A beige smear that was probably Tyrkilld’s face hovered in the middle distance overhead.
“Bodes fair to be a Minor Penance in this for me.” His voice had a vaguely oceanic quality, like distant surf. “Freeman Shade, I must tell you that by happenstance-by sad coincidence, for you-my dear father, a Knight of much greater valor and reknown than my poor self, was foully murdered. By a Monastic assassin. Are we becoming still more clear?”
Stone bled into flesh and back out again and my arms and legs spasmed at random; I couldn’t even roll over. “Fuck . . me. .”
“Though I know well it’s a dark sin to condemn a man for his brother’s crime, I discover I can’t help enjoying myself. Just a bit. Hence cometh my expectation of the Minor Penance I lately mentioned; I find myself hoping, in a shadowed corner of my tarnished soul, that you’ll play games and be evasive and insist upon this immoral defiance of yours, so that I might deliver Khryl’s Hand unto your sinning head, here, until out from your eye sockets leak the shreds of your vile Monastic brains.”
Use leaked back into my body. I made it onto my side and curled around the medicine ball of barbed wire that swelled under my ribs.
“I’d feel bad for you. . about your dad and your tarnished soul and all-” A trail of blood from my mouth made a tiny fading spiral on the stone floor. “-if you weren’t beating the crap out of me right now.”
“Can you stand, then?”
“Do I have to?”
“You won’t like it if I use the boot.”
“I’m no fan of the hand, either.” I put out one of my own. “All right, wait. I’m getting up. Give a guy a couple seconds, can you?”
Tyrkilld opened arms to either side of an indulgent smile.
I found one of the built-out brick benches and pushed myself up. The room spun around me and the walls pulsed and my stomach heaved and I staggered past an armsman and made it to the brass chamberpot in the corner in time to decisively lose the cheese and nuts and dried fruit I’d snacked on an hour or two ago.
On my knees again, leaning on the chamberpot, I spat bloody vomit. “Does it matter I’m telling the truth?”
“Each true word scrubs one stain from your filthy heart,” Tyrkilld said agreeably.
“I never heard of this Freedom’s Face shit until you said the words just now.”
“Go to, freeman. Try not my patience.”
I got my feet under me and swayed upright. “You’re the one with truth-sense, shithead. Am I lying?”
Tyrkilld sighed. “Freeman Shade, are you the man to convince me that Our Lord of Valor’s ear for truth cannot be misled by the dark magicks of the elves?”
The vomit-knotted fist in my stomach clenched tighter. “Elves?”
“Next you’ll try to tell me that it’s pure coincidence that an Ankhanan Esoteric has come to visit this Ankhanan Orbek Black Knife just now.”
“Ankhanan. .? Oh, fuck.” I put a hand to my eyes. “Fuck me like a virgin goat. Freedom’s Face. Fucking Kierendal.”
“Ah, there. There, y’see? Perhaps there is some truth you can share after all.
A shy truth, it must be, requiring a bit of encouraging to poke its wee nose out into the light of day.” He spread those oak-knot hands invitingly. “Speak to me of this Kierendal.”
“Shit, ask me anything. I hate that fucking slag.” I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. “So what is it, some kind of Free-the-Poor-Oppressed-Motherfucking-Ogrilloi thing?”
“And behold.” Tyrkilld beamed. “Come then; coax your shy truth out from its cranny-” He flexed his right hand meaningfully. “-unless you’d prefer I extend the invitation myself.”
“I’m just guessing. .” I panted harshly, wondering if I might spew again. Probably not.
Dammit.
If I hadn’t been so woozy I would’ve thought to puke down the bastard’s breastplate.
“Just. . guessing. Three years ago the Folk were granted freedom of the Empire. Maybe you heard. They’re full citizens now. Full human rights.”
Tyrkilld shook his head dolefully. “Ankhanans.”
“Don’t start. Kierendal is. . shit, I don’t even know what to call her, these days. Call her the Duchess; that’s as good a name as any. She’s a primal-what you call an elf-who runs some very successful businesses in the capital. Reason they’re successful-she also runs a criminal syndicate, a big one. . grew out of an old-time Warrengang, from a part of the city called the Face. So they were the Faces. Get it? So if someone’s running some kind of underground Free-the-Grills shit here out of Ankhana, it’s a good bet she’s in it somehow. Which is a serious problem for you. Because she is very rich and very powerful, really goddamn smart and completely ruthless. Not to mention connected. Which are the other reasons she’s so successful.”
“Friends in high places, has she?”
“She used to bone the Emperor. Does that count?”
Tyrkilld accepted this news with a ruefully genial smile and nod. The armsmen didn’t even blink.
“Oh, for shit’s sake.” I shook my aching head and coughed up another wad of sick. “When I get to anything you don’t already know, wave a fucking flag or something, huh?”
“Oh, well, yes indeed, there is that. We have a way of uncovering the truth, as you’ve seen.”
“Is this where you start bouncing me off the walls again?”
“Very likely. Now that we’ve seen you can find it in yourself to be honest with me, when the effort you make-” His hands flexed again. “-is sufficiently sincere.”
“Shit.”
“Men often do, at certain points in these long afternoons. Let’s move on to your, ah . . brother. . and his friends in the Smoke Hunt.”
“The Smoke Hunt?”
“Oh, yes, freeman. You knew we’d come round to this, did you not?”
I took a deep breath, sighed it out. I lifted my head. It weighed a couple tons. “I guess I might have a shy truth about whatever the fuck that is, too.”
Tyrkilld nodded an encouraging smile.
I nodded one back. “I think it’s hiding up my vile Monastic ass,” I said. “See if you can suck it out my butthole.”
Tyrkilld’s mouth pursed for the labial consonant and this time I didn’t see it coming.
The hand took me below the arch of the sternum and shock blasted up and down my spine and out my liver and kidneys and though the top of my head and soles of my feet, then there was only air around me and I tumbled upward and crashed into the joining of wall and ceiling and bounced off the bench on the way down, and hitting the brick edge from ten feet wasn’t half the blow I just took; I barely felt it. I lay curled around my spasming gut and blood bubbled from my lips while I tried to remember how to breathe.
“Freeman, freeman.” Tyrkilld sounded honestly regretful. “You know how the memory of my poor murdered father tasks me.”
My diaphragm spasmed and air whooped into my lungs, and I coughed and spat bloody mucus up toward the Sunburst on Tyrkilld’s chest.
And missed.
So all I had left was words. I took them slow. Slow and clear and flat. No sense letting him think I was just pissed. “Your father. Was a low-rent. Thug. Piece of shit. Coward.” I gagged more bloody phlegm. “Just like you.”
I got my breath and steadied it. “He died on his knees.”
Tyrkilld’s face froze over. “You know nothing of my-”
“I know he died-” Slow and clear and flat. “-with a friar’s dick in his mouth.”
There was stillness then, and silence: only labored breath from both of us, half strangled and harsh, shared now, bound together. Finally our understanding had started to flow both ways.
Into the silence, a winter whisper. “Get him up.”
The nearest armsman, florid and glistening and greased with heat, shifted grips on his riot gun uncertainly. “Does the Knight-?”
Tyrkilld’s white stare swore murder, and it didn’t look picky. “Get him up.”