Blade of Tyshalle by Matthew Woodring Stover
Three respectful paces behind Toa-Sytell's left shoulder, His Grace the Honorable Toa-M'Jest, Duke of Public Order, coughed into his fist.
"Join me here, M'Jest," Toa-Sytell said informally. "He should be arriving soon. Don't you want to watch?"
"If it's all the same to you, Radiance—"
"It isn't. Join me."
Toa-M'Jest ducked his head and surreptitiously mopped sweat from his brow with his sleeve; the Patriarch pretended that he did not see. When the Duke came to the window, the Patriarch could smell him—a sour, slightly rank sweat smell, with a taint of the outhouse to it that cut through the Duke's expensive perfume. Toa-M'Jest took the Patriarch's casually offered hand; the Duke's fingers were clammy, chill like raw meat off a butcher's iceblock, and they trembled, ever so slightly.
While the Duke lowered dry lips to his master's fingers, the Patriarch stared into the empty distance above Ankhana's towers. "Seven years ago next tenday, I stood at this very window with the Count—shortly thereafter Saint—Berne," he mused. "Then, too, we watched for sight of Caine approaching along Gods' Way. Then, too, we thought he had been taken, chained, rendered harmless."
The Patriarch took the Duke's chin in his hand and raised it so that their eyes could meet. "Then, too," he said, "we did not learn how wrong we were until far too late."
Toa-M'Jest swallowed. "I don't know what you mean, Holiness."
"Of course you do. Don't be an ass." The Patriarch sighed. "I know that you once counted Caine your friend—that you even go so far, privately, as to credit him for your current position. I know that you will be inclined to aid him. I tell you plainly, Toa-M'Jest: This inclination may cost your life."
"Radiance—"
The Patriarch waved the objection aside; Toa-M'Jest could have nothing of interest to say on the subject. "How goes the mopping up?"
The Duke took a breath to gather his wits. "Better, Your Radiance, but still slowly. We hold the Alientown surface from Commons' Beach to the north shanties. I think we'll have everything locked down within a tenday."
"So long?" the Patriarch murmured. "The Festival of the Assumption sprints toward us, Toa-M'Jest. This situation must be resolved."
"It's the caverns—the rock cuts off Flow," the Duke reminded him. "The Thaumaturgics are short of griffinstones. It's bad enough, sending men down there against ogres and trolls without magickal cover, but stonebenders? You can't fight stonebenders in those caverns, Your Radiance. Not without griffinstones. It's suicide."
"You understand, do you not, that your failure to arrest Kierendal is of especial concern now? She was once your lover; sent against her by my order, you failed—"
The Duke bristled. "The kind of magick those fuckers throw around?" he snapped, relapsing into the gutter talk of his former life. "We had to fall back. You should have seen the shit they were throwing—like goddamn Ma'elkoth, excuse the profanity. How many soldiers did you want to lose?"
"The circumstances of their resistance are irrelevant. Half the Alien-town Patrol are Knights of Cant; you should have been better prepared."
"She's not going anywhere. She'll either surrender with the rest or die where she is."
"Nonetheless. Your record against your former ... associates . is less than stellar, M'Jest. We can afford no similar, mm, errors ... in dealing with Caine."
"There won't be any," the Duke promised grimly.
"I understand you have already financed a private cell for him." Toa-M'Jest settled into himself as though anticipating a blow. "Yeah." "Perhaps you have an explanation for this which. might allay my fears ... ?"
"Isn't it obvious?"
The Patriarch allowed himself another thin, cold smile. "Several conflicting explanations are, I think, equally obvious. I am curious which you will select."
"He's crippled," the Duke said simply. "Berne put Kosall through his spine. The Pit's full of street scum. He wouldn't last a day down there, maybe not even an hour—everybody'd want to be the Man Who Killed Caine. Not to mention that most all of them are facing execution on charges—mmm, you might say dubious charges—of Cainism. I don't think anyone'll care to stand up for him."
"I see," the Patriarch said. "So your sole concern is to ensure that he lives long enough to be executed."
Toa-M'Jest turned his face toward the window, looking out over the broad parade route below. "Yeah," he said slowly. "It's not easy to admit, y'know? But I got a position, now; I got responsibilities. I love the guy like my own brother, but every time he comes to town we end up in a fucking war."
The Patriarch's eye was caught by the scarlet flash of the afternoon sun off the halberd blades of the Household Knights as the parade turned the corner from Rogues' Way onto Gods' Way and began its final triumphal leg. Far, far below, he could barely make out the limp figure on the rack above the dungcart's bed.
"Yes," he murmured. He ran his tongue around lips that had become dry and cracked and hot. "Yes, we do."
3
The Imperial Donjon of Ankhana began its existence as the final line of defense for the river pirates who had founded the city more than a thou-sand years ago. In those days, what would later become Ankhana was nothing more than a simple fort of stone and a cluster of huts, enclosed by a wooden stockade wall at the west end of the island that would later be called Old Town.
Below the fort lay a natural cleft in the limestone that was the predominant geological formation of the area; this cleft led far below the river itself, into a bewildering three-dimensional tangle of caverns and passages, including one that was a straight vertical chimney down to another river, underground, that paralleled the Great Chambaygen above. This cleft became known satirically as the Donjon, in the sense of stronghold, from its use as the escape route when the fort above fell to siege.
The Donjon's actual use as the Ankhanan civic dungeon did not begin until nearly a hundred years after the Liberation, when Ankhana's stand against the armies of Panchasell the Luckless and his Folk allies had assured the city's dominance over the surrounding lands. At that time, the pirate chieftains of Ankhana had taken to calling themselves kings; kings, are perpetually in need of secure places in which to deposit those enemies who would be inconvenient to kill.
The Donjon was a place of deep shadow and bad air, rank with fermenting exhalations of decayed lungs filtered through mouthfuls of rotting teeth.
The Pit was an already-large natural cavern that had been enlarged and altered over the years, first crudely—by inexpert human engineers—and later with astonishing skill by teams of convict stonebenders. By the morning on which Hari Michaelson, the man who had once been Caine, was carried down the stairs from the Courthouse, the Pit was fully forty meters across, ringed by an overhanging balcony cut from the stone ten meters above the floor. A single stairbridge, hinged to the balcony, could be lowered on winched chains to deliver new prisoners to the Pit floor. The prisoners' daily rations were lowered by hand in cheaply woven baskets, and eaten without the benefit of utensils.
Newer features included a tic-tac-toe square of plank-floored catwalks crisscrossing the Pit at the same ten-meter height as the balcony, suspended from the arched stone ceiling by heavy chains. On chains as well were five enormous brass lamps—each the size of a washtub, with a wick as thick as a man's arm—that provided the constant light. They burned without interruption, their oil replenished and wicks replaced as necessary by the crossbow-armed Donjon guards who paced the catwalks.
In the Pit, darkness would be a luxury.
In years past, the Pit had been a temporary holding area, a pen of stone for prisoners awaiting trial and convicts awaiting transportation to frontier garrisons, or to the mines of the high desert, or to the galleys of the Ankhanan navy out of the port city of Terana.
Things were different, now.
On Saint Berne's Eve—slightly more than two months ago—the army and the constabulary had begun a systematic program of mass arrests of Cainists and Cainist sympathizers. Holding areas had been pr
The climax of the festival—the grand finale of the grandest festival, the pinnacle of the celebration of the seventh anniversary of Ma'elKoth's transfiguration from mortal god to Ascended Godhead in truth—would be the burning of the Enemy of God: the Prince of Chaos himself
The Pit was now filled with the less problematic overflow of the street sweeps: humans, primals, and ogrilloi. Not that all or even most of these were Cainist either; on the contrary, the majority of them were merely the sort of street trash, thugs, and minor criminals that the constables could easily lay hands upon and thus demonstrate to the Church their zealous prosecution of their duties.
The Pit could hold four hundred prisoners in something resembling comfort; perhaps six or seven hundred in what would be called dangerous overcrowding. On the day that the aforementioned Prince of Chaos was carried down the long, straight stairway cut through the living rock below the Courthouse that was the Donjon's sole entrance or exit, nearly fifteen hundred souls were crammed into this overflowing jar of flesh. There was nowhere one could sit or stand or lie without touching another living creature. The flesh-to-flesh contact that could be such a comfort in the harsh chill of the outside world became a positive horror in this damp bowl of rock, where the walls dripped with the endless meaty condensation of living breath; the Pit was as warm and moist as the inside of somebody else's mouth.
The Pit's sole supply of fresh water flowed through three trenches, each a hand-span wide; they curved out across the floor from a single source in one wall and converged again to empty into a single sump in the opposite wall. These trenches also served as the Pit's cloaca.
The politics of the Pit were simple: the healthiest, strongest, most privileged of the prisoners sat or lay nearest to the source. The internal pecking order described a strict geographic descent from that position to the opposite end: to those who through helplessness and timidity were forced to drink the urine-and-shit-fouled wastewater that drained from the happier climes forty meters upstream.
Hari Michaelson was to be secured in a cell along one of the corridors that radiated from the Pit balcony like spokes of a crooked wheel. Strapped to a litter, unable to move, he lay back silently, not even turning his face to see where he was being taken; he had been here before, and he remembered how it looked. The smell told him everything else he could possibly have wanted to know.
The Donjon guards who bore his litter carried it swiftly around the balcony, but his arrival did not go unremarked. The Pit itself fell silent, as hundreds of eyes tracked his passage; no sound could be heard above the low hush of massed breath and the gurgle of water slithering along trenches of stone.
Rumors of the eventual coming of the Enemy of God had whispered themselves from mouth to mouth on twilit street corners, around low fires, and within darkened pubs for months now. The Ascended Ma'elKoth was expected to return as well, and the two were to meet in final battle at noon of the seventh Assumption Day, just as their initial great conflict had occurred on the first. There were competing rumors, too: that Caine had been no more than a man, just as Ma'elKoth had been only a man, and that any "final battle" on Assumption Day would be merely a dumbshow to impress the gullible masses, a parable of Good versus Evil played out by mummers in Church employ; these rumors were popularly dismissed as Cainist propaganda.
Newer tales had been told, too, of the capture of Caine by the heroic friar Raithe of Ankhana. Raithe, it was said, had conjured the spirit of Saint Berne to sustain him in pitched battle against the Prince of Chaos and his whore-consort, the Aktir Queen once known as Pallas Ril. The epic battle had been fought from peak to peak in the distant mountains of the God's Teeth: the Aktiri legions had attacked with weapons of lightning and flame, against which the small band of friars led by young Raithe could set only their strength of purpose, their purity of heart, and their faith in the justice of Ma'elKoth.
It was told that the Aktir Queen had been slain in that battle by Raithe himself, even as Jereth Godslaughterer had been slain by Jhantho the Founder at Pirichanthe; it was told that the touch of Raithe's hand had reopened the wound of the Holy Stroke upon the Enemy of God, and that the Caine who approached Ankhana in chains was no more than a broken cripple. It was told that the Patriarch himself considered already the question of Raithe's possible sainthood.
Among the hundreds of pairs of eyes that tracked the litter's progress around the balcony were those of a former member of the Monastic diplomatic delegation to the Infinite Court: t'Passe of Narnen Hill, onetime Vice Ambassador to Damon of Jhanthogen Bluff. T'Passe was a thick-bodied, plain-faced woman whose eyes held a curiously unchanging expression, both manic and contemplative at once.
She had been among the very first of the Cainists to be arrested, at the embassy itself, on Saint Berne's Eve. Only a few days later, all the Monastics who had been arrested were officially freed; their status as diplomatic delegates of a sovereign nation demanded it. No fuss came from the Church over this; neither the Church nor the Empire had ever intended the detained Monastics to be imprisoned long enough to require a Monastic response.
T'Passe, however, had refused to leave the Donjon. Threatened with forcible ejection by the civil authorities—to avoid a confrontation with the Monasteries—she had resigned her post on the spot. She would have surrendered her Monastic citizenship as well, had not Acting Ambassador Damon assured her that the Monasteries would make no special effort to have her freed, now that she no longer filled a diplomatic position with the embassy.
"If to speak the truth is a crime, then I shall always be a criminal," she'd said. Now, as she watched Caine's progress on his litter, she might have been carved of the same rough stone as the Donjon itself.
The first words to break the silence were a murmur from an unidentifiable mouth. "He looks so helpless ..."
Another soft voice said, "Maybe it's not him," probably a Cainist's, from its hopeful tone. "It's not, huh? It can't really be him, can it?"
"It is he," t'Passe said stolidly. "I saw Caine at the Ceremony of Refusal after the Battle of Ceraeno.."
"But that was, like, twenty years ago—" someone objected, and t'Passe answered the objection with a flat shake of her head.
"I am not mistaken."
A hulking young ogrillo smirked around his tusks. "Kinda shoots yer whole theology in the ass, dun it?" he asked as he coolly examined his wickedly hooked fighting claw. Snickers came from his small circle of toadies.
"Cainism is not theology, Orbek," t'Passe responded with her customary mild courtesy. "It is philosophy."
"And you can call a turd a sandwich, but it still tastes like shit, hey?"
"I bow to your superior experience," t'Passe replied, "regarding the flavor of shit."
The ogrillo took this with a widened grin and a nod of the head. "Yeah, arright," he said in a friendly enough way. "But one of this day, this moutha yours—it gonna get busted, hey?"
"At your convenience." T'Passe stared calmly at him until he finally shrugged, laughed, and turned away, shouldering through the close-packed mass of prisoners with his toadies
After he left, t'Passe turned once again to the conversation that Caine's arrival had interrupted. Her interlocutor was a broad-shouldered fey, tall for his folk, who was folded into a sitting position beside one of the water trenches. One of his thighs looked subtly wrong, as though something malign grew within, and the shin of the other leg was knobbed a few inches below the knee, as though it had been broken and never properly healed.
He clasped his knees to his chest and looked up at the former Vice Ambassador with great golden eyes, their vertically slit pupils spread wide in the murk of the Pit. Despite the eyes, despite the thick brush of platinum-colored hair that stood stiffly out from his scalp to the length of the first joint of his finger, he did not look entirely elvish; his face had been scoured into a map of age, a contoured terrain of harsh living, until he looked almost human—almost like a man fast approaching his fiftieth birthday. "Why do you bait him like that?" said the elf who looked like a man. "What do you get out of it?"
"My desires are of no concern to you, unless they either coincide with or conflict with your own," she said severely; then she shrugged and hunkered down beside him. She lowered her voice and kept her face near his, so that they could converse softly through the constant general buzz of voices around them. "That is the dogma, at least. In truth, I enjoy the banter. It's a verbal display of dominance; you may have noticed that I am an intellectual bully."
"There is dogma? Cainist dogma?" the man-elf asked. "How can there be Cainist dogma?"
"Dogma in the sense of a set of shared premises, from which we reason. But you are avoiding the subject, Deliann. We were talking about what you want."
"I know," Deliann sighed. "That's just the problem."
"You must want something ..."
"I want a lot of things." He lifted one shoulder, dropped it again. "I want my brother to be alive. I want my father to be alive. I want—" She raised a hand. "You can't wring the bell, Deliann."