Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  In a living village of the First Folk, these shelters, roughly constructed of woodland scraps, would appear to the eye and hand to be shaped of living trees, polished with rich oils, filigreed with delicate spirals of platinum and beaten gold. In a living village, the air would carry the scents of mushrooms simmering in butter, of fine beer foaming as it spills from oaken casks, of rich wood-smoke from hearths alight with mistletoe and ash. In a living village, even the silences would shiver with the almost-heard laughter of children.

  The silences in this village have vanished behind the croaks of ravens, squabbling over carrion.

  This village reeks of old meat.

  I repeat: This is a bad idea. This is a stupid thing to do.

  But I am a prince, and these had been my folk. If I don't go in, Rroni will; though Rroni is far more the sarcastic society wit than he is a warrior, he is equally a prince. This is my job. I have vastly greater faith in my own ability to survive the unexpected. And let's face it: I have less to lose.

  Poised at the village edge, I set the frog of my recurved bow on the top of my boot, bend the bow and string it. I slide a silver-bladed broadhead from the quiver at my belt and fit its nock to the string. I slip into the village as quietly as a shadow lengthens in the twilight; this is one of the things I do almost as well as a true primal.

  The shelters rise around the boles of forest giants in the deepwood, letting the shade of the towering trees do the work of keeping underbrush clear. Needing no more than primal skill with Fantasy for defense, these villages are as open as the forest itself. I drift from tree to tree, letting my nose gather information that my eyes, enhanced or not, just can't; the shadows within the crude shelters are too dark.

  Each window exhales a miasma of rotting blood.

  Beyond the splintery gaps in the corner of one collapsing shanty, a squawking pile of black wings and curved beaks shudders in a span of well-trodden earth. I approach, reaching out with a tendril of my Shell to flick the scarlet radiances of theirs. The ravens scatter, some taking wing clumsily, some only waddling away, too fat and gorged with flesh to fly.

  What they had fed upon is the corpse of a little feyal, lying carelessly splayed on the earth like a cast-off doll. This feyal had been very young, six or seven years old, and the bright colors of his kirtle have not yet faded in the sun. Loving hands had woven this kirtle, thread by thread, and loving hands had embossed the broad leather belt that girdled it, had made the wooden toy sword and the bow of bundled rushes that lie beside him.

  I squat by the corpse, holding my bow and nocked arrow in my left hand, parallel to the earth. I turn the feyal's face delicately up to catch the last of the day's light. Maggots squirm in one empty eye socket, and inside the nose and open mouth, yet the other eye still stares from the skull like a dusty opal. The ravens have torn off only the tongue and parts of the lips; even the tender flesh below the jaw is still unmarked.

  My heart kicks into a gallop. From the size of these maggots, this child has been dead at least three days; the ravens should have stripped his face near to the bone by now. They should be working on his liver and lungs, unless some larger scavenger has been driving them off—and his corpse shows no sign that anything other than birds has been at him. Something has been chasing off the ravens.

  Something in this village still lives.

  Get out of there, Kyllanni sends in words. Of the four that wait outside the village, she's the best hunter, and she understands perfectly what this child's corpse signifies. This feyal had been left in the open deliberately: bait.

  Yes: me, too.

  I drop one knee to the earth and pretend that my full attention is engaged in examining the corpse. The faint scrape of a stealthy footfall comes from not far behind me, along with a muffled rasp of breath, labored and harsh.

  Changeling come on! Get out of there! Now L'jannella and Finnall weigh in, adding their urgencies to Kyllanni's, imagery of a shadowy, monstrous shape looming behind my shoulder. Come on!

  I hunch over the child a little more. I can't help it—it's an instinctive urge to present a smaller target.

  Let him be, Torronell offers, sending a picture of the Deliann-faced ape industriously tinkering with some impossibly complicated puzzle: Let the monkey boy play his game. He occasionally knows what he's doing.

  Please, kind gods, let this be one of those times.

  I gently shift the feyal's body, but find nothing that resembles a death wound. The earth on which it lies is scuffed and printed with countless raven tracks, and so tells no useful tale. The child's hands have twisted into rictal talons, still stiff as stone though rigor had long passed for the rest of his limp corpse. Fluid has leaked from his partially eaten mouth and soaked into the ground—and has left a crust of its trail on his cheek, rimmed with flaking blood. This crust has a strange, fractal, bubbled look, like dried soap scum.

  A sudden coat of sand grows on my tongue and a chilly sickness gath ers in my stomach. I peer closely at this crusted streak, holding my breath and cursing the growing darkness.

  Sweet shivering fuck.

  Oh, fuck, fuck me, god. Please let me be wrong.

  It could be any number of things. It could. The kid could have gotten a mouthful of raw rith leaves, for example; he could have been chewing soapbark for the tingle, and had a stroke.

  But I don't really believe it; some childhood bogymen are fixed too firmly in one's dreams to ever be mistaken. Dried foam on the face, the clawed hands with earth caked under the fingernails, dirt scraped up in the final convulsions

  If the corpse were fresher, I could tell for sure: The tongue would be black, dried and cracked like a mudflat at the end of a summer's drought; the throat would be so swollen that the head could not be turned.

  Again a footfall scrapes behind me, and another. I barely hear them; I'm buried in a fantasy of cracking open the feyal's skull, of excising some tissue at the base of the brain, of improvising some kind of magickal lenses to make a microscope powerful enough to search for Negri bodies in the nerve cells-‑

  The stealthy footfalls become a sudden rush, and now the shout that comes through the Meld is my brother's: DELIANN!

  I throw myself to the right, the edge of my hand striking the ground to begin a shoulder-roll that brings me to a crouch as my attacker blunders past me. The bow in my left stays parallel to the ground; I stroke the arrow's nock to my chest and release it without aiming, allowing my body to target without the intervention of my mind.

  The silver broadhead punches through the ribs of a youthful, powerful-looking fey. He twists, snarling and clawing at the shaft like a wounded cougar. The shaft snaps, and its splintered end slashes blood from his hand. He croaks, "Murderer--murderer,' in a harsh and rasping whisper, then springs at me, empty hands outstretched, fingers hooked like a raptor's talons.

  I drop my bow and slip aside once again, ducking beneath his wide-flung arm. I draw my rapier from the scabbard that rides my left hip; it chimes like a silver bell as it comes free. As he whirls to charge again, I lunge and drive my blade through the side of his thigh just above the knee, twisting it so that the razor edge slashes out through his hamstring.

  His leg springs straight, pitching him sideways to the earth; he writhes there, growling wordlessly, and claws the earth with spastic talons, dragging himself toward me a bloody inch at a time.

  He might not be alone, Rroni sends. I'm coming in.

  NO! My roar into the Meld spikes a backflow of startled pain from all four of my companions. STAY WHERE YOU ARE!

  Don't shout at us, monkey boy. Being loud doesn't make you immortal. You need someone at your back

  How can I possibly explain? Rroni, I swear by the honor of our House that you can't come in here. Come into this village, and you die. Believe me. Is this some manblood thing, little brother?

  Ah, yes, that's it... I have to force the phrase; the Meld makes untruths difficult to share, impossible to conceal. My friends' sharp orange sting at my lie stabs lik
e a needle into my heart. Please, Rroni. Now I'm asking you. Stay out.

  I am Eldest here, Deliann. It was my risk to take from the first. This means trouble—Rroni never calls me by my right name unless he's too upset to be insulting, and years have passed since the last time he pulled rank. Either come out, or I shall come in and get you.

  Don't. Just don't.

  This exchange takes only a second. I crouch in the wounded fey's path and extend my Shell to touch the aura, crimson shot through with crackling violet, that pulses around his form like cold flame. As I delicately tune my own Shell to match the bloody hue and the jagged violet discharge of his, my perception of the Meld trickles away. Now, for the first time since the five of us set out from Mithondion, I am truly alone.

  Once my Shell harmonizes fully to his, I open myself to the liquid swirl of the Flow. With the energy of the forest around me channeled through my mind, I gently take control of his muscles and hold him shivering in place.

  He fights me, but as an animal fights, or a human, pitting the strength of his will against my mindhold; he refuses to believe his limbs will not obey him, and fuels his struggle with his rage. I'm not an accomplished mindwrestler—any of my brothers can beat me—but no one can match my raw power. My brothers like to sneer that I'm as graceful as a mudslide, but like a mudslide, I cannot be overcome by mere strength.

  I play him like a puppet, using his own muscles to roll him onto his back and lift his face for examination.

  Both his eyes are ringed with swollen, purplish-black flesh, and crusted with pale yellow scurf that clings in chunks to his eyelashes and forms a trail down his cheeks. Pink foam bubbles from his mouth, streaked with deeper scarlet that swells from the gaping cracks in his blackened lips. His tongue is black and cracked and leaking blood thick as mucus, and the flesh beneath his chin is swollen until his skin is tight as melon rind.

  The cold sickness that birthed in my stomach as I examined the child now freezes into a solid brick of ice.

  This is not supposed to be possible.

  I would speak my silent ah, shit, holy ship but my chest squeezes itself until I can't even whisper.

  T'ffar sinks into the west, his rosy bloom replaced by the sheen of T'llan rising over the eastern mountains. I get up, and stand over the fey I hold helpless at my feet, watching his blood fade to black. I lift my slim blade, following with my eyes the moonsilver that ripples over it like water, and imagine the slow, raw-meat rip of thrusting this blade into his belly, probing with the point to find the pulse of his heart, to slash that muscle and drain the life from his eyes.

  It's the only medicine I can offer.

  I wasn't born a primal prince. I could have refused the honor, and the duty. I knew, even on that day when T'farrell Ravenlock spoke the formula of Adoption before the assembled House Mithondionne, that the kind of obligation I face now could become part of my life.

  I chose this. It's too late to take it back.

  I lower the point of my moonsilvered blade and touch it to the vault of the helpless fey's rib cage. Current surges through that physical connection, deeper and more intimate than the mingling of our attuned Shells; he rolls his crusted eyes to meet mine, and I flash on him.

  In that second, I become the wounded fey

  Immobile on the cooling earth, trapped inside a body that will not obey me, feeling the stiff sccrrt of my broken rib scraping the arrow shaft that punctures my lung, feeling the hot pool of blood thicken beneath my hamstrung leg. But these are nothing, not even a distraction, behind the agony of my throat.

  Someone took a burning log from a bonfire and jammed it into my mouth; now they are pounding it down my throat in time with the erratic thunder of my heart. A thirst is on me, a savage lust for the faintest touch of moisture, that hurts even more than the broken glass that fills my throat. I have dreamed only of water for four nights now, of cool clear forest springs that could ease my throat and quench the blaze of my fever. My face burns with it, roasting slowly in its internal heat, scorching my lips to bloody charcoal, cooking my tongue to blackened leather within the oven of my mouth; water is my only hope of relief. But even the morning dew, sopped from the hanging sheets of moss that drape the trees nearby, seared my throat like boiling acid. It has been two days since I was last able to swallow.

  The flash ends a bare instant after it began, but it leaves me shaken and trembling, greasy sweat seeping over my forehead. It could have been worse: I could have sunk fully into his past, experienced the nervous hypersensitivity, the way the faintest whisper stabs like a needle into the eardrum, the dimmest candle becomes a knife in the eye, the unendurable itching, the insatiate hunger and convulsive vomiting, the growing homicidal paranoia that transforms your wife, your children, even your parents into leering monsters that tear at your mind

  I know these symptoms by heart; they form shadow-shapes in the back of my mind, always lurking, sniffing around the fringes of my consciousness, wondering when they might finally match my experience.

  Today, I am grateful for the flash that is my gift, because it makes my duty easier: makes it purely merry.

  I hold the fey motionless while I lean on my sword. The blade enters his belly, with a frictive skidding on the muscle that clenches spastically around it. I twist the blade upward until I find his heart, and slash into and through it, the point grating on his spine.

  It takes a minute or two for him to die. Even as his heart spasms and blood floods his abdominal cavity, he's still alive, still awake, still staring up at me with maddened, hungry eyes as his body shuts down piecemeal, blood flow cutting off first to his limbs, then to his guts and chest, trying to keep that last spark of consciousness aflame.

  I watch it smolder, and wink out.

  I wipe my blade, but instead of returning it to its scabbard, I drive its point into the knot of a tree root that sticks up above the earth and leave it there to gently sway in the moonlight. I yank the broken arrow from the corpse's side and do the same with it.

  Slowly, I untie the braided leather belt that holds my scabbard and quiver. I take it from around my waist and hang it from the hilt of my rapier. My shirt and breeches come next, and my stockings, and boots. All these I pile on the knotted root beside my sword and the broken arrow. I collect my bow from where it lies on the earth, a few paces away; with solemn, ceremonial care, I place it on the pile.

  "What in the world are you doing?" Rroni's voice sounds rusty—it's been days since he's spoken aloud—and its accustomed mocking edge is conspicuously absent. "Clothe yourself, Deliann! Are you mad?"

  He's there, behind me; I turn to face him, and meet his eyes. My brother: my best friend. Rroni stands over the dead child, revulsion and horror twisting his delicate features, and for the wrenching eternity between one heartbeat and the next, I can only stare. I can't move, can't breathe, can't blink. I am entirely consumed by the agonizing wish that my brother had been born a coward.

  A coward would never have come into this village; a coward would never have left Mithondion on a dangerous, useless quest with his half-mad, manblood-tainted brother.

  A coward would have lived through it.

  I settle into myself, compressing somehow, barely perceptibly, as though the world has become a smaller place and I shrink with it.

  "What have you done here? Deliann, answer me! What have they done to you?"

  I can't get my mind around it, not yet—maybe not ever.

  Rroni is probably already dead.

  He steps closer, a tendril of his Shell questing out, its shade cycling through the spectrum as he tunes it for a mindhold. In the instant it drops out of the octave of the Meld, I snatch my rapier from the root and lunge at my brother. One advantage of my mortal birth is a strength of body that no primal can hope to equal; when the basket hilt of my rapier hits the side of Rroni's head, he drops like a stone.

  I stand over him, breathless at the fierce ache within my chest.

  After a moment, I return the rapier to its place
on the root's knuckle, then I kneel beside Rroni and swiftly strip him. I bundle Rroni's clothing on top of mine, and place Rroni's boots alongside. Naked, barefoot, and unarmed, I pace the perimeter of the dead village, gathering Flow within a fiery image I hold in my mind, clear as a dream; from my footsteps, the earth sprouts flame.

  At the first hint of smoke, our friends call in alarm from the deepwood, using their voices when they find no answers within the Meld. I brush the Meld for one instant: Patience.

  I turn to the center of the village, fire skipping at my heels like a faithful puppy. At the knotted root, I take my brother into my arms and turn my face to the indifferent stars.

  The death of my entire people dances in this ring of flame around me. I swear—T'nallarann, Lifemind, are you listening?—I swear that this death will not work through me.

  With a silent shout of power, I draw the cleansing flame in upon us, a thunderclap cautery that flares like the sun upon the forest floor. A toad stool of smoke rolls toward the moon; it grows from a fairy ring of cinders that smolders like countless eyes in the darkness around us.

  I stand at the center, Rroni in my arms, both of us now panting harshly in the smoke-thickened air. His platinum hair has become a reeking tangle-melt of char; his flesh is covered with a fine grey ash, the remnants of its outermost layer. I imagine I look even worse.

  "Now," I mutter, my voice as bleak and colorless as the ashes of my heart, "all I need is a good lie to tell the others, and everything might still be all right."

  9

  The connection shattered in a blast of white fire across Deliann's vision, from the slap of Tchako's leather club.

  "What are you doing?" the ogrillo howled, lifting her braided club for another blow. "You murdering motherfucker, I'll beat you to death! What did you do to her?'