“There’s no way out. There’s no way back. There is no parley. No appeal. They’re gonna come, and we’re gonna die. All of us. We can’t even slow them down. All we’ve got is a choice. Die tonight, or die from now till next month. Screaming.”
Not exactly St. Crispin’s Day, but at least I have their attention.
“I am going to die tonight. So is Marade, and Pretornio. Stalton and Rababal and Tizarre.” I nod at the cook, and his lover next to him. “So are you, Nollo. And you, Jashe. And every single one of you. Anybody who doesn’t will wish he had. Say it with me: I am going to die tonight.”
They look at me like I asked them to do the chicken dance.
“Come on. Say it. I am going to die tonight.”
Slowly, with a kind of reluctant surly stubbornness, they mumble their way through it.
“Where I come from, there used to be this, like, nation of warriors. When they were going into battle, they’d tell each other, Today is a good day to die. And they’d believe it.” I nod toward the sunset behind me. “Well, for us it’s night. This night. And I don’t know how good it is, but it’s the only one we’ve got.”
I make a fist and hold it out. “Tonight is a good night to die.”
They look at each other, at the niter-scaled walls, at the shadowed vault above. Anywhere but at me.
Christians like to say the truth will make you free. Guess I’ve got the wrong truth.
“Listen-” I let my fist go slack and rub my forehead. “Listen: I’ve got my share of problems, y’know? You all know it. I’m an asshole. Nobody likes me. Sometimes I don’t like me much either.”
I give them a second to disagree. Nobody jumps in. Big goddamn surprise. “
Shit weighs down on me, y’know? Like it does on everybody, I guess. I worry what the fuck I’m doing with my life. I’ve got a sick dad, and I can’t take care of him, and this girl I’m hot for thinks I’m a jerk, and shit, y’know, she’s right, but somehow I just can’t help my-” I manage to avoid looking at her. “Ahh, forget all that, it’s not important.
“Here’s the point: that’s all future stuff, y’know? Everything you worry about. Everything that keeps you awake at night. All the shitty things the world has waiting for all of us. You know: Failure. Old age. Loneliness. Heartbreak. Cancer. Whatever.
“All that is gone, now. You get it? That’s all shit to worry about tomorrow-but we won’t have to. Not ever again.
“For us, there is no tomorrow.
“Think about it. We have nothing left to worry about. Nothing. Shit, those Black Knives out there tonight? They’re giving us a gift. Because all that bad stuff, all the rotten fucking shit that could possibly happen for the rest of our lives. . won’t. Because the only rest of our lives we have left is a few minutes to decide how we’re gonna die.”
“What difference does that make?” somebody says. “Dead is dead.”
“Don’t care how you die? You don’t even have to leave this room. Just step over here.” I open my arms, offering. “You won’t feel a thing.”
No takers. No surprise.
“I’ll tell you how I’m gonna die.”
A long, slow look, eye to eye to eye. I let that spark in my balls heat up my voice. “I’m gonna drown in their smoking fucking blood.”
A muffled snort from the shadows: sounds like Stalton.
Thought he’d like that one.
“I will choke to death on their raw fucking brains. You follow? The cocksmoke that finally kills me will carry the marks of my teeth into his fucking grave-and when somebody digs him up a thousand years from now, they’ll point to the scar on his throat and they’ll say, ‘You see that? That was from Caine.’ ”
The passage hall goes quiet, and some of the eyes on me go cold now: the open-behind stare of surrendered hope. Good for them.
Good for me.
“I can’t say what happens in the next life. Or if there is a next life. You want that shit, talk to Pretornio, or Marade. I will tell you this, though. There’s one afterlife we know we can have: we can make the kind of fight here that will become a fucking legend.”
I come to my feet. “To hell with the next world. Let’s be immortal in this one. We’re gonna die anyway. Let’s do it right.”
“Yeah?” Sounds like the same guy, there in the darkness. “But who’s gonna know? We’ll all be dead. Nobody will even know this ever happened-”
“We will be remembered.” God’s own truth: this could be Adventure of the Year. I’ll be famous. Hell, they’ll be famous too. Dying in front of an audience of millions.
Wish I could be there to enjoy it.
“Believe it.” I give them a stare like the truth is a nail I can hammer into their heads with my eyes. “Our story will be known.”
“Yeah? Who’s gonna tell it? Who’s gonna remember us?”
My conditioning would choke me if I tried tell him, but I have another truth. A better truth. A truth that just might make us free.
“I thought that was obvious.” I raise a hand and wave at the black stone of the passage chamber walls, through the stone, out into the infinite night beyond.
Out at the Black Knives.
“They will.”
HAND OF PEACE
The robe itched. It smelled like meat.
I padded barefoot up an endless spiral of stairs built out from an inner cylinder of granite; the outer drum curved a good six feet clear of the stairs’ empty edge, leaving a long, long drop to the lamplit arc of the Lavidherrixium below.
My hair was drying stiff, and my face felt tight and sticky, and my skin crawled, and I couldn’t stop half a grimace that was at least part smile. So many people would be shocked, shocked, to find me suddenly fastidious about bathing in blood. .
Funny thing: most of them were dead. Really funny thing: I killed a lot of them myself.
I’m not known for my sparkling sense of humor.
Eventually the smell of blood and lampblack gave way to clean after-rain and a sunset breeze, and the steps became damp, and I rounded the curve of the cylinder and found myself outside. Way outside.
An intricate scale model of Purthin’s Ford speckled with pinpricks of firelight stretched away below, and the sudden shift in perspective from six lamplit feet to six moonlit miles kicked me behind the knees and nearly pitched me headlong over the edge.
I lurched away from the rim, slipping, pressing my back against the white-stone curve of the Spire, bare feet scrabbling for purchase on the damp stair, and I held himself there for a year or two until my vertigo began to pass.
Eventually I could breathe again.
“Holy crap.” A faded wheeze: that was all I had. “They couldn’t post a fucking sign? Maybe put up a railing? Holy crap.”
The final curve of the stairs looped up to the topmost reach of the Spire. I went up it with my right shoulder brushing the wall and my eyes on the stairs in front of me; even the top of the escarpment, only a hundred feet below, pulled at my balance, dragging my head toward the brink.
I had a feeling that even Khryllians didn’t come up here lightly.
The five spires around the top of the Eternal Vaunt curved upward like tenmeter fingers of an upraised hand, plated in lustrous white metal; between them the cap was a steep slant of the same metal, polished and still slick after the rain. The stairs ended where the metal began; the slope of metal curved upward in a convex arc so that its apex was out of view.
I reached down and laid my palm on the metaclass="underline" smooth and slick and colder than the rain.