Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  A third of the way up the arc of the seating stood a ring of pissoirs that had been built an age ago for the use of long-dead spectators. They were similar to the pissoirs that were scattered throughout the city, relics of the Brass King, Tar-Mennelekil, who’d nearly bankrupted his nation with his public works.

  The public pissoirs of Ankhana were built above shafts sunk through the limestone that formed the bedrock beneath the city; within these shafts are three screens of progressively finer bronze mesh to capture the solid wastes and allow the liquid to drain into the bottomless caverns below the city. A parallel shaft descends alongside each. The muckers make their rounds about once in a tenday, to collect the valuable shit and cart it away to Lucky Janner’s Ankhanan Muckers and Manure on the outskirts of Alientown.

  This much any citizen of Ankhana knows; what is less well known among the respectable citizenry is that concealed doors in these mucker shafts can lead one into those bottomless caverns, through which one who knows his way can move freely beneath the city.

  It was up from these pissoirs that they came—the deformed, the blind, the crippled, amputees on their crutches and lepers in their pus-moist shreds of rags. They’d walked through the cloaca of the Empire to get here, and now the Knights of Cant, who stood in pairs at each pissoir door, swept them downward through the broken rings of crumbling stone benches with gestures of welcome.

  Happy babble and snatches of song shivered in the night’s freshening breeze as the mass of beggars swarmed down from the pissoirs, scrambling over seats their ancestors could have only gazed at in envy, never touched—only the landed gentry ever sat so low, so close to the arena. They reached the high wall that surrounded the arena sand and flowed over it like sheep, like lemmings, like a wave of ravenous vermin.

  The sand of the arena floor, still damp from the evening’s misting rain, now churned beneath sandals and rope-tied scraps of boots, beneath the iron ferrules of their crutches and the calluses of their naked feet. For two hundred years this sand had absorbed the blood and shit of mortally wounded gladiators, ogres, trolls, ogrilloi, and dwarfs; the half-digested bowel contents of gut-slashed lions; the ichor of throat-cut wyverns and the aqueous humors of draconymphs stabbed through their vulnerable eyes. For another hundred years it had stood abandoned to squatters, but no more: now oilskin tarpaulins were pulled off stacked cordwood in mounds taller than a man, and snapping bonfires leaped toward clouds so low that they reflected a dull orange toward the fires beneath.

  Around the bonfires the cripples danced, for this hulking ring of stone was the Brass Stadium, and these beggars were the Subjects of Cant, and this night was the Night of the Miracle.

  And among them a presence passed, a ghostly feeling of hereness that could not be explained.

  A leper paused in his grinning tale of a fat purse stolen while its owner handed him a coin; he’d felt a brush along his own rags, but no one stood beside him. He shrugged and finished his tale. Warm breath on a blind woman’s neck caused her to turn and shift the filthy bandages over her eyes that she might see who’d stood so close. She rubbed her eyes and shook her head at her active imagination. Once, briefly, what must have been a trick of the shadows made footprints seem to appear in a clear patch, away from any feet that could have made them, but the Knight who saw this only sighed—his sharp suspicious wonder had instantly faded into bored forgetfulness.

  A Cloak is a fiendishly difficult spell to maintain under the best of circumstances; among a constantly shifting crowd of suspicious and cynical professional thieves and beggars it’s nearly impossible. A Cloak doesn’t affect the physical world, it doesn’t alter the path of light or prevent its reflection; it works directly, and solely, on the mind. Holding a Cloak requires that the adept maintain a constant mental visualization of the surrounding environment, including the positions and postures of every single person present, saving only himself—in other words, the adept must carry in his mind a perfect image of the scene as it would look without him there. As long as this concentration is maintained the adept may still be visible to the eye, but not to the brain: an onlooker is magickally prevented from mentally registering the sight. It’s fairly simple when only one person is there to deal with, not too bad with two or three.

  In the midst of the Subjects of Cant, no ordinary adept could hope to hold a Cloak. No ordinary adept would even attempt it—to be an outsider caught within the Brass Stadium on the Night of the Miracle was certain death, delivered instantly and ruthlessly without trial or appeal of any sort.

  No one of Pallas Ril’s acquaintance would describe her as ordinary.

  Forty hours, murmured a tiny niggling voice in some distant and disconnected part of her mind. I’ve been on the move for almost forty hours.

  Her teeth felt fuzzy, and her eyes seemed to scrape within her skull every time she blinked, but she moved silently through the press, listening here, watching there, letting herself drift wherever her feet took her. It might have been foolish of her to trust these people in the first place, but she was not so foolish that she didn’t realize she’d been betrayed.

  On the Night of the Miracle, all the Subjects of Cant gathered here. That meant that somewhere within this crowd was the man who’d betrayed her, who’d killed the Twins, and Talann—and Lamorak. She wouldn’t have to kill him herself; she knew that Majesty would be grateful for the honor.

  Unless, a cold internal voice reminded her, the traitor was Majesty himself; she was not so naive as to eliminate the King of Cant as a suspect simply because she liked him. She needed evidence, she needed a finger to point out a target, and this need had brought her here. The nature of the evidence she’d find, she had no idea.

  A restless, oppressive lust for motion had driven her here, a feeling that something she couldn’t see was gaining on her from behind. She had no real plan; holding a Cloak, which she’d been doing for several hours now, consumed so much of her attention that she was mostly confined to absorbing sense impressions for later examination. In what was very nearly a Zen state of meditative awareness, she’d opened herself to the radical present—and trusted that the moment itself would provide what she needed.

  The moment provided a drumroll by an unseen hand, somewhere in the northern quadrant of the stadium seating.

  There a ziggurat stood—nine ascending steps built above the stone benches, culminating in a massive high-backed throne that was carved from a single block of the native limestone. The drifting lace of Flow, that filled Pallas’ mindview with translucent veins of color, suddenly whirled up toward the ziggurat and dove down through it. Pallas nodded to herself; inside the ziggurat was where Abbal Paslava the Spellbinder would be standing, weaving the effects for Majesty’s entrance. Caine had described this to her once, and she knew what to expect.

  Single-foot braziers of bronze flared into sparkshowers with no hand to ignite them. Dense billows of white smoke poured from the bronze bowls and down the platform, thickening until they utterly obscured the throne.

  The scattered laughter and conversation among the Subjects died swiftly away; lamb shanks and wineskins were laid respectfully aside. Faces, rosy from the heat of bonfires, turned toward the swirling cloud. The drumroll stuttered into a marching cadence: down, out of the smoke, strode the nine Barons of Cant.

  Pallas squinted at them, only half curious; she was familiar with the name and reputation of a couple of them, but she had no reason to suspect they even knew of her connection to the Subjects. They took up positions on the lower third of the nine steps, seven men and two brawny women, grounding the points of their naked blades into the stone and resting their hands upon cord-wound hilts.

  Now the mist began to thin, slowly revealing first the shadowy silhouettes, then the motionless forms, of the Dukes of Cant arrayed on the third step from the top. Pallas knew both of these men: the skeletal figure in robes was Paslava, still pulling Flow; on the opposite side stood Deofad the Warlord, once of the Lipkan Imperial Guard, white-bearded and stolid.<
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  She had met these two men shortly after approaching Majesty with the concept of the Simon Jester operation; either of them could be the traitor.

  Then from the thinning mist at the apex of the ziggurat rang Majesty’s voice, deep and clear as a temple bell. Pallas heard no suggestion of strain, of raising his voice to fill the Stadium—the lateral swirl of Flow that whirlpooled outward from the apex suggested to her that Paslava was tricking up Majesty’s volume.

  He said: “My Children. We gather tonight in this, the discarded arena of empire. And we, too, are discarded. We are the forgotten, the maimed, the crippled, the blind!”

  The answering choral shout of the Subjects rang from the crumbling walls: “We are!”

  “We are the thieves, the vagabonds, the beggars!”

  “We are!”

  “But we are not alone! But we are not helpless! We are powerful! We are brothers!”

  “We are!”

  “This Arena of Despair shakes before our brotherhood! The power of our brotherhood transforms the Arena of Despair into the Stage of Miracles! Here with your brothers, cast off your crutches! Cast off your slings, your bandages! Let the crippled walk, let the blind see! Rejoice! My Children, you are healed!”

  “WE ARE!”

  And throughout the arena, crutches fell to the damp sand; limbs sprouted from empty sleeves; milky cataracts popped free from clear and sparkling eyes; and the dripping sores of leprosy peeled off from smooth skin as the last of the mist cleared and His Majesty the King of Cant sat on the throne in a coronal halo—a scarlet backlight from braziers that leaped to life above and behind him—as he motionlessly oversaw the transformation of his subjects.

  Pure theater, Pallas well knew—no real cripple or leper would ever be allowed here—but she couldn’t deny the power of this simple ritual, the rush of joy from every side as all their masks fell away at once.

  Caine had tried to explain to her how the Subjects were vastly more than a mere street gang, tried to describe their almost religious devotion to each other, their sense of family, of belonging to something greater than the sum of its parts; Pallas had seen this devotion in action, but now she was beginning to understand it. She also understood how this simple ritual made it thoroughly impossible for an outsider to conceal himself and blend in here, without the use of magick.

  And, looking up at Majesty as he descended the ziggurat, smiling and relaxed, bringing his Dukes and Barons with him to receive tithes at the retaining wall, Pallas had to admit that he knew everything there was to know about making a star entrance.

  She drifted toward the wall, carefully slipping aside from Subjects moving in the same direction, and got close enough to overhear as he accepted gifts, money and otherwise, from the Subjects that trailed past. Three Barons carted the loot away when all was done, and Majesty vaulted lithely into the arena to mingle and laugh with his people. The Dukes and the Barons all followed him, and soon the arena had become a sprawling party, as wineskins passed from hand to hand and voices rose in boisterous song.

  Pallas stayed close by Majesty’s side, vaguely hoping for an opportunity to get him alone where she could speak with him, and so she heard Abbal Paslava’s low-voiced warning as he pulled Majesty to one side.

  “There’s magick here; someone other than myself is pulling Flow within the stadium.”

  Majesty’s answering smile was grimly humorous. “Well, point him out, and we’ll spank the naughty bastard.”

  “I cannot.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Nor do I. I feel it tug at my mind, but when I turn my attention onto it, it seems to skitter away like a sun-flash in the corner of the eye. This is definitely cause for concern.”

  “Keep working on it. And meanwhile, cover my exit; the tithing took too damned long and I’m late for a meet.”

  “Done.” Paslava’s head tilted back, and his eyes rolled up; Flow spiraled into his Shell as he pulled a tiny doll from a pocket and rolled it between his fingers. A tendril of violet power clung to Majesty as he drifted away, and Pallas followed on his heels.

  Not too closely; many a Cloaked mage has given herself away simply by bumping into someone. Once or twice she had to move quickly to avoid clumps of Subjects, and each time she stepped clear Majesty seemed to have inexplicably gained ground, nodding and speaking a word or two here and there among the Subjects that he passed. He never seemed to move quickly, but somehow she could never quite catch up with him.

  Even in her dissociated, meditative state, it took her barely a minute to realize what Paslava had done. This must be a sophisticated variation of the Cloak she herself was under—anyone looking for Majesty would see him off on the other side of the arena somewhere, always just a bit too far away to interact with. She tipped a mental nod of professional respect for Paslava’s creativity. It was a clever spell, though she could break it with ease, if she chose.

  Paslava might be clever, but for raw power he was not remotely in her league.

  Breaking the spell, however, would require concentration that she needed to maintain her Cloak. Instead, she glanced around the arena; as her gaze passed the half-open gate on one of the beast chutes, Flow swirled more strongly around Abbal Paslava’s Shell, and she felt the faintest increase in the tug of the spell’s pull. She needed no more than this, and she let her desire to speak with Majesty draw her more strongly toward the chute, still drifting—she felt like she was floating, her legs obeying her desire for direction, but not for speed.

  The darkness of the beast chute closed over her eyes as she moved away from the light of the bonfires and into the dusty scent of rotting wood and ancient urine. Here in the darkness, in unfamiliar surroundings, she couldn’t visualize accurately enough to maintain her Cloak; it collapsed around her and she sagged against the wall, suddenly trembling.

  Mindview—the mental state necessary to perceive Flow, to cast and maintain spells—is a meditative state, almost transcendental. When in mindview, you don’t feel tired, you don’t feel fear, you don’t feel much of anything at all; you’re aware only of your environment and your will, what adepts call your intention. For hours, Pallas’ mindview had held at bay all the fatigue of protecting the Konnosi and the exhaustion of two days of running from the Cats, all the fear and horror of the fight, all the stomach-gnawing grief for the Twins, for Talann and Lamorak, the swelling ache of having led them to their deaths. But these emotions had circled her like hyenas: they hadn’t lost interest, they hadn’t gone off to seek other prey. Their patience was nearly infinite.

  Now that her defense was gone they mobbed her; they sank needle teeth into her throat and dragged her gasping toward the floor.

  For a moment faces flooded her, driving out all other thought: the terror and desperate hope of Konnos’ two daughters, so much like what she saw on the faces of all the tokali, the hunted, who huddled together beneath that abandoned warehouse in the Industrial Park, with no one but her to depend on. The manic confidence of Talann, the grim trust of the Twins . . .

  And, of course, the face that stung her eyes with a single tear: Lamorak with his gentle smile, tapping the fresh-cut brick arch with the blade of Kosall. “And this is a gap I can hold for a long, long time.”

  Oh, Karl . . . His name, the name she couldn’t say out loud, couldn’t murmur in her Soliloquy, the name that Studio conditioning wouldn’t allow her to so much as whisper until she returned to Earth.

  Until she returned to Earth, alone.

  He’d held that arch for perhaps a minute, no more.

  All these hyenas chewed into her belly, but she was an adept: she lived and died by her control of her mind. It took only seconds for her to strangle these carnivorous thoughts, and soon she pushed herself upright. There was no forgetting the danger she was in, simply by being here. Now as she picked her way up the incline, one hand against the crumbling stone of the chute, the images she’d stored from the Miracle began to organize themselves within her brain.

 
; *A meet,* she monologued. *A meet during the Miracle. When every Subject of Cant will be inside the Stadium. The one moment out of the entire week when you can walk the Warrens without being seen by a Subject of Cant.*

  A pounding rumble like distant surf began to grind in her ears; blood rose into her face, and she picked up speed.

  *Majesty, I swear . . . If it’s you, Majesty, I swear I’ll eat your rotten heart.*

  Her practiced hands flitted unconsciously over the pockets on her tunic and within her cloak, searching by feel for something that would put her on Majesty’s trail without subjecting her to the foot-slowing necessity of mindview. She had plenty of artillery left, even without the boltwand she’d lost to the Cats: four of the charged-buckeye fireballs, two hunks of charged amber for Holds, a powerful Teke and a bladewand, as well as a less aggressive crystal Charm. This Adventure so far had consisted of mostly running and hiding; her defensive and evasive spells were depleted save only a single Chameleon, as were her few scrying devices. Without those prepared spells, she’d have to do everything in mindview—as she had the Cloak—which was dangerous and time consuming, at best.

  When the inspiration came, she smiled to herself and swallowed a chuckle. The solution was so simple and elegant it was almost funny. She drew out from a pouch at her belt a small faceted chunk of purple quartz and patterned her mind to the sigils inscribed upon it. It was a process as simple as turning a key—no need to maintain mindview. The quartz grew warm in her hand, and as she held it out, an intermittent stripe at shoulder level along the wall began to fluoresce a dully ruddy magenta, as did faint, vaguely boot-shaped blotches along the floor. The Cloak variant Paslava had used on Majesty would be shedding magick continuously until it wore off, like a battery leaking charge—until then, she could use this simple detection spell to track his footprints and the places he’d brushed his hands along the walls, to follow his path through this Stygian maze.