Now, even those few seconds are serious enough; that’s a concussion right there, and anybody who thinks an untreated concussion isn’t serious should go recheck the mortality figures. Still, though, it’s something you generally live through. You wake up with a bad headache and persistent dizziness and nausea, general weakness and shit, and you need some bed rest-or, say, a Khryllian Healing, like the one I got after Tyrkilld slapped me up-to get over it, but you do. Eventually.
When those seconds stretch into minutes, you go from bad headache into the territory of, say, subdural hematoma, which is a fancy way of saying that your brain’s bleeding and starting to swell, which means that you’re not gonna just open your eyes and shake it off and go beat up the bad guys. It means it’s a roll of God’s dice whether you’re gonna open your eyes at all, and if you do it’ll probably be a lot like it was for me: a fucking nightmare.
This is not just a metaphor.
The bleeding-brain kind of unconsciousness is a fall across an event horizon of oblivion: an infinitely instant shredding of everything you are as psychic tidal forces smear you into an eternal scream. Waking up is no treat, either; it doesn’t happen all at once, but in little flickers and flashes that start out as needles and graduate to razors in the eye and the grip of God Himself upon your balls, and it involves a lot of vomit and choking and wishing you could go back to falling into that black hole, because the eternal scream is a helluva lot more fun.
That’s how it is for me, anyway.
Maybe it’s because it seems like every time it happens to me, I start that whole razors-in-the-eyes waking-up crap in a bag over somebody’s shoulder while the sonofabitch is out for a jog.
The only way I can reconstruct roughly how long I must have been out before I started twilighting up from semiconsciousness is to guess how fast Markham could haul my twitching ass from the Pratt amp; Redhorn to the jitney ramp up Hell while making a wide circle around the Spire, because he wouldn’t exactly want to bump into any inquisitive Khryllians on the way.
Did I not mention that part?
Turns out I wasn’t wrong about Calm Guy’s backup. I wasn’t even wrong about the really, really good nerves. My only mistake was assuming that the backup in question would have reason to be afraid of the Smoke Hunt.
Well, okay. That wasn’t my only mistake.
There are ways in which I think really, really fast. Like how to kill people. There are ways in which I don’t think really, really fast. Like working out that the only way Faller’s gunmen could have known I was at the Pratt amp; Redhorn was if they found out from Kierendal amp; Tyrkilld amp; Co.-not fucking likely-or if they found out from, say, the all-too-conveniently lurking-in-an-alley-across-the-street Lipkan ass-cob who booked me the room in the first place.
At the time I was playing sack of meat potatoes, I didn’t have any idea of any of this. There were some inexplicable images swimming around the brimstone swamp inside my head, of Boedecken badlands covered in grain and vineyards and a river dividing a city of neat whitewashed brick tangled up with headless ogrilloi burning with a red fire that cast no light. And that was about it.
I don’t remember much of the early part of my visit to BlackStone. Somebody must have taken the sack off me, because I remember somebody saying good lord, clean him up, and sometime after that I was wet and there was a blinding-bright haze pumping in through my eyeballs that was overinflating my head until I could feel the bones of my skull grinding against each other along jagged fissures as they began to separate and a distantly familiar voice said from the top of the well I’d fallen down-
lord tarkanen-you hit him too hard
Then another distantly familiar voice, not Markham’s-like the voices of Actors from Adventures I’d cubed a few times when I was a kid, I always had a good ear for voices-
or perhaps not hard enough-were you not once the practicing necromancer, simon faller? a shade will answer honestly where a man may not-
Which I tried to laugh about, y’know, because of the pun, but I’m pretty sure I only managed a dull moan.
no no no, he has to be alive-my orders-a healing-do a healing-
Nay. This voice was Markham’s. I could even make out a strict grey cloud among the bright haze that filled my universe. This hurt was not taken in battle. Khryl’s Love will not avail.
A round pale shadow in the bright haze began to resolve toward the blur of a face.
Michaelson? Michaelson, can you understand me at all? Do you know where you are? Caine, talk to me.
I remember, here, trying to answer.
Dead. . I was trying to say. Dead. .
Simon Faller, said that familiar voice which wasn’t Markham’s, he raves. Let him die. If he lives, we will all come to regret it. This I know from bitter experience.
Here I would have laughed again, if I could laugh. Somehow thinking how many people could honestly say the same made me giggly.
It’s not up to me, the blur of a face replied. And it’s not up to you, either. We’ll turn him over as is. Let them deal with him however they want; then if he dies, it’s their problem.
Are Artan Healing magicks superior to Khryl’s?
Just-ah, different, that’s all. Let them in.
That face-blur leaned down closer, and more details came into focus: grey cream-plastered wisps of comb-over, a crisp salt-and-pepper beard giving shape to soft jowls. .
It was Rababal.
Michaelson-maybe you can’t hear me, but-I know you always say that everything’s personal, but this really is business. Really. I got over hating you a long time ago. This is just business.
“Dead. .” This time I did manage to get the word out past my teeth, instead of bouncing around inside my fractured skull. “You’re dead. .”
Even when he cannot move, can barely speak, still he threatens you-
It’s not a threat. The dead man retreated to a blur, then to a cloud. As far as he knows, it’s simple fact.
And before I could summon anything like sense to the surface of my scrambled brain, things got even weirder.
In accordance with the treaty between our peoples, Markham was saying, I now deliver this fugitive into your custody and your care.
Then a couple of new shadows loomed in my personal haze. When they leaned down to pick me up, both of them wore on their inhumanly rounded heads these sickeningly familiar funhouse-smeared leers that were still unmistakably me.
My own face.
I knew me. Them. I grew up in a San Francisco Labor slum. Anybody Labor would have to be six days dead to not recognize the Social Police.
Administrator Hari Michaelson. The electronic digitizer in the soapy’s mirror-masked helmet didn’t work in Home physics; he just sounded like he was talking with one hand over his mouth. You are under arrest for the crime of capital Forcible Contact Upcaste, in the murder of Leisureman Marcus Anthony Vilo.
It’s funny, y’know-
Life has a way of sticking a knife in my eye at just the right time.
Being handed over to the Social Police was a dull knife. Rusty. Serrated too. I guess I’m lucky that way.