FOURTEEN

A FEW DAYS before the Festival of the Assumption, a new report detonated like a suitcase nuke in the heart of the net. Actors in Ankhana had witnessed the riverboat arrival of a Monastic delegation, an entourage of dozens of functionaries, and servants, and heavily armed friars with the sword-edged eyes of combat veterans. The delegation had been met at the Industrial Park docks by an honor guard suitable for vassal kings and the entire capital army band; the assemblage had formed a huge parade, a processional that surrounded a large wheeled cart drawn by four humpbacked oxen.

The band had struck up a solemn hymn, “Justice of God,” a standard of the Church of the Beloved Children of Ma’elKoth. The parade marched north up Rogues’ Way, through the midst of the Industrial Park on its broadest boulevard, Artisans’ Angle, then south along Nobles’ Way, past the makeshift barricades that sealed the smoldering ruins of Alientown, across the rebuilt Knights’ Bridge into Old Town, and on down Nobles’ Way to the South Bank, west the length of Dukes’ Street and north along Rogues’ Way once again, crossing onto Old Town before turning east along the grand central artery of Gods’ Way.

The entire circumference of this rough spiral was lined with cheering, jeering, hooting crowds, drawn by the thundering music and the triumphant proclamations of the heralds that preceded the parade, trumpeting the announcement of the capture of the Enemy of God.

On the cart was a tall platform; on the platform was chained a medium-sized, rather unremarkable-looking man with dark hair and a ragged tenday’s growth of black beard. By midnight, nearly everyone on Earth had heard the news.

Caine was alive.

2

HIS RADIANT HOLINESS Toa-Sytell, Patriarch of Ankhana and faithful Steward of the Empire, leaned on the chill stone of the windowsill and stared at the eastward sweep of Gods’ Way. With the sun westering toward twilight, the shadowy room had grown cool. Only the lightest brush of autumnal ochre warmed the top of the Sen-Dannalin Wall, but the gold-leafed spires of the neighboring Temple of the Katherisi blazed like bonfires; Toa-Sytell shaded his eyes against the glare.

An occasional wind-shift brought twists of smoke past this window: smoke from buildings that still smoldered in Alientown. The Patriarch hated that smoke. It seemed to fill his head in choking billows that strangled his thoughts. And below the ruins of Alientown, the fighting still continued.

Thinking about it made him queasy. He had been troubled in both stomach and head of late, as though he had become the city that he ruled, and the conflict had given him fever. He was acutely, almost painfully aware of the fighting that might be going on now, in the caverns below the city—below, perhaps, the palace itself. Even after these several days of what the army had begun to call the Caverns War, he couldn’t get used to it. It made the earth itself seem unsteady, temporary, dangerously frangible, as though any street where he walked was only a soap bubble, decaying in the sunlight, and at any second it might vanish and he would fall, and fall, and fall.

So he no longer left the palace.

Down on Gods’ Way, an avenue so broad it was almost a plaza, the people of Ankhana crowded shoulder to shoulder in bright festival colors, a tightly woven carpet of knobbled heads and hats and hair planed almost smooth by range and elevation. No sign yet of the triumphal procession that brought Caine in public disgrace to the Donjon—but faintly to the Patriarch’s ear came the distance-thinned strains of “Justice of God,” and he allowed himself a slim smile as chill as the stone on which he leaned.

Three respectful paces behind Toa-Sytell’s left shoulder, His Grace the Honorable Toa-M’Jest, Duke of Public Order, coughed into his fist.

“Join me here, M’Jest,” Toa-Sytell said informally. “He should be arriving soon. Don’t you want to watch?”

“If it’s all the same to you, Radiance—”

“It isn’t. Join me.”

Toa-M’Jest ducked his head and surreptitiously mopped sweat from his brow with his sleeve; the Patriarch pretended that he did not see. When the Duke came to the window, the Patriarch could smell him—a sour, slightly rank sweat smell, with a taint of the outhouse to it that cut through the Duke’s expensive perfume. Toa-M’Jest took the Patriarch’s casually offered hand; the Duke’s fingers were clammy, chill like raw meat off a butcher’s iceblock, and they trembled, ever so slightly.

While the Duke lowered dry lips to his master’s fingers, the Patriarch stared into the empty distance above Ankhana’s towers. “Seven years ago next tenday, I stood at this very window with the Count—shortly thereafter Saint—Berne,” he mused. “Then, too, we watched for sight of Caine approaching along Gods’ Way. Then, too, we thought he had been taken, chained, rendered harmless.”

The Patriarch took the Duke’s chin in his hand and raised it so that their eyes could meet. “Then, too,” he said, “we did not learn how wrong we were until far too late.”

Toa-M’Jest swallowed. “I don’t know what you mean, Holiness.”

“Of course you do. Don’t be an ass.” The Patriarch sighed. “I know that you once counted Caine your friend—that you even go so far, privately, as to credit him for your current position. I know that you will be inclined to aid him. I tell you plainly, Toa-M’Jest: This inclination may cost your life.”

“Radiance—”

The Patriarch waved the objection aside; Toa-M’Jest could have nothing of interest to say on the subject. “How goes the mopping up?”

The Duke took a breath to gather his wits. “Better, Your Radiance, but still slowly. We hold the Alientown surface from Commons’ Beach to the north shanties. I think we’ll have everything locked down within a tenday.”

“So long?” the Patriarch murmured. “The Festival of the Assumption sprints toward us, Toa-M’Jest. This situation must be resolved.”

“It’s the caverns—the rock cuts off Flow,” the Duke reminded him. “The Thaumaturgics are short of griffinstones. It’s bad enough, sending men down there against ogres and trolls without magickal cover, but stonebenders? You can’t fight stone-benders in those caverns, Your Radiance. Not without griffinstones. It’s suicide.”

“You understand, do you not, that your failure to arrest Kierendal is of especial concern now? She was once your lover; sent against her by my order, you failed—”

The Duke bristled. “The kind of magick those fuckers throw around?” he snapped, relapsing into the gutter talk of his former life. “We had to fall back. You should have seen the shit they were throwing—like goddamn Ma’elkoth, excuse the profanity. How many soldiers did you want to lose?”

“The circumstances of their resistance are irrelevant. Half the Alientown Patrol are Knights of Cant; you should have been better prepared.”

“She’s not going anywhere. She’ll either surrender with the rest or die where she is.”

“Nonetheless. Your record against your former . . . associates . . . is less than stellar, M’Jest. We can afford no similar, mm, errors . . . in dealing with Caine.”

“There won’t be any,” the Duke promised grimly.

“I understand you have already financed a private cell for him.”

Toa-M’Jest settled into himself as though anticipating a blow. “Yeah.”

“Perhaps you have an explanation for this which might allay my fears . . . ?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

The Patriarch allowed himself another thin, cold smile. “Several conflicting explanations are, I think, equally obvious. I am curious which you will select.”

“He’s crippled,” the Duke said simply. “Berne put Kosall through his spine. The Pit’s full of street scum. He wouldn’t last a day down there, maybe not even an hour—everybody’d want to be the Man Who Killed Caine. Not to mention that most all of them are facing execution on charges—mmm, you might say dubious charges—of Cainism. I don’t think anyone’ll care to stand up for him.”

“I see,” the Patriarch said. “So your sole concern is to ensure that he lives long enough to be executed.”

Toa-M’Jest turned his face toward the window, looking out over the broad parade route below. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “It’s not easy to admit, y’know? But I got a position, now; I got responsibilities. I love the guy like my own brother, but every time he comes to town we end up in a fucking war.”

The Patriarch’s eye was caught by the scarlet flash of the afternoon sun off the halberd blades of the Household Knights as the parade turned the corner from Rogues’ Way onto Gods’ Way and began its final triumphal leg. Far, far below, he could barely make out the limp figure on the rack above the dungcart’s bed.

“Yes,” he murmured. He ran his tongue around lips that had become dry and cracked and hot. “Yes, we do.”

3

THE IMPERIAL DONJON of Ankhana began its existence as the final line of defense for the river pirates who had founded the city more than a thousand years ago. In those days, what would later become Ankhana was nothing more than a simple fort of stone and a cluster of huts, enclosed by a wooden stockade wall at the west end of the island that would later be called Old Town.

Below the fort lay a natural cleft in the limestone that was the predominant geological formation of the area; this cleft led far below the river itself, into a bewildering three-dimensional tangle of caverns and passages, including one that was a straight vertical chimney down to another river, underground, that paralleled the Great Chambaygen above. This cleft became known satirically as the Donjon, in the sense of stronghold, from its use as the escape route when the fort above fell to siege.

The Donjon’s actual use as the Ankhanan civic dungeon did not begin until nearly a hundred years after the Liberation, when Ankhana’s stand against the armies of Panchasell the Luckless and his Folk allies had assured the city’s dominance over the surrounding lands. At that time, the pirate chieftains of Ankhana had taken to calling themselves kings; kings are perpetually in need of secure places in which to deposit those enemies who would be inconvenient to kill.

The Donjon was a place of deep shadow and bad air, rank with fermenting exhalations of decayed lungs filtered through mouthfuls of rotting teeth.

The Pit was an already-large natural cavern that had been enlarged and altered over the years, first crudely—by inexpert human engineers—and later with astonishing skill by teams of convict stonebenders. By the morning on which Hari Michaelson, the man who had once been Caine, was carried down the stairs from the Courthouse, the Pit was fully forty meters across, ringed by an overhanging balcony cut from the stone ten meters above the floor. A single stairbridge, hinged to the balcony, could be lowered on winched chains to deliver new prisoners to the Pit floor. The prisoners’ daily rations were lowered by hand in cheaply woven baskets, and eaten without the benefit of utensils.

Newer features included a tic-tac-toe square of plank-floored catwalks crisscrossing the Pit at the same ten-meter height as the balcony, suspended from the arched stone ceiling by heavy chains. On chains as well were five enormous brass lamps—each the size of a washtub, with a wick as thick as a man’s arm—that provided the constant light. They burned without interruption, their oil replenished and wicks replaced as necessary by the crossbow-armed Donjon guards who paced the catwalks.

In the Pit, darkness would be a luxury.

In years past, the Pit had been a temporary holding area, a pen of stone for prisoners awaiting trial and convicts awaiting transportation to frontier garrisons, or to the mines of the high desert, or to the galleys of the Ankhanan navy out of the port city of Terana.

Things were different, now.

On Saint Berne’s Eve—slightly more than two months ago—the army and the constabulary had begun a systematic program of mass arrests of Cainists and Cainist sympathizers. Holding areas had been prepared to house the detained Cainists outside the Donjon, but soon they had all been filled, many of them with varieties of subhumans who required specially prepared cages: ogres, trolls, treetoppers, and stonebenders, each of whom presented their own particular difficulties as prisoners. Ogres and trolls are predatory carnivores, enormous and incredibly strong, as well as naturally armed with huge hooked tusks and steel-hard talons; treetoppers are tiny, hardly larger than birds, and not only can they fly, but they have the inborn thaumaturgic ability to Cloak themselves, which can render them effectively invisible; stonebenders are able to shift and shape stone, metal, and earth with their bare hands. Not that all or even most of these subhumans were actual Disciples of Caine, of course; but the Empire and the Church found it expedient to pretend that they were, so that they might all be executed in the mass auto-da-fé planned by the Patriarch to celebrate the seventh Festival of the Assumption of Ma’elKoth.

The climax of the festival—the grand finale of the grandest festival, the pinnacle of the celebration of the seventh anniversary of Ma’elKoth’s transfiguration from mortal god to Ascended Godhead in truth—would be the burning of the Enemy of God: the Prince of Chaos himself.

The Pit was now filled with the less problematic overflow of the street sweeps: humans, primals, and ogrilloi. Not that all or even most of these were Cainist either; on the contrary, the majority of them were merely the sort of street trash, thugs, and minor criminals that the constables could easily lay hands upon and thus demonstrate to the Church their zealous prosecution of their duties.

The Pit could hold four hundred prisoners in something resembling comfort; perhaps six or seven hundred in what would be called dangerous overcrowding. On the day that the aforementioned Prince of Chaos was carried down the long, straight stairway cut through the living rock below the Courthouse that was the Donjon’s sole entrance or exit, nearly fifteen hundred souls were crammed into this overflowing jar of flesh. There was nowhere one could sit or stand or lie without touching another living creature. The flesh-to-flesh contact that could be such a comfort in the harsh chill of the outside world became a positive horror in this damp bowl of rock, where the walls dripped with the endless meaty condensation of living breath; the Pit was as warm and moist as the inside of somebody else’s mouth.

The Pit’s sole supply of fresh water flowed through three trenches, each a hand-span wide; they curved out across the floor from a single source in one wall and converged again to empty into a single sump in the opposite wall. These trenches also served as the Pit’s cloaca.

The politics of the Pit were simple: the healthiest, strongest, most privileged of the prisoners sat or lay nearest to the source. The internal pecking order described a strict geographic descent from that position to the opposite end: to those who through helplessness and timidity were forced to drink the urine-and-shit-fouled wastewater that drained from the happier climes forty meters upstream.

Hari Michaelson was to be secured in a cell along one of the corridors that radiated from the Pit balcony like spokes of a crooked wheel. Strapped to a litter, unable to move, he lay back silently, not even turning his face to see where he was being taken; he had been here before, and he remembered how it looked. The smell told him everything else he could possibly have wanted to know.

The Donjon guards who bore his litter carried it swiftly around the balcony, but his arrival did not go unremarked. The Pit itself fell silent, as hundreds of eyes tracked his passage; no sound could be heard above the low hush of massed breath and the gurgle of water slithering along trenches of stone.

Rumors of the eventual coming of the Enemy of God had whispered themselves from mouth to mouth on twilit street corners, around low fires, and within darkened pubs for months now. The Ascended Ma’elKoth was expected to return as well, and the two were to meet in final battle at noon of the seventh Assumption Day, just as their initial great conflict had occurred on the first. There were competing rumors, too: that Caine had been no more than a man, just as Ma’elKoth had been only a man, and that any “final battle” on Assumption Day would be merely a dumbshow to impress the gullible masses, a parable of Good versus Evil played out by mummers in Church employ; these rumors were popularly dismissed as Cainist propaganda.

Newer tales had been told, too, of the capture of Caine by the heroic friar Raithe of Ankhana. Raithe, it was said, had conjured the spirit of Saint Berne to sustain him in pitched battle against the Prince of Chaos and his whore-consort, the Aktir Queen once known as Pallas Ril. The epic battle had been fought from peak to peak in the distant mountains of the God’s Teeth: the Aktiri legions had attacked with weapons of lightning and flame, against which the small band of friars led by young Raithe could set only their strength of purpose, their purity of heart, and their faith in the justice of Ma’elKoth.

It was told that the Aktir Queen had been slain in that battle by Raithe himself, even as Jereth Godslaughterer had been slain by Jhantho the Founder at Pirichanthe; it was told that the touch of Raithe’s hand had reopened the wound of the Holy Stroke upon the Enemy of God, and that the Caine who approached Ankhana in chains was no more than a broken cripple. It was told that the Patriarch himself considered already the question of Raithe’s possible sainthood.

Among the hundreds of pairs of eyes that tracked the litter’s progress around the balcony were those of a former member of the Monastic diplomatic delegation to the Infinite Court: t’Passe of Narnen Hill, onetime Vice Ambassador to Damon of Jhanthogen Bluff. T’Passe was a thick-bodied, plain-faced woman whose eyes held a curiously unchanging expression, both manic and contemplative at once.

She had been among the very first of the Cainists to be arrested, at the embassy itself, on Saint Berne’s Eve. Only a few days later, all the Monastics who had been arrested were officially freed; their status as diplomatic delegates of a sovereign nation demanded it. No fuss came from the Church over this; neither the Church nor the Empire had ever intended the detained Monastics to be imprisoned long enough to require a Monastic response.

T’Passe, however, had refused to leave the Donjon. Threatened with forcible ejection by the civil authorities—to avoid a confrontation with the Monasteries—she had resigned her post on the spot. She would have surrendered her Monastic citizenship as well, had not Acting Ambassador Damon assured her that the Monasteries would make no special effort to have her freed, now that she no longer filled a diplomatic position with the embassy.

“If to speak the truth is a crime, then I shall always be a criminal,” she’d said. Now, as she watched Caine’s progress on his litter, she might have been carved of the same rough stone as the Donjon itself.

The first words to break the silence were a murmur from an unidentifiable mouth. “He looks so helpless . . .”

Another soft voice said, “Maybe it’s not him,” probably a Cainist’s, from its hopeful tone. “It’s not, huh? It can’t really be him, can it?”

“It is he,” t’Passe said stolidly. “I saw Caine at the Ceremony of Refusal after the Battle of Ceraeno.”

“But that was, like, twenty years ago—” someone objected, and t’Passe answered the objection with a flat shake of her head.

“I am not mistaken.”

A hulking young ogrillo smirked around his tusks. “Kinda shoots yer whole theology in the ass, dun it?” he asked as he coolly examined his wickedly hooked fighting claw. Snickers came from his small circle of toadies.

“Cainism is not theology, Orbek,” t’Passe responded with her customary mild courtesy. “It is philosophy.”

“And you can call a turd a sandwich, but it still tastes like shit, hey?”

“I bow to your superior experience,” t’Passe replied, “regarding the flavor of shit.”

The ogrillo took this with a widened grin and a nod of the head. “Yeah, arright,” he said in a friendly enough way. “But one of this day, this moutha yours—it gonna get busted, hey?”

“At your convenience.” T’Passe stared calmly at him until he finally shrugged, laughed, and turned away, shouldering through the close-packed mass of prisoners with his toadies in his wake.

After he left, t’Passe turned once again to the conversation that Caine’s arrival had interrupted. Her interlocutor was a broad-shouldered fey, tall for his folk, who was folded into a sitting position beside one of the water trenches. One of his thighs looked subtly wrong, as though something malign grew within, and the shin of the other leg was knobbed a few inches below the knee, as though it had been broken and never properly healed.

He clasped his knees to his chest and looked up at the former Vice Ambassador with great golden eyes, their vertically slit pupils spread wide in the murk of the Pit. Despite the eyes, despite the thick brush of platinum-colored hair that stood stiffly out from his scalp to the length of the first joint of his finger, he did not look entirely elvish; his face had been scoured into a map of age, a contoured terrain of harsh living, until he looked almost human—almost like a man fast approaching his fiftieth birthday. “Why do you bait him like that?” said the elf who looked like a man. “What do you get out of it?”

“My desires are of no concern to you, unless they either coincide with or conflict with your own,” she said severely; then she shrugged and hunkered down beside him. She lowered her voice and kept her face near his, so that they could converse softly through the constant general buzz of voices around them. “That is the dogma, at least. In truth, I enjoy the banter. It’s a verbal display of dominance; you may have noticed that I am an intellectual bully.”

“There is dogma? Cainist dogma?” the man-elf asked. “How can there be Cainist dogma?”

“Dogma in the sense of a set of shared premises, from which we reason. But you are avoiding the subject, Deliann. We were talking about what you want.”

“I know,” Deliann sighed. “That’s just the problem.”

“You must want something . . .”

“I want a lot of things.” He lifted one shoulder, dropped it again. “I want my brother to be alive. I want my father to be alive. I want—”

She raised a hand. “You can’t unring the bell, Deliann.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve heard that.”

“The question is not what you hope might happen, or what you wish had happened differently. Tell me what you want to do.”

He lowered his face to his knees. “What I want doesn’t matter,” he said, his voice half muffled by his legs. “You’re wasting your time with me, t’Passe. Ask a dying man what he wants, he’ll tell you he wants to live. You say, ‘Oh, sorry. What’s your second choice?’ ” He made a twitching gesture with his head, as though he wiped his eyes against the scraps of his trousers. “I’m just sitting here waiting to die.”

“We can each sit and wait to die, from the very day of our births. Those of us who do not do so, choose to ask—and to answer—the two questions that define every conscious creature: What do I want? and What will I do to get it? Which are, finally, only one question: What is my will? Caine teaches us that the answer is always found within our own experience; our lives provide the structure of the question, and a properly phrased question contains its own answer.”

“I need you to leave me alone, t’Passe,” Deliann said, his mouth pressed to his knees as though he would gnaw his own flesh. “I can’t . . . talk about this right now. Please.”

She rocked back on her heels, her mouth a thin horizontal line; then she nodded. “Perhaps we can take this up again later, when you’re feeling better.”

“Yes,” Deliann said. “Maybe later.”

She could hear in his voice that he did not expect her to live that long.

4

DELIANN LIFTED HIS head as t’Passe delicately stepped from bit to bit of open floor, her broad back stiffly erect, her shoulders square as cut stone. Most of the prisoners in the Pit passed their days sitting or lying down; he could follow her with his eyes until she found a place to squat, among a knot of fellow Cainists beneath one of the hanging lamps.

Deliann had flashed on her when they had first met, shortly after he had been prodded down the stairbridge by the bluntly insistent business end of a Donjon guard’s iron-bound club. His flash had shown him more than he wanted to know of her.

He had learned how it felt to have been a girl of plain, square face, a teenager with a sturdy, strictly functional body as graceless as a mallet, but cursed with a nature as sensitive as her mind was sharp. He had learned how it felt to use a bitter tongue to turn men aside before she could even look for any spark of interest in their eyes. Before she could be wounded by its absence.

He had learned how it felt to turn to the Monasteries, because she’d believed they were a different world, a separate reality where mind counted above beauty, scholarship above flattery—and how it felt to age slowly in a minor diplomatic post, while smaller, duller minds, those more facile with hypocrisy, those that chanced to inhabit more attractive bodies, received promotion and honor that should have been hers.

He had seen how it felt to devote one’s entire life to the Future of a Humanity one has discovered, too late, that one despises.

Cainism answered needs she’d never even known she had. As a philosophy, it was elitist, radically individualistic; such a brilliant woman, who had taken such bitter disappointment from every form of society, could not possibly resist. Perhaps Cainism was purely a philosophy, as she constantly reminded everyone in the Pit—but for her, it was theology, too.

She needed it to be true.

When he had asked her, shortly after she had begun her explication of Cainist philosophy, the most obvious question, “What if everyone behaved that way? What if everyone just made up their own rules as they went along?” she had only shaken her head sadly.

“What if everyone could shoot lightning bolts from their arses?” she’d countered. “It’s a specious question; very few people are capable of behaving this way. It’s like asking, What if everyone had perfect pitch? Or an eidetic memory? The capacity for personal freedom is a rare talent. Talents exist to be used. We do not ask the sheep to be wolves; we, the wolves, do not ask ourselves to be sheep. Sheep can make such rules as happen to suit them—but it’s foolishly naive to expect wolves to obey.”

And in the name of this gospel of freedom, she had imprisoned herself; in the name of “living life honestly,” she would go to her death. It was, he supposed, the only way she could make herself feel special.

Deliann trailed his fingers in the befouled water that trickled along the trench beside him. He could not discuss Cainism with t’Passe; he had known what he wanted, and had done everything he could think of to make it happen. The outcome had been, would be, unimaginably hideous death on a scale this world had never seen.

Whenever Deliann looked up, all he could see was a roomful of corpses.

There’s where your whole system breaks down, t’Passe. In this room, we’re all dead. Free or slave, hero or victim—dead is still dead.

When he brought his damp fingers to his lips, he could smell the urine and feces that stained the water. He was desperately, bitterly thirsty, but he couldn’t summon the energy to come to his feet and struggle through the mass of prisoners toward the cleaner water near the source. When he got there, the group of Serpents—members of a Warrengang who had taken over that prime real estate—would make him beg on his knees for a drink of pure water. Or worse: begging was innocuous enough that most of the prisoners no longer minded, and the Serpents seemed to have gotten bored with such petty, everyday humiliations.

No chance of help from above; the Donjon guards left the Pit entirely alone, so long as nothing reached the point of open riot. Even murder was tolerated—roughly once a day, the stairbridge would come clanking down and a team of litter-bearing guards would descend, covered by crossbows from above, to clear away the accumulated corpses. Not that most of these died by violence—disease and malnutrition were the prime killers in the Pit—but the guards made no distinction for cause of death. Starved or strangled, a corpse was a corpse.

In the past day or so, the price of water seemed to have risen from begging to the kissing of bared asses; an hour or so ago, a desperate woman had given one of the Serpents oral sex in exchange for a single drink. Deliann had turned away, sickened; he hadn’t had the courage to look back since. He couldn’t face whatever the current asking price was going to be.

He let his fingers trail in the water beside him once more, as though he could soak enough moisture through his skin to take the edge off his bitter thirst. Those Serpents, it seemed to him, were a clear example of what Cainism really was: they had the power to make their own rules, and look what they did with it.

On the other hand, he seemed to hear t’Passe’s voice whisper in his ear, Cainism also says that you can fight them, if you choose. Might doesn’t make right; this isn’t a question of right; it’s a question of what you want to do.

And what did he want to do? Everyone kept asking him that, just as though it were important.

5

MY CELL IS just down one of the corridors that radiate off the Pit. They keep a lamp in here, but I can’t light it; it’s on the little writing desk across the room from my cot, and I don’t have the energy to drag my dead legs over there. Besides, enough dull orange glow trickles through the window vent in the door—leakover from the big brass lamps that light the Pit—that I can see better than I really want to, anyway.

I am haunted by that statue of me Tan’elKoth made, his David the King. I can see every sagging line of its jowl, every defeated droop of the bags under its eyes. A calculated, deliberate insult: he used my image for an icon of comfortable failure. The slow slipping-down life of a finally insignificant man.

If only I could have understood . . .

He knew better than I did, all along.

I would give anything if I could be that insignificant, comfortably failed man one more time.

That image wasn’t an insult. It was advice.

It was, You have better than you deserve. Be grateful, and don’t rock the fucking boat.

6

DAY AND NIGHT have no meaning in the Pit. New prisoners were shoved down the bridge now and then; occasionally guards would descend to remove corpses and those who would soon be corpses. For a long time, the only benchmark had been the arrival of Caine. They’d been fed a few times since then, but Deliann found he couldn’t remember if the food baskets had been lowered four times, or six . . . or two . . .

His fever worsened. He’d thought he was getting better for his first few days in the Pit, but that was only because the forced inactivity had taken the edge off his exhaustion. Deliann slept when he could no longer keep his eyes open, and he woke when jostled or kicked.

Though he was well downstream of the Pit’s midpoint, and he no longer risked the brutally whimsical Serpents who guarded the source of clean water, he’d managed to keep his thirst mostly at bay; he’d found that by sniffing fingers he’d trailed in the water trench, he could tell when the incoming flow was relatively free of the shit of upstream prisoners, and he would then risk a swallow or two. He imagined that he was exposing himself to infections that could range from hepatitis to cholera, but he couldn’t make himself care.

During most of his waking hours, he passed the time by listening to t’Passe and her growing band of Cainists proselytize the other prisoners and argue with each other; there were almost as many different interpretations of Cainism as there were Cainists. T’Passe’s position seemed to carry a certain authority, though; her fierce intellect was supported by an extremely penetrating voice and an aggressive temper, and few dared to argue with her.

She would from time to time cast a glance in Deliann’s direction, implicitly asking permission to approach him once more; he rarely met her eyes. Like right now: someone objected that the goal of Cainism was mere anarchy, and she stared directly at Deliann as she answered. “Cainism is not anarchy, but autarchy,” she said. “Not the absence of rule, but self-rule.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“It may appear so,” t’Passe allowed serenely, “if you think of Cainism as advocating autarchy; but we do not. We do not advocate, we merely describe. Autarchy is simple fact. Every day, every thinking creature decides which rules to follow, and which to break. Our reasons for following or breaking these rules may be wildly different, but the fact of choice is identical. Perhaps the only difference between a Cainist and anyone else is that we make these choices consciously, instead of allowing habit to guide us along with the herd. The elKothan Church says: Obey. Love each other. Serve the good of your neighbor. Do not lie. Do not steal. Do not kill.

“It is certainly possible for a Cainist to be a faithful elKothan, and a ‘good person’ by the standards of the Church—the only difference being that the Cainist is aware he is making a choice. He does not obey Ma’elKoth or His Church, he obeys himself.”

T’Passe spread her hands, and from across the Pit offered Deliann a gently knowing smile. “You might say that the real key to Cainism is nothing more than paying attention.”

7

LYING IN THE cell, staring at the rock above my cot—

My legs rotting like week-old hamburger—

Coughing up blood—

And the worst part is that I can still hear that fucker yapping about Cainism.

I can’t tell if this particular fucker is a man or a woman or something roughly in between; all I know is, this fucker has a voice that can chip my goddamn teeth. All the fleshy jabber from the Pit, all the muttering and grunting and farting and the occasional scream, this voice slices through like a knife, but I’m the bone.

If there’s anything that hurts worse than steel on bone, I don’t want to know about it. It’s a pain so intense you can’t even feel it at first; it’s a searing numbness, a shivering empty shock that ripples along your nerves and turns your body to jelly. That’s what this fucker is doing to me, every time I hear that goddamn voice remind somebody that Cainism is not theology, but philosophy.

I got some philosophy for that fucker, and plenty of it: the trusty hasn’t been around to empty my bedpans in two days.

Jesus, it stinks in here.

Isn’t your nose supposed to numb out after a while? Mine did before, waking up in bed with the goddamn spinal bypass fritzed out, not being able to smell whether I’d crapped the sheets. But this place smells like a slaughterhouse.

Some of the burns on my legs have gone necrotic, soppy with greyish goo. That’s gonna be a pretty good joke on Raithe and the Church, if gangrene kills me before the execution. And it might not be gangrene that kills me, the way I’ve been coughing; I was bringing up a lot of bloody snot for a few days, but now I just keep coughing and nothing much comes out. I’m guessing it’s chemical pneumonia from breathing the smoke from whatever that incendiary dust was.

I don’t really mind any of this. It just means that I’m gonna die pretty soon, and I’m all for it. It’s the only thing I’ve been looking forward to since they murdered Shanna.

But for for some reason I keep on living, and I don’t know why.

It’s not that hard to kill yourself, even for a paraplegic. I’ve got plenty of strength left in my arms and hands; it’d be easy enough to tear this sheet into strips and braid them into a reasonable facsimile of rope. The inside of the bronze-bound wooden door that seals my cell has a couple of age-warps gapping the timbers that an experienced climber could wedge his fingers into, to pull himself up high enough to slip a rope around one of the bars in the small window vent. Then when I tie the rope around my neck, I can haul myself up, hold my breath long enough to tie off the rope—then I’ll strangle fast enough that I probably won’t even have time to change my mind.

But I don’t do it. I can’t.

I can’t seem to make myself give up.

Oh, I can come close enough—I can make myself lie here and do nothing but smell the goo from my festering wounds; I can make myself stare emptily at the trusty when he comes to exchange my uneaten dinner for a fresh meal that I will also not eat; I can lie in my own filth and remorselessly enumerate all the multiple uselessnesses of my existence.

I can hate myself, and the world, and everything in it.

But in the end, Shanna’s still dead and I’m still alive, still locked alone in this stone box, still lying on this goddamn cot, still listening to that fucker in the Pit yap about the “core of all freedom.”

“It’s that voice, the quiet inner whisper of intransigence, that anyone can hear if one listens hard enough. It’s the voice that whispers My will, or I won’t. That is the voice of the Caine Within: it is not the Caine’s voice, but it is the voice of that small part of each of us that is the Caine.”

Does this fucker have any idea what an idiot he is?

Tyshalle, if my prayer swings any weight with you at all, kill that yappy sonofabitch. Hurt him some, first.

But despite my prayers, he keeps talking and I can’t stop listening.

You could work a thousand years and never come up with a more perfect hell.

8

DELIANN OPENED HIS eyes when the shouting started, and he managed to lever his aching back far enough off the stone to see that the guards were lowering food baskets from the catwalk again. He had some impression that it had been a long time since the last feeding, and his stomach confirmed this hypothesis with an unhappy snarl.

The healthiest and strongest of the prisoners had already mobbed the baskets. Deliann stayed on the floor; he wasn’t at all sure that he’d be able to walk that far. The rock of the Donjon impedes Flow, and his degrading health made mindview difficult. He was no longer able to suppress the infection within the meat of his thigh, and the constant pain wore on him even more than his gnawing hunger did.

The only other prisoners who did not scramble for food were those too weak to do so—and, of course, the Serpents who guarded the water source. This enterprising group had found that there were plenty of prisoners who would enthusiastically serve their every whim in exchange for more frequent drinks of the cleanest water; the Serpents had taken to letting these volunteers compete with each other for this privilege. Those who offered the largest and most appetizing morsels from the food baskets got the longest and deepest drinks of water. A particularly choice hunk of sausage, and the Serpents might even allow the supplicant to wash himself—an almost unimaginable luxury. The Serpents never had any shortage of eager auxiliaries.

Often, now, the only way to get more than just a mouthful of food was to fight for it.

Deliann also feared that if he did manage to struggle over in time to grab a bite or two before everything was gone, he might return to find someone had taken his spot beside the water trench. Reasoning that, on balance, dying of thirst would be swifter and uglier than starvation, he lay back down on the cold damp stone and closed his eyes.

Some undefinable time later, a soft voice at his side spoke his name.

He opened his eyes. T’Passe stood beside him, a fist-sized crust of bread in one hand and a chunk of hard cheese in the other. “Here,” she said, offering him both. “Can I buy the chance to talk with you?”

Deliann sighed and struggled into a sitting position. He bent his neck to look up at her; she was perceptibly thinner now, as though the Donjon carved away her flesh, but her eyes gleamed even brighter. She had been having more than a little success in her evangelizing of the other prisoners; she had a sizable following now—the Cainists were almost as numerous as the Serpents, and Deliann more than half expected to see a power struggle develop between the two groups for control of the Pit—but she had never given up on her attempts to win him over.

“What is it about me, t’Passe?” he asked slowly. “Why am I so important to you?”

She squatted beside him and placed the bread and cheese in his lap. “I don’t know,” she said. “You’re so profoundly unhappy . . . I think there’s something wrong with the world, that a person like you should be in so much pain.”

“And you want to use food to bribe me to cheer up,” he said, smiling wistfully at the recollection of scrambled eggs at the stall on Moriandar Street. “You know what? That’s how I got into this place.” A strengthless wave of his hand indicated the Pit. “I let somebody cheer me up.”

9

AND I SLEEP and wake and sleep again, my bedpan is emptied and I refill it, and still that fucker in the Pit just never seems to shut up. “Consider, for a moment, the lazy blacksmith: In shoeing a horse for a stranger, he finds that he is one nail short. Rather than trouble to make another, he leaves the last shoe without its last nail. Is his laziness good, or is it evil?

“Then follows the rhyme that we all know:

“His laziness was evil, then, unless—for the sake of argument—the stranger is not a courier of his own king, but a spy of the enemy; so that the kingdom which was lost is the enemy kingdom. Then, to have done a ‘good’ job might have cost this blacksmith and his people all they have, perhaps even their lives.

“The lesson here is this: The consequence of even the simplest action cannot be reliably predicted over any long term. One cannot control how events unfold, and whether any action is ‘good’ or ‘evil’ can only be judged in terms of its consequence—and even that judgment will alter, over time. An action initially judged to be ‘good’ may later be found to have ‘evil’ effects—which eventually may be seen, in fact, to be ‘good.’ Good and evil are, after all, only code words for outcomes we either favor, or of which we disapprove. We all must accept that anything we do, however ‘good’ it seems at the time, might have consequences that will be too horrible to contemplate.

“What then, is the answer? To do nothing? But even inaction has consequences. The essence of Cainism is this: The truly free man chooses his own goals and seeks his own ends, purely for the joy of the choice and the seeking.”

And this is the one that I can’t get out of my head. I can lie here for hours and argue with my memory of that voice, but I go to sleep hearing it, and I hear it when I wake up, and I guess I’m not really registering it as meaning anymore.

It’s soaked in, somewhere. I’ve sucked it in through my pores, and I can’t sweat it out. I stare at the ceiling for a day or two, counting the cracks in the stone by the unchanging glow from the Pit lamps.

I will go to my grave with the vision of her bright eyes staring, washed clean by the spray from that waterfall at the headwaters of the Great Chambaygen, the blade of Kosall driven through her skull down into the stone beneath her head—I did the right thing, and it came out wrong, and I should have known better.

But I didn’t.

I once murdered an old man—the Khulan G’thar—and saved maybe a million lives, when the Khulan Horde collapsed at Ceraeno. Later, I murdered another old man—Prince-Regent Toa-Phelathon—and turned a series of minor border skirmishes with Lipke into the First Succession War.

And maybe that fucker down there in the Pit is right. Maybe there’s no telling which way shit will break. If I listen hard enough, I can hear that voice: that small quiet whisper in the back of my head that keeps on insisting My will, or I won’t. But the fucker in the Pit is dead wrong about it: it is Caine’s voice.

It’s my voice.

I keep thinking about the Assumption Day Festival. I keep thinking about how they’re gonna wheel me over to the Cathedral of the Assumption in that tumbrel of theirs, then put me up on a pyre and burn me to death to amuse a few thousand Beloved Children.

I am so tired of my life and death being somebody else’s entertainment.

And, that simply, my mind is made up.

Up there at Khryl’s Saddle, it took me too long to realize I should have killed myself. That’s a mistake I won’t make twice. Suicide isn’t my trip—but there are other ways to die.

I get the jitters, waiting. By the time the trusty comes again, swinging wide the door of my cell, shuffling in with lowered head to empty my brimming bedpans into his tumbrel, I have to cough the tremors out of my voice before I can speak to him.

“Tell the sergeant—Habrak, is that his name?—you tell him Caine wants to see the Duke of Public Order.”

The trusty’s eyes roll at me, wondering just how mad I am.

“You tell him, that’s all. Tell him to get a message to Toa-M’Jest that Caine wants to see him. The Duke will make it worth his while. And yours, too.”

The trusty’s head bobs, once, and he wheels his tumbrel away down the hall.

Fuck being helpless.

There’s nothing I can do from the inside of this goddamn cell. But get me out in the Pit, out there among the criminals, malcontents, and troublemakers, and I will show them something I can do.

I will rip the head off their precious Assumption Day, and I will shit down its fucking neck.

10

DELIANN COULD TELL something important was about to happen from the way the Donjon guards were turning up the lamps.

He folded his arms behind his head and watched as a little group of them went from lamp to lamp around the tic-tac-toe square of the overhead catwalks. One of the group had a pole with a little Y-hand on the end; he’d catch the lamp chain in the Y and use the pole to push the lamp over to where another guard could grab it by the big brass handles that were welded in a ring around each lamp’s barrel. A third guard would use a snuffer the size of a helmet to douse the flame, then he’d use his knife, inserted flatwise through the grey arm-thick hawser that served as a wick, to pull the wick farther out through the green-scaled brass lamp mouth, to make it burn higher and cast more light.

His fever had surged lately, and he rode its waves, drowsing and waking and drowsing again through dreams of deserts and ovens, summer noons and slow-twisting flame, and he fancied in a vaguely amused way that each time they relit one of the big brass lamps, the Donjon guards were turning up the heat inside his head.

For a time he lay on his back, staring up at the lamps, reflecting upon fire: light and heat, safety and destruction. He’d always had a gift for flame; it was the core of his magickal skill. He could do things with fire that an ordinary mortal could barely imagine. He thought now that perhaps fire was the central metaphor of his existence—like fire itself, he had been a perfectly faithful servant, but once set free of his master’s control, he’d burned down the world—

He never did learn what the something important was; by the time the balcony and catwalks filled with crossbow-armed guards and the sergeant roared for the prisoners to rise at the entry of His Grace Toa-M’Jest, Duke of Public Order—and had the guards shoot one prisoner who appeared prepared to insult His Grace by remaining seated—Deliann was fast asleep upon the stone, his recumbent form screened from view by the close knot of Cainists that t’Passe had gathered around him.

Deliann never saw the Duke; he was dreaming of fire.

11

MAJESTY COMES THROUGH the door of my cell like a fox with hounds baying inside his head. He shifts inside his clothes like something’s crawling on his skin, and he licks sweat from his upper lip. These past few years have been hard on him: He’s gained a lot of weight, but his cheeks sag anyway and the flesh under his eyes is dark. His hairline has retreated somewhere north of the White Desert. A couple Eyes of God officers flank him.

“Caine, I have come here out of respect for the fact that you once saved my life,” he says, the second finger of his right hand scratching the corner of his mouth. “But we are not friends, and you can expect no consideration from me. When you turned against Our Lord Ma’elKoth, you sacrificed our friendship as well.”

The finger-scratch at the corner of his mouth is part of the Quiet Cant, the gestural code of the Warrengang he once ran. This gesture means Hostiles present. Play along. Using the second finger means two—he’s saying both of these Eyes of God officers are spies, and he has to play nice in front of them.

From his sweats and jitters, it’s not too much of a stretch to figure that he’s in the early stages of HRVP—which means this bit about the officers being against him might be nothing but a paranoid fantasy. On the other hand, Toa-Sytell used to run the Eyes; it’s also not too much of a stretch to assume that he’d have informers among the officer corps.

“Fuck friendship,” I tell him. A slight motion brings together the tips of my left thumb and forefinger against the blanket that covers my legs: I read you. “I want to make a deal.”

“There is no deal you can make which will save your life,” he replies, scratching the other corner of his mouth with his left thumb: the signal for truth. “You will die on Assumption Day, as planned.”

Yeah, well, to tell you the truth, I’m looking forward to it; the prospect of having years and years to pick through the wreckage of my life is not a cheerful one.

But I will choose my death.

I will not have my death chosen for me.

“I can tell you lots of things,” I offer. “I can tell you why people are killing each other all over this city, and why it’s gonna get a lot worse. I can tell you what you can do about it.”

Now that thumb that had just scratched his mouth taps the same spot twice: Truth?

I just stare at him. Let him fucking wonder.

“And what do you want for this information?”

I take a deep breath and lace my fingers together on the pretext of cracking my knuckles. “I want to go out the same way I came in: right past the Pit.” My thumbs are touching each other for the words I want to go, then separated for out the same way I came, together for in, separate right past, together the Pit.

Majesty squints at me narrowly while he parses the interaction of signal with word: I want to go in the Pit. His eyes bulge like overboiled eggs. “Are you insane?”

He recovers swiftly and gives me the I read you while he smoothly works his reaction into our little vaudeville. “You are the Enemy of God, Caine. It’d take an order from His Radiance himself to set you free. I can’t believe you would ask such a thing.”

I pretend to scratch my chin with my left hand, while I make the truth sign. “Maybe you oughta go ask him, then. You got a monster shitstorm spinning up, Majesty, and I’m the only one who can smell it.”

“Toa-M’Jest,” he corrects me absently, and glances from one Eye officer to the other like he can’t figure out what to do. They both stand at a relaxed parade rest, pretending they’re not paying attention. “How am I supposed to bring this crap before the Patriarch?” he asks, rubbing his hands together nervously. “You insult me, to even make the suggestion.”

His thumbs brush each other on the words insult me.

Okay, I get the picture.

“That’s it?” I say, blinking disbelief at him. “That’s what saving your worthless ungrateful butt buys me? ‘Kiss off, see you in your next life?’ When did you turn into such a suckass?”

“Mind your tone,” he says frostily. “You are speaking to a Duke of the Empire—”

“Duke of the Empire, horseshit. I’m speaking to a fucking ass-bandit. How’d you get Toa-Sytell’s shit stains off your nose? With your tongue?”

He turns red. “Caine—” he begins, but I’m all over this.

“I can guess how you got into the Cabinet. You think if I give that zombie-faced cocksmoke a rimmer every night, he’ll make me a Duke, too? You ever have to play Guess What the Patriarch Had for Dinner?”

The Eyes of God guys make noises like they’re strangling, and they start toward me, but Majesty beats them to it. He leaps forward and gathers my stained tunic in both fists, yanking me up off the cot. “Say what you want about me,” he snarls in my face, “but never insult the Patriarch. Never, you understand? It is only by his leave that I could give you this cell—otherwise you’d be in the Pit. Is that what you want?” He gives me a pretty violent shake, then another. “Is it?”

“Your hospitality can suck shit out of my ass—nah, sorry, don’t want to ruin your appetite before Vespers, huh?”

He throws me back onto the cot hard enough to bounce my head against the wall and shoot stars across my vision. “You have an unusual way of persuading a friend to do you a favor,” he says coldly. “I think I have done you one too many already.”

He turns to one of the Eyes. “Tell the sergeant of the guard that I will pay for this man’s cell no longer. They can throw him in the Pit with the rest of the scum.”

“Hey—” I say uncertainly, “hey, c’mon, Majesty, I was only kidding—”

“My name is Toa-M’Jest,” he says, “not that you’ll have occasion to use it again. I’ll see you on Assumption Day, Caine.” He does a pretty fair military about-face and stalks out of the cell.

“Hey, come on,” I call after him pleadingly as the Eyes follow him out. “Can’t you take a fucking joke?”

They lock the cell door and swing the bar into place.

It’s good to have friends.

12

THE ROAR OF the flames on Commons’ Beach, in the Warrens, around Alien Games, and on the deck of the riverbarge all converged into the purifying blaze of a village high in the God’s Teeth and fused itself with the voice of a mob, of an army, of all the prisoners in the Pit suddenly starting to yell at once, and Deliann discovered that he was awake.

He rubbed at his face, trying to clear eyes that did not focus well; his skin was hot to his touch. The prisoners around him were standing, shouting, but he couldn’t understand what they were saying. “What’s happening?” he asked thickly of no one in particular. “Why is everyone shouting?”

T’Passe looked down when he spoke, and she squatted beside him so that she could be heard above the shouting. “You might want to see this,” she said, waving one hand toward the balcony around the Pit while with the other she took his arm to help him up.

Numbly, he allowed himself to be pulled to his feet, though his legs ached fiercely to be taking his weight once more. Where t’Passe pointed, a pair of guards pumped the rocker arms on the winch, clanking the jointed pawls in and out of ratchet teeth to lower the stairbridge on its long chains. Prisoners pressed aside as its foot settled to the stone floor; at the stairtop stood a pair of grey-robed Donjon trusties, bearing a litter on which lay a dark-haired man. “That’s Caine,” t’Passe said. Her voice hummed with astonished reverence. “That’s Caine. They’re bringing him down.”

Deliann swayed, feverish; the moment oozed, gooey and labile, between the beats of his pulse. Stung, almost blinded, rapt with a shivering perception of being present at an event of unexplainably transcendent significance, as though he had fallen right out of his life and landed inside an epic that no one had read for a thousand years, he leaned on t’Passe’s arm as the trusties turned and slowly bore the litter down the stairbridge.

The man on the litter was dark of hair and swarthy of skin, of athletic build but no longer young: a scatter of grey marbled his ragged black beard. He lay still, eyes closed, limp as a corpse, and the grey cotton pants that covered his motionless legs were stained here and there with crusted blotches of brown and red. This could not be Caine, not truly: he looked so fragile.

So human.

The surge of the shouting took on an ugly edge.

Deliann swung his head from side to side in blank denial; he could not speak, could barely think, his breath strangled by crushing déjà vu. He had seen this man before—

As though all the tales he’d heard of Caine had solidified somehow inside his head, so that he’d somehow known already that the Enemy of Ma’elKoth was only a slender dark-haired man in the grip of middle age, of completely unextraordinary appearance.

But he hadn’t . . .

In his heart, had he ever troubled to examine it, he had carried the same icon of Caine as had everyone else who had listened to the legend but never seen the man: fists like steel gauntlets that can break stone with a single blow, shoulders an axe-handle wide, muscles like boulders, eyes like torches in a cave, the grin of a predator fed upon human blood—

How was it, then, that he could look at this man and feel that he somehow knew him?

He breathed himself into mindview, searching for that current of black Flow of which Kierendal had spoken. At first he could see only scarlet swirls ghosting outward from the shouting prisoners: their mob-anger energy drifting toward the man upon the litter. The man on the litter, impossibly, seemed to have no Shell of his own—but those swirls of scarlet found something to latch on to around him, some shadowy pulse in the air, a vague darkening that deepened as though it fed upon the anger from below.

The shadow didn’t look like a Shell at all; instead of the almost gelatinous solidity that Deliann could usually see filling the air around a living creature, this was smoke and ghost-shade, shifting and twisting, half imaginary, as though it were a trick of his fever-hazed eyes. With concentration, his disciplined mind could struggle through his haze to draw it gradually into focus . . . But as it came clear—swirls of opalescent grey and white within the black, like a semisubstantial gemstone—the Shells of the other prisoners, of the trusties and the guards and Deliann himself, all faded into only a vivid memory.

Flow is Flow: all the colors and shapes of magick are finally one single force, even as all the shapes and colors of energy, from light to steel to the neutron-soup of a collapsar, are finally and fundamentally energy. But even as energy can have wildly differing properties according to its state, so, too, do the states of Flow. The limestone from which the Donjon was carved impedes and reflects the states of Flow used by human and primal thaumaturges, rendering them powerless; but that rock has a Flow of its own, its own note within the song of the Worldmind.

This small dark broken man, it seemed, inhabited a Flow state of a different order than that of those around him.

Deliann stared at the currents of black Flow that surrounded this man. He had heard of such things—had heard of men whose Shells showed black—but he had never seen one; and even as he stared, the small dark broken man stirred and spoke to the trusties who bore his litter. Halfway down the stairbridge, the trusties paused.

The angry, ugly shouting welcome of the prisoners turned to jeers, hoots, and mocking singsong invitations: the baying of human hounds who believe they smell fear.

Ca-aine! Hey, Ca-aine!

Hungry, Caine? I got something to feedja!

Lookit them pants—wet himself already.

I gotcher Holy Stroke right here!

Come on, bring him down! someone shouted at the trusties. Bring him down! and more prisoners took up the call, and more, until their voices washed together into an oceanic roar.

Deliann barely heard it; he was fascinated by the swirl of black Flow. It darkened visibly around the small dark broken man until Deliann wondered if he might have been able to see it even with his normal sight. It poured in through the walls of the Pit as though the rock were empty air, and the small dark broken man seemed to draw it into himself, inhaling it as though taking a deep, deep breath of power.

He used one hand against the litter pole at his side to lever himself up into a sitting position, and he looked down into the jeering, hooting mob of the Pit.

And he smiled.

“Oh, my god,” Deliann whispered. “Oh, my sweet loving god—”

It was the smile that did it: the white teeth wolflike within the fringe of ragged black beard, the eyes that burned with a cold dark flame like obsidian ice.

You are just begging me to kick your fucking ass.

Yes, in fact, I am. That’s exactly right.

And the identical grin, the identical cold dark flame within the eyes, undimmed in a memory more than a quarter of a century old: I’m into it.

The shock of recognition drove him right out of mindview. The instant staggering pain from his legs unstrung him, and he sagged against t’Passe’s arm. “What’s wrong, Deliann?” she asked. “What happened? Are you all right?”

The goddess had spoken of this man, and told Deliann that he wanted to be remembered to him—but Deliann had never dreamed of being reminded like this. He couldn’t even make himself think the name. “That’s not Caine,” Deliann gasped. “It’s not Caine.”

“It is,” t’Passe assured him stolidly.

The small dark broken man lifted his free hand as a fist and slowly, deliberately, as though savoring the sweetness of one moment’s surpassing joy, he turned the back of his fist toward the Pit. He grinned down on the hostile mob.

And then he gave them the finger.

There came a second of silence, as though everyone together had drawn a single breath, and in that silence his voice could be heard clearly: cheerfully brisk, hard as flint and dark as burnt coffee. “Fuck you all, shitheels,” he said. “You want some of this? Step up and take a fucking bite.”

Deliann barely heard the howls that answered; that voice struck sparks within his mind, and Deliann flashed on him.

13

THE FLASH TOOK him instantly, involuntarily: it crushed his bones between its teeth and sucked out their marrow, shattered his skull like a nutshell, drew out his guts with strokes of a barbed-wire tongue. Kris Hansen had written, What the life you have chosen to lead will cost you, I can’t begin to imagine.

He no longer had to imagine.

The flash whipped him to a day years before: it crumpled him on arena sand with a cooling corpse beneath his back and a sword through his spine. With one hand he took the hilt of that sword to trigger its magick, while with the other he pulled the neck of a traitor across the blade. The traitor’s head came off in his hand, and he flipped the head like a ball into the lap of the god who knelt alongside. The god stammered out the words Hari had died to hear, the words that would save him and the goddess he loved—and as the prismatic haloes of the Winston Transfer limned the edges of the world, to draw him and anyone he touched back into hell, he reached out . . . and took that kneeling god’s hand.

Why?

To this day, Hari had never thought to wonder.

In the answer to that simple question might be the central truth of his life.

Deliann remembered, all those years ago, feeling that this man had been more real than he, that the murderous, charismatic streetpunk he had known was in touch with some fundamental structure of existence; he recalled dreaming of touching that reality himself. Now he had: a spiral galaxy of pain and loss wheeled within his chest.

The flash ended in the same instant it began. Deliann, breathless, clung to the woman at his side. Above, the small dark broken man waved negligently at the trusties like a noble directing bearers of a sedan chair, and they started down the stairbridge once more.

Deliann put his lips against t’Passe’s ear to be heard through the shouts of the prisoners. “Get me to him. Please, t’Passe,” he said. “We have to protect him—they’ll tear him apart!”

She shook her head and leaned close to shout in his ear in turn. “It’s already handled!” she said. “I have men waiting to receive the Caine at the foot of the stairs.”

“We should go—we should be there. We have to be there,” Deliann insisted.

T’Passe cocked her head, giving him a long slow considering look before answering, more quietly now. “And what is it that you think you can do for the Caine? Deliann, you can barely stand.”

“All right,” Deliann said, sagging. “All right, but—”

He looked at the roof, the floor, the prisoners around them, anywhere but her. Finally, he said, “It’s not what I can do for him; it’s what he can do for me. I need to talk to him, just for a minute.” He hated how desperate—how wounded—this made him sound, but t’Passe either didn’t notice or did not care. He could not tell her: Because he once told me I was the bravest son of a bitch he ever met. He could not tell her: Because I deserted him twenty-seven years ago. “You keep asking me what I want. I want . . . I need . . . to talk with that man. Maybe just for a minute; I have to talk to him.”

T’Passe squinted at him as though trying to see something tiny and dark inside his head; then her face cleared into a sudden smile. “All right,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind a word with him myself.”

14

WITH T’PASSE TO elbow her ungentle way through the press, the two of them reached the ring of grimly jubilant Cainists who held back the other prisoners only a moment after the trusties had ascended once again. There had been some scuffling—a few in the crowd were already bleeding, as were a couple of the Cainists—and the prisoners were giving them a little room, now. The trusties had already taken the empty litter back up the stairs, and the guards above began winching the bridge back up into place.

The ring of Cainists parted to allow t’Passe and Deliann within.

The small dark broken man sat on the stone, his legs splayed nervelessly before him. He scanned the ring of Cainists around him like a wolf in the midst of a herd of caribou; when he looked up at t’Passe, he scowled and waved irritably at the backs of the men and women who protected him. “You the head freak of this sideshow?”

“I am t’Passe of Narnen Hill, formerly Vice Ambassador to the Infinite Court,” she said stolidly. “I do not know what a sideshow is, but if I take your meaning correctly, then yes, I am the . . . head freak.”

“Monastic,” he grunted. “I knew from the way you argue: like you’re teaching half-witted kids.”

“You could hear?”

He pulled his lips back over his teeth. “I’ve been praying that somebody would kill you.”

“At the Festival of the Assumption, your prayer will be answered. Does this please you, to have the power of your faith so amply demonstrated?”

“Ask me then,” he said, and leaned to one side, bending his neck so that he could see around her broad body. “And who’s your puppy, here? What’s his story?”

T’Passe shifted her weight, and his gaze met Deliann’s for the first time. Those black eyes widened, then narrowed. “Well,” he said. “Fuck me like a goat.”

“Hari,” Deliann said breathlessly. Even now, he couldn’t make himself believe this was happening. “It’s you, isn’t it? You really are. You’re Hari Michaelson—”

A melancholy half smile slowly developed under those narrowed eyes. “Been a long time, Kris.”

The shouts of the prisoners had already begun to fade toward the usual undertone of grumbling, but the roaring in Deliann’s ears made up the difference. Under that roar was a kind of slack-jawed wonder: the meeting of their eyes had peeled back the layers of Deliann’s life. It was as though the past twenty-seven years had been only preparation, training, rehearsal, for a part he could only flee then, but now, finally, had the strength to play.

I can do this, he thought. At last, I’m ready.

“Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, it has been a long time. I’m not Kris Hansen anymore, Hari. You should call me Deliann.”

“Yeah? Like the Mithondionne prince, huh?”

“That would be me,” Deliann said.

“You’re the Changeling Prince?” Hari shook his head, smiling as though at some private joke.

I suppose you could say I’m the Changeling King, Deliann thought, but he said, “Something like that.”

“No shit? Well, all right, then.”

The small dark broken man leaned to one side, taking the weight off one hand so that he could offer it. “Pleased to meetcha, Deliann,” he said. “I guess you can call me Caine.”

“And so: you are,” Deliann murmured. “You really are, after all: you’re Caine.”

Hari shrugged, and his fingers tangled themselves in the stained cotton breeches covering his motionless legs. He shook himself like a man holding off a nightmare. “Yeah,” he said. “I’d love to play catch-up for a couple hours, but I got a move to make while I still have everybody’s attention. Tell me one thing.”

“What do you need to know?”

He flexed his hands and cracked his knuckles one by one: a series of flat, deliberate clicks of lethal intent, like bullets being loaded into a pistol.

“Who do I have to kill to get a fucking drink around here?”

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.

Now, it came to pass that one particular man had run nearly his entire alloted span, and he had never known defeat; for him, the only defeat was surrender. It soon followed that the king of the human gods undertook to teach this particular man the meaning of defeat. And in the end—the common end, for all who contend with gods—this particular man surrendered, and died.

But among the wise, the tale of this dead man does not end in death.

This dead man lay unquiet in the grave; the earth’s embrace could not hold him. His corpse shifted and writhed, and moaned with the memory of life.

One day a wanderer sought a path out from a dark and mazy wood. This wanderer followed a wind from beyond the world, and that wind led him to this unquiet grave. The wanderer looked upon the grave and spoke to the corpse within it, saying: Dig deeper, and find a darker tomb.

For the wanderer was the crooked knight, and he had learned that only by descending can one rise.