“You truly claim this?”
I looked down at the bracelet of scar around my right wrist. I traced its wrinkled surface with my left index finger, remembering-
Remembering dragging myself on my belly up the Shaft in the Ankhanan Donjon, half-dead legs twitching and useless, lantern in one hand and ring of keys in the other. Remembering finding Orbek chained to the wall.
Remembering what they’d done to him.
“Yeah. I do.”
“As a member of his immediate family, you have the right to visit your ogrillo on this, his final night of life. Say to Lord Tarkanen that such is my will.”
“He’s not my-ah, fuck it anyway.” I stared down at the cloudy smear of sunset gleaming from the platinum floor. “Thanks.”
“It is our way.”
“Are we done here? I better leave before I blow past sad and show up at angry.”
“Angry at whom?” Her eyes said that for her, sad was the edge of the world; angry was a mythical monster somewhere beyond. “Would you punish a sword for the acts of its wielder?”
“I’ve done it before.” I looked away again. “That’s another story I don’t want to get into right now.”
“Would you not prefer to strike at those truly responsible?”
I thought it over. No, really: I did. I’m no great believer in justice, and-like Ma’elKoth used to say-revenge is the shibboleth of spiritual poverty. But-
This was Orbek.
I sighed. “I’m listening.”
So here’s yet one more way this whole shitstorm’s my fault.
That book-writing friend of mine would say you can arrange any story you’re in to make anything your fault, and maybe that’s true. But I knew it then. I could feel it.
We were standing in a boundary condition: on one of those infinitely complex fractal positions where the smallest gesture might trigger the slide toward an infinitely unpredictable resting state. We were the butterfly in Hong Kong, and the whisper from our wings was going to alter the path of the category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic.
I could feel it because that’s what I do. When I breathe myself into mindview, I can even see it: black Flow, the energy of change itself. The cosmic web of causation. Quantum smears of probability, and the islands of order that are the heartbeat of chaos.
Hell, it’s more than what I do. According to a certain pack of demented clusterhumps who are a chronic hornet’s nest in my buttcrack, it’s what I am.
But fuck them, anyway. This story isn’t about them.
She took a deep breath, and her hand tightened on the altar-block. “Your brother had fallen among bad company, here on the Battleground. The truth, I fear, is in fact darker: that he had become part of the Smoke Hunt.”
“If you really want to know what’s going on, why aren’t you just sending down some Knights with a list of questions? With that truthsense of yours-”
“It is not ours, freeman, but Khryl’s. And even so, it has its. . limits.” Her indigo gaze darkened. “Are the Monasteries unaware of this?”
I met that squarely. “Still, though. What do you think I can do that you can’t?”
“I’m sure I couldn’t say, freeman.” That wistfulness had slipped back under her voice, and I realized it had been always there, deepening subtly every time she called me freeman. “I suppose that would be between you and your conscience.”
“Yeah. Conscience. Sure.” I sighed. “What do I have to do?”
“You will pledge yourself to a Call of Duty, sealed and sanctified by the Witness of Our Lord of Valor.”
“You want me to work for you.” I squinted at her. “That’s not as good an idea as it sounds.”
“You would. . work. . not for me, but for Khryl.”
“He might not like it either.”
“Nothing in the Battleground is a question of what we like, freeman. It is necessary that the enemies of Our Lord meet His Justice.”
“You mean your justice,” I said, nodding down at the pistol.
Her eyes went bleak as winter dusk. “It is the same.”
“The coincidence’s kinda funny, huh?”
“Not to me.”
“Not much is, I bet. What’s involved in this Call of Duty shit?”
“Through me, you will pledge yourself to Khryl’s Service in this matter. Your pledge will be Witnessed by the Lord of Battles Himself, and your compliance will be enforced by His Will until He is satisfied that you have completed your task. Once invested, the Call of Duty is absolute; you will faithfully comply with the terms of His Call and pursue its resolution to the exclusion of all other concerns.”
My teeth found the inside of my lower lip again. It was starting to swell.“What if I don’t want to?”
“Freeman, you will want to. Taken freely, His Call becomes your own most potent desire. For the duration of His Call, you will burn for its completion.”
“You sound awful damn sure I’m going to do this.”
“Your alternative. .” One finger twitched at the Automag. “. . remains.”
“What if I don’t like that one either?”
“The ogrilloi of the Smoke Hunt,” she said tonelessly, “bear marks at the bases of their spines. The mark is a simple curve of black, shaped like a fighting claw.”
I found myself dropping my gaze toward the red-smeared streets, but I didn’t see them because I wasn’t looking down a thousand feet at the city. I was looking down twenty-five years at lean, stringy, desert-hard Black Knife bitches. Dancing in the firelight below my cross.
“And now, today, to my city, comes the legendary Bane of the Black Knives. The Skinwalker himself. I cannot believe this is coincidence.”
I shook the flashback out of my head. “It’s not. Not even a little.”
“Thus it is that I have brought you to my side.”
“You want me to stop the Smoke Hunt.”
She said, “Yes.”
“And you think I’m gonna jump at the chance because they’re playing at being Black Knives.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re willing to turn me loose in Purthin’s Ford because you’re afraid that Justice and Truth aren’t gonna cut it this time. Because Khryl makes you play by too many rules.”
“I told you it was. . complicated.”
“Lady, that’s not complicated at all. Think about who I am.” An effort of will unknotted fists I did not remember clenching. “That’s what I came here for.”
“Yes,” she said. “I believe that of all living creatures, perhaps you alone truly understand what it is that Khryl’s land faces: the doom that lours upon His people. Perhaps you alone truly understand what the Black Knives were, and would be once more.”
“Screw Khryl’s land. And his people.” I stared into the clouds. “Even Orbek. It’s not like he’ll thank me.”
“Yes,” she said. “You still hate them. The Black Knives. Even after so many years. It burns in you. I can feel it.”
“Some things,” I said slowly, “you don’t get over.”
“Yes.” Starfire kindled in her eyes. “Yes.”
She thought she knew what I was talking about. I could read in those eyes that she did know something about hate. Something. Not everything. I remember being that young. I remember thinking I knew what it is to hate.
“I believe it is Khryl Himself who has brought us together,” she said. “That Khryl Himself has decided that you are the last best hope of His people.”
“I’m just a guy. A guy who’s gotten lucky a couple times, that’s all.”
The creases around her eyes squeezed toward a smile. “And many who believed so now moulder in the dirt.”
I couldn’t exactly argue the point.
Her face hardened. “Thus it is that I have brought you to my side. Thus it is that Khryl excuses my defiling His Purificapex with your presence-you, the disrespecter. The blasphemer.” Her voice could have cut glass. “The Enemy of God.”
I shrugged. “Not your god.”
“Prince of Chaos. Blade of Tyshalle.”
“I always heard Tyshalle and Khryl were on pretty good terms.”