Free This Forsaken Earth by Paul Kearney Page A

beyond the windows. At last Gallico spoke up. “Rol, you knew all this?”
    “Yes.”
    “And to think we’ve pissed in the same pot!” Rol glanced up at the grinning halftroll, and in that moment he loved him. Creed’s eyes said the same thing. What of it? We are shipmates.
    Rol spoke to Canker. “You’ve loosed your little broadside. Now, what’s the upshot of it all?”
    “Your sister needs you, Rol.”
    “Sincerity sits ill on your face, Canker. Why not be honest? You might find the change refreshing.”
    “You must go to her. This war approaches a climax, and she would have her brother by her side to share in the final victory.”
    Her brother. “I’ll write her a letter. Dear sister, have fun running the world. Will that suffice?”
    Canker’s face darkened. “You damn fool; do you know what it has cost me to get here?”
    “What’s wrong, Canker, the war effort tripping up a little? What need has Rowen of me when she can command armies?”
    “She needs leaders, men she can trust. Do you think a woman like her—”
    “Like what, Canker?” Rol advanced on the Thief-King, and as he left the hearth the light in his eyes quickened. His voice grew loud, ugly. “A woman who has prostituted herself to all and sundry—who fucks and murders her way through the world, whose carcass has been pimped out a thousand times. A woman like that? I can do without her favors—or her goodwill.”
    Canker looked up at him calmly. “You love her,” he said.
    Rol backed away as if he had been struck. Fleam leaped out of her scabbard and was in his fist like a flash of sea-lightning. The scimitar swept through the stool on which Canker had been sitting, cutting it in two and striking sparks from the stone floor below. The Thief-King had thrown himself aside almost as quickly as Rol’s arm had moved. He rolled across the floor like a ball. Gallico and Creed stepped over him. “Rol, no!”
    It was there—he was on the cusp of it, so easy now. Gods in heaven, how good it would feel to let go of it.
    The others in the room watched, horrified, as a vile brightness spilled out of Rol’s eyes. He seemed to rise up off the floor, and a clutch of luminous spears grew at his back, like the unfurling of great wings. The scimitar in his hand grew into a bar of unbearable bright light.
    Gallico’s fist punched back Rol’s head, bursting open the lips on his maniac leer. The halftroll launched himself bodily at Rol and bore him against the far wall, crushing the air out of him.
    For a moment Rol struggled. Fleam shrieked in his head, a woman’s voice that clawed across his brain. Gallico’s weight lay upon him like a hill, but the strength was in him to toss it aside, to rise up like…like…
    And some form of sanity whispered in his ear, like the drunk’s sodden realization of what lies in wait for the morning. He threw the scimitar away, and the blade scored a long, smoking furrow in the solid basalt of the floor.
    “Hold him down!” Artimion was yelling, and Miriam was clicking back the hammer on her musket. Creed clapped his hand across the lock and wrenched free the flint, scattered the powder in the pan. The two of them fought over the weapon like children with a favorite toy.
    Gallico’s eyes, inhuman and yet compassionate, staring at him from six inches away. Rol fought for breath. The tears were trickling helplessly down the sides of his face, liquid fire. Within him, the white flame guttered, struggling against his will. For a moment, he thought he could see clear to the heart of it, and the room about him vanished, to be replaced by a fearsome landscape from another world. But it died before he could make sense of it.
    His ribs creaked under Gallico’s bulk. “Get off me, you big green bastard.”
    “That’s better.” The halftroll’s weight lifted fractionally.
    “It’s all right, Gallico. I’m all right.”
    Gallico stared at him a few seconds more, studying his eyes, then he nodded and got to his