Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  Majesty clenched his jaw to keep from nervously licking his lips. “Horseshit.”

  “Perhaps. But imagine a fire in this crowded building: Imagine flames raging up the velvet; imagine burning beams crashing down from the ceiling. Imagine a fire when there is only a single door, and far too many people need to use it. My staff knows other ways out of this building. Does yours?”

  That pack-hunter smile was back around her wickedly sharp teeth. “As you said, it’s my call—but I raise, instead. Bet or fold, cock.”

  For the space of one long indrawn breath, Majesty could think of nothing to do. He couldn’t back down, not in front of his men, but he saw in Kierendal’s eyes that he couldn’t push her. This was a bluff, he told himself. It had to be a bluff: Some of the men in this place were real South Bankers. If a few of them died in an arson fire, her business would never recover—not to mention that one or two might be minor nobility, which would put her in line for hanging.

  But he couldn’t count on it.

  As he looked at her skeletal grace and her razor grin, he became acutely aware of how unhuman she was; he had no way to gauge how crazy she might really be. What should have been a simple, safe little object lesson in manners had inexplicably escalated wildly toward a holocaust.

  As though Paslava could read his thoughts, he whispered, “She is aware of me; there will be little I can do that she cannot counter.”

  Majesty nodded, as though to himself, and gave a chuckle that sounded far more confident than he felt. “All right,” he said with an appreciative smile, “I apologize for calling you a rookie.”

  “You’re most gracious,” she sneered. “Now get out.”

  “It’s not gonna happen,” Majesty said sadly. “Caine was a Baron of Cant, and you gave him up.”

  “At his own request,” she said through her teeth.

  “I wish I could believe you.” Majesty looked around the room and shook his head. “You also should be thinking, here, that your boys and girls are outnumbered two or three to one. If shit starts to fly, most of them will die here. Secret exits or not.”

  Her head came up like a cat’s, as though she heard the scratch of rat claws in the walls; her eyes lost their predatory focus, looking past him, through him, as though he wasn’t there at all.

  Got her, he thought. “You’re not bad at this, Kieren-dolly,” he said kindly. “You just gotta understand that when you get in a pissing contest with giants—” He laid a pious hand upon his chest. “—you’re gonna get wet.”

  She gave no sign that she heard him; instead, she stared glassily over the knots of armed and nervous folk who crowded the gaming floor, past the massive trolls that made a wall at her back. Everyone in Alien Games returned her stare: Face, Subject, and civilian. Each was suspended on a knife edge of action, a balance as dangerously unstable as a cocked crossbow, waiting for the slightest sign or word from either of them. Swords trembled in sweaty hands, and folk on both sides shifted their weight, seeking the best position to fight or run. She murmured, in a voice so subdued that even Majesty, a bare pace away, could barely make out the words, “No wonder all this spins out of control . . .”

  Majesty scowled at her; he didn’t like this at all. What in fuck was she looking at?

  “Something is happening.” Paslava’s whisper sounded vaguely awed.

  “Yeah, no shit,” Majesty said from the side of his mouth. Hairs prickled along his arms and up the back of his neck; his heart pounded, and icy sweat trickled down from his hairline. He suddenly felt like someone had dosed his wine with rushweed: the floor seemed to rock just a bit under his feet. His head buzzed; it felt kind of carbonated, like fresh beer. He didn’t know what he might do in the next second—if he would launch himself at Kierendal’s throat, burst into tears, or drop his tights and crap on his boots. “What is this? Is this some kind of attack?”

  “I don’t know,” Paslava whispered. “I don’t think so. It’s some kind of Flow effect; I can see dark currents drifting in from all directions. There! Over there!” he nearly shouted, forgetting himself, forgetting to whisper, forgetting that Majesty could not see which direction his Cloaked finger was pointing.

  The excitement in his voice could not be told from panic, and in Majesty’s growing confusion, that was signal enough. He drew breath to cry the attack, to bring it all down, to let the slaughter begin just because straight-up bloodshed would be so much easier than this stretching, twisting, edge-of-the-cliff windmill-the-arms shit.

  Kierendal reached for him and caught his elbow in an astonishingly powerful grip. “Don’t!” she said urgently, pleadingly. “Don’t—he’s here.”

  Majesty tried to yank his arm away, but found her grip was not so easily broken. “What? Who’s here?”

  “Weapons down!” she cried. “Everybody, put them away!”

  From the direction of the single unbarred door came a splintering of wood and the sound of bone meeting bone through intervening layers of flesh.

  “What? What?” Majesty couldn’t seem to make sense of what was happening. Who was fighting? What was Paslava talking about? Who was Kierendal trying to say was here? “What—?”

  “Majesty, tell your men to put their weapons down! Do it!”

  “Ah—”

  “Yeah, do it,” somebody said in Caine’s voice. “Let’s everybody play nice, huh?”

  Majesty turned. Caine stood in the far doorway. His battered black leathers looked even dirtier than usual and shadows dark as bruises ringed his eyes, but it was unquestionably Caine.

  “But—but—” Majesty sputtered, gaping, “but you were arrested!”

  “That’s right.” He walked slowly onto the gaming floor, limping, heavily favoring his right leg. “And there’s a lot of people out looking for me, right now, so I’d appreciate it if nobody left this place. Can the two of you manage that?”

  “I, ah . . . yeah. Yeah, sure,” Majesty said stupidly, then he raised his voice. “Hear that? Nobody leaves. Nobody.”

  Caine kept on limping toward them, fixing Kierendal with a searching look. “And you?”

  She pulled her head back, the whites of her eyes showing around her golden irises like a spooky horse. “We were quits, Caine. Even. You said you would leave me alone.”

  She’ll face down a hundred fifty Subjects of Cant without blinking, Majesty thought with a puzzled frown, but Caine shows up and she’s about to piss herself.

  At his shoulder, Paslava whispered, “It’s Caine.”

  “What am I, an idiot?”

  “No—that Flow effect. It’s Caine. He’s part of it, somehow.”

  Caine said, “I can make it worth your while.”

  “Another thousand royals?” Kierendal snorted and waved her hand at the roomful of armed men. “You see what the last one almost bought me.”

  “How about an alliance with the most powerful Duke under the new Emperor?”

  “What?” Majesty said, for what seemed like the thousandth time. Too much was happening, too fast; he couldn’t make sense of any of it. “What new Emperor? What Duke? If you’re handing out alliances with Dukes,” he said, “don’t you think you should be thinking about your old friends, first?”

  “I am.” Outwardly, Caine seemed grim as a hangman, but behind his flat black eyes danced some secret glee. “You’re the Duke I’m talking about. You will be.”

  Majesty and Kierendal exchanged equally dumbstruck looks.

  “But . . .” Majesty struggled to sort through the hundred questions that crowded his brain, to find one or two that would be most pertinent. “But how can I be a Duke—? And no, fuck that; start with how you managed to escape.”

  Caine grinned at him, and his teeth seemed edged with fresh blood. “Two questions, one answer: I gave you up to Ma’elKoth. I told him you’re Simon Jester.”

  “You what?” The room seemed to darken and rock dizzily around him.

  “Sure,” Caine said. “Why not?” He leaned close to the King of Cant, peering deeply
into Majesty’s eyes as though cryptic runes might be read there. He said with slow, deliberate precision, “That’s how you will help me save Pallas Ril.”

  “Pallas . . .” Majesty murmured. Of course he would; nothing was more important than Pallas Ril’s life, than her happiness. Majesty felt as though he was awakening from a dream: what foolishness had he been undertaking here, picking a fight with Kierendal, while Pallas was in danger? He passed a hand before his eyes and fervently thanked his every god that Caine had come along in time to remind him of what was really important . . .

  Whatever Caine had been looking for, he apparently found, though this finding seemed not to please him. His mouth twisted briefly, a spasm of nauseous distaste. But an instant later his face cleared, as though he drove some evil thought from his mind by force of will.

  “So, Kierendal,” he said cheerfully. “Who’s a guy have to maim to get a drink around here?”

  The bartender who Kierendal summoned looked at Majesty and said in that infuriatingly superior tone that is acquired by a lifetime in fine food service, “You, sir, owe me one royal.”

  20

  “BUT IT’S NOT proof,” Kierendal says stubbornly. “It’s a trick, not real proof.”

  Sometimes, the toughest part of a revolution is deciding to start one.

  “But it’s a good trick. A good trick is better than proof,” I say with an easy grin. I nod toward Paslava. “Ask him.”

  Paslava doesn’t wait for Kierendal’s question. He leans forward and clasps his skeletal hands judiciously on the tabletop near his mug of beer, and the table lamp’s flame paints deep shadows in the hollows of his cheeks. “It’s true. With twenty thousand witnesses, Ma’elKoth will never be able to deny, never be able to explain. It will shatter the morale of the army; without the army to keep order, control of the city—and the Empire—falls into the hands of the first man prepared to grab it.”

  They exchange looks, lust sparking to life behind their eyes. Here in Kierendal’s sitting room, the air is still as a tomb’s; the flame of the lamp might as well be cut from shining glass. My faked ease is getting to them; infected by my perfectly feigned confidence, they’re starting to believe that toppling Ma’elKoth might be doable, after all, and the pure possibility makes it nearly irresistible.

  The riots were one thing—they’re self-sustaining now. When the riots are crushed under the military’s heel and the main agitators are arrested, none of them will be found to be Subjects of Cant. This is something else: they’re seeing it now, in their minds, in their hearts; they’re seeing the Empire without Ma’elKoth, the army without leadership, Ankhana without law.

  It pulls them like a river’s current, like the gravity of this world. The four of us, sitting around an ordinary dining table—an icon of Ma’elKoth watching us from the corner shrine—could take down the Empire. That lust in their eyes, it’s the same hunger that drives a kid to smash his only new toy on his birthday afternoon; it’s the same hunger that drives riots in the Temp slums, where we torch our own homes and dance around the flames; it’s the same hunger that drives a conquering army to loot and burn.

  Sometimes, we destroy simply because we can. Because, when you come right down to it, it’s the kind of fun you just can’t get anywhere else.

  Don’t get me wrong. I don’t disapprove of that lust.

  In fact, I’m counting on it.

  Majesty leans forward to weigh in. “Then why put troops there at all?” he says. “We’ll need every man we have to hold the city once the fighting starts. Why risk every Knight and half of the Subjects?”

  I settle for being cryptic. “Chaos creates opportunity.”

  He doesn’t give up that easily. “But opportunity for what?”

  Every time Majesty’s natural pragmatism surfaces, all I have to do is reach out and tap on his weakness, that trump card that always seems to be there in my hand, no matter how many times I play it. “I told you before,” I tell him. “I’m going to rescue Pallas Ril.”

  His eyes glaze over a little bit; the Charm still has him, even if it’s fading. “But how?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t.” That’d give too much away to you viewers back home. “What this does for me is gives me a smaller, more concentrated version of the riots. I need someone to keep the Cats and the constables off my ass while I save Pallas. The rest is all gravy. The revolution? That’s just the come-on, to give you a little something for your trouble.”

  He winces. “The Cats—”

  “No, you want them there,” I say significantly. “All of them, or damn near, all gathered into one place.”

  “Waiting for us.”

  “Sure. Waiting for a small, elite strike team. With the whole Knights of Cant in the stadium, you can bury them.”

  “Bury them under piles of our own bodies,” Majesty grumbles.

  “You have to deal with the Cats,” I tell him flatly. “The Cats are the best troops in the Empire—not just man-to-man, but running small-unit tactics, too. Everybody’s afraid of them: shit, they can hold the army together by sheer terror, if they want. Nobody wants to cross the Cats.”

  “Especially not me,” Majesty agrees grimly.

  “On the other hand, they might not even fight.”

  Majesty shakes his head. “You don’t know them. The Ma’elKoth bit won’t break their morale; Berne has them believing they’re more than human.”

  I turn to the Spellbinder. “Your specialty is crowd control, isn’t it? You can whip up some sort of magick that’ll take the heart right out of them.”

  “In theory,” Paslava says slowly. “But I don’t have that kind of power, to search them out in a huge crowd and hold their spirit down—especially not if Ma’elKoth smells what I’m up to.”

  I chuckle. “How much power do you need?”

  I dip two fingers into the thigh sheath where one of my throwing knives used to be and come up with one of the griffinstones from the hem of the net. I flip it skittering across the table, and Paslava’s hand strikes like a rattlesnake; breath leaves his lungs in a long hissing sigh as he holds the griffinstone up and regards it in the lamplight with naked, wet-eyed lust. Kierendal’s eyes widen, glittering in the lamplight, and flick from the stone to me with pure golden envy.

  “Ahh,” Paslava says with breathless reverence. “Ahh . . . I’ve never even seen one this size. It’s flawless. It’s beautiful.”

  “Will that do it?” I ask, knowing the answer.

  “Oh, yes,” he says. “This will do it very well, indeed.”

  “We’ll never get our men into the stadium,” Majesty interrupts gruffly. “They hardly look like real South Bankers, and there will certainly be a weapons search at the gates.”

  “You can do it,” I tell Kierendal. “You can do an illusion that’ll hold up just fine.” I pull another two griffinstones out of the thigh sheath. “With a little sliver knocked off one of these on every Subject to power them, you can put illusions on them that’ll hold till next week.”

  Paslava’s mouth drops open. In a second or two he’ll be drooling on the table. Kierendal reaches toward them with a tentative hand, and she sighs like in sexual afterglow when I put them into her palm.

  “Here’s your alliance. The Snakes, the Dungers, and the Rats aren’t going to fade away. When the government goes down, you’re gonna have to fight them—and they’ll be recruiting deserters from the army, you can bet. With the Faces and the Kingdom of Cant together, the other Warrengangs won’t have a prayer.” I smile cynically. “They won’t have a prayer to Ma’elKoth.”

  “What about Berne?” Majesty asks. “So what if Ma’elKoth’s not there? The kind of power Berne throws around these days, he can turn the battle by himself.”

  “Don’t worry about Berne. He won’t show up.”

  “No?” He makes a face. “What, he’s gonna be taking a snooze after kicking your ass again?”

  I let h
im see all my teeth. “A long snooze. A permanent snooze.”

  “I don’t like it,” he says decisively. He pushes himself up from the table. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It can work,” Paslava interjects, each of his eyes reflecting an image of the griffinstone he twirls between his fingers. “We can do this.”

  “Sure we can,” Majesty says, “but what then? Who’s gonna rule the Empire? Us?” The derisive edge in his voice makes it all too clear what he thinks of this idea. “Who’s to say whoever ends up in charge won’t be worse? And the Cats might be monsters, but they’re still Imperial troops. You’re asking me to commit the Kingdom of Cant to open rebellion—to regicide, for shit’s sake—because somebody has to storm the palace and kill that bastard; he’s too powerful to leave alive. And who else is there but us? Whoever winds up on the throne will have to wipe us out just to keep the Ma’elKoth loyalists happy; otherwise they’ll start working on their own revolution as soon as shit calms down.”

  “Majesty, Majesty, you forget: you’re already committed,” I say. “If Ma’elKoth lives out the day, he’ll have your balls in his teeth by sundown.”

  “I should kill you for that,” he says grimly.

  “Too late, buddy. It won’t help you any, and you know it. Besides, didn’t I promise to make you a Duke? All you need is an Emperor who owes you a big favor.”

  “And you’ve got one in your pocket?”

  “No,” I say with a grin, “but you do.”

  “Huh?”

  “Sure. Toa-Sytell,” I offer, then grin into the deathly silence that greets my suggestion. Majesty’s eyes bulge with the effort of restraining a curse, and he glances around the small back room as though to make sure we are still alone. Kierendal nods in grim self-satisfaction at this confirmation of her long-held suspicion. Paslava’s mouth drops open.

  “Am I the only one who doesn’t know about this?” he says incredulously.

  Majesty shakes his head at him. “I’ll explain later.”

  “You’d better,” his thaumaturge says feelingly.

  I go on. “Think about it. You need somebody you can trust. Despite the Kingdom’s loyalty, despite the position you’ve held in this city all these years, you’re a commoner. Your kingdom is one of spirit and devotion, not of birth. The nobles won’t follow you. Toa-Sytell, on the other hand . . .”