Why do you tell me? Why do I listen?
“Because I want off this fucking cross.” More panting brings enough strength to go on. “Because you know it.”
One pace closer. The other bitches cluster instinctively at her shoulders. Those yellow eyes never flicker. Pagallo nezziokk. Burshraggikko ymik treyy, paggtakkuni. Ymik.
Talk now. Later I take you down, little rabbit. Later.
“I got your little rabbit for you right here, you stupid fucking cunt. You want to play games? Fine. I’ll die up here. Laughing.” I cough a wad of blood out of my throat and manage a spit that sprays it across her face. “Because I get to watch you die down there.”
She doesn’t flinch at my blood. She doesn’t even blink. The flarelight from Pretornio’s overload has gone stark white, crowning Crowmane with a halo of starfire. Pagallo nezziokk.
Talk now.
Out of the west come the low skirling whispers of storm winds spinning up over gravel-scoured badlands, rising into the hush where I can still hear the hiss and snap of the lightning-blue corona of flame and the high, thin sound of Pretornio’s voice, still chanting, still screaming her invocation to her god while His power burns away her breasts and her fingers and her cheeks and eyebrows and her scream loses words and spirals upon itself into the simple shriek of superheated gases that opens into an end-of-the-world thunderclap.
A whipcrack shock blasts out and over us and the camp and the vertical city and the badlands. Every bonfire and torch and hurricane lamp and even fucking candle flares into instant firestorms that claw for the stars-
And go out.
Darkness. Only a sliver of moon, and embers swirling toward the sky.
And near-to-silence, while night-blind Black Knives pick themselves up and try to discover just how badly hurt they all might be.
Shapes moving in the ink pool below my cross: Crowmane and her bitches. One of them murmurs, and a parapet stone casts sickly green light enough to let them find their feet.
Out in the camp, all that’s left of Pretornio is a smoldering ember on the end of half the impale-o-matic.
Three feet of vertical cigar.
Crowmane’s a little singed, but by the time she’s on her feet she’s pulled herself together and is already shouting orders down into the camp, getting torches relit, bonfires rekindled, burns tended.
To the west, the storm winds whisper themselves up to moans.
And I just hang here. And watch.
I watch Crowmane and Dugsacks and Cornholes and Thumbnipples and Turdcrotch and all the rest of them look around and check themselves out and chuckle at each other and convince themselves that they were never really scared in the first place. That the stupid Lipkan bitch-on-a-stick just didn’t have the juice, when the balls hit the butthole. I watch them get their party going again with an extra kicker because they had a little thrill but it’s all over now.
I watch Crowmane giving her orders, wielding her handful of Reality, striding back and forth on the parapet doing her Cinerama Tits-to-the-Wind Napoleon thing without even turning me one more glance.
I only watch. I don’t say a word.
Because I was just, y’know, making that shit up. About knowing what Pretornio was doing. It was just a story to get me off this cross long enough to get my teeth into Crowmane’s throat. That’s all it was. But that’s not all it is.
Here’s a nifty thing about my Monastic education-
It tells me, for one thing, that we have time right now for a history lesson, if I make it quick.
The Monasteries were founded by Jantho of Tyrnall at the end of what people here call the Deomachy-the God War. When gods go to war, it’s an ugly thing-that whole Armageddon Rag, Ragnarok’n’Roll shit. It’s never really over till everybody’s dead. That’s what got Jantho Ironhand’s brother Jereth up in arms; he decided to make the God War as ugly for the gods as it was for the poor bastards who worshipped them, which brought the Deomachy to a relatively swift and bloody end. Bloody on all sides. Though Jereth didn’t survive the war, he is reputed, before his death, to have kicked substantial deific butt.
His epithet is “the Godslaughterer.”
The Deomachy is why Our Founder, Jantho Ironhand, was of the considered opinion that the greatest threat to humanity’s survival on Home was our unfortunate tendency to murder people for bowing down to the wrong gods, and the gods’ unfortunate tendency to take advantage of our unfortunate tendencies, to play power games just because they can.
The whole murdering-people-because-we-like-their-land-and murdering them as an oh-well-what-the-hell side effect of making money and murdering them because, y’know, it’s the kind of fun you just can’t get anywhere else-those were all side issues for ol’ Jantho, so the Monasteries didn’t start worrying about any of that shit till later on. Of course, most religions get into those businesses eventually, too.
So a lot of what the Monasteries do is keep an eye on the gods, and on their worshippers; a lot of what we in the Esoteric Service do is get ourselves bloody when some of these religions look to start running a little wild.
So we have to know the gods. All of them. And their religions-which, of course, often don’t have a whole lot to do with their particular gods, but let that go. We’re encouraged to be consecrated to some god’s worship and rise in their service, even their priesthood. So Monastics know a lot of, well, esoteric shit, if you’ll pardon the expression, about every major religion. Including some of the splinter sects that follow Dal’kannith Wargod.
This is why I’m sounding kind of fucking cheerful right now.
When I said I knew what Pretornio was up to, yeah, I was lying. . but, y’know, funny fucking thing. I was also telling the truth. Just took me a while to remember.
Probably that dying-on-a-cross thing screwing with my concentration a little.
And maybe it was because I was still thinking she was praying to Dal’Kannith. .
They were supposed to have died out or been suppressed-I can’t remember-something like two hundred years ago. That might be another reason. The trehv’Dhalleig Jzranapal, if my memory can be trusted, something like that anyway-the Silent Pure, more or less. Reluctant hostage-sacrifices from Chi’iannon to her son/husband/master Dal’Kannith, so the story runs-but really they were more like Home-grown Joans of Arc, strapping down their tits and stuffing fake codpieces and becoming, before the world, full Kannithan battle-priests. Often the most powerful Kannithan priests, in fact, so long as their secret was never exposed. And so long as they stayed virgins.
Surrendering virginity surrendered power. But surrendering virginity’s one thing. Rape is something else.
The Great Mother of the Lipkan pantheon rules the dead as well as the unborn-because, y’know, they’re the same, right? — and there is one tale in the Monastic Record, one fucking scary one, of an incident in Paquli’s Western Marches some three hundred and change years ago, in the Vale of the Dead, when one of the Silent Pure called upon Chi’iannon, instead of Dal’Kannith, while being murdered by sexual mutilation. Want to know why it’s called Vale of the Dead?
Wait-
Hear that?
Those low swirling storm wind moans from the west? I know you can hear them. You’re using my ears. Hear them ramping up toward the howls of a full gale? The question is, how long before those storm winds catch the attention of Crowmane and her bitches?
How long will it take them to notice that the wind they can feel is only a medium breeze? And it’s coming from the east. And then, sooner or later, eventually, maybe, one of them’s gonna remember that all there is west of the camp. .