Hari shouted back. “We’re not out of here yet!”

He rolled the hydraulic scaffold—the one that held the pneumatic chisel—over so that it spanned one corner of the light trap, then locked its wheels and cranked it up to its full extension, which took it nearly to the ceiling. He swarmed up the side ladder, picked up the chisel, and jammed its cutting edge against the armorglass on one side of the arched skylight. When he squeezed the trigger handle, the chisel roared to life like a jackhammer.

Working as fast as he could, he scored a manhole-sized circle in the armorglass—the pressure in the chisel’s tank was dropping rapidly. Tan’elKoth coughed his way up beside him, carrying the cable coiled in his fist, as the chisel slowed. Its strokes weakened and finally stopped.

Hari put his shoulder against the scored circle of armorglass and shoved, but he might as well have been pushing a mountain. Tan’elKoth caught his elbow and pulled him aside; then the big man lifted the chisel’s pressure tank like a Social Police battering ram and slammed its curved end against the scoring. A tracery of cracks bloomed from the point of impact like lightning crawling the face of a thunderhead.

Tan’elKoth slammed it again, a quarter of the way around the circle, and again, and again. His face had gone from bright red to purple, and he hit the circle one more time, in the middle, and the disk of armorglass popped out like the lid of a vacuum pack.

Hari made Tan’elKoth go out first, and Tan’elKoth turned back to help him through the hole so he didn’t cut himself on its razor-sharp edges.

Once out in the cool darkness of the roof, Hari stripped off the respirator mask and crouched next to Tan’elKoth, who lay on the roof, still coughing, wiping his eyes. Smoke boiled out the skylight behind him, a long column twisting up toward the gibbous moon.

Hari’s hands were shaking, and the inside of the respirator mask was spattered with blood. “Goddamn,” he said softly, to himself. “Goddamn if I didn’t pull it off.”

8

HE LAY DOWN on the roof beside Tan’elKoth and let the heat of his burns drain into the night-cool stone. The pain was only beginning, and he knew it would be bad. Still, though, for this one moment, he was content to lie here under the stars and luxuriate in the sensation of being alive.

“Why?” Tan’elKoth said; his voice was thick, as though he held back a sob. “Why? I am your enemy. Why did you do this?”

“I don’t know,” Hari answered. “I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.” He rolled his face toward Tan’elKoth, smiling with his bloody lips. “Maybe I just wanted to hear you say thanks.”

Tan’elKoth turned away. “My David,” he murmured. “Oh, my David—”

“What, is this about the fucking statue?” Hari made himself sit up. “Your life or the statue,” he said. “Which would you rather save?”

Tan’elKoth buried his face in his hands. “This is a choice no artist should ever have to make.”

“You didn’t,” Hari reminded him. “Nobody asked you.”

“No more did I ask for your help,” Tan’elKoth said bitterly. “No more shall I give you my thanks.”

And while Hari sat there, staring at the ex-Emperor, he realized he wasn’t interested in gratitude.

Old, tired, whipped by life, one leg tied behind his back—

I’ve still got it.

He showed his teeth to the moon.

I’ve still fucking got it.

That feeling was worth every one of his burns.

“Come on, get moving,” he said abruptly. “Tie the damn cable to something up here so we can get off this roof.”

While Tan’elKoth slid a loop over one merlon of the Curioseum’s crenellated roof and walked himself backward down the wall, hand over hand along the cable, Hari Michaelson triaged the casualties of his life.

Duncan was beyond help; the bulldog jaws of the Social Police had locked upon him, and his life bled out through their teeth. Faith would keep; bad as her situation was, alone and probably frightened among strangers, she was in no immediate danger. Shanks wasn’t the type to torture and kill a helpless child just for fun; she only tortured and killed helpless children when she had something to gain from it. Tan’elKoth didn’t need any more help; warned now, aware of the danger he faced, he could go to his Leisure friends for protection.

And Hari himself—

To save himself would cost more than his life was worth.

Tan’elKoth called up to him from the sidewalk below. “I’m down!”

Instead of answering, Hari walked past the smoking skylight to another one a few yards away; he leaned on it, pressing his palms against the armorglass, and looked down past the actinic blaze from the Pallas Ril figure, down to where the wax Caine leaped upon the blade of the wax Berne. He’d relived that instant so many times in the past seven years that he no longer knew if he remembered it for itself, or if he only remembered remembering; he’d never quite had the courage to play the secondhander cube, to check his recollection.

He did know this, though, beyond a dream of doubt: on that day, on that sand, knowing he was about to die, he had been as close to happy as he’d ever come.

All right, he thought, staring down at the wax Caine. All right. I understand now.

Caine had died, on the arena sand that hot autumn noon. For seven long years, Hari had been no more than Caine’s rotting corpse.

Fuck it. If dying were anything special, they wouldn’t let everybody do it.

Tan’elKoth called from below. “I’m down! Are you coming?”

Hari went to the edge of the Curioseum’s roof. Out across the carhive between the Curioseum and the Studio, security vans roared toward them, and high against the stars wailed approaching fire and emergency rescue vehicles. He looked down at Tan’elKoth. “You haven’t seen me,” he said as he pulled the cable up, coiling it around his arm. “I was never here. You got out on your own. You hear me?”

“What are you talking about?”

“No time to explain. I gotta go save the world.”

He pulled the last of the cable up and slipped the loop off the merlon. From below, Tan’elKoth said, “Caine?”

He almost answered with his reflexive Call me Hari, goddammit, but he changed his mind. He stood absolutely still for one long second, savoring the feeling.

Then he leaned out over the battlement. “Yeah?” he said. “What?”

“It’s my world, too, Caine,” Tan’elKoth said. “Good luck.”

“Thanks.” Looking down, he touched his brow in a sketch of a salute. “Same to you,” he said, then turned and ran like hell, streaking across the roof, heading for the skywalk that connected to the Studio.

9

THE RESCsUE SQUAD paramedic piled out of the emergency services vehicle before the turbines had even spun down; he staggered through the backblast to reach the side of Tan’elKoth. “Are you hurt, sir?” he shouted over the declining roar of the turbines. “Do you need medical attention?”

“Yes, I do,” Tan’elKoth said grimly. “But more than that, I need your palmpad.”

“What?”

Tan’elKoth seized the paramedic’s shoulder in one titanic hand, his grip so sudden and powerful that it short-circuited the startled man’s will; he didn’t even try to move while the ex-Emperor yanked the palmpad from his belt holster. Tan’elKoth shoved the man stumbling backward and gave him a volcanic glare that told him to keep his distance. “Initiate telecommunications,” he spat into the device’s microphone. “Studio two five X-ray zulu four. Execute.”

A moment later, the tiny screen shimmered with a view of Kollberg’s wasted, leering face. “Well?”

“Not at all well,” Tan’elKoth growled. “To what manner of fool did you assign this task? I was nearly killed, as was he—mortal danger to us both was never part of the plan.”

“Mortal danger makes it convincing,” Kollberg said. “Don’t presume to lecture me on the mechanics of entertainment.”

“This is not entertainment—”

“Of course it is.”

“Your incompetence nearly destroyed the entire—”

“Did it work?” Kollberg interrupted hungrily.

“Are you listening to me?”

“Only cowards and weaklings whine about what almost happened,” Kollberg said. “Is he coming?”

Rising fury swelled the flesh around Tan’elKoth’s eyes; he had made similar pronouncements himself in the past, and he discovered that he disliked them profoundly from this side.

“Yes,” he said slowly. “Caine is on his way.”

10

INSIDE THE STUDIO, Hari discovered that his priority override codes still operated the palmlocks. He slipped into the deserted infirmary and treated his burns to a liberal dosing of anesthetic salve and himself to a couple of potent analgesic caps; after a moment’s thought, he picked up the whole bottle, two extra squeeze tubes of the burn ointment, and a bottle of broad-spectrum antibiotics.

They think they have me, he thought. They think I’m trapped.

He piled his loot onto the seat of a wheelchair and pushed it out into the hall, jogging along briskly toward the elevator. Inside the elevator, he swiftly tucked the stuff into the magazine pockets alongside the wheelchair’s arms, because he was gonna need to sit in this thing in a minute or two.

His next stop was the Studio ON vault.

The vault’s armored door swung open with a barely audible whirr of actuators. Hari sat down before he rolled inside. The twitching and jerking of his legs as the boundary effect shut down his bypass didn’t matter a damn; he had more important things on his mind.

He picked out a sturdy leather tunic and pants, a pair of boots that didn’t fit him too well—which, after all, wasn’t really important; you don’t get blisters when you can’t walk. He found a knapsack full of jerky, hard biscuits, and dried fruit belonging to a swordsman called Masric, and took his canteen as well. A broad belt with a couple of large sheath-knives strapped to it turned out to have five gold royals in the concealed coin pouch sewn inside it. A quick rifling of the rest of the costumes produced three more royals, seventeen silver nobles, and a double handful of copper peasants.

I’m rich, he thought.

He held all this in his hands a moment, grimly reflecting how Caine had once taken pride in the fact that though he might be a killer, he’d never been a thief. Things change, I guess.

He rolled back out of the vault, closed it behind him, then went to the greenroom lavatory to reboot. It was a little bit complicated, with Rover still in L.A.—he had to access Rover’s controls over the net through his palmpad, and route the return commands through the appropriate subdirectory—but it only took him about three minutes, all told, before he could walk out of the bathroom and dress in his stolen clothes. He filled the canteen and put it in the knapsack along with the medicines, and all the coins that wouldn’t fit in the belt’s concealed pouch.

When he went to pull on the boots, he was slowed for a moment by the sight of the Mantrak bracelet around his ankle. Designed for durability, the Mantrak had come through the fire with only a little surface blackening. Its diode winked at him like an eye, reminding him of everything he had posted for his bail.

Everything he was about to throw away.

Wink: there goes the job you paid for with your legs and your self-respect, Chairman Michaelson. Wink: there goes the caste you clawed your way up to, Administrator Michaelson. Wink: there goes every goddamn mark Caine’s blood and pain and sweat and courage and rage and joy and victory and defeat ever gave you. Wink: there goes the Abbey, built from your dreams, the perfect symbol of everything you have achieved in your life, the only home your daughter has ever known.

Hari thought it over, just for a second; then he shrugged.

None of that shit ever made me happy, anyway.

He pulled the knives from their sheaths. He examined the gleam that ran like water along their edges—fresh and keen, no nicks—and spun them through his fingers, leather-wrapped hilts cool and soft against his skin. He checked their balance, decided they were throwable, if less than ideal; he swung his arms back and forth, loosening his shoulders, then turned the motion into a liquid kali flurry that transformed the blades into arcs of barely visible silvery flickers. He resheathed the knives, warm now from the heat of his palms, and rested his hands upon their pommels for just a moment, allowing himself half a smile. Like a chance meeting with an old friend, it was bittersweet: memories of better days.

He saw in his mind Tan’elKoth’s statue David the King. He saw again that middle-aged jowliness, the bags of defeat below the tired eyes, the aura of comfortable failure. You, he said to the image in his mind—the image of Administrator Hari Michaelson, Chairman of the San Francisco Studio—can fuck off.

He walked out of the greenroom, strong and sure, but they were waiting for him in the corridor.

11

BY THE TIME the first shock baton swung at his ribs, Hari was already beaten. He never had a chance, but that didn’t stop him. It didn’t even slow him down.

The baton sparked, whistling toward him just as he cleared the greenroom door. The instincts of a lifetime moved him faster than thought: his hand slashed down, striking the gauntleted wrist, bending its arc below his ribs to miss his thigh and trigger harmlessly against the doorjamb. His hand stayed with the wrist as though it was glued there, turning it over so that he could lever his other forearm against the elbow in an arm bar. He yanked back on the wrist as he shoved with the forearm, and the elbow snapped with a splintery crunch—muffled by the blue body armor even as the grunt of shock and pain was muffled by the mirror-masked helmet.

That’s when Hari figured out he’d just broken the arm of a Social Police officer—and there were five more of them bracketing him in the corridor. Assaulting an officer of the Social Police is a capital crime.

If I wasn’t already fucked, he thought, I’d be pretty upset about this.

He lunged back for the greenroom door, where they could only come at him one at a time, but the soapy whose arm he’d broken sagged against him, clawing with his good arm and letting the rest of his body go limp so that Hari had to shove him off. In that half second when his hands were busy a shock baton triggered against his lumbar vertebrae.

Right over his bypass.

His legs went dead, and he dropped like a sack of fish, flopping and twitching uncontrollably. Only his left arm still worked a little; he snarled a wordless wolverine growl and dragged one of the knives from his belt, but the officer that stood over him slapped it away with another stroke from a shock baton. Enough charge was conducted through the blade to make his arm flail wildly and send the knife skittering down the corridor.

“Hit him again.” This was a human voice, not the digitized soapy drone. The sound of it scorched Hari’s throat with vomit; the voice hurt him, burned him like acid poured into his ear.

He had spent too many years listening to it tell him what to do.

The soapy gave him another shot with the baton, and Hari bucked and thrashed like a depressive taking ECT. Darkness closed in around his vision, narrowing the lights of the corridor to a shrinking pool of fluorescent white. A wasted scarecrow caricature of Arturo Kollberg stepped into the pool.

Hari moaned. Kollberg licked his lips like a bum at a Dumpster. “Give him another.”

Hari could no longer feel the shock of the baton; he was barely even aware of his own convulsions. As the light of the world slipped away from his eyes, Arturo Kollberg bent low and kissed him on the mouth.

“You know what?” Kollberg said, making a face. “You don’t taste good. I’m not even getting hard.”

12

MUCH OF THE Curioseum’s menagerie was devoted to species that once had roamed the land and sky and seas of Earth. Shuffled among the wyverns and draconymphs, the griffins and the unicorns were creatures now nearly as exotic, nearly as much the stuff of legend: otters and seals, frogs and salamanders, wolves and foxes and hawks, cougars and lions, elephants, an eagle, even two small inbred whales and a pod of dolphins. The menagerie occupied the central rotunda within the Curioseum’s arboretum, beneath an immense dome of armorglass that allowed a pale filtering of moonlight to trickle wanly over the cages. But that greasy light was the limit of the menagerie’s contact with the environment of Earth; even those creatures capable of surviving without the trace Flow available within the Overworld-normal field would not have found healthful what passed for air outside.

A scent hung in the recirculated, chemically scrubbed atmosphere, even through the acidic back-of-the-throat sizzle remaining from last night’s fire: a trace of musk and dung and urine that interlaced the perfumes of chokeweed and marsh poppy and complemented the constant chuckle of living voices, from the chirps of otters and belches of frogs to the whistle of the songtrees and the hissing snarl of a wyvern in rut.

To Tan’elKoth, it smelled almost like home.

He stood in the center of it all, his mighty arms spread wide, his Shell agape like the mouth of a hungry chick, drinking every flutter of wings and rustle of leaves and splash of fins or tail, for in this place was the greatest concentration of the life of his world—and the life of his world breathed out Flow. He was battered and burned, bruised and bandaged; though he had cut away his long chocolate curls that had been scorched to black crinkles, the smell of smoke clung to him. His mighty chest was wrapped tightly to keep his sprung ribs in place, and his fashionable, freshly dry-cleaned clothes bulged oddly here and there with the bulk of burn dressings beneath. An ordinary man would have required potent narcotics to dull the pain of his burns; Tan’elKoth did not. All he needed to salve his wounds, he could draw from the Flow.

Though the Flow here was but a trickle, he was Tan’elKoth. For Tan’elKoth, a trickle would suffice.

At his feet knelt Gregor Hale Prohovtsi, twenty years old, the finest student ever to participate in Tan’elKoth’s Applied Magick seminar, a slim intense youth with long dark hair and penetrating hazel eyes. His Shell shimmered bright with the saturated spring green of transcendent concentration, and it grew larger, brighter, and more vivid as Tan’elKoth fed it power. Gregor knelt with his head lowered, his hands folded before him on the inverted hilt of a broad-bladed bastard sword, its tip grounded into the marble tile of the rotunda, staring at the cruciform guard like a Knight Templar at prayer.

This blade was Kosall.

Beside Gregor’s knees was a small paintpot of liquid silver—it looked black, in suspension. A small brush of ash and sable lay across the paintpot’s open mouth, the end still dark with paint. The liquid silver had been used to paint the gleaming runes that spidered down both flats of the blade, not quite connecting at the tip.

Tan’elKoth stroked an image into shape with the pale fingers of his mind: the last five runes, interlinked and joining the patterns on the two faces of the blade. He affixed this image to his student’s Shell and added power to burn it in; Prohovtsi would be able to see this image overlaying the blade as long as he remained in mindview. Slowly, carefully, minding his breathing, Prohovtsi lifted the brush, dipped it into the liquid silver, and began to trace the mental image onto the steel.

“Well done, Gregor,” Tan’elKoth murmured, watching. “Well done, indeed. If anything, your hand is more sure even than my own.”

Without the Flow of home to energize them, these runes were as silent as was Kosall itself. On Overworld, they would spring to eldritch life when the touch of flesh linked their patterns through the conductive salts of living tissue; with one cut of the irresistible blade, the runes would inescapably trap the consciousness that flees as the body dies—a quite simple variant of the spell that Ma’elKoth had used to capture Lamorak, and so many others.

Even as magick had been scribed in patterns along the blade, so, too, had magick been scribed in Prohovtsi’s mind; at the touch of the proper trigger, Prohovtsi would speak the proper words—in a language he does not understand—and his body would perform the proper gestures. Hours had passed in intensive mindwork under the yellow glare of the caged wyvern, as Tan’elKoth had meticulously, painstakingly layered and sequentialized each syllable, each turn of the palm and cant of the head; it was, not to put too fine a point on it, a masterwork. Tan’elKoth was certain that no other man alive could have equaled this feat.

This was an exquisitely satisfying process; infinitely more so than creating sculpture over which the ignorant wealthy might coo could ever be.

He had made of Prohovtsi a puppet—no, more precisely, a waldo: an engine through which his will would work, even at a distance. Submerging his student’s will beneath his own had required only the slightest effort; through the months of the Applied Magick seminar, Prohovtsi had been ineluctably conditioned to accept Tan’elKoth’s orders without question. By now, he could not even dream of resistance. Almost as though I have planned for this all along, Tan’elKoth thought. Curious.

This was the fulfillment of his bargain with Kollberg and the Board of Governors: he would gift them with the destruction of Caine and the death of Pallas Ril. Occasionally, he allowed himself the luxury of hoping that the Board would keep their own end of the bargain, but he did not rely upon it. Their perfidy had peeked around the corner of their proclamations last night. Perhaps they would not murder him outright—rather like Caine, ironically enough, he had many admirers among the Leisurefolk, and some few in the Leisure Congress itself—but the Board obviously did not place a high value on his life, or their word.

This distressed him not one whit. He had seen this fork in the fractal branches of the world-tree that he tended with his will, and he had prepared already the graft that would bear the fruit of his desire.

While Prohovtsi brushed the runes onto Kosall, Tan’elKoth turned and walked briskly away. Consumed by the challenging—for him—task of maintaining mindview while painting, Prohovtsi would never notice his teacher’s absence. The ubiquitous Social Police, attached to him like limpets since the fire, had been temporarily banished; Tan’elKoth had been able to claim, entirely truthfully, that their mass of electronic gear and armor and weaponry would interfere with the delicate traceries of Flow in the menagerie. Kollberg had ordered them to stay away from him until the spellcasting—spell programming—was complete.

So now, if only for the nonce, Tan’elKoth was free.

He slipped through the arboretum to its twinned field-lock doors of armorglass, then out into the vacant echoic space of the Curioseum’s atrium, beyond the ON field. Carbon-fiber bomb shutters were in place across the public accessways, englooming the atrium with artificial twilight; the entire Curioseum was closed during the make-believe “internal arson investigation” of last night’s fire. Tan’elKoth paced past the vast empty ring of information and ticket booths to the bank of public screens that filled the wall beside the coat check.

Lamorak’s memory provided the Shanks private code: thus this call would be billed to SynTech, and any security captures set to monitor Tan’elKoth’s communications would continue their peaceful slumber on the net, undisturbed. He smiled when the personal acknowledgment came back. He had no desire to leave a recorded message. This matter was somewhat too delicate to be committed to a datacore.

Avery Shanks herself answered; her predatory gaze cycled from blankly hostile suspicion through recognition to open hatred. She was really very attractive, he decided. Stark, forbidding, all sharp edges and bleak contrast, yet somehow perfect, as though nature had intended her as precisely this: like a mountain on the Moon. “You,” she said flatly.

“Me,” Tan’elKoth agreed. “I’m gratified that you know me, Businessman.”—and thus have no need to speak my name, he thought. The Studio’s security captures would certainly register any mention of his name; should the phrase Tan’elKoth be spoken, he would instantly close the conversation with the blandest of trivia, and sign off.

“How did you get this code?”

“You know how,” Tan’elKoth reminded her gravely. “You must have seen some of Kollberg’s trial.”

Her gaze lost its needle focus, and for an instant the hard lines of her face softened toward an actual human expression of grief, but for an instant only. “Yes, I did.” Her eyes iced over. “What do you want?”

“Tomorrow morning, within an hour or so of dawn, your granddaughter will suffer a traumatic shock entirely unlike anything you can imagine. It may manifest as schizophrenia, autism, even catatonia—I cannot say precisely. What I can say, however, is that there is no one on Earth who will be able to help her—” Tan’elKoth tilted his head just slightly, a barely perceptible nod to his presumption. “—except me.”

“How do you know this?”

“I am who I am, Businessman.”

“What kind of trauma?”

Shanks’glare was so direct and levelly hostile that Tan’elKoth felt an absurd desire to apologize for the implausibility of what he was about to say. He set his teeth and spoke with the full conviction of truth. “You have had the child for two days. Surely, by now, you are aware of her connection to the river?”

“I am aware of the ridiculous, pernicious fantasy with which her parents have poisoned her mind, yes. She is forbidden to speak of it.”

As though that will make it go away, Tan’elKoth thought. Typically Business. “Hardly a fantasy, Businessman,” he said smoothly. “Tomorrow morning, her mother will die.”

The Businessman’s eyes sharpened like a knife, but she said nothing.

“Faith will experience her mother’s death in a fashion so intimate as to defy description. I cannot predict with any precision what form her reaction will take. I can say only that it will be extreme, certainly irreparable. Possibly fatal. You will want my help.”

Shanks’ eyes drifted closed for a moment, as she appeared to think this over, but when they opened again he read nothing but flat rejection. “Neither I nor my granddaughter have any need of your help,” Shanks said, crisp as winter’s first frost. “Do not use this code again. It will be canceled within the hour. Do not attempt to make contact with me, her, any member of my clan, or any Shanks affiliate. If you do, I shall file stalking and caste-violation complaints with the Social Police. Do you understand?”

“As you will,” Tan’elKoth said with an expressively liquid shrug. “You know where I can be reached.”

The corners of Shanks’ mouth drew down, and her voice went even colder. “You’re not getting this, are you? You will never speak to me or my granddaughter again. You think that I don’t know about your . . . prank . . . the other night—the call, the picture. But I do. I’m not a damned idiot. The only reason I haven’t had you arrested for impersonating a Businessman is that you handed me a stick I could hit Michaelson with. And this is the limit of my gratitude: I have let you use me to take your own revenge. Because it suits me. I enjoyed it. You gave me the chance to hurt him almost as badly as he hurt me, so I let you get away with it. Don’t push your luck.”

“Businessman,” Tan’elKoth began, but the screen was already blank.

He shrugged at his dark reflection in the midnight grey of the screen. This particular branch of his fractal world-tree was growing precisely in its predicted curve. He had successfully planted the idea; now it would grow, watered by Faith’s coming distress and the ferocious mother-tiger instincts that were the very core of Avery Shanks’ being. Lamorak had schooled him well in the art of dealing with his mother; Tan’elKoth had not the slightest doubt of eventual success.

The god within him throbbed with desire. Soon, he promised Ma’elKoth for the thousandth time. Soon you shall live again, and our world shall be saved.

For Faith could touch the river; through her, he could touch it, too. Once he tapped the river’s power, not all the Kollbergs and Governors and Studios in the world could stop him from going home.

He turned away from the bank of screens, and only the massive exercise of a level of self-restraint not accessible to lesser mortals enabled him to suppress what might otherwise have been the leap and snarl of a startled panther when the screen behind him crackled to life, and Kollberg’s voice called his name.

His heart thudded like punches against his chest. He strangled a suicidal urge to stammer out a hasty explanation for his presence in the atrium. All this passed in the merest blink; he was, after all, Tan’elKoth. “Yes, Laborer?” he said with magisterial dignity. “How may I be of service to the Board?”

“How goes the work with the blade?”

“It is prepared. Prohovtsi is ready, as well. I will send the blade with him to the docks as soon as I return. All is precisely as I have agreed with the Board.”

“I’m not calling for the Board,” Kollberg said in a friendly enough tone—though there was something undefinably strange in his voice, as though he spoke words memorized phonetically in a language he could not comprehend. “The Board doesn’t need you right now.”

The Laborer gazed from the screen without expression. Slowly, he tilted his head to one side, as though abstractly curious about how Tan’elKoth might look from a different angle. Kollberg seemed reduced, refined, somehow less even than he had on their initial meeting two days ago, as though some inexorable erosion continued to scour away what little humanity had survived his downcasting. His unblinking eyes, with their cold unquenchable hunger, reminded Tan’elKoth of a dragon’s. And yet, Tan’elKoth thought, I have faced a true dragon with more ease than I feel right now.

“In fact,” Kollberg said with eerily disconnected cheerfulness, “I called to offer a service. We have a transmission coming through that I think you’ll find, ah, entertaining.”

In a single lightning-strike flicker, every screen in the atrium flared, from the public screen banks to the touchscreen infopods to the towering jumbotrons hung like canopies from the ceiling. Every screen showed the same scene—something perhaps from one of those motion picture entertainments of which Caine was so fond—a Western, possibly: the interior of a railcar, low mountains passing outside, beyond a window stained grey-brown with coal smoke.

But none of the five visible passengers wore guns or broad-brimmed hats or any of the other standard appurtenances Tan’elKoth had come to expect from such fare. In fact—Tan’elKoth realized with a mildly disorienting shock—four of them wore the customary dark robes of Monastic ordinaries, while the fifth wore the gold-stitched scarlet of a full Ambassador.

He frowned. “What is this?”

“This,” Kollberg replied, “is what the Studio is currently receiving from Hari Michaelson’s thoughtmitter.”

An epithet borrowed from Caine thumped inside Tan’elKoth’s skull: Holy freaking crap . . . It stole his breath; clutching at his chest as though in pain, he murmured, “Through his eyes—you can show me the death of Pallas Ril through his eyes—”

“Oh, yes,” Kollberg agreed, and there was an ugly suggestion of mutual lust in his voice, like a dealer in child pornography warming up a potential customer. “Wouldn’t you like to watch?”

The prospect stunned him; for a moment, he was closer to speechless than at any time in his entire life. “I, ah, Laborer, perhaps—”

Tan’elKoth told himself that he should be above such things; he told himself that he had done what he had done not for revenge—not to injure the enemies who had destroyed him, not to satisfy any of the myriad such base urges that Ma’elKoth had buried along with the eidolon of Hannto the Scythe—but to save his world.

And yet—

Kollberg might as well have reached into his chest and taken hold of his heart. The force that tugged him toward the nearest screen was far beyond any concept of resistance. He found himself leaning against the glass, staring hungrily, almost panting.

“Laborer,” he said thickly, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

THERE IS A cycle of tales that begins long, long ago, when the human gods decreed that all their mortal children shall know sorrow, loss, and defeat in the course of the lives they were given. Lives of pure joy, of perfect sufficiency and constant victory, the gods reserved for themselves.

Now, it came to pass that one particular man had run nearly his entire alloted span, and he had never known defeat. Sorrows he had, losses he had taken, but reversals that other men would call defeats were to him no more than obstacles; even the worst of his routs was, to him, merely a strategic withdrawal. He could be killed, but never conquered. For him, the only defeat was surrender; and he would never surrender.

And so it soon followed that the king of the human gods undertook to teach this particular man the meaning of defeat.

The king of the gods took away this man’s career—took away his gift for the art that he loved and that had made him famous—and this particular man did not surrender.

The king of the gods took away this man’s possessions—took away his home, his wealth, and the respect of his people—and still this particular man did not surrender.

The king of the gods took away this man’s family, everyone that he loved—and still this particular man did not surrender.

In the final story of this cycle, the king of the gods takes away this man’s self-respect, to teach him the meaning of the helplessness that goes with defeat.

And in the end—the common end, for all who contend with gods—this particular man surrenders, and dies.