Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  You find them in the crops of the draft horse–sized bird-beasts; they can store an immense amount of magickal energy. Unlike dragons, who can tap Flow as directly as any human thaumaturge or primal mage, griffins are wholly dependent on the power of the griffinstones they carry in their muscular flightcrops. Lacking griffinstones, they’re every bit as clumsy and helpless as you might expect from a half-hawk, half-lion abomination of nature; with them, they become swift flyers and fearsome predators—and the targets of stonehunters, who have trapped them nearly to extinction. That makes griffinstones exceedingly rare and hideously expensive, even tiny ones like this.

  Arkadeil steps mechanically over to Rushall and Lamorak and puts the griffinstone into Lamorak’s outstretched hand. A smile spreads over Lamorak’s face, and his eyes drift closed in what might be mistaken for sexual pleasure.

  “All right,” he murmurs. “We can go now.”

  “You heard the man,” I say to Rushall, nodding toward the stairs. “Giddyap.”

  By the time we reach the top of the stairs, Rushall’s already panting under Lamorak’s hundred kilos; a bad sign. I step over the two unconscious guards—both breathing, so far—and nod to Talann.

  “Let’s get out of here. We can bar the door from outside.”

  “Wait,” Lamorak gasps thinly. “Wait one second.”

  “For what?”

  By way of answer, Lamorak lifts the fist in which the griffin-stone is clenched, and his eyes drift closed again. “Pick up the scalpel,” he says clearly, and far below us on the platform in the middle of the Theater of Truth, Arkadeil does.

  “Thine eye offends thee,” Lamorak says, with venom in his voice more potent than I’ve ever heard from him. “Pluck it out.”

  With robotic lack of reaction, Arkadeil drives the scalpel deep into his left eye.

  Talann gags and says thickly, “Mother!”

  “Fucker,” Lamorak says, his teeth showing yellow and savage. “That’s motherfucker.”

  Blood and thick, clear fluid stream down Arkadeil’s cheek as he saws the scalpel back and forth within his eye socket. Rushall moans in terror and revulsion.

  “Mmm,” I say thoughtfully. “Remind me to stay on your good side.”

  Once out in the corridor, we bar the door behind us. While Lamorak is busy producing a flame to light the lamp, Talann leans close. “Can we haul him up that rope?” she says, low, nodding at Lamorak. “He’ll never climb it.”

  “We’re not going up the rope.” I nod back in the direction from which we came. “That’s gone—the daycooks’ll be in there by now, with guardsmen to watch them. But there’s another way out of here.”

  “There is?”

  I grin. “What, you thought I wouldn’t have a fallback? Am I an amateur?”

  “How do we get there?”

  “Well, y’know, that’s the trick. We have to go through the Pit.”

  “Through the Pit?” Talann goes goggle-eyed. “Are you insane?”

  “No choice,” I say with a shrug. “Our way out? It’s in the Shaft.”

  Lamorak and Talann exchange a grim look, and Rushall blanches—they all know the Shaft’s reputation. Lamorak clenches the griffinstone, and Rushall calms; we put the lamp into his soft-fleshed grip.

  “Follow me.”

  We head off along the corridor, and a four-man guard unit swings into view around a corner ahead.

  In the instant of recognition it takes for the guards to register our presence, Talann has already leveled one of her bows. The guard who opens his mouth to shout “Don’t move—” takes her quarrel right into the back of his throat.

  It strikes through his spine and bursts out the nape of his neck, so the impact doesn’t knock him down: he stands, swaying, dead on his feet. The other guards fire wildly in their alarm, and their quarrels strike fire from the limestone walls. Something smacks the side of my right knee hard enough to buckle it, making a noise like a slap of raw meat on a wet butcher block. They’re shouting for help as they duck back around the corner to reload, and the leader finally topples on his face, twitching.

  I start to sprint after them and my leg gives way, sending me sprawling. Talann’s right with me: she leaps over my head while I hold on to my knee, finding blood there that leaks through my fingers. She bounds like a gazelle toward the corner. Only one foolhardy guard manages to recock before she gets there, but she’s ready for him as he swings back around the corner, and she never seems to miss.

  Even as he brings his bow down into line, Talann springs into the air and fires, using the smooth arc of her leap to make her hands as steady as if she stood still. She’s maybe three meters from the guard when her quarrel takes him in the heart. From this range, his armor can’t even stop the vanes: the quarrel punches right through his hauberk to vanish inside his chest.

  She drops the bow and makes the corner without slowing, brushing past the guard who makes thick choking noises deep in the back of his throat. Around the corner, the guards’ shouted alarms become shouts of alarm, and the wet bone-on-bone music of close combat swells, just out of sight.

  Now I find out what’s wrong with my knee: on the floor, close enough that I almost fell on it, is a steel crossbow quarrel, its point bent and blunted. One of the wild shots from the guards must have hit me on the bounce. Even blunted and with much of its force dissipated against the limestone floor, it hit the bone of my knee like the blow of a mace. My whole leg is filled with numb tingling, and I can’t feel my toes—probably chipped the bone. This is gonna hurt like a bastard in a few minutes. If it got in under my kneecap . . . I don’t want to think about it.

  This may not be my best day.

  There’s no time to find out how badly I’m injured. I’ll worry about it after I’m sure I’m gonna live through this.

  The sounds of combat cease abruptly, and a second later, Talann comes back around the corner, looking pleased with herself.

  “Are you hurt?” I ask her.

  “Caine,” she says seriously, “I’m just warming up.”

  She can do lots of impressive things, she’d said.

  “You are really something,” I tell her weakly.

  She shrugs and gives me a smile I’d have to guess would be dazzling if her face weren’t smeared with shit.

  Still no feeling in my right foot, though little white-hot needles are starting to prick my calf. “Help me up,” I tell her. “I’m not sure I can walk, yet.”

  She takes my hand in hers, weapon to weapon, and lifts me to my feet with easy strength. The look in her eyes goes through me like a spear. When was the last time my wife looked at me like that?

  This is something I can’t think about right now.

  The side of my knee is pulpy and swelling already, making sausage skin out of the tight leather of my breeches—nothing feels broken in there, but between the numb tingle and the swelling, nothing feels much of anything in there.

  Better keep moving and hope for the best.

  Talann slips a muscular shoulder into my armpit and helps me along. Rushall and Lamorak still stand swaying in the middle of the corridor; Lamorak’s barely hanging on, head drooping like a freighter pilot’s at the ass end of a two-day run.

  Shouts that answer the alarms of Talann’s recent victims come from ahead of us, toward the Pit.

  Talann glances from Rushall’s blankly sweating face to my knee. “We can’t outrun them.”

  “No shit. Lamorak, we need some help, here.” I take his shoulder and shake him gently. “Come on. Stick with us, man. We’re about to have guards crawling all over us. Can’t you do something to draw them off?”

  His eyes barely focus. “N’much. Mmm, pretty useless . . . swordsman, y’know . . . shitty adept . . .”

  I take my arm off Talann’s shoulder and whack him a stinging open-hand slap to the side of the face.

  “Wake up! We got no time for this, you whining sack of shit! You pull it together—or I just cut your throat right now and we take our chances withou
t you.”

  His face seems to clear, and a half smile bends his lips. “Easy to be tough . . . unarmed man with a broken leg . . . A’right, I got something.”

  He shakes his head sharply, struggling to keep his focus. “But you gotta look after, uh, after my horse, here—I can’t hold him and do . . . other shit at the same time.”

  “No fear.” I draw one of the long keen fighting knives from the rib sheath within my tunic as the pale cast of thought returns to Rushall’s face. I show him the knife’s chisel point.

  “Think of this as a spur. Don’t make me dig it into your flanks, huh?”

  Rushall wheezes something incomprehensible, and we limp away, deeper into the Donjon, accompanied by the rising sound of boots clattering toward us.

  They’re between us and the Pit, and so we try to swing wide. Lamorak mutters “Corner” from time to time and we turn; when one of the clattering patrols sees us, they insensibly point in the wrong direction and hustle off down other corridors at right angles to the one we’re in. Whatever kind of illusion it is Lamorak’s running, it’s obviously working.

  Now at various places around the Donjon we can hear them shouting to and at each other: conflicting orders and argument over which way we went. It’s working swell, but there’s too many fucking guards down here—they’re everywhere, and Lamorak’s grip on consciousness is loosening.

  Now and again one of the rushing patrols points at us. They see us instead of his illusion, once even firing on us, before Lamorak’s head jerks up like a narcoleptic marionette’s and the guards mill in confusion for a moment before stumbling off the wrong way.

  And the prisoners are into the act now, wakened by the yelling. They amuse themselves as prisoners will, by imitating the shouts of the guards—“This way! That way! The other way! Have you looked up your ass?”—and by simply howling wordlessly to drown all voices in a rising surf of noise.

  We turn aside again and again, dodging back from advancing groups, and finally, blessedly, around the curve of a corridor appears the steady light of the torchlit Pit.

  I douse the lamp Rushall carries. In the yellow-rose glow from the Pit, his face is grey and slack—shit, he looks worse than Lamorak. His chest heaves, and tears stream down his face.

  I can’t, he mouths again and again, and: Don’t kill me. It’s possible to feel some sympathy for the poor bastard until I remind myself what he was studying to become.

  I motion for them to wait here, and I slide along the curving wall, limping up to the corridor mouth to get a look.

  I don’t like what I see.

  The door to the Shaft is all the way on the far side of the Pit, across the thirty-endless-meter diameter—a long, long walk around the perimeter balcony—and only a few steps from the verdigris-caked double doors that lead up the steps to the courthouse.

  Standing by those double doors are nine very alert-looking men in full armor with crossbows at the ready, with the hip-height stone wall of the balcony rail for cover, and with, no doubt, orders to hold that door with their lives.

  I mutter, softly enough that no one can hear, “We are lip-deep in shit.”

  Is it too late to change my mind about this stupid escape thing?

  But, y’know, I’m an optimist, and I can look on the bright side: at least we don’t have to cross the Pit floor below, with its surging mass of jeering, hooting prisoners. And better a quick death, choking on the blood that fills your lungs from a crossbow through the chest, than to be delivered alive into the Theater of Truth.

  I slip back into the darkness to rejoin the others.

  “Talann, you remember what I told you before, what you have to tell Pallas Ril if I don’t get out of here?”

  Her face hardens, and she shakes her head stubbornly. “No. No, I don’t, and don’t waste your breath telling me again. We all make it or none of us do.”

  Idiot child. “Lamorak, listen to me.” His eyes are glazed, and he seems to be looking at something deep within the stone over my head. I shake him until his consciousness swims up into view.

  “Lamorak, goddammit, you have to tell Pallas she’s off-line, understand? When you meet Pallas, tell her she’s off-line.”

  “Pallas?” he murmurs thickly. “Caine . . . shit, Caine, I’m sorry . . .”

  He’s in a world of his own. “No time for that, now. Listen to me: Pallas dies in three days, or maybe less, maybe only two. You hear me? Pallas dies!”

  Lamorak frowns, leaning his head on the back of Rushall’s shoulder; I think some of this is drifting into view through the fog in his mind. But now Talann stares at me with an uncomprehending squint.

  “What do you mean, Pallas dies in three days? Is she hurt? Poisoned? What does ‘off-line’ mean?”

  I bite down on my desperation and speak through clenched teeth. “Talann, I swear to you, if there’s ever a way for me to explain this to you, I will. But not now. For now, just accept my word.”

  “I do, but—”

  “Fine then. Lamorak, you got it? You have to tell her she’s off-line.”

  His brows slowly draw together. “Off-line . . . Pallas is off-line? Bleeding god, Caine . . . she’ll die—!”

  “Yeah.” Now she has two chances: if either one of them makes it, she might learn it in time to get to a fixed transfer point and live. “All right, follow me.”

  I lead them up toward the mouth of the corridor; we all stop just barely far enough in the shadows that the guards on the balcony opposite can’t see us.

  “All we have to do is get to the Shaft door,” I tell them, pointing.

  Talann’s face hardens as she looks out there, but she says nothing. She understands as well as I do the brutal tactical reality of rounding that long open curve of balcony. I pull her back so that I can instruct her out of Rushall’s hearing. We don’t have to go far—it’s loud as a fucking nightclub in here.

  “Once we’re through that door, we’re home free. At the bottom end of the Shaft there’s a sump, just a hole in the stone that they drop bodies down. It’s a long drop, but the bottom is full of a couple yards of shit and composting corpses on a ledge, and an underground stream flows right by there. That’s how we get out. Understand? Jump in and don’t swim; just hold your breath and let the current carry you while you count to sixty, like this: one-ankhana two-ankhana three-ankhana. Then swim for the side—the stream is narrow, just swim hard and you’ll bump into stone eventually. Keep hold of Lamorak—he can make a light. You’ll be in the caverns under the city. If I’m with you, everything will be fine—I know those caverns. If not, keep moving upward and calling out; you should be able to meet up with the Subjects of Cant—they use the caverns to move around under the city.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  Ma’elKoth showed me a map, that’s how, an emergency fallback in case something went wrong at the kitchen. I give her a grim smile. “I know a lot of things about this city. It’s practically my hometown.”

  We go back up to where Rushall leans weakly on the wall, sagging under Lamorak’s weight.

  “All right,” I tell them, “here we go.” Rushall whimpers, tears leaking steadily from his eyes. “Relax, kid. Once we’re inside the Shaft, we won’t need you anymore. And we won’t have any reason to hurt you, all right?”

  He nods uncertainly, not really reassured.

  “Lamorak, we need something from you again here, something to keep those guards busy while we cross the Pit.”

  His breath rattles in his throat for a second or two before he whispers his answer, barely audible above the roar of jeering prisoners. “. . . I, I got nothing left, I think . . . Caine, sorry . . .”

  Fuck. Yeah, that would have been too easy.

  “All right,” I repeat, “let’s try it this way. Hands and knees. Stay below the balcony wall and get as far as you can.”

  “Call that a plan?” Talann says. “Ever try crawling in a robe?”

  “Deal with it. You lead. Give me those bows, I’m bringing up
the rear.”

  She hands me the crossbows and the two quivers and begins knotting her robe up around her hips. Rushall whimpers, “I can’t do it. Please. I can’t make it.”

  “. . . can crawl,” Lamorak offers dully. “Don’t need him for that . . .”

  “No you can’t and yes you do. And you—” I point a crossbow at Rushall. “—I’m not interested in your problems. You start to feel too tired, just imagine how you’ll feel with this quarrel sticking out your asshole. Move.”

  Rushall flinches away from me with more energy than I’ve seen since I chose him for this job, and I turn to Talann. “When you get to that door, don’t wait for me, just open the damned thing. I’ll be right behind you.”

  They set out with painful, nerve-racking slowness, creeping into the light. I hang back in the shadows, pressed against the wall with a bow in each hand, and watch the nine guards across the Pit.

  Three minutes, that’s all I ask. Tyshalle, if you’re listening, if you’re there, give me three minutes and I’ll get us out of this.

  Talann’s already out of my line of sight, and Rushall’s right behind her, crawling close to the wall, Lamorak riding him like a baby chimp clinging to its mother’s back.

  I hold the crossbows upright, pointed vertically on either side of my head. Their weight makes my shoulders start to ache, and when I shift my balance a knife of pain jabs into my right knee. I hope to god I can run. I start a breathing routine and dull the pain with one of the meditative control disciplines I learned all those years ago at the abbey school.

  The Shaft door stands closed and silent. As soon as that door starts to move or the guards give any sign of alarm, I’m gonna jump out, fire both bows to get their attention, and sprint for it. Maybe I’ll get lucky and drop one. A target moving at the speed I can run, across the thirty meters of the Pit’s diameter, will be nearly impossible to hit.

  Or, I should say, at the speed I could run this morning. My knee feels like it’s being slowly crushed in a vise.

  I only hope none of these guys can shoot like Talann.

  No sign of alarm, yet. This is going to work. We’re going to make it.