Caine Black Knife

I AM THE SMOKE HUNT

I woke with the taste of raw human flesh still fresh and bloody on my tongue.

I rolled over and scrubbed at my face with one hand while my other groped for the pitcher on its stand beside the bed. I rinsed my mouth with stale water, then made a face and spat it on the floor. Fucking water tasted worse than the blood.

I hacked goo up the back of my throat and muttered, “Now, that was a party. .”

I poured water into a shallow terra-cotta bowl and splashed it on my face, softening the sleep gunk at the corners of my eyes before scraping it away with my fingernails. Dawn had paled the stars above the room’s slanted skylight. I sighed and shook myself till my ears rang. It’d probably be an hour before I could get breakfast. Or even coffee. After a soggy minute or two, I remembered ordering the Pratts out of town.

My head got too heavy to hold up. It sank into my hands. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

I pulled the chamber pot from under the bed and opened the lid, reflecting that somebody on this planet really ought to invent twenty-four-hour room service. As I settled my bare ass onto the night-chilled steel, I decided I could live without the room service. What Home really needed was a couple million union plumbers.

And plastic goddamn toilet seats. With heaters.

I spent a while staring at my hands. Soft and pink and small. Far too small: flimsy fingernails barely thick enough to crack a flea. Forearms smooth and bare where I still vaguely sensed that fighting claws should be. And clean. Too clean. No crust of drying blood, no shreds of ripped manskin-It could have been just a dream.

Sure it could. Really. It was possible.

I finished with the chamber pot, flipped the lid shut and shoved it over by the door. The day porter’d take it from there. If there still was a day porter. I sat on the bed and laced up my breeches. Left in its holster patch overnight, the Automag jabbed into the small of my back. I was about to yank it out and toss it on the bed, but I stopped with my hand on its butt.

A dream-echo of the drumming pounded inside my head.

This hadn’t been like the vision of being Orbek. That had been real as waking life. This was the gradual leakback of memory after a bad drunk.

But maybe just as real. I hadn’t been that drunk.

Some kind of ritual. I couldn’t quite tease it up to the surface of my sleep-fogged mind. Flames in a cave. Leaping and stomping and whirling. Chanting. A house-size bonfire and the savory tang of burning rith. A stone chalice, filled with blood.

Kaleidoscopic. Hallucinatory. The three D’s: drums, drugs, and dance-

Dad, wearing his anthropologist hat, would have called it ritual frenzy: a deliberate, systematic breakdown of self, of the ego’s defenses of recursive inhibition, shredding self-awareness to open a religious communicant’s mind to the infinite. Unreserved, unconstrained, enthusiastic pursuit of transcendant union with-

What?

I had a sick feeling that I knew.

The textbook answer was a higher power. But this hadn’t felt like transcen-dance. Not like emptying myself into the infinite. Just the opposite.

It had felt like summoning.

I am the Smoke Hunt.

I still had that nagging presque vu. This should remind me of something. The Wild Hunt, maybe. I’ve always had warm shorts for the mythology of the Wild Hunt: a storm of chaos sweeping across the land, destroying all in its path. What’s not to like?

Reminds me of my Acting career.

But the Wild Hunt wasn’t it. At least not all of it. This was a different kind of hunt.

The dream or vision or whatever hadn’t stopped with the drumming and the dancing but had flowered into an effortless lope through moonlit streets filled with scents of piss and rainwater, spilled wine and human sweat-A sense of connection. . like the Meld the primals do, a sense of being more than one person. . or being one person spread through different bodies, all the bodies, so that in my pack I could look at myself through different eyes at the same time, and see myselves wreathed in flickering scarlet flames that cast no light, and the flame was the connection, and the connection throbbed thick and hot with shared werewolf lust.

Hitting a building. A door ripped from its hinges. Lamps shattering, flames licking wide: real flames here, crackling and scorching flesh. A casual punch splintering through a wall. Burying my jaws in soft screaming pink-fleshed humans tangled in bedsheets that leaked bright sweet blood into shredded mattress ticking.

More flames, and more terror, and more sweet copper blood.

Grey-fleshed fists crushing meat and bone with the same wet ripping crunch as the seven-bladed morningstars in the hands of men in chainmail that bore the sunburst of Khryl, the thunder of their long guns, the shirr of buckshot and the shree of rifle slugs, the clatter of steel-shod hooves on cobbled streets and no fear, no pain, just impact: blows given, blows received.

And draped over a crumple of ruined wall, shreds of corpse so battered it could have been ogrillo or human or pieces of both, freshly dead, sharp-slanting moonlight catching wisps of steam curling up from open gleaming meat-

Steam from the wounds. .

My dad, maybe forty years ago, had told me an anthropologist’s theory about the origin of the myth of the human soul: that water vapor rising from deep wounds might have been mistaken by ancient humans for the soul escaping from the body. Probably the origin of ghosts, too. The word spirit comes from a root meaning breath; in most traditions, ghosts resemble the curling fog you see from your own mouth on a chilly day. All the crap about the afterlife, about Heaven being in the sky. . all from nothing more than wisps of condensing vapor, coiling upward like smoke-

Like smoke.

I said, “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.”

Sure. That was it. Had to be. Had to be. Drummming. Dancing. Mind-altering substances. Ecstatic union with a higher power. . no fear, no pain-

Even bullets can’t hurt you. They can only kill you.

Take a pacifist Earth-human millennial religious movement, filter it through the consciousness of sentient pack-hunting carnivores, and what do you get?

The Smoke Hunt.

“They’re Ghost Dancers, for shit’s sake. Fucking ogrillo Ghost Dancers.

Crazy fuck my ass Horse and Jesus stinking bloody Christ on a stick.”

I ground my face harder into my hands. “Orbek-what the fuck have you gotten your stupid dog ass into?”

It was a rhetorical question. Because there had been more to the dream.

There had been her.

Armor like a mannequin of convex mirrors. Out from the shadows of a street’s mouth across the plaza, a massive two-handed morningstar propped casually over one shoulder. Reflected firelight dancing on facades. Three of me sprinting across the flagstones to meet her, smeared with the blood of the finest soldiers of Home. Casually removing her helm, shaking loose her hair. On her face, no fear. No anger. Only a reserved, remote sadness.

Her scent: human, female, thick with death. Red-smeared mirror-curves of armor rumpled with fist-shaped dents and pocked with bullet holes. Hair caked black with clotted blood. A morningstar rising with mechanical precision, falling in steel thunderbolts. Shreds of meat plastering cheekbones and forehead into unhuman texture around her vivid eyes.

Vasse Khrylget, they called her. I had a pretty good idea why.

“Yeah, okay,” I muttered. “What d’you want me to do about it?” Not that I really expected an answer. Or needed one.

I scowled at the pulse of orange dawnglow on the frame of the skylight. Too early for coffee for sure. Maybe I could snag some beans from the kitchen, chew them like aspirin. . which was another goddamn thing this world could use-the pounding in my head was turning out to be less drums than migraine again. .

Still only half awake, I had already pulled on my boots and was looking around for my tunic when it finally occurred to me that dawnglow doesn’t pulse. “Oh,” I said. “Oh, crap.”

And what was that noise? Voices?

I stood on the bed and shoved the lower edge of the skylight until it squealed loose from the rust on its rim.

Yeah: voices. Faint, empty with distance, but clear-

Dizhrati golzinn Ekk!

Okay: not a dream. Not a vision.

Prophecy.

I sagged, hanging from the skylight’s lower rim. “Son of a bitch.”

Did I have to deal with this before I even got coffee? “Son of a bitch.” I rubbed my stinging eyes. “Yeah, okay. Whatever.”

Fixing the prop to hold the skylight open, I turned around and grabbed the rim underhand; with a groan of middle-aged morning, I heaved my legs up through the opening and back over the lip. As I slid through the skylight belly-down, I collected a soot-greased scrape on the stomach from a sharp slate and a bang on the skull from the lead-framed pane, so when I pushed myself up to my knees I was already pissed as hell, rubbing the back of my head and looking around for somebody to take it out on.

A distant surf of ogrilloid roaring half-drowned shrieks of terror and agony and rage. Human shrieks. Probably.

There: three or four blocks over, toward the voices; that was the glow I’d thought was dawn.

Buildings on fire.

My breath smoked. Splashes of the water I’d wiped from my face trickled goosebumps across my bare chest. I glanced longingly back down through the skylight at my warm rumpled bed-but the false dawn caught my eye again. Looked warm enough over there.

I was already backing up to get a running start for the leap across the alley to the rooftop beyond when I finally thought, What in the name of sweet shivering fuck am I doing?

I was fifty years old, for shit’s sake. Fifty years old and about to run the rooftops toward some kind of goddamn free-for-all massacre. For no reason. Just because it was there.

Without even a shirt on.

I shook my head and lifted a hand as though telling some pushy asshole to back the hell off. “Not my business.”

I didn’t sound convinced, or convincing.

“Not my business.” That was better. Good enough.

Now the shouts and screams picked up a soggy kettledrum backbeat. Gunfire. Full-throated: heavy-caliber stuff. The Khryllians had arrived.

Anything I needed to know, I could find out in the morning. After the shooting was over.

*You want me to stuff my aging ass into that meat grinder?* I monologued to my audience of one. *Make me a fucking offer.*

God did not reply.

I shrugged. “Have it your way,” I said aloud. “I’m going back to bed.”

Sitting on the edge of the bed. Leaning on my knees. Staring at the floor. At the splotch where I’d spat that mouthful of water. Just a blot now, about the size of my hand, darker in spots where water had soaked into wood through worn-down varnish.

It had tasted like blood. .

Now, in the dim pulse of fireglow through the skylight, it looked like blood, too.

Gunfire and screams.

Dizhrati golzinn Ekk!

And bubbling up out of that soggy black swamp of that dream: stone walls crumbling beneath my fists and two of me leaping into a bedroom full of screams and blood-A thin pale human dying across the body of a young trim redhead-

And the saliva that pumped along my tusks when both of me heard howls coming from the twin bassinets beside their bed.

This prophecy thing pretty much sucked dog ass.

I put my shirt on. After a second’s thought, I added the rest of my clothes: my knives, the spring-loaded baton, the garrote, and the spare clips for the Automag. Even the flatpack of picks. Because you just never fucking know. Then I headed for the stairs.

At the landing below the second floor, I heard Pratt’s voice. He didn’t sound happy. He sounded like he was trying not to crap himself.

“I’m sorry, goodmen. Please, the hostelry is closed, you’ll have to come-no, Kravmik, don’t-!”

A stranger’s voice drawled, “Yeah, Kravmik. Don’t.”

The period on the sentence was the cold double-click of a single-action hammer going to full cock.

The stranger had an Ankhanan accent.

Somebody else said calmly, “Go sit down. Both of you. Next to the girl.”

On the landing above the lobby, I stopped and muttered, “Shit.”

There was a window at the far end of the hallway behind me. I was already turning for it, already seeing myself dropping the four, maybe five meters to the alley, when I heard “But he’s not even here.”

Pratt sounded desperate. “He ate, changed his clothes, and went right out again-he had something to do with Knight Aeddharr-I don’t know what it was-”

“Put it away, Hawk,” the calm voice said. “There’s no need for that. Yet. Whistler?”

“I’ve got him.”

“What are you doing? What is that thing?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

The voice of Whistler: “Now. Did Freeman Shade really go out?”

“No, not really,”

Pratt said sheepishly. “I just made that up, because I was afraid you guys might want to hurt him or something.”

“Pratt?” Kravmik’s rumble sounded blankly astonished, and a woman’s voice said, “Lasser, what are you doing?”

“Oh, it’s all right,” Pratt told them. “These are good people. Really.”

“That’s right,” said the voice of Hawk. “We’re good people. Now shut up, both of you.”

“Hey-” Pratt lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Hey, do you know who he really is? I mean really?”

“Yeah,” Calm Guy answered. “We know. We’re friends of his.”

“Oh, good. Everything’s better when everybody’s friends.”

Up on the landing, I wasn’t feeling friendly.

A professionally laid-in Charm. At least one handgun. Three in the lobby, one a thaumaturge. That meant probably one in reserve on the street out front and two more covering the alley. That’s where they’d have the heavy stuff. And the Smoke Hunt was on its way.

“Pratt, let’s take a walk up to his room. Whistler, on me. Hawk, watch the grill and the girl.”

“By myself?” Hawk sounded bemused rather than worried. “This could get interesting.”

“If he slips us, use them. Use the girl.”

“He’ll give a shit?”

“Sometimes he gets sentimental. Especially when they’re pretty.”

“I’m feeling a little sentimental, myself. .”

“Keep your pants on. She won’t live that long.”

“I can be real fast-”

“Yeah. If there’s time we’ll all get a turn. But I’m first, get me? Whistler. Come on.”

I pulled up the rear of my tunic, drew the Automag and very gently racked the slide. Holding the big pistol tight against the back of my right leg, I started down the stairs.

Sometimes I do get sentimental. Especially about people who work for a living. Pretty or not.

To my left, through the posts of the bannister: Kravmik sat half hunched across Yttrall Pratt next to the dining-hall door, shielding most of her tiny figure with his huge curve of shoulder. In front of them slouched a nightclub-pale junior featherweight with glossy black hair, his compact efficient-looking frame loaded into a slashed-velvet doublet and hose under a loose knee-length cape. Hands empty. Loose.

Hawk. The gunman.

Middle of the lobby: Pratt, hurricane lamp in one hand, turning toward the stairs, catching sight of me, face lighting with a smile of pure uncomplicated welcome. At his side another smallish man, thin, long-faced, balding, folds of flesh sagging under eyes mournful as a bloodhound’s, wearing a thigh-length hunter’s vest, all pockets, a twist of thread between thumb and little finger on which spun gemstone flashes.

Whistler. The thaumaturge.

And half-turned toward the stairs, left hand extended to usher Pratt and Whistler past, bigger, solidly into cruiserweight, head shaved and polished the color of tea-stained mahogany, also doing the slashed-velvet doublet thing but his worn open like a jacket, no hose here-the pants would look normal enough on a darkened street, but even in Pratt’s lamplight they jumped up and bit: close-fitting heavy leather, flapped at the ankle to overlap instep and heel tendon, jointed at the knee, thick boiled panels over hamstring and quads joined by heavy wire, not much against a bullet or a Khryllian morningstar, but they’d turn most blades-and it was a good bet the jerkin under that open doublet was made the same way because that’s what Grey Cats favor when going out for red work. Or ex-Cats gone merc.

No-name. Calm Guy. Giver of orders. Whose right hand was out of sight.

This might turn out to be a bit of a trick.

Another step down the stairs and Pratt’s pure uncomplicated welcome burst out with pure good nature. “Hey, here he is now!”

“Hey, here I am now.” The Automag was cold through the thin cotton of my breeches. “Let’s nobody get stupid.”

“Sounds like a plan.” Calm Guy didn’t move. Didn’t even blink. “You first.”

Another step down the stairs. “Civilians can walk, huh?”

“Maybe they could have,” Calm Guy allowed, “if it had been my idea. Since it was yours, I like them where they are. At least until I see both your hands.”

“You first.”

A shrug. “I’m easy.”

Calm Guy turned and spread empty hands. The ruffled cuffs of his doublet draped his wrists and half his palms. The drape along the insides of his forearms was just exactly the wrong shape.

“Those blades up your sleeves’ll get you pounded by a Knight.”

Another shrug, and a tilt of the head at the kettledrum backbeat of gunfire in the night streets beyond the lobby’s lamplight. “Knights are busy.”

“Yeah. That’s exactly the problem.” I took another step. “We can still get out of this with nobody dying.”

“Dying?” Pratt looked from me to Calm Guy in growing distress. “What exactly is going-?”

Whistler said, “Shut up. Don’t worry about it.”

Pratt relaxed. “Oh. Oh, sure. I forgot: you guys are all friends.”

“Yes,” Whistler said, spinning his gemstone. “Yes, we are friends.”

Calm Guy squinted up the stairs. “Still haven’t seen your hand.”

“Yeah. I appreciate the invitation, but-”

“You think this is an invitation?”

“If you were here to kill me, we wouldn’t be talking.”

“Killing you’s Plan B. Moving up toward Plan A-and-a-Half. You’re coming with us. Peacefully. Peacefully in our company or peacefully in a bag.”

“I like peacefully.” I can play nice, when I have to. “Peacefully works for me just fine.”

“Come on, then.”

I didn’t move. “Where we going?”

“Simon Faller has requested the pleasure of your company. Forcefully.”

“Faller?” I tried them in English. “Y’know, I’ve been wanting a word or two with Mr. Faller myself-”

He gave me a what the fuck? smirk, and spread it around to his friends. “You talk too much already,” he said. In English. He had a Brooklyn accent. “We’re not here to talk.” He chuckled and made a slight, ironic bow. “Just guys with a job to do, you get it? Deliverymen.”

I went back to Westerling. “I’ll make you a deal.”

He did too. “I don’t think so.” I guess he was used to Westerling enough that he didn’t really care.

I did, though.

“The Smoke Hunt’s outside,” I said. “We don’t want to be on the street anyway, right? We’ll wait here. All of us. Once the Knights take care of the Smoke Hunt, I’ll go with you to BlackStone and see Faller. Peacefully.”

And when those amped-on-God fuckers break in here and find, instead of some sleepy hostelers, an assload of heavily armed Actors, it’ll make me a shitty prophet, but a happy one.

Not to mention that it wouldn’t exactly break my heart to have Tyrkilld and Kierendal-and, say, Angvasse Khlaylock-know I’d been hauled at gunpoint off to see the Wizard. But nobody ever wants to do things the easy way.

Calm Guy shook his head. “We’re on a schedule. Once the Knights take care of the Smoke Hunt, it’ll be too late.”

“Too late? For what?”

“For you’ll find out, smart guy.”

“I made a good offer. Think it over.”

“Don’t have to.” I sighed. “Is your fucking schedule worth more than your life?”

“Maybe not.” Calm Guy grinned up at me. “But it’s worth more than their lives. Hawk-?”

“Hey.” A glossy white grin unfolded under the gunman’s glossy black hair. “Wanna see a trick?”

“Not really.”

Hawk’s right hand and arm became a blur that in less than an eyeblink resolved into a big black pistol leveled at arm’s length on Ytrrall Pratt’s pretty red head.

Kravmik growled wordlessly and tried to pull her closer.

“Go right on,” Hawk told him easily. “I’ll just shoot you first.”

I sagged. “That’s a pretty good trick.”

“Ain’t it just?”

“You’re fast, kid.”

“Fastest you’ll ever see.”

“Fastest I ever saw was Berne. Saint Berne, they call him now. Maybe you heard what happened to him.” I nodded toward Calm Guy: the ex-Cat. “Or you could ask him. He’ll know. He might even have been there.”

“Ancient history, old man. A whole different world ago.”

I looked down at this grinning killer who’d been in short pants then. Who had maybe just been born when Black Knives ruled here. But only maybe. Ancient history. “I guess it was.”

“Let’s see that hand,” Calm Guy said.

“Yeah, whatever.” I showed them the Automag. Nobody looked impressed.

“Put it on the stairs behind you and keep coming.” I didn’t move.

“You said you know things about me.” Half a shrug half lifted the Automag. Not enough to get anybody tense. “Most of what you know about me is wrong.”

“Let’s find out,” Calm Guy said. “Hawk: the grill. Leg first. Then the head. Then the girl.”

“The leg?” Hawk sighed. “I hate when they yowl.”

“Wait.” I scowled down at the blur of my reflection in the Automag’s chromed slide, tilting it like I wasn’t entirely sure what I was seeing. And I wasn’t. Not really.

I was trying to decide exactly who I was right then.

“Hawk.” I rolled the nickname around my mouth. “Hawk. Ever study at an abbey, Hawk?”

“Hey-” Calm Guy began.

“I’m talking to Hawk. I’ll talk to you again when I’m done with him.”

The words came out slower and slower, like my spring was winding down.

Slower and flatter and colder. “Ever do any Esoteric training?”

Those glossy white teeth showed up again. He had a lot of them in that soft red mouth. “What’s it to you?”

“I’m gonna ask you a riddle, Hawk. An Esoteric riddle.”

“Do I give a shit?”

“If you know the answer, Hawk,” I said, dead slow, dead flat, “I might let you live.”

A dead cold silence.

Calm Guy and Whistler exchanged a look like they were asking each other if either of them liked Hawk well enough to get in the way of whatever was about to happen without knowing what the fuck it was about to be. They each saw the same answer.

Hawk saw those answers too. His pale cheeks flamed. “Screw this-”

“What-” The riddle came out soft, gentle, quizzical, like I really wanted to know. “-is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Hawk’s eyes narrowed, then widened, and then his extended arm and hand and pistol became again a blur, now in a quarter arc toward the stairs, but even that blur had to cover a meter and a half while the muzzle of my Automag had to twitch only a couple inches.

Both pistols blasted flame. Hawk’s blasted once. Mine blasted three times: an autoburst, which is an accommodation for crappy shooters, which I am. The autoburst fired three of its caseless tristacks-a total of nine shatterslugs-in a brief sequence that kicked its muzzle through a short arc up and to the right. A couple of brief shrieks came from over by the dining hall door: Mrs. Pratt, maybe. Maybe Kravmik.

Splinters burst from the bannister in line with my navel: Hawk’s round. A great shot, that kid-ten times the shooter I’ll ever be. For all the good it did him.

Splinters also burst from the floorboards past Hawk’s right knee. As well as from his right thigh, right hip, spine, and the left side of his rib cage. A different kind of splinter.

Shatterslugs break into tumbling needles after impact: full kinetic transfer and a shitload of internal shredding. Hawk went down like a sack of hamburger. He didn’t bounce when he hit the floor. It was more of a splat.

He lay there making dying-fish popping noises, and his eyes stared beyond the world.

“Good guess, kid. Too bad you can’t take a bow.”

And that told me who I was. For now.

I turned the Automag on Calm Guy. Calm Guy was backed off in a crouch, the snarl on his face distorted through what appeared to be a semisubstantial curve of shimmering glass that had sprung out of nowhere to enclose him and Whistler, along with the preternaturally calm Pratt.

A Shield.

“Hey, nice. You’re fast too.” I nodded a smile toward Whistler. “Was that on a trigger? Set on the first gunfire, I bet.”

“Hawk-Hawk!” Calm Guy’s calm had evaporated.

I shrugged down at them. “I was just kidding about letting him live.”

I thumbed the Automag to single shot and squeezed off a tristack against the Shield. The three shatterslugs burst into flares of sparks that crawled over the half-real curve of energy. Whistler grunted like he’d been punched.

“Feedback’s a bitch, huh? Think your Shield’ll hold against my whole clip?”

“Take him, Whistler!” Calm Guy had become Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy. “Take him now-!”

“I’ve got him.” Fast, smooth, professionally nerveless, Whistler reached into one of the pockets on his hunting vest. His other hand was busy keeping his gemstones spinning, and Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy had a knife in one hand and a pistol in the other and both eyes on the muzzle of the Automag and Lasser Pratt, without a word, a preparatory breath or so much as a flicker on his utterly serene expression, lifted the hurricane lamp and smashed it over Whistler’s head.

Whistler’s face went blank. The shield went down.

The lobby darkened.

The Automag roared but only floorboards splintered because Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy was quicker than a cat and had already thrown himself sideways into a shoulder roll that brought him to his feet on the far side of Pratt and the lobby was brightening again now because Whistler had fallen to his knees and the lamp oil had wicked his vest and caught fire, and Whistler went down on his face, burning on the floor, and Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy smacked Pratt on the temple with the pommel of his knife and caught his sagging body under the arm with the same hand, so that he had a knife in front at the notch of Pratt’s collarbone and a pistol under Pratt’s jaw at the rear, and he snarled, “Drop it! Drop it now!”

I walked down the stairs.

“I’ll cut his fucking head off! Drop your weapon!”

I said, “Why should I?”

Blood trickled along Pratt’s cheekbone. “Fuck this guy. He told that cock-sucker to kill my wife. Shoot him.”

“Shut up!” Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy jabbed the muzzle up into Pratt’s jaw hard enough to make the hosteler grunt. “Didn’t you hear me?”

“I thought,” I said, “you know who I am.”

“After I kill him-” His eyes were bright and hard and slick: gemstones wet with spit. “-we’ll move on to the grill and the woman. And the kids.”

“Why don’t we talk it over by the light of your burning spellbitch?”

Pratt said through teeth forced shut by the pressure of the muzzle under his chin, “Shoot this fucker.”

“Shut up!”

“When you get back to Faller, tell him I said there’s more going on here than he knows. More than he can guess. Tell him I said it’s Caine’s Law, here. Ask him if he knows Rule Three.”

“What the fuck are you talking-”

“You let Pratt go.” I gestured at the flames on Whistler’s back. “We put out your spellbitch while he’s still breathing. Then you go out that door and I never change my mind about letting you two live.”

“I don’t like this deal.”

I lifted the Automag. “You think Pratt’s life means more to me than yours does to you?”

Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy considered that. Not for very long.

This is a perk of being me.

He licked his lips. “Put him out first.”

“Kravmik. The tablecloth.”

The huge ogrillo reluctantly let go of Yttrall, pulled the tablecloth out from under the remaining lamp on the small lamp stand, and spread it over Whistler. The lobby darkened again.

Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy started backing for the door, yanking Pratt along with him. “You can’t protect them, old man.”

Old man. I felt every day of it. “Don’t forget to tell Faller what I said.”

At the doorway, Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy shoved Pratt stumbling back into the lobby. “I’ll tell your mother,” he snarled from the shadows beyond. “I’ll tell her that you-”

The Automag blasted another autoburst. From the night-shadowed street came another shredded-body splat.

I watched a wisp of smoke curl back along the Automag’s muzzle. “Guess I’ll tell him myself.”

I walked without hurry across the lobby. I thumbed the Automag again to single shot and put a tristack into the back of Whistler’s head as I passed. Whistler’s transition from man to corpse was marked by a single whiplash buck and a halo-splash of blood and bone splinters into the carpet.

At the doorway I kept close beside the jamb, where the dim lamplight wouldn’t line me to the street outside. I looked down into the shadows off the boardwalk at the crumpled mess of Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy, who had now become Writhing and Struggling to Breathe as He Bleeds to Death Guy.

“You-you said. .”

“I said-” I lifted the hem of my tunic and reholstered the Automag. “-I wasn’t gonna change my mind.”

“You. . you. . don’t let me just. . for the love of God. .”

“Which god?”

I stood there and watched him die. It didn’t take long.

I raised my head and called out into the night. Not loud. They’d be close enough to hear me. “Hey. You seeing this? Hawk and Whistler are dead too.”

The night answered with echoes of distant gunfire.

“Think you can do better? Take your best fucking shot. I’ll be right out.”

When I turned back from the doorway, pale faces were peering down from the second-floor landing: other hostelry guests, clutching half-closed clothing around themselves and rubbing sleep from fearful eyes.

“Get everybody up and anybody Armed, get armed,” I said. “The Smoke Hunt’s outside, bandits and looters are everywhere, and the Knights can’t protect you because they’ve got bigger problems. Get every weapon you can lay your hands on and get ready to fight for your fucking lives.”

The faces stared blankly down at me. I pointed at Hawk and Whistler. “You want to be dead like them? Go!”

The faces disappeared.

I went back across the lobby. Whistler smelled like bad barbeque. Hawk smelled like roadkill.

Kravmik was trembling all over. “You-the Knights-have to go to the parish-”

I picked up Hawk’s pistol. “Can you shoot?”

Kravmik’s face twisted doubtfully. “Never have.”

“Hold it tight and keep your wrist locked. The safety’s here. Aim it like a handbow. Can you manage?”

The pistol nearly disappeared inside his vast fist. “It’s a weapon. I’m an ogrillo,” he said with a deep breath. “I’ll manage.”

Pratt was half crumpled in his wife’s arms, shaking with adrenaline collapse. “Got ’em-we got ’em, didn’t we?”

“You hurt?”

“I, ah-I dunno, I-”

Yttrall shook her head without looking up. She stroked his thin sweat-damp hair. “He’s well as can be hoped, my lord. No harm beyond the shaking, I think. Though I feared much for my brave Lasser lad-”

“No need, no need-they had me right where we wanted ’em,” Pratt said with a shaky laugh.

“Yeah. How’d you slip the Charm?”

“You should know,” his wife said.

“I should?”

“Wouldn’t be real successful here if every ass-mandrake and his buttsister could Charm me out of their bill, would I?” Pratt fished inside his blouse and pulled out a coin-size medal on a chain. “Proof against all forms of magickal compulsion.”

I reached for the medal and turned it over in my hand. It was damp with the touch of Pratt’s skin, and of a warm pale metal, maybe white gold. On one side was stamped a representation of a pair of hands, both holding daggers; the forearms crossed at the wrists and were pinned together by the blade of a sword that stuck up between the angled dagger blades to bisect the angle they made. The opposite side was plain except for a phrase inscribed in simple Westerling script.

My Will, or I Won’t.

“Son of a bitch.” I dropped it like it had burned me and jerked to my feet. “Didn’t I tell you to get out of town?”

“We-well. .” He made a faint backhanded wave around the small lobby, which I only now registered was lined with baggage piled along the walls. “We can’t just go, not all at once, my lord-”

“I’m not your lord.”

“-I mean, please, you must understand, we have staff here, they’re family-and they have families of their own-”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“And our guests. .”

“What about them?”

Pratt cast a help me glance at Kravmik, who just shrugged and shambled over Whistler’s corpse toward the door, already holding Hawk’s pistol like he’d been born with it in his hand.

Pratt gently disengaged himself from Ytrall’s arms. “It’s not that easy to explain.” “

Nor so hard either,” his wife said. “A guest in our house has a claim on us, begging your lordship’s pardon. We’ll not be leaving while there’s danger they must face within our walls, or without. It’s a duty, your lordship. Not unlike your own.”

I wasn’t going to debate my duty. Whatever the fuck it might be, which is something I’ve never been able to get entirely straight. “It’s worth more than your life?”

Pratt shrugged helplessly. “It is our life.”

“Then get them out of here too.”

“That we shall,” Ytrall said. “When it may be done. Which is not this instant, begging your lordship’s pardon.”

“Well-” I locked a snarl behind my teeth and stifled a sudden lust to slap the snot out of both of them. “-do it, that’s all. As soon as shit calms down enough that you can hit the street.”

“Not this street. Not anytime soon.” Kravmik turned back from the door.

His eyes were empty yellow saucers. “We got Hunters outside. I think they’re coming this way.”

From the front of Kravmik’s massive shoulder, the street looked empty.

“I don’t see them.”

“Me neither.” With the muzzle of Hawk’s pistol, Kravmik tapped his snout alongside one age-greyed tusk. “But they’re out there. And not far.”

“Any idea how many?”

I felt him shrug. “Thirty years ago, maybe I coulda. No stalker, these days.”

“Don’t smell Tyrkilld anywhere, do you?”

“Not if I don’t have to.” But he couldn’t even force a smile.

I leaned into the doorway. “Hey,” I said, louder. “Hey, fuckers. Still there?Talk to me.”

Blank storefronts and boardwalk for fifty yards to the river. The other way, just a long straight gloom, half-lit orange by fireglow reflected from low clouds.

Indigo shadows still and sharp as the gaps between stars.

“We got a mutual problem that can have a mutual solution,” I called.

“Come on, fuckers. You want to be out there with the Smoke Hunt?”

Nothing. Maybe I was wrong about the backup. Or maybe their nerves were just really, really good. One way to find out.

I stepped through the door and bent over Calm Guy’s corpse to pry the gun out of his dead hand. Nobody shot at me.

The weapon was Earth-make, not stonebender: a Smith amp; Wesson select-fire, loading thirty hypervee steel-tail aluminum tumblers in a double-stack extended clip. Old-fashioned, but these rounds could pick a lock at a hundred meters and body armor doesn’t even slow them down. Not that Smoke Hunters would be wearing any.

It fit my right hand just fine.

From out on the boardwalk, the street looked even more deserted. Shuttered storefronts stared back at me. A puddle left from last night’s rain rippled burnt orange in the breeze. And the gunfire sounded to be moving the other way.

How good was Kravmik’s nose anyway?

I mean, that breeze was on the back of my neck. . the firefight was fading beyond the shadows down the street. . any Hunters that would be coming this way must have slipped the armsmen somehow, because the Khryllians sure as hell weren’t chasing them. . was Kravmik’s nose good enough to scent them from blocks off? Downwind?

Which was when a tiny voice inside my head whispered, that’s right, dumb-ass, the breeze is on the back of your neck.

I turned.

Six were already in the river. Faint shimmering haloes of scarlet witchfire around their heads evoked corpse-lanterns on the Great Chambaygen-except they were coming at us across the current, and at a pretty good clip. Two more right behind, slipping silently down into the black water. One last on the far quay. Standing. Staring at me.

Naked. Rippling with flames of power.

He spread arms like the thighs of bulls, and drew air into a chest like a bargeload of boulders-

And I, for roughly the duration of my entire lifetime in reverse, froze.

Sort of.

I didn’t so much freeze as I froze about freezing.

I was hanging from a wire an arm’s length over my own head: a psychic Sword of Damocles. Because I really didn’t know how I was going to take this. I’ve been having this dream half my life.

Back in the Boedecken. .

The details are different every time, so it doesn’t matter who’s with me or how the place looks, how I’m armed, none of that, all that mattered was that I was back in the Boedecken but I was old and slow and tired with killing.

And Black Knives were coming for me. Again.

It felt like some kind of justice. This was where I really started-everything before was prologue-so this was where I ought to end. There was a bitter poetry to it: after all the spectacularly fraudulent mock heroics that had made me a legend, I freeze on a dark street in front of people who’d fallen for that legend so hard that they worship it. That might be the only way to pay for being me. To make my end not a storied, gloried song but the punch line to the bad joke I’ve always been. To go out like a punk.

Stalton’s eyes. . opal stars of slivered moon-

You don’t decide to freeze, or to break, or to crumple in a corner and crap yourself any more than you decide to black out when somebody cracks your head with a pipe. It’s something your brain does without your cooperation. When the demons asleep in the back of your skull wake up hungry.

Crowmane’s smoking stump and Stalton’s eyes and Purthin Khlaylock, lifting his morningstar to pray-

So I hung there over my own head, dangling from a golden thread of I think maybe but how am I supposed to know and when the fuck, exactly, does my wave function collapse and leave Whiskers’ corpse rotting in my skull?

But in the same instant I was remembering-as my dead wife used to remind me, way too fucking often-not everything is about me.

Kravmik and the Pratt family and a house full of ordinary damn people bobbing downstream toward the fecal falls were counting on me to be the closest thing they had to a canoe, and justice for me wasn’t gonna do them any goddamn good at all, so for a decade-long blink of an eye I saw myself starring in Beau Geste again, this time for real, making a stand here in the hostelry, trying to hold off the Smoke Hunt with a grand total of three guns, two balls, and no brains at all. Which wouldn’t end up doing Pratt amp; Co. an assload of good either. It’d just make me feel better about dying ugly.

Which, because in my heart I’ll always be an Actor, made me think of Edmund Kean’s last words, Dying is easy-comedy is hard, and I found myself muttering, “You think so? Just watch how fucking funny this is gonna be.”

And it had all started and finished in an Ox-Bow Incident half-second, because by the time that buck across the river unleashed the roar he’d been drawing breath for, I had already snapped back into my body and was turning to Kravmik in the doorway. “Forget what I said about fighting them. Get the Pratts and the staff and all the guests up to the roof and have them scatter over the alleys to the surrounding buildings. I mean scatter. Anybody who can’t make the jump? Throw ’em. And give me back that gun.”

He scowled down at me. “But you say-”

“Forget what I said. You’re not gonna fight them. Get people going and go with them. I’ll lead the Hunters off-slow ’em down till Tyrkilld and the Riverdock armsmen can get back here-”

The big chef squinted toward the river. “Maybe I can talk to them-grills are grills. Smoke Hunt’s got no reason to hook red with-”

“Kravmik.”

He heard it in my voice. That doubtful scowl crawled back down his crown ridge. “What?”

Kravmik had to be pushing my age-maybe from the wrong side-which meant he was old enough that this was one of those happy accidents where I could just tell the truth. “Those are Black Knives.”

His eyes popped to about the size of my hands, and he made a noise like he’d swallowed his tongue. When he could finally get out a word, that word was a half whispered, “No. .”

“Yes.”

His mouth hung slack for a second or two, then his lower lip started to flap. “But-b-but-n-n-no clan sign-”

“Not where you can see it. Don’t believe me? Go over there and ask Pratt who I am. But give me the gun first.” Because, y’know, ever since I made sure the Khulan Horde went down at Ceraeno, Black Knives aren’t the only grills who have reason to hold maybe a bit of a grudge, and I wasn’t in the mood to take a round or two in the back for being a fucking wise guy.

“Who you are-?”

“Just do it. Go on, move!” He frowned like he’d found a rat turd in his almondine, but he put the gun in my outstretched left and jogged heavily back around Whistler’s corpse toward the Pratts.

A couple of the Smoke Hunters were already out of the river. One loped toward me along the street, slow and easy, trotting on all fours, and the other reared up and spread his arms and expanded a steamer-trunk chest to unleash a contrabasso blast of-“Dizhrati golzinn Ekk!”

— which somehow, on its twisty cart ride through the funhouse I use for a brain, didn’t do anything like start a freeze; a toasty red glow kindled somewhere around my balls and spread up through my chest and down my legs and into my arms, and when it finally reached my head, what the buck had roared ended up translating Welcome back to the Boedecken, Skinwalker.

And I felt a whole lot better.

I nodded a smile back at him as I leaned my left forearm against the boardwalk post in front of me and wedged my right hand down hard on top of it with Calm Guy’s Smith amp; Wesson braced against the post on the side, because steadied like that with a gun like this, even a crappy shooter like myself can get medium-range accuracy on the order of a carbine, and so my reply to his welcome was a cheerfully warm Thanks; it’s good to be home, which was delivered in a three-round burst to the heart that slapped him down flat and wet and floppy.

I swung the sights onto the one trotting toward me-who hadn’t even broken stride-and let him have his own burst into the upper lip. His head exploded like a meat grenade.

Four more were up out of the water and the other three were behind them and I was coolly taking aim, y’know, two down, seven to go; hey, honey, watch me turn Rover into Spot, and generally feeling pretty snappy about myself until the first one got up.

So I shot him again. More than shot him. I hosed him down-at least ten rounds. Big wet chunks of Smoke Hunter ripped loose and plopped onto the puddled street. Including his right arm.

Which was when he bent down, picked up his own severed goddamn arm by his own severed goddamn wrist, and swung it around his head.

“DIZHRATI GOLZINN EKK!”

He wasn’t even bleeding.

And I wasn’t feeling all that snappy anymore.

I remember blinking stupidly until I could finally make my mouth work.

“Fuck this for a joke-”

It got even less funny when the one with only a gooey mess of raw sausage where his head should be rolled to his feet and loped over to join the others.

The dream-vision-prophecy. . that Meld thing. . how I had spread my mind though different bodies. . seeing through each other’s eyes. . plus a sick twist on the Ghost Dancer bullets-cannot-harm-us thing. .

Somebody had learned a new trick. No. An old one.

— the Black Knife camp below my cross alive in the night with shadows leaping, howling, teeth and claws and hunger-Somebody learned Pretornio’s trick.

No wonder the Hunt could ring up Khryllians wholesale. I’d watched reanimated corpses of Pretornio’s porters rip Black Knives limb from limb-reanimated ogrilloi would be proportionally stronger-

From the dream: that fantasy of power, stone walls shattering under a blow of my grey-leather fist. .

. . a fantasy of being stronger than a Knight of Khryl.

Now there’s a new kind of suicide bomber. . I monologued to my audience of one.

Now they were all down to all fours, coming at that ground-eating lope, not in any hurry so I had maybe all of three seconds, and across the street an alley mouth yawned darkness, and I remembered another alley up around the corner, and in that two-seconds-left I decided to bet my life that they were connected.

I ran out into the street, holding down the Smith amp; Wesson’s trigger, not aiming, spraying low to empty the clip and hope for a boneshot to a leg or two to slow a couple down. The slide racked open before I hit the opposite boardwalk and I dropped it and stopped at the alley mouth to empty Hawk’s pistol at them too before I fell back into the shadows and that’s when shit went really weird.

Because one of Smoke Hunters said, “Hey, check it out-did you guys see that? I think that was Caine!”

And another said “No fucking way,” and a third said, “No, man, I think he’s right-”

They were speaking English.

“Do we kill him?”

“Kill him? Before I get his autograph?”

So there, in the alley, back against the cold wet brick wall, two-handing the Automag up by my cheek, I did freeze. I didn’t have the faintest fucking ghost of a clue what could possibly be going on, or what I should be doing about it. Which led me to do maybe the only really smart thing I’d managed since I got off the boat yesterday morning.

I called out in English, “Hey-what the fuck, huh?”

All eight of them clustered at the alley mouth, slowly, squinting into the moonshadow. The one carrying his own left arm let it dangle forgotten by his leg. “Holy shit-it’s you, isn’t it? You’re really you?”

I replied, “Back the fuck off. All of you.”

They didn’t.

I swung the pistol down into line. “You can see well enough to see this gun, right?”

They all kind of shrugged and nodded to me and each other-except the one with no head-but kept inching tentatively closer. “Yeah-yeah, Caine. . yeah, it’s not even really dark out here, not for us.”

“This isn’t one of the civvie pieces I shot you with before,” I told them. “This is a Social Police Automag.”

They stopped.

“Hey, no, shit, no-Caine, we’re not after you-” One-Arm said. “I mean, Jesus Christ, this is so fucking awesome, you’re like my hero-”

“Oh, he is not,” another one said.

“He is. You are,” One-Arm assured me earnestly. “You’re the greatest-I always said so-”

“Packard, you are such a buttsuck.” The second one cocked his head toward me confidentially. “He never bought a cube of yours in his life-his whole collection is like some K’Trann and Jhubbar, and some old Pallas softcores from before she met you that he beats off to-”

“Shut up-!” One-Arm backhanded him with his severed arm hard enough to knock him sprawling. “It’s not my fault-my parents-”

One of the others snickered in my direction. “Ass-Packard’s mommy won’t let him have your shit because you say fuck all the time and stuff. Doing it’s one thing, but she gets weird when you say it-”

“Will you drop it? Jesus Christ-!”

I found myself sagging against the alley’s wall. “Who are you fuckers?”

They told me. Their names were a roll call of Earth’s Leisure Congress. Packard, Rand, Windsor, two Sauds, a Walton, a Bush, and-the one whose head I’d shot off-a Turner.

“Turner?” I said, blinking at the headless hulk of ogrillo. “You’re one of Wes Turner’s kids?” Back in the day, Westfield Turner had been the president of Adventures Unlimited.

My former boss.

The headless one waved this off and pointed at One-Arm-Packard.

Packard said, “Leisureman Turner’s his grandfather. Little Turner’s the one who gets us the berths, y’know. Usually he plays really well-it’s hysterical you blew his face off like first thing-you should see how it looks when your eyes explode, it’s so awesome-”

I let the Automag fall to my side. “How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

The one he’d knocked down-Bush-snickered. “You are not. He’s not.”

“I will be in two weeks.”

“Two weeks makes you a lying sack of fourteen-year-old shit.”

“I am so gonna beat your ass.”

“Oh, sure.” Bush got up. “Try it, Lefty.”

“I mean after. I am gonna fly down to your broke-ass daddy’s dinky little white-trash island and I am gonna pound you.”

“You’re kids. .” My brain had somehow turned into a wet wool blanket stuffed inside my skull. “You’re all kids.”

“Well, sure,” one of the Sauds said. “This is still in beta, and they need play-testers, and Turner’s really pretty all right, you know, he set us up, it’s a real party, even though everything’s virtual. The simichair hookup cost my dad a bundle, and he’s itching to play, too. Maybe once they smoke the bugs out and get this ready for release. This is way sweeter than even firsthanding, because, you know, first off, the Studio hasn’t even done that in like forever, and even then, if we were like firsthanding you, we’d just be riding along while you kill people. This way we get to kill them ourselves-”

“And eat them.” Bush’s tusks gleamed pale and wet in the moonlight. “We get to kill them and eat them. This is way harder core than even your stuff-no offense, y’know; I’m a real fan, not like Ass-Packard. I have your Collector’s Platinum Edition box-set, plus I’ve got a bootleg master of Servant of the Empire-”

“Just ’cause your mom sucked Turner’s wrinkled old grampadick for it,” Packard sneered.

I shook my head. “You little shits understand that these are real people? You get it? This isn’t just a fucking game-”

“Sure it is,” Packard said. “Our pack gets points for every civilian we take out before the Knights knock us to pieces. We get extra points for taking out armsmen, and killing a Knight’s an automatic win, unless another pack gets a Knight too, and they’ve got more civilian kills than-”

“And you get points too just for duration, you know?” Bush nodded enthusiastically. “We’re short on kills, but just standing here talking to you we’re racking our score, and that’s bone grippy, because we get to meet you and everything, and we can still do our mission objective, because we came down the river-these grills we’re piloting are already dead, y’know, they don’t have to breathe-and the Knights aren’t here yet-”

I couldn’t get my mind around it. “You’re just sonofabitching kids-”

Packard smirked at me. “Yeah, right. How old were you the first time you killed somebody?”

“The first time I killed somebody I was fighting for my life, you little bastard.” Which was a damn lie, but what the hell. “You’re a pack of spoiled Leisure brats sitting in simichairs a universe away-”

“Well, sure,” the other Saud said, shaking his head at me like I was a goddamn idiot, which was exactly how I felt. “You think our parents would let us do this if we could actually get hurt? I mean, check it out-” He lifted his loincloth to show a ragged stump where the Smoke Hunter’s cock had been severed at the root. “We can’t even fuck. What are we supposed to do except kill people?”

“I never killed anybody just for fun-”

“No, you killed ’em for our fun.” Bush’s smirk was almost identical to Packard’s. “You were good at it too. The best. You know you’re still in the Top Ten? Sure, the Studio hasn’t released anything fresh from anybody in about forever now, but you’d probably hang in there even against the new guys, they’re such pussies-”

“Shut up. Everybody fucking shut up a minute.”

I was not going to have this argument with goddamn Leisure brats who were playing at being Black Knives in a virtual sonofabitching game.

Especially since this was an argument I’d lose.

I came to Overworld-became an Actor in the first place-to taste the kind of power I could never have on Earth. Sure, wealth. Sure, fame. Adulation, and even some political influence. But all that was just perks, y’know? The real prize was power: to ignore the laws that circumscribe the lives of Earth’undercastes. To live without law altogether. To bow to no law except my own will. But that’s more abstract than it really was; when you get right to the bone, it was about being a god.

To kill without consequence.

It’s never been a mystery to me that I’m more than a little crazy. It’s also never been a mystery that if I hadn’t been an Actor, I’d have died in prison. So I got myself to a place where bloodlust is power, and casual murder is the point of the game.

Same as them.

They were starting out from a place of power already, that’s all. They get to have everything I busted ass for without putting their butts on the line.

But y’know, my butt was never all that much on the line either. Half the scars I carry are from wounds that should have killed or crippled me-would have killed or crippled anyone who’s not an Actor. Unlimited access to the most cutting-edge medical treatment in the world, plus the occasional use of flat-out magick: the best health plan in the history of both universes.

So what’s the difference between me and them? The real difference? They were in it for fun. I got paid. That’s about it.

It’s an old joke at the Studio Conservatory, and not a funny one: If you kill for money, you’re a soldier. If you kill for fun, you’re a psychopath. If you kill for money and for fun, you’re an Actor.

Dizhrati golzinn motherfucking ekk.

My headache thundered in my ears. “You said you had a mission objective.”

“Sure.” Bush swung his talons toward the Pratt amp; Redhorn. “It’s a sander. On that hotel.”

“Sander?”

“Search and destroy. Nobody left alive. And we burn the place down. Five hundred points. Fuck, don’t you know anything?”

“I know some things.”

Search and destroy. I would have vanished without a trace-missing, presumed dead in the fire. . This Faller character was going about things in a very organized way. Looked like he always did. He had a setup twice as nifty as the Khryllian trick of using grill hostages as draft animals. Ten times as nifty.

Let’s say you’re an Overworld Company goon trapped here on Assumption Day, and you want to get home. If you know enough folklore, you know about the dillin, and you might even remember the references in my dad’s book, Tales of the First Folk, where he suggested that the Quiet Land-the place the dillin are supposed to lead to-might be Earth. You might also remember cubing Retreat from the Boedecken and the story behind the Tear of Pan chasell, and when you get to Purthin’s Ford, you start mining griffinstones. But not for money.

For power.

And when you find out about this Smoke Hunt business-that some enterprising ogrilloi have managed to find a way to tap into the Outside Power that was both the dil T’llan and the onetime God of the Black Knives-you discover that animating the Smoke Hunters draws enough energy off the Outside Power that you can force open the dil.

Well and good. You can get to Earth. But you don’t go to Earth. . because you’re smart enough to know you’re sitting on the only working gate between Earth and Home.

I discovered that I was kind of looking forward to meeting this fucker.

I squinted past them at the bloody corpse of Calm Guy on the boardwalk, then up over the skyline of the hostelry’s roof. “I know some things,” I repeated. “I know you fuckers aren’t going in there. And you’re not gonna burn it down, either.”

“Aw, come on,” one of them-I think it was the Windsor, but it was dark, and really, when you come right down to it all dead grills look pretty much alike to me-said, “You’re gonna cost us the game-”

“A little over five minutes ago I killed three men to protect that place. Three real men, who really died.” I looked deep into the Windsor’s piss-yellow eyes. “What do you think I’ll do to you?”

The Windsor blinked. “Whoa-for real? Would you really? I mean, that’d be so fucking cool-way better than an autograph!”

“I’ll torture the fuck out of you, if it makes you happy. Just don’t burn my shit.”

Bush sniggered. “What, were you in there? We could have killed you? Hot fuck, how awesome would that be? To be the guys who killed Caine?”

Packard nodded slowly. “Y’know. .” He looked around at the others. “We still could. .”

“Settle down-”

Bush looked suddenly thoughtful. “All you’ve got is that gun, right?”

I said, “Let me explain,” and put a tristack into his kneecap.

The impact spun him, and when he tried to catch himself, his leg bent backward and folded in half and toppled him sideways, because the shatter-slugs had chopped his knee joint into ogrillo scrapple.

“Hey. .” he said, aggrieved. “Hey, come on. What’d you do that for?”

I hefted the Automag. “Anybody else?”

“This sucks,” Bush said as he struggled to get back to his feet. Er, foot. “I haven’t got to kill anybody yet!”

“Cry me a fucking river.” I shrugged down at the ogrillo body he was wearing. “You should be grateful. Other people who make that mistake with me don’t live through it.”

“It was Packard’s idea-why don’t you shoot his leg off?”

“And it’s still a good one,” Packard said. “Everybody spread out. When he opens fire on me, rush him. I don’t know how many points he’s worth, but who gives a shit? This is Caine. How cool are we?”

“Sure, ice cold, you are.” I took a step backward into the alley. If I could get deep enough, I could enfilade them as they came at me. Which wouldn’t likely be enough to save my life, but I didn’t have any better ideas.

A slight noise from behind me in the alley-a metallic rustle, like a sleepy silver rattlesnake-and I risked a quick glance over my shoulder in time to see the shadows transform into a straight, severe man in straight, severe armor, plain and functional except for the golden Sunburst upon the open electrum Palm on the breast of the cuirass, and I said, “Holy crap-I never thought I’d be saying this, but I am really glad to see you right now-”

Markham, Lord Tarkanen, replied simply, “Pynhall.” He was faster than Tyrkilld.

I never saw it coming.