Blade of Tyshalle by Matthew Woodring Stover
Raithe stared at him blankly, uncomprehending. Words echoed along the dark tunnel in his head without releasing meaning.
"How'd you get in here?" Caine said, explaining. "Where'd you get those wounds? What happened to your face? You look like you got boiled in oil. How in hot staggering fuck did you get the Patriarch on a prisoner leash? And what's that shit all over your hand?"
Raithe lifted Kosall. The hanging lamps rippled orange light along its silver-painted design. He let the blade swing down by the quillon so that he could reverse it; he took again its hilt and spent the last of his strength to bring the blade to life, then drove its point into the stone. He let go and stepped back, leaving the sword to gently sway between them, and turned his hand as though to offer Caine its hilt.
"I—" His voice thickened, and he coughed apologetically to clear it; the pressure of his cough shot colored sparks curling through the tunnel that stretched ever farther, ever darker.
"I found out what those runes were for," he said, and fainted.
On the day the dead man named himself, that naming became a clarion, calling the heroes to battle. They came severally, one by one and together: the mad queen and the dead goddess, the faithful steward and the dark angel's spawn, the crooked knight, the dragoness, the child of the river, and the god who had been a man.
When the dead man named himself, that naming shredded all veils. None could now deny their natures; now was the test of their truths. They had come to fight the war between the dead man and the god of dust and ashes.
For the dead man's grave had been unsealed. From that mortal cocoon arose a butterfly; from that tomb of flesh, a dark angel, come with a flaming sword.
TWENTY-TWO
That fucking sword
A steel crucifix, head wrapped in sweat-stained leather
It swung like that—in exactly that gentle arc—through the waterfall's spray below Khryl's Saddle. Mist collected into droplets and trickled down the blade, and washed her staring eyes
They wouldn't even let me wash off her blood .. .
I can still taste it.
I carry the countervirus. She must have created it in her own bloodstream. Shit, it makes sense. That's why nobody in the Pit has HRVP. That changes things. That changes a lot of things.
Sitting around here waiting for somebody to come down and kill us is no longer an option.
"You." I jab a finger at Toa-Sytell, who's twitching like a panicked dog and whining through his gag. "Sit."
The stupid fuck looks for a chair.
"Right where you are, shithead. Sit. Dinnie, get the leash."
The nearest Serpent takes the prisoner leash, and Toa-Sytell lowers himself to the floor, slow and stiff like an arthritic old man. And who am I to criticize? He moves better than I do.
"Orbek."
"Little brother?"
"Take ten guys and reconnoiter upstairs. Nobody armed but you."
He looks a question at me. I answer, "You're not going up there to fight. You meet any resistance at all, get your ass back down here. If the place is empty, see what your boys can scrounge for weapons and armor. Take one of them along." I wave a hand at the six Donjon guards we captured, tied up near the foot of the stairbridge. "They'll know where the emergency shit is kept."
He nods. "Like you say, little brother."
I dismiss him. "T'Passe, see what you can do for Raithe. At least stop the bleeding."
She blinks at me, which is what passes on that bulldog face of hers for a gape of astonishment.
"Did I stutter? And be careful of that black shit on his hand—I don't like the looks of that at all. Some of those wounds could be chemical burns."
She nods, and kneels beside him, and her strong square hands go to work tearing the rags from my pallet into strips she can bind around his wounds.
"T'Passe—" She looks back at me. "Tie him up first," I tell her. "That fucker's dangerous:"
"He's barely even breathing—"
"Do it."
She shrugs, and the first of her bandages goes instead to restrain his ankles; then she pauses to consider how she can tie his wrists without getting that oily stuff on her hands.
And I can't stop looking at the sword.
I keep seeing it sway above me in time with my breathing. I keep feeling its brain-freezing icicle spear me to the sand. I keep feeling it hum inside my spine while I pull Karl's neck against its edge--
"Deliann?"
He lies still at my side, eyes closed, breath hitching, face dry and corpse-pale. "Kris, come on, man. Stay with me. I need you."
His eyes don't open, exactly; it's more like they kind of roll forward from the back of his head. "Yes, Hari ..." he murmurs. "I hear you." "You got something off Raithe, right? You flashed on him?" "Yes ..."
"I need to know. He's out cold, Kris. I need to know what the hell is going on."
"I can't ... It's too much," he says, faintly. "Words—I could . . . in the Meld, I could share—we can Meld-"
Christ, he's raving again. "Come on, Kris, snap out of it. You can't Meld with a human."
Now his eyes do open, and a distant smile creases his lips. "Hari, I am human."
Uh, right.
I roll my shoulders to untie the knots that are cramping all the way up the side of my neck. "Do it, then."
"You won't like it."
"Shit, Kris, it's a little late to start worrying about what I won't like." "There are things—things about the goddess—"
"I'm not worried about the goddess. Shanna's dead."
His gaze drifts out of focus. "Mostly."
A thrill trickles down my spine and congeals into an iceball in my guts. "You better tell me what you mean by that."
"I can't" His voice is weakening; I can hear how much effort speaking costs him. "I can only show you."
"All right," I say solidly. "I'm ready."
"No, you're not. You cannot possibly be." He takes a deep breath, then another, and another, gathering his strength. "Find mindview."
It takes some doing, but in a few minutes I can pick out some of those black threads twisting insubstantially through the air; a few minutes after that, they solidify from mere imagining to actual hallucination. Another light gathers in the Pit, too, now: a soft but penetrating glow, like a full harvest moon. It draws in around us, until it seems to cradle Deliann's head. That soft glow wells into his face from some unimaginable spring, brims him full of moonlight, then reaches out and stabs me through the eye.
The light eggshells my head and blows out my brains.
Then, into where I used to be, he sluices Raithe's life.
Ah‑
fuck‑
fuck me .. .
... hhurrr .. .
2
A lot of it isn't so bad.
Toa-Sytell's chin against my knuckles . . . caustic oil leaching from the pores of my fist ... flames on the dockside ... drowning in Shanna .. . the logic of pain . . . the hum of Kosall, warm in my hand, there between the crates on the deck of the barge .. .
it's the other shit I can't take.
It's the
What they did
What they're doing
I can't even think it; the briefest flash of the image rips me inside out and slams me to the cold stone of the Pit floor, puking.
"Caine?" This from t'Passe, close by. "Caine, do you need help?
Vomit claws out of me, slashing at my throat, drenching my mouth with blood. It takes a long time. A lot longer than I would have guessed. Dry heaves keep twisting my guts, and that's okay.
Saves me from having to talk.
I manage to get my eyes open. The pool of my vomit spreads toward one of my hands. I don't move. Compared to my hands, my vomit is clean.
I force myself to examine the black crust along Kosall's blade. Dried blood. Her blood. Half of her falling away from the other half. The blade chopping into her face. That brief buzz as her life drains through the sword
Drains into the sword.
My traitor heart ignores my desire. I can hear her scream. I can taste her tears. Faith
My god, Faith
Whack
A sharp sting from my right hand: I stare at it numbly, for it has become a fist, and a thin line of blood trickles from my knuckles, and only then do I understand that I have punched the stone floor beneath me.
This is the kind of pain I can handle.
This is the kind of pain I like.
So I do it again.
Whack
The calluses that once protected my knuckles faded years ago, but my bone density must still be good; my knuckles don't break. The flesh peels back over them, exposing red-streaked ivory like a pair of dice in sockets of raw meat.
"What is he doing?" t'Passe says. "Why is he doing that?"
Whack
"Hari, stop," Kris says from the floor beside me.
I turn my head and meet his eyes. They brim with compassion. So much compassion that there's no room for mercy. He won't spare me this. He'll hurt for me, hurt with me, but he won't spare me.
Whack
I leave a couple bone chips behind in the pool of vomit.
"There's something wrong with him," t'Passe says. "He needs help. Make him stop."
People come close, hands out to offer me aid, to offer me comfort. To offer me life. "Touch me," I force through my teeth, "and I'll kill you."
Everyone stares at me. I lift my fist, and shrug an apology. Blood trails down my forearm and drips from my elbow.
"My daughter," I say by way of explanation, and they seem, somehow, to understand. But they all keep staring; Deliann, t'Passe, the Cainists and Folk and Serpents, even Toa-Sytell—and slowly it gets through to me what they want.
They want me to be the guy who knows what to do next.
And I am.
I can see it: the smart move. The responsible thing. Slip away through the caverns. Run downstream. Defend the sword. Gather allies, fight a guerrilla war. Seek among the great mages of the Folk for a way to cleanse the blind god's taint from the sword and from the river. I can see it, but I can't say it. I can't put words to it and make it into a plan.
Because to do that would leave Faith in the hand of my enemy. Whack
I stare at the chipped bone of my knuckles. It's starting to show hairline fractures of black scaling through the blood-washed ivory. It hurts. It hurts a lot.
Pain is a tool. Nature's tool. It's nature's way of saying Don't do that, dumbshit. My enemy is a universe away; I can't get to him. But now I know who he is. What he is. And I can make him come to me.
Then I'll let nature take its course.
Orbek and his detail tumble out of the Courthouse stairs onto the balcony in a Mack Sennett tangle. "Boss! Hey, Boss!" Orbek shouts. "God-damn Courthouse's full of fuck-me Monastics!"
I lift my head. "I know"
The lunatic jumble Deliann poured into me clicks into place inside my head, faster and faster as I start to see how everything connects with each other and with itself Shanna and Faith, Tan'elKoth and Kollberg, the Monastics who come at us from above and the Folk from below, the ring of Social Police troops that tightens around the city. Raithe. Deliann.
Me.
This has a shape.
Our lives ride an infernal tornado, a vortex that draws us, each and all, down to its single point of central calm. I can see it coming: the shape of the future. That shape gives me all the strength I need.
"All right," I say, my voice hoarse and thick. I say it again, louder. "All right. Shut up and listen. You want to know what we're gonna do? I'll fucking tell you what we're gonna do."
I look at t'Passe, and twitch my bloody fingers at Raithe. "Wake him up." "Caine—"
"Wake him up," I repeat. "I have something he wants—" I lift my hand and watch the gather of scarlet become a drop that falls into the filth beneath me. "And there's something I want from him."
I make that hand into a fist, and squeeze out a thicker flow, rich and round and red. I can taste it.
"I'm gonna offer him a deal."
3
At the rectum of the Shaft, below the crusted gape of the sausage grinder, the iron grate that seals the sump is set into stone. A stonebender rockmagus did the work, under contract to the Imperial Constabulary. Her song had softened the stone to the consistency of warm tallow; once the grate had been pressed into place, the stone had closed around it like living lips, and the silent melody of the rockmagus had hardened the limestone to the solidity of granite.
In the Shaft, the human eye can find only darkness, but that is not be-cause there is no light; eyes that see deeper into the lower frequencies of the spectrum might find the Shaft illumined with the dim thermal glow of living bodies, and the brighter plumes they exhale. Had such eyes looked upon the sump grate now, they would have seen stubby fingers wriggle upward through the bars like pale grubs twisting from black soil; had ears sharper than human listened, they would have heard a dark hum that pulsed with the millennial patience of the limestone itself. More fingers joined, and large hands pushed at the middle of the grate, and the iron squeezed free from the limestone's softened kiss.
The grate was passed silently from hand to hand down the sump all the way to the underground river below; an altered hum rehardened the stone lips of the sump, and two rockmagi climbed out. They were followed by a pair of hulking lambent-eyed trolls, then more stonebenders, some primals, more trolls, a few clumsy night-blind ogres, and even some treetoppers who had made the long climb up the sump with their birdlances strapped across their backs.
Many had armor; all had weapons. Each of the primals carried a small griffinstone, looted from the secret caches of the Thaumaturgic Corps, and many had magickal weapons to use the power the griffinstones provide. One of the ogres took a long whiff of the Shaft's wet stench and murmured that he was hungry; a troll replied that the place was usually lined with humans chained to the walls: a homophage's dream buffet.
But the Shaft was empty.
Up the long, long step-cut slope, there was nothing to be found save shackles left open, discarded, dangling by their chains from the thick bolts that anchored them to the limestone.
One of the rockmagi said grimly, "Might be trouble, this. Get moving." The rockmagus pointed the length of the Shaft. "Up there, have business, we."
But when they broke through the door into the Pit, the Donjon was as deserted as the Shaft had been.
Treetoppers, primals, ogres, trolls, stonebenders, and ogrilloi ranged throughout the concentric rings of tunnels lined with private cells, searching every one. The sole inhabitants of the Donjon were the corpses stacked at the downstream end of the Pit.
The doors that led toward the Courthouse above could not be forced, even by the strength of ogres. Someone suggested the doors might be magically held, and for a time there was debate whether the doors should be chopped through with axes, burned through by griffinstone-powered flame, or removed by a rockmagus softening the stone in which they were set. While this debate grew more and more heated, tangles of demented illogic twisting like threads drawing violence from thin air, Kierendal arrived.
She'd gotten the news by treetopper, and she came through the Shaft door cradled in the arms of Rugo the ogre, who peered around nervously, tongue shooting up along the curve of his tusks, because he had a sick suspicion that maybe that little fey fucker, that Changeling, had survived the battle on Commons' Beach, too, and he didn't want to get in trouble again with Kier for letting him live. He was pretty relieved to find the place as empty as the treetopper had said.
Alongside Rugo paced Jest, at heel like a dog, eagerly obedient to the prods and growled commands of the armored ogrillo, Tchako, who guarded him. Blood still beaded from the tooth punctures on his lower lip, and when he looked down from the balcony at the stack of bodies
And when Kierendal and Rugo and Jest and Tchako came in, the primals and stonebenders and ogres and all started to jabber at once, everyone trying to explain why the doors should be broken this way, or that way, or some other way, and there came angry snarls, and shoving, and the rasp of steel on steel.
Some of the clouds of fever had begun to part within Kierendal's mind; in the hours since Jest's capture, she had even begun to doubt Caine's guilt. She was unaccountably relieved to find the Pit deserted. This relief troubled her more than her fever had, and sharpened the edge of her Fantasy-voice as she hissed inside all their heads. "He is not here. We are too late. To force the door is fruitless—we cannot fight the whole army above. We have lost him."
They fell silent while they considered the consequences of losing Caine.
As though the silence was itself a signal, the door to the Courthouse stairs swung open. In the doorway stood a huge, vicious-looking ogrillo with bandaged wrists, wearing a hauberk three sizes too small and carrying a Donjon guard's club. His lip flaps drew back in an approximation of a human's smile, and he waggled his tusks invitingly. "Hey, you fuckers," he said. "You looking for Caine? There's a party in the Hall of Justice, hey? Big party. Invites all around."
"What?" Kierendal rasped painfully, surprise drawing a word from her throat instead of her mind. "What?"
"Come on," he said, beckoning. "Don't be late. Everybody come." Kierendal, naked and trembling, a half-dead, mutilated, spiderish thing, said, "Caine wants me to come to a party?"
"You gotta come, Kierendal," the ogrillo said seriously. "You're the guest of honor, hey?"
4
You get into the Hall of Justice from the second floor of the Courthouse. It's a vaulted auditorium, where the King—later the Emperor, and until a couple days ago the Steward—of Ankhana sat to try cases that came before his personal judgment. Its design dates from the days when some civil cases were decided by combat; the circular expanse of floor where the litigants stand is still walled, still traditionally strewn with clean sand. Still called the arena. One thing I can say about arenas in general: Better to be up here looking down, than down there looking up.