Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  Suddenly Hari was on his feet, his eyes alight, his hands grabbing inspiration from the air.

  “But, but, but—don’t you get it? That gives her intrinsic value to the companies she represents, value that maybe could be legally separable from her employment as an Actor.”

  Vilo frowned skeptically. “You’re going to go after the Studio through trademark law?”

  “Why not?” Hari said. “Why not? By intentionally planning her death, Kollberg is deliberately infringing upon her value as a spokesman, isn’t he? The loss of consumer identification, from shifting to a new spokesman, that could translate to actual damages—”

  “It’s ridiculous,” Vilo said. “It’s never been done. Shit, even if it worked, a precedent like that could destroy the whole Studio system—I mean, even scheduling an Actor on a few safe, boring Adventures would reduce his value as a spokesman and a trademark . . .”

  But Hari had no attention to spare for Vilo’s objections; his breath had stopped in his throat as he watched the play of expression across Dole’s smooth and kindly face.

  There was doubt there, certainly, but she was thinking about it—and she was slowly coming toward some kind of decision.

  “It is,” she said suddenly, reaching out for Hari’s hand, “brilliant! So what if it’s never been done? Arturo Kollberg is deliberately reducing the income of a noncompeting business, and from an immune position, as an officer of a public trust. I should be able to get a cease-and-desist on him before the close of business today.”

  She rose and laid a hand upon the arm that was bound to Hari’s chest for a moment, and then drew him, astonishingly, into a hug.

  Hari and Vilo gaped at each other over Dole’s shoulder until she released him. Tears shone in her eyes.

  “I knew you really loved her,” Dole said. “I knew it wasn’t just an act. I could feel it. Thank you so much for finding a way to let me help you save her.”

  Hari’s whole body tingled, partly from the sheer height from which she’d stooped to touch him—Leisure to ex-Labor—and partly from an early intimation of victory.

  Dole’s face now hardened. “And I tell you something else: if we can find any hard evidence, any evidence at all that will stand up in court, I swear to you that I will not rest until that vile little man is crushed. He will not live to try this again with someone else. That won’t be easy; you know their files and procedures are sacrosanct—”

  “I know,” Hari whispered, because he could not trust his voice. Inch toward daylight.

  “I’ll find something. You’ll see. Somehow, I’ll get what you need.”

  “I know you will.”

  Dole now turned away and spoke to the air. “Robert.” Mist jetted out from concealed vents in the rock face, and intersecting lasers formed a full-animation holosculpture of her majordomo.

  “Madam?”

  She began issuing instructions to be channeled to the Dole Family’s vast galaxy of lawyers. Hari and his Patron were forced to wait while she made her plans and arrangements. A couple of times during those minutes Hari caught Vilo staring at him through narrowed eyes, a sort of newly appreciative squint, as though he was having difficulty reconciling what he saw with what he’d expected to see.

  Hari answered this stare with an expressive shrug.

  Dad was right, Hari thought. I don’t have to solve every problem with my fists.

  His father had told him to inch toward daylight, but some inches are longer than others.

  DAY SIX

  “Hari? Hari, wake up.”

  “Hurr . . . ?”

  “Hari, I’ve been thinking. I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Shan . . . can’t do what? It’s four o’clock, for Christ’s sake. Can’t this wait till morning?”

  “I don’t like who I am with you, Hari. Do you understand that? Can you?”

  “I don’t understand anything at this time of the morning . . .”

  “Hari, I want a divorce.”

  1

  ANKHANA WENT TO bed with terror and disbelief, but the disbelief fled during the night: at dawn, only terror remained—slow terror, the kind that feels like icy teeth chewing on your bones.

  There was no one in the city who did not know of the battle at dockside, no one who did not have a friend or family member who had been there, who had seen it with their own eyes. Some had connected it to the recent explosions in the Industrial Park; it seemed that a day did not pass without a pitched battle somewhere in the streets of the capital.

  Those citizens brave or desperate enough to risk these streets this morning did so with frequent over-the-shoulder glances. They strolled or hurried depending on how near they chanced to be to a sheltered doorway or narrow alley down which they could run should battle suddenly erupt.

  Ankhana was a notoriously violent city, but even here there had always been limits: a brawl might end in a stabbing, or the constables might clash with a stonebender gang in Alientown, but a pitched battle in the streets was far beyond the pale.

  Fear was fueled by a problem of scale, as well: jets of fire a thousand yards long, the whole dockside burning, that monstrous wall of water—it was insane, incomprehensible. Who could possibly be safe, even in their own homes behind Old Town’s massive walls, when such things can occur in broad daylight?

  When Ma’elKoth had begun his campaign to cleanse the Empire of the Aktiri, only the most childishly superstitious of his subjects had believed that such beings existed. But as Aktiri were discovered, slowly, here and there in places of responsibility throughout the Empire, even among the nobility, this disbelief had turned to a sort of nervous suspiciousness.

  Neighbors and acquaintances suddenly became conscious of each other’s peculiarities—the sort of little quirks of personality and behavior that had seemed harmless before, but now appeared inexplicable and more than a little sinister. After all, how was one to know who might secretly be an Aktir?

  Rumors began to circulate of certain touchstones that would cry out when pressed to an Aktir’s flesh, of characteristic witch marks that could be found upon an Aktir’s body. Tales were told of men who woke and found an Aktir in bed beside them in place of their beloved wives—the substitution having taken place under a new moon at midnight—tales of Aktiri curses, of poisonings and massacres and more. Each was more extreme than the last, as though truth could be found only by topping what people thought they knew. Everyone felt in their secret hearts that the worst was yet to come, and so each fanciful escalation was taken as hard evidence of how bad things would eventually get.

  There were conflicting stories about the proper way to destroy an Aktir. Some held that a simple ash-wood stake through the heart would suffice; others claimed that its lips must be sewn shut over a mouthful of copper coins, and then its severed head must be buried facedown at a crossroads. Most agreed that to burn the Aktir alive on a pyre of wood soaked with oil that had been blessed by a priest of Prorithun would serve as well as any other method.

  Out in the provinces, these and many other techniques were widely experimented with on any number of the usual outcast folk—old solitary widows, eccentric men who kept to themselves at the edge of this or that village, all the folk of this sort—and all were found to work quite well.

  Later, stories began to filter into the cities of wealthier, more prosperous peasants being accused, and even some gentlefolk, small landholders and the like. The cityfolk nodded wisely to each other at these tales of provincial superstition and speculated—often correctly—that the accusers in these cases somehow ended up in possession of the executed Aktir’s land and goods.

  Only later did it occur to these worldly-wise city dwellers to wonder how the sum of their own little quirks and pecadillos might appear to their neighbors; only later did they wonder how vulnerable they themselves might be to false accusation; only later did they begin to eye their more prosperous neighbors, wondering how vulnerable they might be, as well.

  These screws of tension had
been driven tight into the heart of the Empire for months now, even while most of the citizens of the Empire only reluctantly, halfheartedly believed that the Aktiri were any more than a ghost tale to frighten children. Many of the citizens listened with a sort of sneaking approval to stories of the slippery rebel Simon Jester, who seemed to effortlessly defy the constituted authority of the entire Empire; Simon Jester had become something of a folk hero, a cunning rogue who could thumb his nose at the power of Ma’elKoth himself.

  Anyone in Ankhana who still felt that way need only pause a moment and cast a glance at the wreckage of Knights’ Bridge, or pay a copper coin to a page of the Imperial Messenger-News to hear a recital of the names of the innocent dead along the dockside—a hundred men and more. Sailors, dockers, warehousemen, and clerks wiped from existence without warning. As a kitchen tale, Simon Jester was entertaining, but as a real, powerful, implacable foe of the Empire, he was terrifying.

  These liveried pages also gave an account of how the thaumaturge who’d caused such unimaginable destruction had been captured by the heroism of Count Berne. The pages who wore the green and gold of the competing news service, Colin’s Pages and Current Events, gave a somewhat different story—of the marksmanship of an unknown bowman and the escape of a boatload of accused Aktiri downriver. The army had sworn to take them, but thus far they remained at large.

  Suddenly the Aktiri had become real to Ankhana in a way they had never been before. The Aktiri really were out there, as powerful and terrifying as even the wildest stories had ever claimed them to be. Not off somewhere in some distant land across the sea, not in the provinces, not even in some other great city on the far side of the Empire, but right here, right now.

  Those citizens who were given to prayer now prayed for Ma’elKoth, prayed to their gods to protect their Emperor and strengthen his mighty arm in his death struggle with the unholy Aktiri. Many more of the citizenry found themselves kneeling uncomfortably, unused to the position, before the statues in their small household shrines; instead of praying for Ma’elKoth, they prayed to him. The Beloved Children of Ma’elKoth had no other shield.

  The object of their prayer was busy this morning. He had forgone his daily morning’s ritual of constructing his Great Work; instead he paced to and fro beside the bloodstained limestone altar in the Iron Room.

  Some of the blood on the altar was fresh: it leaked through the neatly tied bandages that covered the sucking chest wound of Pallas Ril, who was staked spread-eagled across the coffin-sized stone.

  The interrogation progressed very slowly indeed; Arkadeil was in no condition to work and Ma’elKoth felt he couldn’t trust any of the apprentices in a matter of such delicacy.

  His own techniques lacked, perhaps, the elegance and refinement of Arkadeil’s art, but he felt sure they would prove equally effective, in the end.

  2

  THE MOB OF downcasters surged against the Studio gate and splashed back upon itself like a wave against a seawall. This incoming tide of desperate fans was vast—doubling, tripling the record numbers the Studio had expected. They were packed shoulder to shoulder over the surrounding right-of-way, pressed back to the walls of distant buildings. An excited secman, standing atop the gate in the light of the rising sun, babbled into his comlink that he was sure there must be more than two million people outside waiting for Caine’s arrival.

  This was only a mild exaggeration; the secman had overestimated the size of the crowd, but not by much.

  They were all to be disappointed: Caine was already inside.

  His blood-crusted black leathers had been carefully removed from his battered, unconscious body in the Studio infirmary and stored overnight in the Studio ON vault. Hari had arrived by cab long before dawn, and it was down in the vault that Kollberg found him.

  The vault, with its Overworld-normal field, conferred almost perfect privacy. Its thick walls were innately soundproof, and the slightly altered physics within its field prevented electronic eavesdropping.

  Kollberg posted two of the riot-armed Worker secmen at the vault door on his way in. He kept two more with him, with careful orders to hold their power rifles at the ready between him and Michaelson and to shoot without warning if Michaelson made the slightest move to attack.

  Michaelson had become so unstable that all of Kollberg’s precautions were predicated on the assumption that Michaelson would become psychotically violent at the first opportunity. Kollberg had made the mistake the other night of being in the line of fire; only the shield of his heavy desk had saved him from injury. This was a mistake he did not intend to repeat.

  The safest option, of course, would have been to avoid Michaelson entirely, to have someone else deliver the greenroom instructions, but Kollberg knew well that the safest option is often not the best one. The instructions he must give were of a delicate nature; the fewer people who knew about them, the better. This was why he’d chosen the Worker secmen instead of drawing his guards from the more flexible and responsive Laborers: testimony by a Worker was meaningless in any court.

  Furthermore, he’d been up all night basting in his own juices, in a fury after a curt screencall from a Dole Family lawyer—imagine, a Professional allowed, even encouraged, to disturb an Administrator at his home! The man’s tone was so clearly insolent that Kollberg had immediately filed a countercomplaint with the Social Police, but that had done little to ease the acid ball in his belly.

  Between this disturbance, the brutal stress of preparing the climax of this Adventure, and the amphetamine he’d taken to give himself the energy to get everything done, he hadn’t slept at all.

  And he couldn’t let an incident like this pass unanswered. No matter how big a star Caine might be, Michaelson was still only a Professional, and he could not be allowed to one-up his betters. In fact, this incident bothered him more than Michaelson’s attempt to lay hands upon him; the attempted violence was merely an outgrowth of Michaelson’s increasing instability, while this ridiculous legal maneuvering was clearly a calculated insult.

  When Kollberg entered the vault behind the lockstepping Workers, Michaelson stood nearly naked before the dressing mirror. Caine’s leathers hung from a peg nearby, and the surgical tape that had bound his torso lay in scissor-cut tangles on the floor behind him. He wore only his leather jockstrap, and he watched himself in the mirror as he flowed through a series of complex stretching exercises, scowling and wincing at the aches and pains these produced.

  He looked worse than Kollberg felt. Despite the antibiotics, the crudely stitched wound in his shoulder flared an angry red, and his back swelled with the neat blackened discs of gelslug bruises, clustered around a larger, ragged one tinged with red, left by a Donjon guard’s iron-bound club. Another red-purple bruise swelled at the outside of his bandaged right knee, and even Kollberg’s untrained eye could see the stiffness in each of his movements. From the pasty look of his hollowed cheeks and the shadowed smears beneath his eyes, he’d missed some sleep himself last night.

  In the mirror, his reflected eyes met Kollberg’s without so much as a glance at the armored secmen.

  “Kollberg,” he said flatly. “You don’t want to be in here, right now.”

  “That’s Administrator Kollberg, Michaelson,” he replied with a tight smile.

  Michaelson’s expression didn’t change. “Fuck you, shitheel.”

  A cold tingle shot through Kollberg, as though he’d touched a poorly grounded terminal.

  He blinked once, twice, then took a deep breath and answered calmly. “I’ll have my due respect or I will have you broken for caste violation.”

  “That is your due respect, you flabby sack of shit. Do whatever you want.”

  Kollberg glanced at the cyborgs between them. “Or I could simply have you shot.”

  Michaelson shrugged. “Then what do you tell the Leisurefolk—what is it, a million of them, now?—that’ve already paid to be me this morning? Never thought that making me such a big star would whip around and bite
you on the ass, huh?”

  Kollberg nodded to himself; he should have seen this coming. “I came here this morning to, ah, outline for you the ground rules of this Adventure. I have already spoken with the Board of Governors on this matter, and they concur. The emergency transfer switch will remain active. At the first suggestion of seditious commentary, you will be recalled, and the Adventure will be terminated.”

  Michaelson made no response. He stared into the mirror with an expression of peculiar concentration; he seemed to be watching his hands, his fingertips, as they lightly brushed first one, then another of the numerous scars that patterned his body, kneading each in turn.

  “Seditious commentary,” Kollberg continued, “will include any reference to your contracted goal of the assassination of Ma’elKoth. When you face him, it will appear to be the result of a personal vendetta, do you understand? Any reference to this being at the direction of the Studio will result in your immediate recall.”

  As if in answer, Michaelson’s hands stroked the flattened diamonds of scar tissue, front and back, left by a long-ago sword-thrust through the liver.

  “If you make any reference to Lamorak as the betrayer of Pallas Ril, whether you connect it to his contract—to the Studio—or not, you will be immediately recalled.”

  Michaelson ran his fingers over a jagged scar across his collarbone.

  “If you make any reference to your mistaken idea that Pallas Ril’s difficulties are in any way related to any policy or directive of the Studio, you will be immediately recalled.”

  Michaelson’s hand ran up a long, keloid-knotted scar on his right thigh.

  “If you are recalled for any of these reasons, you will not be returned to Ankhana. Your wife will be left to fend for herself. The press will be told that the transfer malfunction seems to reflect some peculiarity of Ankhana itself, and it is too dangerous for you to return. Any public contradiction of this story will result in your being broken back to Labor and put out to work in the Temp slums where you came from.”