She said, “Before I give the signal, three things must be said. First, you must agree that I am no longer Alalloel of Lree. For the purposes of this encounter and hereafter, to you I am Alalloel of the Anserine, a Paramount of an unlimited mental communion. You must so address me, or as Anserine. Is this acceptable? May we continue?”

Del Azarchel spoke sharply, “I do not see it makes a difference. Does everyone change his name, save only for me and Montrose? I accept. Continue.”

Sarmento’s eyes jerked toward the winged woman, and narrowed in thought.

Montrose suppressed the impulse to introduce himself by a new name, such as Mr. Nostradamus Twiddle Apocalypse, Esquire. A man’s last words should not be a jape. He said only, “I accept. Continue.”

Alalloel of the Anserine next said, “If a peaceful accommodation can be sought and found, both participators may even now withdraw, and with no loss of honor, and no imputation against their steadfastness. Witnesses! Inquire now and finally if accommodation can be made on any other ground.”

Mickey put his head near Montrose and said softly, “Can it? You told me once, Judge of Ages, that you had some admiration for him, the Master of the World. The two of you have been like sun and moon for all of all the history anyone here knows. It will be odd to walk under the dome of heaven and nevermore to see one of the great luminaries.”

Montrose said, “To be frank, I’d give almost anything to be able to take him, and walk away from here arm in arm, and find something to do together, go on a space voyage or something. You know he stole my starship, the Emancipation, that I named after my childhood dream? And I’ve never been aboard her. So, yeah, I suppose I’d give almost anything. Almost. But not my word. That I keep, even if I die for it.”

Mickey turned and raised his voice. “Madame. No accommodation can be made.” And Sarmento i Illa d’Or said the same.

Alalloel said, “Have all measures to avoid this conflict, with or without an accommodation, been examined and exhausted?”

Mickey called all, “Yes.”

But Sarmento i Illa d’Or said, “Just a moment!”

For Sarmento was having some fierce, whispered debate with Del Azarchel. Montrose, thinking it was one of the privileges of being posthuman, adjusted the interpretation mechanism of his temporal lobes so that the words came crisp and clear despite the distance. But it was gibberish. Del Azarchel and Sarmento i Illa d’Or were inventing new languages with radically differing grammar and signification rules, one per each sentence, based on some arbitrary algorithm known to both of them. It seemed they also enjoyed the perquisites of being posthuman.

Finally, Del Azarchel said, “I want to talk to Montrose privately.”

Anserine said, “That is not allowed. You must abide by the rules and follow them.”

“No, I think not,” drawled Del Azarchel. “Menelaus Montrose never obeyed a rule in his life, save when it suited him. Nor have I. Lesser men follow and obey us. We do not follow. He and I, we are the makers of rules.”

And so Del Azarchel started walking forward, his gait in his armor stiff and rolling, a fashion of walk that was something comical while being menacing. Montrose thought he looked like a Sumo wrestler.

5. Always One More

Mickey whispered to Montrose, “Del Azarchel is in breach. You now have a faultless right to withdraw, and no man can say infraction.”

Montrose did not answer that, but heaved up his heavy boots and stomped forward himself. He did not want to withdraw, and live. He counted the number of years he had awaited this day, and compared it to the number of steps he now made across the icy and broken rock, gray with ashes and pockmarked with miniature craters. It was roughly eight hundred years per step. Unhelmeted, unarmed, they closed the distance.

Then they were together, close enough to look eye to eye. Close enough that when Del Azarchel laughed, Montrose felt the touch of warmth on his face.

Suddenly an old memory bubbled up in his mind.

He was four years old, maybe three. He had been lying in bed, hungry. He often went to bed hungry, as the older boys who could do chores needed their strength to do them. It was a cold night, as most nights of the endless winter were, and he had doubled up with two of his brothers in the same narrow bed for warmth, with three blankets piled over all of them. One of them, maybe it was Agamemnon, was telling the other, Hector, that the Sheriff had been asking mother where she had been yesterday, and whether anyone had seen her there, and so on. It had meant nothing to him then.

Now, looking back with adult memory, posthuman memory, he identified that as the day and date Hatchet Jim Rackham had died. Gunned down by an unknown assailant. It had been a light caliber bullet, so the rumor ran that it might have been a woman, using a small pistol. But he had also been stabbed savagely, repeatedly, methodically, and the trail of bloodstains showed that he had been alive and crawling the first few times the blade entered his back. Whoever had done it had not had a strong arm.

It clicked into his mind what his mother had meant. There is always one more.

Whenever you kill a man, and you think that is the end of it, someone will come to avenge him. No matter how dead he is, a force as invisible as a specter would rise up, and find someone, a brother or a friend, or even a stranger who now feared your murderer’s reputation or envied and sought to better it, and the dead man’s vengeance would walk, even if the man himself never moved physically from the grave. And if you kill that avenger, that brother or son, he might have another brother or son.

Or he might have a fierce young wife with ten small children to feed. Hatchet Jim had been the man who shot his father. That clicked into place, too.

Looking back with his posthuman memory, he counted the number of knives in the knife rack when he saw them at age four, age three, age five. The largest blade had been missing since April of that year. The one mother had used to murder a man after her first shot had failed to do the deed.

Something very cold and still touched his heart at the moment. To take a man’s life was a fearful thing. And even if he killed Blackie, that would not be the end of it. It would never end.

He straightened his shoulders, and, with an apology in his cold heart for his mother, he vowed to himself: Very well. It never ends. Even if it lasts to the last hour of the universe.

He was ready.

14

Chessmaster of History, Fencer of Fate

1. Privately

Montrose said, “Blackie. Is there anything to say? I am a professional duelist. Back when I was young, I made my whiskey money drilling holes in men’s hearts. So you are not likely to unnerve me. It is not just that we hate each other. Everything in us is opposed.”

Del Azarchel said, “Not everything.”

“You’re right. We both love the same girl. Not exactly a basis for an amiable coexistence.”

Del Azarchel’s face tightened. “I made her for myself. All my ideals of perfection are embodied in her. She’s mine.”

“That’s incest. Your own daughter. You make me puke.”

“Incest at least is between members of the same species. She can no more mate with you than with a monkey. That is bestiality. It is not enough to vomit; I must scrub my inward parts with lye to clear my palate.”

“Wait. All this time, you were thinking I have not consummated my marriage? You came to call me out to duel on my wedding night, but not early enough. It is not like we waited for sundown to start in on our nuptial pleasures. She was more eager than I was. In fact, in the car ascending the tower, she—”

Del Azarchel threw back his head and laughed. Menelaus was surprised and disappointed. He had been toying with the idea of a little fisticuffs to get the blood pumping on a cold and sluggish morning like this before they picked up pistols. He had been half believing that was Del Azarchel’s purpose in drawing him aside. He did not really think Montrose could be talked out of anything, did he?