SEVENTEEN

THEY CARRY ME down the steps until they find a Shafter who doesn’t move when the officer kicks her; good odds she’s dead, from the bloat of her belly, but it’s hard to be sure. There’s so much filth caked on her skin that the lamp can’t pick up postmortem lividity. She might only be catatonic. They unlock her wrist from its wall shackle, and drag her down toward the sump at the foot of the Shaft.

The officer notices my gaze following her. He smirks.

“Yeah, I heard,” he says smugly. “That’s how you got out last time. That’s probably how you’ll go out this time, too—it’s just that they got iron bars set in the stone down there now. With just about this much space between them.” He shows me with one hand, like he’s holding a loaf of invisible French bread. “So we got a new piece of equipment, too, right next to the sump: a sausage grinder. One of those bigass ones. We bought it off Milo, the livery guy. Big enough to take a half-ton porker. Plenty big enough for you.”

Sooner than I would have liked, the gleam from the guard’s lamp picks up the grinder’s black-crusted shape: a stone idol, maw open for offerings. The guard shoves the woman in head-first and inches the wheel ahead a few times until the teeth engage in her hair; then he lets go of her torso and cranks for all he’s worth. It’s geared way down, to be used by one man, so he has to yank that wheel around a few times before the meat paste it makes of her starts to churn out its ass end and drip into the sump.

The hot billow of stench that rolls up the Shaft is actually a little comforting: at least I know she was already dead.

The detail officer unlocks my manacles and says, “Strip down,” and then he whacks me one after I again suggest he should fuck off. He cuts away my shirt with a small hooked knife that might have been designed for exactly that use, and then we have a bit of low comedy while they try to strip the breeches off my useless dangling legs, until the officer slaps their hands aside and goes after my pants with the knife. If I had a sense of humor left, I’d get a chuckle out of the look on his face when he discovers another layer under the breeches: those burlap bandages of Deliann’s, now dark and stiff with dried pus. He cuts those off as well, then makes one of his flunkies bundle them up and carry them. “Right-handed or left?”

This time, I don’t even have to speak: the look on my face is eloquent enough to earn me another whack.

They drop me in a heap in the dead woman’s muck, lock the wall shackle around my right wrist, and tramp off up the broad, shallow steps of stone, taking their lamp’s paltry glow with them. The last of the light vanishes above, leaving me in the dark with the whimpers and screams and soft hoarse giggling.

And the smell.

I know this smell.

I have drowned in this before.

It’s the smell of 3F in the Mission District: third floor in the back, farthest from the stairwell, two rooms and one walk-in closet barely big enough for an eight-year-old boy to have a cot.

It’s the smell of the chemical toilet inside Rover’s seat.

It’s Dad’s smell.

The slow shit-slickened slide—

I have been eaten by my nightmare.

The mouth of Hell has yawned beneath my feet, and I will fall forever.

2

I SEE THE darkness of the hours and days before me, identical to whatever hours and days behind: no light to define the world, no silence. Eternal night with staring eyes, straining against the shimmering dark. Sometimes people talk to me, and sometimes I answer.

Not people. Shafters. We’re none of us people anymore. The next guy upslope has dysentery, and every time he lets go more acid shit he starts to cry. He keeps telling me how sorry he is.

I tell him we’re all sorry.

I don’t tell anyone who I am. Who I was.

I mean, how can I?

How do I know?

No sleep. No sleep ever again: the screaming never stops. They will scream until their anguish erodes the last of my sanity. That’s what I tell myself, but I know I do sleep . . .

Because every once in a while, I awaken from a memory of light.

I awaken from the touch of my daughter’s hand, from the scent of my wife’s skin. I awaken to the endless night and stench and screams. Sometimes beside me there is a wooden trencher with broth-soaked bread or a bit of cheese, that I can find by touch over the stone. I eat with shit-caked hand.

Once or twice I’m awake when the trusty slouches down the stairs with his lamp in hand: he’s some kind of wetbrain, mismatched drooping eyes and a line of drool trailing from slackly open lips. He looks at us, but I cannot imagine what his semi-functional brain makes of what he sees.

Here in the Shaft, I might slip from life to death seamlessly, never realizing that I have passed; how should death be different? The funny thing is, I’m pretty much okay with this. More than okay.

This is no demon-drained numbness. This isn’t even a grip-jawed I can handle it. It’s a feeling warm and chill, a tingling of skin and sweet taste on the tongue, an expansion of heart within my chest so alien to me that some hours or days or years pass before I can really figure out what it is.

It’s happiness, I guess.

I can’t remember the last time I felt this good.

I am, right now—lying naked in the pool of a dead woman’s shit, chained to stone, gangrene eating my rotten-meat legs—as happy as I have ever been.

Maybe it’s the smell.

3

NOW THAT THE stench of the Shaft—of my life—lives inside my nose and my mouth, now that it’s soaked in through my pores and oozed around my cortical folds, I don’t really mind it.

It reminds me . . .

I can’t draw the memory all at once. I tease it out, bit by bit. After a day or a month, I have it all together. I remember what the smell reminds me of.

It reminds me of the day I came home walking funny.

This is the smell of 3F that day when I slunk through the door, maybe thirteen years old, with a severely bruised rectum and a storm-surge of tears gathering behind my eyes.

Dad was having one of his better days, and he was trying to clean out the room off the kitchen where he slept. He’d been in one of his paranoid delusional phases for a while, saving his shit in plastic bags because he was afraid his “enemies” had been trapping the hall toilet we shared with 3A, B, C, D, E, and G. He thought these imaginary bad guys could separate out his stools and use some kind of whackass SF machine to analyze them until they could tell what he’d been thinking; he was convinced they would steal the ideas of some book he was secretly writing.

That day he was pretty lucid: he’d been trucking the bags down to the storm drain in the alley below the aluminum sill of my window. I guess even his imaginary bad guys would have a hard time figuring out which shit was his, once it was down in the sewer.

Anyway, one of the bags had ripped open and slopped across the kitchen floor, and when I came in he was trying, in his dizzy, blurred, ineffectual way, to scoop up the turds with a dustpan and pour them into another bag. All I wanted that day was to make it to my little closet and curl up on my cot and forget how scared I was for a while, but somehow I’m never that lucky.

Or maybe I’m always luckier than that.

After a few years, it gets hard to tell the difference.

Dad grabbed me when I tried to hustle past and told me I had to help him clean this up. I remember vividly the pain of trying to get down on my hands and knees, and even as crazy as Dad was, my screwed-shut face and old-man moves woke something inside him. He put his arms around me and held me to his chest and asked me what had happened in a real calm, gentle voice like he really cared about the answer, and I burst into tears.

There was this kid named Foley. Toothpick Foley. Big kid, maybe sixteen or seventeen, twice my size. He was a courier for a black-market chit trader named Jurzscak, which made him kind of a big deal on my block. Foley always had a couple of guys hanging around him, trying to pick up the odd food or booze chit by gophering and general stooging.

I thought, in those days, that Foley had a pretty good line of work; I’d been supporting Dad and myself as a burglar, being small and agile and not overly concerned with the niceties of personal property, but it doesn’t take too many close calls with big mean drunk Laborers coming through the front door while you go out the back window to make a guy think that there’s gotta be an easier way to make a living.

So I went to work for Jurzscak. My whole life, nobody ever called me lazy; I hustled my ass off for that guy, and he was starting to toss some of the perks and goodies my way that used to go toward Toothpick, and Toothpick took exception to this.

He and a couple of his boys cornered me in an alley and got me down on the pavement.

I don’t remember Foley’s first name. Everybody called him Toothpick—I think it was for his skinny little needledick, but I never knew for sure. When he realized he was never gonna be able to shake the name, he’d decided to attach it to something else: he started carrying around this bigass sheath knife, with a blade something like nine or ten inches long, and started calling it his toothpick.

That’s what he tried to jam up my ass.

He didn’t bother to take down my pants; this was just a warning. While his boys held me down, he took the point of the sheathed blade and stuck it against my asshole and just leaned on it. It’s a pain that does not bear describing.

He told me in very clear words of one syllable that I should get my ass off Jurzscak’s team, or next time he sees me, he sticks it in up to the hilt.

No sheath.

I don’t think I ever did manage to explain it to Dad. I couldn’t get the whole story out between my sobs, and anyway there were no words for how scared I was. The whole long limping walk home, I couldn’t think about anything but the ice-slide of razor-sharp steel up my butt, slicing through me from the inside out—

I’ve never been so afraid of anything in my life, before or since.

Dad just held me, and rocked me in his crazy stinking shit-smeared arms until I was almost calm again. Then he asked me what I was going to do about it. I told him I was going to quit. What else could I do? I had to quit, because if I didn’t, Toothpick would kill me. What Dad said then changed my life.

He said, “He might kill you anyway.”

I thought about that for a while, until I started to shake all over again. I had just barely enough control of my voice to ask Dad what I should do.

“Do what you need to do, Hari,” he said. “Do what will let you look in the mirror and like what you see. This boy might kill you. He might not. A building might have fallen on him on his way home tonight. Tomorrow, you might get caught in a crossfire, and then you’ll never have to worry about Toothpick again. You can’t control the future, Killer. All you can control is what you do, and the only thing that’s important is that you feel good about it. Life’s hard enough without going through it ashamed of yourself. Do something you can be proud of, and let the rest go.”

The words of a madman.

But he was my father, and I believed him.

The next day I reported in to Jurzscak as usual. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And instead of hustling straight out, I hung around for a few minutes until Toothpick showed up.

I’ll never forget the look on his face.

He stared at me, blank as the moon. He couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing. He was four years older than me, he outweighed me by a hundred pounds, and he’d seen that unmistakable stark terror on my face just the day before. He couldn’t bend his mind around a reality in which I wasn’t running away from him.

While he stood there trying to figure out what the hell was going on, I pulled two and a half feet of copper pipe out of my pants and played teeball with his kneecap.

He went down screaming; Jurzscak popped up yelling; Jurzscak’s boys all jumped at me; I was spinning and swinging my pipe and howling that if anybody wanted some of this, they should step up to the plate. Toothpick managed to get his blade out and lunged at me off his good leg. I let him have another stroke right on the top of his head and he went down hard, writhing and moaning, blood going all over the damn place, and Jurzscak finally managed to get the pipe out of my hand and he hit me in the belly with it hard enough to fold me over gagging.

“Michaelson, you crazy little fuck,” he said breathlessly, “what in the name of crap is going through that shithouse rat you use for a brain?”

When I got half my own breath back, I told him. “Toothpick said the next time he saw me he’d jam his blade up my butt,” I said. “I believed him.”

So Jurzscak had a talk with Toothpick, which ended up with Toothpick’s shattered kneecap bearing the weight of Jurzscak’s shoe and Toothpick finally mumbling out the truth through tears as bitter as mine had been the day before. “But it was just a joke,” he sobbed. “We was just kidding around.”

“You were?” I said, thinking Ask my asshole how funny it was. “Hey, me, too. Just kidding, Toothpick. No hard fucking feelings, huh?”

Then Jurzscak turned on me, weighing that pipe with his hand. “I won’t say you didn’t have reason,” he told me a little sadly, apologizing in advance for the stomping he was about to inflict, “but that don’t mean I can let it go, either. You know the rules, Michaelson: Two of my boys have a problem, they bring it to me.”

Nothing Jurzscak could do scared me half as much as what I’d faced to walk in there that day. So I looked him in the eye and said, “Isn’t that what I just did?”

He thought about that for a little while; then he nodded. “I guess you coulda snuck him, you wanted. But why the pipe, kid? Why not just tell me?”

“My word against his?” I asked. “You would have believed me?”

He didn’t answer, but then he didn’t have to.

“The pipe,” I told him, “was to let you know I was serious.”

I worked for Jurzscak for most of the next year, until he pissed off the wrong guy and Soapy broke up his gang and put him under the yoke. Toothpick was, as they say, a dead issue: In the Mission District Labor Clinic—the same one where my mother died—the meditech got so interested trying to reconstruct Toothpick’s knee that she missed the slow hemorrhage inside his skull, and Toothpick shuffled off this mortal coil about three the next morning.

Toothpick Foley was the first guy I ever killed. Didn’t even mean to; it just happened that way. I knocked him on the head, and a few hours later he died. Like the Cainists say, you can’t unring the bell. Not that I’d want to.

Christ, I was strong in those days.

What the hell happened to me?

4

THAT STATUE STAYS in my head: that David. The more I think about it, the more it makes a creepy kind of sense. David was, after all, the Beloved of God, who fell from grace—

Over a woman.

It’s not exactly a secret that Tan’elKoth’s always had a little thing for me.

Not sexual—I’m pretty sure that sex was one of those things, like eating and sleep, that he gave up to become Ma’elKoth. But I know he is capable of love; he loved Berne. And he hinted to me, all those years ago, that he’d turned to Berne because he couldn’t find me. He hinted that I’d been his first choice, all along. And, Jesus, the way Shanna felt about him, you could say she was jealous. And he despised her; he never even tried to pretend he didn’t.

Is that what built this whole pile of shit? A goddamn love triangle?

It makes a certain amount of sense.

Even in For Love of Pallas Ril, you can see it: He was trying to get me to choose him over her—over anyone. And on Earth he moved into that Other Woman position in our lives—

Now that I think about it, he could be behind the whole goddamn thing. The way Garrette was reading off those cards—that stuff sounded like it might have come right out of Tan’elKoth’s mouth. He could have done it all out of jealousy and revenge. It hangs together.

But, you know what?

All these stories—the stories that I tell myself, to try and understand why what happened happened; the stories that are all I have of my life—

They all hang together.

The longer I think about it, the more different ways I can tell it. It’s like what Raithe was talking about: He had found a way to trace everything in his life, good or bad, back to Caine. He could just as easily have turned it sideways, and traced everything back to Ma’elKoth, or to Pallas Ril, or to the goddamn weather twenty-seven years ago Sunday.

Sure, this could have happened because the big bastard was in love with me. I can also swing the same facts around and make it all happen because I wanted to play at being Caine. I can make it all happen because Raithe wanted revenge for his parents. I can make it all happen because a pack of damn fools decided that Caine was really the Devil, or because Kris Hansen wanted to turn himself into a goddamn elf.

Shit, I can make it all happen because Toothpick Foley bruised my butthole.

Like that statue: It’s an insult. It’s a piece of advice. It’s a love letter. What it means is a function of who I am when I look at it.

What anything means depends on how you tell the story.

5

JESUS, I REMEMBER—

I remember crouching in the supply closet inside the Language Arts shitter, waiting for Kris’ setup to draw in Ballinger. I remember how dark it was—just a single line of white light under the door from the shitter’s fluorescents—and the smell, the opposite smell from the Shaft: harsh chemical tang of cleaning solvents leaching from the ruck of mops and brooms and the rag-draped bucket. I remember having to keep still, so I wouldn’t knock anything over or kick something and give the game away; we couldn’t clear a space for me in there, because open floor inside that crowded supply closet might look suspicious to an investigator. I remember how hard it was to breathe in there with the smothering walls close around my face, and how I started doing long slow-motion kneebends to keep my legs from cramping up.

I remember the prickly ball of needles that rolled over my whole body when I heard Ballinger’s voice, and the hot drop of my stomach when I realized he’d brought backup.

I remember thinking, So: there’s four of them. All right. Four Combat cavemen against a pair of Shitschool pussies; we were probably both gonna die, and who cares? Nothing they could do to me would be as bad as Toothpick’s knife going into my asshole. And I knew that if I stayed in that closet and listened to Kris die, I could never look myself in the mirror and like what I saw.

If I ever get a chance, I should tell him the story of how my father and Toothpick Foley saved his life. Shit. I wish I could tell Dad that story, too.

If any of that other shit hadn’t happened to me—if my father hadn’t gone crazy, if my mother hadn’t died and left me running wild on the District streets, if Dad hadn’t beat the snot out of me every other day, if Toothpick hadn’t gone for me, basically my whole fucked-up life—I would have stayed in there. All the bad shit that ever happened to me had made me into a nineteen-year-old kid who could jump out against four guys without even thinking about it.

And I knew it. In those days, I knew it. I even said it to Kris once: I had a great childhood. That’s what Kris was talking about—that’s exactly what Kris was talking about. Scars are the key to power.

Each of us is the sum of our scars.

Because if any of it had been any different, I never would have gotten the chance to be Caine.

Kris had it right. I should have taken my own goddamn advice. I never wanted to be a fucking Actor, not really. All I ever wanted to be was Caine.

How’s this for irony: I can see now that Caine is who I already was.

That scene with Jurzscak and Toothpick Foley? Caine, right down to the dialogue. At the Conservatory, Kris could see it already. “When you think about hurting people, when you really let your passion run, you want to do it by hand.”

He understood me better than I did.

He probably still does.

I mean, is that fucker ever wrong about anything?

“No, no, no. You ended up here because you were trying to not be Caine.

“What if it’s Hari Michaelson who is the fictional character? What if the middle-aged paraplegic is just a role that Caine plays, so that he can get along on Earth?”

6

DAMN.

God damn.

That Kris, he is one scary son of a bitch.

Because when I think about it that way, I can see it perfectly. I can see the exact moment when Hari Michaelson was born.

I was just out of my freemod debriefing: two weeks of interrogation by Studio brainsuckers going over everything that had happened to me over my almost three years of freemod training at Garthan Hold abbey and elsewhere. I wasn’t the first Actor to study with the Monasteries, but I was the first to be sworn to Brotherhood. They made me an Esoteric even though I sucked at mindview. I didn’t need magick to be good at stealing stuff and hurting people.

So the Studio decided they wanted me to rise within the Monasteries for a while. They wanted to feature me as an assassin. I wasn’t into this shit at all; I’ve never been good at taking orders. I wanted to do straight Adventures, explore, see strange creatures, and hunt for treasure and all that kind of crap. I was even thinking about maybe going pirate—y’know, the high seas and shiver me timbers and island girls and shit. But the Studio wanted an assassin.

I was more than half ready to tell them to fuck off. Assassins are boring. I’d known a couple of contractors when I was little, and met a few more while I worked for Vilo. It’s plodding, methodical work. Real killers are not stylish, or dashing, or even imaginative. They’re more like accountants with guns. If you do your job right, there’s no drama in it at all. Who wants that kind of life?

They and Vilo had a lot of money invested in me, and I figured that gave me enough leverage to get what I wanted. Then Vilo took me for a ride in his Rolls and explained how the world works.

He started off trying to placate me. The Studio didn’t want me to be a real assassin, he tells me. They wanted me to be a Hollywood-style assassin: kind of a high-fantasy James Bond. Sure, they say that now, I’m thinking, but five years down the road, when my audience numbers suck wind from all the Monastic scutwork I’m doing, they won’t be talking to me about James Bond anymore. They won’t be talking to me at all.

Being generally full of piss in those days, I wasn’t gonna do it. Let them shitcan me; who cares? Contract violation would get me busted back to Labor, but that didn’t scare me at all. Shit, with the skills I’d learned between the Conservatory and the Garthan Hold abbey, I could drop right back into the District and make a solid living as freelance muscle, maybe end up a neighborhood boss and not have to kiss any Studio ass in the first place.

Vilo, though, didn’t get to be the Happy Billionaire by being stupid. He had me tagged and bagged before I even knew I was hurt. The Rolls touched down in a nice, quiet Labor neighborhood, mostly twencen sixflats and courtyard buildings—light-years better than a Temp ghetto like the District—and took me to Dad’s apartment.

I hadn’t seen Dad in six years, since I blew the District when I was sixteen to go work for Vilo. The last time we’d been in a room together, it was a roach-infested shithole, garbage six inches deep covering the floors, one whole room converted into Dad’s personal septic tank and the damn place only had three rooms to begin with. The last time we’d been in a room together, he’d tried to open my skull with a pipe wrench.

Where he lived now was a pristine one bedroom, with cream walls and honest-to-Christ wooden molding around the doors and windows. Curtains. Furniture. A dining-room table. A refrigerator with real food in it, a kitchen sanitary as a surgical theater. A bathroom—his own private toilet, right inside the apartment, and even a stall that would measure out ten minutes of hot shower every day.

And Dad.

Dad: shaved and dressed in clothes that were clean and whole, if not actually new. With hair gone entirely grey and cut close to his scalp, and the light of reason in his eyes. Dad: who could shake my hand and tell me he hoped we could get to know each other again, now that he was sane. Who could put his arms around me and smell like a man, instead of a slaughterhouse.

I don’t even remember what we talked about that day; I was lost in marveling at this man who was simultaneously so Dad and so alien. He almost made me feel like I was five years old again, like he was normal and Mom might just walk into the room and give me a hug.

After we left, Vilo took off his velvet glove.

Vilo, y’see, took real good care of his undercastes. He was famous for it. He’d started looking after my father only a few months after I went to work for him. Turned out that Dad’s condition wasn’t curable, but it was treatable; with the right combination of drugs and therapy, he was able to hold down a steady job as a net research assistant—could pay for that apartment and even get a decent meal at a diner every once in a while.

Vilo explained to me that Dad’s employment was contingent upon mine. If I screwed him on my contract, he’d cut Dad loose. It wouldn’t take a week for Dad to be back in 3F, or worse.

So I swallowed my piss and did what I was told. It was the only way I could keep that smell out of my head.

That’s who Hari Michaelson is, I guess: he’s the guy who will do anything to stay out of 3F.

No, Hari’s more than that. He’s the good guy, I think.

He’s the guy who thinks that if he does what he’s told, the people he loves will all be okay. He’s that profoundly unhappy man who sits at his desk at 3 A.M., head full of bitter smoke from the ashes of his heart. He’s the guy that Shanna wanted me to be.

He’s the model for David the King.

Funny: Shanna fell in love with Caine, but she couldn’t live with him. She could live with Hari. Did she love him? I really can’t remember.

If only I could ask her.

7

ALL THE DAMAGE we did each other—

Christ, I remember the first time I saw her: at the table in that conference room at Studio Center. I had just come off back-to-back megahits, Retreat from the Boedecken and Last Stand at Ceraeno; and I had just been approached by Hannto the Scythe to locate and recover Dal-kannith’s crown. Kollberg had decided to put together a serial Adventure, a multiparter featuring an entire team of Actors with me playing lead. There were six of us, and Kollberg had even set up a romance for me—he was always on my back to put more sex into my Adventures. I was supposed to spend my idle hours dallying with Olga Bergman, a big gorgeous Nordic blonde who played a Khryllian knight named Marade. Olga was a good kid, a rising star with a booming laugh and a spectacular Ms. Olympia physique, and she was more than willing to play along.

But Shanna was sitting at the end of that table.

She was shy for an Actor, at least in those days. Reserved. Intense. A little spooky.

Luminous.

They all knew me, of course; I was the hottest property in the whole Studio System. They’d all rented Last Stand, and every one of them had to tell me how great they thought it was. Standard showbiz stroke-up. All through the whole meet-and-greet, they were laughing and joking and asking each other which was their favorite part. All but Shanna. She never said a word.

When Kollberg himself finally pushed her on it, she said quietly, “My favorite part isn’t on the cube.”

She blushed, and dropped her eyes like she was embarrassed. Kollberg didn’t let up. Finally, she revealed her shameful secret: “My favorite part is thinking about all the people in Ankhana who get to go to bed at night, who get to get up in the morning, who get to kiss each other and hug their children. All the people who will never know what you did to save their lives.”

“Ah, grow up,” I told her. “I didn’t do it for them. I did it for audience share.”

She shrugged. “They’ll never know that, either,” she said, and gave me that incendiary little half smile of hers that made my chest go tight and my heart stutter, and I was pretty well done for.

The shitty thing is, we never had a chance. If we’d lived together for a hundred years, she never could have comprehended 3F. I look back on my life with her, and I cannot believe I didn’t understand what was happening to me.

I wanted a world where there is no such thing as 3F—where it belonged to the frozen past, entombed in millennial dust, never to rise again. I wanted my world forever purged of that smell.

So I built my own 3F and called it the Abbey, and locked myself in, and tried to pretend I was happy about it. Shit, the Abbey was worse. My old room was something I could run from. I could fight the smell.

The Abbey had me fighting to stay there.

Now that I’m down here, now that 3F is my whole reality in the bottomless stench of the Shaft, I’m so much happier it makes me want to laugh out loud. I can’t remember the last time I was this happy.

No, wait: Yes, I can.

I remember—

8

A FEW OF the costumed mock revelers see me now, and still themselves, hands drifting toward folds of clothing for the weapons concealed there.

I keep walking toward them, slowly, offering a friendly grin.

The golden sand of the arena crunches as it shifts slightly under my boot heels. The sun is hot, and it strikes a reddish glow onto the upper reaches of my vision, where it glistens in my eyebrows.

All my doubts, all my questions fly away like doves in a conjurer’s trick. Adrenaline sings in my veins, a melody as familiar and comforting as a lullaby. The thunder of blood in my ears buries all sound except for the slow, measured crunchch . . . crunchch of my footsteps.

Toa-Sytell sees me now; his pale eyes widen and his mouth works. He tugs upon Ma’elKoth’s arm, and the Emperor’s head swivels toward me with the slow-motion menace of the turret of a tank—

That was the last time I was truly, utterly, completely happy: seven years ago, on the sand at Victory Stadium.

Happy. For the same reason I’m happy now.

I knew I would die there.

It’s not death that cheers me, though; it’s not death that draws a stinging smile from my battered mouth. It’s that I get to die on Overworld. It’s that I don’t have to go home.

I’ll never have to go home again.

Shit, y’know what?

I even kinda like the smell.

It smells like running the streets on a San Francisco summer night; it smells like stickball and fistfights, like rolling ragfaces for loose change and dodging down blind alleys to skip over a fence one step ahead of the cops.

That’s why I’m happy.

Oh, Shanna . . .

If only—

That’s one bell I wish I could unring.

I wish I could have gotten to this while Shanna was still alive. I wish I could have shared it with her. She might not have understood—shit, I know she wouldn’t have understood—but I’d like to think she would have been glad to see me happy.

I’m gonna die a free man. Is anything better than that?

I’m free.

9

I THINK OF Kris, and his stuff about names. I think I understand a little better what he meant. Dad once told me that I am more than Caine, and he was right. But he didn’t understand that I am more than Hari Michaelson, as well. Hari was a good guy. He loved his wife, loved his daughter, loved his father and this world. He was in over his head, that’s all. This wasn’t his fault. He didn’t have a talent for it.

He never really had a chance.

I never gave him one.

The corner of the manacle around my right wrist makes an imperfect tool, and I have no light by which to work. On the other hand, I have nothing but time. The wall of the Shaft is that same porous limestone, much softer than the iron that binds me to it. I work slowly, and do a good job, even though I’m working entirely by feel.

Once in a while the trusty comes by with the soaked bread that passes for dinner, and by the dim flicker from his lamp’s flame I can see my handiwork grow.

It reads simply:

HARI MICHAELSON

And a pair of dates.

The first is the day Vilo took me to see my father.

The second is my best guess at today’s.

He deserves an epitaph, but I don’t scratch one in the stone.

I am his epitaph.

10

THE WORLD WANTS to call me Caine. But that does not encompass me. I must remember that Caine is the name for only part of what I am. Someday, that name will grow to name me more truly. Right now, it names all of me that I need. Caine is an Actor. An actor.

One who acts.

I need something to work on. Something to try to do.

To be shackled here in the Shaft, dying—it’s a gift: I don’t have to waste time trying to make up my mind. There is only one thing I can even try.

Kris said that black Flow comes through even this Donjon stone. That it comes through everyone; that we draw it and direct it without even knowing what we do. That it is energy in its most fundamental form. Energy is energy, he said. No reason why Flow can’t go through wires and microcircuits, I guess. It only needs to be properly tuned.

Calling upon skills buried for a quarter of a century, I curl both of my hands into the Three Finger mudra and begin to cycle my breathing in that ancient, ancient rhythm. Mindview won’t come right away, but Caine can find it. Years and years ago, he was trained for it. I was trained for it.

I will find it.

That middle-aged paraplegic was just a part I played, so I could get along on Earth. I don’t need him anymore.

I will move my fucking legs.

THE PART-TIME GODDESS passed into the lands of the dead, and there she strove with monsters. She brought with her the dark angel’s spawn, and the man who had been a god. They fought sometimes beside her, and sometimes against her, for in that land of shadow and illusion one cannot always distinguish friend from foe.

In the lands of the dead, there is only one certainty. It is the certainty of self. This is why tales and legends people those lands with monsters.

It has been written that when one contends with monsters, one risks becoming a monster. This is not true.

The true risk is that one might discover the monster one has always been.