ELEVEN

THE STORY TRICKLED onto the nets in exactly the kind of dribs and drabs most likely to keep the cauldron of public prurience at a rolling boil. First the fire at the Curioseum, and the suggestion of sabotage and arson by a shadowy group of eco-terrorists, the Green Knights; then came the Where is Caine? stories, as a source within MicroNet confirmed that Hari Michaelson’s Mantrak anklet had vanished from the satellite position grid and the courts had presumptively seized his house and all his assets.

The investigation of the Green Knights led the CID to one Administrator Kerry Voorhees, the head of Biocontainment for the San Francisco Studio. Professional Voorhees was unavailable for comment—but a few of her associates in Biocontainment were extensively interviewed, and they spoke of certain behavioral changes that seemed to have begun with Voorhees’ “friendship” with Shanna Leighton. When CID searched Administrator Voorhees’ Oakland apartment, coded documents relating to the Green Knights were found in her desk’s datacore, as was a journal that suggested her relationship with Shanna Leighton went somewhat beyond friendship.

The real fury began when a reliable source within the Studio leaked clips from the security records of the Curioseum fire, when the public learned how close the world had come to losing Caine forever—and when an enterprising reporter uncovered the enlightening fact that the Studio had bought Michaelson’s house and the rights to his Adventures back from the civic treasury.

The mystery of Michaelson’s disappearance now took on massive conspiratorial overtones, with rumors of secret missions and Studio-sponsored death squads. Had the Studio killed him? There was, for the space of twenty-four hours, a rumor that Michaelson had been seen entering a backstreet cosmetic surgery clinic in Kabul; was he truly on the run, or had the Studio sent him undercover to strike back at the eco-terrorists? And what, in all this, was the connection to the HRVP outbreak on Overworld, and the—by now popularly confirmed—homosexual love affair between Pallas Ril and the terrorist Kerry Voorhees?

After two days, the partially decomposed body of Administrator Voorhees was found floating in the Bay; in the datacore of her palmpad was a full confession. She had dusted supplies waiting for transshipment to the Transdeian mining colony with test samples of several different HRVP strains. This was done, her obviously unbalanced account claimed, to draw public attention to the dangers of Earth exploitation of Overworld resources.

She had made this recording in the depths of guilt and the agony of having been betrayed, when she realized that her lover, Shanna Leighton—her mentor, her idol—had deceived her. Entertainer Leighton had never intended to halt the outbreak; she instead had sworn to go to Overworld and, as Pallas Ril, carry on the fight against any who would harm the natural world—against any who would till the earth for crops to feed a family, against any who would so much as gather fallen wood for a fire.

Kerry Voorhees could not live with having done the unthinkable. And the unthinkable had been done—as Jed Clearlake himself notably observed with the sort of tragi-ironic bon mot of which most net reporters can only dream—for love of Pallas Ril.

In the furor of the search for Caine, Gayle Keller became an instant celebrity and came off quite well on his many netshow interviews. His somewhat oily facade of unrevealable inside knowledge was nicely balanced by his staunch defense of Chairman Michaelson: loyalty is a primary virtue in an Artisan. He repeatedly insisted that Chairman Michaelson was devoted to his job, to the Studio, and to the world—that he was a real team player. The Chairman had acted hastily, true, in sending Pallas Ril to Overworld without first investigating the source of the outbreak, but you have to remember who he had been, don’t you? Caine was a man of action; Chairman Michaelson had seen a chance to end the crisis almost instantly, and at virtually no cost to the Studio. That was responsible Administrating, no matter the unfortunate outcome. He certainly could not have known how unbalanced his wife had become, nor could he have had any idea what she was planning.

“What man, after all,” Keller pointed out with a wry shrug, once in each interview, “ever really knows what a woman is thinking?”

When the mystery of Michaelson’s disappearance was finally solved, it fell to Studio President Businessman Westfield Turner to break the tragic news to a shocked and saddened public. At a press conference with the Roman facade of the Leisure Centre in Geneva for a backdrop, Businessman Turner spoke to the world.

“Late last week, San Francisco Studio Chairman Administrator Hari Michaelson—courageously, and without consideration for his personal safety—consented to join with the Studio and the Overworld Company in a clandestine effort to combat the most terrible threat that the people of Overworld have ever faced: the cowardly, vicious bio-terrorist who infected that pristine and innocent place—killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, and placing millions at risk—the ruthless Pallas Ril.

“The effort was successful, the danger averted. Pallas Ril and her savage terrorist organization can never again threaten the safety of the innocent millions of Overworld. But this victory has come at a terrible price.”

Businessman Turner paused here and could be seen to take a deep, slow breath: clearly moved, and steeling himself for what he must next reveal. “It is my sad duty to inform you all that Administrator Michaelson—along with Administrator Vinson Garrette, Professionals Gregor Prohovtsi and Nicholas Dvorak—gave his life in this effort.”

Businessman Turner went on to touch briefly upon some of Michaelson’s accomplishments, his rise from the Temp slum of San Francisco’s Mission District to the Chairmanship of the jewel in the Studio’s crown, his services to the Studio and to the world as Caine.

Operations were now under way to recover his body, lost in the cliffs below Khryl’s Saddle. According to Chairman Michaelson’s expressed wishes, his remains would not be returned to Earth, but would be transported to the city he loved best, Ankhana, for burial. The San Francisco Studio—already shut down for a security review in the wake of the terrorist attack on the Curioseum—would remain shuttered for a month in respect for his memory, and Studios around the world would close for three days of official mourning.

“The job Hari started isn’t over; there is work still to be done, to protect Overworld from the scourge of HRVP. Even as I speak, the Adventures Unlimited Biocontainment Administrator is organizing the largest and most comprehensive antiviral relief effort in the history of mankind. As Studio President, I offer my personal word that the Studio is in this to the very end. The job Hari gave his life to begin, I swear that we will finish.”

Businessman Turner slicked his snowy hair back with one palm and took another deep breath to steady his voice; his barely restrained tears picked up the glare of the klieg lights and made his eyes sparkle like tiny daggers. “In closing, I would like to urge Leisurefolk the world over to support the Studio’s petition before the Leisure Congress. In the name of the Studio, I ask that Chairman Administrator Hari Khapur Michaelson be posthumously awarded Earth’s highest civilian honor: the Medal of Freedom.

“And finally, on behalf of all the peoples of Overworld, and all the people of Earth—

“Good-bye, Caine. Thank you. You will be missed.”

Finally overcome, Businessman Turner waved aside all questions and left the podium, mopping at his eyes; he was seen weeping openly as he was led away by his aides.

The newsworks had obviously been prepared for this announcement: they had an array of recorded reactions from a variety of Michaelson’s friends and associates. Of them all, perhaps Leisureman Marc Vilo—in his own rough-hewn way—said it best. “Hari was always the guy you could count on to do what had to be done. Sure, he loved her; everyone remembers his final Adventure. But she crossed the line. Like he always said: ‘A man’s gotta shoot his own dog.’ When you come down to it, I guess that’s what he did.”

2

THERE WERE TOO many loose ends, and the Studio’s PR line was too convenient, too neat; competing stories ran wild through the net. The Studio fell officially silent, and that silence only fed the flames—if they’re not talking, the theory ran, there must be something they’re not talking about. It was generally agreed that the “something” was most likely the full extent of the HRVP outbreak. Within days, hundreds of netsites were filled with speculation; the first hint of hard news came, unsurprisingly, through Adventure Update, when the show broadcast a leaked internal Studio report that HRVP had been identified in the Ankhanan capital. Eventually, the Studio confirmed these reports.

The Ankhanans, on the other hand, seemed to believe that the spasm of random violence that had overtaken the capital was part of a concerted terror effort by Cainists, in response to recent mass arrests and detentions. Patriarch Toa-Sytell had declared a state of martial law, and the army was currently engaged in rounding up the remaining Cainists and their sympathizers and collaborators—and apparently anyone else that someone had taken a particular dislike to—all in preparation for a barbaric auto-da-fé that was planned for the fast-approaching Festival of the Assumption. It hadn’t been difficult to locate a suitably large number of victims; this was not so different from the reign of terror in Ma’elKoth’s final days. As many of the commentators gleefully pointed out, Ankhanans had developed a certain taste for witch-hunts.

More disturbing were reports that came from Actors in the capital, along with some spectacular recordings. Open warfare had erupted in the subhuman ghetto of Alientown, pitting the Ankhanan constabulary and some elements of the imperial infantry against a large paramilitary organization of subhumans, most likely members of the transplanted Warrengang known as the Faces. When the mundane Ankhanan constables found themselves overmatched by the potent magicks of the subhumans, they had responded by summoning the Grey Cats and the capital contingent of the Thaumaturgic Corps.

The battle raged for more than a day through the streets of the ghetto, leaving nearly a sixth of the city in rubble and flames, but it had ended with the Imperial forces firmly in control. Mop-up operations were being directed by the Grey Cats, and commentators on the nets spent several days shaking their heads, tsk-tsking the savagery of the conflict, and arguing whether blame for the massacre lay with the “semicivilized fringe elements and squatters” or with the “small faction of irresponsible witch-hunters driving public policy.”

Public interest in Studio affairs hit a seven-year high; not since For Love of Pallas Ril had a situation on Overworld so captured the public’s imagination. The Studio’s in-house profit projections were so outrageously positive that representatives of Studio President Turner publicly announced he would be entering binding arbitration on a new contract, expected to nearly double his current salary.

Amid all this furor, it was—perhaps inevitably—Jed Clearlake who scored the journalistic prize of the year: a live interview with the former Emperor of Ankhana himself.

“It is clear,” Tan’elKoth said darkly, turning slightly so that the light would properly halo his magnificent profile, “that the Studio has not told the entire story. Consider: less than seven years ago, Caine destroyed my government—sparking a bloody war of succession—to save the life of Pallas Ril. I do not believe he would act against her, no matter what the provocation.

“That she was mad, and a threat to every living soul on my world, I do not deny; as you may recall, I fought her hand-to-hand—and mind-to-mind. I knew her better than did even her husband, I believe. But nothing I could say would ever sway him in the least, not when it touched upon Pallas Ril. He claimed once that to save her, he would burn the world.

“This, I believe, is precisely the truth.

“He is that wayward, that selfish, that scornful of the needs of society and civilization.

“And this drivel about his request to be buried in Ankhana? It’s ridiculous. Ankhana was not his home; it was where he worked. He loves it no more than a clerk loves his cubicle.”

At this point, Clearlake smoothly picked up on something that the viewing public might not have noticed: that Tan’elKoth still spoke of Chairman Michaelson in the present tense.

“Of course I do,” Tan’elKoth said with his characteristically suave cool. “I do not believe that Caine is dead.”

Clearlake sputtered like a faulty datacore; Tan’elKoth only smiled into the video pickup. When Clearlake finally managed to stammer out his question, Tan’elKoth replied without hesitation.

“Certainly President Turner lied. Studio executives always lie; it is for this that they are paid. The question is, What was it, precisely, that he was lying about? If Caine is dead, where is the body? ‘Lost in the cliffs below Khryl’s Saddle,’ indeed,” he said scornfully. “Is it truly Khryl’s Saddle—or is it Reichenbach Falls?”

He turned and faced the entire world through the netcamera pickup. “Until I see Hari Michaelson’s corpse with my own eyes—until I hold his cold, unbeating heart in my own hand—I will never believe that Caine is dead.”

He opened his hands before his face, not an appeal but a conjurer’s flourish. “Show me the body, President Turner. Show the body to us all. Either show us the body, or admit the truth: somewhere, somehow, Caine lives.”

Entertainer Clearlake was no stranger to controversy; some said that he had built his dream home within the eye of a hurricane. There is, however, a clear difference between riding out a storm and twisting a dragon’s tail. Wisely, he let that line of questioning drop, favoring instead a neutral wrap-up: “And what now for you, Professional? Back to work in your own private studio?”

“I think not. My people—my world—are still threatened by the disease this madwoman inflicted upon them. The elimination of Pallas Ril does not save my world. The Studio and the Overworld Company have begun a massive containment operation, putting at risk thousands of lives and costing billions of marks, with every probability of failure, while they ignore an option that is obvious, effective and inexpensive.

“They can send me back.

“Back to my world. Back to my people, who cry out for me in their anguish. I can do in truth what Pallis Ril only pretended: wipe out HRVP on Overworld—at a cost to the Studio of precisely zero.”

He turned to the video pickup, speaking again to the whole world. Some trick of the light made his eyes seem to burn from within, as though a crust of stone had broken to reveal an unexpected flow of lava below. “This is your choice: Spend billions and fail, or save the world for free. If Caine is dead in truth, can you so insult his memory? Let him have died in vain? Do not make his sacrifice go for naught. You know what must be done.

“Send me home.”

3

THE DOORS OF the Social Police riot van opened onto full night on a rooftop landing pad, floodlit a pale frog-belly white. Tan’elKoth shook a fist-sized knot of tension from his massive shoulders and stepped out onto the weather-cracked asphalt.

He breathed slowly and deeply, consciously forcing himself to stay loose, relaxed, ready. Mental preparedness was the key: he must be ready to react smoothly and naturally to any eventuality. Though this would be easier, he reminded himself mordantly, if he had one bloody idea what he might be preparing for.

The riot van had been waiting for him on the landing pad outside the Adventure Update soundstage, where he had expected to find a Studio limousine; now, looking back on it, he found ominous the manner in which Entertainer Clearlake had wished him luck before signing off the live interview. That slight squint before he had spoken, that faint glazing of the eye—had a warning come over his earpiece? Had some whispering tech hinted that Tan’elKoth had fallen afoul of Soapy?

A cold suspicion settled onto the back of his neck. He had watched on a security monitor as Kollberg and the Social Police had ambushed Caine.

This landing pad was on the roof of a low building surrounded by looming residential domes. The riot van rested squarely at the crux of a large cross of paint that had once been red, but now had faded to a scuffed and dirty pastel pink, within a wide circle of sooty grey. This was some kind of hospital, then.

Had been some kind of hospital, Tan’elKoth corrected himself. The rooftop was now ringed with Social Police riot vans identical to the one in which he had arrived, turrets bristling with cannon that pointed outward and below, fanned to cover all approaches.

Or, perhaps, all exits.

One of the faceless officers gestured toward an open access door across the rooftop, and Tan’elKoth started toward it, sliding his thumbs beneath the bandolier straps of his ammod harness. It must be binding him up, somehow, or perhaps he had fastened it too tightly over his heavy sweater; he was having a certain difficulty drawing breath.

The access door opened onto an unlit stair: a dark rectangular recession into oblivion. It exhaled a breath of acid sweat, ammoniac urine and bubbling green decay, as though the stairwell were the throat of a scavenger slowly dying of some awful necrosis of the bowels.

Tan’elKoth paused. Hannto the Scythe—Hannto the timid, the weakling, the coward—had somehow struggled to the very gates of Tan’elKoth’s mind. Or perhaps not so much the coward: Hannto urged Tan’elKoth to turn upon the Social Police officers beside him, to attack, to crush and kill them, and to be cut down in turn. Better a clean death, up here in this gritty smog-choked simulacrum of open air, than to be swallowed by that unimaginable throat.

Nearly all the lives within him wept with fear; Ma’elKoth, the god himself—even He counseled caution. Lamorak had nothing to say; that dark shade huddled in wordless terror in some black and forgotten corner, for the breath of the stairwell smelled of the Donjon, of the Theater of Truth.

It smelled of the Shaft.

One of the soapies reached toward him, and Tan’elKoth tensed, expecting a stroke from a shock baton; instead, he was astonished to find that the soapy only touched his arm with one gauntleted hand and leaned toward him to speak softly through his digitizer.

“Go on in,” the soapy said, with as close to a human tone as Tan’elKoth had ever heard from one of them. “It’s better if you don’t keep him waiting.”

The other soapies turned helmets toward each other, nodding infinitesimal agreement; their gauntlets twisted upon their weapons as though their hands ached too much to find a comfortable grip. That transitory brush with the humanity behind those silver masks, so unexpected, turned the twist of nerves in Tan’elKoth’s stomach into an icy dread that settled into his bones; it was terrifying to imagine that Social Police might feel some kinship of apprehension.

As though what awaited him below frightened even them.

With a deep, shuddering breath, Tan’elKoth descended the stair, and was swallowed by darkness.

4

BELOW, HE FOUND a nightmare of baffled, terrified Laborers and Adminstrators and Physicians, of blood and sobs and shit and screams, of silver-masked Social Police standing robotic guard. Within, the only light came from the bleached wash of emergency floods. The acid stink of human fear mingled with the mildew that leached from the filthy carpet beneath his feet, nearly overpowering the sweet metallic earth-smell of blood and shit.

He moved through the reeking shadows of a long, narrow corridor, and out into an open space that had been some kind of office; the wreckage of several desks lay among the tumbled carpet-covered panels that Tan’elKoth assumed had once been cubicle walls. Here and there were knots of wretched people in the tattered remnants of Laborer dress—some clutched desperately at each other, some sobbed softly, and some merely stared blankly at the brown stains on the walls.

Also among the wreckage were pieces of what had probably been at least three people: a severed hand here, there a head pulped like a hammered watermelon, a tangled knot of intestine looped over the remains of a water cooler. The ferric slugs from power rifles littered the floor, and one office wall was now only a tattered framework of slug holes. More corpses, here and there, were half buried in the broken ruin of office furniture; something had been chewing on them, gnawing at their flesh—not to feed, but rather out of some restless urge to use its jaws: a dog mindlessly worrying a marrow bone.

An infant, teething.

The shootings had been only the beginning. Someone had been playing among the corpses: someone had braided their guts into tangled ropes, had popped out their eyeballs and disjointed the mangled bodies like a bored child pulling apart its dolls. Tan’elKoth had no doubt who this bored child was. He could see him.

In the middle of the floor, his dungarees down around his knees, buttocks pulsing between the thighs of a woman with empty eyes and a mouth like a smear of blood. His pitted scalp was unmistakable.

Kollberg.

The woman’s only clothing was a brown-crusted bandage that covered the flat wound where her right breast had once been. Even as Tan’elKoth watched, Kollberg lowered his face to her one remaining breast and sank his teeth into her nipple. Blood spurted up across his eyes. The woman only grunted, likely near death from shock. Kollberg dug his face in, chewing deeper and deeper into her, and Tan’elKoth had to lower his eyes.

The other chewed-upon corpses . . . those that were female, the breasts had been torn away. Each corpse that had been male now had only ragged bite wounds in place of its penis. With their equally flat chests and equally empty groins, the corpses bore a gruesome, crudely chopped resemblance to each other: they had been surgically homogenized by a blunt scalpel of rotten teeth.

And this, Tan’elKoth thought emptily, is what I chose for an ally, against Caine and Pallas Ril.

O abandoned gods, what have I done?

Kollberg looked up from the shuddering death spasms of the woman and caught Tan’elKoth’s eye. He stretched his neck ophidically: a snake basking in warm tropic sun. “Welcome to my home,” he said. “Do you like it? I furnished it myself.”

Tan’elKoth held his silence.

Kollberg pushed himself up to his knees, off the woman’s corpse; he stuffed his penis back inside his dungarees without so much as wiping off the half-clotted blood that caked it. “You,” he said thoughtfully, still squatting, “are not a team player.”

5

HE ROSE, AND approached Tan’elKoth closely enough that the ex-Emperor had to turn aside from the reek of his breath. “I think your heart’s mostly in the right place, you understand, but there are one or two things that you don’t seem to understand.”

How much does he know? How much does he know about Faith? The myriad that populated the ex-Emperor’s mind gibbered and cringed, but he was more than they: he was Tan’elKoth, and he would not flinch. “I understand this: You dare not harm me,” he said firmly. “I am no common Laborer, who can be made to disappear without uproar and alarm. Your best hope of life is to release me and pray that I hold my tongue.”

Kollberg stretched up onto his toes, until the top of his head nearly reached Tan’elKoth’s chin; he swiveled his head and angled his face so that his fetid breath wafted upward as he spoke. “You still don’t understand.”

Tan’elKoth took a step backward—no amount of fortitude could enable him to stomach that stench—and he would have taken another, but that first step had brought his back into solid contact with one of the soapies who stood immovably behind him. “I have friends and admirers upon the Leisure Congress itself, do you understand? I can no more be detained or harmed than could Caine. Your own Board of Governors oversees my welfare—and I imagine that they would be . . . disturbed . . . by your lifestyle.”

Kollberg took a step back, still on his toes, his head cocked, squinting at the ex-Emperor so tightly that it pulled up the corners of his rubbery lips into a humorlessly acquisitive smile. “Let me explain.”

A sharp stroke from a shock baton across the back of Tan’elKoth’s neck: he collapsed into the bloody muck that covered the floor, twitching spastically. One of the Social Police officers kicked him precisely in the groin, another in the ribs, and a third in the kidneys while the fourth went to work on his head. He could do no more to defend himself than writhe; the charge from the shock baton had shut down his peripheral motor nerves, and his limbs would not obey his will.

Tan’elKoth gasped with every kick, and his gasps might have been sobs, if he’d had strength to cry. A shock went through him at each blow, a wave of impact that carried the impersonal malice of the Social Police through his every defense. Helplessness wriggled in through his skin, into his blood, between the cords of his muscle like screwworms digging down to the bone.

The Social Police facelessly inflicted a dispassionate, thoroughly professional stomping. One of these soapies had, only minutes ago, touched him as one man does another; in a way, that made it worse.

6

HE MUST HAVE lost consciousness, perhaps more than once. Some indefinable interval later, the beating had ceased.

Awareness gathered within him, correlating with the surge of sense impressions that grew as though he had reached out and toggled up the volume on the world. A mild discomfort, of the sort he might have suffered while he sat too long motionless in meditation, swelled into a burning, throbbing ache along his ribs, into his kidneys; at his groin it became a spike driven into his testicles—sharp and dull simultaneously, familiar already, but still twisting his guts until he might vomit.

Light now: a dim bloody glow through closed lids. Squinting against it tightened flesh across his raw and swollen face and screwed down a band of pain across his brow. Someone cradled his head on a lap warm and wet; he feared to open his eyes. And the smell—that feculent carnivorous stench—

The smell told him more than he could bear to see.

“Do you understand now?” Kollberg asked, stroking Tan’elKoth’s face like Mary in the Pieta. “Are we on the same page?”

Tan’elKoth flinched.

He couldn’t help himself.

His face flushed with sudden shame, with the humiliation of discovering himself to be so fragile. Some dispassionate part of his mind considered this, abstractly wondering at the emotional power of a merely physical beating.

Kollberg waited with reptilian patience, but Tan’elKoth could not answer. “Well,” Kollberg said vacantly. “You might guess that I didn’t find your interview with Entertainer Clearlake very funny. Not funny at all. You think that I might not come through on my half of our bargain. That’s insulting. You think that you can use public opinion and political pressure to make me do what you want. That’s more insulting.”

He bent his neck over Tan’elKoth’s immobile face, close enough to kiss. “Don’t insult me. I don’t like it.”

Tan’elKoth tried to speak, but the residue of the shock baton’s randomizing pulse allowed only a thick “Nnnh . . . nnnh . . .” to pass his lips.

It was as well; he was not yet in sufficient command of himself. He thought of Faith, of her link to the rivergod, and hugged that thought to himself. If he could hold on to that, keep it safely buried behind his eyes, he could still come through this. All he had to do was survive. He would be Ma’elKoth again, and on that day he would have the power to repay abuse a hundredfold.

“But that wasn’t what really made me angry.” Kollberg didn’t sound angry. He didn’t sound human. “I got angry when you started that drivel about Michaelson being still alive. Then, when we reveal that he is still alive, you have the public’s confidence. You thought that was very clever. It was very clever. There is another thing you need to understand about me.”

He leaned forward and took Tan’elKoth’s wrist. “Clever people make me hungry.”

He lowered his face as though he might chastely and reverently kiss the ex-Emperor’s hand—but instead, he closed his lips upon Tan’elKoth’s smallest finger, sucking it fully into his mouth like a five-copper whore warming up for a blowjob. Tan’elKoth tried to speak, but still he could produce only a series of bestial grunts.

Kollberg bit down.

Tan’elKoth said “. . . gunhg . . . guhh . . .”

Kollberg chewed on the finger, worrying it, cracking the bone like a dog sucking marrow; he turned his head to one side, wedged the finger back between his molars, bit down again, and yanked his head from side to side until the bone splintered at the knuckle and he could rip it free. Blood sprayed, and Kollberg fixed his lips to the wound, sucking greedily.

Tan’elKoth’s guts spasmed, and he retched rackingly across Kollberg’s knees. Thin, clear vomit came out of the emptiness of his unused stomach, trailed down his legs, and trickled into his shoes. Kollberg shrugged and let Tan’elKoth slide to the floor; one of the officers took his hand and pressed a rag to the spurting stump.

Kollberg chewed on the severed finger for a moment longer, then swallowed it. He smiled at Tan’elKoth with blood-smeared lips. “Now,” he said thickly. “Now you understand.”

Tan’elKoth trembled, aching for breath, trying to stop the new surge of vomit that forced its way up his throat. Faith, he told himself. He still doesn’t know about Faith.

“Say it. Say you understand.”

Tan’elKoth looked away, down, anywhere but at the creature’s face.

Clearly outlined through Kollberg’s dungarees was his stiffened penis, straining against the fly.

“Say it,” Kollberg repeated. “I’m still hungry.”

Tan’elKoth struggled to make his numb, slack lips and tongue form the words. “I . . . unners’an’. . .” he mumbled. “I unners’an’.”

Kollberg gestured, and gauntleted hands dragged Tan’elKoth’s twitching body across the room and balanced him on a tiny swivel chair in front of a child-sized desk. The screen on this desk was already fully lit, showing the Adventures Unlimited logo: the armored knight upon the back of a winged horse, rampant.

Hot breath slid down the back of his neck, and that meaty voice came thick and wet beside his ear. “I believe you wanted to have a word with the Board of Governors, isn’t that right?” he murmured warmly, almost lovingly. “You wanted to tell them about me, mmm? Would you be interested to know that they have been watching us, all this time?”

The gradual return of motor function made Tan’elKoth shudder uncontrollably. “T-t-true?” he stammered. “Is-z-z-z it?”

“Professional Tan’elKoth,” the digitized voice from the screen replied, “you were told that Laborer Kollberg has our full confidence in this matter. Are you not wise? Is not a word sufficient?”

“Th-th-th-this m-m-monster—th-this fiend you employ—”

“Mmm, it seems there has been some . . . misapprehension . . . on your part, Professional. Laborer Kollberg does not work for us.”

“N-no? But, but—”

“Not at all. Quite the contrary, in fact; we work for him.”

Tan’elKoth, at that moment, wished only that he could use his arms well enough to stuff his fingers in his ears, wished he could use his voice well enough to howl, wished he could do anything at all to shut out the words he knew would come next.

“And so do you.”

The logo vanished. The screen was as blank as Tan’elKoth’s stare.

He did understand. Finally, fatally, he did. He had thought he was the master of history, that his fractal world-tree had grown according to his will. He had allowed himself to be deceived.

He had let himself believe that the Board of Governors was rational, when in truth it was only hungry.

The Bog, he thought. Caine’s joke: the acronym BOG. A word, in English, for swamp. A word, in a dead Slavic language, for God.

Kollberg sighed. “You’re thinking that Pallas is dead, and Caine is destroyed. You’re thinking, What other use can he have for me? Why am I still alive?”

Slowly, unwillingly, Tan’elKoth forced himself to meet Kollberg’s glassy dead-fish stare. “Yes.”

“Well, first, you’re still alive because we made a deal, and I don’t break my deals—not with my friends. And second, there is still something I need you to do, before we send you back to Overworld.”

Tan’elKoth closed his eyes.

“I need you to help me decide,” Kollberg said, “how we should use Faith Michaelson.”

Tan’elKoth lowered his head. He no longer had even the strength for anguish.

“Talk to me,” Kollberg said. “Talk.”

Tan’elKoth talked.

THE DARK ANGEL’S spawn was a created thing, a golem, a half-silvered reflection of its sire in a mirror of flesh. In the mind that dreams the world, each was a symbol of the other, and in such dreams, symbol is reality; this is what is called the law of similarity.

Each was the other.

In their mortal struggle, the dark angel and his spawn each fought against himself.