Heroes Die

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Heroes Die Page 64

by Matthew Woodring Stover


  Again I throw myself sideways and roll away. My god, my god, that was my best shot. Any normal man would have fainted from the pain, and this would have been over . . .

  “Run, Caine,” he rasps, hoarse with agony. “I can still catch you. I can still kill you. Go on, run.”

  I believe him. Despite the knife blade scoring the bones and slicing the cartilage in his hip joint—causing what kind of pain I can’t even imagine—he doesn’t seem slowed at all.

  I’m gonna have to take him inside.

  I stand and wait for him.

  Kosall is a heavy weapon, and Berne’s magickal muscles don’t entirely compensate; swinging a blade that size shifts your balance in ways that have nothing to do with strength. He’s not lunging this time—maybe that knife blade in the joint has that much effect.

  He slides his feet forward, keeping his weight perfectly centered as he lifts the blade in a short semicircular arc.

  “That fighting girl, that friend of Pallas’,” he says, straining for a conversational tone, “she was better than you are.”

  I shrug. “She was worth both of us, Berne.”

  “Pretty, too. Did you fuck her?”

  I let him think it’s working, the cretin: I force heat into my voice. “You sonofabitch, I’ll—”

  And that’s all I have time for as he comes for me again. He thought he was taking me off guard, but in fact it’s the other way around. I slip Kosall’s lethal humming edge and step into him, knife blades reversed along my forearm. There are a couple things that you just can’t learn in abbey school. One of them is kali.

  Suddenly I’m close enough to kiss him. As he tries to step back and slice with the sword, I stay right with him, my body against his, blocking at his wrist with the blade of my knife while the other one slices at his neck. His Buckler turns my blade from his neck, but the other cuts deep into his arm.

  He snarls into my face, but he’s nothing if not adaptable. When I try the same trick again, only this time at his face and his heart for the death stroke, he drops Kosall and gets his hands in close, taking the cuts on his wrists. We stand nose to nose for one eternal second while our hands fly in lethal flurries; blood sprays, and it’s not mine, but he’s faster than I am and he slips a short hook onto the side of my head that shoots stars across my vision, follows it with a twisting roundhouse knee to my side that breaks a couple ribs with dull internal pops, and the next thing I know he’s got hold of my head and he’s gonna break my neck. He’s too fucking strong, I can’t hold him but there’s Kosall upright in the sand—I get my hand on the hilt and feel the buzzing tingle. I can just barely drag it across his foot, and his toes fall away, and I’m flying one way while Kosall goes another.

  Flying, tumbling through the air, I land skidding through the sand.

  He cast me aside like a bored child throws a doll.

  I struggle up, coughing blood—the sharp ends of those broken ribs must have ripped into my lung—but he’s not coming after me. He’s got Kosall again, and his back’s to me because he’s limping over toward Pallas.

  She shines above us, a star against the storm, the center of a firestorm of lightnings and energy bolts that fly freely, seemingly from all directions. Berne, Tyshalle damn his rotting heart, has somehow matured enough to get his priorities straight.

  Once she’s gone, I’m no threat at all.

  He’s too strong; he’s too fucking good. Nothing I do seems to matter to him.

  I couldn’t beat him on my best day.

  I have one trick left, an old one from my childhood, from long before there was a Caine, from a bootleg video my father showed me once. It’s just that I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to do this.

  Ahh, what the hell: after this one, I won’t be in any shape to care, anyway.

  I drag myself to my feet, my feet that seem a mile below me now. I can’t even really feel them as Toa-Sytell’s poison spreads through my body. I draw my last two knives, the little five-inch leafblades from my boot tops, and check my grip on them. I hold them as tight as I can, the one in my right tanto style, the other reversed, its blade flat against my forearm.

  This had better work.

  I have to lean forward to get myself moving, because my legs seem to belong to somebody else. Whoever he is, though, he’s still letting them operate instinctively to keep me upright. As I lean farther and farther forward they finally break into a clumsy, lumbering run.

  Even over the earthshaking roar of the battle above our heads, he hears my boots on the sand at the last second. He whirls, instinctively leading with Kosall’s point, which enters my belly as smoothly as a hot knife into butter.

  It slides in just below my navel, and he continues the thrust until its humming point comes out the middle of my back.

  It doesn’t hurt, but it’s very uncomfortable, a buzzing ache I can feel in my teeth.

  He’s killed me.

  Our eyes meet. His face goes slack in astonishment: after all these years, he can’t believe he’s finally done it.

  For one stretching second, his mind whirls back through every time he’s dreamed of this, a cascading flutter of his dreams of revenge. In that slack instant I lean forward, forcing my body onto the blade until its hilt at my stomach stops me, and I stab him below the solar plexus.

  My knife doesn’t go in as smoothly as his sword did, but we stand there, locked together, our blades within each other’s bodies.

  I work the blade, sawing upward to slice muscle, using the feel of the knife to search for the beating of his heart. Suddenly the blade locks in place; I can no longer move it at all—he’s shifted his Buckler down into his torso. Our eyes meet again, for one last instant, because he knows he’s about to die.

  The other leafblade, held reversed in my left, I windmill overhand into the top of his head.

  The blade crunches through his skull into his brain. The bone crackles as I jerk the hilt back and forth, taking Berne’s life, all his memories, his hopes, his dreams, his lusts, and his joys and twisting them into scrambled eggs.

  An instant ago he was a man. Now he’s just meat.

  His eyes roll up and he convulses. He finally releases Kosall’s hilt as he falls at my feet, and the buzzing blessedly stops.

  I stand in the middle of the arena, the sword sticking through me. I try to step away, just a few steps, anything to get me away so that I don’t die on top of Berne, but I can’t feel my legs at all anymore. I can’t tell if it’s from the poison in my bloodstream or if Kosall went through my spine.

  My knees buckle, and I twist toward the ground.

  Spine, I guess—the buzzing in my teeth said it hit bone in there.

  I splay my arms so that I fall faceup. A foot and a half of Kosall is forced out of my belly by the impact with the sand.

  Pallas’ star still shines above me, and it’s all right.

  I don’t mind so much, so long as I go out with her light being the last in my eyes.

  23

  THE TECHBOOTH STILL thundered with the sounds of the battle playing out on the POV screen, but within, all was still.

  Kollberg tried to control his shaking, but he couldn’t. His whole body trembled and itched, and one eye winked spastically.

  “My god, my god,” he kept repeating, over and over again. “He did it. He finally did it.”

  One of the techs murmured, “I’ve never seen anything like it. This ought to be the biggest seller since the Caste Riots. The biggest ever.”

  Another tech, of a more thoughtful bent, murmured in reply what a privilege it was to be present, how he’d be able to tell his grandchildren that he sat in the booth and watched Caine die.

  Of everyone there, it was—surprisingly—Kollberg who prayed for Caine to hold on, to keep drawing breath.

  His reasoning was simple: Pallas still fought Ma’elKoth in the skies over the Stadium. If Caine died too soon, he wouldn’t have any recording of the outcome.

  The subvocal murmur of Caine’s Soliloquy wh
ispered in the techbooth’s speakers.

  *I understand now. I know what he meant. My father told me that knowing the enemy is half the battle. I know you, now. That’s right.

  *It’s you.*

  Kollberg blanched at the words. It was as though Michaelson spoke directly to him. He mopped his mouth with a trembling hand and eyed the emergency recall switch. He could do it; he could pull Caine right now, out of the middle of the battle, and he’d goddamn well do it, even now, if he got the first hint that Caine was straying into forbidden territory.

  But an instant later he made himself relax. How much could Caine really say? His conditioning would stop his mouth before he could say anything really damaging. He squirmed in his chair, trying to get comfortable, trying to find a position from which he could give Caine’s death the attention it deserved; he’d been waiting a long time for this, and he intended to enjoy it.

  24

  IN THE SKIES above Victory Stadium, two gods met in battle.

  The water of the river discomfited Ma’elKoth only in that it interfered with his vision. Within the sphere, he called upon the love of His Children and stretched forth his hands, and lightning from the sky danced to his gesture. The fire of his body boiled the river around him, sending clouds of white upward to meet the rolling grey above.

  A holocaust of lightning and fire together struck that small part of the Song of Chambaraya that was the body of Pallas Ril and passed through as though her body were a lens, striking outward at Chambaraya itself—and harmed the god not at all. Fish died, trees withered, grass burned black away from its bank; an otter and its family choked and died in a boiling pool, and a scalded deer fell into the current. In all, the extreme power of Ma’elKoth could not affect Chambaraya as much as could a single brushfire, or an early frost below the mountains.

  Pallas sang with the Song, and the Song flowed through her, and the Song was her; she was transparent to the Song, just as she was to the power of Ma’elKoth.

  And through her, Chambaraya struck back: not with fire, not with lightning, but with the power of the life that it served.

  Boils festered instantly upon Ma’elKoth’s perfect skin, and algaes flourished within his lungs. Leprosy ate away his flesh. The tiny symbionts that still lived deep within his guts suddenly grew and grew, swelling his belly, swelling his chest, and would certainly have burst him from within—but Ma’elKoth, like Chambaraya, was as much an idea as an entity. The powerful love that he drew from the lives of his Children burned within him; soon his guts, his skin, his lungs, his blood, all were as sterile as the face of the moon.

  As the two gods strove together, they conversed. Ma’elKoth’s voice was a choir of thousands, from the cries of newborn babies to the whimpering rattle of consumptive old men: Why do You not strike at My Children? By this you know you can weaken Me: shake the earth, topple their buildings, flood their homes. Is not this where Your true power lies?

  The answer came in the roar of a waterfall, the trumpeting of geese, the ice crack of a shifting glacier: THEY HAVE NOT OFFENDED ME.

  And Ma’elKoth understood: Pallas Ril was more than a simple conduit for the power of the god. Her will colored its Song; they were one . . .

  He didn’t have to defeat Chambaraya, only Pallas. Concerns that would be less than dust motes to the river might loom large indeed for the woman through which its power flowed.

  Come then, you and I. Let Us finish this.

  He spread wide his mighty arms and poured power at her; not fire, nor lightning, nor wind, but power. Pure power, raw Flow that he drew from the lives of His Children, focused and sluiced into her without end.

  She accepted it all. It passed into her and through her, and as it came, she felt within it the source from which it sprang: she felt the lives of the Children of Ma’elKoth, one by one, wink out like fireflies in the frost.

  25

  NOW THAT IT’S too late, now that I lie here dying on this bloodstained sand, I finally get it.

  I understand, now.

  I understand. I know what he meant. My father told me that to know the enemy is half the battle. I know you, now. That’s right.

  It’s you.

  All of you who sit in comfort and watch me die, who see the twitch of my bowels through my own eyes: You are my enemy.

  Corpses lie scattered around me, gleanings left in a wheat field by a careless reaper. Berne’s body cools beneath the bend of my back, and I can’t feel him anymore. The sky darkens over my head—but no, I think that’s my eyes; Pallas’ light seems to have faded.

  Every drop of the blood that soaks into this sand stains my hands and the hands of the monsters that put me here.

  That’s you, again.

  It’s your money that supports me, and everyone like me; it’s your lust that we serve.

  You could thumb your emergency cutoff, turn your eyes from the screen, walk out of the theater, close the book . . .

  But you don’t.

  You are my accomplice, and my destroyer.

  My nemesis.

  My insatiable blood-crazed god.

  Ah, ahhh, Christ . . . it hurts.

  26

  WITHIN THE SONG, Pallas’s heart broke. As the power of Ma’elKoth flowed into her and through her, she knew the men, the women, the children whose lives were snuffed by its drawing, knew each and every one of them as a mother knows the lives she brings forth from her body. Each death lashed her with the world-ending grief of a mother who watches her children die, one by one by one.

  Perhaps if they had come in a mass, she could have borne it; a single shattering extinction could have blended these people into some huge and abstract mass, a Stalinist statistic; but instead she knew the individual tragedy of each and every one.

  Her soul sagged beneath the weight of clasped and loving hands, and sudden weeping, and despairing last glances exchanged through closing eyes.

  What had brought her here was her devotion to innocent lives; the inmost core of her being was the defense of innocence; to withstand this grief would have required that she be someone other than Pallas Ril, other than Shanna Leighton.

  Even the aeonic serenity of the river could not carry away this pain.

  Though she knew it would cost her life, and Hari’s, she could not allow this distant and passionless slaughter to continue; their two lives for thousands—thousands that were as close to her as family, thousands that resided permanently within her heart. This was a bargain that she was prepared to make.

  Slowly, with searing regret, she muted her melody within the Song.

  Ma’elKoth sensed the change within the Flow, and his attack dwindled as the water of the river deposited him upon the sand of the arena. It withdrew, flowing away along its bended arm above the stadium wall, and returned to its place within the banks.

  Pallas stood facing him, across the blood-soaked sand.

  “You win,” she said simply. “I surrender.”

  He sprang forward and seized her, holding her limp and unresisting arms in his mighty hands. He looked down on her with disdain.

  “Compassion is admirable, in mortal man,” he said in tones almost kindly, but then his voice sharpened into cutting contempt. “In a god, it is a vice.”

  She made no answer.

  He looked about himself, compressing his lips as he surveyed the carnage and the men and women who now began fearfully to look up. He raised his eyes to the heavens, and the skies cleared and the sun shone down brilliantly upon the earth.

  “This has been no more than a delay,” he said. “An amusing diversion, but the end is the same.”

  He hummed to himself, distractedly muttering, “Now, where is Caine?”

  She saw him first, lying with back bent over a corpse that could only be Berne’s. A double span of Kosall stuck out of his belly like Excalibur in the stone.

  She felt that sword stroke herself, punching into her guts, and her breath left her.

  Ma’elKoth followed her eyes and hummed his satisfac
tion. “So, he lives yet. Excellent.”

  Through the tears that flooded her vision, she saw: Kosall’s hilt shifted back and forth, swayed above his body in a hitching, ragged rhythm that could only be Hari’s breath.

  Ma’elKoth’s grip was oddly gentle as he dragged her across the arena to where Caine lay, and the noonday sun was warm on her river-moist skin. He cast her to the sand beside the corpses.

  Hari’s eyes rolled toward her. “Pallas,” he murmured faintly. “Dark . . . It’s cold . . .”

  His arm twitched, lifting his wrist an inch from the sand, dropping it again. “Take . . . take my hand . . .”

  Pallas held his hand; she folded her legs beneath her and cradled his precious head on her lap. “I’m here, Caine. I won’t leave you.”

  Her tears had dried; they had come from the stinging realization that he was still alive—that at least she’d have a chance to say good-bye. Now as she knelt upon the sand with his wet hair cold on her bare thighs, she had no tears, no agony of grief, only a deep, calm melancholy.

  She had been here too many times in her career, had held the hands of too many dying men; she had only the acute perception of something unique, a single irreplaceable life, leaving the world; and the world becoming less, in its absence.

  I believed he was indestructible, she thought, gently stroking his beard. Everyone did. But wherever it is he goes to, I’ll be with him soon enough.

  I’m sorry, Hari, she thought and could not say. If I’d had strength like yours, we wouldn’t be here now, soon to die.

  “Ahh-hh,” Ma’elKoth said abruptly, above her, a hitch in his voice that approached a sob. She looked up. His face was tragic, skin still flecked with the marks Chambaraya had left there, blood that streamed from his broken nose painting scarlet into his beard.

  “Ah, Berne,” he murmured. “Ah, My Child, you deserved better.”

  He became aware of her regard and mastered himself instantly, drawing up to his full height.

  “Now.” He walked in a slow circle around Pallas and Caine, and his hands worked, clenching to fists and opening again. “Now,” he repeated. “Now, indeed. I shall learn . . .”

 

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