“Uh, yeah.”
“And you may speak freely here; Khryl is a warrior god. His Sanctum cannot be profaned by mere words, no matter how coarse.”
I coughed again. “How do you-who do you think I am?”
She waved a dismissive hand. “Please. An Ankhanan Esoteric enters the Battleground, speaking of Black Knives? I am not ignorant of our history. And now, meeting you in person-I passed my youth in my uncle’s house. His portrait of you hangs in his study.”
I blinked. “It does?”
“Of a much younger you, of course. Slimmer. Less scarred.” Her eyes creased again like she was thinking about smiling but decided against it. “And I thought you’d be taller.”
“Everybody does.” I scowled at her. “Are you putting me on? A portrait?”
“He is an accomplished painter. When he retires as Justiciar, I have no doubt he will become a noted artist.”
I started to monologue, *God save me from the fucking sensitive artistic types,* until I remembered that the god to whom I was bitching is Himself one of those fucking sensitive artistic types. “But in his study? I mean, in his study doesn’t he want, I don’t know, a picture of his father? Or Khryl or something?”
“Such paintings grace other rooms in his manor. You hang on the wall of his study, he has said, as a constant reminder-” Her melancholy took on a curious note of schadenfreude. “-of the price of vanity.”
“He was never short on that.”
“You would find him,” she said, “quite changed.”
“I’d rather not find him at all.”
She nodded. “He does not remember you fondly.”
“But still-I mean, I’m supposed to be defended against-”
“Not from God. The Lord of Valor directs my attention to threats against His Soldiers and His land.”
“I’m a threat?”
“Are you not?”
“I wasn’t planning to be.” Another shrug. Why lie? “Getting beaten more-or-less to death might have changed my mind.”
“And thus I offer my apology. The incident occurred at my command, and I sincerely regret the necessity.”
I chewed on that. It tasted like the inside of my lip. “You ordered that bastard to kill me?”
“Not to kill. Never.”
“Did you explain that to him?”
“We are a young land, freeman; I have not seen thirty years, yet I saw the birth of the Battleground-as you must know, you who had so much a hand in creating it. We are still building the customs and tradition-constructing a society entire-that will fulfill Our Lord’s Command to tame His Land and defend the innocents who seek to thrive here.”
A wistful undertone hinted that she used to believe it.
I did my best to sound encouraging. “Uh-huh.”
“And our circumstance has become desperate. It was necessary to be certain of your intentions.”
“What’s this got to do with Orbek?”
“Certain. . elements. . have begun to interfere in Khryl’s society. Violently.”
“Yeah, I gathered. So, what, he’s hooked in with this Freedom’s Face?”
“Freedom’s Face is nothing.” She turned a hand as though releasing a fly from her fist. “Overprivileged and underexperienced scions of your Ankhanan burghers. Children with too much time on their hands, who have somehow come to believe that the romance of Liberty outweighs skill at arms. Who believe that casual vandalism, minor sabotage, and demonstrations of civil disobedience can bend the Will of God. We own Freedom’s Face; we can destroy it at a whim. We allow its survival only because we find it a useful beer pot in which to gather your juvenile wasps.”
“Has anybody explained that to Tyrkilld?”
“Explained it?” She looked honestly puzzled. “He is Khryl’s leading Knight in the control of Freedom’s Face. They are no serious threat.”
Oh, really? Well.
Well, well, well.
I said, “The rifles and checkpoints looked serious enough.”
“We have a problem of our own; they call themselves the Smoke Hunt.”
“I gathered that,” I said slowly. “What’s it got to do with Orbek?”
“This is where the matter becomes. .” She sighed. “. . complicated.”
I shrugged. “I call it Caine’s Law: Everything’s more complicated than you think it is.”
“Ah.”
“There’s a corollary,” I offered, going for an amiable keep on chatting, lady kind of tone. “Whenever somebody tells you shit’s simple, they’re trying to sell you something.”
Again she almost smiled. Almost. “Perhaps. Yet I tell you matters are complex, and I too am. . selling you something.”
“Yeah? What’re you selling?”
She fixed me with the infinite melancholy of her twilight eyes. “This Orbek-his claim of being a Black Knife-is this truth?”
“Far as I know.” I shrugged and found something to look at in the darkening sky. “That’s what his father told him, anyway-Orbek was born after the-after, uh, y’know-”
“And you truly claim him as brother? You, of all men living?”
“It’s-kind of a longer story than I really want to get into right now.”
She shook her head. “You are an interesting man.”
“He’s pretty interesting too.”
“I meet too many interesting people,” she said distantly. “Most of them I have to kill.”
“Probably just coincidence.”
Her voice went sad and cold: autumn winds dropping toward winter. “Not in this case.”
The evening damp turned to winter on my neck. “Maybe you want to tell me what you mean by that.”
She lifted her face to the heavens and murmured, “Ammare Khryl Tyrhaalv’Dhalleig, hrereteg yroshallai ti Hammantellentlei av uvranishai terishiin,” which I somehow knew, without being surprised at the knowledge, in the way you know things in a dream, was Old High Lipkan. Which wasn’t a shocker; I have heard Old High Lipkan before. The shocker was that I knew what it meant.
Beloved Khryl, Lord of Valor, I do this only for the honor of Your Name and the future of Your people.
This was a shocker because I don’t speak Old High Lipkan.
I found myself chewing the inside of my lip again while I waited for her to pull her nerves together. Eventually she lowered her head and took a deep breath. “How much do you know of your-brother’s-doings on the Battleground?”
“Uh-uh.” I folded my arms. “That’s not how this works.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“This is your party. You lay out the snacks.”
Infinite weariness in her nod. “I met him, this Orbek who styles himself kwatcharr of the Black Knives.”
“He does?”
She went on like I hadn’t spoken. “He was sought for questioning in an unrelated incident-a murder, in the fourth tier of Hell.”
“That wasn’t murder,” I said.
“Oh?” she said mildly, angling her head toward me.
I met her gaze squarely. She waited for me to elaborate. I waited for her to get tired of waiting.
She sighed. “The killing was done with a firearm-merely to bring such a weapon into Purthin’s Ford-”
“How d’you know he didn’t get it here?”
Again she waited for me to elaborate. Again I waited for her to get tired of waiting. Eventually she surrendered a nod. “He avoided armsmen and Knights together for some days; he was not taken until I myself joined the hunt. He defied me personally, in Khryl’s Battledress, which is an affront to God Himself.”
“Ankhanans are like that.”
“Yes. You are. While the Empire maintains a pretense of careful neutrality, it is known that some of the Battleground’s current difficulties are of Ankhanan origin, and your own relationship with the Empire, and the Emperor, is known to Khryl’s Order. This why you were mistreated; it was necessary to ascertain whether you might be associated with these elements. Knight Aeddhar felt he had no better way to prove your innocence. And for this I apologize, on my own behalf, as well as on behalf of Knight Aeddhar, the Order of Khryl, and the Civility of the Battleground. This apology is profound and sincere, as is my hope that you might accept it.”