couple steps to the side to clear the way for the passengers behind. I stood the trunk on end and sat on it.
*
I’ve been doing the Actor’s Soliloquy for so many years it’s mostly reflex: whenever my attention starts to wander, I find myself narrating my life in subvocal twitches of lips and tongue and glottis. I used to make a good living at it; back in the day, such subvocal twitches had been registered by a tiny device inside my skull behind my left ear and transmitted a universe away to Earth, where a sophisticated computer algorithm had translated them into a quasithoughtlike internal monologue for the amusement of tens of thousands of narcotized fans who’d paid obscene amounts of money for the illusion of being me.
My life always played better than it lived.
Those days are long gone, but I still monologue. Now I play for an audience of one.
*
I waited, but there was only dockside chatter and the rustling thump of cargo nets, whistles of distant birdsong and the ripple-slap from the river.
God doesn’t talk to me anymore.
“Fine,” I muttered. “Fuck you anyway.”
Maybe He’d decided to hold a grudge for that sword-through-the-brain thing. Which suits me fine, most of the time; I have a grudge or two of my own.
I shoved myself to my feet and dragged the trunk back into the line of passengers filing toward the customs barn.
The queue was minded by spearmen in cheap-looking hauberks, Khryl’s sunburst displayed on their chests in scuffed and faded yellow paint. Their helmets and the shields slung on their backs looked like quality work, though, the sunburst design inlaid in polished brass, and the half-meter blades that tipped their spears were conspicuously well tended. Hand labor on the docks was done by teams of ogrilloi, who wore light tunics in various degrees of stained disrepair. The tunics seemed to be some kind of uniform; each of the various work gangs had its own distinctive design.
They also had their fighting claws sawed blunt.
Each gang also had two or three grills in oversized versions of the sunburst hauberks, with helmets that bore flares of steel bars descending from their lower rims, fanning to guard the neck. These supervisors each carried thick hardwood staves maybe five feet long, their ends capped with steel and knobbed with nailheads.
More interesting were four humans who patrolled the dockside on the backs of heavily muscled horses. No cheap chainmail for them; theirs was so fine-linked it rippled like watered silk, and their sunbursts gleamed with gold leaf. Most interesting of all were their weapons: in addition to the traditional seven-bladed morningstar of the Khryllian armsman, each of them carried slung on a shoulder what looked like the most serious kind of riot gun, despite being filigreed with gold on the intaglioed walnut stocks and chased with electrum: under short straight no-choke barrels, their tube-mags terminated in foot-long, no-frills, cold steel bayonets.
Times change.
Some people blame me for that. Go figure.
I gave a sidelong squint to the nearest of the horses until my attention drew its gaze. And got nothing. The horse’s stare was bleak: dead as a chip of stone. Curls of foam dripped around the pivots of the curb bit wedged deep into his mouth. A martingale with straps an inch thick locked his head down. And spending all day hauling around two hundred fifty pounds of chainmailed pain-in-the-lumbar wasn’t doing the poor fucker any favors either.
It hurt me just to look at, and I don’t even like horses all that much. Horses in general. About all I can say for horses in general is they’re a hell of a lot better than people in general.
The dockside was eerily quiet, despite the crowd of passengers from the riverboat, despite the teams of sullen hulking dockers cranking donkey-wheel cranes to swing cargo nets off or onto barges, loading or unloading chockedwheel wagons that stood with yokes and traces empty, despite all the sausage carts, the pastry kiosks and the dozens of little freestanding market stalls thrown up in the shade of high warehouse walls. When the riverboat’s steam whistle shrieked noon into the silence, people all over the dockside jerked and jumped and then laughed at themselves-but even the laughter was subdued. Self-conscious. Nervous. People instinctively knew that the quiet here was no accident.
The dockside was quiet because the Khryllians like it that way.
It wasn’t a good quiet. It wasn’t library quiet, temple quiet, evening-by-the-fire quiet. It was lying in bed without moving because Dad’s drunk in the hall and you don’t want to give him the idea of coming into your bedroom quiet. When your authority comes straight from God, shit always turns ugly.
And these were the good guys. I’ve known my share of Khryllians. And they
As long as I was just shuffling along in line, it wasn’t too bad. A couple of feet every minute or two, dragging the trunk, leaning on it when I had the chance, shading my eyes against the sun to watch the grills work the docks-
I could take it. Being there.
I didn’t have to do anything. Didn’t have to make any moves. Nobody got hurt. Nobody died. Nothing unlocked the black vault inside my chest. Not even the Spire, a thousand-odd feet of whitestone looming behind my left shoulder. The glare off its facing made a pretty good excuse not to look up at Hell.
The passenger queue snaked to one side of the customs barn; most of the smothering semi-gloom inside was full of cargo crates and livestock and whiteshirted human clerks with clipboards, charcoal pencils in stained fingers and behind blackened ears, damp seeping rings below armpits. Autumn sun heated the corrugated steel roof to a medium broil that cooked human sweat, cow and pig farts, machine oil, wood mold and rotting straw into a chewy stench, familiar, suffocating.
Smelled like civilization.
I passed the time reading an enormous poster of fading edge-curled parchment that listed in six languages the bewildering variety of items which nonSoldiers of Khryl were forbidden to possess or import into Purthin’s Ford. Some were understandable enough: a variety of impedimentia related to combat magick, edged weapons with blades longer than two-thirds handbreadth, that kind of thing. But others made me shake my head. Grapevine cuttings? Beverages of greater than 17 percent alcohol? Live mealworms?
The lower margin contained two vividly recent additions painted in doublesize brushstrokes of arterial scarlet: CHEMICAL EXPLOSIVES
FIREARMS
A handful of customs inspectors worked their way among the crates and nets and cargo pallets. They wore circlets of what I guessed might be electrum strapped around their skulls; from those circlets depended an array of individually jointed mechanical arms, each of which supported a lens. The lenses varied in size and color, and the inspectors would squint through each in turn while examining a suspect container. They looked bored, as did the inspector who stood beside the passenger queue, similarly scrutinizing hand luggage.
I smiled bland-friendly as the inspector examined me and my trunk through a succession of six different lenses. All I had with me were clothes, toiletries and gold. The inspector frowned. “You show positive for weapons.”
“Can’t help that.”
“Extend your hands.”
I did, palms up. Open. Empty.
The inspector switched lenses, then nodded to himself, muttering as he jotted notes on his clipboard. “Crimson, grade six-arms, legs. . hmp. And head.” He looked up. “Monastic?”
“Used to be.”
He nodded. “Very well. Pass along. Be advised that Khryl does not recognize Monastic sovereignty. On the
