“Which is a point of curiosity to me, as Khryl’s Healing extends only to hurts taken upon the field of battle.”
“So?”
“So it is a curious happenstance that the hurts Khryl’s Hand delivered unto your person through mine own seem Healed as well. Seeing as how they were delivered before the fighting began.”
I shrugged as I finally stepped into my pants. “There’s fighting and there’s fighting.”
“Ah?”
I pulled my pants up. “That fight started when your poor bastard Braehew pointed his shotgun at my balls.”
“Oh, did it now?” Tyrkilld frowned thoughtfully. “I would not have regarded it so.”
“That’s why you lost.”
“We lost,” Tyrkilld said, drawing himself up with an impressive display of dignity for a naked man, “because such was the Judgment of Our Lord of Valor.”
“Ever occur to you,” I said as I fastened the row of buttons up the side of the pants, “that maybe you just got beat?”
“Hnhn?”
“Don’t you wonder? Maybe I just kicked your ass. Maybe I got lucky.”
Tyrkilld’s eyes went dreamy and his voice gentled. “Might this be, to my unworthy ear, the music of a confession?”
I snorted. “It’s just that your Utterance of Valor shit is kind of, well. .”
“Primitive? Unreliable? Childish? Stupid?” Tyrkilld shrugged a couple yards of hairy shoulders. “Only to Incommunicants. To distinguish between simple defeat and the Judgment of God is not difficult in most cases, and in this one it’s clear as Trahammeth’s Glass. At the critical moment, Khryl withdrew from me His Love.”
“Oh, I get it.” I favored him with a bland smile. “You’re saying Khryl Himself affirmed what I said about your father.”
Muscle rippled along his wide jaw. “That’s not what we were fighting about.”
“The hell it wasn’t.”
Streaks of flush like claw marks surfaced across his chest, and the skin over the knuckles on those oak-knot hands went white. “You. . are a very, very bad man.”
“Do you know that when you get really angry, even your nuts blush?”
Tyrkilld spun and stomped toward the pool hard enough to shake the stone floor-but he stopped at the edge. “What you said. . about your father. .”
The view wasn’t any better from behind. “What about him?”
“You made him sound a fine man-a man of great courage and conviction,” Tyrkilld said quietly. “A far better man than your vile self.”
“Maybe we have that in common.”
“Possibly we do. May I express my regret that I can never make his acquaintance?”
“Don’t.” I picked up my tunic. It was inside out. “He would’ve spit in your fucking face.”
When I looked up, Tyrkilld had turned away and was silently wading into the blood-tainted water, and somehow, unaccountably, I felt like an asshole. More of an asshole.
“Don’t take it too hard.” I tried to swallow it, but the truth came up my throat like vomit. “He’d spit in my face, too.”
Tyrkilld stopped. “We are at war.”
“Sure you are.”
“You can have no faint idea-”
“You think you’re at war.”
“And what, if you’ll again indulge the curiosity of a poor ignorant parish Knight, is that intended to mean?”
“When you go upstairs to see Khryl,” I said, “stand there with your bloody cock and balls in hand and pray to Him that you never find out.”
Tyrkilld shook his head grimly. “There is not a gracious bone among your double hundred, is there? Not a one.”
“I had a gracious bone once. Some Khryllian ass-bandit beat it to paste.”
He was silent for a moment, staring into the slow thick ripple of the bloody water around his thighs.
“What you said this afternoon-about men like me ruling the world. .” Tyrkilld looked over one shoulder. “Men don’t rule the world, you might know. We scarcely rule the Battleground.”
“I wasn’t talking about this world.” I got my tunic straightened out and began to shrug my way into it, and so it was from the inside of my tunic, half-muffled and blindfolded, that I heard Tyrkilld’s reply.
“That I know well enough.”
I said, “Fuck me like a goat.”
“I’ll pass, if it means no particular offense.”
“Oh, for shit’s sake.” I managed to get my head out and pulled the tunic down. I got one of my boots and began trying to pull it on, snarling under my breath, “Should’ve just drove into town on a circus wagon with a motherfucking brass band playing ‘Send in the Clowns.’ ”
“Your pardon? My ears are less than-”
“How’d you know me?”
“Ah. Well, there’s little to it, at that. We’ve met before, is the sum of the tale. I was with Lord Khlaylock, back in the day. Back in the day in question, one might say.”
“I don’t remember you.”
“I was one among several, and you were. . well, you.”
“I still am. More or less. Maybe you noticed.” I stomped my boots the rest of the way on. “All right, I’m dressed. Markham’s gone. Let’s drop the fucking games.”
“Your pardon?”
“You’re going to do me a favor.”
He wheeled on me, slowly, head back, eyes half slitted, two-thirds of a disbelieving smile crawling across his lips. “And how does one arrive at this improbable conviction?”
“You owe me, Tyrkilld. You owe me your life twice over already today.”
Those oak-knot hands went to his vast hairy hips. “Indeed?”
“At the Riverdock customs sequestry, your life was forfeit by your own Laws of Engagement.”
“Not my Laws. Khryl’s. And my gratitude for your unexpected mercy is unbounded, never doubt. But a second time? When could this have occurred?”
“About fifteen minutes ago. Call it a tenth of a watch.”
“Ah? You spared my life when I was not even present to appreciate your mercy? How virtuous.”
“If you say so.”
“And how, precisely, did you perform this extraordinary act?”
“I didn’t tell Angvasse Khlaylock that you’re an Ankhanan agent.”
The smile vanished. His head rolled forward, and his hands came off his hips, and his weight shifted and he took the beginning of a breath, and I said, “Better not.”
He stopped at full poise.
“Think about it,” I said. “She’s right upstairs. She just Invested me with the Authority of Khryl. I don’t care what magick you’ve got to fuck with her truthsense. She’ll never believe you. Never.”
He subsided into a kind of relaxation-the kind you see on lions who are trying to decide whether they’re hungry-and forced another of those disbelieving smiles onto his face. “And here we’ve arrived at another improbable conviction. Preposterous, one might even-”
“Don’t.”
“I am a Knight ordained and-”
“Yeah. A Knight ordained and whatever who’s working for Kierendal. Let’s not argue, huh?”
“It’s so entirely ridiculous-”
“Shit, Tyrkilld, what do I care? But you’re gonna do this thing for me.
Nothing serious. Just deliver a message to her.”
“To your Ankhanan elf gangster-queen?”
“Tell her I know she’s in Purthin’s Ford, and I know why. Tell her we don’t have to be enemies. We have interests in common here. We should meet, and we should talk. I’ll even let the whole ordering-you-to-beat-me-to-death thing go. As a courtesy.”
He gave me a pretty credible snort. “Uncommonly magnanimous-or might it be your habit to extend amnesty for imaginary crimes?”
I gave him back a shrug. “Kierendal and I have an unusual relationship. She gets nothing but good from me, but every so often anyway she decides to have me killed. I guess I’m used to it.”
“Custom gives ease to many a queer fashion.”
“Something like that. Unless she didn’t tell you to do anything about me at all.”
“I’m sure I couldn’t say.”
“Because that’d mean she’s decided to have you killed.”
Tyrkilld looked suddenly thoughtful.
“She knows Orbek, and she knows me, and she knows I’d be here as soon as I got a hint Orbek might be in trouble. If she wanted you to live, she’d have warned you to expect me. And reminded you that I’ve killed men for a hell of a lot less than slapping my head into next fucking year.”