Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  “That’s not your concern. I’ve come to take you to the Emperor.”

  “We could have done this last night.”

  “No, we could not.”

  “And the reason for this is—?”

  Toa-Sytell spread his hands. “Ma’elKoth did not choose to summon you until this morning.”

  Caine nodded, scratching disgustedly at his beard; keeping others waiting is a privilege of power everywhere, but he didn’t have to like it. In fact, he’d probably be pretty damn angry, once he was fully awake.

  “You don’t think you still need these guys, do you?” he said, waving a dismissive hand at the guardsmen. “I thought we’d reached a sort of understanding.”

  A sere smile barely bent the Duke’s mouth. “Perhaps I should be confident that I can depend upon your good nature; I imagine that Creele was.”

  Last night, when Toa-Sytell had cautiously installed Caine in this room in the Colhari Palace, a room already provided with a generous platter of cold meats, bread and fruit, a carafe of wine, and a piping-hot bath freshly drawn, Caine had shaken his head and given a bitter laugh. He’d said, “And to think I just now killed a man for turning me over to you.”

  Toa-Sytell, watching from the doorway as Caine’s shackles were removed by the King’s Eyes who’d accompanied them, had replied without a hint of humor, “Perhaps you were somewhat hasty.”

  While Caine picked at the food, Toa-Sytell had revealed why the reward had been issued, why he’d been arrested and brought here. The stinging irony of it left Caine speechless.

  The Emperor wanted to hire him to find Simon Jester. Wanted to pay him to do what he was already doing, wanted to offer all the resources of the Imperial Government to help him in his search.

  Creele, all unknowing, had been doing Caine a favor.

  Caine had very slowly and carefully laid aside the sandwich he’d made, swallowed, and said, “Sure. What does it pay and when can I start?”

  But here was the sticking point: Ma’elKoth wished to personally interview him. Toa-Sytell didn’t know why. Caine was invited to bathe and wash his clothing, and to hold himself in readiness. He’d eagerly done so, even mending the tear in his breeches from the ogre’s tusk; his fingers had trembled, shook with the anticipation and the astonishment he felt at this swift surge of fortune—palace access, an excuse to meet privately with his target, and the full resources of the King’s Eyes to find his wife.

  Then he’d waited.

  After that, he’d waited some more.

  Alone in the sumptuous room, he’d paced up and down, growing impatient and angry, then furious. The door was locked from the outside, and when he’d rattled it, the solicitous voice of a guard posted in the hall had inquired if there was anything he needed. He’d checked the concealed service door, remembering its location from the week he’d spent in this palace masquerading as a servant before the murder of Toa-Phelathon, but that too was locked. He could, he had supposed, break a window and have a chance of escape, but to what?

  He was imprisoned here more by his own wishes, his own hopes and desires, than by the locks on the doors. This was an opportunity he couldn’t bear to let pass.

  His thoughts had twisted around the axis of the female prisoner in the Donjon like a pinwheel in the hand of a running child.

  Shanna could be in that cell.

  She could be safe.

  She could be in his arms within an hour, or less.

  Because of that spell, it was certainly possible that Berne could have captured her without understanding who she was, just taken her into custody for her proximity to the scene, arrested her because she was there. It was possible.

  It was also possible that the prisoner in the Donjon was this Talann woman. Shanna could be anywhere. It could be she was having a lavish dinner at a club on the South Bank. It could be she was cornered in an Alientown back alley, fighting for her life against the Cats.

  It could be she was already dead.

  The uncertainty had chewed at him like a rat trapped inside his skull.

  Ma’elKoth had never come, had never sent for him. As the night crept by he had only been able to pace angrily and watch the level of rose-scented oil in the lamp’s base shrink by the millimeter; he’d counted with the beating of his heart each minute of Shanna’s life that he wasted in this room.

  Sometime past midnight he had gotten over any regret for Creele’s murder.

  Finally exhaustion had dragged him into a soft overstuffed chair. He had sat, brooding on his helplessness, until that brooding passed seamlessly into sleep.

  Now he preceded his escorts into the corridors of the Colhari Palace. The six Household Knights followed him in a shallow arc, and Toa-Sytell came last, his hands clasped behind him and an expression of thoughtful attention on his face. Their boot heels made no noise on the deep teal runner that half covered the pale, vaguely peachy marble floor. Toa-Sytell directed Caine verbally—turn here, here again, take these stairs.

  The stairs were near an open archway that led onto a vertical shaft with oiled ropes at the back and sides that stretched upward and downward out of sight. Near the arch was a bellpull. Caine nodded toward this arrangement as they passed. “Too many of us for the Shifting Room, eh?”

  Toa-Sytell replied, “Yes, the ogres on the donkey wheel in the cellar cannot manage more than three or . . . But then, you’d know all this, I imagine.” In his voice whispered an odd huskiness, a thickness of some unidentifiable emotion.

  Caine shrugged and walked on to the stairs. They went down two floors in silence, and along another corridor, and Caine could now detect a growing carnal scent, a coppery, meat-locker kind of smell.

  “You and I are nearly of an age, Caine,” Toa-Sytell said abruptly. “You cannot be more than four or five years my junior. Do you have children?”

  Caine stopped and squinted at the Duke over his shoulder. “What’s it to you?”

  “Sons are a man’s pride, Caine, and daughters are the comfort of his age. I am only curious.”

  Caine shrugged. “Maybe someday.”

  “I had two. Sons that I loved, Caine. Who grew into men of honor, strong and fierce. Tashinel and Jarrothe. They were both killed, only a month apart, in the Succession War.”

  He said this as though he were reporting a rise in crop prices in the markets, but something dark and potent flickered behind his face.

  Caine’s eyes held those of the Duke for a moment, gravely acknowledging his loss. Another knife aimed at my conscience, he thought. But compared with the other wounds his conscience had taken, this was barely a scratch.

  Eventually, he dropped his gaze as though ashamed, then turned to walk again. Let him think I feel it more than I do, if that’s what he wants. Let him take what comfort he can.

  And I should remember that Berne might not be my only enemy in the palace.

  Toa-Sytell said, “Your destination is through that archway at the hall’s end. Take care not to speak, or in any way interrupt the Emperor. He’s engaged in what he calls his Great Work, and will address you when and if he so desires.”

  “Great Work?” The capitals had been audible in the Duke’s tone.

  “You will see. Go, now.”

  The bloody scent grew thicker. By the time Caine reached the doorway he could taste it, like raw meat a couple of days old.

  This room had been the Lesser Ballroom in the days of Toa-Phelathon, an intimate space for fetes of less than a thousand guests. Sunlight strong enough to singe the eyeballs glared in through the huge windows that dominated the south wall, narrow Gothic-arched windows ten meters high and separated by sturdy columns of imported granite. The center of the parquet dancing floor had been cut away, and a shallow bowl half a stone’s throw across had been scooped from the limestone beneath.

  The resulting pit was lined with coals that glimmered red and cast a wilting heat, but no smoke or scent of any kind; supported on legs of brass above it was a massive cauldron, shallow as a stew bowl but
broad enough to swim laps in. The cauldron was tended by pages who raced around its edges, stirring with long wooden poles held high above their sweat-soaked heads or pouring hods of this or that into the brew, while pairs of others roamed from side to side, bearing massive leather-lung bellows. These they rested on the floor and leaned upon with all their weight, to breathe searing yellow life into the coals below.

  Within the cauldron appeared to be boiling mud, or very wet clay; it was from here that Caine thought the blood-scent—as well as some bitter, acidic undernote—might be coming. The entire room rippled and shimmered with heat.

  Barefoot across the surface of the boiling mud walked the Emperor Ma’elKoth.

  His size alone made him unmistakable. Caine stood just within the archway and studied him from there, mindful of that finger poking at the back his head, that nagging sense of familiarity to the way the Emperor had moved, had gestured and spoken in the recording Kollberg had shown him.

  The Emperor wore only a kilt of crimson velvet bordered with a weave of cloth-of-gold, and there was something of the dinosaur, of the dragon, in the slow, majestic grace of his movements, the way he would flow from pose to pose with evident satisfaction, as though the play of muscle in his massive arms and shoulders, chest and back, gave him some deeply spiritual joy to be savored; as though it answered some personal aesthetic need in a fashion as primal as sex.

  This wasn’t it—Caine couldn’t find that tug of familiarity here. These movements were as stylized as a bodybuilder’s, and as precise as ballet.

  The boiling clay beneath Ma’elKoth spat smoking gobbets up his legs; he paid them no more attention than he did the breeze from the pages’ bellows. His eyes shone pale shamrock green and more: fluorescent emerald. He raised his hands like a priest extending benediction, and from the boiling clay there rose a formless mass, still spitting steam and roiling with its heat.

  The mass of clay, a hundred kilos or more, hung in the heat-shimmer, two meters above the surface, supported only by Ma’elKoth’s will. Pseudopodia squirmed outward from the mass, five limbs that stretched and seemed to form themselves of their own accord. Clay fell away from the mass, dropping like fresh shit back into the mud beneath; four of the limbs stretched and thinned while one contracted, and the mass took on the shape of a man.

  The man-shape looked small, even tiny, beside the Emperor’s bulk. It rotated in the air, its features refining. Ripples and folds of what would represent clothing passed in waves over its surface. Its face slowly swung through Caine’s view; this face had a close-clipped mustache and thin jawline beard, a nose with the slight bend of an old break and a scar across it, and his mouth went suddenly dry.

  He lifted a foot to step forward, to get closer, and Ma’elKoth said, “Please do not move. This is, you might imagine, difficult.”

  He had never even glanced toward the archway. There was no way he could have seen Caine standing there; not with his eyes, anyway.

  Caine stared at the statue, barely daring to breathe. Tyshalle’s bloody Axe, he thought.

  That’s me.

  And by the time this thought was completed, it was true: it was a replica, perfect in every detail save only that it still had the color of the clay—it even matched his posture in the doorway. It hung in the air, rotating slowly like a body on the gallows, while Ma’elKoth studied his handiwork. The Emperor’s voice had the warm and distant rumbling tone of a father heard through the walls of the womb.

  “You may move now, Caine. Please come in.”

  The pages who scurried around the cauldron, stirring and pumping the bellows, barely spared him a glance as he entered the room. Caine’s step was tentative, and his chest ached with some emotion that he couldn’t at first identify because he really couldn’t remember ever having felt this before—seconds passed before he realized that it was awe.

  This had been the most astonishing display of total mastery he’d ever seen: it was impossible for him to conceive of a man more completely in control of every element of his environment.

  And I’ve contracted to kill this man, Caine thought. I’d better catch him in his sleep.

  Ma’elKoth strode across the boiling surface of the clay, oblivious to the steam and the heat, the Caine-manikin he’d made bobbing along behind him like a puppy. His smile of welcome warmed Caine like a shot of whiskey, and he said, “I cannot quite see where this piece fits. What do you think?”

  “Piece?” Caine said hoarsely. What piece? Piece of what? “I don’t understand.”

  An Olympian chuckle: “Of course not. You look on this—” He nodded toward the clay statue. “—as a finished work of art. To Me, it is only a single piece: of that.”

  Ma’elKoth swept up a hand to point behind and above Caine’s head. Caine turned and looked up, and up, and up. His mouth hung open like a child’s does, as he stared up the side of a skyscraper.

  It was a face.

  It could only have belonged to a Titan, to Atlas who carried the sky on his shoulders. From just above the arch to the very ceiling of the ballroom, thirty-five meters above, stretched this Gargantuan relief of a face.

  It was less than half finished. Some parts were still bare wall; others had the structure of bones building slowly outward. Only the brow and one eye were truly complete.

  It was built out of people.

  Like the jigsaw puzzle of an insane god, it had been constructed of human bodies, layered and pieced and interlaced like corpses in a mass grave; an instant later Caine realized that these weren’t bodies, of course, not actual corpses, but were clay statues like the one of him that floated at Ma’elKoth’s shoulder.

  The sheer immensity of it was staggering; when he thought of how much work it had taken to form each perfect manikin and fit each into place, when he thought of how much work remained to be done, that earlier awe swelled into his throat, choking off any real hope that Ma’elKoth was just another thaumaturge, merely a man of power writ large.

  Caine could only stare.

  “Do you like it?” Ma’elKoth boomed. “I call it The Future of Humanity.”

  At these words something clicked within Caine’s mind, and he saw it: he had an instant’s prophetic vision that built the bones outward, and fleshed them, and painted them with color.

  The face was Ma’elKoth’s.

  Caine whispered, “It looks like you.”

  “Of course it does. It’s a self-portrait.”

  Ma’elKoth’s voice came now from just at his side, and Caine turned to find himself nose-to-collarbone with the Emperor’s immense chest. He must have leaped down from the cauldron’s rim as silently as a cat. Caine could smell him: rich masculine sweat over the lavender-scented oil that gleamed in his hair and beard, and the thick, meaty odor of the clay that caked his bare flesh. Ma’elKoth showed his perfectly white, perfectly even, and impressively large teeth.

  “All great art is ultimately self-portraiture, Caine.”

  There was something so daunting about being within the reach of those bulging arms that Caine couldn’t speak, could only nod in response.

  The Caine manikin was beside him, perfect in height and every feature: Caine looked into his own eyes modeled in clay, and could see now that even individual hairs were modeled into the beard.

  Ma’elKoth said, “And this is the piece with which I’m working right now, but I cannot quite see where it needs to go. Every piece must have its own place; every piece must contribute to the whole.

  I have been working with this one from time to time for two days now, and I still do not see it. Perhaps you have a suggestion?”

  Caine shook his head and forced words through his constricted throat. “I wouldn’t presume.”

  “Just so,” Ma’elKoth sighed. “Well, then. If no proper place can be found—”

  The Emperor lifted his hand up before his eyes and suddenly made a fist; the Caine manikin convulsed and squeezed out of shape, squirting its clay-flesh out between the fingers of some invisible giant.


  For just one instant Caine thought he saw an expression on his face of clay, of some hideous and inexpressible agony, and then it too was crushed. Another gesture from Ma’elKoth, and the irregular ball of clay lofted up over the rim of the cauldron like a child’s ball to splash down into the clay from whence it had come.

  Ma’elKoth said, “Any questions?”

  “You,” Caine replied slowly, “are not subtle.”

  “Subtlety is for the weak. It is a wheedling tactic they use to achieve their desires, when they lack the power to do so directly.”

  Funny, Caine thought. I can remember saying almost the same thing, more than once.

  A page walked by carrying a large bucket of dark liquid, which he then poured over the rim of the cauldron. Caine watched him do this, then squinted up at Ma’elKoth.

  “Here’s a question: what’s this stuff they keep pouring into the clay? It smells like blood.”

  “It is blood,” Ma’elKoth replied gravely. “All Great Works are built with blood; did you not know this?”

  “That’s, ah—” Caine cleared his throat uncomfortably. “That’s usually just a metaphor.”

  “Is it?”

  He rubbed his hands together briskly and suddenly clapped a comradely hand on Caine’s back, hard enough to make him stagger. “Come. I must wash, and you, of course, are hungry and should eat. We have much discussion ahead of us.”

  He strode off through the arch with a swinging gait so fast that Caine had to jog to keep up.

  3

  THE BREAKFAST TABLE looked to be laid out for a banquet, loaded with everything from vegetable soufflés to stuffed quail. Caine sipped from a tall frost-rimmed goblet of iced coffee and tried not to think of Greek myths and pomegranate seeds.

  Ma’elKoth lay on a curving couch at the far end of the table, reclining with leonine ease. He’d made skillful small talk while Caine had sat beside his bath; the three lovely girls who’d shared the bath with him, scrubbing away the hardening clay, had drawn no more of Ma’elKoth’s attention than had the table alongside the tub.

  Caine hunched over the table so that the hilts of his new knives poked into his ribs; he was acutely aware of the presence of all seven of these blades. On the stroll from the baths to the breakfast chamber, Ma’elKoth had suddenly turned to him and said joyfully, “I must beg your pardon for a poor host. I have only now realized why you seem so uncomfortable and reticent in conversation. Please follow Me.”