The Knights of the Black Earth Read Free Page A

fuckin’ bastard. Him and that fuckin’ Derek Sagan.
Wasn’t for that fuckin’ Derek Sagan, he’d be alive today.”
    A glance at the
photograph of Snaga Ohme clarified the pronoun.
    “Tell me about
Derek Sagan, Bosk,” the stranger suggested.
    Bosk tore his gaze
from the vid. “Why d’you wanna know about Derek Sagan?”
    “Because he was
the reason for the Negative Waves project, wasn’t he, Bosk?”
    Bosk hesitated,
regarded the stranger suspiciously. But the Adonian had had far too much to
drink to make the mental effort to play games, keep secrets. Besides, what did
it matter anyway? Ohme was dead. And when his life had ended, so had Bosk’s. He
didn’t even have revenge to keep him going anymore. So he nodded.
    “Yeah. Sagan was.
I don’t care who knows it. If His Majesty sent you—”
    “His Majesty didn’t
send me, Bosk.” The stranger leaned back comfortably in the chair. “His Majesty
doesn’t give a damn about you, and you know it. Nobody gives a damn, do they,
Bosk?”
    “You do,
apparently,” Bosk said with a cunning not even the jump-juice could completely
drown.
    “I do, Bosk.” The
stranger opened the briefcase. “I care a lot.”
    Bosk stared. The
briefcase was filled with plastic chips—black plastic chips, stamped in gold,
arranged in neat stacks.
    Bosk rose slowly
to his feet to get a better look, half afraid that the liquor might be playing
tricks on his mind. It had been almost four years since the night Snaga Ohme
had been murdered. Four years since the night Warlord Derek Sagan had seized
control of the dead man’s mansion and its wealth. That night, as Sagan’s army
marched in the front, Bosk had exited the mansion via the secret tunnels in the
back.
    During these
intervening four years, Bosk had never seen one black chip stamped in
gold, much less . . . how many were in that briefcase? . . . He took a
conservative guess on the number of chips in each stack, counted the number of
stacks across, counted the number of stacks down, did some muddled
multiplication, and drew in a shivering breath.
    “Twenty thousand,
Bosk,” said the stranger. “It’s all yours. Today.”
    Bosk found his
chair with the backs of his legs, sat down rather suddenly. Life up till now
had been an endless lineup of jump-juice bottles, selling his favors in cheap
bars and bathhouses, and dodging the local collection agency.
    “I could go back
to Adonia,” he said, staring at the black chips.
    “You could leave
tonight, Bosk,” said the stranger.
    Bosk licked dry
lips, took another drink, gulped it the wrong way, coughed. “What do you want?”
    “You know,” said
the stranger. “You tried to sell it a couple of years ago. Bad timing. No
market.”
    “Negative Waves.”
Bosk’s gaze strayed to the computer.
    The stranger
nodded, closed the lid of the briefcase. The light seemed to go out of the
room.
    “Tell me about the
project, Bosk. Tell me everything you can remember.”
    “Why do you want
to know?”
    “Just to make sure
we’re talking about the same project.”
    A mental hand was
tugging at the coattails of Bosk’s brain, trying to get his attention. But the
jump-juice and the gold-stamped black chips combined to cause him to shoo it
away.
    “Yeah, sure,” Bosk
said. He reached for his glass, discovered it was empty, started to head for
the bottle.
    He found the
stranger holding on to it. Bosk staggered back, blinked. He had no clear
recollection of seeing the stranger move, yet the man was standing right in
front of him.
    “We’ll have a
drink to celebrate closing the deal,” said the stranger, smiling and holding on
to the bottle. “Not before.” He walked back to his seat by the computer.
    Bosk was going to
get angry and then decided he wasn’t. Shrugging, he went back to his chair. The
stranger returned to the folding chair, set the bottle down next to the
computer, beside the picture of Snaga Ohme. On his way past, the stranger
flicked off the vid. Congenial