Blade of Tyshalle by Matthew Woodring Stover
Tan'elKoth's reply had been an exasperated glower. "You are the damned Chairman," he'd rumbled savagely. "If you don't know, how should I? Follow me."
Hari had a lot of trouble convincing himself to step into the gate. He knew, he just knew, that when he took one more step into the Curioseum he would collapse, crippled and helpless, at Tan'elKoth's feet. Tan'elKoth had been as sympathetic as Hari had come to expect. "Fine, then. Let her die," he'd said coldly, then had turned and walked away.
A second later, Hari had followed him. But still he could not get comfortable with walking where he had always rolled.
Ahead, Tan'elKoth turned down the gallery that led toward the Caine Hall and his own apartment. Hari paced in his wake, listening to the echoes and rubbing his forearms to make the hairs on them lie down again. "Are you ever—" he began, whispering instinctively. He caught himself and coughed—some bitter, chemical tang tickled his throat—then repeated loudly, "Are you ever gonna tell me what this is about?"
Tan'elkoth stopped, his back a wide black wall that seemed to half close off the gallery. "Can you not smell it?"
That chemical smell, the one that coated the inside of his nose, his mouth, his throat—he recognized it. It was the preservative gas from Berne's display case ... but thicker, stronger, far more dense. Until now, he'd never smelled it until he was right up next to the case. The back of his neck prickled.
He leaned out so he could peer around Tan'elKoth's broad back; he dreaded what he knew he would see, but he had to look.
Berne's case was empty. It stood on its pedestal in the archway of the exhibition hall, vacant as a corpse's eyes.
Hari's bowels dissolved into ice water that drained into his legs. He couldn't move, couldn't speak—he was afraid to turn his head, because he knew with irrational certainty that as soon as he looked, he'd find Berne waiting for him, standing in the shadows with Kosall poised to strike, and he'd collapse and start to scream like a stolen baby.
Dead is dead, Hari told himself. He'd jammed a knife through the top of Berne's skull and scrambled the bastard's brains: You don't get any deader than that.
After repeating this to himself a few times, he found that he could breathe again. When he finally decided he could trust his voice, he said, "All right. I've seen it. Now tell me what it means. Who would steal Berne's body?"
Tan'elKoth turned, half his face bleached white in the emergency lights, the other half lost in shadow. "Studio security. Your own secmen, Caine."
Hari winced. He didn't like this already, and he knew it was going to get worse.
Tan'elKoth went on. "I was engaged in my usual research this evening after closing, developing a new lesson for my Applied Magick seminar, when I heard the noise of what turned out to be five secmen opening this case. I enquired what they were doing—perfectly innocently, I might add, I had assumed they were acting upon your orders. Their response was to place me under arrest and hold me incommunicado in the security office detention center until perhaps half an hour ago."
"When you called me."
"Yes."
Tan'elKoth moved slowly, almost meditatively, down the long gallery and stopped in front of the empty case. He pressed one enormous hand against the armorglass, like a lover waving good-bye through a car window, and bent his head for a moment as though weary, or in pain. As Hari joined him there, Tan'elKoth turned and seated himself on the case's pedestal, leaned his forearms on his knees, and folded his hands.
"My first thought," Tan'elKoth said, "was that this was some stroke of yours—some plot to wound me by a further desecration of the corpse of my most faithful servant. As if what you have done to him already were not enough."
"Hey, don't try to splash me with that shit," Hari said. "Putting his body on display was Wes Turner's idea."
"A puerile evasion," he said darkly. "This crime was an act of the company that employs you. You cannot exculpate yourself by claiming the boss made me do it. The nature of your masters has never been a mystery to you, yet you have continued to take their money and enjoy the borrowed status they lend to you. You are as guilty as they."
"You're gonna debate morality with me? You? You're the only sonofabitch I ever met who's murdered more people than I have," Hari said through his teeth. "What about the body?"
"Yes." He met Hari's gaze with a level stare. "No long interval passed before I realized this could not be your doing. You are a walking catastrophe of Biblical proportion; this type of petty, emotionally wounding revenge has never been your style."
"I don't give a rat's ass how you knew it wasn't me. I already know it wasn't me, goddammit. Who was it?"
"This is not the central question; the thieves were Studio secmen, acting upon orders from above. Who gave those orders is peripheral—a mere detail. The central question is for what would they want it?"
Hari ground his teeth together and resisted the impulse to break the bastard's nose again. "Tan'elKoth," he said tightly, "on my best days, I'm not a patient man. This is not one of my best days. Drop the fucking games."
"Just so." He rose, towering over Hari, starkly outlined against the emergency floodlight. "I can tell you precisely why the Studio would take Berne's body."
"Christ, I hope so."
"They intend to use him to kill Pallas Ril."
Looking up into Tan'elKoth's black-shadowed face, Hari could feel the strength leaving his knees as though it trickled out a pair of spigots on his heels. "I don't understand," he said numbly.
"I found it obvious." Tan'elKoth walked away again, into the Caine Hall, heading for his apartment door. "Berne was stolen by the Studio. Pallas Ril is the only obstacle to the success of the Studio's plans for my world."
His voice boomed off the walls of stone. "Berne was the finest swords-man of his age—perhaps of any age. Combat skill—like any other physical skill, even walking and talking—is a matter of reflex conditioning. An animated corpse of Berne would still have the skills of a superior swordsman, even without the higher cognitive functions that govern tactics. And, of course, they also took Kosall."
Hari, following, had to stop suddenly: his back ached fiercely at that name.
The scene, the wax-figure diorama in the middle of this hall, was of that moment on the sand of Victory Stadium, on that hot Ankhanan noon seven years ago. High above, figures of Ma'elKoth and Pallas Ril were locked in deific combat. In the center of the display, Caine brandished a pair of knives while he leaped onto the unstoppable point of the sword in Berne's hand.
If the Curioseum had had power, the scene would have been lit by the white blaze that would radiate from the figure of Pallas Ril. Here in black-shadowed semidarkness, the scene had an eerie, nightmarish life. Darkness hid the wires; for a disorienting, hallucinatory second, Hari wasn't sure whether he was the one standing out here looking at the display or if he was the leaping figure within it.
—and for a moment he could feel again that harsh buzzing in his teeth from Kosall's vibrating edge when the blade had slid, smooth as butter, through his spine
He rubbed his head as though he could massage meaning in through his skull, and he snarled at himself to pull it together. "An animated corpse—?"
Tan'elKoth stopped at his doorway and sighed like an exasperated professor. "Must I forge every single link in this chain of reasoning? Here then, simply: Pallas Ril—Chambaraya—is a god of life. No living thing can ap proach her undetected, however it may be concealed. If, on the other hand, a potent magickal weapon is borne by, shall we say, an unliving thing ... ? Need I say more?"
The face of the wax Berne above him seemed to shift in the black wash of shadow. The glass eyes glittered with malice; they seemed to turn from the figure of the wax Caine before it and fix upon Pallas Ril high above. In that final instant the most famous sequence of the most famous Studio Adventure of all time—Caine had thrown himself upon Berne's sword, for that was his only hope of saving Pallas Ril.
Hari's chest ached with helpless rage.
&
The people behind this could have chosen any random corpse for their weapon; they wouldn't even need to dig one up—they could lease one from the Working Dead in Ankhana's Warrens. But instead, they took Berne. So Hari would know it was coming.
So he'd know there was nothing he could do to stop it.
Back in the bad old days, when he and Shanna hadn't been able to open their mouths to each other without sparking a shouting match, she had constantly accused him of being obsessively self-absorbed; she liked to tell him that something or other isn't about you. Not everything in the bloody world is about you!
Yeah, maybe not he thought. But this is. I don't know why, or how, but you can't get away from it. This is about me.
He'd been told: the greatest skill of the successful Administrator is to know when to do nothing.
Just like Dad: I can't fucking learn to shut up.
"I am no great admirer of Pallas Ril, as you know," Tan'elKoth said as he fished out his keys—the ON field disabled palmlocks as efficiently as it did Hari's bypass; all the Curioseum's interior doors had Overworld-style manual locks with physical keys. "Nonetheless, she is the sole shield between my Children and the masters of this ... this death cult you call a Studio. Is there anything you can do?"
Hari shook his head, mouth twisted against a taste of metal and bitter ash. "If I can get a message to her, somehow ... She can handle pretty much anything if she knows it's coming." He turned up his palms helplessly. "But the Studio is gonna be ahead of me on this, too."
He could taste defeat already. He had been hit too hard, from too many directions at once. He'd lost already.
She would die.
Standing at the freemod dock: You get in trouble over there this time, I can't come and bail you out.
How had he ended up so useless, and so guilty?
His head hammered; he pressed the heel of his hand to his temple and squeezed shut his eyes. It felt like a steel band ratcheted tighter and tighter around his skull: at any second the bone would crack and his brains would squirt out his eye sockets.
"I shall do what I can, but first—" Tan'elKoth circled a hand at the particolored light and shadow of the power-dead Curioseum. "—I must find a place to stay. The power cells in these harnesses of yours are not inexhaustible. Amplitude decay is—as you have reminded me many times—an ugly way to die."
"Where will you go?"
Tan'elKoth shrugged. "My art has garnered admirers among the Leisurefolk—some few of them have ON vaults not unlike the one you maintain at the Abbey, only larger, to hold collections of artifacts brought to Earth by Actors that they sponsor. I am certain one or more can be persuaded to accommodate me until this—" Again, the circular gesture. "—situation can be resolved."
He turned to the door to his apartment. "Once I have my spare harness, I will be off."
He pushed the door open—and every light in the Curioseum burst to life.
Hari jumped as though the sudden glare was a stroke of nearby lightning. Overhead, the figure of Pallas Ril blazed like a fusion torch, and the simulated power of the simulated Ma'elKoth became a jet of fire that joined them breast to breast. Hari clenched his teeth until the stuttering of his heart settled into a steady rhythm. "Looks like you won't have to move after all," he said.
"Don't be an idiot," Tan'elKoth said as he disappeared within his apartment.
Hari went to the door. "But with the power back on—"
Tan'elKoth stood at his desk, his back to Hari. "You're still walking." His voice was rich with dark-roasted contempt.
"Huh." Hari scowled thoughtfully as he paced through the door. "That doesn't make any goddamn sense."
The Curioseum's ON field generator was hardwired into the Studio grid—which was energized by the Studio's transfer pump. It should have been impossible for the power to be on down here without the field returning as well.
In fact, there was no reason why the damn power should have been off in the first place. There were backup generators, and as a third failsafe the Curioseum would self-connect to San Francisco's civic grid—the Curioseum's collection was irreplaceable, and much of it would vanish into amplitude decay in goddamn short order if the field didn't come back up. If he hadn't been distracted by all the shit that had hit him today, he would have seen it already: the only reason to turn off the power was to turn off the ON field.
But why would somebody want to do that? Was he just being paranoid, or did this smell of enemy action? It's not whether I'm paranoid, he thought. It's whether I'm paranoid enough.
Now, with the power back on, but still no field
Hari frowned down at the floor. "What's this crap?"
Tan'elKoth's athletic shoes had left tracks, faint but definite, even across the area rug that defined his "living room"—slipper shapes where his tread had disturbed some kind of fine silvery dust that was spread all over the floor and the furniture, like pesticide left behind by a careless exterminator. "What the hell is this dust?" Hari asked Tan'elKoth's back. "You working in marble these days?"
"Mmm," Tan'elKoth agreed distractedly, while he thumbed through an old-fashioned bound-paper address book he'd pulled from a drawer of his desk. "But this is not marble dust—my pneumatic chisel has a vacuum hose that's vented to the outside. There are several fairly serious varieties of lung damage, as well as systemic disturbances, that are caused by the inhalation of marble dust; even with the hose, I wear a self-contained breathing apparatus while I work. Ah, there he is," he said smugly, holding his place in the address book with one sausage-sized finger. "Rentzi Dole. He has several of my pieces, and has invited me to Kauai on any number of occasions. And—most important—he is no friend of this Studio."
Hari's answering nod was equally distracted. He knew all about Leisureman Dole—his late aunt had been Shanna's Patron for many years. Rentzi Dole was one of Hari's least favorite people; the Leisureman had defied the explicit terms of his aunt's will and terminated Shanna's patronage.
Hari had something else on his mind: a thought that was beginning to take shape, still misty around the edges, kind of foggily inchoate as it organized itself--his brain wasn't accustomed to doing this kind of work anymore. "Uh, Tan'elKoth?" Hari began uncertainly. Why would someone have the power on but the ON field off?
Clearly, they wanted to run some kind of equipment that requires both power and Earth-normal physics. Something electronic. Like a deskscreen. "Tan'elKoth," Hari said, "don't make that call."
"Don't be ridiculous. What choice do I have?"
No electronics work in the ON field—not even, say, the voicerecognition chips built into palmlocks.
"I'm telling you," Hari said, stronger, more urgently, "don't do it. You have to listen to me." He started toward the ex-Emperor, his hand out as though to grab the bigger man and haul him away from the desk by force.
Voice-recognition chips aren't restricted to operating palmlocks or controlling access to netsites; they can be used to trigger almost any kind of device--
"Nonsense," the ex-Emperor said, thumbing the mike key next to the speaking tube.
—like a detonator.
"Don't do it—"
Tan'elKoth continued, "Iris: initiate telecommunications. Exec—" A shattering roar obliterated the rest of the word.
7
The blast hurled Tan'elKoth backward into Hari, flattening them both like they'd been hit by a freightliner. Hari might have lost consciousness for a second or two; he found himself on his hands and knees, shaking his head, thunder rolling on and on in his ears, joined by a high, singing whine that made his teeth ache. Some kind of thick greyish chemical smoke burned the back of his throat and punched hacking coughs out of his lungs. All that was left of Tan'elKoth's beautiful rolltop desk was a kneehigh bonfire--the oil- and varnish-impregnated wood pumped out black smoke of its own, but that didn't worry him.
What worried him was how bright it was in here.
White a
The whole apartment was on fire.
Even the stone of the floor burned: outspreading rings of white flame hissed sparks at the ceiling. In the center of each widening ring was a smoldering splinter of wood—pieces of the desk, flaming, blown everywhere by the bomb. And the hissing, spark-showering rings of fire grew slowly, spreading like ripples in a pond of molasses, and the stone in their wake glowed red-white like slag from a blast furnace.
That fucking dust
Somebody'd sprayed it all over the goddamn place. Thermite, maybe a magnesium compound, maybe something new he'd never heard of it didn't matter. What mattered was getting out of here.
Holding a fold of his tunic across his mouth and nose against the smoke, he snaked over to Tan'elKoth. The big man lay on his back, limbs splayed bonelessly, out cold. His black sweater had been blown to rags, and the chestplate of the ammod harness looked like the front end of a car after a disagreement with the pylon of a suspension bridge. His face was scorched, his eyebrows burned off; embers still crawled through his hair, making it crinkle and spit smoke.
Hari spent an eternal five seconds feeling for a pulse between the windpipe and the massive cords of Tan'elKoth's neck; he wasn't sentimental enough to get his ass cooked trying to rescue a corpse.
One, two, three, four—son of a bitch if the big bastard wasn't still alive after all. Now all Hari had to do was figure out how a 170-pound middle-aged man who was not in the best shape of his life was gonna get out of here hauling this fucking behemoth who was way too goddamn close to three times his weight. This, Hari thought concisely, is gonna suck.