Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

And I, I confess, am loving this.

  This is what I live for. This is why I am what I am. There is purity in violence, in the desperate struggle to pull life from death, that surpasses any philosopher’s sere quest for truth.

  All bets are off, now, all rules suspended: no more grey-scale wandering through the moral fog of real life—this is elemental, black and white, life and death.

  And even life, even death: they have little meaning for me now. They are only outcomes, consequences, vague peripheries. The violence itself consumes me, even in anticipation. When I step out from my cover, stake my life and the lives of my friends on my gift of slaughter, the caustic tide of mayhem will wash me with grace: a saint touched by his god.

  Rushall interrupts my poesy by suddenly standing: he pops up behind the wall like a paper target in a shooting gallery. He’s holding Lamorak’s arms to keep the swordsman on his back—Lamorak looks like he’s out cold. Faintly over the din I can hear Rushall’s panicky scream:

  “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! I’ve got one!”

  Did I say we’re lip-deep in shit? Make that: up to the eyeballs.

  I spring out onto the balcony—I’d shoot that cocksucker if I could be sure of missing Lamorak—and level my bows on the guards across the Pit. They have no such reservations; even as I’m bringing my bows into line, eight of them fire. Some miss, but about five quarrels slam into Rushall’s chest and drive him spinning back against the wall. He slides to the floor with Lamorak beneath him.

  I fire both bows from the hip. One quarrel strikes fire from the balcony wall as it glances upward, and the other takes a guard in the ribs. At this range, chainmail is no protection: the quarrel chops in till it’s stopped by its vanes, and the guard sags against the bronze doors—which are opening!—and now even more guards press through—

  I duck behind the balcony wall to recock and reload, and one of the guards blows some kind of brief tattoo on a bugle that echoes through the Donjon.

  This is about to get kind of hairy.

  I have to run the opposite way, draw the guards off, but even as I’m uncoiling to stand, something snaps past my head and something else hammers my shoulder from behind. I roll with the impact, and a red-smeared crossbow quarrel clinks to the floor at my feet, even as I spin and see for the first time the four guards pounding up the corridor I was just in.

  Fuck going the other way—I’m not feeling heroic enough to get pincered on this balcony just to provide a five-second diversion.

  Two of the guards sprint toward me along the corridor walls; the other two stop in the middle of the corridor and take aim on my head.

  I drop my bows and shoulder-roll to my feet, simultaneously drawing the little leafblades from my ankle sheaths and flipping them both backhand down the corridor. There’s no force behind the throw, but it’s enough to make them flinch and duck and spoil their shots.

  I sweep up my bows and toss them over the balcony rail and follow them with the quivers. A bloodthirsty roar goes up from the Pit as a couple of prisoners find themselves unexpectedly armed. Then without hesitation I skip forward to meet one of the charging guards and grab his armor at the collarbone. I fall to my back and plant a foot in the pit of his stomach, kick him into the air, and he sails right over the rail and falls wailing into the Pit.

  I continue the roll and let it bring me to my feet. The other charging guard has skidded to a stop out on the balcony, and now he looks like he’s not at all sure he wants to deal with me by himself. He says, “Hey, wait—” as I jump at him and smear his lips with a stiff jab.

  In the instant that he blinks, I wrap my forearms around his head and twist around for the neck-breaking hangman’s throw. He clenches his neck enough to save his life, but the leverage sends him, too, over the rail to join his comrade among the prisoners below. He and his partner both had crossbows dangling from their baldric-slung shoulder straps.

  Now four prisoners below are armed.

  The two still in the corridor struggle with their bows; one doesn’t even have it cocked yet, and the other is hastily trying to fit a quarrel into the groove, hands jittering with adrenaline. I show them my teeth and beckon, and they exchange a worried glance.

  I start toward them along the corridor, and their nerve breaks: they turn and bolt. The instant their momentum is taking them away from me, I spin and sprint back out onto the balcony, heading for Rushall and Lamorak.

  More quarrels snap past me, two or three coming close enough to sting me with stone splinters they strike from the wall, one tugging at my leathers as it grazes my ribs. The guards across the Pit are busy with the bowmen downstairs: this flight of quarrels must have come from someone else, new guards answering the trumpet blast, but I don’t have time to turn and look.

  My shoulder seems to be working well enough, despite the spreading slimy warmth from the wound. The quarrel must have missed the bone, slicing instead through my trapezius next to my neck, missing my spine by maybe two inches. Every step sledgehammers a railroad spike into the side of my right knee.

  I round the curve, and Talann’s on the floor, keeping her head down as she fights to disentangle Lamorak from Rushall.

  “Go go go!” I shout. “Get the door; I’ll bring him!”

  Her head comes up at my shout; she nods and back-rolls away to her feet. Two guards across the Pit track her with their bows as she runs.

  I shriek “Stay down!” but before they can fire, a pair of flat whacks sound from the Pit floor. Quarrels zip past their heads. They jerk back, and both their shots go wild.

  The others by the courthouse door return fire down into the Pit. All I have to worry about is the four guards that come pounding toward me, now joined by the two I’d chased off earlier.

  I have fifteen seconds before they get here.

  I grab one of Rushall’s limp arms and try to drag him off. Lamorak shrieks in sudden agony—that’s all right, at least he’s awake—and Rushall jerks convulsively and moans; even with five quarrels in the chest it’ll take him a minute or two to die.

  I see the problem: they’re pinned together by a quarrel that had struck through Rushall’s chest just below the collarbone.

  The racing guards are forty feet away, then thirty.

  I wedge a toe between Lamorak’s chest and Rushall’s back; all three of us cry out as I summon a burst of hysterical strength and yank Rushall upward, lifting him in my arms like a sleepy child. Blood pumps from Lamorak’s belly and from a deep ripped-edge puncture next to his right nipple.

  “Run you worthless fuck get up and run!” I scream, and encourage him with an ungentle kick in the ribs as the six guards come thundering up behind me. Lamorak rolls over, groaning and starting to drag himself away on his hands and one good knee.

  I spin to meet the guards with Rushall still struggling in my arms and throw him bodily into the leader. They meet with a solid thump, Rushall screaming and clawing frantically, clutching at the cursing guard to recover his balance. Their struggle brings them against the retaining wall; they tip, locked in a lover’s embrace, and tumble to the Pit floor. Howling prisoners swarm over them.

  The remaining five guards skid to a halt and spread out, lifting their clubs to guard position and moving to flank me.

  I could run now; I could get away and leave Lamorak to crawl and be taken—these men in chainmail could never catch me, even half gimpy as I am. Instead I wait for them in an open stance, fists up with fingers forward, presenting the meat of my forearms to absorb the coming blows of iron-bound clubs. Crossbows fire somewhere, and men scream in pain.

  Past the closing guards I can see corridor mouths vomiting reinforcements onto the balcony as more patrols answer the alarm.

  I wait, forcing air in and out of my lungs.

  My soul sings poetry within me.

  Their eyes flicker to meet each others’, preparing to strike.

  I attack, letting go of conscious thought.

  I spring to one side of the nearest with a passing-leg, an
d he folds around the impact of my shin, gasping, even while my fingers stab for the eyes of another. I shift my balance and side kick a third stumbling back over the wall into the Pit, before I spin and slice the edge of my palm against the base of the skull of the first. He drops, twitching spastically.

  I’m winning.

  Just as I feel the first swelling surge of victory, one of the bastards pegs me from behind, not squarely but solidly enough to drive the breath from my lungs and buckle my knees: icy fire spreads from the point of impact above my kidney.

  Another swings his club at the joining of my shoulder and neck, and I barely get my hands up in time to take it on the outside of my left forearm and the palm of my right hand. The club blasts the feeling out of both of them and crashes through my guard, on target, but instead of breaking my neck it only strikes meteors through my swimming head.

  I snarl at the pain and slap his jaw with my doubled elbow, turning in time to duck under the follow-up of the guard behind me. From my bent-over position I hammer an uppercut into his armored groin—which only makes him grunt, but it lifts him up onto his toes—I grab his belt with my numb fingers and yank him forward and down on top of me in time to shield me from the down-stroke of the other. I can feel its impact through his chest, but it’s not enough to take him out through the padding under his armor, and now the one whose eyes I poked is blinking like he can see again, and I am in deep, deep trouble.

  I can’t say exactly why I thought I could handle five armed and armored men—

  There is, y’know, a history of insanity in my family.

  I heave and roll out from under the guard; as he struggles away from me one of his boots whacks me in the eye hard enough to shoot more stars through my vision. I keep rolling while my head slowly clears—if I stop moving, they’ll beat me to death in a second or two. When I can see again, the first thing I see is a shiny black pebble on the floor about six inches from the end of my nose.

  I get my hand on it as the three guards advance on me, clubs up for the kill. A quick glance back—there’s Lamorak, only five or six meters away, wheezing and dragging himself along, still maybe ten meters short of the door.

  “Lamorak!” I holler. “Catch this fucking thing and give me a hand here!”

  He looks behind, and I shoot the griffinstone at him like a marble. It skips and skitters along the floor, then it hits a crease on the rough-cut stone and bounces wildly into the air.

  I track the stone with my eyes, the guards above me forgotten.

  Lamorak squints like he can’t see it, like he’s lost it in the uncertain torchlight.

  His palsied hand wavers—Where is the damned thing? Did it go over the fucking wall?—and it drops right into his palm.

  His fingers close around it, and that dreamy sexual smile comes back to his face.

  He says clearly, “Kill them before they kill you.”

  I know better than to think he’s talking to me. I back-roll to my feet, away from the guards, as one of them pivots and swings his club like a baseball bat into the unprotected face of the man beside him. Bone disintegrates under the impact, and the man flips over like a pancake, dead before he hits the floor.

  He swings on the other one, who’s still too startled to defend himself, and drops him too. Then he races away from me to meet the charge of the ten or twelve guards that are thundering toward us.

  Lamorak has to concentrate to keep this going, so I scramble over behind him and lift him with my arms around his chest. Ten meters is all that’s left between us and escape. No one’s shooting at us; they all seem engaged in the exchange between the guards and the prisoners in the Pit. I look ahead—

  Talann has the Shaft door open.

  It opens out onto the balcony; she’s holding it wide to use it like a tower shield, closing off half of the balcony so that the guards on the other side can come at her only one at a time. The robe I gave her is painted crimson; no way to tell how much of the blood is hers.

  I drag Lamorak toward her; now I’m wheezing and limping and this is taking forfuckingever.

  Our tame guard goes down under a hailstorm of iron, a couple of the advancing guards stopping to stand over him and beat him until they make porridge out of his head. Lamorak is trying to take over another one, but his breathing is ragged and he’s lost a lot of blood and the effort is too much for him—more blood bursts from his nose in a bright crimson spray; he sags in my arms.

  The guards sprint toward us, more and more seeming to join them with every step. I look over my shoulder—we’re almost there. As I drag Lamorak to the doorway, Talann is using the two knives I gave her in a very complex infighting style that looks vaguely like wing chun, a flurry that not only slices the wrist tendon of the guard’s club hand, but ends by driving a blade up through the soft underside of his chin.

  She kicks his twitching corpse back into the arms of the man behind him, and we’re through the door. I drop Lamorak like a sack of meal and grab the back of her robe, yanking her backward into the Shaft. She whirls on me with a shout and recognizes me barely in time to stop the flashing arc of her blade a couple of inches from my eyes.

  I step past her and haul the door shut, bracing a foot on the wall beside it to hold it closed against the pull of the guards outside.

  “Don’t wait for you?” she says breathlessly. “You’ll be right behind me?”

  “No fucking lip out of you,” I tell her.

  With the door shut, there’s only a thin line of torchlight leaking beneath it for illumination. They pull a couple times, hard enough that I feel something pop in my wounded shoulder.

  “What now?”

  “Wait.”

  I let go of the door and shift my weight onto the balls of my feet while I draw one of my long fighting knives. This time, when they pull on the door, it swings wide, and I lunge like a fencer, stabbing the chisel point into the mouth of the nearest guard, splintering his teeth and slashing sideways to part his cheek back to the hinge of his jaw. He jerks backward and falls, howling. I slam the door shut again and hold it.

  “Now,” I say softly, “we just have to wait for one of them to get a bright idea . . .”

  “What idea?”

  Through my hands I can feel the grinding chunnk as somebody slides the heavy bar into place. “That one. They’ve barred the door from outside. They figure we’ll be here when they’re ready—they’ve got problems other than us, right now.”

  The heavy door cuts almost all the noise from outside along with the light; now soft, despairing voices from below begin to ask each other if they can tell what’s going on.

  The throwing knife from between my shoulder blades will serve perfectly. I pull it out and feel for the crack of the door, slip the blade within it, and pound it home with the pommel of my fighting knife. It’s just like pennying shut a door in the apartments where I grew up. It won’t stop the guards when they come for us, but it’ll slow them down and give us a little warning—we’ll hear them pry it open.

  I pull Kierendal’s lighter from the pocket inside the waistband of my breeches and thumb it alight. From the darkness beyond the tiny pool of wavering light it casts, eyes peer uncertainly back at us.

  “What’s happening?” somebody whispers. “You’re not guards—have you come for me at last?”

  Talann’s breath catches, and I put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t answer. There’s nothing we can do for these people. To speak to them will only give them cruel hope.”

  And the smell comes to us: bitter sweat and shit and the sweet rot of gangrene, the thick reek of gas escaping from bloated corpses below, a dizzying stench that burns my throat and slaps tears into my eyes. I hand Talann the lighter.

  “Lead the way. I’ll carry sleepyhead, here.”

  In the glow, Lamorak looks even worse, and the blood that once had pumped out from his chest wound now only flows sluggishly. I don’t know if he’s going to survive. Shit. At least I got him out of the Theater of Truth—that should count
for something.

  “Hang on, you bastard,” I mutter as I slap some of Ma’elKoth’s unguent on the chest wound; maybe it’ll slow the bleeding, anyway. I sling him up into a fireman’s carry that makes my own wounds, shoulder and knee, announce their presence loudly. “Hang on. I don’t want to have to look Pallas in the eye and tell her you died down here. She’ll never believe I didn’t kill you myself.”

  We move down the long, long step-cut slant of the Shaft. The floor is slick with the condensation from the breath of hundreds of gasping prisoners, and now Talann reaches the first of them, all with one wrist chained to the wall above their heads.

  The Shaft is maybe five meters across, just wide enough that the prisoners chained in an endless double row down along its walls can’t reach us as we walk down its middle. All are naked, clothed only in their own filth and the filth of those upslope.

  Prisoners in the Shaft are unchained only if, through some extraordinary mercy, they are to be released from the Donjon. They are kept here, fed a minimal diet, and kept chained to the wall until they die. Their wastes flow downhill, to the sump that is our destination, so the prisoners below are bathed constantly in the shit and piss from those chained above. Rarely—perhaps once a month—the guards come in here to unchain the corpses and flush the Shaft with barrels of water. The corpses, too, are rolled downhill into the sump and left there to rot.

  Our tiny bubble of light reveals men and women in misery so abject that they’ve become objects, not even animal, only bundles of shattered nerves and gangrenous sores that have no purpose left beyond experiencing the slow, shit-filled slide down to death.

  Even Dante would swoon, here; Talann can barely take it. Her shoulders tremble, and sometimes I can hear a faint sob and a murmured prayer that the Great Mother have pity and release these souls from life.

  Y’know, I admire Ma’elKoth, I really do—but if I ever start to actually like the man, all I’ll have to do is remind myself that he runs this place, and he could change it if he chose.

  On the other hand, I guess it’s not that different from being born into a Labor slum. Shit, as they say, flows downhill at home as much as here—and in the Shaft, it doesn’t take as long to kill you.