It was a rhetorical question. Because there had been more to the dream.
There had been her.
Armor like a mannequin of convex mirrors. Out from the shadows of a street’s mouth across the plaza, a massive two-handed morningstar propped casually over one shoulder. Reflected firelight dancing on facades. Three of me sprinting across the flagstones to meet her, smeared with the blood of the finest soldiers of Home. Casually removing her helm, shaking loose her hair. On her face, no fear. No anger. Only a reserved, remote sadness.
Her scent: human, female, thick with death. Red-smeared mirror-curves of armor rumpled with fist-shaped dents and pocked with bullet holes. Hair caked black with clotted blood. A morningstar rising with mechanical precision, falling in steel thunderbolts. Shreds of meat plastering cheekbones and forehead into unhuman texture around her vivid eyes.
Vasse Khrylget, they called her. I had a pretty good idea why.
“Yeah, okay,” I muttered. “What d’you want me to do about it?” Not that I really expected an answer. Or needed one.
I scowled at the pulse of orange dawnglow on the frame of the skylight. Too early for coffee for sure. Maybe I could snag some beans from the kitchen, chew them like aspirin. . which was another goddamn thing this world could use-the pounding in my head was turning out to be less drums than migraine again. .
Still only half awake, I had already pulled on my boots and was looking around for my tunic when it finally occurred to me that dawnglow doesn’t pulse. “Oh,” I said. “Oh, crap.”
And what was that noise? Voices?
I stood on the bed and shoved the lower edge of the skylight until it squealed loose from the rust on its rim.
Yeah: voices. Faint, empty with distance, but clear-
Dizhrati golzinn Ekk!
Okay: not a dream. Not a vision.
Prophecy.
I sagged, hanging from the skylight’s lower rim. “Son of a bitch.”
Did I have to deal with this before I even got coffee? “Son of a bitch.” I rubbed my stinging eyes. “Yeah, okay. Whatever.”
Fixing the prop to hold the skylight open, I turned around and grabbed the rim underhand; with a groan of middle-aged morning, I heaved my legs up through the opening and back over the lip. As I slid through the skylight belly-down, I collected a soot-greased scrape on the stomach from a sharp slate and a bang on the skull from the lead-framed pane, so when I pushed myself up to my knees I was already pissed as hell, rubbing the back of my head and looking around for somebody to take it out on.
A distant surf of ogrilloid roaring half-drowned shrieks of terror and agony and rage. Human shrieks. Probably.
There: three or four blocks over, toward the voices; that was the glow I’d thought was dawn.
Buildings on fire.
My breath smoked. Splashes of the water I’d wiped from my face trickled goosebumps across my bare chest. I glanced longingly back down through the skylight at my warm rumpled bed-but the false dawn caught my eye again. Looked warm enough over there.
I was already backing up to get a running start for the leap across the alley to the rooftop beyond when I finally thought, What in the name of sweet shivering fuck am I doing?
I was fifty years old, for shit’s sake. Fifty years old and about to run the rooftops toward some kind of goddamn free-for-all massacre. For no reason. Just because it was there.
Without even a shirt on.
I shook my head and lifted a hand as though telling some pushy asshole to back the hell off. “Not my business.”
I didn’t sound convinced, or convincing.
“Not my business.” That was better. Good enough.
Now the shouts and screams picked up a soggy kettledrum backbeat. Gunfire. Full-throated: heavy-caliber stuff. The Khryllians had arrived.
Anything I needed to know, I could find out in the morning. After the shooting was over.
*You want me to stuff my aging ass into that meat grinder?* I monologued to my audience of one. *Make me a fucking offer.*
God did not reply.
I shrugged. “Have it your way,” I said aloud. “I’m going back to bed.”
Sitting on the edge of the bed. Leaning on my knees. Staring at the floor. At the splotch where I’d spat that mouthful of water. Just a blot now, about the size of my hand, darker in spots where water had soaked into wood through worn-down varnish.
It had tasted like blood. .
Now, in the dim pulse of fireglow through the skylight, it looked like blood, too.
Gunfire and screams.
Dizhrati golzinn Ekk!
And bubbling up out of that soggy black swamp of that dream: stone walls crumbling beneath my fists and two of me leaping into a bedroom full of screams and blood-A thin pale human dying across the body of a young trim redhead-
And the saliva that pumped along my tusks when both of me heard howls coming from the twin bassinets beside their bed.
This prophecy thing pretty much sucked dog ass.
I put my shirt on. After a second’s thought, I added the rest of my clothes: my knives, the spring-loaded baton, the garrote, and the spare clips for the Automag. Even the flatpack of picks. Because you just never fucking know. Then I headed for the stairs.
At the landing below the second floor, I heard Pratt’s voice. He didn’t sound happy. He sounded like he was trying not to crap himself.
“I’m sorry, goodmen. Please, the hostelry is closed, you’ll have to come-no, Kravmik, don’t-!”
A stranger’s voice drawled, “Yeah, Kravmik. Don’t.”
The period on the sentence was the cold double-click of a single-action hammer going to full cock.
The stranger had an Ankhanan accent.
Somebody else said calmly, “Go sit down. Both of you. Next to the girl.”
On the landing above the lobby, I stopped and muttered, “Shit.”
There was a window at the far end of the hallway behind me. I was already turning for it, already seeing myself dropping the four, maybe five meters to the alley, when I heard “But he’s not even here.”
Pratt sounded desperate. “He ate, changed his clothes, and went right out again-he had something to do with Knight Aeddharr-I don’t know what it was-”
“Put it away, Hawk,” the calm voice said. “There’s no need for that. Yet. Whistler?”
“I’ve got him.”
“What are you doing? What is that thing?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
The voice of Whistler: “Now. Did Freeman Shade really go out?”
“No, not really,”
Pratt said sheepishly. “I just made that up, because I was afraid you guys might want to hurt him or something.”
“Pratt?” Kravmik’s rumble sounded blankly astonished, and a woman’s voice said, “Lasser, what are you doing?”
“Oh, it’s all right,” Pratt told them. “These are good people. Really.”
“That’s right,” said the voice of Hawk. “We’re good people. Now shut up, both of you.”
“Hey-” Pratt lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Hey, do you know who he really is? I mean really?”
“Yeah,” Calm Guy answered. “We know. We’re friends of his.”
“Oh, good. Everything’s better when everybody’s friends.”
Up on the landing, I wasn’t feeling friendly.
A professionally laid-in Charm. At least one handgun. Three in the lobby, one a thaumaturge. That meant probably one in reserve on the street out front and two more covering the alley. That’s where they’d have the heavy stuff. And the Smoke Hunt was on its way.
“Pratt, let’s take a walk up to his room. Whistler, on me. Hawk, watch the grill and the girl.”
“By myself?” Hawk sounded bemused rather than worried. “This could get interesting.”