TWENTY-SIX

I DON’T REMEMBER being dead.

I remember some of the dreams that flitted in and out of my slowly reassembling mind as I woke, though, and what I remember of them seems to be about drowning, or being strangled by hands of inhuman strength, or having my head stuck inside a plastic bag. Trying to scream, but without enough breath to give sound to my voice—

Perhaps that should be taken as a hopeful sign about the afterlife. It must be lovely, if I was so reluctant to leave.

I suppose I’ll never know.

I’d like to keep this roughly chronological, if I can. It’s not easy; there are connections here more subtle than simple sequence. And I’m not always sure in what order everything happened, and I’m not sure it’s always important. Somebody wrote once that the direction of time is irrelevant to physics. I’m sure this half-remembered physicist would be pleased to know that my story only makes sense when it’s told backwards.

That seems much more profound when you have a fever.

I sometimes catch myself thinking that life is a fever: that the universe fell ill two or three billion years ago, and life in all its fantastic improbability is the universe’s fever dream. That the harsh intractability of the inanimate is the immune system of reality, attempting to cure it of life. That when life is extinguished, the universe will awaken, yawn and stretch, and shake its metaphoric head at its bizarre imagination, to have produced such an unlikely dream.

But I get over it when I cheer up.

It’s not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.

One might suppose that I would now be immune to melancholy, but that is not so; I seem to be immune only to senescence, and to death. It’s better thus—to be eternally happy would deprive me of the bulk of human experience. And, for all else, I am still human.

More or less.

But to give the story a moral before I recount its events will rob the moral of meaning. Meaning is the goal. I sometimes think the greatest danger of immortality is the infinite leisure to digress.

So:

I could write page after page on the process of waking up that very first time in my new life. I could string together fading details of dreams with the incredibly soft warmth of the wool-felt blankets and the fine-woven linen of the sheets, and shuffle the bracing sting of sunlight through closed eyelids with the faintly animal musk of the goosedown that filled the feather bed on which I lay. It’s a powerful urge to recount these things, because each individual sensation of living has become indescribably precious to me; though each breath is as sweet as the last, there comes always something wistful, because I cannot forget that this breath is a single thing, as discrete as I am, and no matter how wonderful the next will be, this will never come again.

I was lucky, though: the antidote for such wistfulness was waiting for me beside my bed, grinning like a wolf.

When I opened my eyes, he said, “Hey.”

I smiled, and thus discovered I had lips; I squeezed his hand, and thus discovered I had arms. A moment later, I found my voice. “I’m not dead, then?”

“Not anymore.”

“Oh, that’s good,” I said with a feeble chuckle.

“What’s funny?”

“Well—finding you here, I was pretty sure this can’t be heaven.”

His wolf-grin widened: his substitute for a laugh. “It’s close enough for me.”

I thought about that for a while, while I watched dust motes drift through slanting sunbeams. The window was enormous, nearly the size of the titanic eight-poster bed. Lamps of gleaming brass topped each of the posts—which were ornately carved from some luminous stone like translucent rose marble, and slowly the name for this stone surfaced inside my head: thierril.

That was when I understood that we were on Overworld.

“Caine?”

“Yeah?”

“I was wrong,” I said. “This is close enough to heaven for me, too.” Closer than I deserve, I finished silently.

He heaved himself to his feet and walked to the window, his gait only slightly unsteady. The window faced west, and the afternoon sun painted him with scarlet and gold.

“I’m glad you feel that way, Kris,” he said, “because this is as close as you’re ever gonna get.”

“I don’t understand.”

He stared beyond the sunset. “Let me tell you a story.”

2

IT REALLY WAS the end of the world.

In less than an eyeblink, the world as it had known itself had been destroyed and replaced with a new world, a different world, so like unto its predecessor that a man might fool himself into believing the two were one. The time of nonexistence that separated the two was itself nonexistent; no one saw or heard or even felt the interval, but everyone knew.

Things were different, now.

I understood well enough what had happened, as Caine explained it, at the instant when the world became new: The spell painted in runes upon Kosall’s blade had captured Ma’elKoth’s pattern of consciousness even as it had that of the goddess—but because the goddess had, in that moment, been touching the river’s Song through Hari, the Ma’elKoth-pattern had been channeled through them both. That pattern, that shade, that consciousness would have dispersed like smoke before a wind, sunk back within the Song, save for the idea of the Ascended Ma’elKoth: the image to which millions of Beloved Children pray every day: the Power they endow with the energy of their devotion. That Power was so nearly co-resonant with the pattern of Ma’elKoth that harmonic entrainment caused them to merge in an instant—and through Hari and the goddess, they touched the Song of Chambaraya.

At that moment, He became both a god of humanity, and a limb of the Worldmind: a power which had no precedent in all the aeonic history of Home. Given that place to stand, He moved the world.

He became the world.

But not the world that the Blind God had desired.

The Blind God’s grip upon Ma’elKoth was physical: a function of the physical thoughtmitter implanted within Ma’elKoth’s physical skull—left behind in Ma’elKoth’s physical corpse. And though in one sense Ma’elKoth is as much an agglomerate entity as is the Blind God, in a greater sense He has always been an individual; that individual is, above all else, an artist, and He could not bear to destroy a thing of beauty.

With the conjoined power of his human worshipers and Chambaraya, he could pattern himself even to the matrix of the Worldmind. He flowed outward from the river, and sent His will into the great symphony that is T’nnalldion—Home—itself.

His stroke had been elegant: He had taken the transfer shield—the patterning of force that blocked the Winston Transfer from Ankhana—and extended it over the world entire. In that fraction of a second, every transmission from every Actor on Overworld had ceased.

In the next fraction of a second, He had sung a new note in the Song of Home. Neither Caine nor I have a very clear way to describe its effect. It was, one might say, a minor alteration of local physics.

He made the Blind God improbable.

Extremely improbable: down to the quantum level.

The small segment of the Blind God that had stretched to Overworld disintegrated, and its remnants burst into a scattering flight of night-black shards. The rest recoiled like a knife-cut worm, back to its nest, to lick its wound and brood.

The Social Police in Ankhana felt the difference as a sudden surge of panic, real panic, the ancient panic: the unreasoning terror of being lost and lone in the deep forest of night, in the grip of its unhuman god. Many screamed; all twisted and staggered; most ran; and some fired their weapons into the air, or at each other.

Some turned their weapons upon Caine, where he knelt on Gods’ Way; some upon the limousine; some upon any targets they could find. All who did so died before they could squeeze their triggers.

Some of the Social Police still live. I have not yet decided what to do with them.

For now, they are in the Pit.

I wondered at the irony of it, when Caine had finished describing the end of the world: “You made him a god. You transfigured him, and he ascended. On Assumption Day.”

“Yeah.”

“You took the fiction of Caine and Ma’elKoth, and made it truth.”

“Fiction,” Caine said, “is a slippery concept.”

“You defeated your enemy by granting his fondest wish.”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure enemy is the right word,” he sighed. “Our relationship is . . . complicated.”

“But I don’t understand,” I said. “How did I get here? Why am I alive? What does all this have to do with me?”

His smile faded then, and he looked down at his hands. He laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles in swift succession. “That’s a different story,” he said.

3

HIS NEW STORY began some few days after the end of the world: after the dead had been collected, in their hundreds and their thousands, after graves had been dug and pyres lit. It began at the prow of Old Town: a jumble of rock that once had been Six Tower, overlooking a blunt spit of river sand. Caine stood upon the sand, his daughter riding his hip, while from the broken rocks above watched an honor guard comprising the whole of the surviving Household Knights.

But I will not transcribe the story he told; the story I care most about is my own. His gift to me, of the device he calls the Caine Mirror, later let me see for myself the events that he then described. Though I saw them through his eyes, what’s important, to me, is how I tell the story.

It begins:

One arm about Faith’s shoulders. Her hands locked around his neck and her forehead tucked into the hollow beneath his jaw. Faith in the white-tasseled shawl of Ankhanan mourning; Caine in a tunic and pants of new black leather, belted with a thin cord, and low soft boots.

He held the blade of Kosall so that it reflected the rising sun, while he said good-bye to his wife.

I will not recount what passed between the three of them there. The device—which sits on my desk as I write this—shows me less than all, but more than I can bear to know. I will say only that their good-byes were private, and brief. The details are Caine’s story to tell, if he chooses; any who might wish to know them will have to ask him.

I will say this: Pallas Ril chose to pass on.

She could not be both goddess and woman; though she could build a mortal body for herself once more, she could not make herself wholly woman. To have been a god is to be forever less than human, but to be wholly goddess was within her grasp.

And she had no better way to keep her family safe.

When their good-byes were done, Caine drove Kosall into the stone before him until the hilt alone projected.

“Faith, honey, get down for a minute,” he said, lowering her to the sand. She dutifully found her feet and took a step away from him.

He said, murmuring as though to himself, “Let’s do it.”

And the power to which he spoke answered him with fire.

He extended his hands, and from his palms burst flame like the surface of the sun; all had to shield their faces, and even Caine was forced to close his eyes. When the flames died, the great stone block had been reduced to a pool of slag, and Kosall was no more.

Pallas Ril had gone to join the river forever.

That was her happy ending.

The only music that marked her passing was the splash of the Great Chambaygen, the chatter of a pair of foraging squirrels, and the scream of a lone eagle, far, far above.

After a moment, Caine looked down at Faith. “You ready?”

She nodded solemnly.

He held out his arm to help her back up onto his hip, but instead she took his hand. “I’m big enough to walk,” she said.

“Yeah,” he agreed, slowly and with some reluctance. “Yeah, I guess you are.”

As the two of them helped each other negotiate the tumble of rock, a dry voice spoke within Caine’s mind. Touching.

“Have some respect,” he muttered.

Ironic: that the man least likely to show respect is the first to ask for it.

“Shut the fuck up.”

Faith blinked up at him owlishly. “Are you talking to God again?”

Caine said, “Yeah.”

She nodded, solemnly understanding. “God can be a mean bastard sometimes.”

“You got that right.”

4

THEY THREADED BETWEEN the ranks of Household Knights, who stood at attention with weapons at port arms and standards lowered. Alone at the end of the ranks, shivering despite being half buried in an enormous raccoon coat, stood Avery Shanks.

Caine and Faith stopped before her.

She matched his level stare.

“Faith?” Caine said, releasing her hand and placing his own on the middle of her back. “Go with Grandmaman back to the palace.”

Faith’s eyes had the otherworldly half emptiness of the river’s Song within her head. “All right.” She held him with her gaze. “I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you too, honey. I just—I have some things I have to do by myself. I’ll be there in time for supper.”

“Promise?”

“Promise,” he replied, and the memory of his last promise to her, and how badly he had failed it, ripped him like fishhooks dragged across his heart.

Reluctantly, Faith joined her grandmother and took her hand. Caine once again met Shanks’ gaze. “Take care of her.”

She snorted. “Better than you ever did,” she said. “Better than you ever will.”

As he watched them walk away, hand in hand, picking along the winding pathways that had been cleared through the debris-choked streets, he murmured, “I have always been fortunate in my enemies.”

Mm, flattery, the voice within him hummed dryly.

Caine opened his mouth as though he might reply, but instead he grimaced and shook his head in silence. He swung his legs into motion, climbing over a crumbled wall, heading toward Rogues’ Way, toward Fools’ Bridge. When he told me this story, he said that he simply needed to move, that he wanted to get off the island for a little while; the Caine Mirror confirms this, but I think it is not the whole of the truth. I believe he wanted to go into the Warrens to see what was left of his old neighborhood.

To see what was left of himself.

5

THE GAP IN Fools’ Bridge where the timbers of the bascule had burned away was spanned by temporary planking supported by ropes of knotted hemp. On that morning, workers trundled barrows of brick and salvaged limestone blocks across, and so Caine took the catwalk on the upstream side: a pair of taut ropes, one above the other. He did not pause over the river—he kept moving, sliding one foot ahead of the other along the lower rope while he slid hands along the upper—but his wife was much on his mind as the water rolled beneath him. He thought, so his Soliloquy claims, of what she had shown him, in that infinite instant when he had joined with the river: how the river was everything within its bound, and everything within its bound was the river.

He thought of so many men and women and children on Earth, for whom a river is a natural toilet, suitable only for flushing away their waste. In a distant, abstract, impersonal way, he felt sorry for them. But not too sorry. If they wanted their world to be different, they could change it.

It wasn’t his problem, not anymore.

Just so. But this begs the question: What, then, is your problem?

Caine left the bridge and wandered at length upon the north bank of the river. From the Warrens to the ruins of Alientown and back again, the streets were filled with people clearing away debris, separating what could be salvaged and used again from what would be suitable only for landfill. Nearly all the corpses had been cleared away and burned days before, and there was a certain grim cheerfulness among the townsfolk, a camaraderie in adversity, that bespoke their shared determination to rebuild their home.

Much of the rebuilt Ankhana will be constructed of timber from the goddess’ unnatural spring: young and sap-filled, many of the tree trunks had burned only on the surface, where the oil had oozed through their bark. Their hearts are sound, and will form the skeleton of the city that will rise from this waste of ash and rubble.

Everywhere Caine went, he was greeted with nods of recognition. It was a strange feeling: Everyone knew who he was, and no one feared him. The greetings he got were instead respectful, and that respect was tinged with awe. Most of the citizens of Ankhana were Beloved Children of Ma’elKoth, and each of these had awakened to the new world with an eldritch knowledge in their hearts of what Caine had done for them, and for their world.

Even more strange for him, I think, was to walk, and walk, and continue to walk with no particular place to go; to return nodded greetings in a friendly way, to listen to the breeze and the conversations, smell the old char on the wind and feel the crunch of gravel beneath his boots—

And find nothing he had to do.

I cannot be certain—the device records no commentary—but I believe he took some comfort from this. These few days were the closest he had ever come to a respite from the struggles of his permanent war. In all his life as Caine, there had always been someone he had to kill, or someone who sought to kill him; always treasure to be searched out, or adventure to be pursued; there had always been the pressure to keep his audience entertained.

Now he was the audience, and he found that the path of a cloud across an autumn sky had an unexpectedly great entertainment value of its own.

Whenever his wandering turned him back toward the Warrens, he found himself staring at the vast hulk of the Brass Stadium. The lone structure of stone in all the Warrens, it towered above the remnants of burnt-out buildings around. In years before, Caine had been an honorary Baron of the Subjects of Cant, the Warrengang that had used the abandoned stadium as their headquarters. In those years, the Subjects had been his family. He had left his family on Earth—his father—for the family of the Monasteries; he had left the Monasteries for the Subjects of Cant; and he had left them in turn to make his own family with Pallas Ril—

But once again, the device records no commentary. And perhaps I am not telling his story here, so much as I am my own.

Sometimes I have difficulty telling the two apart.

I can say for certain that he spent much time staring at the Brass Stadium, and twice made halfhearted attempts to pry off the boards nailed across the street entrances as though to slip inside, and twice changed his mind. Here I do have his words, in Soliloquy: I’m breaking into the wrong stadium.

With that, he turned once more to the west, walking with purpose now, following the dockside to Knights’ Bridge. On the Old Town side, he passed the crater where the Courthouse once stood with barely a glance.

I suppose Caine and justice have always had little to do with each other.

For me, though—my heart clenches whenever I review this part of the recording. That crater, that slag-crusted gap in the city, is a scene of personal destruction: I did that.

I died there, doing that.

It’s not easy to look at.

I’ve had, as of this writing, some few weeks to brood on the experience of being dead. It’s not easy to think about.

Caine had seven years.

The recording admits only of a stew of emotions, cycling and shifting and mixing until all that is definite is their overwhelming power; I will not venture a guess as to what Caine might have been thinking as he crossed Kings’ Bridge and saw, for the first time with his own eyes, the Cathedral of the Assumption.

6

HE’D SEEN IT hundreds of times, if not thousands, through the eyes of his Studio’s Actors, but to be there in the flesh makes it immediate in a way that a simichair can’t duplicate. It towers overhead, looming until it eclipses half the sky: a titanic arc of snow-white marble, the tallest structure in Ankhana, overtopping even the surviving spire of the Colhari Palace. There are no straight lines or hard angles here; the facade curves away in an eye-fooling trick of perspective, to seem even larger than it is, its true dimensions unguessable. Its appearance dwarfs even its reality, and it is fiercely blank: no decoration or detail gives it human scale.

It stands unscathed by fire and battle. No living thing grows upon or within it; no ivy scales its pristine walls. Its floors are stone, its doors iron, and its ceilings brass. The Cathedral of the Assumption transcends mere intimidation; to enter is to be crushed by one’s personal insignificance.

Caine barely noticed.

He walked up to it, whistling tunelessly, absently: a whisper that carried only a ghost of music. Teams of acolytes swung from ropes moored to the roof, scrubbing the facade; though none of the black oil had fouled it, smoke from the fires had stained its gleaming surface.

“I suppose you’ll be shutting this place down,” he muttered.

Why should I? the voice within him replied. Ma’elKoth yet exists—still the patron of the Ankhanan Empire, still the grantor of His Children’s petitions. Though He is only part of what I Am, the name Ma’elKoth still compasses what He is.

There are many such: I am an entire pantheon. Did you not understand this? Pallas Ril is part of Me, now, even as is Ma’elKoth; she shall be the patron of the wild places that she loves, and also the defender of the weak and oppressed, even as the wilds shelter those who must flee—

“Christ, shut up, will you? If I’d known I’d have to listen to you yap for the rest of my fucking life, I would have let you kill me.”

He went to the gate, and a priest wearing white robes under a mantle of maroon and gold opened it for him. “In the name of the Ascended Ma’elKoth, this humble Child bids the Lord Caine welcome.”

Caine made a face and brushed past the priest’s deep bow with a bare nod of acknowledgment. The priest called after him, “Would the Lord Caine desire an escort? A guide, perhaps? Can this humble Child direct him in any way?”

“I can find it,” Caine said, and kept walking.

He had no difficulty making his way to the sanctum. Seven years is not so long a time that any detail of this place was less than fresh in his memory. He knew the sanctum well: he had died there.

The Cathedral of the Assumption had been built around Victory Stadium.

He came out a long dark gangway into blinding sun: the interior of the stadium was still open to the sky, and virtually unchanged since that original Assumption Day. He descended the shallow steps toward the retaining wall around the arena, and every time I review the recording I think he’s about to vault the rail and alight upon the sand.

But he never does.

Instead he sighs, and I feel a grim set fix itself on his face. He looks about, and finally moves along the rows until he sits in one of the Ducal Boxes—the one that had belonged, in fact, to the late Toa-Sytell. He leans forward, supporting his weight with his elbows upon his knees, and stares out across the sand.

For a long, long time.

Again, the recording offers no Soliloquy, no clue to his thoughts, save only the occasional adrenal race of his pulse, and once or twice the hot sting of incipient tears.

Finally, he mutters, “The problem with happy endings is, nothing’s ever really over.”

Amen.

Another long, long silence, while he searches the sky as though he seeks there the clashing eidolons of the goddess and the god; then he fixes his gaze on one spot of sand, far out near the center. Near the altar.

“And Lamorak?” he says, at length. “That shitbag’s a god now, too?”

Of course.

“Christ.”

No. Say rather: Judas. Lamorak shall be the god of traitors, of jealous lovers, of all who plot harm in their hearts, and seek to carry it out in secret. Poisoners.

Assassins.

“Great,” Caine grunts, his mouth a bitter twist. “That’s like a little gift just for me, huh?”

No reply comes.

“What about Berne?”

Alas, no. I do not carry Berne within Me. A pity; he would have made a lovely god of war, don’t you think? Very Arean, in so many ways.”

Now it is Caine who does not answer.

A bit later, he mumbles pensively, “What about Hannto the Scythe? He—you—started out as a necromancer, right? God of death?”

Beauty.

Caine snorts.

Ironic, yes? A man so ugly I could not bear to be him—yet his sole passion was the beautiful. Even now, it is only this for which He truly cares.

Caine shakes his head. “Seems kind of a pissant job. I mean, he’s the original You, right?”

And that is why He is chief among Us, Caine.

“Chief? The god of beauty?”

If you’ll permit, I believe Keats put it well:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty;

That is all ye know on Earth,

And all ye need to know.

This sets Caine to leaning back, staring into the sky to consider; I think he might sleep for a time, here; there comes a point when he closes his eyes, and when he opens them again, the shadow of the cathedral wall seems to have climbed the eastern grandstand.

He seems calmer, when he speaks again, almost—almost—at peace.

“What’s with this Lord Caine shit?” he says slowly.

The dry voice replies without hesitation, as though for it no interval has passed. Only the smallest gesture of My gratitude. My Children will address you so, and will do you honor every day of your life.

“Well, fucking cut it out. I don’t want to be Lord anything. I’m Caine. That’s enough.”

There comes a pause.

Then: Perhaps it is. But how then am I to express how deeply I value you, and what you have done for Me? What reward could possibly suffice?

“You could leave me the fuck alone.”

Ah, Caine, has either of us ever been able to do that?

Caine does not answer.

Can I offer you a job?

“A job?”

Would you like to be, say, Emperor?

“Good Christ, no!” Caine says, and actually bursts out laughing. “Call that a reward?”

But the Empire needs a ruler, and many men would consider nearly unlimited power—

“I have plenty of power,” Caine says. “Remember?”

After a pause: Just so.

“Stick me with a job I’d suck at? Yeah, that’ll cheer me up. Shit. And working for you doesn’t always turn out so well for either of us, you know?”

Again: Just so.

How about eternal youth?

Caine blinks, startled by the idea. “You can do that?”

I can. In the moment when you and Pallas Ril joined Me to the river, I knew you utterly. I know you to the molecule, Caine; to the atom. I can make a new body for you, just as Pallas Ril began to make one for herself. I can make you twenty-five again—twenty-five forever. Think of it: no pain in the hip and shoulder, muscles with the supple flexibility of youth . . . And I can do better: I can give you superhuman strength, and speed, make your flesh regenerate wounds—

“You can stop there; I’ve heard enough. No thanks.”

This would not be some simulacrum, Caine: You would be you. The nervous system of the new body would receive your consciousness every bit as well as the one that channels it now, and probably better.

“And that’s it. That’s exactly it: that part about better.”

Why would you turn down a perfect body?

He says through his teeth, “Because I can’t fucking trust you.”

Caine, you have My word—

“Yeah, we both know how much that’s worth,” he says. “And we both know that while you’re building me a new body, and you’re already in there tinkering around, you’d start to get the itch to perfect my mind, too. Erase a couple of those bad habits that nobody likes about me—cussing too much, scratching in public, whatever—it’d start with minor shit like that, and end up with some of my other bad habits. Like kicking your ass every once in a while.”

A long interval passes in silence.

At least let me fix your legs.

“They work all right, these days.”

Their use remains a chancy proposition, Caine. You may live to regret declining this offer.

“I’m living to regret plenty of things,” he says with a deep sigh.

Here I flatter myself: I believe he might possibly be thinking that he is the sum of his scars.

7

HOW, THEN, MAY I show My gratitude? How may I show the world how much I value you, My friend?

Here Caine takes a long, slow breath and speaks in tones deliberately flattened, to rob them of any suggestion that some emotion might color his words: a judge issuing final instructions to a jury. “We,” he says, “are not friends.”

Caine—

“No,” Caine says with inarguable finality. “I had a sort of friendship, once, with a man named Tan’elKoth. He’s dead now. You—I don’t even know what you are, but you’re no fucking friend of mine.”

You know what I am: I am as you have made Me, Caine.

I am Home.

And I am your friend.

“Well, I’m not yours. You killed my wife, you sack of shit. You hurt my daughter.”

And from those crimes, you and I saved the world.

“Fuck saving the world. You could save ten worlds. You could save the motherfucking universe and it won’t get you off the hook with me. I don’t care if you are God. Someday, somehow, I’m gonna fuck you up.”

We were at war, Caine. We both fought for what we most loved.

“So what?”

Sacrifices had to be made to defeat our common enemy.

“Yeah? What did you sacrifice?”

Apparently, your friendship.

Caine spends a long, long time staring at his hands, making fists and opening them again, watching them transform from tools to weapons and back to tools once more.

“I saw that statue,” he says finally. “The night of the fire. David the King. It was a good likeness. A good statue. Your best work. But it’s not me.”

I disagree.

“I’m not your David.”

Oh, that—yes. You are correct, however much I would wish that you were wrong. Where I disagree is this: David the King is not My best work. You are.

“Shit.”

I see a man who was shattered more thoroughly than that block of marble—who has been reassembled into something greater than the sum of his parts. The artist in Me will always take pride from My participation in that reconstruction. If you and I must be enemies, so be it.

It has been said that the true measure of greatness is the quality of one’s enemies. If this be so, then I am proud to be yours, Caine.

Caine?

“Hmn?” Caine grunts. “Were you talking?”

You weren’t listening.

He shrugs. “When you start to drone on like that, it makes my eyes glaze over. I was thinking: That new body trick—you can do that for anyone who was joined to the river?”

I can.

Caine ignites his wolf-grin. “Then I think I’ve got an Emperor for you.”

And that’s where I come into the story once again.

8

I CONFESS TO watching my resurrection many times. I find it fascinating, and not only for the impressive ceremony, which took place at the Cathedral of the Assumption a few weeks later. It involved the great brass icon of Ma’elKoth in the midst of the temple statues of every god in Ankhana, a Great Choir of elKothan priests, all the nobility and most of the gentry of the Empire, a tremendous amount of chanting and singing and incense and fireworks, and every possible kind of symbolic pinch of this and trace of that: sand from the Teranese Delta, a cup of Tinnaran brandy, an apple from a Kaarnan orchard, et cetera ad infinitum. It was the culmination of a weeklong festival throughout the Empire and was, in Caine’s words, “the biggest fucking dog-and-pony show in the history of the human race.”

Part of what I find fascinating is the way my body seems to assemble itself from the mound of symbolic bric-a-brac, and how when it’s done, it’s me.

It’s me the way I always thought of myself, when my body allowed me to forget the approach of middle age: young, smooth of face, a corona of platinum hair around golden night-hunter eyes.

A primal mage.

I’m sure this came as rather a rude surprise to many of the nobility’s more hardened bigots. But even they can’t object too loudly: the whole capital garrison of the Imperial Army heard Toa-Sytell proclaim all the Folk as citizens of the Empire, with the full complement of rights and duties. And for now, anyway, even the bigots carry the certainty of God Himself within their hearts: that this slim ageless fey is their new Emperor.

I say again: That would be me.

Someday, perhaps, if I say this often enough, it will no longer sound so strange, or so awful.

And so I watch it happen again and again: I watch God Himself, through His faithful priests, carve me out of a mound of dead things and breathe life into my nostrils, and it still seems entirely wonderful, and entirely terrifying.

That is not the only portion of the recording within the Caine Mirror that I watch again and again; I further confess that I spend much of my time reviewing Caine’s talks with me, and our first meeting in the Pit, and every other time he and I were together.

What a gift he has given me—

For this is the one seeing my flash can never offer: to see myself through another’s eyes. It is altogether humbling, and exalting, and to precisely the same degree.

Not too dissimilar, in that respect, to being Emperor.

9

I LAY UPON the bed where one ruler of Ankhana had died, and one had awakened from death, and stared numbly at the man responsible for both.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why me? It doesn’t make any sense.”

He replied through half a smile. “You just haven’t had time to think about it yet.”

He came back from the window and pulled the high-backed laquered chair from the vanity table. He reversed and straddled it, reminding me for one instant so strongly of Tommie that sudden tears stung my eyes.

“The new Empire can’t just be for humans, not anymore,” he said. “Everybody’s gonna have to work together. You’re already the Mithondionne. The Folk will follow you. But you were born human, so the nobility can accept you—reluctantly, sure, but remember, God’s on your side. Their god. And you’ll need him: the Blind God’s still out there, and we both know it can’t give up.”

He leaned forward as though sharing a confidence. “The task of the Empire will be the defense of Overworld. You were born on Earth. You know what we’re up against. Part of what makes a great Emperor is the ability to choose people who are responsible, capable, and honest enough to administrate the business of the realm. Who better than you? Who better than you to mediate disputes and disagreements between provincial Barons? Who better than you to negotiate alliances? Who’s gonna work harder? Who’s gonna care more? Shit, Kris—who better than you for anything?”

“But, Hari—” I brought fingertips to my eyes to hold back tears. “But everything I do, it turns out wrong.”

He shrugged this off as irrelevant—and perhaps he was right. “Sure, shit doesn’t turn out how you expect—or how you hope—but wrong?” He grinned at me. “You’ll have to take that one up with t’Passe.”

“T’Passe . . .” I murmured. “How is she?”

“She’s alive. Took a bullet and an assload of shrapnel out on Gods’ Way, but she made it. That’s a tough broad, no mistake. But this whole thing has flipped her lid a little—I guess she’s decided I am some kind of god after all, and she’s my prophet. She’s been running around trying to start up a church for me. Every time I tell her to cut it out, she just shrugs and tells me she respects my wishes,” he said sardonically, “but she is not compelled to comply.”

“T’Passe liked to say that people are either sheep or wolves,” I said wistfully, watching a cloud billow past the window. “Which am I, Hari?”

“Well, you know what I always say: There’s two kinds of people in the world: the kind who say things like ‘There’s two kinds of people in the world,’ and the kind who know that the first kind are full of shit.”

He waits while I parse this, and I give him a smile to let him know I’ve gotten the joke.

“But that’s serious, too,” he said. “Two-valued systems break down in contact with the real world. True or false, right or wrong, good or evil: those are for mathematicians and philosophers. Theologians. Out here in the real world? Sure, there are sheep, and there are wolves—and there are also shepherds.”

“Shepherds,” I echoed.

Hari nodded. “Yeah. Maybe your real job is to protect people like them—” A jerk of his head indicated the world beyond the bedchamber’s window. “—from people like me.”

I thought about that for a long time, and I have to admit I liked the sound of it.

I am always mildly astonished when such things come out of his mouth; it’s so easy to forget that he was raised by a former university professor—by the author of Tales of the First Folk, no less. And that is, itself, a reminder of how shallow and caste-biased I remain, even after all these years: my need to explain his gifts according to his bloodline. Perhaps, immortal, I can someday outgrow myself; for this I maintain some hope.

“But what about the other way around?” I asked. “Who will protect the people like you?”

“Wolves don’t need protecting,” he said. “All we need is some open country—without too many fences, or too much concrete—and we can take care of ourselves.”

“Sheep, and wolves, and shepherds,” I murmured. I sat up in bed, and Caine handed me a robe of such silken liquid softness it was barely even there. I wrapped it about my shoulders and wandered to the window, marveling at my straight, strong, pain-less legs.

I looked out over the city, watching the people slowly bring it back up from the ashes. “And so there must also be ants and eagles, trees and flowers and fish. Each to its own nature—and the more there are, the more beauty in the world.”

“Butchers and bakers and candlestick makers,” Caine snorted. “It’s just a fucking metaphor. Don’t beat it to death, huh?”

I nodded. “And Emperors. Do you really think I can do this, Hari?” I turned to face him. “Do you?”

He squinted at me against the light from the setting sun. “In my whole life, there are only three people I’ve ever really trusted,” he said. “One of them was my father. The other two are you.”

This burns me every time I watch this scene in the Caine Mirror; it wounds me with a pity I can never share with him. I can never tell him how sorry I am that he could not include his wife in that small company. I know too well how deeply it wounds him.

Through his eyes I watch myself say, “All right. I can try. I just . . . need time to get used to the idea.”

“Not too much time,” he tells me. “Your fucking coronation’s in less than an hour. Come on. Let’s get you ready.”

“Yes,” I see myself tell him. “Let’s.”

10

MY CORONATION WAS very grand, in a disconnected, slightly nightmarish way. I lack sufficient interest in pageantry to spend much ink upon the details. In the vast stark shell of the Great Hall of the Colhari Palace, I accepted personal fealty from hundreds of nobles and from the lords of the Folk. I sat upon the venom-stained bulk of the Oaken Throne and watched myself receive the diadem in that dreamlike dissociative state where I was and was not myself: an experience both terrifyingly immediate and as familiarly comforting as the hundredth hearing of a favorite bedtime story.

I still could not make myself believe it was happening.

It finally became real when Querrisynne Massall approached through the assembled ranks and climbed the steps to the dais, to kneel and offer me the mithondion that had been borne by the Twilight King. I took it from his hand, and received his embrace, and neither shrieked my pain nor collapsed upon the throne.

The Massall is father to Finnall: brave, lovely Finnall, my comrade, whom I stabbed on the precipice above the mines of Transdeia. Father to Quelliar: the murdered chief of the legates to Thorncleft. That the Massall was here told me all I could bear to know of the fate of my family, and my people.

Yet I took the symbol of my House from his hand with no feeling other than a grave respect for what was offered and for what I then accepted. This was how it first became real to me: At that moment, I understood how different I am from what I had thought to become.

Caine had tried to make me understand, while he helped me layer myself with ceremonial dress.

“The real problem with monarchy as a system of government,” he’d said, “is that virtue is not hereditary. So I guess the Big Guy decided he had a better plan.”

I have been improved.

I am immortal.

Immune to illness, to age, to every infirmity that afflicts mortal kind. It may be possible to kill me, though Caine tells me that if I should, by some fluke, be destroyed, the power that I call T’nnalldion—Home—can create me again as I am at this moment.

I don’t think it’s changed me too much; to alter my essential nature would defeat the purpose of having a living ruler at all. One might as well cede authority to a book of bloodless law; one might as well have a robot for a judge, dispensing justice according to its programming, unable to mitigate, unable to abrogate—which of course is not justice at all.

Justice is just only when it is specific.

It seems I am myself, saving only a subterranean connection to the pulse of Home: a constant wellspring of strength. It is strength I cannot live without. Only by touching that living world within myself can I bear the pain of all the lives that come before me. Without it, their pain would overwhelm me; I have no doubt I would go mad, banish the sorrowful from my presence, and end up a Fool King in a court of happy idiots. Provided a court full of such folk could be found.

There are so few happy people in the world.

11

MANY CAME BEFORE me in my Audience the next day; I will mention only those who are part of this story. Nor will I make any attempt to preserve the order of their coming; I find I cannot even recall who was first, and who came after.

Kierendal came to plead the case of the former Duke Toa-M’Jest in absentia; the former Duke himself had not been seen since he left the Courthouse on the night before the battle. I had confirmed the decision of the late Patriarch to strip him of his title, though I rescinded the order for his arrest and execution, and sentenced him only to banishment. As Tommie had said, the only reason to kill a man is for something he’s going to do. His threat to the Empire is mostly symbolic: the resentment of the Folk he had persecuted in the name of the Church, and the vendettas of victim’s families. The Empire cannot be perceived to condone his actions.

“But this is the only home he has ever known,” Kierendal pleaded, kneeling on the steps below the Oaken Throne. She wore the white of Ankhanan mourning, and her face was smeared with black ash. “Banishment might as well be a sentence of death. He is not a bad man—”

“Bad or good is irrelevant,” I said gently. “And this sentence is kinder than he deserves.”

“But the amnesty—”

“Does not apply.” I’d decreed a general amnesty for crimes committed during the height of the outbreak; it would have been impossible to sort out who was responsible for what, when so few could be considered responsible at all. “The crimes for which Jest is banished occurred before the disease took hold.”

“He is a friend to Caine—he helped Caine, freed him from his cell—” Her voice dropped to a bare whisper.

“And it is Caine who spares him execution. Caine has done what Jest himself refused: argued for the life of his friend. That is why the sentence is banishment, not death.”

She lowered her head and flooded my chest with her pain. I understood her too well. She pleaded for him not because he deserved such support, but because he was familiar. Jest was the only remnant of her former life that she could still hope to salvage; she hoped for a rock to anchor her in the empty ocean of her life, even if it was itself the rock that had battered her to pieces.

I have never been able to decide if it might be kinder to allow such false hopes to survive.

“And what of my punishment?” she said.

Without my flash to show me her heart, I might have been confused by this, for—far from punishing her—I had declared her a Friend to the Throne; she is one of the few true heroes of this story, pure-hearted and strong, and fierce in her defense of her people. I knew what she wanted, and I knew what she needed, and I knew that these two things only loosely resembled each other.

“Kierendal, this is the punishment I decree for you: to live without those whom you could not save. I further sentence you to bear this punishment with dignity, and never to disgrace their memories by claiming guilt which is not yours. Let it be so.”

She wept as a steward led her away.

Acting Ambassador Damon came before me, to make the traditional refusal of the honor I had, in respect to that same tradition, offered: a title and lands on the borders of the Empire. He desired only to stay within the Monasteries. He had already resigned his post, though his resignation had not yet been officially accepted by the Council of Brothers. Despite the amnesty, despite all arguments to the contrary, he held himself responsible for the destruction of the embassy. He put it thus: “This happened on my watch. There is no possible mitigation.”

I suppose it is a function of conscience, to insist upon our fair share of guilt.

T’Passe as well came before me. To her, I offered the only reward she would accept: a proclamation rescinding Toa-Sytell’s criminalization of the Disciples of Caine.

“The Disciples of Caine, as a group, are under no obligation to you for this,” she reminded me stiffly.

“I thought the Disciples of Caine, as a group, don’t believe in groups.”

This sparked a tiny smile. “I personally, however,” she said, “am in your debt.”

“If you would repay that debt, visit me on occasion,” I told her. “I value your insight, and would welcome your conversation.”

This seemed to both startle and please her greatly, and she promised to comply.

And I remember Faith Michaelson, brought before me by Businessman Shanks. I remember how pale and serious she looked, how her eyes had retreated into black hollows, and I remember the slight tremble of her hand as she reached for the hem of her dress to perform a curtsy. Her voice was thin, fluting like a rabbit’s whimper. “Your Imperial Majesty . . .” she said.

“I am so very pleased to meet you, Faith,” I told her. “I hope that we may someday become friends.”

“Mm-hm,” she hummed faintly. Avery Shanks squeezed her hand and murmured, “Yes, sir.”

Faith repeated, “Yes, sir.”

“And I hope,” I said to her there, “that someday you will feel free to call me Uncle Kris.”

Her expression did not change. “Yes, sir.”

This child was so profoundly wounded by the unspeakable crime she had suffered—

More: she had been ripped entirely from the world she knew.

The best I could offer was some stability, and the hope of comfort. For her services to the Empire and the world, I created her Marchioness of Harrakha, giving her title to Imperial lands where the Transdeian railway comes down from the God’s Teeth, and to the river town nearby.

Avery Shanks regarded me with eyes that glittered like a falcon’s. “I’m told you’re Gunnar Hansen’s youngest son,” she said, speaking the English that was her sole tongue.

“I was,” I admitted.

“I know your father.” Her gaze judged my robes and my diadem, the mithondion in my hand and the vertical pupils of my eyes. She said coldly, “I can just imagine what he would think if he saw you now.”

“Then your imagination far outstrips my own,” I replied.

“I don’t suppose a man like you truly understands the importance of family—”

“And you may perhaps be correct.”

“—but I am the only real family this child has. You must not take me from her.”

“I had no intention of doing so.”

At this she looked startled. “But Michaelson—”

“I know no one by that name.”

She shut her mouth so abruptly that her teeth clicked together.

A formidable woman: even more so than she had been on Earth. The new world had been transformative for her, as well. In that instant when the world had become new, and the Social Police officers who had restrained her had fled in terror, she had found herself alone with the creature that had been Arturo Kollberg. Mad with rage and loss, it had leaped upon her, knocking her down, kicking her, clawing at her, and the totality of her universe underwent an instant skew-flip.

She had suddenly, instantly, passionately comprehended that despite being fifteen years her junior, and male, and the aspect of some unimaginable creature of nearly limitless power, physically he was a small, frail, malnourished little man—

Who had hurt her granddaughter.

For the creature that had been Arturo Kollberg, I can only imagine that the new world was equally transformative. It must have found itself entirely astonished to be pummeled and clawed and kneed and kicked by Avery Shanks. How could it have possibly guessed that such a beaten, broken old woman could have become so instantly fierce? It couldn’t have guessed how much hand and arm and leg strength Avery Shanks had, even at seventy, from her five weekly sets of tennis. It could never have anticipated that this woman had spent thousands of hours reviewing the recorded Adventures of not only her son, but also of Caine, her dearest enemy. While her body might not have the trained reflexes of a warrior, she had gleaned considerable theoretical knowledge of personal combat, and she had long ago overcome the sort of squeamishness that stops ordinary folk short of savage murder.

It could not have guessed that, in fact, Avery Shanks rather enjoys the taste of blood.

And so when her sharp teeth latched into the side of its neck, sawing through skin to rip its jugular, she still didn’t let go as blood poured across them both, but kept biting deeper and deeper, and chewed through muscle to sever its carotid artery.

It must have still been entirely surprised when it died.

All this I got in the instant’s flash. I regarded her with the same wary respect I offer Caine: the recognition of being in the presence of a natural killer.

“All who know your granddaughter desire nothing beyond her welfare,” I told her. “We are agreed that she can do no better than to remain in your care; and it is for this reason that I now create you Countess of Lyrissan—which you will hold in fief from Lady Faith—and further name you Steward of all the lands and holdings of the Marchionness until she reaches her majority.”

“Countess?” she said. I watched her try the title on and discover that she liked its fit.

Which was as well. She cannot be returned to Earth, and she is an aristocrat to the bone. I confess that I had the interests of the Empire in mind: Placing a ruthless and frighteningly capable Businessman in control, for the next fifteen years, of what was sure to become our primary overland trade route would certainly redound to the Empire’s benefit.

I had thought to make her title conditional—to make her swear to give over her vendetta against Caine—but Hari himself had earlier persuaded me otherwise. “Let her be who she is,” he’d said. “You put a rule on her like that, she’ll just start trying to figure out ways around it. And in the meantime, she’ll be pissed at you for making her go to the trouble. Avery Shanks is a bad enemy to have. Let me worry about her. In the end, she’ll understand that hurting me hurts Faith; she’d chew off her own arm first.”

This might have been my first true lesson in governance: Sometimes, to accomplish more, do less.

And then, inevitably, there was Raithe.

I think of him often, now, and when I think of him, I see him as he was before me in that Audience: kneeling upon the steps below the Oaken Throne. He kept his head lowered, refusing to meet my eye. His left hand he had held as a fist before him, wrapped in layer after layer of linen to the size of a white fabric boxing glove. While he knelt, the oil from his hand had slowly soaked out through the linen, until it dripped upon the steps before him like black tears.

He had come in search of a doom. He wished his tale to end with punishment for his crimes.

I didn’t want to judge him. I had seen all that he has suffered, all he has done, and all that has been done to him. He is a very lonely, very troubled young man.

Caine and I had discussed Raithe, as well, for I had anticipated this moment.

“Better keep him close,” Caine had advised. “That fucker’s dangerous. He’s only gonna get more dangerous as he goes along. You need him where you can keep an eye on him.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“I was thinking,” Caine had said, a wicked glint sharpening his smile, “that he’d make a pretty good Ambassador to the Infinite Court.”

I thought about that for a while.

While I was thinking, Caine had gone on: “Get Raithe installed here, and I’m pretty sure between the two of you, you could get Damon on the Council of Brothers. That’s the place for him: making policy.”

“You could be right,” I admitted.

“You’re better off with Raithe. You need somebody who isn’t afraid to break a rule here and there.”

“Like you.”

“Me?” He laughed. “I don’t break rules. I don’t even notice them.”

I remember musing how alike Raithe and Hari were, in so many ways, and I made mention of this. “In a sense, you’re almost like father and son.”

“Yeah,” he grunted. “Not in a good sense.”

“Have you ever wondered if you might be his father? You told me he’s illegitimate—that his mother was a prostitute in Ankhana—and his age would be about right. You said you were pretty wild, in those days.”

“Nah, he’s not my son,” he said carelessly. “Might be yours, though.”

I stared, drop-jawed and blinking. “You must be joking.”

“No, I’m not. That’s what makes it so funny. His mother was a Korish whore at the Exotic Love; I didn’t hang out at the Exotic in those days—I couldn’t afford to look through the goddamn doors, let alone buy a girl. My place was Fader’s, over in the Warrens.”

“Fader’s,” I said hollowly, caught in memories a quarter century old. “I remember Fader.”

“Yeah, well, she’s dead now. You used to work at the Exotic, right?”

I nodded, numb.

“You remember a girl named Marte? Dark skinned, tiny?”

“Marte—I do, I think.”

“Ever bang her?”

“Caine—”

“Come on, you can tell me. Did you?”

“I—I’m not sure. I might have. I had a lot of sex in those days, Hari, and I wasn’t often sober.”

“Well, he’s got your build. I don’t know what color your eyes were, before the surgeries—”

“Blue.”

He shrugged. “And he’s got all these mind powers and shit, and you’re the bust-ass thaumaturge, right? You gotta admit it’s possible.”

“Yes,” I murmured slowly. “I suppose I do.”

All this swirled through my mind as I looked down upon him in the Great Hall. I tried to persuade him to drop his request; he is not, after all, my subject. Any punishment for his crimes must come from the Council of Brothers, for he retains his rank of Ambassador, with its attendant diplomatic immunity. “Don’t preach law to me,” he said there. “I don’t need law. I need justice.”

His plea moved me, and so I reluctantly consented.

“This, then, is your doom, Raithe of Ankhana.” I pointed down at the pool of oil collecting on the step. “You are now the chokepoint of the Blind God’s ambitions for this world; it is through you its power will still seek to poison us. Your doom is to resist the Blind God with every breath, and to struggle every day to repair the damage he has done through you.”

He said, “How can I—?”

“You cannot. You will strive without respite until the day of your death, always knowing that you will ultimately fail. Always knowing that the instant you surrender, things you love will begin to die.”

For a long moment he knelt there, his head lowered; and then without a word he slowly and deliberately used the hem of his robe to mop up the oil that had dripped from his hand. Then he touched his forehead to the stain, rose, and backed out of my presence.

I watched him go in silence.

“That’s kinda harsh.”

There is a small alcove behind the Oaken Throne. Within the alcove, there is a chair, set so that its occupant can peer out an unobtrusive spygate concealed within the ornate carvings of the wall; it was through this spygate that the dark, dry voice came.

“You think so? What I gave him wasn’t punishment, it was a gift,” I said softly. “I gave his life purpose. Meaning.”

“Some gift. Next Christmas? Cards only, huh?”

I allowed myself a gentle chuckle. “I still wish you’d let me give you a title.”

“Forget it. I have other plans.” Hari had, over the past day, dropped veiled hints that he and the god had reached some sort of rapprochement. “There are some places,” he’d admitted, “where our interests coincide.”

“Hari—”

“Drop it, Kris. Like I told you the first time—” When he had turned down my every offer, from Duke of Public Order down to what he called Baronet of Buttfuck Nowhere. “—if I hold a title from you, some people are gonna hold the Empire accountable for shit I do. Believe me, Kris, you don’t want that. Believe me.”

I found I did believe him.

“And what is it you’re going to do?”

His voice warmed with that familiar wicked grin. “Make trouble.”

12

HOURS BECAME DAYS that turned to weeks. I kept myself buried in work—which was primarily discovering whom among the nobility I could trust to administrate the Empire’s business. I also helped Lady Avery and Lady Faith establish their household; Francis Rossi, the unfortunate Actor Kier and I had kidnapped so long ago, became Lady Faith’s aide. Caine trusts him, and the new Marchioness needs someone who can not only protect and defend her person, but can translate her English into Westerling. Lady Avery has already gathered a substantial cadre of former Actors to be her agents. I saw little of Caine during those weeks, by my choice.

I could not face him.

I had made one dreadful mistake, a mistake that haunted me, poisoning my every waking moment, until the only answer my horror would allow was the distraction of constant work.

I had looked into the abyss.

This was how I did it:

“I need to know, Hari,” I said one day. “I need to know how you knew it would work. When you killed Ma’elKoth. How could you have possibly known? How did you know he was not wholly the blind god? How did you know he would turn upon his master once you joined him with the river? How did you know you weren’t handing the enemy the exact victory it most desired?”

Finally I came to the real question, which I barely dared to ask. “How did you know you weren’t destroying the world, instead of saving it?”

“Ma’elKoth asked me the same thing,”

“And?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t.”

I stared, speechless.

“I thought I was dead, Kris,” he said. “There was no way Kollberg and the Social Police were gonna let me walk out of there. All I could do was try to save Faith.”

My mouth opened, and a chill coiled within my guts. “You . . . all you could—”

“I didn’t even know that killing Ma’elKoth with Kosall would channel him into the river. Didn’t have a clue. How could I? All I knew was that he was the one who had the hold on Faith. She was the link to the river, but he was the link to her. So I killed him. He’s dead; she’s off the hook. Then Soapy shoots my ass off, and I’m dead, too. The blind god gets the sword—it doesn’t need her anymore. Raithe was gonna leave her with the elves. They’d have looked after her, healed her as best they could. She might have had some kind of life.” He shrugged again. “It was the best I could do.”

Still half dumbstruck, I stammered, “Then—then your plan—you didn’t—all this—?”

“That was the plan. The only plan I had.”

“From the beginning . . .” I murmured.

“Yeah. From as soon as I understood what was going on.”

“All this—the prisoners, the Faces, the Monastics. The destruction of the city. Raithe. Me. You used us all.”

“Yeah.”

“You made all this happen just to save one little girl.”

He nodded. “And to take a chunk out of Ma’elKoth. Leave the world something to remember me by.”

He spread his hands as though offering a hug to my horrified stare. “Hey, what can I say? I am who I am.”

“Yes,” I agreed numbly. “Yes, you are.”

“You never know how things’ll play out. You can’t. The universe doesn’t work that way.” He grinned at me. “So cheer the fuck up, huh?”

“No, I—no, I mean . . .” I shook my head, trying to fit all this into my reality. “You found yourself on a precipice, in the dark. So you jumped.”

“Every day, Kris. Every fucking day.”

And he sounded happy about it.

I can’t be happy about it. I can barely even think about it. It makes me feel empty: hollow, fragile, broken inside.

It’s all so meaningless—

I have been judged with every judgment I have pronounced. Like t’Passe, I represent a people suddenly granted the full rights of Ankhanan citizens, whether we want them or not. Like Kierendal, I am sentenced to live without those I could not save. Like Faith, I must take comfort from a title and power bestowed—inflicted—upon me without my desire or my consent. Like Raithe, I have been given the thorny gift of purpose.

Like Caine, the world now asks of me only that I be who I am.

What have I done to deserve this?

Hari likes to quote Nietzsche: “And when you gaze into the abyss, remember that the abyss gazes also into you.”

My only reply is the mantra of Conrad’s Kurtz.

I am aware that this is yet another failure of character, that other, stronger men do not suffer from the nausea of the void. I am also aware of the gape of hell beneath my feet. The history of both my worlds is replete with monsters called kings, and demons called emperors.

In every case, they became so simply because, in a universe without meaning, there was no reason not to.

And here is another gift I have been given, far greater than I can possibly deserve: When the horror overwhelms me, I have someone to whom I can always turn, who will always save my life.

13

CAINE TOOK ANOTHER long, slow sip of the hundred-year-old Tinnaran in his snifter and made a face. “Know what really sucks?” he said. “On this whole fucking planet, nobody makes a decent scotch.”

We sat together in the palace library, long after midnight. I sat at this very table, near the warmth of a slowly wavering lamp flame. Caine sprawled across an overstuffed chair upholstered in glistening crushed velvet the color of black cherries, while we shared a cask of the palace cellar’s finest brandy. “There are worse problems,” I said.

“For you, maybe. How am I supposed to face old age without Laphroaig?”

“Hari—”

He waved his snifter at me. “Pour me some more of this nasty shit, huh? It’s hard enough to be serious when I’m sober; it’s impossible when I’m only half drunk.”

I tipped another splash of brandy into his glass, and he swirled it while he waited for it to warm to his hand. After I refilled his, I added a splash to my own. I took a long drink and replenished again before I replied. “Do you remember the last time we sat and drank together like this?”

He lifted his glass and stared at the lamp flame through the warm amber transparency of the brandy. “Last time, it was retsina. Remember?”

“Vividly.”

“Twenty-five—no, twenty-seven, twenty-eight years ago, it must be. Yeah, I was thinking of that. You were pretty down that night, too.”

“Too?”

He gave me a knowing Oh, come on, now look. “Shit, Kris, if we were on Earth, I’d be taking you to an emergency room somewhere to get your serotonin balance adjusted.”

I suddenly found my brandy much more interesting than I did his face.

“Hey,” he said, “you want to talk about it, we’ll talk. You don’t want to talk, we’ll drink. I’m easy.”

For a time, we did just that: sat, and drank. He seemed to enjoy the quiet; for me, the silence rang with anomie, and I felt as though my chair were made of knives.

At length, I made a try. “I only—” I began. “I remember, a few days before I left on freemod, I wrote the story of what happened to us at the Conservatory, and what we did. I remember wondering what our lives would be like, twenty or thirty years from then. How we might meet again.”

“You didn’t come close to this, huh?”

“Not really.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Maybe. Maybe that’s part of it.”

“How come?”

“I just can’t make myself understand, Hari,” I said helplessly. “I can’t figure out what I did right, and what I did wrong. Here I am: Emperor of Ankhana. Power. Limitless wealth. Eternal youth. And I can’t even decide if this is a reward or a punishment.”

“I might not be the right guy to be having this conversation with,” Caine said, chuckling. “For me, breathing is its own reward.”

“How can you laugh?”

“What, should I cry? Would that make more sense?”

“I don’t know, Hari.” I set down my glass and turned away from him. “I don’t even know what sense is, anymore.”

Suddenly my face was in my hands.

“Hey—hey, come on, Kris.” He’d lost his bantering tone, and his hand was warm on my shoulder.

“Maybe laughter is the only answer,” I said, rubbing my burning eyes. “It’s all so . . . ridiculous, you know? How could these things have happened to me? How can I possibly be who I have become? I don’t understand, you see? I need to understand, and I can’t. Everything is so . . . random. I can’t make it make sense.”

“Yeah, no shit. What did you expect?”

Slowly, I raised my head once more. “I don’t know. Maybe—maybe I expected that I would have learned something. That I’d have an idea what it all meant.”

“The meaning of life? Shit, Kris, I can help you there.”

“You can?”

“Sure. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Now I did laugh—bitterly, hopelessly. “Some help.”

“It is what it is, Kris. One day you’re alive. One day you’re dead. One day you’re a loser. One day you’re king of the fucking world. No reason. It doesn’t mean anything. It just is.”

“I don’t accept that. I can’t accept that.”

He shrugged. “Everybody spends their whole lives pretending that shit isn’t random. We trace connections between events, and we invest those connections with meaning. That’s why we all make stories out of our lives. That’s what stories are: ways of pretending that things happen for a reason.”

“I keep thinking of my father—of the Ravenlock. Of my brother Torronell. What did they do to deserve such horrible deaths? How is it that I live to rule, and they died in agony?”

“How should I know? Those aren’t my stories.”

“Are they mine?”

“Maybe you shouldn’t worry so much about their stories. Maybe you should just pay attention to their roles in your story. Let them worry about what they deserved or didn’t deserve.”

“Let the dead bury the dead,” I said.

“Yeah. What you’re gonna do about it, that’s your story. You might find things make a little more sense.”

“What kind of story can possibly make sense of that? What about all the innocent citizens of Ankhana who murdered each other in the plague? What about all the ones who burned to death? What about all the cowards who ran and hid and let others die, and now walk free in the sunlight?”

He took a slow, meditative draft of brandy and let it rest in his mouth while he considered.

“I had a lot of time to myself to think shit over not too long ago,” he said at length, holding up his right hand so that the lamplight fell upon the scars the Shaft shackle had left on his wrist. “I’ll tell you what I think. I think capital-L Life has no meaning in a human sense—it is what it is, like a rock, or the sun, or anything else. It means itself, and that’s all. But that doesn’t mean our lives have no meaning, you follow? Life might not have a meaning of its own, but the stories we tell about it do. You told me once that the universe is a structure of coincidence. It means whatever you decide it means. Which is another way of saying: What your life means depends on how you tell the story.”

“That’s not good enough,” I said. Like all words of wisdom, those had been much easier to say than to accept. “What meaning can I possibly give a story like mine?”

“How the fuck should I know? Maybe if you just tell it the best you can, it’ll grow its own meaning.”

And that is what I hold on to, now. That is how he saved me, yet again.

It’s my life.

What it means depends on how I tell the story.

14

I SAID GOOD-BYE to Caine in a grey dawn at the dockside, lashed by spits of winter rain. Lady Avery was already bundled into her cabin within the riverbarge, and the crew stood at ready, waiting for Caine.

Past his shoulder, as we embraced, I saw Lady Faith, still on deck, watching with wide, solemn eyes—making sure that her father was not going to leave her again. Beside her, Orbek stood in motionless guard, an assault rifle cradled in his massive arms.

I was at the dockside incognito, dressed in a commoner’s tunic and pants, covered only by a woolen cloak that hung heavy and wet about my shoulders. I do not fear to walk unguarded among my subjects; I still have skills of hand and mind to defend myself at need, and the word of T’nnalldion that the Empire will not go untended should I fall.

Caine wore no cloak of his own, only a tunic and pants of black leather that seemed to bristle with knives at every angle. These made embracing him an uncomfortable business—

But I suppose it would have been so, regardless.

“What will you do, now?”

He smiled at me from under hair plastered flat by the freezing rain. “After I get Faith and Shanks settled in? Maybe it’s better you shouldn’t know. I don’t want you to worry.”

“I’m not your mother.” I fisted him in the ribs and tried for a tone of cheerful banter. “I’m your king.”

“Yeah, well, let’s keep that just between us, huh?” Then he shrugged, and grinned at me. “It’s occurred to me that if I’m gonna be raising a daughter on this world, I’m gonna want this to be a decent world to raise her on. So I’ll be heading southwest—down into warm weather. There’s a place in northern Kor I need to visit. Chanazta’atsi.”

“Chanazta’atsi?” The name was familiar, and after only a moment I remembered why. “There’s a dil in Chanazta’atsi.”

His grin spread. “I know.”

Before I could pursue this further, his eyes shifted toward something over my shoulder and his smile faded. His face hardened to stone.

I followed his gaze. Toward us through the rain came a man dressed as I was, though the hood of his cloak was drawn up until it occulted his face. He carried a large black valise in his right hand, and only when I saw the bulge of white linen around his left did I realize who he was.

A twist of motion in my peripheral vision: Orbek adjusting his grip on the rifle to hold it at low-ready.

Caine stepped away from me and moved to intercept Raithe. He stopped midway, and his hand went beneath the hem of his tunic at the small of his back; it came out with a large, matte-black automatic pistol, which he held against the back of his thigh, where Raithe could not see it. He waited, motionless, as Raithe approached. He said something that I did not hear, and Raithe replied by lifting the valise and offering it to Caine.

“It is the only gift I can offer that might have meaning,” I heard him say. “And the greatest gift you can give in return is to accept it from my hand.”

They spoke together then for some little time, while I watched. As did Orbek.

As did Faith.

What they said to each other is not part of my story, but it was not long before Caine shrugged, showed Raithe the gun he held—and then put it away.

Raithe departed with a bare nod in my direction. Caine returned to my side and handed the valise to me. “You might find this useful,” he said; then he explained to me what it was, and how it is used, and left me there on the dockside in the rain, holding the Caine Mirror in its case.

“See you around,” he said as the poleboys unmoored the barge and shoved it away from the dockside.

I could only wave.

He returned my wave with a nod; then as the freezing rain thickened toward sleet, shading the barge and all upon it to grey silhouettes, I saw his dim ghost place an arm around the blur of his daughter’s shoulders, and they turned and went into the wash of firelight through the cabin door.

Orbek stood in the rain for a moment longer. He gave me one solemn nod, then followed them within.

I stood in the sleet until the barge could no longer be seen.

Then I came back here, to my writing table in the library, and poured myself more of this fine Tinnaran, and finally—hours or days later—summoned the courage to use Caine’s gift to me.

15

SOME MONTHS AFTER the battle was over, war was finally declared. I wasn’t there—I don’t know the details—but I have a powerful and detailed imagination, which has proved accurate in the past.

I see it like this:

The members of the Board of Governors are summoned to an emergency plenary session; their personal implants—similar to thoughtmitters—alert them to the emergency, and each of them hurries to find a private place where they can activate without fear of discovery or interruption.

For Leisureman Marc Vilo, the alert comes while he’s sitting on the toilet, off the master bedroom of his sprawling estate in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. This being already more than private enough for his purposes, he speaks the required code phrase, then sighs as the reality of the bathroom around him thins to translucency; his final independent thought, as his consciousness melds with the electronic group mind that is the Bog, is that this business of being on the Board—far from the huge accession of power it had seemed to him as an outsider—is really kind of a pain in the ass. Especially now that the entire Studio system has been shut down for more than a month. What he finds, though, is electrifying.

Every POV screen in every Studio on Earth has suddenly come back to life, and they all show the same thing.

Caine.

He squats on his heels in some kind of desert setting: a rock outcropping at his back, scraps of scrub like sagebrush around his feet. He wears his familiar costume of black leather, and his familiar wolf-grin. His hair is a bit more grey than some of the Bog recall, and his waist a trace thicker, but there is nothing about him that looks the faintest bit old, or soft.

He bears no resemblance to the former Chairman of the San Francisco Studio.

Shortly thereafter, telemetry confirms from whom the POV is being transmitted: an Actor named Francis Rossi, aka J’Than. Several of the Bog comment that this seems ironic—wasn’t J’Than the Actor who had been used as a camera some months ago, when all this began? A lightning consult of the Studio’s online data files confirms that he is.

Caine, meanwhile, seems to understand that his audience is now assembled. “Hi there,” he says, darkly cheerful. “You fuckers know who I am, so I’ll bite right to the gristle.”

He stands. “I know there are people over there who are thinking, Yeah, big deal, we’ll reopen the colonies. Yeah, we’ll find a way around this transfer shield, and then we’ll send Actors and tanks and guns and all the rest of that shit. I know people are thinking that. I know I’m talking to some of those people right now.

“I know you’re thinking: In the end, numbers and technology let you do whatever you want. You’re thinking there really isn’t dick we can do about it. Well, guess what?

“I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong.

“We can hurt you.”

He walks away, around the outcrop of wind-eroded sandstone, and J’Than follows. Caine stares off, far down a long, sloping hill; several buildings cluster in the twilit distance, window lights winking on as the sun gives way to night. “Sure, you can probably find a technological answer that’ll get you back to Overworld. I just wanted to let you know that we can get to Earth.”

He points down at those buildings. “See? You know what that is?”

Marc Vilo, alone among the Board of Governors, does.

Holy crap, he thinks. That’s my house.

Something seizes J’Than from behind—possibly Caine himself—and he seems to fly through the air: desert rolls beneath him, and the complex soars to meet him with terrifying speed.

In his bathroom, Marc Vilo’s hand finds a hazily translucent key on the pad beside the toilet, and alarm klaxons blare.

They land on the pool deck, beside an artificial waterfall, and the shriek of sirens seems to please Caine in some darkly savage place. “Think about it,” he says. “All of you. Okay, you can get at us. Now we can get at you. We know what your tanks can do to our cities. Imagine what a dragon can do to New York. Imagine being in a skyscraper in downtown Chicago while rockmagi liquefy its foundation.

“Imagine.”

The general consensus of the Board is that Caine must be bluffing. Dwarfs? Dragons? Magick on that scale cannot be done on Earth—

As if in answer, Caine turns away from J’Than. “Ma’elKoth?”

A shaft of crimson flame bursts from his outstretched hands, and the building he faces explodes.

He watches it burn, grinning.

He turns back to J’Than and leans close, his face demon-lit by flames behind. “Marc? You home, old buddy? Knock fucking knock.”

The Vilo Intercontinental secmen who guard the estate barely have a chance to prime their weapons before Caine scatters them with a tidal bore of fire. He strides among the buildings, and his merest glance strikes ablaze even the brick of the walls.

When he reaches the main house, he batters through the carbon-fiber-reinforced ceramic armor of the front door with his bare hands. Brick and stone shatter under his fists, and he disappears within, leaving the Actor staring helplessly after him.

He disappears from the view of the Bog. But Marc Vilo sees him when Caine rips the bathroom door from its hinges. To Marc—half his consciousness subsumed in the Board—Caine seems translucent, only partially there, but his half reality is doubly terrifying.

“Never expected you’d die on the toilet, huh?”

“Hari—” he says. “Hari, for the love of God, please—”

“Which god?”

“Hari, I’m begging you, please—c’mon, kid, all the stuff I’ve done for you—I made you. Please, you can’t—”

Caine shakes his head. “You of all people, Marc. Of all the people in the world—in any world—”

His lips stretch open over his teeth, feral and cold. “You should have known better than to fuck with my family.”

That is the last Vilo sees: his eyeballs boil and burst in the first wash of flame. He does, however, have time to hear himself scream.

To the Bog, watching through J’Than’s eyes, it seems the house detonates like a fuel-air bomb. J’Than himself is hurled tumbling through the air by the force of it, and lands gasping and stunned upon the lush green grass that defines this desert home’s front lawn. For several seconds, the Bog allows itself to believe that Caine might have perished in the explosion, but then he walks out of the flames. Unhurt.

Not even singed.

“You want a war?” he says with that same dark and savage cheer. “Bring it on.”

He leans so close to J’Than that his teeth fill the world. “As of right now, the Studio is out of business. So is the Overworld Company.

“Overworld is closed.”

He puts his hands on J’Than’s face.

“Thank you, and good night.”

The light from the last Actor’s eyes contracts to a point, and winks out.

16

SO:

Here I am.

At my desk, my head full of stories.

There are so many heroes in these stories: Hari, and Caine; Raithe, and the Caineslayer; Avery Shanks and Kierendal and Damon of Jhanthogen Bluff—

Tan’elKoth, of course.

And, I suppose—in my backward way—even me.

I remember reading somewhere that the name for how we structure reality is myth: that myths are stories that offer a perception of order within the chaos of existence.

I’m still not sure I will ever understand, but I think I see how to survive without understanding. I will tell the story as best I can, and let it grow its own meaning. And if I can’t find myths that properly order the chaos of my life, I’ll make up some of my own.

My story begins:

A tale is told of twin boys born to different mothers.

One is dark by nature, the other light. One is rich, the other poor. One is harsh, the other gentle. One is forever youthful, the other old before his time.

One is mortal.

They share no bond of blood or sympathy, but they are twins nonetheless.

They each live without ever knowing that they are brothers.

They each die fighting the blind god.

THERE ARE SOME who say that Time is itself a hammer: that each slow second marks another tap that makes big rocks into little rocks, waterfalls into canyons, cliffs into beaches.

There are some who say that Time is instead a blade. They see the dance of its razored tip, poised like a venomous snake, forever ready to slay faster than the eye can see.

And there are some who say that Time is both hammer and blade.

They say the hammer is a sculptor’s mallet, and the blade is a sculptor’s chisel: that each stroke is a refinement, a perfecting, a discovery of truth and beauty within what would otherwise be blank and lifeless stone.

And I name this saying wisdom.