Chapter 40: The Horse Thieves

Patches led us to a room that may have been spacious if there were fewer of us, and fewer of him. Vassey, our best sharpshooter, sat in the back of the room with his windlass trained on the Traitor's head. Patches merely laughed, and leaned back in his chair with his burly arms folded behind his head.

"All right, Turk, I'm curious."

I expected an arduous bout of verbal sparring, but Turk wasted no time.

"You know what Goth and I've been doing."

Patches nodded, his demeanor sobering somewhat. "You're going about it all wrong."

"That so?" Turk had a large tablet in his hands. Patches' jinn, a tortured looking emanation, was flickering in the air in front of Turk, swiping through the photonic pages of a lengthy ledger.

"You've been playing whack-a-mole with a hydra, Turk." There was as much venom in Patches' voice when he said Turk as there was when Turk said Traitor. "You can put that pad down. I know what you're looking for and it's not there."

Turk ignored him, and weathered several other protests and mocking denials, until the jinn held between its hands an image of a fortress city so vast and foreboding that the mountain it was built partially around seemed like no more than a buttress. Patches made some sudden and pitiful denials, whilst I wondered if whack-a-mole was the subterranean version of pop-a-roach. My gaze had wandered to the floor when I heard sudden silence, then slow laughter from the devil. As a boy, I saw him out of his shell. I'm glad, because when in the awesome presence of Blitzkrieg, I would remember a naked Patches howling at every touch of his raw nerves on floor and wall and air.

The fortress city, unassailable and immeasurably huge, with towers uncounted and a high wall that sprang from the highest shoulders of the mountain, rising conglomerate where the city surpassed the mountain's summit, was now a thing divided, sliced like an onion, so that its tiniest parts were divided from each other. A thin orange glow-worm appeared from off-grid and burrowed into the mountain, then found its way through a massive treatment plant into a tangle of drainage pipes and at last to a large bay that reminded me of Haven's great dock.

"No more hydra heads, Colonizer." Turk leaned forward and set the jinn's vessel on the table between him and Patches. "We're going for its heart."

"You need pegasi," Patches said, his head nodding. "No." He stood, almost upturning the table. "Not his. I won't. I can't."

"You helped him overthrow Haven, Traitor. But your brothers put a stop to any plans he had there, so why not help us?". Turk too was standing now, and though he was only half of Patches' mass at best, he commanded the room. I have a feeling that he would have stood thus even if he were alone with the brute. Those mean, bronze eyes of his spoke of an age of warfare, and memories of pain that none now living know how to inflict. What could this brazen beast do? Strike him? Shoot him? Turk would rise, and bleeding be the victor.

"There is no greater stock of flying steeds," Turk insisted.

Patches was adamant. "There are others. I know where. Easier scores than V's."

"It would take too long."

The devil kept shaking his head. "No. You only need twenty or so, and Goth forty. If you split up, you could have them..."

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"Jadus is with us."

Patches stopped and looked at Turk with genuine fear, though he seemed more a soldier accepting suicidal orders than a coward seeking retreat. While his eye was a specter, and his face hidden within a ghastly masque, I could somehow determine his expression to be one of resolution. "All right. I'll look through my books tonight. You can camp outside. I'll raise my cloak."

"Your cloak?". Matoya's displacement was an unsettled score between the Cataphract and the devil.

"Yes," Patches replied. "Until she comes back with my body, the cloak, and all she left, is mine."

"You'll never get your skin back, Traitor." Turk whirled about and exited, his cape billowing with as much command as his stare and his voice.

Emboldened, perhaps by Turk, I remained while the others filed out. Abdiel lingered for a moment, then left with a shrug when I remained still.

Patches gave me an impatient look. "Suit yourself," he said as he too began to leave the room.

"Do you ever go back there?" I asked.

He stopped and turned, confused. "Back where?"

"Where I found you?".

He spread his arms across the doorway and ducked his head under. He was clearly annoyed. "What are you getting at, Batch-Boy?"

"Where Matoya kept you. Surely you remember chasing me through the tunnels. You murdered a good person that day."

"That's what I do." He was grinning behind his mesh screen, and I thought his makeshift helm looked like a vessel for cooking meat. "I don't remember a whole lot about that day, sorry. There's food in the cellar. Help yourself. And feel free to grab a few bottles of shine for you and your boys. I'm going to bed."

My hate list gained another name, and I decided then that it would be my responsibility to kill Colonizer Kharn, to atone for my hurling Dolores in his path and getting her killed. Oscar, Dolores, Kendra, Caduceus, the Dolomites, my sweet Eris; Tarthas had claimed too much from me. It was time for me to become the one who claimed.

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