Blade of Tyshalle by Matthew Woodring Stover
Privately, hugging the thought to himself, shielding it from Ma'elKoth and Lamorak and all the other shades and all the countless, countless blank-faced billions of Them, he said: I won't.
He was only one against the billions, but he could wait, and he could watch.
If any chance came, he could act.
8
For two days, the riverbarge had toiled back upriver, pushed by chanting poleboys and pulled by the ox-teams that Master Dossaign had hired along the way. Now it was moored against the foot of the Old Town wall just upstream of Knights' Bridge.
To get the myriad necessary Imperial permissions had taken nearly a day and a half; over the last few hours, a team of Monastic engineers had hurriedly constructed the enormous swivel-mounted crane that towered above the wall's top. A double-sheaf block was lashed to the outer timber of the crane's arm, set up as a luff tackle; from the single-sheaf block at its lower end hung four chains. Each chain attached to a large wooden hook, nailed foursquare around the area on the barge's deck where Raithe still lay, still twisted in unnatural rictus, the sword still clutched in his hands.
The deck shelter had been cleared away, and now a magick-capable friar worked his way from corner to corner, slicing out the section of deck where Raithe lay with one of the embassy's prized relics: a Bladewand, recovered from the river six years before, believed to have once belonged to Pallas Ril.
Damon leaned through a crenel of the wall, the embassy's Master Keeper beside him. Damon picked obsessively at his fingertips, the skin dry, cracked and oozing blood. He was aware of the sidelong looks from the Master Keeper, but he could not make himself care. The man was an idiot, and he'd always been against Damon—just another of the petty voices who whispered together behind his back. They both silently watched the blue-white plane of energy flicker in and out of existence from the Bladewand's focal crystal.
The stone of the merlon beside him was moist and cool with dew. Damon leaned his face against it to let it draw some of his fever. Since this morning, he had had little to drink; his throat pained him, making swallowing a chore.
The barge captain stood nearby, wringing his hands, muttering under his breath.
"An inelegant solution," the Master Keeper murmured for perhaps the hundredth time.
Damon grunted. Yes, his solution was not elegant; neither was it cheap. But it should get Raithe into the Secure Vault without any loss of life.
"I say just shoot the son of a bitch," the barge captain growled from behind them. Between the damage done to his deck and being pushed around for four damn days by a bunch of Monastics who all acted like they owned the damn world, he had swallowed about as much crap as any one man can. "A couple guys with crossbows could settle that little cock right down. Whyn'tcha just shoot him?"
"Because he is a Monastic citizen in distress,' Damon said without turning, "and as such, he is by right entitled to whatever aid I can lawfully offer."
"What about my rights?" the captain said. "I got rights, too!" "Do you?"
The captain looked at the back of Damon's head, then at the several heavily armed friars who stood in various postures of attention around him on the wall. Some of them stared back at him with disturbingly expressionless faces.
Damon said, "Perhaps you would care to enumerate these rights?"
The captain lowered his head and stalked away, grumbling under his breath. "Sure, fine, go ahead and serve your goddamn Human Future, who cares if you're buttfuckin' people along the way."
The friar on deck below stood and stepped back, waving the depowered Bladewand three times over his head. The men who held the ropes hauled away, and the section of deck upon which Raithe lay lifted clear, swinging gently and twisting in the late afternoon sunlight.
They'd raise him, deck and all, up over the wall and lower him on the other side, directly onto the bed of a cart that waited in the alley below, with a team already harnessed. Then a slow, careful journey across the cobbled streets of Old Town to the rear of the Monastic Embassy, where ten more friars waited near the loading dock; they would carry the section of deck on their shoulders, slowly and gently, all the way into the Secure Vault, without ever coming close enough to the stricken Raithe to place themselves in danger from the deadly blade.
This operation had garnered a large crowd of curious onlookers, both on the docks opposite and lined up along the stone rail of Knights' Bridge. As the section of deck went higher and higher along the tall curve of the Old Town wall, spontaneous applause broke out here and there.
Damon barely heard it. He was mesmerized by Raithe's stillness—even a corpse would have relaxed from rigor long ago.
"He's been like this for days," Damon muttered to no one in particular. "How can he keep going? I'm exhausted just looking at him."
The Master Keeper shook his head. They had speculated endlessly about this, and no one had a reasonable answer. "Effort like that over this length of time--over half this length of time—would kill any ordinary man. I cannot imagine what he's using for strength."
"Whatever it is, he uses it still," Damon said grimly. "He's moving again."
Perhaps it was something in the motion of the piece of deck that had roused him, something in the gentle swing and sway as it rose beside the black stone of the wall; perhaps it was the laughter and applause from the crowd. For all Damon would ever know, it might have been some arcane perception of the plan to move him into the Secure Vault.
Some things are destined to remain mysteries.
All Damon knew was that something made Raithe roll, and brought the edge of Kosall against one of the chains that supported the deck; the chain parted with the bright schinnng of sandpaper scraping a silver bell.
"Haul away!" Damon shouted. "Haul, rot your eyes!"
The section of deck swung a little farther than it had before. Two more friars leaped to the rope, yanking on it desperately to get him up and over the wall, but Raithe rolled to the next corner and Kosall sheared the next chain. The crowd yelled in alarm as the deck section swung down like the trap door of a gallows and Raithe tumbled insensibly toward the deck of the barge some sixty-odd feet below.
Damon tracked his fall with grim eyes.
When Raithe missed the deckrail by inches and hit the water with a mighty splash, the crowd cheered again. The Master Keeper waved his arms and shouted, "Divers! Divers, go!" Friars on deck started toward the rail until Damon overpowered the uproar with a shockingly loud, "Hold your posts! That's an order!"
The Master Keeper turned on him. "Master Ambassador, you cannot—" "I can. It is you who can't. I am in authority here. Never presume to is-sue orders in my operation."
"But he might still be alive! He can still be saved!"
"Not by us," Damon said. He opened a hand down toward the impenetrably murky waters of the Great Chambaygen. "You would send men into that? And what will happen to those who are unlucky enough to find him?"
"I—I ..." In Damon's eyes, the Master Keeper could see the reflection of severed staff ends clattering across the barge's deck, and the image struck him speechless. "I am sorry, Master Ambassador," he gasped, when he had finally recovered his voice. "I wasn't thinking."
Damon said, "Fortunate for them that I was," and turned away. He leaned over the retaining wall and looked down at the roiled murk of the river for any sign that Ambassador Raithe might still be alive.
Minutes passed, and the stricken Ambassador never surfaced. Damon closed his eyes.
Some time later, the Master Keeper asked in a very soft and thoroughly chastened tone, "Do you think we might try divers now? He's surely drowned, and we must recover the sword. We cannot risk that it should fall into unwary hands."
"I am not at all sure he is dead," Damon said. "He should have been dead hours ago, or days. I do not know what sustained him then; I do not know that it does not sustain him still."
"What, then, shall we do?"
"What we would have done from the beginning, had I not been so enamored of my o
"Huh," the barge captain grunted from his place along the wall. "Woulda been simpler, you just shot him like I said, huh?"
"Simpler, yes," Damon agreed. He gave a heavy sigh. "You should go now. I find myself tempted to simplify the problem I have with you."
9
At the bottom of the river, he drowned in the Aktir Queen.
The river itself could not harm him, for the Aktir Queen defended his body with her power; like a child in the womb, breath was unnecessary while the living water flowed around and through him.
He fought as stubbornly and savagely as ever, though he knew he was dying. She continued to hurt him, and he continued to hurt her back. Her endurance was illimitable and her power overwhelming—but he could himself draw upon the power that sustained her, and use it to resist.
So the murder was taking a long, long time.
A day passed, and another; through the goddess' river-born senses, he could feel the slow wheel of the sun. There may have been more days, or less; though he could sense whether day or night clothed the world above, he could no longer remember if it had done so once, or three times, or five, or a dozen.
Slice by onion-skin slice, she cut away his life.
The final turning point came when some disconnected part of his brain wondered why, exactly, he was putting himself through this. What, exactly, did he have to live for?
To watch Caine die? He had taken his revenge. He had wounded Caine as deeply as he himself had been wounded; he had proved to the world that the Enemy of God was no more than a man.
He discovered that he was no longer interested in Caine's death. Now, with the final darkness closing in around his mind, he discovered that he was no longer interested in anyone's death.
Perhaps he was the Caineslayer no longer.
Perhaps he had never been.
He remembered vividly Caine's despair, his fantasies of oblivion, visions of death seductive and sweet. He thought of how Caine had longed for the emptiness, and the end of pain. The billowing clouds of darkness that would fade until light and dark were no longer even memory
Here, at the final link of his long and tangled chain of destiny, he found, unexpectedly, a choice.
He chose.
It's better this way, he thought, and let himself fall into the infinite lack.
10
Late in the dark of autumn, under stone-grey clouds that bleached sunlight to the color of dust, new grass sprang up from the banks of the Great Chambaygen. Among that ankle-high jungle of brilliant young green, crocuses raised their faces and unfolded like warm snowflakes toward an invisible sun. Trees creaked and shivered as new leaves opened like fists that had been held closed against the approach of winter.
The hills below Khryl's Saddle echoed with the gunshot reports of bighorns clashing in rut, and birds proclaimed their territory with bursts of song; along the river's length, horses kicked and bucked, cats howled, dogs chased one another through the unseasonably warm breeze. Even slower, duller species such as humanity felt a quickening surge in the blood: the intoxicated fizz inside the head that says It's spring.
And so it was: all of spring in a single day.
The streets of Ankhana suddenly burgeoned with young corn twisting upward from horse turds; flagstones cracked and split into green-swarmed rubble. Oak and ash, maple and cottonwood splashed out from seeds that should have drowned within the river itself, curling branches up the outer walls of Old Town and twining the piles that supported Ankhana's bridges. Windowboxes became cascading riots of new greenery, and trellises vanished under the sudden spread of climbing vines. In moments Ankhana could have been a city abandoned to jungle decades before: a skeleton giving shape to the verdant explosion that consumed it.
This was no false spring; for, after all, spring is precisely the earth's echo of a goddess, when she shouts I AM ALIVE.
Darkness is the greatest teacher.
A tribe of the Quiet Land once had a rite of passage in which the aspirant was buried alive, deep beneath the earth, where no light could find him and no ear could hear his sobs and his screams. This was the final rite; after a span of days spent in such a coffin the aspirant was released, and numbered among the wise.
They did this because they knew:
Darkness is a knife that peels away the rind of what you think you know about yourself. The shades of your pretenses, the tones of your illusions, the layers of deception that glaze your life into the colors that tint your world—all mean nothing in the darkness. No one can see them, not even you.
Darkness hides everything except who you really are.
SEVENTEEN
They carry me down the steps until they find a Shafter who doesn't move when the officer kicks her; good odds she's dead, from the bloat of her belly, but it's hard to be sure. There's so much filth caked on her skin that the lamp can't pick up postmortem lividity. She might only be catatonic. They unlock her wrist from its wall shackle, and drag her down toward the sump at the foot of the Shaft.
The officer notices my gaze following her. He smirks.
"Yeah, I heard," he says smugly. "That's how you got out last time. That's probably how you'll go out this time, too—it's just that they got iron bars set in the stone down there now. With just about this much space between them." He shows me with one hand, like he's holding a loaf of invisible French bread. "So we got a new piece of equipment, too, right next to the sump: a sausage grinder. One of those bigass ones. We bought it off Milo, the livery guy. Big enough to take a half-ton porker. Plenty big enough for you."
Sooner than I would have liked, the gleam from the guard's lamp picks up the grinder's black-crusted shape: a stone idol, maw open for offerings. The guard shoves the woman in headfirst and inches the wheel ahead a few times until the teeth engage in her hair; then he lets go of her torso and cranks for all he's worth. It's geared way down, to be used by one man, so he has to yank that wheel around a few times before the meat paste it makes of her starts to churn out its ass end and drip into the sump.
The hot billow of stench that rolls up the Shaft is actually a little comforting: at least I know she was already dead.
The detail officer unlocks my manacles and says, "Strip down," and then he whacks me one after I again suggest he should fuck off. He cuts away my shirt with a small hooked knife that might have been designed for exactly that use, and then we have a bit of low comedy while they try to strip the breeches off my useless dangling legs, until the officer slaps their hands aside and goes after my pants with the knife. If I had a sense of humor left, I'd get a chuckle out of the look on his face when he discovers another layer under the breeches: those burlap bandages of Deliann's, now dark and stiff with dried pus. He cuts those off as well, then makes one of his flunkies bundle them up and carry them. "Right-handed or left?"
This time, I don't even have to speak: the look on my face is eloquent enough to earn me another whack.
They drop me in a heap in the dead woman's muck, lock the wall shackle around my right wrist, and tramp off up the broad, shallow steps of stone, taking their lamp's paltry glow with them. The last of the light vanishes above, leaving me in the dark with the whimpers and screams and soft hoarse giggling.
And the smell.
I know this smell.
I have drowned in this before.
It's the smell of 3F in the Mission District: third floor in the back, farthest from the stairwell, two rooms and one walk-in closet barely big enough for an eight-year-old boy to have a cot.
It's the smell of the chemical toilet inside Rover's seat.
It's Dad's smell.
The slow shit-slickened slide
I have been eaten by my nightmare.
The mouth of Hell has yawned beneath my feet, and I will fall forever.
2
I see the darkness of the hours and days before me, identical to whatever hours and days behind: no light to define the world, n
Not people. Shafters. We're none of us people anymore. The next guy upslope has dysentery, and every time he lets go more acid shit he starts to cry. He keeps telling me how sorry he is.
I tell him we're all sorry.
I don't tell anyone who I am. Who I was.
I mean, how can I?
How do I know?
No sleep. No sleep ever again: the screaming never stops. They will scream until their anguish erodes the last of my sanity. That's what I tell myself, but I know I do sleep .. .
Because every once in a while, I awaken from a memory of light.
I awaken from the touch of my daughter's hand, from the scent of my wife's skin. I awaken to the endless night and stench and screams. Sometimes beside me there is a wooden trencher with broth-soaked bread or a bit of cheese, that I can find by touch over the stone. I eat with shit-caked hand.
Once or twice I'm awake when the trusty slouches down the stairs with his lamp in hand: he's some kind of wetbrain, mismatched drooping eyes and a line of drool trailing from slackly open lips. He looks at us, but I cannot imagine what his semifunctional brain makes of what he sees.
Here in the Shaft, I might slip from life to death seamlessly, never realizing that I have passed; how should death be different? The funny thing is, I'm pretty much okay with this. More than okay.
This is no demon-drained numbness. This isn't even a grip-jawed I can handle it. It's a feeling warm and chill, a tingling of skin and sweet taste on the tongue, an expansion of heart within my chest so alien to me that some hours or days or years pass before I can really figure out what it is.