Blade of Tyshalle by Matthew Woodring Stover

  I don't think I'll manage another.

  I lay the girdle out on the floor and roll myself onto it so I can buckle it around my waist. Huh. Nice knife. I tie the club to the girdle by its leather thong, and contemplate my next move.

  I have no fucking clue how I'm going to get through the Shaft door, how I can get past the guards outside it, or what I can do out in the Pit, but: First things first.

  That Shaft door is a long hundred feet or more above me, up a slope of unevenly worn slick stairs, and a twitch or two of my no-longer-entirely-dead legs is a few damn miles short of an evening stroll.

  Well, y'know: you have to crawl before you can walk.

  I stick the sheathed dirk under the girdle at the small of my back, because I'm going up on my belly. Lamp in my left hand, keys in my right, I start pulling myself up the Shaft with my elbows.

  I head for daylight, an inch at a time.

  2

  Orbek rubbed his stinging eyes with his free hand, then stared again at the jerky hook-and-pause of the point of light far below. He couldn't figure out what could be making it move like that; it looped and stopped and looped again, a stuttering spiral like the beckon-lamp of a hungry marshghoul.

  The hot damp air of the Shaft became a snort of winter down his back.

  He'd never heard of a marshghoul coming into a city. They stick to their swamps, where they can lure a guy off the road with their beckon-lamps till the unlucky bastard gets lost, then they suck out his eyeballs and all his juices and push his corpse down into the bogs and nobody ever sees them again, except maybe someday when somebody's cutting peat a hundred years later they find him, his skin gone to leather and his empty eye sockets slick and gummy, and if a marshghoul ever did come to a city, it'd sure as shit start in the Shaft, because the Shaft was as good as a bog and you can't get away and now it was coming for him like his dam always said it would

  And if he kept thinking about it, he would start to scream, and he didn't have much voice left anyway. He'd pretty well used it up a couple hours after they chained him here.

  These other guys, though, their voices never did seem to go out. They were still screaming—and these screams and sobs and moans and shit were sounding different, now; not so hopeless, not so scared, not at all like he figured a guy'd howl when a marshghoul started sucking out his eyeball.

  Orbek didn't really believe in marshghouls, anyway.

  The light came closer, rising through the Shaft's murky gloom, and it was a lamp: a lamp in the hand of something that pulled itself up the steps of the Shaft with its elbows. And as it approached it might as goddamn well have been a marshghoul, considering the sizzle of superstitious terror it sent down Orbek's spine when he picked up the glint of its eyes and then the gleam of its teeth, and Orbek figured out what it was.

  It was Caine.

  And he was smiling.

  Orbek had a fair amount of time to figure out what he would say, while he watched Caine inch his way up the Shaft. When Caine got close enough that he might be able to hear through the din of the Shafters' howls, Orbek hid his maimed hands behind him and said, "Hey."

  Caine stopped. He twisted his head so he could look at Orbek past the flame of the lamp in his left hand. He set the lamp on the floor and slowly levered himself up to one elbow, and stared at Orbek for what felt like a couple of years.

  Then he said, "Hey."

  Only two things in the Shaft had reality for Orbek then. One was the look in Caine's eyes; the other was the iron ring of keys that he held in his left hand.

  "Good to see you," Orbek said.

  Caine said, "Yeah?"

  "Yeah. Better, though: to see those keys."

  "I'll bet." He grunted something that might have been a chuckle. "You don't ask how I got them. How I got loose."

  Orbek shrugged. "Don't matter, hey?"

  Caine nodded thoughtfully. "Y'know, Orbek, you and I, we're maybe a lot more alike than we are different."

  "Maybe we are," Orbek said. "You gonna let me loose?"

  "I'm thinking about it. What are you doing in the Shaft?"

  "Sittin' on my fuck-me ass."

  "You know what I mean."

  Orbek shrugged. Now Caine's gaze became hard to bear; he had to look away, up into the darkness that shrouded the door. "That don't matter, either."

  "Maybe not to you."

  Orbek felt himself flush. He rattled his chain and coughed in his throat, and hoped Caine would let him off the hook, but the bastard just lay there staring until Orbek had to go on. "To explain ain't easy."

  "Try."

  "After they take you away ... everything just goes to shit, hey? Thinkin' she's boss now, t'Passe orders everybody around, but nobody likes her, and everybody splits up into these little shitty groups that all kind of hate each other and, well, shit, I don't know. If you ain't come back, we all die anyway. So I figure I maybe chain my ass in here with you, so if you do come out, I can maybe help. Be your legs, like before."

  Caine squinted at him. "Yeah?"

  "So I throw shit at the guards. Whenever they come out on the catwalk. I lob a couple clods of shit, and here I am. I call you. I call your name and call again, but I don't hear no answer. Pretty soon, my voice gives out. You're dead, I figure. How come you don't answer?"

  Caine said steadily, "I was busy."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah. I had my mind on other things. What about Deliann?" "Dead, I guess."

  "You guess?"

  Orbek shrugged. "He's pretty sick when I come in here. That leg's bad. Don't think he's got a day left, and that's a while ago."

  Caine stared down into the infinite black below.

  "So," Orbek said after a while. "That's the story, hey? Unlock me, you gonna?"

  Caine slowly drew back his gaze and met Orbek's eye. "Maybe I'm thinking you'd be safer down here."

  "Don't do me no favor, Caine." Slowly, painfully, Orbek pulled his hands out from behind his back and showed Caine the crusted, filthy bandages around his wrists, where his fighting claws had once been. Where now there were only pus-weeping stumps.

  Caine hissed through his teeth.

  "More than I expect, they give me, hey?"

  Caine murmured, "Holy shit."

  "Boltcutters," Orbek said. "Click clack. Click fuck-me clack You understand what they do to me? Do you?"

  Caine's answer was a bleak stare.

  "They do to me what you do to Black Knives those years ago: cut off what makes me me. Now I never get a bitch. Never get pups. What good's being safe? A good death is all I got left. A good death. Honor on my clan."

  "I hear you," Caine said.

  "Let me loose."

  He didn't move. "Maybe I'm safer with you down here."

  "Maybe you are." Orbek showed him his tusks. "What you gotta do, do."

  Caine thought about it long enough to set Orbek's heart pounding against his ribs; then he shrugged. "Yeah, whatever," he said, and tossed Orbek the keys.

  Orbek unlocked his manacle, and rose. He looked down on the crippled human at his feet. "Here we are again, Caine," he said.

  "Yeah."

  "I can kill you now."

  Caine didn't answer.

  "You know it's true," Orbek said. "You know that armor, that club, they don't help you. That wrestling you do, that don't help you either. Not this time: When you give me freedom, you give me your life. You understand what that means?"

  "That I'm a goddamn idiot?"

  "Maybe I die here in the Shaft. Maybe on the fire Assumption Day. But if I kill you now, I kill the man who cut off the Black Knives. Honor on me. Honor on my clan."

  "So?" Caine said, flat and cold, waiting.

  Orbek shrugged. "So maybe I got a better idea."

  He knelt at Caine's side and stripped the bandage from his right wrist. Its crust stuck to his infected stump. He ripped the bandage free, bringing an ooze of black blood, thick with pus.

  "This is my battle wound," he said, and he laid his stump on one of t
he gangrenous sores on Caine's leg. "This is your battle wound. Our wounds are one. Our blood is one."

  "What the fuck are you doing?"

  Orbek's lips pulled back from his tusks. "I'm adopting you." "The fuck you are."

  "Black Knife, you are now. You give me your life. This is how I take it." "Are you nuts? I'm the guy that—"

  "I know who you are," Orbek said. "You remember who I am. Dishonor you put on the Black Knives. Now that dishonor, you share." He showed Caine his tusks. "Now what honor you win, you share that, too. Good deal for Black Knives, hey?"

  "Why would I want to join your fucking clan?"

  "What you want? Who cares?" Orbek rose, grinning. "You don't choose your clan, Caine. Born Black Knife, you're Black Knife. Born Hooked Arrow, you're Hooked Arrow. Now: Say that you are Black Knife, then let's go kill some guards, hey?"

  Caine lay on the stone, silent.

  Orbek growled, "Say it."

  The lamp gave Caine's eyes a feral glitter.

  "All right," he said at length. For all his tiny, mostly useless human teeth, he managed a surprisingly good mirror of Orbek's tusk display. "Like you say: I am Black Knife."

  3

  Deliann felt, rather than saw, the slow amble of the drooling trusty who followed the arc of the balcony to the Shaft door, bearing his sack of hard bread and his jug of water.

  Deliann's paste-colored head centered a dark stain of sweat, sweat that rolled down his face like tears and spread across a makeshift pallet of rolled shirts and ragged trousers and tattered robes layered over each other: clothing of dead prisoners. A few days ago, the Pit folk had begun stripping corpses before the guards could get down and pull the bodies out; now, most of the seriously ill prisoners possessed at least improvised, provisional beds on which to die. "Get them up," he whispered. "You don't have much time."

  No answer came from the translucent shadows that crowded his uncertain vision. "T'Passe?" He forced his voice louder, trying for a shout. He managed a strangled croak. "T'Passe, are you there?"

  A strong hand took his. "Deliann. I am beside you."

  He rolled his head toward her voice. At his side crouched a slightly more substantial shadow; this shadow had a hint of solidity, half obscuring the twisting lattice of energy in motion that had washed away the reality of the Pit and all within it. Deliann frowned, and squinted.

  "Night threads," he murmured. He had to make her understand. "Night threads draw shadows from the moon ..." No, that wouldn't help; he lifted a weakly trembling hand and tried to massage his vision into focus. "Everything seems to be falling apart . . . ?"

  T'Passe sighed and squatted beside him, lowering herself along with her voice. "Everything is falling apart," she said.

  Deliann took her hand in his clammy, shaking fingers. "It seems like it's falling apart. But that's only seeming. It's falling together. It's gathering toward a center that isn't here yet."

  The swelling on Deliann's thigh had risen and reddened and finally burst; its corrupt milk lent his makeshift pallet a fouler stench of rot. The abscess left behind was a crater lined with dead flesh, grey and slick and oozing, big enough that t'Passe could have put her fist inside it. Fever scattered his best attempts at coherence. "This is our chance," he said. "This is the blow we can strike in Hari's war."

  "I don't understand."

  "I can't help that," he sighed. Words were a microscope, the truth a planet. Even if he could describe the pale sliver of the shadow of the truth that he could see, could she understand? Indrawing concentric rings of force that shifted and flowed across two universes, narrowing and refining and focusing into a pinpoint star of right now, of right here; the scalar self-similarity of fractal reality from the interplay of quarks to the event horizons of all the universes—what words could make these comprehensible to a mind that had not experienced them directly?

  He struggled to pull himself below the waves of fever, down into the calm depths of the here and now, down to where he could feel the gathering storm of violence that lowered upon the world, the Empire, the city, the Donjon. Violence swarmed the Courthouse like bees around his head; violence forced up the sump below the Shaft like rape. Violence shimmered toward existence on the Pit balcony: it gathered like pus within an abscess, stretching dying skin above. It grew where the trusty stood, waiting for the guards at the Shaft to open the door.

  And on that same spot, a white flare of power sparked from outside the world. Knotted threads of black Flow streamed toward it, twisting themselves into strings, then ropes, then hawsers pulsing with furious energy. "Get them up," Deliann whispered. "Get everyone up. Get them on their feet. Just do it. This is your only chance."

  "You heard him," t'Passe said roughly, speaking toward the shadows above. "What are you waiting for?"

  Some of the translucent shadows moved away from him then, slipping past and through each other. Throughout the Pit, shadows overlapped and deepened as they came to their feet, and the sizzle of violence around was joined by one within.

  T'Passe's shade leaned close. "What are we waiting for?"

  "Not what, but who," Deliann whispered. A surge of energy hit him like nausea; he could barely choke out the words. "Caine is coming." The guards unbarred the Shaft door.

  "Deliann—" He heard the despair in her voice; she still didn't understand. She still didn't believe. "Deliann, Caine is dead."

  "No," Deliann said.

  "Yes. He's been in the Shaft for days. With open sores on his legs, deep ones. By now, he is certainly dead."

  "No," Deliann said. "T'Passe, I was wrong. He isn't coming." "I know," she said sadly.

  The Shaft door swung open, and the trusty started to enter. "He isn't coming," Deliann said. "He's here."

  4

  The bar scrapes across the outside of the Shaft door.

  Orbek shows me his tusks and hefts the club. The hauberk fits him like the skin on an overcooked sausage. I'm naked again, but I don't mind. I've got the knife.

  That's all the clothes I need.

  Orbek wishes me luck: "Die fighting, Caine."

  I raise the knife in salute. "Die fighting."

  Then a crack of lamplight widens along one side of the Shaft door, and I tell him to "Go goddamn go DO IT!" because there is a time to be smart and careful and look before you leap, and there is a time to just rock and fucking roll.

  Orbek plants a splay-clawed foot against the slats and gives the door a kick that could stagger a bull. The door booms open and the wetbrain is standing there with his mouth slack, one thin line of astonished drool stretching for the floor for maybe half a second until Orbek steps up and pegs him with the club. He falls, howling, and the doorway is clear, and Shafters pour out.

  The guards to either side of the door don't even get a chance to unsling their clubs; Orbek and I found maybe eighteen or twenty Shafters—mostly human, but a couple primals and three or four 'rillos—who were still sane enough to give a coherent answer to the question: "You want to die down here in the dark, or up there in the light?"

  The door guards go down under a howling tide of naked filth-crusted madmen. Guards pound around the balcony and across the catwalks, scrambling to get into position to fire their crossbows without shooting each other. A pair of Shafters carry me out onto the balcony, holding my arms around their shoulders. Orbek and five or six Shafters sprint for the winch platform. The rest of them leave the door guards to bleed on the balcony and throw themselves onto the catwalks to intercept the fresh guards charging toward us.

  "Put me right up to the rail," I tell the guys carrying me, and they stand me up against the low retaining wall around the balcony. Guards scream at me, at all of us, to put up our hands, surrender, there's nowhere for us to go, all that kind of shit, and there are a hell of a lot of crossbow quarrels aimed at my chest.

  Everybody in the whole damn Pit is on their feet, staring, mouths birthing snarls: this place is a fucking live grenade, just waiting for somebody to twist the primer.

  S
o I do.

  "You said I was gonna die down there!" Thirty years of ki-ai have given me a voice that cuts through the shouting like a civil defense siren. "I said I'd be back!"

  I give the Pit my wolf-grin and howl, "What's Rule Two?"

  That brings them up like a storm surge in the Atlantic: they snarl and hoot and bunch toward me, shoulder to shoulder, a living mass of bloodhunger writhing and rippling as it shakes the sleep out of its joints.

  The guards let fly, and quarrels chop into flesh. Blood sprays, skin and chunks of yellow bone flip through the air as Shafters fall; one of the Shafters at my side grunts and staggers back, a quarrel sticking out of the ragged hole it punched through his rib cage. Two-thirds of the way to the winch platform, Orbek takes one in the belly that doubles him over. A couple of the Shafters with him go down, but Orbek's up in an instant and running again.

  Those armor-safe crossbows kinda suck when a prisoner has armor of his own.

  Ten seconds to reload.

  I'd had a vague plan to shout some kind of inspirational slogan, to get them all heated up and ready to charge the stairs, but I can't think of one goddamn inspirational word. Henry the vee I'm not. What I am, though, is a good enough Actor to know when to throw focus.

  I point the dirk at Orbek and shout, "Look!"

  He's left the Shafters behind. Two of the three guards from the winch platform run down the stairs to intercept, while the third stays back by the winch and cranks the crowsfoot on his bow. Orbek bulldozes the first one like a defensive end on a fistful of greens, and a roar goes up from the Pit.

  Then he's past; the second guard whirls his club into a whistling overhand that Orbek deflects with a very professional roofblock—just like I taught him before he counters with an abneko umbrella-strike that dents the guard's helmet and sends him him staggering backward.

  "It's not a fucking duel!" I shout. "Just kill the sonofabitch!"