Lips peel off your teeth. “Who I am is better.”
Kollberg blinks. “Michaelson-”
“This is the question, Administrator. You don’t have to answer. Don’t answer. Just think about it. What was the part that made you decide to pull me? To take this chance on me? What got your dick hard?”
Kollberg’s lips vanish altogether, and his eyes nearly do the same.
“I bet I can tell you what it wasn’t. It wasn’t when I was making that speech about being legends. It wasn’t when I sold everybody on the die fighting crap. It wasn’t even when I went out alone and fought Spearboy. None of that hero shit.”
“Heroes sell, Michaelson-”
“Sure they do. Hell, I like ’em too. What’s not to like? You can’t piss without splashing a hero in this business.” More of your teeth appear. “But you weren’t out pimping Marade’s clips, were you?”
Kollberg looks thoughtful.
“I’m not one of the good guys, Administrator. I am what I am.”
“This-” Kollberg still looks thoughtful. “-is not necessarily a problem.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“I believe,” Kollberg murmurs, “that I am beginning to understand.”
“That’s what’s wrong with the whole escape-and-rescue thing. Getting your friends out, saving lives, all that shit. That’s good-guy crap.”
“And you. .”
“I don’t care if they live through it. I don’t care if I live through it.”
Kollberg gives you a half-believing smile. “What do you care about?”
“I care about story.” The heat in your chest boils into your throat, but your voice stays low and hard.
Because now it’s your voice. Not Hari Michaelson’s.
“Remember what I said about story? I’m gonna teach those shit-rotten rat cunts a fundamental principle of real story.”
“Ah?”
“When you fuck with the bad guy-” Your true grin unfolds like a butterfly knife. “-the bad guy fucks you back.”
And I, as I did, as I do, as I will forever, say-
Yes, My Love. Yes.
Fuck.
RETREAT FROM THE BOEDECKEN (partial)
You are CAINE (featured Actor: Pfnl. Hari Michaelson)
MASTER: NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.
© 2187 Adventures Unlimited Inc. All rights reserved.
I take my time unwrapping the wire from the dagger’s hilt, smoothing each kink, stroking it long and straight. It’s good wire, flexible, copper maybe, eight feet or so; I double it, slip the dagger through the loop, and wrap off the ends to the dagger’s naked tang just below the guard. And that’s it.
Time to go.
I unfold myself from the Warrior’s Seat. Undoubling my legs brings a red snarl from the crusted spike-holes in my ankles. It makes me smile.
The blue sparkle has faded from the mud, and it has dried now, and I scrape it from my arms and chest and back with the dagger’s blade, shaving with it fear, and doubt, and the memory of pain.
I have no need to check the belts, or the gear I have taken from these ancient bones. Each piece is in its place, as I am in mine.
The mud falls away, and the blade touches scars I bear.
This is the axe from Kor.
This is the arrow from the Teranese floodplain.
This is the spike from the cross, and this the burn from Crowmane’s god.
This is the alley knife from home, and this the brick, and this my father’s fist. There are scars the blade cannot touch, but I don’t need them. The ones on the outside are enough to tell me who I am.
I am strong. I am relentless. I am invincible.
I bend now and lift from among the dusty armored bones the spikes I pulled from wrist and ankle. Dirt has caked my blood upon them. In the rose-pale glow cast by Panchasell’s Tear, I weigh them in my hand. Then I stick them behind my belt.
I grin at the runecut rose diamond the size of my head on its pedestal of gold, and the vast shadows of the cavern echo my black chuckle. “Think you’re the biggest tear ever shed?”
I thread the dagger through its doubled loop of wire. “That’ll change.”
››scanning fwd››
He hunches away from his partners and shuffles along the shadowed alleyway. At the ass end, he leans his spear into the corner so he can use both hands to unwrap his breechclout, and he squats.
Ogrilloi and humans aren’t that different. They’re pack hunters, we’re opportunistic scavengers, but the behaviors overlap enough that our evolutionary adaptations have a lot in common. Like, say, we both prefer a little privacy when we crap.
Has to do with diets heavy in protein and aromatic fats. We evolved using the undeniably fierce smell of our feces to mark off territory. And being top predators-or, in our case, smart enough to be dangerous to top predators-we don’t worry about fresh fecal reek attracting the wrong kind of attention.
Our shit says better keep the fuck off.
Loudly.
And it’s a hell of a lot louder to a scent-hunter like an ogrillo than it is to us poor nose-challenged humans.
Steam from one hard turd rises faintly into the slanting moonlight. Which is why that squatting buck over there has no idea I’m slipping over the lip of this ruined wall. He leans on the shaft of his grounded spear, grunting low in his throat, waggling his hips, trying to work the next turd out. Poor bastard’s crapping diamonds. Too much rich food.
But, y’know, I’m about to help him with that.
I slide through the moonshadow along the crumbled wall, bare feet feeling each step before I shift weight forward.
There are two contrasting styles of garrotte. The more popular is the cheese-cutter style: a single strand of thin flexible wire between a pair of handles. It’s pretty damned foolproof. Slices the external jugulars, crushes the trachea, and with the right kind of takedown there’s not much struggle either. The downside is that it takes a long damned time; a determined man can keep fighting quite a while with no fresh oxygen to his brain, and if you get a little careless on his back he can still kill you before he bleeds out. And if the wire’s too thin it can cut the trachea instead of crushing it, and then you’ve got a real fucking fight on your hands.
I favor the strangler’s noose.
Squatting, he’s put his head just at my chest height; the doubled loop of the dagger’s hilt wire slips down past his eyes, his snout, his tusks-the loop’s extra-wide; if it snags I’m a dead man-and in the nightshadow he can’t see it. The first he even knows it’s there is when my two-handed yank on the dagger snaps the noose tight under his chin. He jerks up standing, and I ride his rise, doubling my knees to put my weight into his shoulder blades.
One one thousand.
My weight captures his balance; we go staggering backward. He drops his spear to claw at his throat, and his cry of alarm doesn’t even make a hiss past the two strands of hilt wire that clamp shut his trachea.
Two one thousand.
His backward stumble takes us to the ruined wall. He hits it just above his knees and we topple over it. His weight crushes me into the rubble and flares splash the inside of my head and I don’t care.
Three one thousand.
He kicks and flails and rolls and tries to reach back over his shoulders to get at me with his fighting claws, but his own massive musculature betrays him; his arms won’t bend that way.
Four one thousand.
And now he finally remembers the spear he left on the ground over by his steaming turd, and he struggles to his knees and pulls himself over the wall again.
Five one thousand.
And he takes one step, and my weight drives him to his knees. He keeps trying-the bastard’s no quitter-but this is the thing about the strangler’s noose: properly applied, it doesn’t cut the jugular veins, it only squeezes them shut-and it doesn’t close the carotid arteries. Which is to say: it doesn’t stop blood from going to your brain. It stops blood from coming out.