Blade of Tyshalle by Matthew Woodring Stover
I go to a stranger one tomorrow.
I'll look for you there, Hari. Maybe someday, twenty years from now, you'll be sitting in an Overworld tavern, and a familiar-looking primal mage will offer to buy you a drink. There really isn't any other way to say thanks, for saving my soul.
I only wish I could save yours.
What the life you've chosen to lead will cost you, I can't begin to imagine.
I guess the best you can hope for is not to be noticed.
She was only a goddess part-time, but she loved her job, and she was good at it. She went to and fro upon the earth and walked up and down in it, and where she strode bloomed flowers and sprouted grain; when she spread her hand, the winter was mild and the harvest bountiful, a summer storm brought showers warm and sweet as a sunlit pond, and the spring sang of things green and growing.
The First Folk called her Eyyallarann, the Flowmind; the stonebenders called her Thukulg'n, the Drowner; to the treetoppers she was Ketinnasi, the Riverman; to mankind, she was Chambaraya, the Water Father; but her name was Pallas Ril.
It was said she had a human lover, in some far-off place; that for half the year she took the form of mortal woman and lived in peace with her lover and her human child. Others said her lover was himself a god, her shadow-self, a dark angel of slaughter and destruction, and that the half of each year she spent at his side was the world's ransom: that she paid with her body to keep him beyond the walls of time, and preserve the peace of the good land.
As is common with such tales, both were true; and false; and to the same degree.
The part-time goddess had no church, no religion, no followers; she could not be propitiated by sacrifice or summoned by invocation. She walked whither she willed, and followed the course of her heart as though its turns were the twists of her riverbed; she loved the land and all things in it, and all prospered under her hand. The only prayer that might sway her was the sob of a mother over her ill or injured child—be that mother human or primal, goshawk or bobcat, elk or rabbit—and this only because the human part of her remembered what it is to be a mother.
This was probably, in the end, the real reason why she and her lover both had to die.
For the scent of her green and growing land troubled the slumber of another god: a blind and nameless god, a god of dust and ashes, whose merest dream can kill.
ONE
The severed head of a child bounced once on his mattress, then rolled against his ribs, and Hari Michaelson began to wake.
He groped for it, struggling upward through smothering blankets of hungover sleep. His gummed-together eyelids parted with the slow rip of shredding meat. Layers of dream shredded into smoke tatters, leaving behind only wisps of melancholy: He had been dreaming of the old days again. Of his long-dead Acting career. Or even earlier—he could not quite grasp the details, but he might have been dreaming of his student days at the Studio Conservatory, more than twenty-five years ago, when he was young, and strong, and full of hope. When he'd still been riding the upward swing of his life.
He found the foreign object on the bed, his fingers flapping blindly across it. Not a head, of course it wasn't a head; it was a ball, that's it, just a kid's ball, like the one he used to play rugger with, centuries ago in those bright and happy days before his mother's death and father's breakdown. With the abstract certainty of the dreams he shed, he knew the ball was Faith's. She'd sneaked into the master suite, and this was her way of encouraging him to get his lazy ass out of bed and take her to Saturday morning soccer practice.
He rolled over and coughed a wad of phlegm out of his cottony lungs. "Abbey: Clear th' windows," he said thickly, in a tone the housecomp would recognize. "Get s'm fucking light in here."
Strange ball, though, he thought fuzzily while he waited for the windows to depolarize. Weird shape, kind of irregular—bumpy and malformed—and the texture was strange, too, smooth and soft over a hard surface within, almost like bone
And what was this shit here? Hair? This ball has hair on it?
At the same moment that he realized that the windows weren't working and no light was entering the room, his hand found the ragged mess of bone and bloody shreds of flesh that remained of the neck, and an oiled voice spoke Westerling from a tall shadow at the foot of his bed. "So, Caine; it murmured with dark, humid lust, "I hear you're crippled , now ..."
And the head in his hand was his daughter's, and the shadow at the foot of his bed was Berne.
The blade of Kosall flickered like a flame in the moonlight, and Hari Michaelson's legs would not move.
2
Hari lay shivering beneath his tangled, sweat-soaked sheets, and hoped he hadn't crapped himself again.
A warm hand cupped his shoulder. "Hari, it's okay," Shanna said softly from close by. "I'm here. Just a nightmare, that's all."
He clenched his teeth, biting down on his courage until he could open his eyes. She knelt beside his bed, her hair a tousled halo of deeper shadow in the darkened bedroom, her eyes wide and almost luminous, a faint vertical crease of concern between her brows.
"Was I—" he started thickly, then he coughed his throat clear and tried again. "Was it loud?"
She nodded sadly. "Berne again?"
"Yeah."
"Those always seem to be the worst."
"Tell me about it." He rolled his head to the side, staring across the room at the rumpled covers on her bed; he couldn't bring himself to look down at his own. "Did I—is there a mess?"
"I don't think so," Shanna said gravely. "I can't smell anything. Do you want me to look?" She had that nurselike professional detachment in her voice again. He hated that tone; it made his stomach knot into a sick tangle of bile. That tone had loathing and disgust lurking just beneath the calm I'll handle it surface.
"You'd better," he said tightly. It hurt more to say this than it had to take the fucking wound in the first place. "The bypass is down again."
The neural bypass that shunted impulses around the break in his partially regenerated spinal cord was erratic, at best; he hadn't reloaded the software in three days, and some unexplained bugginess in the program made the bypass shut down unexpectedly now and again. That part of the dream had been perfectly accurate: he couldn't move his legs, couldn't feel them, or anything else below his navel. Below the three-inch-wide scar Kosall had left in his belly, he was dead as a butchered cow.
A shutdown always gave him nightmares, and sometimes he woke up in a pool of his own shit and piss that he couldn't feel, and sometimes—if he'd been lying there long enough to numb his nose--couldn't even smell. This was the reason Shanna no longer slept in his bed.
One of the reasons.
"Abbey: Room lights to one quarter," Shanna said calmly. "Execute."
The room lit with a soft decentralized glow, and she peeled back the covers. He made himself look. The sheets were stained only with the sweat that made his nightclothes cling to his clammy skin-that meant the shut-down was not yet complete; he still had control of his bowels and bladder. He gave a sigh of relief that threatened to become a shudder. Maybe he could make it to the bathroom before the goddamn bypass rebooted itself.
The regeneration therapy the Studio physicians had used to treat Hari's severed spinal cord had slightly better than a 90 percent success rate—that's what they kept telling him. Looking at it the other way, though, meant it had a 10 percent failure rate, and that's roughly where Hari fell.
So to speak.
Sure, it had partially worked—he had some urinary and rectal sphincter control, and limited sensation. But even those partial gains were sacrificed to the spinal bypass. The bypass worked by neural induction, similar to the Studio's first-hander chairs; when it went down, it played fuckass with everything below his waist.
"Administrator?"
The screen on the night table beside his bed flickered to life, casting a cold electric glow into the bedroom, and the disembodied face of Bradlee Wing, his father's nurse, frowned out of it.
Shanna lifted her eyebrows at him, and he nodded reluctantly. She hit the voice recept key for him so he wouldn't have to drag himself across the bed using only his arms.
"Yeah, fine, Brad. I'm fine."
"I heard you shout—"
"I said I'm fine. Shanna's here, everything's okay."
"Want something to help you sleep?"
Almost half a liter of Laphroaig remained in the bottle beside the screen; the scotch's acidic, iodine bite still lingered in the back of his throat. He saw the expression on Shanna's face as she caught his look at the bottle, and he turned away, scowling. "Don't bother. Just check on Dad, will you? Make sure I didn't wake him."
"The sedatives Laborer Michaelson takes—"
"Don't call him Laborer Michaelson. How many times do I have to tell
you?"
"Sorry, Administrator."
"And don't fucking call me Administrator, either."
"Sorry—sorry, ah, Hari. The hour—I forget, that's all."
"Yeah, whatever. Check on him."
"Will do, ah, Hari."
"Yeah."
The screen faded to black.
He couldn't quite make himself meet Shanna's eyes. "I, uh, I better go check on Faith. If I woke up Bradlee all the way down on the first floor, I must have scared the shit out of her."
Shanna rose. "I'll go."
"No, no, no," Hari insisted tiredly. "Go back to bed. My fault, my job. I have to go reboot anyway—I'll use the hall toilet so you can sleep."
He whistled for his wheelchair, and it whirred into his bedroom, weaving around the furniture; the proximity sensors of its self-guidance system gave it an animal smoothness of motion. A simple command, "Rover: Stay," locked its wheels into place once it reached his bedside, but Hari en-gaged the manual brakes as well. His bypass had taught him a grim distrust of microprocessors.
Shanna slid a hand under his armpit to help him up. He lowered his head and didn't move. "I can do it," he said.
"Oh, Hari ..." She sounded so tired, so inexpressibly sad, as though one breath of his name could compass each of his failures, and all of her forgiveness. It made him grit his teeth till his ears rang. "Go to bed," he said tightly.
"I wish you'd let me help," she murmured, and for a moment the knots in his heart eased, just a little.
He covered her hand with his own. "You help every day, Shan. You're what keeps me going, you and Faith. But you have to let me handle what I can handle, okay?"
She nodded silently. She leaned down and kissed him lightly on the cheek, then went back to the bed on her side of the room. Hari watched her grimly, waiting until she crawled back under the covers and settled in. "Good night; she said.
"Yeah. Good night."
She rolled onto her side, away from him, and gathered the down-filled pillow beneath her head. "Abbey," he said, "lights out. Execute."
Safe in the darkness, he slowly and carefully levered himself from the bed into Rover's seat. It took both hands to move each dead-meat leg, one at a time, into place on the footrests. He sat there for what felt like a long time, breathing too hard, staring at his hands.
He'd made these hands into weapons, conditioned them until they were as deadly as any blade. In years past, he had been widely considered the finest infighter alive. His sole reminder of those days was the crumple of knuckles broken and rebroken, banded with faintly discolored scars.
He'd thought he was tough, back then. Only later, when the most use he had for his hands was shoving a glycerine suppository up his ass and manually disimpacting his bowels, did he find out how tough he really wasn't. The first time Shanna had heard him sobbing, and found him sitting on the toilet with shit all over his futile fists, splattering it in child's footprints across his dead thighs as he tried to pound some feeling, some use, back into them, he realized that he'd been kidding himself all along.
He'd never be tough enough for this.
After unlocking Rover's wheels, he gripped their rims and spun the chair roughly toward the door. He'd had a levichair a few years before, but he'd sold it; he'd told Shanna, and his doctors, that he thought the levichair's magfield wasn't properly shielded, and it might have been the culprit behind his software problems. The truth was, he'd hated the fucking thing, and feared it. Any mechanical failure, even a mild powerdown, could leave him helplessly immobilized. At least Rover had wheels.
Which didn't stop him from hating it, too.
The door slid aside at his approach; he wheeled out into the hallway and turned for Faith's room. He should have stopped by the toilet to reboot first, he knew, but some irrational mulishness wouldn't let him be sensible about it. Even if the worst should happen, he wouldn't make much of a mess: Rover had a urine tube, and chemical toilet under the seat though Hari privately thought that if he ever let himself get into the habit of using them, he'd kill himself.
The smell . . . More than anything else, that's what he feared; the bare thought of it closed down his throat and stung his eyes. He remembered that smell too well: the chemical reek of illness and incontinence. It was Duncan's smell, after his breakdown and downcaste spiral. The tiny apartment he'd shared with his father, in San Francisco's Mission District Temp ghetto, had enclosed that stench, concentrated it, burned it into him like a brand on the inside of his skull. Not sharp, but thick and somehow rounded; not pungent but gooey, filling the back of his throat like he was drowning in snot.
It smelled like madness.
Rover's comfort hookups were not a convenience; they were a threat. If he let himself fall that far, if he surrendered in the way every doctor told him he had to, if he accepted his disability and tried to accommodate it, that smell would cling to him forever. He was afraid that he might get used to it. He was afraid that someday he wouldn't even notice anymore.
Rover rolled to a stop at Faith's door. Hari touched the door with the tips of three fingers, as gently as a caress on his daughter's cheek, and it swung silently inward a few centimeters. He whispered to the Abbey to raise the lights in the hallway, and the house complied, slowly turning up the intensity until a spill of light crossed Faith's bed and gleamed on her spray of golden hair.
She lay in the boneless sprawl of childhood sleep. Hari's chest burned with a fierce ache, and he could not shift his gaze until the slow rise and fall of the nightshirt that covered her chest unlocked his eyes. He remembered staring at Shanna the same way, as Pallas Ril lay bound to the altar in the Iron Room, high atop the Dusk Tower of the Colhari Palace in Ankhana; he remembered the relief—the flood of sanity and purpose returning to the universe—he'd felt when he saw that she still lived.
No such relief ever came to him in these dark nights, when he would stop by Faith's door to stare at his daughter. The cold terror that coiled behind his eyes, the constant expectation that one of these nights he would look in and not see her chest rise and fall, never vanished; it was only postponed. He knew, with a certainty that went beyond religious conviction, that she would be taken from him. It was the most basic weave of his fate: Nothing so precious was allowed to remain in his life.
Her translucent skin—it seemed to glow, lit from within by the warmth of her eyes—her hair the color of sunlight on winter wheat, the classical Nordic regularity of her features, all carried just a hint of Shanna's Anglo heritage, and none at all of his. She favored her real father.
Her biological father, Hari corrected himself. I'm her real father.
He thought with longing of the scotch bottle on his nightstand. He should have brought it with him. He could use a little peat-fired comfort tonight; these postmidnight hours were a fertile earth for thoughts darker than the night outside.
Sometimes when he looked at Faith, he couldn't help thinking of Lamorak—of Karl. Karl Shanks: second-rate Actor, a minor star, a goodlooking swordsman with a small gift for thaumaturgy, at one time a pretty good friend of Hari's. Shanna's lover. Her betrayer.
The father of
Lamorak had betrayed Shanna, and Hari; Hari had betrayed him in turn. Had given him over to torture.
Had murdered him with his own hand.
He could still feel it, even now, more than six years later, if he closed his eyes and thought for just a moment lying on the arena sand with Kosall through his guts, Ma'elKoth towering over him and Lamorak at his side. With Shanna's tears trickling across his face like the opening drops of a spring shower. He could feel the buzzing hum of Kosall's magick vibrating up his severed spine to his teeth, when he took its hilt to activate the magick of its irresistible edge.
He could feel Lamorak's head slicing free of his body with the ragged zzzip of a page being ripped from a book, as he pulled the traitor's neck against Kosall's blade.
It's better this way, he thought. This thought came to him every time he considered whose child he was raising; every time he reminded himself that Faith shared no Michaelson blood. Duncan liked to observe, with Thomas Paine, that virtue is not hereditary; no more so would be its opposite.
Madness, on the other hand, runs in families.
He briefly considered waking her—one sleepy smile from his daughter would chase off a whole night's worth of shadows inside his head but he knew he wouldn't. He never did. He wouldn't let himself use Faith as a drug against his black moods.
After one last longing look, to watch the rise of her chest, he wheeled Rover down the hall toward his office. When these black fits took hold of his heart, work was his only answer.
But first
He turned in at the guest bathroom, next door to his office. Rover's arms folded down, and he was able to swing himself onto the toilet using the wall-mounted rails. His pajama trousers fastened up the back with a Velcro closure, so that he could pull them open instead of having to lower them. A four-digit code on the belt unit slung across Rover's back shut down his bypass software, and a single keystroke began the reboot.
As the software that allowed him to walk reinitialized, making his legs twitch and jerk, as his bowels and bladder spastically voided themselves, Hari Michaelson—who had once been Caine—clenched his jaw and squeezed his eyes shut against the familiar tears of his private humiliation. Why can't I wake up? Please, God—whoever might be listening. That's what I want. That's all I want.