Hmm.
I knew enough about the physics of magick to understand that the curve of the finger-spires above would focus Flow on that apex-the cup of the stylized palm-so this metal would be conductive. . not silver, though. From this height, a slash of sun still burned the horizon, visible through a rent in the slow clouds; in its light the metal showed no hint of tarnish, and I couldn’t imagine a legion of Khryllians making the climb up here for a daily polish. Not to mention Ma’elKoth and his friggin’ artistic sensibilities. . which meant this had to be something like, well-
Platinum.
And not leaf, either; though I couldn’t guess the thickness, this was clearly designed to be walked on. I frowned up at the vast finger-spires and the plated convex slopes between-could there be this much in the entire world? — but then I shrugged. If your basic Joe Alchemist can turn lead into gold, Ma’elKoth could probably make platinum out of his own turds.
*Figures,* I monologued. *Silver just isn’t quite white enough, is it?*
“Please join me. The view is better from up here.”
My jolt at the unexpected voice didn’t quite send me slipping down the platinum slope, tumbling off the rim of the thousand-foot tower and screaming down through misting drizzle to shatter some random embrasure far below in a cannonball of meat and bone. Not quite. But it came close enough that I saw the whole thing happen inside my head.
“Yeah?” Panting, I crouched and leaned on the platinum. It felt even colder now, smoother, satin ice. “Then it’ll be nice if I live long enough to see it, huh?”
“If Khryl had willed your death for this day, you would have died in the Riverdock customs sequestry. Join me.”
The voice was feminine, educated, with the air of effortless Lipkan aristocracy that Ankhanan society types so desperately try to emulate; at the same time, it had a full-throated chest resonance belonging more to fields than to drawing rooms. A rasping edge hinted that the woman who belonged to that voice spent a fair amount of her time on those fields shouting orders above the clash of weapons and the drum of steel-shod hooves.
I thought blankly, a chick?
I clicked over some decades-old Monastic research on the Order. This’d be the first female Champion of Khryl since, what, Pintelle? Call it eighty-odd years, give or take.
Wow.
Bare feet gave me just enough purchase on the platinum, despite the damp, that if I trusted my weight and didn’t lean too far into my balance I could make my way up the slope.
She stood at the focus of the Purificapex, her back to me, hands folded behind her. She wore a robe identical to mine, stained with old blood, raised hood shrouding her head. Her feet were bare, her ankles pale and thick, her calves trim, chiseled white marble; her folded hands were long and hard on thick corded wrists.
Beside her stood a waist-high extrusion of metal sloping up out of the general flooring, smooth on top, gently sloped, maybe ten inches wide and a couple of feet long. On top of it rested a leather bundle, rolled and tied with a thong like a chef’s knife wrap.
Good size for an altar, maybe. Or an anvil. Or a chopping block.
On the far side of the altar-block there was some kind of a long handle-like the hilt of a bastard sword wrapped in wire-sticking up at an angle. That handle was the only part of the furnishings that wasn’t platinum; it looked old, rusted, eaten by age and exposure.
I padded up behind her. “Think your boy Markham believes this apology crap?”
She didn’t move. “It does not matter what he believes.”
“Then why the story?”
“It is the truth.”
“Oh, come on.”
One shoulder lifted a millimeter. “It is part of the truth. The apology is not on behalf of Knight Aeddharr, but on my own.”
“Shit, lady, you could’ve just sent a card.”
“You are here,” she said, “because it is my wish that you see the Battleground as I see it.”
She unclasped her hands and extended one to swing through a long, slow wave out at the darkening downland: the sprawl of city and the gentle swells of plantations and vineyards beyond. “Purthin’s Ford. The Knightly Estates of the Order of Khryl.”
The gesture turned toward the escarpment, toward distant compounds lit with the glow of coal-gas mantles, and a nearer compound, vast rows upon rows of regimented shacks and cages surrounded by razor wire and guardhouses and greenish beams of roving searchlights. “The Upland Manufactories, and BlackStone Mining, and the Pens.”
She returned her hand behind her back, and lowered her shrouded head toward the tiers of the vertical city below. “And of course, the face of Hell.”
“Yeah. Pretty. So?”
“Five hundred Knights of Khryl. Ten thousand armsmen. Thirty thousand sworn Soldiers, man, woman, and child. There was a time that the Order of Khryl was so respected-so feared-that the mere chance we might enter battle was enough to end a war. Whole empires bowed before us.”
“What’s your point?”
“Now we are-” This time her shrug was big enough to hurt. “-jailers. Keepers of the Boedecken ogrilloi.”
I nodded a shrug of my own at the platinum spires around us. “But you’ve got a really nice house.”
“Bitter though it may be, this duty has fallen to us, and I shall see it done. For the sake of all that you see around you here. Do you understand this? It is not for mine own sake, nor for Khryl’s, nor for the Order’s alone-certainly it is not for glory, nor for any hope of the return of bygone days. It is for the lives and hopes and happiness of forty thousand Khryllians, near that many again of the Civility, and near to two hundred thousands of the ogrilloi themselves that I do this. They are each and all my responsibility. My duty. Thus do I fulfill it.”
“Thus?” I frowned. “What, you mean by bringing me up here?”
“Yes. By bringing you to the Purificapex of Khryl. By standing you at my side, in a place where only ordained Knights of Khryl have stood till now. By showing you what I see. For we must understand one another, you and I.”
Wincing, the pounding in my head telling me I wasn’t going to like the answer, I asked, “We must? How come?”
“Because,” she said, turning to me finally, pulling back her blood-stained cowl, “I know who you are.”
For long enough that the platinum numbed my bare toes, I could only stare.
She missed good-looking by a yard on the hard side: her face might have been shaped from chrome steel by a cutting torch. Her hair hung straight and limp, the color of maple leaves that have lain under snow cover all winter long. Her neck was corded with knife-etched muscle, and her jaw looked to have been modeled on a splitting maul.
But her eyes-
Those eyes. . damn. I knew that color.
Lifetimes ago, I trained at the Studio Conservatory on Naxos, in Earth’s Aegean Sea. At twilight in late summer, as the last arc of the sun slips into the sea and the first stars kindle, the sky goes to indigo velvet: warm, and soft, and impossibly remote. That color.
But in her eyes that remote melancholy was overlaid with cool unselfconscious speculation, a direct and level interest that examined my face, my shoulders. The shape of my hands. The drape of my robe.
I offered another blank mental Damn. .
I played dumb. I’ve had plenty of practice. “Have we met?”
She spread her hands. “I am Angvasse, Lady Khlaylock, currently the Champion of Khryl.”
“Khlaylock?” My stomach lurched. “Any relation?”
“I have the honor to be that great man’s niece.”
I said, “Uh.”
Another Khlaylock was the last thing I needed in my life right now. Or, say, ever. I coughed. “Sorry. I’m supposed to take a fu-a knee or something, right?”
“Formalities need not be observed; I am not in Khryl’s Battledress. Here in the Palm of God we are equals. You may stand. You may even call me Angvasse.” Faint creases appeared around those startling eyes as though she might be about to smile. “You should understand that these liberties are not taken elsewhere.”