Nothing wrong with his reflexes: he let go of my arm and twisted toward me with a smoothly professional bob-and-weave that cleared his helmet under my swing, which was okay because I wasn’t aiming for him anyway.
Markham jerked back out of my reach with his gauntlets coming up like a boxer’s guard and some Old High Lipkan trigger word burst from his mouth to drape his entire body in electric blue witchfire-also top-rate reflexes-which was also okay because I wasn’t aiming for him either.
Purthin, Lord Khlaylock, Justiciar Et Cetera, Radiant Mantle of Whothefuckcaresanyway, had just barely time to blink his eye and begin to draw breath for his own Old High Lipkan trigger word when my handful of Holy Foreskin came up his blind side and caught him below his left ear.
There’s an esoteric variant of the Southern Cobra style of chi tao chu’an called Python; it’s based on wrist and open-palm strikes that lead into joint locks and strangles. It was in that Python spirit that my slap didn’t follow through after impact; instead my open palm hooked around the back of his neck so that his reflexive jerk away drove the base of his skull hard against the Holy Foreskin, which was-though less hot than the surface of the sun-plenty hot enough to blast the water content of his skin and muscle into a burst of superheated steam. A shotgun fired beneath the surface of a bathtub filled with blood would make pretty much the same sound.
And nearly as much mess.
Being a minor expert on destruction of the human body, I could go through the technical details, such as how the blast vaporized his upper trapezius and most of his capitor group, crushing his cervical vertebrae into chunks that blew out through his levator scapulae, and so on and so forth-not to mention coming way too damn close to blowing my own damn hand off-but the actual significance of all this was the sum total effect: by the time the Holy Foreskin faded from my palm, Khlaylock’s half-severed head had flopped onto his breastplate and dragged his balance forward over locked knees so that he toppled like a felled tree.
Soapy One, still holding my left arm, took a reflexive step away from the arterial blood spurting out the ragged remnants of Khlaylock’s carotids, which is the only reason a hundred-forty-some-odd kilos of armored meat didn’t actually land on me.
Holy Foreskin-dazzle slowly faded from my eyes, and color slowly leached back into the lamplit room, and from the way Faller and Markham were blinking, they couldn’t see any better than I could. We all stood there for a stretching second or two, staring down at Khlaylock’s corpse while the only sounds were the soft plopping as scorched shreds of his flesh peeled off the walls and dripped to the floor, the sizzle of the steam coming off my newborn-pink palm, and Fallerbal’s low psychotic-fugue moan of oh god oh fuck me fuck me fuck me god. .
Looking back on it, I feel like I should have had some kind of flash then, a life-passing-before-my-eyes vision of all the things Purthin Khlaylock has meant to me in the last twenty-five years. Who he was and what I did to him are so intimately intertwined with everything I am that without having kicked his armored ass off the escarpment above Hell, I can’t imagine ever becoming me.
Instead I just sighed. “Well. That’s done.”
Maybe I’m not so sentimental after all.
Markham stood in a half-jittering immobility, like the blue witchfire crawling over his armor was a few thousand volts AC. I nodded to him. “Hey, you win. Congratulations. Here’s your prize: you get to explain all this to Angvasse Khlaylock. She’ll probably be here in a minute or two; I’m surprised she’s not here already.”
Markham and Faller favored me with identical owl-eyed blinks. “What?”
“Did I not mention that part? Hey, sorry.” Guess I didn’t look sorry either. “Think about it, Markham-you took me out of an alley that’s in the middle of the Riverdock parish. In full view of Tyrkilld Aeddhar’s favorite bar. Where one of his best friends happens to be an ogrillo. You think those shadows were dark to him? What do you think’s gonna happen when he tells Tyrkilld that you slapped me into a skull fracture and hauled me off? In the middle of a Smoke Hunt. With Smoke Hunters standing right in fucking front of you. You don’t think Tyrkilld’s gonna be kinda curious? You don’t think Angvasse’s gonna be, say, a little interested in what happened to her Invested Agent of Motherfucking Khryl?”
“I–I was-” Markham had to cough his throat clear before he could go on. “I was acting on the direct order of the Justiciar-”
“Sure, all right. Did you waste those Hunters? Or do they have some way to recognize you? So they don’t, y’know, kill one of the guys who’s on their side.”
Markham’s mouth snapped shut with an audible clack.
“What are you gonna tell Angvasse about why you’re even here tonight? You gonna tell her you were never in her service at all? Gonna tell her you’re a lying bastard whose main job is to babysit her so that she never finds out what’s really going with the Smoke Hunt?”
“An order of the Justiciar,” Markham said though locked teeth, “which still stands.”
“Sure. Good luck with that, huh?” I swung my ton-and-a-half of head toward Faller. “Shit, man, you’ll have to tell her yourself.”
Faller just gave back the empty stare of a jacklighted deer.
I pointed my chin at Khlaylock’s corpse. “That pile of meat was the local head of state, who just got himself murdered by an Earthman on Earth territory. And you’re about to whisk his killer out of reach of Khryl’s Justice. You get it? You’re maybe five minutes away from war with the Order of Khryl. And because he’s also the Lipkan viceroy, you can likely toss in war with Lipke on top.”
“I–I-I can’t-I mean, the Social Police-I-” Faller’s eyes bugged out and his stammer dissolved into choking.
“Listen to me, Rababal. I’m showing you the way out, get it? All you have to do is tell the truth.”
“What? What truth?”
“Tell her I killed him. Tell her I said I was doing my job. My Invested Agent of Khryl gig. Remind her she knew going in that hiring me doesn’t always work out how my bosses hope it will.”
“Hiring-? Your job?”
I nodded. “She hired me to stop the Smoke Hunt.”
“To-what makes you think-?”
“That was the tricky part of this job. It’s usually easy enough to figure out who’s in charge of shit-all you have to do is find out who’s getting the most out of it, you follow? Who’s gonna win if it goes all the way. But the Smoke Hunt? Everybody gets theirs. It’s a stable system. Nobody wants it to change. The Smoke God gets an endless banquet of dread, fury, and terror. The Hunt’s leadership gets political power-they’ve unified the Boedecken clans in a way this world hasn’t seen since the Khulan Horde. The Khryllians get a permanent enemy that keeps the whole population militarized and obedient. Black Stone gets an open dil, an exploding business in export griffinstones, not to mention a stable slave-labor supply because the toughest, most committed troublemakers get chopped piecemeal into each new round of Smoke Hunters. The Board of Governors gets new access to Home. Hell, even Khryl wins; as an Ideational Power, His Power is a function of the devotion of his worshippers. When shit goes bad, what do people do? They fucking well pray. Khryl’s never been happier. That’s how I knew. It wasn’t one of you, or two or three. It’s too neat. There’s too much to go around. That’s how I knew you’d made a deal. It’s all of you. All you fuckers. Everybody wins.”