He shrugged. “Nor would any such warning have signified overmuch, even had your hypothetical elf-queen managed to impress upon me quite how entirely skilled you are at it.”
“Have it your way. But tell her what I said, huh? I don’t want to piss in her soup. And she won’t want to piss in mine.”
“And so, perchance-” Tyrkilld squinted past me, like he was looking for something in the darkness of the passageway down which Markham had vanished. “-were a man to unexpectedly find himself in a position to do such a service for your estimable self, whence cometh recompense, and in what manner?”
“I’ll tell you how I knew. What gave you away.”
“Oh?”
“Think about it, Tyrkilld. Khryllians aren’t as easygoing as I am. Knowing where you fucked up could save your life. Could save lots of lives. Like, say, the lives of everyone in Freedom’s Face, y’know?”
He looked down into the slow roil of bloody water around his thighs.
“I suppose. .” Even in the dead silence of the Lavidherrixium, I could barely hear him. “I suppose there would be value in that. To learn how you could be so certain.”
Dumbass. “I wasn’t. Not certain.”
His head snapped up. His mouth dropped open.
“Fucking amateur,” I said, and turned for the darkness.
From the outside, the Pens was Mid-Period Gulag: barbed wire and bright lights and guard towers posted with sharpshooters. I automatically noted shadows, fields of fire, available hard and soft cover, and shook my head silently. Somebody knew what they were doing.
Somebody Artan: the wire fencing looked galvanized, and the searchlights had a moon-greenish glow I recognized. The limelights at the Railhead in Transdeia are exactly that color.
This Faller character. . Back in the day, I used to run Earthside transit operations for the Overworld Company out of the San Francisco Studio; I knew most of the techs and OC operatives by sight, and all of them by name. How could Faller have come out of Transdeia and I didn’t know him?
Maybe tomorrow I’d pay a visit, and ask.
Tonight I had to save Orbek’s life.
Getting in to see Orbek wasn’t a problem. I didn’t even need to whip out the Holy Foreskin. With Markham to hold my hand, we walked right through the gates and nobody looked like they were even thinking about stopping us.
From the inside, the Pens looked less like a prison camp than a kennel. Banks of eight-by-five strap-iron cages sat on legs a meter off the scraped-bare stone of the escarpment. No plumbing, just eligible trusties with rakes and buckets and wheelbarrows and a vast manure pile at the cliffside fence.
The dusk clogged up with misting drizzle again. I was starting to hate the weather in this town.
Some stretches of cages stood open and empty, waiting for convicts who stood in chains of eight in the mustering pen. Some stretches of cages were full of indistinct shapes, huddled against the damp. Trusties fanned out among the rows, tossing tarpaulins over cage tops to keep out the rain. Chill white flames burned steady in some cage-irons’ lattice gaps: cold greenishyellow gaslight erasing color in cold greenish-yellow eyes.
The drizzle thickened toward rain. Head down, arms crossed over my chest, I walked behind the Lord Righteous. An icy trickle traced my spine from my plastered-flat hair to the crack of my ass. Shivers started below my ribs and rippled out into my legs and up to my neck.
At least it was rinsing off the old blood. That was some consolation.
Sure it was.
Markham walked with a long swinging confident stride. He didn’t seem to notice the rain running inside his collarpiece. Maybe the armor had drains in its heels.
I might start to hate the bastard.
I stared up under dripping eyebrows at his back, cataloguing every joint in that rain-beaded armor where a fighting knife’s spearpoint might drive through into flesh. Not from any ill intent. Just on general principle.
Mostly.
He led me past the kennels toward a broad, flat field that steamed gently in the rain. Closer, I could see that the field was checkered with square panels of iron grillework though which the vapor leaked. At the edge, the grilles were set into stone over the mouths of ten-by-ten pits cut fifteen feet deep into the escarpment’s bedrock. The vapor-
Breath and body heat.
“Um,” I said, “you got some kind of ladder or something? Or do I just jump?”
“No need.” Markham waved a gauntlet ahead. “Your ogrillo has a visitor already.”
Out in the middle of the iron and stone field stood a pair of hulking trusties, immense shoulders hunched to their ears, and an uncomfortable-looking Knight Attendant. One of the trusties held what looked like a short siege ladder: a metal pole that sprouted rows of pegs a couple of spans apart along opposite sides.
Markham stopped at the edge of the field. “I leave you here, Freeman. Put yourself in the care of yonder Knight Attendant.”
“What, you’re not gonna walk me home?”
“Your possessions will be delivered to the Pratt amp; Redhorn hostelry. Any page can direct you. Good evening.” He executed a crisp about-face and marched off into the rain.
I shrugged and set out across the field.
Some of the grilles had tarps draped across them. Most did not.
Orbek’s didn’t.
The trusties and the other Knight Attendant were staring down into Orbek’s pit. The rain half-muffled growls and grunts and low-throated snarling howls. Helm tucked under his right arm, the Knight watched with the grimly blank look of a man refusing to flinch from a distasteful obligation. The trusties both had trifurcate lips drawn back from filed-blunt tusks: grins or sneers, I couldn’t tell. Yellow eyes slitted, steam curling from snouts, one massaged the stump of a fighting claw with his opposite hand. The other rubbed his own crotch through his burlap pants, unself-conscious as a dog licking its balls.
The howls rose into yelping. Sounded like pain. Didn’t sound like Orbek. “What, you make him kill his own dinner?”
“Not exactly, Freeman.” The Knight stepped to one side to let me pass.
“Then what’s that fucking noise?”
A faint crinkle twitched at the corners of the Knight’s eyes. “Exactly.”
It wasn’t until I got to the edge of the pit that I suspected a Lipkan Knight of Khryl could actually have a sense of humor.
“Oh, for shit’s sake.” I rubbed my eyes. Headache thundered in my skull. “I didn’t need to see this.”
What I didn’t need to see was Orbek and his other visitor.
Fucking.
A middle-aged ogrillo bitch, naked but for a pair of battered boots, stood braced wide-legged, facing the near corner like a boxer leaning on the ropes between rounds, while Orbek pounded her from behind.
Orbek was on another planet: eyes squeezed shut, spasms in his massive neck jerking his tusks ripping at the rain. The bitch’s dugs swung and bounced like wattles on a spastic turkey. Another spasm of yelping brought her head up and she met the eyes above and she howled even louder: performing, exaggerating, a sardonic lip-curling mockery of passion, thick purple tongue lolling between her tusks, green-yellow eyes wide, fierce, challenging-
Like she was daring us all to jump in and have a whack at her too.
I looked over my shoulder at the Knight Attendant, whose expressionlessly polite stare somehow managed to look like a smirk. “Let me guess. You asked what he wanted for his last meal. He said, ‘Cooze.’ ”
The Knight snuffled something close to a laugh without cracking his deadpan. “The Pens is a jail, not a brothel. This is a conjugal visit.” He nodded down at them and offered an apologetic rattle of a shrug. “Likely their last.”
“Conju-that’s his wife?”