It went in my left eye socket and sawed around inside my sinus cavity until the scrape of rusty serrated metaphoric steel on metaphoric bone cranked me up across my personal event horizon, and though I could not summon any ghost of a clue where this might be happening or why, through the pain and general mystery I was able to dimly recognize that this situation boded ill for my immediate future.
So I thought, Fuck it. Let’s fight.
This may seem like an unusual decision from a semiconscious middle-aged naked guy with a skull fracture who’s bound hand and foot in unbreakable high-tech police restraints, but I have this rule of thumb, one that I’ve practiced so long-ever since I was a kid running wild on Mission District streets-that it’s become hard-wired instinct. When bad guys try to take you somewhere by force, fight.
Fight now.
Because they’re taking you into their comfort zone. That’s why they’re not killing you where you are: because wherever you are, you still have a chance. For whatever reason. Witnesses. Police. Weapons. Escape routes. Something. That’s why they want to take you somewhere else. And once you get where they’re taking you, it’s over.
Or it’s not over. Not for a long time.
Fighting might get you killed. But it’s better than whatever’s waiting for you where they can take time to enjoy themselves.
It happened to some of the street kids I knew back in the District. They’d disappear. And their bodies would turn up later. Sometimes you could tell they’d been kept alive for weeks. Or months. By how many of the wounds had scarred over. Even some of the amputations. And castrations and vaginal mutilations and you don’t want to know.
So-
Fuck it.
Fight.
But, as people who know me will have heard before, there is fighting and there is fighting.
“Rababal. .” I managed to say, or thought I did, blinking toward the dead man. “Rababal, you needme. .”
The dead man leaned back into the fog. Rababal died twenty-five years ago. You didn’t help him, and I need no help from you.
“You can’t. .” The words seemed to be sticking in the haze inside my head. I worked harder to push them out into the air. “Turn me over. . this place. . gone. . a few days, that’s all. . war-war with Ankhana-”
That made some kind of impression; the grey-fringed face recoiled into a deeper blur. Is he-could that be true-?
The almost-familiar voice answered, I learned long ago that from this man’s mouth, not even Khryl can hear truth.
Ah. .
So that’s who Almost Familiar was.
Even to my splintered consciousness, finding him here made everything make sense. I’m just fucking intuitive that way.
Khryl’s friends within the Infinite Court assure me that his position in Church and Empire is purely symbolic. If war is to come, it will not come on his behalf.
I tried to shake some use into my brain, and my mouth. “Not. . about me, dumbass. . make a deal-we need to deal-”
Michaelson, I’m sorry. The grey-fringed blur didn’t sound sorry. It’s done.
“No-no you can’t-can’t send me back. . can’t give me to them. . please-”
I already have. Officers? Time is short. If you’ll bring him this way, please.“
Stop, goddammit. . stop-”
Hanging from the wire-laced gloves of the Social Police, hands stripcuffed behind me, ankles bound together with the same wire-reinforced plastic, naked, retching, unable to stand, unable to see, I still somehow snarled myself an internal sword of sunfire to cut through the fog inside my head and burn it away. No matter how broken I am, somehow I can always get pissed enough to kill somebody.
Because, y’know, I’ve never been the type to go gentle into that et cetera.
The room snapped into focus. It looked like the hideout of a half-successful caravan raider. Expensive furniture that didn’t match, delicately carved where it wasn’t notched and starting to splinter, upholstered in beautiful leathers and crushed velvets and brocades that couldn’t hide the stains and wear of careless overuse. The rug that filled the whole room had once been fine as anything I’d put in the Abbey, my San Francisco mansion back when I was a star, but now it bore a grey-brown smear of ground-in wear track between the door and the overlarge, overcarved big-dick I’m The Boss desk in overstained cherry. And there were wall hangings and shit that framed silver hookstands holding blackened glass lamps, but the silver was tarnished and the tapestries smudged with lampblack and the walls they hung on were cheap whitewashed plaster tracked with blue-grey mildew. The whole place looked impermanent, half-abandoned already, like this Faller guy had boosted the best of Duke Kithin’s furnishings before he’d left Thorncleft, then had just stashed the shit in some shack so he could piss on it like a bear before leaving it behind.
In that raider’s cave of a room-besides me and the Social Police and Markham Lord Situational Fucking Ethics and the middle sixties-looking guy who was Rababal’s ghost or twin brother or identical goddamn cousin or whateverthefuck that I didn’t care about right then because he was a problem for another time-stood a magnificent man in magnificent armor, the kind of Radiant Mantle of Kingship sonofabitch that doesn’t really exist outside of stories and songs; you know, Arthur, Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, Richard Cour de Lion, all those blood-drunk thugs with good enough press agents to somehow end up heroes to way too many gullible losers.
Not unlike me, I guess. But let that go.
The armor was chrome steel, curves and angles of mirror that gleamed like dawn’s own rhodos goddamn dactylos in the lamplight. The guy inside was your basic snow-topped mountain of Biblical Patriarch, but in the blossom of mature strength-y’know, like that white brow and beard salted his face only to give the calm certainty in his eye a translucent shimmer of Revealed Truth.
When I say eye, by the way, that’s literal.
Half his face had that carved-from-God’s-Own-Granite agelessly rugged beauty that well befits said legendary king. The other half, well. .
His left eye socket was a crumpled ruin of empty scar above a deep ragged dent that once had been nobly jutting cheekbone; it looked a lot like some vicious ghetto punk had, about twenty-five years ago, say, sneak-punched him with his own morningstar.
This appearance was not, as smart people might have guessed already, coincidental.
With all the mental and physical clarity my internal sunblade could bring me, I managed to gasp, “I was never his prisoner. .”
“All that matters,” the soapy on my left said in very credible Westerling, “is that you’re our prisoner now,” and he and his partner kept on hauling me toward where Rababal’s ghost twin cousin was holding the door for us until six foot nine of chrome steel and Biblical Patriarch moved into our way with the reluctantly majestic unstoppability of an entire glacier cracking free of a mountainside to slide into an arctic sea.
The Social Police, wisely, stopped. So did I, perforce.
Purthin, Lord Khlaylock, Justiciar Impeccable of the Order of the Knights of Khryl, turned that Revealed Truth glare on Markham, Lord Tarkanen, Lord Righteous in service to the Champion of Khryl. “Is this truth?”
Markham didn’t so much as blink, let alone flush. “I was tasked by My Lord Justiciar to deliver this man without fail,” he said simply. “I did not fail.”
“Ambushed me. .” I slurred. “Abducted. . while I w’s tryin’ t’ save people. .”