Blade of Tyshalle by Matthew Woodring Stover

  I gotcher Holy Stroke right here!

  Come on, bring him down! someone shouted at the trusties. Bring him down! and more prisoners took up the call, and more, until their voices washed together into an oceanic roar.

  Deliann barely heard it; he was fascinated by the swirl of black Flow. It darkened visibly around the small dark broken man until Deliann wondered if he might have been able to see it even with his normal sight. It poured in through the walls of the Pit as though the rock were empty air, and the small dark broken man seemed to draw it into himself, inhaling it as though taking a deep, deep breath of power.

  He used one hand against the litter pole at his side to lever himself up into a sitting position, and he looked down into the jeering, hooting mob of the Pit.

  And he smiled.

  "Oh, my god," Deliann whispered. "Oh, my sweet loving god—"

  It was the smile that did it: the white teeth wolflike within the fringe of ragged black beard, the eyes that burned with a cold dark flame like obsidian ice.

  You are just begging me to kick your fucking ass.

  Yes, in fact, I am. That's exactly right.

  And the identical grin, the identical cold dark flame within the eyes, undimmed in a memory more than a quarter of a century old: I'm into it.

  The shock of recognition drove him right out of mindview. The instant staggering pain from his legs unstrung him, and he sagged against t'Passe's arm. "What's wrong, Deliann?" she asked. "What happened? Are you all right?"

  The goddess had spoken of this man, and told Deliann that he wanted to be remembered to him—but Deliann had never dreamed of being reminded like this. He couldn't even make himself think the name. "That's not Caine," Deliann gasped. "It's not Caine."

  "It is," t'Passe assured him stolidly.

  The small dark broken man lifted his free hand as a fist and slowly, deliberately, as though savoring the sweetness of one moment's surpassing joy, he turned the back of his fist toward the Pit. He grinned down on the hostile mob.

  And then he gave them the finger.

  There came a second of silence, as though everyone together had drawn a single breath, and in that silence his voice could be heard clearly: cheerfully brisk, hard as flint and dark as burnt coffee. "Fuck you all, shitheels," he said. "You want some of this? Step up and take a fucking bite."

  Deliann barely heard the howls that answered; that voice struck sparks within his mind, and Deliann flashed on him.

  13

  The flash took him instantly, involuntarily: it crushed his bones between its teeth and sucked out their marrow, shattered his skull like a nutshell, drew out his guts with strokes of a barbed-wire tongue. Kris Hansen had written, What the life you have chosen to lead will cost you, I can't begin to imagine.

  He no longer had to imagine.

  The flash whipped him to a day years before: it crumpled him on arena sand with a cooling corpse beneath his back and a sword through his spine. With one hand he took the hilt of that sword to trigger its magick, while with the other he pulled the neck of a traitor across the blade. The traitor's head came off in his hand, and he flipped the head like a ball into the lap of the god who knelt alongside. The god stammered out the words Hari had died to hear, the words that would save him and the goddess he loved-and as the prismatic haloes of the Winston Transfer limned the edges of the world, to draw him and anyone he touched back into hell, he reached out . . . and took that kneeling god's hand.

  Why?

  To this day, Hari had never thought to wonder.

  In the answer to that simple question might be the central truth of his life.

  Deliann remembered, all those years ago, feeling that this man had been more real than he, that the murderous, charismatic streetpunk he had known was in touch with some fundamental structure of existence; he recalled dreaming of touching that reality himself. Now he had: a spiral galaxy of pain and loss wheeled within his chest.

  The flash ended in the same instant it' began. Deliann, breathless, clung to the woman at his side. Above, the small dark broken man waved negligently at the trusties like a noble directing bearers of a sedan chair, and they started down the stairbridge once more.

  Deliann put his lips against t'Passe's ear to be heard through the shouts of the prisoners. "Get me to him. Please, t'Passe," he said. "We have to protect him—they'll tear him apart!"

  She shook her head and leaned close to shout in his ear in turn. "It's already handled!" she said. "I have men waiting to receive the Caine at the foot of the stairs."

  "We should go—we should be there. We have to be there," Deliann insisted.

  T'Passe cocked her head, giving him a long slow considering look before answering, more quietly now. "And what is it that you think you can do for the Caine? Deliann, you can barely stand."

  "All right," Deliann said, sagging. "All right, but—"

  He looked at the roof, the floor, the prisoners around them, anywhere but her. Finally, he said, "It's not what I can do for him; it's what he can do for me. I need to talk to him, just for a minute." He hated how desperate--how wounded—this made him sound, but t'Passe either didn't notice or did not care. He could not tell her: Because he once told me I was the bravest son of a bitch he ever met. He could not tell her: Because I deserted him twenty-seven years ago. "You keep asking me what I want. I want .. . I need ... to talk with that man. Maybe just for a minute; I have to talk to him."

  T'Passe squinted at him as though trying to see something tiny and dark inside his head; then her face cleared into a sudden smile. "All right," she said. "I wouldn't mind a word with him myself."

  14

  With t'Passe to elbow her ungentle way through the press, the two of them reached the ring of grimly jubilant Cainists who held back the other prisoners only a moment after the trusties had ascended once again. There had been some scuffling—a few in the crowd were already bleeding, as were a couple of the Cainists—and the prisoners were giving them a little room, now. The trusties had already taken the empty litter back up the stairs, and the guards above began winching the bridge back up into place.

  The ring of Cainists parted to allow t'Passe and Deliann within.

  The small dark broken man sat on the stone, his legs splayed nervelessly before him. He scanned the ring of Cainists around him like a wolf in the midst of a herd of caribou; when he looked up at t'Passe, he scowled and waved irritably at the backs of the men and women who protected him. "You the head freak of this sideshow?"

  "I am t'Passe of Narnen Hill, formerly Vice Ambassador to the Infinite Court," she said stolidly. "I do not know what a sideshow is, but if I take your meaning correctly, then yes, I am the . . . head freak."

  "Monastic," he grunted. "I knew from the way you argue: like you're teaching half-witted kids."

  "You could hear?"

  He pulled his lips back over his teeth. "I've been praying that somebody would kill you."

  "At the Festival of the Assumption, your prayer will be answered. Does this please you, to have the power of your faith so amply demonstrated?"

  "Ask me then," he said, and leaned to one side, bending his neck so that he could see around her broad body. "And who's your puppy, here? What's his story?"

  T'Passe shifted her weight, and his gaze met Deliann's for the first time. Those black eyes widened, then narrowed. "Well," he said. "Fuck me like a goat."

  "Hari," Deliann said breathlessly. Even now, he couldn't make himself believe this was happening. "It's you, isn't it? You really are. You're Hari Michaelson—"

  A melancholy half smile slowly developed under those narrowed eyes. "Been a long time, Kris."

  The shouts of the prisoners had already begun to fade toward the usual undertone of grumbling, but the roaring in Deliann's ears made up the difference. Under that roar was a kind of slack-jawed wonder: the meeting of their eyes had peeled back the layers of Deliann's life. It was as though the past twenty-seven years had been only preparation, training, rehearsal, for a part he cou
ld only flee then, but now, finally, had the strength to play.

  I can do this, he thought. At last, I'm ready.

  "Yes," he said finally. "Yes, it has been a long time. I'm not Kris Hansen anymore, Hari. You should call me Deliann."

  "Yeah? Like the Mithondionne prince, huh?"

  "That would be me," Deliann said.

  "You're the Changeling Prince?" Hari shook his head, smiling as though at some private joke.

  I suppose you could say I'm the Changeling King, Deliann thought, but he said, "Something like that."

  "No shit? Well, all right, then."

  The small dark broken man leaned to one side, taking the weight off one hand so that he could offer it. "Pleased to meetcha, Deliann," he said. "I guess you can call me Caine."

  "And so: you are," Deliann murmured. "You really are, after all: you're Caine."

  Hari shrugged, and his fingers tangled themselves in the stained cotton breeches covering his motionless legs. He shook himself like a man holding off a nightmare. "Yeah," he said. "I'd love to play catch-up for a couple hours, but I got a move to make while I still have everybody's attention. Tell me one thing."

  "What do you need to know?"

  He flexed his hands and cracked his knuckles one by one: a series of flat, deliberate clicks of lethal intent, like bullets being loaded into a pistol. "Who do I have to kill to get a fucking drink around here?"

  There is a cycle of tales that begins long, long ago, when the human gods decreed that all their mortal children shall know sorrow, loss, and defeat in the course of the lives they were given.

  Now, it came to pass that one particular man had run nearly his entire alloted span, and he had never known defeat; for him, the only defeat was surrender. It soon followed that the king of the human gods undertook to teach this particular man the meaning of defeat. And in the end—the common end, for all who contend with gods—this particular man surrendered, and died.

  But among the wise, the tale of this dead man does not end in death.

  This dead man lay unquiet in the grave; the earth's embrace could not hold him. His corpse shifted and writhed, and moaned with the memory of life.

  One day a wanderer sought a path out from a dark and mazy wood. This wanderer followed a wind from beyond the world, and that wind led him to this unquiet grave. The wanderer looked upon the grave and spoke to the corpse within it, saying: Dig deeper, and find a darker tomb.

  For the wanderer was the crooked knight, and he had learned that only by descending can one rise.

  FIFTEEN

  The Patriarch's left hand trembled ever so slightly, as the tip of its middle finger marked a drier line through the sweat that beaded his brow. Then this unsteady hand slid along his cheek to cup the corner of his jaw, feeling for fever; a moment later it massaged the swollen glands in his throat.

  "Is His Radiance unwell?" the Eyes of God officer asked somewhat anxiously. "Shall I summon a healer?"

  "Not at all," Toa-Sytell murmured. Even if he did feel ill—which he didn't, not at all, not one little bit—he certainly wouldn't show it before this officer.

  The man could not be trusted.

  "Continue your report," he directed absently. He listened with barely half his attention to the officer's tale of the meeting between Duke Toa-M'Jest and Caine in the Donjon cell. A premonition muttered inside his head: a dark echo of calamity's swift approach.

  "And the Duke defended the Patriarch's honor quite vigorously," the Eye of God was saying.

  "Of course he did," Toa-Sytell murmured. "He always does. It's how he thinks to deceive me."

  "Your Radiance?"

  "Nothing, Captain. Continue."

  "So the cell has been cleared, and Caine is being moved down into the Pit even as we speak. Shall we post additional guards?"

  "Mmm? Why?"

  "Well, I—" The Eyes captain shifted uneasily. "I had understood that His Radiance was concerned for Caine's safety."

  "Me? Oh, no, no. No. That was the Duke," Toa-Sytell said. "That was his excuse."

  "Your Radiance, that Pit is filled with men and subs that hate him. Death will inevitably follow—"

  "Unquestionably," the Patriarch murmured. "But I very much doubt this death will be Caine's."

  2

  It takes all of a minute for me to get a grip on the way shit works in the Pit.

  Dad would have loved this place: a culture in a bottle. They've already cycled through warlordism into a classic water monopoly—a real Lords of the Nile kind of thing, with the Serpents as the ruling civil authority and this t'Passe and her buttlickers as the fundamentalist insurgency out to reform by destabilizing yadda yadda yadda horseshit.

  And there's a lotta goddamn Serpents down here, couple hundred at least. No surprise: The Serpents were always the Kingdom of Cant's biggest rival. Figures Majesty would use Toa-Sytell's Cainist-purge shit to pay off old grudges.

  I beckon to this t'Passe character. "Who's the hump?" I ask, nodding at an ogrillo—a big bastard with fighting claws the size of kukhris—who walks around like all he lives for is fighting and fucking and he's not particular about which he does to who. He's carrying a lot of scars for a 'rillo pup his age, too. Six flunkies orbit him in swaggering arcs, and he's giving me the fisheye: he's got something to say, but he's waiting for me to give him an excuse.

  "He is called Orbek," she says. "He's become part of the Serpent organization."

  "Perfect. Get him over here for me, will you?"

  She stiffens. "Am I your servant?" she asks with a frosty stare. I give her a quizzical lift of the brow. "You mean you're not?"

  "We don't worship you, Caine," she says, getting that hectoring school‑

  master tone that makes me want to pop her one. "You are not a god to us, but rather the symbol of a philosophical stance—"

  "Yeah, whatever, shut up, huh? You gonna do it, or should I ask some-body else?"

  "I, ah ..." She blinks, frowns while she tries to decide what her doctrinal purity might require, then sighs. "I suppose . . . I'll go get him." "Hey, thanks."

  Hansen—Deliann, whatever—watches her waddle off, and he shakes his head like he'd find this all pretty funny if he wasn't so tired. "I don't think you've changed at all, Hari."

  If only that were true.

  I look him over, and I have to look away. He's not easy on the eyes; some of it is that I keep expecting to see that white plastic postsurgical mask of his, but most of it is that the last twenty-seven years haven't done him a hell of a lot of good. He's got a dent in his skull that's only half scabbed over—like somebody rapped him a good one with a sword—and his hair's growing out screwy, patchy and ragged like he's got the mange, and every time I get a glimpse of his legs it makes me glad I'm pretty much dead below the waist.

  I wonder if it's as hard for him to look at me.

  Deliann Mithondionne, the Changeling Prince, whipass-in-residence for T'farrell Ravenlock: a More in Sorrow Than in Anger legbreaker. He still has those sad puppy-eyes, though; probably still tells himself that Violence is the Last Resort.

  He lowers his head like he's afraid to look at me. "The Flowmind ..." he begins hesitantly, "... I mean, the goddess—uh, Pallas Ril—she came to me a few days ago."

  I manage to get out a word. "Yeah?"

  "She told me that she could create a countervirus, one that would give immunity to HRVP ..." His voice trails off hopefully, and I can't look at him because I don't want to watch that hope go out of his eyes.

  "She could have." I bite down on the words hard enough to chip a tooth. "If she'd lived."

  "Then it's true," he says in a voice so small he might have squeezed it out his tear ducts.

  "It usually is. That's the thing about stories. One way or another." "There's another story," he murmurs. "About you and she, that the two of you were—"

  "Yeah, that's right," I tell him. "Eleven years. Almost."

  And I can still taste the hot copper of her blood. I can still smell the steam that
swirled up from her severed heart.

  In his eyes, now, I can see a brutal comprehension. He whispers, "How do you stand it?"

  I shake myself, hard. I can't let him drag me back down into my private darkness. "I don't have to stand it," I mutter. "A few days from now, neither of us will have to stand it anymore."

  3

  Now t'Passe's coming back, with Orbek and his flunkies sauntering along behind, kicking prisoners out of their way and generally making assholes of themselves. The circle of guys t'Passe put around me to hold back the crowd parts to let her through. "At your request," she says, nodding toward Orbek.

  "Swell." I swing a hand around at the ring of Cainists. "Now tell your lapdogs to stand down."

  "Caine," she says with exaggerated patience, "nearly every prisoner in the Pit is facing execution, accused of Cainism. Falsely accused. You are not, as you might imagine, popular here. My lapdogs, as you call them, are all that stand between you and an ugly death."

  "Nothing stands between any of us and an ugly death," I remind her. "Now fuck off, and take your puppies with you."

  Her face ices over, and she waves to the Cainists, who reluctantly move a few paces away. The other prisoners start to crowd around, and a lot of them are shouting Down in front! and shit like that because people farther away want to be able to see. Orbek has his own flunkies clear a little space around us, while he stands there with his gorilla arms folded around his barn-sized chest

  Pretty soon things quiet down; everybody's watching. Over at the head of the water trenches, a bunch of the Serpents stand on the bench ledge that rings the Pit, staring and grinning.

  "You got something to say to me?" Orbek growls. He's got a trace of a Boedecken accent, which explains the attitude. He might even be a Black Knife. Could I be that lucky?

  "Nah," I tell him. "I just wanted to see you up close. You look stupid enough to be a Limp Dick"

  He takes a couple long strides and towers over me; his fighting claws swing out over his closed fists. "I am Black Knife. My dead father is Black Knife, from before. From when the land likes Black Knives," he snarls.