Caine Black Knife

CAULDRON

RETREAT FROM THE BOEDECKEN (partial)

You are CAINE (featured Actor: Pfnl. Hari Michaelson)

MASTER: NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.

© 2187 Adventures Unlimited Inc. All rights reserved.

Wet

cool wet sting lips tongue throat

water fuck me it’s water

hakHAKH

fuck that hurts

fuck hurts just breathe

breathe

a pinhole star in the void bright and brightening and going red and wind hushing to a roar and the star screams toward me and yawns beyond the universe-

And I’m awake. And it wasn’t a dream.

I’m still on the cross.

Tilted back so I can breathe. Must be some-

It’s Crowmane. Cold yellow eyes framed with gloss feathers gleaming black-red in the light from the bonfires. Looking in her face feeds the furnace in my chest with dreams of fist-fucking her eye sockets.

She lifts a dipper to my lips and I take a mouthful of cool clean water-fuck me, it is water, it is-and I spit it on her anyway.

Try to.

My gut just won’t push that hard right now.

Water dribbles down my chin and neck and chest and some of it goes down my throat, and y’know, if she’d bring that dipper up again I’d just fucking drink it, but instead her raw-liver lips peel back around her tusks and she says something to me, waving down at the lower tier with the dipper, splashing carelessly the water that is my sole hope of heaven, painting the retaining wall with little black wet dustballs that I would gladly lick off her asshole just to get that moisture past my lips. .

Down where she points, the other bitches have Pretornio.

Shit, they haven’t even stripped him yet. I couldn’t have been out more than a couple of minutes.

Shit.

I wanted to miss this one.

Next to where the bitches hold him rises a pole seven feet tall, blunt as a knuckle and big around as my wrist. It’s fixed on a sprawling iron stand so it won’t tip over when he starts to struggle. I wish I could look away. I have, y’know, some, what you might call, issues with anal penetration. In general. And this will be, y’know-

Overly specific.

I really wanted to sleep through this.

I wish there were some way I could stop myself from imagining how it’ll feel.

The bitches go to work on his clothing, cutting it off so they can strip him without opening his shackles, and he’s still staring up at me-I mean, it looks like he’s staring up at me, kind of, in a sick way-with that same stupid dreamy smile he had when he begged me to pick him for this. Which is bone-fucking creepy on a face with only clot-crusted holes where eyes used to be.

Well, this is what you asked for, man. You can fuck me if I have a clue why.

Under his robes he’s all soft and white. It’s hard to look. I mean, sure, priests don’t have to be athletes, even Kannithan priests, but shit he’s got these little saggy man-tits. . and when they cut away his pants, his crotch is just a thatch of mud-colored hair. Huh. Since when is Dal’kannith one of those, y’know, those full-castration type of-

Oh.

Holy shit. I get it. I get it now. Those aren’t man-tits.

Pretornio-

He’s a chick.

››scanning fwd››

When the world comes all the way back the smell is still turd-smoke and old meat; the feel is still easterly breeze on my face and my chest and my balls but not on arms and legs that are numb as the wood they’re nailed to. The sound on the wind is still Pretornio’s voice, gone high and ragged, still chanting away in Old High Lipkan, and when my eyes fall open she’s still impaled on the pole like a trout on a fish spear.

Doesn’t wriggle, though.

Me, I’d be thrashing with everything I’ve got. Drive my weight down onto the blunt end of the pole. Make it rip through me. End it fast.

She’s perfectly still. Must be holding out for something from Dal’kannith.

Good fucking luck.

Moon’s out, way over in the west. The top bitches are back up here. I catch Crowmane’s voice behind me, and Dugsacks leans on the retaining wall and chews wood-roasted meat off what looks a little like it could be half a giant chicken wing but is actually the forearm of somebody I know.

Knew.

Maybe somebody who died in the fight. Stalton. Rababal. Maybe somebody who’s died since. Somebody I chose. Maybe Kess, or Nollo.

Maybe Tizarre.

Dugsacks sees me watching her eat and tosses the arm to Cornholes, who gives me a friendly snort that sounds like a lion’s cough because each of her nostrils is bigger around than my dick. Teasingly, mockingly, she lifts the arm up within reach of my teeth.

So I take a bite.

Why not? Better than a sop of vinegar. Tastes good too.

The ridges of flesh that serve her for eyebrows pop wide. While I chew, she chuckles and says something to the other bitches and they hoot and when she turns back and lifts her head to laugh up at me, I figure my gut’s recovered some. I make an experiment: I spit the hunk of somebody-I-know in her eye.

Dammit. Wanted it up her nose.

She starts for me and Crowmane stops her with an authoritative bark. Dug-sacks says something that gets a laugh from the other bitches and Cornholes’ eyes bulge and she whaps Dugsacks a good one with the roasted arm and they go for each other and Crowmane has to wade in personally, and while they’re all still hooting and clawing and shrieking and struggling-

This place is suddenly getting light. .

Shadows sharpen and stone glares and what exactly the hell is going on here? Not dawn. Can’t be. Dawn here is vermillion dust. This light’s yellow as a lamp and it’s coming from-

It’s coming from-

Hot staggering fuck. Pretornio’s on fire.

A crown of flames fans the night from her skull, lightning-blue where it springs from naked bone, rising to a sunflower spray, and across the badland camp Black Knives turn and stand and stare, and the world goes quiet except for the night wind’s whisper and the harsh spit of flame. Flesh has burned off her spine, and the exposed bone spits a column of blue blaze up to join her crown, bright as an arc-welder. Bright as a star.

Shit, she’s in overload.

And she’s still chanting. .

Guess Dal’kannith’s coming through for her after all. With something Old fucking Testament.

The bitches have forgotten about me now. They’ve forgotten about each other. They line the retaining wall, staring down in brain-dead stupefaction at their homemade fusion torchsicle.

Crowmane recovers first. She roars something into the camp, where awed Black Knives have stopped eating and fucking and gambling and everything else to stand and stare with stupid looks scorching into their warthog faces. Crowmane roars again, and a couple of bucks grab a water barrel and run at Pretornio. This tickle in my guts might be the pre-echo of an oncoming laugh. They’re gonna be sorry.

The bucks skid to a stop at the base of the impale-o-matic and heave the barrel. A gout of water splashes up onto her and power explodes through it like a fuel-air bomb. The shockwave blasts cook fires into showers of burning shit and shreds tents and sends ogrilloi tumbling. What’s left of the two bucks looks like Daffy Duck after the dynamite goes off in his beak.

And Pretornio chants on.

Another roar from Crowmane. Bucks scramble to string their bows, and four-foot arrows as big around as my thumb zip out of the night and smack into her unresisting flesh with a stutter of flat whaps like bored applause.

Every one of them bursts aflame: instant torches fed with her melting body fat. And I finally manage that laugh.

The laugh shakes me. It rocks me. It rips barb-wire chunks off my ass-boned-to-Neverland diaphragm. I don’t mind.

It always did hurt.

“Hey. .” Dead crows wheeze better than that, if they’re fresh enough. Nobody even looks around. “Hey. . dumb cunts. .”

Gahh. Throat’s worse’n my gut.

Fuck it anyway.

I suck a fold of lip between my teeth and bite down and thick salt-black metal syrup slides down into my throat before I give myself time to think about drowning in my own blood.

“Hey, you stupid goddamn cows-”

Dugsacks turns and gives me the fisheye. I gasp strength back into my lungs. “Tell your head shit-suck over there that you have maybe two minutes. Maybe three. Then it’s fucking over for you.”

Next to Crowmane at the retaining wall, Cornholes snarls something savage over her shoulder at Dugsacks, who snarls something back and Cornholes raises a fist that’d stun a buffalo but Crowmane’s all over them again and one of her hands has gathered unto itself all the reality there is to be had here on the parapet, and I simply and purely dream-certain know that if they get seriously into it right now, she’ll make them seriously dead before either of them can seriously blink.

They know it too. Cornholes shuts the hell up. Dugsacks mutters something, and Crowmane barks at her. Dugsacks flinches, and says whatever it was again, louder.

Now Crowmane looks at me. The hyper-real shimmer around her hand swells toward my face, and when she growls something that sounds like nerroll pagganik torrin nezz, paggtakkuni, the eldritch dream-knowing tells me that she means What do you whimper, little rabbit?

I lift my head enough to give her a look at my teeth. “I know what she’s doing. I can tell you about it. Maybe in time.”

She swivels her swinging tits toward me and gives me a toss of the crowfeather headdress. Nershrannik pagannol. Pelshragikk laggan?

Why do you tell me? Why do I listen?

“Because I want off this fucking cross.” More panting brings enough strength to go on. “Because you know it.”

One pace closer. The other bitches cluster instinctively at her shoulders. Those yellow eyes never flicker. Pagallo nezziokk. Burshraggikko ymik treyy, paggtakkuni. Ymik.

Talk now. Later I take you down, little rabbit. Later.

“I got your little rabbit for you right here, you stupid fucking cunt. You want to play games? Fine. I’ll die up here. Laughing.” I cough a wad of blood out of my throat and manage a spit that sprays it across her face. “Because I get to watch you die down there.”

She doesn’t flinch at my blood. She doesn’t even blink. The flarelight from Pretornio’s overload has gone stark white, crowning Crowmane with a halo of starfire. Pagallo nezziokk.

Talk now.

Out of the west come the low skirling whispers of storm winds spinning up over gravel-scoured badlands, rising into the hush where I can still hear the hiss and snap of the lightning-blue corona of flame and the high, thin sound of Pretornio’s voice, still chanting, still screaming her invocation to her god while His power burns away her breasts and her fingers and her cheeks and eyebrows and her scream loses words and spirals upon itself into the simple shriek of superheated gases that opens into an end-of-the-world thunderclap.

A whipcrack shock blasts out and over us and the camp and the vertical city and the badlands. Every bonfire and torch and hurricane lamp and even fucking candle flares into instant firestorms that claw for the stars-

And go out.

Darkness. Only a sliver of moon, and embers swirling toward the sky.

And near-to-silence, while night-blind Black Knives pick themselves up and try to discover just how badly hurt they all might be.

Shapes moving in the ink pool below my cross: Crowmane and her bitches. One of them murmurs, and a parapet stone casts sickly green light enough to let them find their feet.

Out in the camp, all that’s left of Pretornio is a smoldering ember on the end of half the impale-o-matic.

Three feet of vertical cigar.

Crowmane’s a little singed, but by the time she’s on her feet she’s pulled herself together and is already shouting orders down into the camp, getting torches relit, bonfires rekindled, burns tended.

To the west, the storm winds whisper themselves up to moans.

And I just hang here. And watch.

I watch Crowmane and Dugsacks and Cornholes and Thumbnipples and Turdcrotch and all the rest of them look around and check themselves out and chuckle at each other and convince themselves that they were never really scared in the first place. That the stupid Lipkan bitch-on-a-stick just didn’t have the juice, when the balls hit the butthole. I watch them get their party going again with an extra kicker because they had a little thrill but it’s all over now.

I watch Crowmane giving her orders, wielding her handful of Reality, striding back and forth on the parapet doing her Cinerama Tits-to-the-Wind Napoleon thing without even turning me one more glance.

I only watch. I don’t say a word.

Because I was just, y’know, making that shit up. About knowing what Pretornio was doing. It was just a story to get me off this cross long enough to get my teeth into Crowmane’s throat. That’s all it was. But that’s not all it is.

Here’s a nifty thing about my Monastic education-

It tells me, for one thing, that we have time right now for a history lesson, if I make it quick.

The Monasteries were founded by Jantho of Tyrnall at the end of what people here call the Deomachy-the God War. When gods go to war, it’s an ugly thing-that whole Armageddon Rag, Ragnarok’n’Roll shit. It’s never really over till everybody’s dead. That’s what got Jantho Ironhand’s brother Jereth up in arms; he decided to make the God War as ugly for the gods as it was for the poor bastards who worshipped them, which brought the Deomachy to a relatively swift and bloody end. Bloody on all sides. Though Jereth didn’t survive the war, he is reputed, before his death, to have kicked substantial deific butt.

His epithet is “the Godslaughterer.”

The Deomachy is why Our Founder, Jantho Ironhand, was of the considered opinion that the greatest threat to humanity’s survival on Home was our unfortunate tendency to murder people for bowing down to the wrong gods, and the gods’ unfortunate tendency to take advantage of our unfortunate tendencies, to play power games just because they can.

The whole murdering-people-because-we-like-their-land-and murdering them as an oh-well-what-the-hell side effect of making money and murdering them because, y’know, it’s the kind of fun you just can’t get anywhere else-those were all side issues for ol’ Jantho, so the Monasteries didn’t start worrying about any of that shit till later on. Of course, most religions get into those businesses eventually, too.

So a lot of what the Monasteries do is keep an eye on the gods, and on their worshippers; a lot of what we in the Esoteric Service do is get ourselves bloody when some of these religions look to start running a little wild.

So we have to know the gods. All of them. And their religions-which, of course, often don’t have a whole lot to do with their particular gods, but let that go. We’re encouraged to be consecrated to some god’s worship and rise in their service, even their priesthood. So Monastics know a lot of, well, esoteric shit, if you’ll pardon the expression, about every major religion. Including some of the splinter sects that follow Dal’kannith Wargod.

This is why I’m sounding kind of fucking cheerful right now.

When I said I knew what Pretornio was up to, yeah, I was lying. . but, y’know, funny fucking thing. I was also telling the truth. Just took me a while to remember.

Probably that dying-on-a-cross thing screwing with my concentration a little.

And maybe it was because I was still thinking she was praying to Dal’Kannith. .

They were supposed to have died out or been suppressed-I can’t remember-something like two hundred years ago. That might be another reason. The trehv’Dhalleig Jzranapal, if my memory can be trusted, something like that anyway-the Silent Pure, more or less. Reluctant hostage-sacrifices from Chi’iannon to her son/husband/master Dal’Kannith, so the story runs-but really they were more like Home-grown Joans of Arc, strapping down their tits and stuffing fake codpieces and becoming, before the world, full Kannithan battle-priests. Often the most powerful Kannithan priests, in fact, so long as their secret was never exposed. And so long as they stayed virgins.

Surrendering virginity surrendered power. But surrendering virginity’s one thing. Rape is something else.

The Great Mother of the Lipkan pantheon rules the dead as well as the unborn-because, y’know, they’re the same, right? — and there is one tale in the Monastic Record, one fucking scary one, of an incident in Paquli’s Western Marches some three hundred and change years ago, in the Vale of the Dead, when one of the Silent Pure called upon Chi’iannon, instead of Dal’Kannith, while being murdered by sexual mutilation. Want to know why it’s called Vale of the Dead?

Wait-

Hear that?

Those low swirling storm wind moans from the west? I know you can hear them. You’re using my ears. Hear them ramping up toward the howls of a full gale? The question is, how long before those storm winds catch the attention of Crowmane and her bitches?

How long will it take them to notice that the wind they can feel is only a medium breeze? And it’s coming from the east. And then, sooner or later, eventually, maybe, one of them’s gonna remember that all there is west of the camp. .

Is the funerary platforms.

Those winds you’re hearing with my ears-I bet you guessed it already. That’s not wind. It’s howls of mindless insatiate hunger.

The voices of the dead.

There’s a storm coming out of the west all right, but it ain’t fuckin’ weather.

››scanning fwd››

“-your ass till it comes out your ears. Had your chance.” I’d need the voice of a civil defense siren to be heard over the screams and howling from the horror show in the camp, but I’m pretty sure Crowmane catches my meaning anyway.

I laugh down into her smoking yellow stare. “I’m comfortable right here.” My instructor in Applied Legendry at Garthan Hold-Brother Clement, his name was-I remember him bloviating about the Vale of the Dead story: How minor incidents become exaggerated to preposterous degrees over only a few years. . Clearly impossible for a single individual, no matter how complete her attunement, to channel power sufficient for yammana yammana yammana bullshit. Pompous old fuck.

Wish he could be down in that camp right now.

The rest of the top bitches have joined the final defense perimeter, a thick wall of wide-eyed, flared-nostril, clenched-jaw fight-to-the-death determination between the howling chaos of the camp and the corral area where they’ve got all their cubs and juvies. Their last line of defense, with all the power they’ve got left. Dunno how much it is. Down in the camp, Black Knife bucks have given up on arrows and spears to use whatever heavy cleaving shit they can lay hands on to hack desperately at the arms and legs of writhing howling shadows that are all teeth and claws and hunger.

I think the bucks might be winning, might have a pretty good chance of containing the corpses and chopping them down. It’s hard to tell.

Goddamn shame so many of ’em we killed went down sliced in half by my bladewand, or with spines or legs crushed by Marade’s morningstar or arms severed or legs hamstrung by Pretornio’s porters. If we’d left their dead in better shape, this would have been a shitload more entertaining. But, y’know. .

It’s still not bad.

From the foot of my cross, Crowmane shows me her age-greyed tusks and sends a wave of dream-Real threat up to close over my head.

You think it can’t be worse for you. I tell you it can.

I show her my own teeth. Probably pretty fucking grey by this time, too. “Now you’re just flirting.”

She snarls up at me and squeezes her ball of Reality-

— and my days of death on the scaffold rewind within my head in a harlequin whirl of white-noon blaze and black-ice midnight until the dead cold carved-oak tree limbs that are nailed to the arms of the cross and connected still somehow to my shoulders and hips spasm and jerk-

Hang on to your balls, kids. My arms and legs. .

She’s bringing them back.

Ligaments twist barbwire through acid-etched joints. Muscle fibers ripped in handfuls like hair from my head, steelclamped around the spikes-

I can feel the spikes again. .

Iron on naked bone scraping blossoms of screaming midnight off my arms-ankles-

Gahh.

Gahhhh.

Fucking pain center. . got that going again too. . betcha . . noticed, huh. .?

huhh-

the spasms and the twisting and the spurt of tears into the blood that trails from my lips-

tellya. . secret. .

secret to-

— gahhhhh-

The secret to great Acting.

Huh.

Huh fuck huh.

Here’s the, the, the secret to great Acting-

give the people what they want.

So I finally let it out: the howling and the sobbing and shit, sure, she’s seen me cry already and she’s heard me moan and sob but here it is: I finally let it all hang out.

All the the begging for mercy.

All the pleading that she just fucking end it I don’t care anymore just make it stop-All the weak sad shit I’ve been sucking back and swallowing ever since I first saw that buck stand up in the badlands.

I give it up. I give it all up.

“I’ll tell you I swear I’ll tell you anything-it’s the Cauldron of Chi’iannon, all right? I know about it! I know! Please-just get me down-! Just make it stop. .”

Fading now: a broken whisper.

Broken like me.

“. . just get me down. I’ll tell you everything. . please. .”

And because she wields a piece of Reality in her right hand, she knows my pain is real. She knows my break is real.

She knows I’m telling the truth.

She goes to the big wheel-crank that controls the angle of my scaffold and turns it until my cross becomes a timber bed. A curl of contempt twists her lips around her tusks. She slashes the ropes that tie me to the cross with the filed-sharp fighting claw below her left hand. She leans across my face, and with the same hand she yanks on the spike through my right arm. The wood squeals as it comes free, and my arm comes with it and my shoulder’s silent roar is loud enough to grey out the universe.

Annnnnd. .

When the world comes to life, I’m off the cross.

Under my back-

— night-cold stone-

Oh god-

Oh god oh god I made it. I’m off the fucking cross.

I made it.

Thank you. Oh, thank you.

The night gathers force in my ears: roars and screams. Smell of burning shit and hair and rotten meat.

Pressure on my chest crushes my sobbing down to thick gasps, then to a choked hush. I open my eyes. It’s Crowmane’s foot.

Long as my forearm. Wide as my hand span. Toenails hooked enough to draw blood from my chest. Her eyes smoke yellow into the stars around her head. Reality pulses around her right hand. Talk now, little rabbit. Talk of this Chi’iannon’s Cauldron. Tell me how I stop it.

Shit.

Gahh. She left-

Fucking spikes’re still in my wrists-

And-ahh, fuck me, fuck me, she left my ankles nailed together, ahh, fuck-

Guess I can give right the hell up on that quick getaway.

Talk now, little rabbit.

So I meet her eyes and give her the truth I promised. “You can’t stop it.”

Without transition her huge foot is on my throat-so goddamn wide she’s breaking my sonofabitching neck-

Tell this again, little rabbit. Tell this for the last time.

If she weren’t crushing my throat right now, I’d tell her I love her.

With weakly trembling hands, I scrabble at her ankle, then let my arms fall back, right thrown across my face to mask what she’s got to think is despair.

Hands work. So do arms. Maybe even legs, if I can take the pain.

She did this for me. And I’m off the cross. She did that for me too.

I love her very, very much.

I don’t need Control Disciplines. The singing in my ears makes the night a wonderland of shimmer and fades the screams and roaring into a distant melody of blood.

Darling. . they’re playing our song. .

From behind my right elbow I manage some whimpering gasps around her huge clawed foot on my neck. “Y’can’t. . stop the spell-’s done-all y’can do. . ’s chop ’m up and burn ’m. .”

She leans over me, shifting weight onto the foot-wide paw on my neck. My cervical vertebrae pop and crackle as the ligaments stretch. Her drool drips down across my face. It smells of rot. Been too gentle with you, little rabbit.

I shift my left hand three inches. Her eyes never flicker. She didn’t pick up the motion. The heel of my left hand is now against the head of the spike through my right wrist.

Oh, my god, how I love this bitch.

Some ideas I save. Something special.

I love her so much, I’m going to fuck her.

Special just for little-

Right swinging backhand from my left armpit, left jamming like a short shovel-hook and I can’t get much on them but together I don’t need a whole hell of a lot. The spike through my right wrist spears deep into the side of her knee.

It grates on bone and I can’t tell if it’s mine or hers but I’m balls-up adrenoamped far beyond feeling any fucking pain.

She jerks like I clamped a high-tension line to her nipples and says-

“. . hurkk. .”

— and I give the head of the spike another good whack with the heel of my left hand, and this time the bone it grates on is the inside of her kneecap because when she yanks back her leg, the spike rips down and jams behind her patellar tendon, so her yank of the leg yanks me with it by the spike, which sits me up and plants her foot within the loop of my pinned-together legs and slams my battered nervous system hard enough to grey the world down by better than half-

But there is a fundamental difference between her and me. On the street, in the ring, on Adventure-so many times I’ve been half out or better, so greyed I didn’t know where my fucking legs were, hurt, cut, bleeding, having to use one hand to hang onto my guts while I try to cover my head with the other-

I can deal.

Crowmane, though-what is she? She’s no Marade, no Pretornio. She’s not even a Tizarre. When you carve all the way to nuts and guts, Crowmane’s just a bitch with a shitty attitude, playing games with somebody else’s power.

Which is why when some of the world is slipping back into focus she’s still screaming like a brain-damaged howler monkey and trying to shake me off her leg.

It’s only now that she remembers she’s got better than a hundred pounds on me and a razor-sharp fighting claw curving around the fist that is directly over my head.

All I can do is bring up my left as her right comes down and in the last infinitesimal fraction of a second I register the relationship between her fist and my forearm and an image blossoms and my forearm adjusts its angle without interference from my brain.

Her fist comes down. Her fighting claw spears into my trapezius and scrapes my collarbone but goes no deeper because my block braced my left forearm across my head which set the spike in that forearm against my skull like a spear grounded to receive a horseman’s charge.

The horseman, in this case, is Crowmane’s fist.

She takes the spike between the second and third knuckle and she jerks again, rearing up, yowling-

Which is when we both remember that the fist she just punched me with, the fist I just spiked, was her right.

The one holding that ball of Reality-

WHITEOUT

The world darkens back into existence. .

Still pinned together-my forearm to her knee-

Not pinned forearm to fist anymore. She doesn’t have a fist. Just a stump of charred bone.

A snap of my left arm whips the white-hot remnant of the spike out of my charring flesh, and there is a bleak red light shining up on her and from the smell and the pain I’m guessing that my hair’s on fire, and I don’t give half a mouthful of shit. That spike was grounded against my skull.

We’ve been joined by the Outside Power.

She’s looking down at me, and in those yellow eyes now is the greatest gift she will ever give me.

Fear.

Because we Know each other now. And the punkass bleeding heart who said “To understand all is to forgive all” wasn’t from my fucking neighborhood.

I grin up at her. “Shaikkak Nerutch’khaitan. .”

I roll her name around in my mouth.

“Skaikkak Nerutch’khaitan-” My left hand spasms with nerve shock from the burn through my forearm; I let the spasm beckon to her. “I believe this is my dance.”

Her stump and her left hand make an off-balance pinwheel when she tries to backstroke into the night sky. I throw my weight forward when her heel hits my nailed-together ankles, and my forearm spike comes free from behind her kneecap and I keep the momentum going forward so that I can roll up onto one shrieking foot and shove myself up her leg and hook my left arm behind her neck. My weight captures her balance, and she keeps on staggering backward.

Behind her is the perimeter wall and beyond that there is nothing but coils of black turd smoke spinning toward the sky.

Guess this is my star exit.

Finally.

Good-bye, fuckers. Good-bye all of you sacks of shit who’re watching at home with your dicks in your hand or a thumb up your snatch.

Hope you had a good time, and kiss my ass.

The perimeter wall hits her above the knees, crushing my nailed ankles into a snarling white flare inside my head, and the wall’s just barely high enough to hold her, so I crook my arm behind her neck and croon lovingly into her rumpled mass of ear-

“When you wake up in Hell, you festering slab of rat cunt, I’ll already be killing you again.”

— and I backhand the point of my forearm spike at her right eye.

Nothing wrong with her reflexes: she jerks her head back and away from the point-

— and so the spike-

— which I hadn’t really expected to get her eye with, y’know, anyway, so there’s no point in shitcanning my follow-through-

— takes her just under the cheekbone, above her upper jaw, into what on a human would be a savagely sensitive nerve cluster around the trigeminal-

— triggering a transcendently satisfying airhorn shriek and instant stiff hyperarch of her back-

Guess ogrilloi keep a nerve cluster there, too.

— and we topple over the wall.

With a kick that’s half convulsion I yank my ankles apart as we start our long slow tumble into the darkness.

Why not? Like our Garthan Hold personal combat Brother used to say-

Hurts now. Be over soon.

Gahh-

– ’d like to hear that fucker say it again with a fifty-penny nail behind his motherfucking Achilles tendon-

But I still swing my legs around and wrench her thrashing underneath me as we fall free, because I am for ass-raping sure gonna land on-

Wham.

— tumbling flailing clawing-

WHAMWHAMWHAM

. .

. .

.

.

stars in the dust

breathe

— whoop-

breathe goddammit breathe

— whoop-

stars

hrakchakh

stars come out like a window

dusty sand settles around me and

on me

into my eyes and up my nose and

fuck my bleeding ass I’m still

alive

One minor-

hrakchakh

— minor flaw. . in the whole sonofabitching plan. .

The vertical city isn’t exactly vertical, exactly.

More of a steep slope.

I’m in one of the houses. . still has walls. . hasn’t had a roof in a thousand years or so. .

With the kind of effort that would have gotten Sisyphus to the top of his motherfucking hill, I roll my head sideways.

The city above catches enough of the firelight from the camp that I can pick out Crowmane’s body crumpled on the rubble maybe ten feet away.

She looks worse than I feel.

That is to say: dead.

I figure that between my two half-working hands, I oughta be able to chopstick a big enough piece of rock to make sure. And I will.

I will.

Just-

Just as soon as I get my breath. .

Yeah.

Someday this week.

All right, fuck breathing. I’ll go. . I’ll go-

Just as soon as I can make my eyes work.

Because I can’t blink away those haloes-migraine-aura prismatic splinters of starlight crystallizing over the rubble, crawling Crowmane’s bloody face, shimmering along my hands and arms-

That’s not my eyes. That’s the fucking universe slipping out of focus. .

This isn’t happening.

This isn’t happening. .

But no denial can keep the stars in the sky.

No denial can stop the freefall sideways-inside-out

yank

that puts a ceiling of acoustic tile and recessed fluorescent tubing over my staring eyes-

— that replaces the rubble under my back with a Winston Transfer platform-

— and the crumbling millennial walls of the abandoned city with the white latex gloves and surgical masks and blue antimicrobial cap-and-gowns of Studio EMTs-

— who heave me onto a crash cart in a bone-wrenching hurricane of stat this and amp of epi and no narco, no narco, adrenocorts only and thunder me out into some corridor of anonymously sterile tile, and there’s only one guy among them with a real face, and I reach over to him and grab his arm with my right hand.

“Am I-is this for real-? I’ve been having this dream-on the cross, I don’t know how many times-this dream where you pull me-”

The guy with the face-a mid-thirtyish flabby pale kind of guy, with colorless eyes and too-fleshy lips, already losing his hair-can barely keep up with the EMTs pushing my crash cart while he stares down at the bloody spike through my wrist with a creepy revolted fascination, like it sickens him and gives him a hard-on at the same time. “Oh, oh, no, Entertainer Michaelson,” he says, “oh, this is entirely, ah, for real, I assure you. Really.”

“I’m home. .?” The new tears that find the crusted trails down my cheeks are hot enough to burn me. “You brought me, brought me home. .”

“I’ve been in touch with your, er, Patron, that is, mm, Businessman Vilo,” he says, jogging alongside the cart, already going breathless. “He underwrote your emergency transfer, and he has, mmm, authorized me to, ah, renegotiate your contract-once you’ve been stabilized, of course. .”

“I don’t care,” I tell him, “I don’t care. Just. . thank you, that’s all. . thank you. Oh, god. Oh, god, thank you. I don’t even know your name. .”

“Oh, I am. . ah.” He surrenders trying to keep up and stops with a little wave.

“Kollberg,” he calls after me. “Administrator Arturo Kollberg, Entertainer. Get yourself patched up. We have a, ah, great deal to talk about. .”

He waves again. “A great deal.”