Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  He shook his head to rattle his attention back to the charts in his hands. He'd been staring at them sightlessly for he didn't know how long. The figures on the page no longer had any meaning he could comprehend; they had become vaguely threatening hieroglyphs, an apocalyptic prophecy in Linear A.

  With a sigh, he finally surrendered. He folded the charts once, then again, then tucked them neatly into the disposal chute alongside his desk "Abbey: Call out. AV," he said. "The Studio Curioseum. Private line of Tan'elKoth. Execute."

  In a moment, the Waiting logo on the screen dissolved to a high-contrast, discolored view of Tan'elKoth's face. "Caine. Another sleepless night?"

  "Goddammit," Hari said for what seemed like the millionth time, "if I have to call you Tan'elKoth, you can fucking well call me Hari." But this protest had become familiar, reflexive, and he could hear the insincerity that blunted its edge.

  Tan'elKoth heard it, too. One majestic eyebrow arched, and the creases at the corners of his eyes deepened a trifle. "Just so."

  "What's wrong with your screen? You're all orange, and the contrast is so bad it looks like half your face is missing."

  Tan'elKoth shrugged and rubbed his eyes. "The screen is fine. I can no longer abide reading from a monitor, and the incessant flicker of your electric lights gives me a headache." He turned the screen so that Hari could see the large book open on Tan'elKoth's reading desk, and the tall flame of the oil-burning hurricane lamp that sat beside it. "But you did not rise in these wee hours to chaff me for poor equipment maintenance."

  "Yeah," Hari sighed. "I guess I was wondering, if you weren't too busy—"

  "Busy, Administrator? I, busy? Perish the thought. I am, as I have been for lo, these many years, entirely at your disposal, Mr. Chairman."

  "Forget it," Hari muttered. He lacked the strength to shoulder Tan'elKoth's heavy irony tonight. He reached for the cutoff.

  "Caine, wait," Tan'elKoth said. His eyes shifted, and he passed a hand over his face as though he wanted to wipe away his features and become a different man. "Please—ah, Hari forgive my tone. I have been too long alone with bitter thoughts, and I spoke without thinking. I would be glad of company tonight, should you wish it."

  Hari studied Tan'elKoth's image on the screen: the dark streaks beneath his eyes, the new creases and sags of his once-perfect skin, and the downtwist at the corners of lips that had once known only smiles. Shit, Hari thought. Do I look as bad as he does?

  "I was thinking," Hari said slowly, "that I might brew a jug of coffee and sail over. Feel like walking?"

  Tan'elKoth's downtwists flattened toward what might have been a smile, on somebody else. "Into the District?"

  Hari shrugged like he didn't care, fooling neither himself nor Tan'elKoth. "I guess. Game?"

  "Of course. I enjoy your old neighborhood; I find it stimulating. Rather like one of your antique nature films: an ocean of tiny predators, circling each other." He cocked his head at the screen and spoke with the soft cheer of a man telling an off-color joke in a crowded restaurant. "When was the last time you killed someone?"

  Below the desk, one of Hari's hands found its way to the numb, deadmeat oval of scar tissue at the small of his back. "You should remember. You were there."

  "Mmm, just so. But, one never knows: Perhaps tonight, we shall be lucky enough to be attacked."

  "Yeah, maybe." If we run across a wolfpack that's stone fucking blind, Hari thought. "All right, then. I'm on my way."

  "I'll be at the South Gate in half an hour."

  "See you there."

  "Yes, you shall—" He smiled as he poked the cutoff. "—Caine."

  Hari shook his head and directed a disgusted snort at the dark rectangle of screen. He hit his own cutoff and found half a smile growing on his face.

  "Hari? You never came back to bed."

  He looked up, and his smile faded away again. Shanna stood in the doorway, looking at him reproachfully through her pillow-twisted hair. Her face wore the fading ghosts of beatitude, a slowly dimming glow of transcendent peace: she'd been dreaming of the river.

  It made him want to throw something at her.

  "Yeah, I—" He lowered his head and tried not to look guilty, and gestured at the stacks of hardcopy spread across his desk. "I decided to get some work done."

  "Who were you talking to? That was Tan'elKoth, wasn't it?"

  He lowered his eyes and stared at the fists he'd made against his legs. "You know I wish you didn't spend so much time with—"

  "Yeah, I know," Hari interrupted. This was a familiar argument, and he didn't feel like spinning it up again at this hour of the night. "I'm gonna go out for a little while."

  "Now?" These days, it never seemed to take long for that transcendent peace to flush out of her face; it was gone already. "You're going out in the middle of the night?"

  "Yeah. I do that, sometimes." He left unsaid the And you'd know it, if you were here with me and your daughter more than six months a goddamn year, but it hung between them anyway, silently poisoning the air.

  She pushed back her hair with the heel of one hand, and her face had that pinched, overcontrolled look he remembered too well, from the bad old days when they couldn't so much as open their mouths without starting a fight.

  Bad old days? Who am I kidding? he thought.

  These are the bad old days.

  "Will you be back in time for breakfast?" she asked; then she slipped in the cheap shot like a knife between his ribs. "Or do I need some lie to tell Faith about where you are?"

  He started to snarl back at her, but caught himself. Who was he to complain about cheap shots? He let out a long, slow breath and shook his head. "No. No, I'll be back for breakfast. Look, I'm sorry, Shanna. Sometimes, I just need somebody to talk to—"

  When he saw the look on her face, he wished he'd bitten his tongue in half before those last words had come out.

  Her eyes pinched almost shut, and her mouth set in a painfully thin line. "Sometimes I still let myself hope you might want to talk to me."

  "Oh, Shanna, don't—look, I do talk to you." He did: whenever he could stand to hear for the billionth fucking time How Easy It Is to Be Happy, if he just let himself Flow Like the River and shit like that. He looked away so that she wouldn't read this on his face. None of this was her fault, and he'd promised himself over and over again he wouldn't take it out on her. "Ah, forget it. I'm going."

  He shuffled the hardcopy into a stack and stood up. She came into the room as if she could stop him. "I wish you'd be more careful with Tan'elKoth. You can't trust him, Hari. He's dangerous."

  He brushed past her, careful not to touch her on his way to the door. "Yeah, he is," he said. He added under his breath, as he walked away down the hall, "Like I used to be."

  And behind him, with endless inanimate patience, paced Rover.

  4

  She leaned on the window of his study, cooling her forehead against the glass, and watched him go. The black teardrop of his Daimler Nighthawk followed a long, smooth, computer-directed arc upward toward the cloud deck.

  She ached for the river.

  Forty days, she thought. That's really just five weeks—well, six. For six weeks, I can stand anything.

  Forty days from today, at 0900 hours, her next shift as the goddess would begin. At 0830 she would snug the respirator and lower herself into the freemod coffin and lock down its lid; she'd lie motionless on the gelcot for the endless minutes of mass balancing—the freemod transfer requires an extremely precise exchange of mass/energy between the universes—and for those slow-ticking seconds she would hang in delicious anticipation, awaiting the mind-twisting soundless thunderclap of freemod transfer. Awaiting the first notes of Chambaraya's Song: the deep, slow hymn of welcome that would fill her heart and draw forth her answering melody. Twice a year, for three months at a time, she could be part of the river.

  Twice a year, she could be whole.

  She'd never told Hari how she longed for that music; she'd never to
ld him how empty and stale Earth had become for her. She loved him too much to tell him how painful it was to be alone inside her head. Can't you see? her heart cried to the departing arc of his car.

  Can't you see how lonely I am?

  Slow tears rolled down her cheeks. How could she live, with nothing inside her but memory and hope?

  "Mommy?" Faith's voice came tentatively from behind her. "Mommy, are you all right?"

  Shanna pushed herself away from the window. She didn't bother to wipe away her tears; the intimate bond she shared with Faith for half of each year made lying impossible. "No," she said. "No, I'm sad today."

  "Me, too." Faith knuckled her eyes as she slowly came into the study. Shanna met her and picked her up, straightening Faith's pajamas and brushing the fine-spun golden hair back from her face. Faith sighed and laid her cheek against Shanna's shoulder. "You miss the river, huh?"

  Shanna nodded silently. She sat back down on the window seat and held Faith on her lap; she looked out toward the orange-underlit gloom of the cloud deck.

  "Me, too," Faith said solemnly. "I miss the music. It's always so quiet when you're home—sometimes I get a little scared."

  Shanna hugged her daughter tightly, intimately aware of how small and fragile she was, holding her small head against her shoulder. The physical contact was only a poor echo, though, of the intimacy and love they could share when connected by the river. Faith had been born nine months—almost to the day—after her battle at the Ankhanan docks, The cells that would someday become her daughter had been already riding in her womb, that first time she'd ever touched the river and joined its Song.

  Faith had been brushed with power at the apotheosis of Pallas Ril.

  "I miss you when you're here," Faith said. "It's pretty lonely, without the music. But Daddy needs you, too."

  "Yes," Shanna said. "Yes, I know."

  "Is that what happened? Were you and Daddy fighting?"

  "No, we weren't fighting. No one fights with your father anymore," Shanna said hopelessly. She looked out toward the swell of cloud where the Nighthawk had disappeared. "I think that's most of the problem."

  5

  The tenement sagged under the weight of two hundred years' neglect. Its smog-blackened walls gave back almost none of the glow from the single cracked streetlight outside: a vacant, slightly lopsided rectangle, it loomed against the overcast night, a window into oblivion.

  Hari stood on the crumbling pavement, staring up into the alley be-hind, at the spot where he knew his window still was: 3F, third floor in the back, farthest from the stairwell. Three rooms and one walk-in closet barely big enough for an eight-year-old boy to have a cot. That tiny closet had been his room until a month after his sixteenth birthday.

  And that window, which could be pried open silently if he worked at it carefully enough: with better light—or younger eyes—he was sure he'd be able to pick out rope scars on the ancient aluminum windowsill.

  He could still feel the coil of that rope pressing against his ribs from its hiding place between his thin camp mattress and the steel slats of the cot frame. That coil of rope had saved his life dozens of times; sometimes his only chance to escape Duncan's intermittent homicidal rages had been to lock the door of his room and slip out that window, lower himself to the street. Down here among the whores and the addicts and the prowling sexual predators he had been closer to safe than anywhere within his father's reach.

  Closer to safe than breathing that apartment's stink of madness into his lungs.

  "I once thought," Tan'elKoth said beside his shoulder, "that I understood why we come here. I believed that you come to remind yourself what an extraordinary journey your life has been. From here, one can see both where you began—" He nodded at the tenement, then turned to regard the spire of San Francisco Studio Central, only three kilometers away. "—and the pinnacle which you have achieved. The contrast is, not to put too fine a point on it, astonishing. Yet it seems to give you no satisfaction."

  Hari didn't need to look at Tan'elKoth to know the expression he'd be wearing: a mask of polite interest that half concealed a savage hunger. The ex-Emperor had an interest both intense and abiding in anything that might cause Hari pain. Hari didn't grudge that interest; he'd earned it.

  "That's not why I come here; he said heavily.

  He looked around at the crumbling buildings that leaned over the broken pavement; at the darkened basement bars on every corner, filled with loud music and restlessly still people; at the food bank, where empty-eyed men and women with silent children were already queuing up for the breakfast that was still two hours away. Not far away, a rumpled mound of tattered clothing moved slightly, revealing a ragface in the final stages of his long descent: his eyes rolled sightlessly, blind with methanol poisoning, his nose and part of his upper lip rotted into oozing open wounds. The ragface opened a plastic bag to pull out his dirty wad of fuel-laced handkerchief and pressed it to his mouth, shuddering deeply as he inhaled.

  Hari lifted a hand, dropped it again: a brief hopeless flick that encompassed the entire Mission District. "Sometimes I have to remind myself it's a long fucking way down."

  An old, old punchline whispered in the back of his head, bitter and unfunny: The fall ain't so bad—the problem's that sudden stop at the bottom .. .

  "You are considering a leap?" Tan'elKoth said slowly.

  Hari shrugged and started walking again. Rover hummed along in the street behind him, keeping its robotic two-pace distance.

  Tan'elKoth swung alongside with the ponderous majesty of a battle cruiser at half speed. "And this is why you bring me here? Do you hope that I hate you enough to convince you to jump?"

  "Don't you?" He squinted up at the enormous man beside him. Tan'elKoth wore the cable-knit sweater and chinos of a casually stylish Professional, and his dark mane was pulled back in a conservative ponytail. Middle age was softening his jawline toward a curve of jowl, but he still had the titanic build of the god he had once been. The metallic straps of the ammod harness that he wore over his sweater gleamed like armor under the streetlight. It was easy to imagine that the pavement would tremble beneath his step.

  "Of course I do," Tan'elKoth said easily. They ambled along another block, passing from shadow to light to shadow again, sharing a companionable silence.

  "I have dreamed your death, Caine," he said finally. "I have lusted for it as the damned in your Christian hell lust for oblivion. Your death would not give me back my Empire, would not return to me the love of my Children, but it would ease—if only for the few seconds that I crush your life between my fingers—the suffering of my exile."

  He lowered his head as though to examine the sidewalk. "But: once done, I would be bereft. I have nothing else of which to dream."

  Hari sidestepped a pair of drunks who leaned on each other as they tried to decide whether to go indoors or pass out here on the street; Tan'elKoth shouldered them effortlessly out of the way. They shouted something slurred and angry. Hari and Tan'elKoth kept walking. "And further," Tan'elKoth murmured, "I confess that I would miss you."

  "You would?"

  "Sadly, yes." He sighed. "I find myself living more and more upon memories of the past. They are the sole comfort of my captivity. You are the only person with whom I share those memories; you are the only man alive who truly remembers—who truly appreciates—what I once was." He spread his hand in a gesture of resignation. "Maudlin, isn't it? What a revolting creature I have become."

  This cut a little too close to the bone for Hari's comfort; he walked on without speaking for a block or two. "Don't you—" he began slowly, then started again. "You ever think about going back?"

  "Of course. My home is never far from my thoughts; Ankhana is the land of my birth, and of my rebirth. The bitterest wound that life has inflicted upon me is the knowledge that I will never taste that wind, never warm my face with that sun, never stand upon that earth, ever again. I could leave this life a happy man, if only my last breath might be o
f Ankhanan air."

  Tan'elKoth lifted his massive shoulders and dropped them again. "But that is an empty fantasy. Even if your masters would allow such a thing, the Beloved Children have no need of me; I am of greater value to the Church as a symbol than I could be as a personal god. And that god still exists: The power of Ma'elKoth is a function of the pooled devotion of my worshipers. Priests of Ma'elKoth still channel the power to perform miracles by praying to my image—I should say, His, for He and I are no longer coextensive."

  He released a long, slow sigh, empty of all feeling save loss. "I cannot pretend that the world fails to turn for lack of my hand upon it."

  Hari nodded. "Shit just turns out that way sometimes," he said. "You should be used to it by now."

  "Should I?" Tan'elKoth came to a halt; he appeared to study the urine-stained wall at his side. "And how is it that I should find my defeat more tolerable than you have your victory?"

  Hari snorted. "That's easy: you can blame it on me," he said. "Who do I blame?"

  Chocolate brows canted upward over his enormous liquid eyes as Tan'elKoth considered this. "Mm, just so," he admitted at last, nodding to himself with a rueful half smile. "It is a curiously consistent characteristic of yours, Caine, that you always seem to be just a bit smarter than I anticipate."

  "Yeah, sure. I'm a genius with a capital J."

  Tan'elKoth laid one finger alongside the bend in his nose where Caine had broken it: the only flaw in his classically perfect features. "Do you know why I have never had this repaired?" he asked. He opened his hand as though releasing a butterfly. "For the same reason that I changed my name."