Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  He said, “The tale of Simon Jester ends today, in defeat and bloody death. To your places.”

  As the Cats assembled in their prides and filed silently from the bridgehouse, every man of them swore in his heart to make Berne’s vow become truth.

  9

  “AAAH, LADY?” THE barge captain’s whiskey rasp came from out of sight beyond the hatch at the ladder’s top.

  “Y’might wanna come up here and look at this . . .”

  Pallas pushed herself to her feet, aching in every joint. When the barge captain said lady, he was always talking to her. Everyone else was hey you, even Talann; he’d told them outright that he didn’t want to know any names.

  The newly hired crew had done a fine job on the bilge, flooring it with layers of open-worked shipping pallets, to make a slatted floor eight inches above the slop that still covered the bottom. They’d scrubbed the bulkheads and hung lamps from pegs and generally made it temporarily comfortable.

  Several of the tokali were tall enough to knock their heads on the beams that supported the deck above, and even the shorter ones felt oppressed and confined by the low ceiling; there was very little moving about. The tokali sat huddled into their family knots, here and there, and they all looked at her with wide, frightened eyes. As usual, muttered some weary and resentful part of her brain.

  As soon as she climbed the ladder, they’d start asking each other what was happening, spinning ever-more-alarming fantasies about what might be going on in the daylit topside world; eventually, one of them would summon the courage to brace Talann about it. Talann would assure them that all was well, and they’d return to their family knots, and the whole process would begin again.

  She’d Cloak-walked Talann with the last of them from the warehouse in the Industrial Park an hour ago. Lamorak had decided to stay with the Subjects, and that was all right with her. Majesty and the Subjects could take care of him, hide him, and protect him from the Imperials better than she could. Now they waited only for the barge’s turn to slip from the docks and head downriver. The captain had bribed the dock boss to move them up the queue, and they had less than another hour to wait.

  All Pallas wanted was to get the tokali out of town and well on their way downriver. Then she could leave the barge, walk back into the city, find a way to cancel the Eternal Forgetting, and get herself on-line, safe from amplitude decay. She would come back to the city just in case the Studio had prepared an autotransfer protocol, waiting for her transponder signature; she didn’t want to be unexpectedly transferred out in full view of the tokali, the crew, and Talann.

  Then she’d see what she’d see; if the Studio chose not to pull her, she’d make her way back to the barge—a fast horse would catch it in less than a day—and ensure the tokali made it safely to Terana. If she found herself suddenly back on the transfer platform in the Studio, well, she’d deal with that when she got there. At least she’d be able to call Hari and find out what in the name of god was going on.

  His sudden transfer last night had wakened terrifying images of what might happen to her—and it was a mystery that chewed on the fringes of her consciousness.

  Why would the Studio have pulled him in the middle of an Adventure? It didn’t make any sense.

  And that long moment of stillness, that slow count of ten where he’d sat without so much as a twitch of his finger . . . She’d seen that from him before—the catatonia of thought so consuming that he didn’t have enough brain capacity left over to remember to breathe. What had come to him, then? He’d looked straight at Lamorak and said, “You. It’s you,” with another look on his face, one Pallas had seen only a few times before: his soul-extinguishing rage that brought instant, reflexive violence.

  It was the look she’d seen on his face the night he’d come for her at Berne’s camp, back in Race for the Crown of Dal’kannith. When he’d loosed her bonds and helped bind over the burns and salted cuts of Berne’s amusements, she’d whispered, “Take me out of here.” When he looked at her wounds, then at the flayed corpses of Marade and Tizarre, still lying in the tent with her, then out through a slit in the tent flap at the men who had done this to all of them, sitting around their campfire, drinking and laughing among themselves, that was the look his face had worn.

  He’d looked at Lamorak the same way he’d looked at Berne that night, and she didn’t know why.

  But she didn’t have time to think about it much. Time pressed on her from all sides: how little of it she had, to move thirty-six tokali out of Ankhana, to find a way to save her own life. She’d already spent far too much of her limited time thinking about Caine, about the last look on his face when the crystalline prismatic shimmer began to halo his body.

  It stuck with her, and she couldn’t shake it; she kept coming back to it in unguarded moments.

  It stuck with her because he’d been in his killing zone, consumed by that berserk fury that seemed sometimes to rule his life, the state of mind where nothing mattered to him but blood and pain. But when the world had begun to halo out, in that half second he had to act, he didn’t attack. There wasn’t any time to think, to consider consequences, to weigh a choice.

  His reflex had spun him away from killing and back toward her.

  She knew what he’d been trying to do when his hands had stretched toward her: extend the transfer field, take her with him back to Earth and safety. It shook her; it really did. It didn’t fit her image of him at all. It made her think that maybe he was changing, a little, slowly and gradually in her absence; it made her think that maybe it’d be worth her trouble to get to know him again.

  She fought these thoughts, recognizing them for the succubi they were, seductive fantasies that could lead only to more heartache. That was past, she told herself again and again. I’m over him.

  Beneath the layers of her resentment, she’d often felt a sneaking envy for his ability to surrender himself to bloodshed. There must be something deeply free about hating so much, having so much anger that consequences became irrelevant, the way he hated Berne.

  After all, she’d suffered more at Berne’s hands than he had. It wasn’t him who had been bound in that tent, watching friends being tortured to death, feeling Berne’s loathsome caress between the kiss of hot coals and the icy pain of needle and knife edge; it wasn’t him hunted through the streets, hiding in basements, remembering the swift and efficient slaughter of Dak and Jak. But he was the one who could forget everything, drop his whole life in an instant for a chance to hurt Berne—or really, any of the enemies he’d made over his career.

  She’d always been the mature one, the dedicated one, the one who could put her personal feelings aside, the one who had her priorities straight: save the innocents; protect the children; hold back; think, plan, strategize until her brain went numb.

  This came partly from the voluntary discipline of her art; effective thaumaturgy was as precise as mathematics, and like mathematics it required a certain coldness of mind, a detachment. But she had a not-too-deeply buried desire—once in her life, just once—to let it all go, to cut loose the way Caine did.

  All of these thoughts swirled and colored each other as she mounted the ladder, passing through her brain in seconds, chasing each other in the confused and feverish way that comes with bone-deep fatigue. So when she stepped out onto the sunlit deck and saw the antiship nets being cranked slowly up from the river’s surface, dripping weeds and slime, she couldn’t really register exactly what was happening, or why it was important.

  The upper rim of the antiship nets stretched in a deep catenary across the river from the titanic windlasses, down-geared and ratcheted, atop Onetower and the northwest garrison on the downstream side, and from Sixtower to the northeast garrison at the easternmost tip of Old Town, almost out of sight around the curve of the island. The nets were made of huge steel links, each one nearly six feet long and as thick as Pallas’arm, bent to join with each other like the rings in a shirt of chainmail. They sealed off a stretch of river
docks and the barges and boats moored there along the whole curve of the bank opposite the towering limestone walls of Old Town, including the barge on which she stood.

  For the moment, though, Pallas could only feel the blessing of sunlight and a fresh breeze; ever since her encounter with the Cats two days ago, she hadn’t been outside in daylight without being Cloaked, separated from her sensations by the focused concentration of mindview.

  The two poleboys—ogre brothers, each a great hulking hunchbacked brute over eight feet tall—leaned on their twenty-five-foot river poles, staring silently west toward Knights’ Bridge. In the wheelhouse, the pilot—human, but ugly enough to be part ogrillo—stared in the same direction, and the two human bilgeboys peered out from a gap in the deck-lashed stacks of cargo crates.

  The captain nodded toward the high-arching span of Knights’ Bridge while he pretended to light a long-stemmed pipe.

  “ ’S not just the nets, lady. I’m thinking, that up there might be trouble for us.”

  That up there—Pallas could barely make it out with a squint; the captain must have exceptional eyesight—was two men standing at the center of the Knights’ Bridge arch, leaning on the stone rail to look out over the river, the sun very nearly at their backs. In the glare, she had difficulty defining what it was about them that disturbed her so much. One had something on his head, some kind of hat, or a hood, and the other—

  A tendril of cloud passed before the sun, and in the sweep of shadow, she could see that the other man wore a shirt of faded and blotchy strawberry and had something that looked like the hilt of a sword sticking up over his left shoulder.

  And he seemed to be staring directly at her.

  A shock went through her, from the top of her head in a wave down to the soles of her feet. She froze for an endless second before reason took over. There was no way he could pick her out, recognize her from that distance among this crawling mass of boats and barges along the busy dockside. On the other hand, there was no reason to dawdle up here in plain view.

  Now, too, she could see men in grey leather fanning out among the dockworkers and the rivermen. They seemed to come from everywhere, casually half stealing into view simultaneously from doorways and alleys all along the dockside.

  “Chi’iannon’s Grace,” Pallas muttered. “There must be a hundred of them.”

  She turned to the captain. “Keep the crew calm,” she said. “Think of this as just another inspection. I’ll Cloak the passengers below, exactly as we did for the inspection this morning. They’ll look around; they won’t find anything; they’ll go away.”

  He shook his head dubiously, sucking on the pipe stem. “Dunno, lady. My boys, they’re good boys. I’d put ’em against any barge crew; I’d put ’em against most river pirates. Nobody can ask ’em to stand against Grey Cats.”

  “It won’t come to that,” she said, putting a reassuring hand on his arm. “Tell your boys to play dumb; you go on and yessir-nosir the Cats until they’re sick of your voice. I’ll handle the rest.”

  She swung back down through the hatch before the captain could render another objection. The huddled knots of tokali below raised apprehensive eyes to her with unspoken questions. She lifted her hands.

  “It’s another inspection, that’s all. We’ll do this exactly like the last one, all right? Everyone stay still and quiet while I Cloak you, and we’ll send off these inspectors none the wiser. It’s best to be ready, though. Everybody find a comfortable spot and lie down. Go on. It’ll take only a few minutes; try to relax. In less than an hour, we’ll be on our way downstream to safety.”

  She paused for a moment and waited and watched until the tokali slowly began to arrange themselves. Lying down was best; when she was doing something so complex as a mass Cloak, sudden movement in her eye plane could distract her.

  Talann sat below her on the stairs, sunk in some kind of brown study, resting her chin on her hands. She’d been listless and uncommunicative ever since Pallas had returned last night from her talk with Lamorak and Caine.

  Pallas sat down beside her and murmured, “I need you alert and with me, Talann. It’s the Cats.”

  Talann looked at her blankly, light only gradually returning to her eyes. “Sorry?”

  “The Cats, Talann. And I’m exhausted.”

  Her gaze gradually sharpened. “Is Berne out there?”

  “Yes, he is,” Pallas said slowly, with a growing frown. “Why?”

  “He fought Caine—he fought Caine again, just two or three days ago, in a brothel in Alientown. The Subjects were talking about it last night. Caine lost. Again.”

  “Let me tell you something,” Pallas said sharply. “Facing Berne and living through it? I wouldn’t call that losing.”

  “He ran,” Talann said, staring off into some private distance.

  “So did I.”

  “Well, but you’re . . .”

  “What? I’m what?” Unaccountable anger harshened her voice. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing,” Talann murmured. “It’s not the same.”

  Then she mumbled something under her breath, something that Pallas couldn’t make out, something that she wasn’t supposed to hear, but somehow she understood the indistinct mutter all the same: But I wouldn’t run . . .

  It was all too clear that Talann was going through some kind of adolescent crisis, and for a brief moment Pallas actually imagined herself talking to the young warrior about it. This distracted sullenness and resentment—this had something to do with Caine, and with Pallas herself, and with Caine’s disappearance. They’d spent a whole day together, alone except for the intermittently conscious Lamorak . . .

  The thought slid into her mind like a hot needle: Did he sleep with her?

  But this came only from fatigue and the pressure of fear, a mind trick to avoid thinking about the approaching Cats; she shook it off and forced herself to concentrate on the immediate problem.

  “Listen,” she said. “Don’t even think about Berne. Help me keep everybody quiet, and for the love of Chi’iannon don’t do anything stupid. Don’t forget what we’re here for, all right? We’re not here to kill Cats; we’re not here to fight Berne. We’re here to save the lives of these people.” She nodded toward a far corner of the bilge, where Konnos and his wife tried to quiet their younger daughter, who had become restlessly hyperactive, spurred by the tension and the inactivity.

  Talann stared at them silently, stared past them, beyond the hull. “I know it. Don’t worry about me.”

  Pallas took her at her word. With a final, comradely squeeze of Talann’s shoulder, she stepped to the corner of the bilge and sank into the Warrior’s Seat position that Hari had taught her. Though not quite as comfortable as her accustomed Lotus Seat, the Warrior’s Seat had the advantage that one quick surge of the doubled legs beneath her would pop her to her feet, already in a fighting stance.

  She began the slow pattern of circular breathing that brought her to mindview. All of her worries, her doubts, and her fatigue sloughed from her spirit like dry leaves stripped by an autumn breeze, and now she began the long and intricate process of erasing her mental image of each person in the bilge. One by one they faded from her consciousness, each of the tokali, then Talann, finally even herself, and then she wiped away the provisions, the ragged palliasses, the shipping pallets that made the dry-slatted floor, then the lamps that hung from the pegs on the walls, as well as the light they cast.

  And as her final touch, which would have been far beyond the skill of a lesser adept, she added to the scene: scuffed the walls with mental grime, raised the level of black wastewater, and imaged bits of unidentifiable flotsam bobbing on its surface.

  This last was to discourage the Cats from coming down the ladder for a closer look. This water would look real, but there was no way she could disguise the feel of the dry pallets beneath a man’s boots. If one of them came down the ladder, the game would be up, and they’d have to fight their way out.

  T
ime passed unnoticed in mindview, and the level of concentration she required to maintain a Cloak of this complexity prevented her from any more than barely registering the sounds of voices and of boot heels on the deck above. She knew that the Cats were here, that even now the barge captain was muttering with his best pretense of simpleminded helpfulness, but she couldn’t spare enough attention to comprehend the words they spoke.

  A shaft of light speared into her Cloak as the hatch opened, but she was ready for that. Her disciplined mind automatically made the necessary adjustments of light and shadow, and added a glittering reflection from the surface of the illusionary water. Even in mindview, she felt a certain pride at the quality of this illusion. It was unbeatable.

  A pair of heads appeared, silhouetted against the afternoon sky; one of them wore some kind of hood, made of metallic-looking netting, and she heard a gasp that came from down here in the bilge itself. She knew the voice: Konnos.

  What in the name of god could have startled Konnos so much that he’d give them all away?

  There was no way to tell if the Cats could hear it as well—they were up in the breeze and the dockside noises—but now the bareheaded Cat said something, and the one in the hood replied. Both heads withdrew, and the hatch started to swing closed . . .

  And Talann streaked up the ladder and threw herself against the descending hatch.

  The sudden motion startled Pallas out of mindview. What was that lunatic doing?

  But now memory surged back, and she understood what the Cats had said, the words whose meaning hadn’t penetrated mindview: “Nothing. It’s empty and it smells bad.” And the reply from the one in the hood: “It’s full of people . . .”

  Talann hit the hatch door like a locomotive, hammering it open, ripping it from the grasp of the startled Cats. She reached up through the open hatch and tangled her fists in the leather collars of the two Cats, then kicked off from the ladder and let herself fall into the bilge, her sudden weight pulling both of them in after her.