TWENTY-ONE

WHEN HIS CONSCIOUSNESS intersected the world once more, he lay prone on dirty flagstones, his face turned to the left, rocks warm as blood digging into his cheek. Flame roared on all sides. Someone with agonizingly strong hands compressed his back to pump river water out of his lungs. He opened his mouth to speak, but instead retched forth a gout of water mixed with blood. It splashed across his right arm, his right hand, and he made a fist.

“I think he’s awake,” someone said.

For a gooey eternity, he could not recall who or where he was. He had dreamed of being Caine, of lying crippled in his own filth. The flame-streaked night offered no clue, and the feculent stench of the Donjon packed his head. Now, a bitter reek overpowered the outhouse smell: a sharp, throat-scorching tang not unlike the smoke from the Artan mining machines in Transdeia, when they chew away the mountainsides.

Those strong hands rolled him onto his back. He stared up past a pair of unfamiliar faces into billows of black smoke that smothered the stars. “Ambassador,” someone said, his voice raised over the liquid roar of nearby flame. “Master Raithe—can you hear me? We must move you. How is your breathing?”

That’s right, he thought. Raithe. I am Raithe.

He struggled for air, but he could not tell if this came of water still in his lungs or of the baking heat of the fire around him. A swamp belch of borrowed memory bubbled up from the quagmire of bruise inside his head, but it burst and vanished before he could fully grasp it.

“Raithe, you must speak now,” a new voice said, a voice raw and ragged as though torn by screams.

A silhouette shambled into view above him, then squatted at his side. Scarlet firelight lit half this man’s ravaged face from below and threw the rest into impenetrable shadow. Grey stubble prickled from his jaw, and his visible eye stared round and red as though he struggled never to blink. He wore the robes of a Monastic Ambassador, now stained and torn and streaked with filth. “I lost three friars to the burning oil when we pulled you from the river,” he rasped. “Three good men. The last good men. The last men I could trust. Now I have you, and I will have my answer.”

He leaned close and chewed at Raithe with starving eyes. “What is the significance of the sword? What did it do to you? What are you, and what have you done to the city?”

Raithe’s mind stumbled spastically from word to word. He could make sense of none of this.

“Master Damon,” a friar said warningly. “We must move. We must leave. Our lives are in danger here.”

Damon’s teeth showed yellow and savage as he turned on the man. “I will hear this! You can’t stop me!”

“What he has to say won’t mean much if we all burn to death,” the friar retorted sullenly, and with an astonishing animal snarl, Damon sprang for his throat. The Acting Ambassador crashed into him and they tumbled out of Raithe’s view. He couldn’t seem to properly turn his head, but he could hear grunts and savage curses joined by the liquid smack of bone against muscle.

He tried to summon his mindeye, to look with his power where he could not direct his eyes, but he saw only flames closing around him. He tried to lever himself up onto his elbows, to turn himself over or at least sit up. Tried, and failed.

His left arm did not work.

His exploring hand found a zone of numb flesh that bordered his pectoral muscle and grew outward to his shoulder, deepening until the arm itself was as dead as a steak in a smokehouse. He tried to call out, but all that could come from his throat was a strangled grunt; he tried to push himself away with his feet, scrabbling with his heel. But he pushed with only one heel; his left leg was as dead as his arm.

Help me was formed by his lips. Please, someone—someone help me—

Instead of flames charring his flesh, he now saw himself helpless under the knives and fingernails and teeth of men and women stripped of their humanity by Garrette’s disease: demented homicidal bogeys with hearts empty of all save hunger and lust. He seemed to smell their slaughterhouse breath, seemed to feel the warm slide of their drool down his neck—

The sounds of fighting faded behind the roar of the surrounding flames. “There,” Damon panted, out of sight. “There. This is the punishment for treachery. Does anyone else wish to question my authority?”

Raithe squinted against the sting of tears.

Damon reappeared at his side, and there was blood around his mouth. He sucked on a skinned knuckle for a moment before he spoke. “What is it?” he rasped. “I know you know, Raithe. What has done this to us?”

The only sound Raithe could summon was a thick, gargling “No—no—”

Damon drew close. “For days,” he murmured, “I have awaited your rising. We are locked together, Raithe, you and I. This city has become a madhouse. You know why, and you know what I can do to save it. I have been patient, Raithe. My forbearance is at an end.” A clawlike hand seized Raithe’s dead left arm, and Damon lifted it with an expression mingled of lust and loathing. “I have become hungry.”

His face spasmed, and he cast down Raithe’s arm, pushing himself away like a man with vertigo retreating from the brink of a cliff. “Why won’t you help me, Raithe? I know you can. I don’t understand why you refuse . . .”

Refuse? Raithe raged inside his head. Look at me! Will you look at me? What exactly was he supposed to be able to do?

“Is it the water?” Damon asked softly, stroking Raithe’s numb left cheek with his twisted clawlike hand. “I know we have been poisoned, but I must know where the good water can be found. It is our only hope, Raithe. It is the only hope of the city. Why won’t you tell me?” Damon lowered his head and turned his face away. He whispered, “I am so thirsty . . .”

Raithe could only stare, gasping through the panic that crushed his chest.

“It’s blood, isn’t it?” Damon said suddenly. He turned back to Raithe. His eyes smoldered. “That is why you will not speak. I understand. Clean water avails nothing—it is too late for that. Our only hope is to find blood. Clean blood. Blood is life. Blood is what we must drink. We must sustain our lives with life itself.”

Once more, Damon seized Raithe’s dead arm. This time, he brought it close to his mouth, and his lips spasmed with tangled hunger and revulsion. “Is it your blood, Raithe? Is that what we must drink? The blood of a man become god? Is that why you will not speak? Is that why you want us all to die? Because you do not wish to share your blood?”

Blood, Raithe thought. There is an answer in blood. But he could not quite grasp the memory. He had learned something about blood, something important. From where?

The goddess.

From the goddess.

Close upon this realization came a heart-tearing burst of wonder: When did she stop being the Aktir Queen to me, and become simply the goddess?

There: it was all there, inside him. He could not contain all that she had shared with him, but he did not need it all: one small corner sufficed. Blood—

He remembered about blood.

Damon bit into Raithe’s wrist, clamping down with a rending twist of the jaw, but Raithe barely noticed.

I can save him. I can save them all.

The tears that streamed now onto his cheeks were tears of gratitude.

Damon lifted his blood-smeared mouth from Raithe’s wrist. “Does this hurt you? I am sorry for that, Raithe. Sorry—I truly am. But I must have your blood. Without your blood, I will die, and when I die the embassy will fall, and with it the Monasteries and the Empire, and my whole life will have been for nothing. For nothing, do you understand? Of course you don’t; you are too young. You are too young and strong to comprehend the futility that pursues a man, gaining ground with the turn of each year, each month, each day—”

Raithe gathered his will and summoned his mindhand to work his body like a puppet. He shifted his lips and tongue to make himself say, “Nnno, Daaamon . . . I unnderrrstannn . . . I cannn hhh . . . hhhelllp you . . .”

“You can? You will?” The older man’s staring eyes sparked with hope. “What must I do? What do you require?”

“Nnnot my bl . . .” Raithe forced out. He took a deep breath, and struggled to make his words clear. “Blood. To sssavve . . . you nnneed . . .” He summoned all his concentration, and sternly forced his lips and tongue to form distinctly the words he needed to save the world.

“Not my blood,” he said, “but Caine’s.”

2

RAITHE HUNG FACEDOWN across a broad shoulder, and held on to consciousness by the clench of his teeth. With the winter-grey eyes of his body, he saw only oil-stained stone and the legs of the friar who carried him; with the invisible eyes of his mind, he could see everything.

Damon led the small group of Esoterics in erratic dashes from patch to patch of burned-out ground, sliding between walls of flame and slipping across oil-slicked cobbles. Behind them, at the dockside, buildings had started to collapse; now and then the friars were forced to fade into the dangerously narrow confines of alley mouths, to avoid the parties of bucket-armed soldiers who trotted past. The soldiers, and the civilian volunteers who worked beside them, no longer tried to save individual buildings, but rather tried to contain the fires; they struggled to build firebreaks of sand to smother the oil, but flame overleaped them, spreading from wall to wall and rooftop to rooftop, and soon the black oil soaked through the mounds of sand and began to burn anew.

Often the soldiers and the civilian volunteers fought not only the fires, but each other. The slightest disagreement might jump instantly to bloodshed, and the violence was more contagious than the disease that sparked it. Perhaps it does take two to fight—but it takes only one to attack. Only one to murder.

The winner, in such fights, was the fire.

In the dark depths of his heart, Raithe felt a shadow flow toward the city from far upstream, blank and faceless. With what sense he felt this he could not say—another revenant of the goddess and the god who had striven against one another within his brain—but he felt it with an acute certainty that left no room for doubt.

The Artans were coming.

The Esoterics dashed up Knights’ Bridge, reaching the top of the arch; ahead, where it joined the end of the arching stone span, the massive timbers of the drawbridge’s single-leaf bascule had become a towering forest of spider-branched oaks that seeped gleaming oil.

“We can make it,” Damon decided, panting. “Here—” He turned to the men he led and pointed. “You—you’re the strongest. Take the Ambassador on your shoulders. You, and you—your robes are wet. Strip and wrap him; the wet cloth will give some protection should the flames catch us still on the bridge.”

And in that speech, Raithe heard an answer: For all his murderous dementia, Damon was still Damon. He summoned his mindhand to make himself speak once more. Exhaustion made moving his lips like juggling boulders. “Nnno.”

Damon ignored him, studying the unnatural forest ahead. “Reese—scout along the left retaining wall. Rhoole, Cole, get a look to the right and in the middle. We must choose the clearest path, or none of us may survive.”

“Nnno,” Raithe repeated. “Leavvve me heere.”

“We will not,” Damon muttered distractedly. “You are a Monastic citizen in distress—”

“Leavvve mmme here,” he said, louder. “Tha’ . . . that is annn order.”

Damon wheeled and seized the back of Raithe’s neck in a crushing grip, straightening him one-handed across the friar’s shoulder with lunatic strength. He leaned close enough to bite, and snarled, “Never give orders in my command! Never! I am in authority here! I! Do you understand?”

Raithe met Damon’s snarl expressionlessly. “Nno,” he said. “You arrre nnnot.”

“I am invested by the Council of Brothers—”

“You arrre relievved.”

“You have no authority!”

Raithe’s command of his lips and tongue sharpened by the moment. He was able to say more strongly, “I amm . . . the Council’s ch-chosen Ammmbassador . . . to the Arrrtans. T-to the Ak-tiri. Caine is Arr-tan. This—” He waved weakly with his good hand at the burning city around them. “—this is the w-work of Aktiri.”

By extreme focus of his will, he forced the words to become perfectly distinct. “I amm vvested with fulll auth-thority in all dealings with Arta . . . annnd the Aktiri. I amm . . . in command, here.”

Damon met his gaze squarely, pathetically dignified in his tattered filthy robes and the blood that streaked his face. “I shall protest,” he said. “I shall protest to the Council.”

“D-do ssso. Unn-til th-thenn, you arre rre-lieved.”

Damon released Raithe’s neck, and stepped away with lowered eyes. Raithe patted the flank of the friar who held him. “Ssset me downnn.”

The friar obeyed, laying Raithe gently on the cold stone arch. Raithe said, “Daamonnn?”

The reply was half muffled, as though his mouth had difficulty forming the words, but was clear nonetheless.

“I am . . . at your orders. Sir.”

3

RAITHE GAVE ORDERS as swiftly as his infirmity allowed, and the Esoterics sprinted away through the decaying trees of Knights’ Bridge. He let his eyes drift almost closed; he had been through so much, and he was so tired—

Damon gazed longingly after his men. “And I still don’t understand,” he said, plaintive and puzzled, like a lost little boy. “How will this save us?”

“Hhhellp,” Raithe said reluctantly. “Hellp mmme . . . up.”

Damon knelt and slung Raithe’s dead arm around his own neck. Slowly, working together, they managed to get Raithe to his feet. “What are we to do, now? Where are we to go?” Damon asked, his voice thickening with tears. “I fear—I fear I may not have the strength to carry you, Raithe. I’m sorry—I have not been well. Do you know I have not been well?”

“To th-the Courrthoussse,” Raithe gasped. “Caine—Caine’s blood—”

“But how will we even get in? The Courthouse will be sealed for the night—and it was built as a fortress! It would take a siege engine—”

“Th-thisss—” Raithe said. “This is hhhoww—”

He reached forth with his mindhand. No effort was required to find what he sought; the same odd, unexpected kinesthesia that enabled him to feel the cold approach of the Artans made this as natural as his one hand reaching for the other in the dark.

On the surface of the river beneath them, the flames leaped high, then parted. A circle of pure calm flattened the roiled water as though it were a mountain lake on a windless summer’s day. Up from the center of that circle rose the Sword of Saint Berne.

Raithe drew the sword upward through the flame and smoke and darkness.

The blade sizzled to life as his fingers closed around it, and shot a bolt of power along his arm that blossomed into a fireball of acid within his left side—and he could feel it. The touch of Kosall’s hilt had joined something that had been severed within him.

He pushed Damon aside, stood on his own two feet, and brandished Kosall at the sky; power shouted from the blade like lightning.

He thought, Well. All right, then.

He lowered the blade, and the glare around him faded. “No siege engine will be required,” he said with grim satisfaction. “Come, Damon—”

Damon screamed: a raw, animal scream of agony and terror. He staggered away, clawing at his chest and shoulder, then fell to his knees. He tore at his clothing, his scream already ragged, hoarse, going choppy as he gasped for breath. Raithe was at his side in an instant.

A dripping patch of black oil the size of a fist stained Damon’s robe; before Raithe could even wonder whence this oil might have come, flesh beneath the cloth began to smoke, and then to burn. As Damon tore at his clothing, the oil smeared across his hands, raising blisters so fast they burst before his skin could stretch over them, and his fingers began to swell, trailing streamers of acrid smoke.

Raithe grabbed a handful of Damon’s robe and slashed it off with a swift stroke of Kosall, then ripped the rest of the robe free. He wadded it up and roughly scrubbed at Damon’s chest and hands, wiping away as much oil as he could one-handed, since he dared not put down the sword.

At last Damon huddled on his side on the cold stone, crumpled fetally around the oil burns on his chest, shivering with pain, tears streaming from his eyes. Raithe stared numbly at the wadded cloth in his hand, unable to comprehend what he saw: the robe was nearly soaked through with oil, now, and oil dripped from its torn hem to stain the bridgestones at his feet.

He dropped the robe, and it landed with a sodden slap. He lifted his left hand, staring; he turned his hand this way and that, seeking some glimpse of human skin within a slick, wet-gleaming glove of jet.

He made a fist, and out through the pores of his skin flowed thick syrup ripples of the blind god’s black oil.

4

IN A SHADOWED doorway of the Financial Block across Ten Street from the Courthouse, Raithe let Damon slide slowly to the doorstep. With an empty sigh, Damon settled onto the oil-slick stone and curled around the chemical burns on his chest. His eyes held the horizon-fixed glaze of the Control Disciplines. Raithe pressed back into the shadows, Kosall humming along his thigh.

Ten Street was choked with people: people with packs on their backs and bundles in their arms, people pushing carts and people pulling wagons, people who clutched the hands of children or the leashes of pets, people who sought this way and that in tears or red-faced rage, crying names indistinguishable from all the other shouts and screams.

With Fools’ Bridge and Thieves’ Bridge already in flames—as well as many of their homes and businesses—thousands had bundled whatever they could carry of their precious possessions and rushed to the west side of Old Town, only to find Knights’ Bridge burning as well; the forest of oak that had sprung from its bascule had ignited only seconds after Raithe had carried Damon through. Now the only way off the island was the long arch of Kings’ Bridge—and Kings’ Bridge was held by a company of heavy infantry whose captain was grimly determined to keep this rabble of potential looters off the South Bank.

Flames slowly crept westward through twisting alleys and around rooftop peaks, behind water troughs and under board-walks: anywhere the wind was broken. The whole city east of Rogues’ Way burned, and the approach of the flames pushed more and more people into the Financial District. People were dying on the street already: now and again the press parted to reveal a body trampled or clubbed or surreptitiously knifed. The river itself stretched arms of flame around Old Town as oil flowed in from upstream, becoming a moat of fire.

Kosall hummed in Raithe’s left hand, shedding tiny droplets of black oil in a continuous rain; Raithe watched them fall. He remembered, foggily, the agony he and the goddess had suffered when the black oil had first flowed forth; the right side of his body—the clean side—was blistered and scorched, and had the stiff swollen thickness of parboiled meat. Part of what frightened him was that he wasn’t in much pain.

Far, far back behind his eyes, faint but persistent—a melody stuck in endless obsessive cycle within his brain—throbbed the lives of all within the river’s bound: ghosts of the living. The clearest of them were the men and women who crowded the street around him; he could also feel men—soldiers, he presumed—within the Courthouse. He even got faint corner-of-the-eye after-images of the confusion and anger among friars who struggled to arm themselves, blocks away at the embassy: fights broke out among them, and a number of the embassy’s rooms held victims of virus-spawned murder.

He could feel other ghosts as well: terrified ghosts, cringing behind locked shutters; lunatic ghosts, giggling with gore-smeared mouths; even a few stolid, comfortably ignorant ghosts, snoring within bedlinens never tangled by any troubling dream, far from the fires and the madness that gripped the city.

And he could feel ghosts below him: unhuman ghosts that boiled through the caverns, terrified and savage; he felt their mad queen and heard the thump of her murderous command echo in the heart of ogre and primal, troll and treetopper. He could see the image of their destination and feel their bloody intention, and he knew that if he delayed, Caine might have no blood left with which to save the world.

Another part of what frightened him was what he saw across the street: The Courthouse doors were open, and on the verandah at the top of a broad sweep of stairs, two armored officers of the Eyes of God stood guard.

The facade of the Courthouse pulsed orange with reflected firelight and gleamed with black oil; the ivy that once had climbed its walls had become a jungle of knotted woody vines that now rotted and dripped oil that flowed across the broad railed verandah in syrupy waves. The Eyes of God officers shifted uncomfortably, trying to keep their boots out of the oil, and threw many nervously longing glances toward the crowded street, as though only fear of something worse than fire kept them at their posts.

The rest of what frightened Raithe was that he knew what frightened them. He could feel it.

With the same sense that tracked the approach of the Artan Guard along the river and through the outlying streets, he felt something huge and dark and rabid within the Courthouse: a wounded beast that licked itself in hungry silence. These Eyes of God feared this beast, not knowing that they themselves were parts of its limbs; Raithe feared the beast, for he knew that he was.

He felt the dark power’s flow through the sword into his brain, and with his own powers of mind he seized upon it. Power is power, he thought. I need all I can get.

He felt the gate that the goddess had closed in his mind, the gate that his touch upon the sword had reopened. He turned his will upon that gate, and shattered it so that it would never close again. He would bear the ache, the legion of rats that chewed into his guts. He would bear the black-oil stigmatum.

Small enough penance, for his great sins.

He shifted his grip upon Kosall so that he held it by one quillon, and its eldritch hum died. He still could make a fist of his left hand, and his left leg still held his weight. Slowly, careful not to brush the sword’s hilt, he slid the naked blade behind his belt. “Damon,” he said. He yanked the semiconscious man to his feet and shook him roughly. “Damon, come up. Now. That’s an order.”

Slowly the Acting Ambassador’s eyes drifted into focus.

“Yes.” Damon’s face was blank with returning pain. He hugged his bare, burned chest as though he were chilled. He wore only his breeches and boots. “Yes—Raithe? Aren’t you Raithe? What—what—? I’m hurt, Raithe,” Damon said, blankly plaintive. “I must get to the embassy. I’m hurt, and they need me.”

Raithe laced his fingers together into a specific knot, which tuned his mind in a specific way. The oil from his left hand made the skin of his right sizzle and smoke, but his mind was master of his flesh; he could accept this pain, too, even welcome it, and in doing so he found he could accept his fear as well. His fear, like his pain, became a mere fact.

“You will stay here and await the embassy’s soldiers,” he said. “When they arrive, you will take command. Secure the Courthouse. Take it, and hold it. You will allow no one to enter until you are so ordered, by either myself or another who, to your certain knowledge, wields the full authority of the Council of Brothers. Do you understand these orders?”

“But—”

“Do you understand these orders?”

“Yes. Yes, sir. Yes. But—but—”

Raithe left him in the doorway and strode out into Ten Street. Most people in the crowds gave way before him; those who didn’t, he brushed with a fingertip of his left hand. Their screams and the smoke that rose from their burns were more than enough to convince everyone else to let him pass.

“But—” Damon called after him. “What you have ordered—it’s an act of war!”

“This is already a war,” Raithe said softly, more to himself than to Damon. “And it is time for us to act.”

He mounted the Courthouse steps, to face the Eyes of God.

5

AS RAITHE CLIMBED the steps, one of the officers said, “You can’t come up here.”

Raithe reached the oil-stained verandah and stopped a non-threatening five paces from the door. “Why not?” he asked mildly.

“Go on, back into the street, chummie,” the other guard told him, pointing down into the mass of people with his sword. “Nobody’s allowed on the steps.”

“But I want to go in.”

“Back on the street,” the officer insisted. He took a step toward Raithe and lifted his sword. “Courthouse’s been closed since dusk. Get moving.”

“But the door is open.”

“That’s not your concern—” the officer began, but Raithe again knotted his fingers together, again ignored the sizzle of the skin on his fingers, and interrupted.

“Tell me why the door is open,” he said.

“Because the Patriarch has a thing about doors, these days,” the officer said. “He doesn’t like doors closed on him when he’s inside—”

His partner gaped at him. “Dorrie! Are you mad?”

The officer looked back, puzzled. “What?”

Raithe said, “The Patriarch?”

“Dorrie, shut up,” the other officer said. He stepped in front of his partner and pointed his own sword at Raithe’s belly. “And you, get out of here. You didn’t hear anything, you understand? The Patriarch isn’t anywhere near here, and if you say otherwise, I’ll find you and kill you.”

But he didn’t sound as certain of that as he might, and his eyes were fixed upon Raithe’s oil-covered left hand. “You—uh,” he said, with a frown that was half a wince, “and you, you better wash your hands. I mean—don’t you know that stuff is dangerous?”

Far better than you, Raithe thought. He reknotted his fingers. “I am Ambassador Raithe of the Monasteries. The Patriarch sent for me. You will direct me to him at once.”

“I, uh, I uh . . .” the officer stammered. “Your Excellency, your clothes, I didn’t—”

“At once,” Raithe repeated. Without waiting for an answer, he swept past the officers and entered the darkened Courthouse.

“The chapel,” the officer called from behind him. “He’s in the chapel. I’d—uh, I have to stay on post, I’m—”

“I can find it,” Raithe said, and strode into the darkness.

The atrium of the Courthouse was an immense vault of shadow, striped with dancing orange crosses cast through the cruciform slot–windows by the flames that approached outside. Raithe limped through the atrium, his boot heels clacking cavernously. He’d been inside the Courthouse dozens of times; in boyhood, he’d worked as a page for the Imperial Messenger-News to help his father pay for the cost of his education at the embassy school. But seeing it gloomed in flame-tattered shadow—and the smell—

The Courthouse had always had a peculiar odor of its own: the colognes and powders and flower-oil sachets of the noble judges half captured by the fear-sweat of guilty men, then soaked permanently into the limestone. That blend of perfume and guilt had always been, for Raithe, the smell of justice.

Now the Courthouse smelled only of rotting plants and burning oil.

The chapel had once been a shrine to Prorithun, the sky god who was the keeper of men’s oaths and the defender of Ankhanan law. Here the judges would pray and purify themselves before presiding in court. A Prorithar priest had always been present, empowered by the sky god to bestow upon the judges His Blessing, to render them temporarily proof against persuasive or compulsive magicks. Though Prorithun no longer reigned in Ankhanan courts, the chapel remained. Now it was a shrine to Ma’elKoth.

Here, too, the door stood open, flanked by Eyes of God.

“Hey, you,” one of them said, intense but low, as though he feared to be overheard. “I don’t know how you got in here, but you have to leave. Get out.”

Raithe stopped in a column of firelight that painted half of him scarlet and left the rest in black shadow. He knotted his fingers. “I am Ambassador—”

“I don’t give a squirt who you are, pally.” The officer paced forward, stripes of firelight rippling over him as he approached up the long dark hallway. “If you’re still here when I count three, I’ll kill you. One.”

Raithe frowned. Could some of Prorithun’s influence still linger? Again, he knotted his fingers. “Put away your sword,” he said.

“Two.”

“Go on, get out of here,” the other officer said. “He means it.”

Raithe settled into himself. He sighed, and shifted his balance forward onto the balls of his feet. Reluctantly, he put his right hand near the hilt of Kosall. “I don’t want to fight.”

“That makes one of us.” The officer took another step; now one long stride from Raithe, he said, “Three.”

Yet he did not strike. Perhaps from this close, he could see death in Raithe’s sad, wintry eyes.

“Your Radiance?” Raithe called, pitching his voice to carry. “Your Radiance, it’s Raithe—Ambassador Raithe.”

“Sure you are,” the officer said.

“Your Radiance, I must speak with you.”

From beyond the chapel’s open door came a sepulchral croak that hummed with the resonance of an empty room. “Go away.”

“You heard the man, pally,” the officer said, edging even closer. He raised his sword like a boy cocking a stick to threaten a strange dog.

“Your Radiance, it’s about Caine,” Raithe said. “I must speak with you about Caine.”

For a long-stretched moment, no one moved.

“Let him pass.”

The officer took a step back, and swung his sword to wave Raithe on. Raithe passed him without a glance, but as he did, he felt a shift of weight in that hungry wounded beast.

He said, “Don’t.”

He stopped, waiting. Oil from his left fist gathered into thick droplets that spattered on the floor.

The guard at his back slowly lowered the sword he had swiftly raised. “You can’t scare me.”

“No,” Raithe agreed, without turning. “But I can kill you, though I would rather not.”

He felt again the shift of that hungry wounded beast—this time a settling back, a slow uncoiling. He nodded to himself, and walked on.

6

THE HIGH VAULT of the chapel glowed with faint, reflected firelight; it leaked through the colored glass from the airshaft outside and rippled on the rows of padded knee-benches to either side of the aisle. The shift and pulse of the reflected light gave an eerie aspect of life to the stone Ma’elKoth that stood, double manheight, in the chancel. A bundle of filthy rags, stinking of oil and smoke, lay at the foot of the altar.

Raithe stood motionless in the transept, staring up at God.

A tear rolled from his right eye, tracing the fold beside his mouth to fall silently from his chin. Slowly, feeling suddenly old, ancient, Raithe dropped to one knee and lowered his head. He made a fist of his clean right hand. He struck himself on his chest, above his heart, and opened his palm toward the image of his god. Father, forgive me, he prayed. I have no choice.

More tears pricked his eyes.

Forgive me.

Yet somewhere in his heart, a secret flame burned. Even his tear felt forced—felt performed—as it rolled down his cheek. What have I become?

“Raithe . . .”

The voice came from the chancel. He lifted his head to find that the bundle of rags at the foot of the altar had opened to reveal a fatigue-seamed face smeared with muck. The rags shifted and moved in unpleasantly liquid ways, as though they covered some soft-boned sea creature that was barely more than a sac of jelly.

“Your Radiance,” Raithe said. “Thank you for receiving me.”

The bundle of rags shook itself and gradually unfolded to the height of a man. “I know why you’re here.”

I doubt it, Raithe thought. Remaining on one knee, he said, “I have come to save the city, and the Empire.”

“Don’t lie to me, Raithe.” The rags shambled toward him along the nave. “Everyone lies to me. I can’t understand why everyone thinks I don’t already know the truth.” A hand like that of a corpse in rigor extended from the rags, pointing with immobile fingers. “You’ve come for Caine. You were in this with him from the beginning.”

“Your Radiance, I can help you. I have a cure. I can make you well.”

“Don’t lie to me!” The hand jerked at him as though casting a curse. “You came to me with this idea—this plan to bring him here. You came with him. You inflicted him upon me, and upon my city. All this—” The hand circled high, drawing in the boundless ravage of the city and the Empire around it. “All this is your doing. You made this happen, Raithe!” White flecks of spittle sprayed. “You! You! You!”

Each shout brought the swing of the accusing hand a step closer. Raithe could only lower his head once more; eyes directed at the ragged oil-stained hem that half masked a pair of cut and bleeding bare feet, he said, “Your Radiance, please—”

The shouts became a screech for the Eyes of God; a rattle of boots answered—many boots.

“Your Radiance, there is a cure. You can be saved. The Empire can be saved—”

The rigored hand swung down to point. “Arrest this man! Arrest him and kill him!”

Raithe finished softly, “Humanity can be saved . . .”

Now leather boots that sprouted leggings of chain shuffled into place around him. “All right, pally—that’s it for you. Let’s have that sword.”

Raithe stood.

Five Eyes of God surrounded him, swords at the ready. Three more waited behind. The beast had him in its grasp. “The sword, pally. You can’t fight all of us.”

Raithe raised his black-gleaming left hand, and his right hovered an inch from Kosall’s hilt. “Yes, I can.”

“You’ll lose.”

Raithe flicked his left hand at the officer who had spoken, and droplets of the black oil spattered across his face; at the same moment he seized Kosall and turned the awakening blade so that it sliced instantly through his belt. One officer fell backward, howling as flames burst around his eyes; another stared dumbly at the stub of his sword, sheared off a finger’s breadth above the guard.

But as they fell back, others came forward.

“I have your deaths on my conscience already,” Raithe said. “Killing you all costs me nothing. But if you would live a little longer, leave now.”

The voice of the beast spoke from the rags. “Any man who crosses that threshold while this traitor lives shall feel the full weight of Imperial justice.”

“There is no Imperial justice,” Raithe told them. “And this man will not live to see you punished. Go.”

Their response was a single shared glance, to coordinate their rush.

As a swordsman, Raithe was only competent, but Kosall was a singularly forgiving weapon. Its irresistible edge took no account of shield or parrying blade, and armor provided only barely more resistance than naked flesh. His sense of the beast let Raithe meet attacks before they were even begun: in seconds the aisle around him was littered with bits of sliced-off swords and pieces of cloven shields. To pass within Kosall’s reach on his right was to bleed; to close with Raithe from the left was to burn.

But he was one, and they were six. Raithe bled as well: from a long slash on his thigh and a deep stab below his ribs. Despite his words, he killed no one. These were the same men he was fighting to save—and he was uncertain what taking a life with Kosall might do to the goddess within its blade.

Now knives replaced broken swords, but the Eyes hesitated. To attack a sword-armed man with a knife is foolish; to do the same to a man armed with Kosall is suicidal.

A moment fell, and another, and another.

“Cowards!” hissed the beast. The rags shouldered through the officers. “Cowards! Traitors! Villains! Here is how We deal with traitors!” A pair of knives blossomed from tattered sleeves and swung wide, and the Patriarch sprang upon him.

Raithe’s reaction had been trained into him by years in the abbey school, by hours on the diskmat and days spent hammering millions of punches into leather-wrapped bags of sand. Kosall shifted instantly from his right hand to his left; his left foot swung out a precise handspan, and his weight transferred smoothly onto it from his right while the knuckles of his right fist described an invisible wall exactly at the point of the Patriarch’s chin. Chin met wall, bone to bone—

And Toa-Sytell collapsed.

I’ve knocked out the Patriarch, Raithe thought blankly.

The Eyes of God officers stared, uncomprehending; they could no more believe what Raithe had done than he could himself. He repeated silently, I’ve knocked out the Patriarch, as though thinking the words again could make the act more real.

What have I become?

He lifted his eyes to the Eyes of God.

“Run,” he said.

They ran.

7

RAITHE STARED DOWN at the crumpled form of the unconscious Patriarch, terrified by how good he felt. Not happy—he could never be happy again—but calm. Centered. At peace.

In control.

As though his own chin had met the same wall his knuckles had described against Toa-Sytell’s, a stunning impact had knocked things loose inside him, and now, for the first time, he began to understand—

Alone in the chapel, amid the dancing glass-stained firelight, Raithe turned once more to pray. But he did not pray from his knees, with bent neck and lowered eyes, as he had been taught. Instead he stood like a man and met the stone eyes of the icon of his god. He struck his breast again, and again opened his hand in offering.

But this was his left, and it opened upon the blind god’s black venom.

I am Your Beloved Child, he thought. I will always honor You. Now, and forever, you have my love, my devotion. My worship.

But not my obedience.

I will always be Your Child, but I am a child no longer.

There are too many children; too many grow old but never grow up. I think I would have liked to be one of them, but that does not seem to be my fate. My destiny.

He allowed himself a bitter smile.

Father, forgive me, for I finally know what I’m doing.

8

THE CLAMOR FROM the guardroom reached Raithe even up in the broad hall outside the chapel: shouted threats and tearful pleas, roars of rage and shrieks of pain. In the stairwell, it was painfully loud. Kosall in one hand, leash in the other, Raithe rounded the last bend in the stairway.

In the small antechamber below, six men in chainmail that bore the emblem of the Eyes of God paced back and forth, gesturing as though they argued in voices that could not be heard above the clamor. The clamor rose from beyond the steel gate—within the guardroom itself—which was packed solid with desperate, panicked men in the gear of the Donjon Guard. The men of the Guard struggled and clawed and bit each other, fighting to get to the gate; an anemone-spray of arms waved between the bars, fingers clutching futilely toward the Eyes of God beyond.

Raithe watched for a moment, then he nodded to himself and thoughtfully brought Kosall’s forte against the corner of stone beside him. Kosall bit into the stone with an earsplitting squeal. Below him, men jumped and flinched and covered their ears. He turned the blade slowly, carving a chunk from the wall as though the stone were hard cheese. The chunk rattled down the steps to the anteroom floor, skittered slowly across it with a fading chikchikchik, and then there was silence.

Raithe pointed Kosall at the Eyes of God. “You can go.”

They stared at him, taking in his tattered clothes that dripped black oil down one side, while the other side hung thick and red, soaked in the blood that still pulsed from both the slice on his thigh and the stab wound below his ribs. One of the Eyes straightened and stepped forward. “We are ordered to hold this gate—”

“I don’t care. Go.”

“Toa-Sytell himself—”

Raithe drew on the leash in his other hand.

Around the bend of the stairway, leashed by the prisoner collar locked around his neck, hands bound and mouth gagged with strips torn from his own robes, came His Radiant Holiness Toa-Sytell, Steward of the Empire and Patriarch of the Church of the Beloved Children of Ma’elKoth.

His gaze was fixed, unseeing; as Raithe descended the last few steps to the anteroom, the Patriarch stumbled and half fell, striking his knees hard upon the stone floor. He knelt there abjectly, a low animal whine leaking around his gag. Tears rolled from his blankly staring eyes.

Kosall’s whine hummed through the autumnal rustle of in-drawn breath.

Raithe said, “Go.”

The officers, with many an exchanged glance, slowly and carefully circled around him, then backed up the stairs.

“Hey,” a Donjon Guard said from beyond the gate. “Hey, what about us? You can’t leave us—you don’t know what’s going on down there—!”

“Enlighten me.”

From many voices in conflicting babble, Raithe was able to piece together an impression of a riot in the Pit below. He thought, Caine, and remembered the boil of unhuman ghosts through the caverns: caverns that connect to the Donjon, through the Shaft.

He took a long stride forward and swung Kosall overhand. The men beyond shoved themselves frantically back from the bars. Sparks flew from the gate’s lock as the blade sheared it through, and the gate swung open. Raithe stepped to one side, shortening Toa-Sytell’s leash as though the Patriarch were an unruly dog, and silently watched the rush of guards on their way up and out.

The guardroom went quiet. The Donjon door stood open. The stairwell beyond was dark as an open mouth. Raithe took one deep breath, staring down, then shrugged. Drawing the Patriarch after him, he went down.

As he descended, the living ghosts that had peopled the back of his mind slowly faded; fading likewise was his sense of the methodical approach of the Artan forces, both overland and along the river. By the time he reached the lower landing he was, for the first time in what could have been forever, alone inside his head. Even Kosall’s whine trailed away to silence.

He stopped, frowning.

If there was indeed a riot beyond these doors, he could not hear it. The loudest sound in the stairwell was the shuffle of the Patriarch’s battered and bleeding feet. Scant light trickled from the guardroom; Raithe could discern only the faintest gleam from the studs that fastened the brass bindings on this door. He glanced at the featureless silhouette of Toa-Sytell, and found no advice in his silent shape.

He cautiously pulled the door handle. The doors were locked—or possibly held from the far side. He pressed his ear against the door. Now he could hear voices, many voices, from the Pit beyond, though he could make out no words among the general quiet murmur. He allowed himself a slow sigh, and nodded to himself.

He breathed himself into his Control Discipline and built within his mindeye an image of Caine as he had last seen him, chained to the dungcart, drawn away in the processional while the Imperial Army Band played “Justice of God.” He detailed the image with every scar he had seen in five days of study on the barge, with every sweat streak that striped the travel dust on his skin; he laid strands of grey along his temples, and imaged perfectly the white-salted stubble that had coated his cheeks and chin.

Now from this image he stripped away the sunlight and the music; he erased the dungcart and the shackles; finally even the tunic and pants of rough homespun evaporated from his consciousness. Then there was only Caine.

And Raithe saw him. Vaguely, blurrily, fading in and out of view, as if through a mist.

He sat upon a pile of rags and tattered clothing that somehow, beneath him, was a throne; he wore an age-greyed tunic, frayed at the hem and worn thin enough to be translucent, that became armor polished like the sun. At his feet lay a dying elf; at his side knelt a massively muscled ogrillo who tied strips of rag around Caine’s raddled legs with hands that were themselves heavily bandaged; before him stood a thick-bodied woman, hands folded behind her like a student reciting in abbey school. Caine’s hair had gone whiter than Raithe remembered it, and his beard had grown in full and shaggy; his cheeks had sunk close upon his teeth; hunger and illness had drawn his eyes deeper within his skull.

But those eyes still gleamed like embers at the back of a cave.

He shook his head to wipe the vision from his mind, and he passed the sleeve of his sword arm across his brow. Raithe had seen Caine not as he is, but as Raithe needed him to be: beclouded in a fog of legend. More than human: a hero: a myth.

Probably, he thought, he is dead. Many will be dead, and many more injured. But: someone may have touched his blood. Someone may have tasted it, if it ran in the water, or was splashed from a wound. This may be enough.

It will have to be.

He tried to summon the power of his mindhand, to manipulate the lock upon these doors as he had those in Garrette’s office a lifetime ago, but his power had deserted him. He had a vague recollection—something about the rock from which the Donjon is carved—but he did not trouble to pursue it; he had another option.

He pushed Kosall’s point between the doors and slid it downward until it met resistance. By extreme concentration, he was able to direct a shudder of power into the blade; it rattled to life, sank, then swung free before falling silent once more. Gasping, Raithe was forced to lean on the stone for a moment, to regather the shreds of his strength. When he pulled the door handle with the hand that held the Patriarch’s leash, the door opened.

Framed in the stairshaft’s shadow, Raithe found an array of crossbows centered upon his breast, held steadily by men and elves on the far side of the balcony, a hundred feet away. A voice closer at hand but out of sight said firmly, “Onto the balcony. Nice and slow.”

Raithe moved into the light.

A few paces to his right, another small group of mingled species held cocked and leveled crossbows, near enough that the curve of the balcony’s retaining wall could offer no protection. “Put down the sword,” one of them ordered.

Raithe ignored them. He took one step closer to the retaining wall and looked down into the Pit. On a pile of rags and clothes become a throne, wearing a grey ragged tunic that should have been polished steel—

Gathered round him: elf, ogrillo, human—

Gaze as solid as the Donjon stone: a state of being in which the unexpected receives barely a blink of recognition.

“Raithe.”

Raithe said, “Caine.”

A long, slow, measuring stare: a whole conversation passed in the meeting of eyes of grey ice with those of black fire. Raithe had to lower his head.

“Can you give me one reason,” Caine said, “why I shouldn’t have you shot where you stand?”

Raithe tugged on the leash, drawing Toa-Sytell to the retaining wall where Caine could see him. The Patriarch moaned into his gag.

Caine said, “Well.”

He seemed to ponder this development for a moment; then he folded his arms and cocked his head fractionally to one side. “That,” he said, “buys you a trip down here, to tell me what the fuck you’re up to.”

One of the crossbowmen on the balcony said, “He’s armed.”

Caine nodded, and spoke softly to the elf who seemed to be drowsing at his feet; the elf lifted his head and opened eyes so fever-shot that to Raithe, even dozens of yards away, they looked like bloody eggs. Those raw eyes swallowed Raithe whole.

He swayed.

The elf said something to Caine that Raithe could not hear, then laid his head upon his bed of rags and closed his eyes once more. Caine said to the crossbowmen, “Don’t worry about it. Let him come.”

Raithe led Toa-Sytell around the long curve of the balcony and down the straight span of the stairbridge. The mass of prisoners parted before him so that he could lead the Patriarch to Caine’s feet.

He felt the pressure of their massed stare like a yoke across his shoulders, its weight compressing his spine, anchoring his feet to the stone. The ogrillo hulked nearby—closer to Raithe than to Caine—wearing a glare that invited violence. The woman mirrored him, saving only that her gaze was one of dispassionate measurement rather than threat. Blood trickled down his leg, and he could clearly hear the slow drop of the black oil from his left hand.

Caine said expressionlessly, “That’s Kosall.”

Raithe lifted the sword. The ogrillo shifted his weight onto his forepads.

“Yes.”

“You’ve been using it.”

Raithe looked at the slow pulse of blood soaking down his clothing. “Not well.”

Caine did not respond.

“I have—” Raithe began weakly, then coughed, sighed a deep breath, and continued with more strength. “I have come to ask you to save the world.”

9

CAINE OFFERED A smile that was cold, remote, and thin as the arc of a saber. “Yeah?”

“In your blood,” Raithe said, “there is a, a countervirus—” He stumbled over the unfamiliar word. “—that is the cure for Garrette’s disease.”

“In my blood?”

Caine rocked back on his throne of rags, and his eyes fixed upon something that was not there.

“Yes,” Raithe said.

“In my blood . . .” Caine repeated, but now with a tone of slow, wondering discovery, as though this explained some long-standing mystery.

“Yes,” Raithe said again. “The tiniest drop will save a man, and then he himself will carry this cure, and can pass it on—”

“I know how it works,” Caine said. The wonder drained from his face, leaving only flat, cold stone. “What do you want me to do about it?”

Raithe stared.

Caine stared back.

Raithe gave his head a tiny disbelieving shake. He drew Toa-Sytell up beside him. “A drop of your blood, Caine. That’s all I ask. One drop. You can save his life.”

Caine lifted his right hand and examined it as though it were some piece of exotic machinery, unfamiliar in design and uncertain of use. He watched his knuckles as he made a fist; then he opened his fingers again. He met Raithe’s gaze, shrugged, and turned his hand over, palm up. “What’s in it for me?”

“Caine,” Raithe said patiently, “he’s the Patriarch. The Empire needs him.”

“Fuck the Patriarch.” Caine pushed himself forward and took his weight elbow-to-knee. “The last time I was this close to that little cocksucker, he knifed me. Fuck the Empire, too. And, while you’re at it, fuck yourself.”

Raithe knew better than to waste breath on argument or plea; he was, after all, the world’s leading expert on Caine. “What do you want?”

Caine’s smile sharpened. “First,” he said with dark satisfaction, “though I know it’s the worst kind of manners to mock a guy when he’s down, I want to remind you: You told me that nothing, ever again, would be about what I want.” He showed his teeth. “Shit, kid, thinking about that makes me all warm and fuzzy inside, like I just ate a kitten. Second?” He opened his other hand. “Make me an offer.”

“Your freedom—” Raithe began, nodding back toward the Donjon stairway above.

That open hand waved a contemptuous dismissal. “My freedom has nothing to do with you.”

Raithe swayed. The corners of the room dimmed, darkening into a tunnel that stretched ever longer, and the only light at the distant end was the face of Caine.

“Anything, then,” he said tiredly. “Even my life.”

“Your life? Look around you, pinhead.” Five or six of the crossbowmen took more careful aim. “I have your life already. I just haven’t decided what I want to do with it.”

“Then what, Caine?” Raithe asked quietly, eyes drifting closed, dizzy with blood loss and defeat. “What? Tell me. Say it, and if it is within my power—”

“When I make up my mind,” he said, leaning back once more. “Start by telling me what the fuck happened to you.”

Raithe stared at him blankly, uncomprehending. Words echoed along the dark tunnel in his head without releasing meaning.

“How’d you get in here?” Caine said, explaining. “Where’d you get those wounds? What happened to your face? You look like you got boiled in oil. How in hot staggering fuck did you get the Patriarch on a prisoner leash? And what’s that shit all over your hand?”

Raithe lifted Kosall. The hanging lamps rippled orange light along its silver-painted design. He let the blade swing down by the quillon so that he could reverse it; he took again its hilt and spent the last of his strength to bring the blade to life, then drove its point into the stone. He let go and stepped back, leaving the sword to gently sway between them, and turned his hand as though to offer Caine its hilt.

“I—” His voice thickened, and he coughed apologetically to clear it; the pressure of his cough shot colored sparks curling through the tunnel that stretched ever farther, ever darker.

“I found out what those runes were for,” he said, and fainted.

ON THE DAY the dead man named himself, that naming became a clarion, calling the heroes to battle. They came severally, one by one and together: the mad queen and the dead goddess, the faithful steward and the dark angel’s spawn, the crooked knight, the dragoness, the child of the river, and the god who had been a man.

When the dead man named himself, that naming shredded all veils. None could now deny their natures; now was the test of their truths. They had come to fight the war between the dead man and the god of dust and ashes.

For the dead man’s grave had been unsealed. From that mortal cocoon arose a butterfly; from that tomb of flesh, a dark angel, come with a flaming sword.