Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

They had taken his clothes, his watch, his palmpad, his boots. They had given him a disposable cellophane dressing gown and stuck him in a cell. Every time he saw a soapy, he asked for a chance to call his lawyer. None of them ever responded. They spoke only to give him orders.

  Every once in a while, an enforcement squad came by his cell and marched him out at baton-point. The first time was just a standard identity check by DNA sampling. The next time was a high-pressure wash from a cold-water hose, leaving him bruised and chilled till he couldn't stop shivering. The third time was a manual body-cavity search, gloved fingers forcing themselves into his mouth, his nose, his rectum. And through it all, the only face he ever saw was his own, distorted and leering in their silvered masks.

  He'd begun to fantasize that he could detect some kind of expression in the masks, as though some unknown cue of body language—maybe the subliminal angle of a shoulder, or the turn of a head, or even just the slow pace of a gesture—was letting him see into them a little bit: was letting him feel something from them.

  The specifics? He couldn't get there, and they never said anything to give him a clue, but he was sure they wanted something—the feel he got from them was kind of like lust, almost. Or maybe hunger.

  It was giving him the fucking creeps.

  He kept seeing the look on Shanks' face as her goon had carried Faith ofF that bleak triumph. Maybe there had been something there, too—she had wanted something from him, too, and he didn't know if she'd gotten it. Was taking Faith enough for her, or was she really going to try this bullshit legal maneuvering with the criminal Forcible Contact charges? No way to know where Shanks would stop. She seemed almost like one of Ma'elKoth's Outside Powers from the old days: like she wanted to feed on his pain.

  Just get me out of this cell, he thought. She might be out of his reach, but Businessmen don't rule the world. One screencall to Marc Vilo—Leisureman Marc Vilo: his upcaste had been sponsored by the late Shermaya Dole five years ago—and Shanks would have some fucking pain of her own.

  She probably wouldn't actually do anything to harm Faith. It was him she wanted to hurt. Taking Faith away from him was the worst damage she could do without breaking the law herself. People that high up the caste ladder don't have to break the law; they can use the law to break you.

  We'll see who breaks who. We will goddamn well see.

  But fantasies of beating Shanks to death quickly dissipated in the blank white plastic silence of his cell. Sitting hour after hour in that box of featureless petrochemical, he kept thinking about Kris Hansen, and what he'd said about the blind god.

  Some of what he'd read came back to him, slowly, in little dribs and drabs over the slow-ticking minutes of his confinement. He was pretty sure that this blind god was something specific, a title in capital letters: the Blind God. He seemed to recall that Duncan's book referred to it as some kind of elvish cultural bogyman, like the Devil, sort of. The Blind God was supposed to be the most powerful god of humanity, but somehow kinda invisible; even though nobody knows about it, everybody does what it says anyway. You could only see it by looking at the things people do

  Like put on silver masks and shove their fingers up your ass, Hari found himself thinking.

  Something about those masks—he couldn't quite pin it down, because he couldn't quite remember exactly what this Blind God thing was supposed to be all about but whenever he thought about the Blind God, he found himself picturing the Social Police. And whenever he thought about the Social Police, he found himself picturing the Blind God. Like Soapy was the Blind God's face. And Soapy's face is a mirror.

  He didn't want to think about that one too closely.

  Eventually, his lawyer arrived. He'd never had to call him at all; Hari's arrest had been the lead story on the newsnets worldwide. His lawyer had been trying to get in to see him for hours, and the news he brought was not good.

  Because of the caste-weighted rules of testimony in legal actions, Avery Shanks' affidavit that Faith was her granddaughter became presumptive evidence, unless Hari could establish otherwise. In addition to the Forcible Contact Upcaste charges against him, she had filed kidnapping charges that named Shanna as codefendant. The court had already awarded her temporary custody of Faith until the case could be brought to trial.

  And there was more bad news: Hari's bail was set at ten million marks. "Ten . . . million?" Hari repeated, stunned.

  His lawyer shrugged unhappily. "It's a punitive bail. Businessman Shanks knows you can't afford that much, so she's expecting you to pay a bondsman."

  "Ten percent, straight out of pocket," Hari said grimly. "One million marks to get out of jail."

  "It's the threat, Administrator. You threatened her in front of the Social Police; all four of them recorded it."

  Hari nodded to himself "All right. Do this for me: Make them let me use a screen. Or get my palmpad back. I need to make a call. Right now."

  His lawyer shrugged. "I'll see what I can do."

  Whatever the lawyer did, worked: within a few minutes, he'd been led out to a screen, allowed to dial a private priority code, and was on the line with his Patron, Leisureman Marc Vilo.

  "Hari!" Vilo said, bluffly cheerful around the thick butt-end of a smoldering cigar. "What news, kid?"

  Hari scowled. "I guess you haven't been watching the nets."

  "No, I saw it. You've dug yourself a deep one." There was something disturbing in Vilo's expression: a kind of cold distance that had settled in around his eyes, a patient reserve as though he was hiding: waiting in ambush behind a screen of cigar smoke.

  "Yeah," Hari said. "It's time to start digging back out."

  "Sure, okay," Vilo said. "But what do you want me to do about it?" "What do I want?" Hari said, incredulous. "I want you to step on her like a fucking cockroach. What do you think I want?"

  "It's not that simple," Vilo said, frowning regretfully. "Her legal position sounds pretty strong. Y'know, I warned you years ago that concealing Faith's real identity was a bad idea—"

  "The hell you did." What the fuck was going on, here?

  "—I always said it'd come back and bite your ass someday."

  "Bullshit," Hari said. "Marc, that's a load of shit—you never said a goddamn—"

  "Hey," Vilo said warningly. "I know you're upset, but watch your mouth."

  "What's wrong with you, Marc? Why are you doing this?"

  "Sorry, kid. I just don't think there's much I can do."

  "All right, fine, whatever," Hari said desperately. "I'll handle Shanks myself. How about my bail? Can you put up my bail?"

  "I don't think so. As serious as these charges are? I don't think so." "Marc—"

  "I said no, kid." Vilo stuck his cigar back into his mouth. "Sorry."

  "Yeah?" Hari said. Tendons stood out in his neck. "You don't look sorry."

  Vilo frowned, squinting through the smoke.

  That high insectile whine was back in Hari's ears, thickening toward thunder. "What did they give you, Marc?"

  "What are you—"

  "You've been my Patron for thirty years. How much did you get for me, Marc? What was my price?"

  "I didn't want to hit you with this when you're already down, kid, but I'm not your Patron anymore," Vilo said coldly. "This afternoon I submitted an Order of Severance. We have no relationship, you and me."

  "What did they give you? Money? Christ, Marc, you're richer than God already."

  "Nobody gave me any money," Vilo said, waving his cigar impatiently. "I don't give a shit about money. I don't know what you're talking about." "What was it then, stock? Voting stock."

  For one second, Vilo didn't move. "That's it, isn't it?" Hari said grimly. "Let me guess: you sold me for goddamn voting stock in SynTech." "That's ridiculous. What would I want with SynTech?"

  "Yeah, you're right," Hari said slowly. "That's not real power. You'd go for the real power. Voting stock in the Overworld Company. In the Studio."

  Vilo didn't say anything, but he didn't have to;
Hari could read the truth in his eyes. The real enormity of what was happening to him roared within his head like a funnel cloud dipping toward his life. Numb, stunned, Hari said, "No, I got it: They gave you a seat on the Board. You're on the Board of fucking Governors."

  "Hari, these paranoid fantasies—"

  "I hope it's worth it, Marc. I hope you think it's worth it. I hope you still think it's worth it on the day when you and me, we meet somewhere dark and quiet. When I show you exactly what it is you just bought."

  "Hari—"

  Hari hit the cutoff, and the screen went dead.

  Look on the bright side, he told himself. Shit can't get much worse.

  4

  Hari stepped out of the cab at the Abbey's front lawn. He moved away, to be out of the cab's backblast as it lifted off, and the unfamiliar weight of the Microsoft Mantrak bracelet around his ankle made him limp a little more than usual. The Mantrak was designed with similar circuitry to a palmpad: as long as he wore the bracelet, the Micronet satellites could track his position to within a meter anywhere on Earth. As the soapy had dispassionately explained to him when it was locked around his ankle, to deactivate or attempt to remove the Mantrak would automatically register a forfeit of his bail and make him liable to further charges of flight from justice. The cab lifted off in a stinging cloud of sand, and Hari stood for a moment, looking at his bail.

  The Abbey loomed over him, a black hulk against the stars, every window dark except for the kitchen's.

  By pledging every asset he had—all his savings, his investments, Faith's education fund, the cars, all his Caine memorabilia, the royalties from all of Caine's Adventures, and the Abbey itself—he had covered the ten mil-lion marks. Barely.

  He looked up at his house—this house he had built twenty years ago, just after Caine had cracked the Top Ten. He remembered standing in this very spot and watching its timber skeleton rise from the knoll; real wood in the Abbey's walls had cost an extra million, but he'd never regretted it.

  He remembered walking through its empty rooms, remembered the echoes its bare walls had reflected, remembered how it had seemed like a palace, a fairy-tale dream castle of happy endings. He remembered the sat­isfaction of registering its name with the San Francisco Entertainment Commission, so it would be listed on their star maps. He remembered the day Shanna moved in—and the day she moved out—and all the laughter, the sullen sulks, shouting matches, and sweaty sex in between.

  He remembered coming home after For Love of Pallas Ril, before his bypass, floating across the threshold in his levichair, finding the moving company there to load all of Shanna's possessions back into the house once more. He remembered the day his father's sentence had been officially commuted, and Duncan had been released from the Mute Facility at the Buchanan Social Camp—the day his father came home to the home he'd never seen.

  He remembered thinking that he'd finally found his happy ending.

  He shook his head and walked toward the spill of yellow light across the side lawn. His stomach was a little shaky, and he felt unsteady in his balance, as though a mild temblor shifted the ground beneath his feet. Psychosomatic, he told himself, just a reaction to walking without Rover whirring at his heels. The Social Police couldn't be bothered to transport his wheelchair; it was still down in L.A. Funny—much as he'd always hated the goddamn thing, he really missed it right now.

  It'd be nice to have something waiting to catch him as he fell.

  Bradlee, Duncan's nurse, was waiting for him at the kitchen door. Be fore Hari could even get inside, Bradlee started yammering about the Social Police and SynTech security and how they'd barged in and taken all Faith's clothes, and her toys, and impounded all the photoprints and vacation cubes, and rifled the office, and pulled all the books off the shelves and taken backups of all the memory cores and this and that and every other goddamn thing until Hari wanted to smack him one just to shut him up for half a second. When he finally stopped for breath, Hari said, "How's Dad?"

  Bradlee blinked. "He's fine," he said reflexively. "Well, you know, not fine, but about usual—"

  "How'd he take it? You kept him away from the soapies, didn't you? You didn't let him talk in front of them?"

  "Please, Admin—uh, Hari," Bradlee said. "They searched his room, but I took away his digivoder until they left. I'm not a fool."

  "Yeah, I know. That's why I hired you."

  "I think he's still angry with me," Bradlee offered confidentially. "He really wanted to give the Social Police a piece of his mind."

  "Yeah, no shit. And they would have taken it. All of it. His fucking body, too," Hari said grimly. "Thanks, Brad."

  Bradlee accepted this with a nod, as if to say he'd only been doing his job. "Are you hungry? I've put Duncan on his drip, and I was about to have a snack; it's no trouble to make extra."

  Hari shook his head. "Is he lucid?"

  Bradlee shrugged noncommittally. "He's been in and out all day. The drip should help. You'll look in on him?"

  Hari nodded.

  "Good. He's a little shaken up." Bradlee coughed apologetically into his hand. "We both are."

  "Yeah."

  Duncan's room was just off the kitchen, small and dark like a cave, with the flickering screen on his traveling bed's armtable for a campfire. Hari stopped in the hall. Going into Duncan's room was never easy—that powerful back-of-the-throat scorch of antiseptic couldn't quite cover the fermenting shit in his relief bag, or the dark rot that seemed to ooze out of his pores.

  The only light in Duncan's room was the screen's cold shifting glow. He lay in his traveling bed like a broken puppet, head lolling bonelessly, veins twisting across his hairless scalp. One arm lay limp on the rumpled sheet; the other was strapped along the armtable to keep his hand in the digivoder. The convertible bed was raised, and he was strapped into it to hold him up in roughly a sitting position. An W bag hung from a rack over his head, its line plugged into the socket that had been surgically installed in the hollow of his collarbone. The only indication that he was alive was the slow roll of his eyeballs, back and forth like lopsided marbles.

  Hari couldn't make himself go in. He couldn't make himself speak. What could he say? What could he tell his father that wouldn't come out of his mouth as a raw scream of pain?

  Oh, Faith ... Hari sagged against the wall and covered his eyes with his hand. Something rose in his throat that felt dangerously like a sob; at the last second he forced it to become a cough. Ah, gods, he thought helplessly. How am I gonna live through this?

  In the same instant, he hated himself fora selfish bastard; here he was, whining about how much he hurt, while Faith was trapped by people who thought of her only as a weapon against him

  He gritted his teeth and clenched his burning eyes shut, determined that no tear should leak through to his face. Shit, Faith's probably handling this better than I am, he told himself. She's not alone. As long as Pallas Ril walked the fields of Overworld, Faith was never alone.

  The mechanized voice from Duncan's digivoder croaked, "Hari. You. All right?"

  Hari took a deep, shuddering breath and rubbed his eyes. Duncan's face had rolled toward him, and his glazed eyes held a hint of sanity. Funny how much more human Duncan's digivoder sounded, once he'd had a chance to compare it to the voices of the Social Police.

  "Yeah, Dad, I'm okay," he said slowly. "I'm just kind of tired, that's all."

  A thin line of drool trailed from Duncan's slack lips. The muscles in his strapped-down forearm rippled; the digivoder glove that enclosed his hand translated the nerve impulses into digitized speech. "Tough. Day. Remember. Keep. Your head. Down. Inch. Toward daylight."

  Hari smiled with a sort of nostalgic melancholy; this was the best advice he'd ever gotten. "Yeah. You should make that a macro."

  "I. Will. Come in. Sit. Talk."

  Hari sighed. He wished he could confide in his father; wished he could tell him everything that seemed to be happening; wished he could ask him for advice more point
ed and specific than keep your head down and inch toward daylight.

  But Hari couldn't say what was on his mind. Those SynTech goons had probably seeded the entire fucking house with microrecorders, and even if they hadn't, there would be a lot of Social Police traffic through here in the next few weeks. And Duncan had nearly ended his life under a sedition sentence in the Mute Facility of the Buchanan Social Camp for one over-powering reason: he had never learned to shut up.

  But there was something Hari had wanted to ask his father about, he reminded himself It should be a safe enough subject.

  "Yeah, y'know?" Hari said, forcing himself to walk into the room, breathing shallowly as though that might keep the stink of madness at bay. "Somebody was talking about the Blind God today—you know, that elvish bogyman? Didn't you write something about it, once? It's in Tales, isn't it?"

  "Chapter. Twelve. Or thirteen. Why?"

  "It's kinda hard to explain. It stuck with me, that's all. I couldn't stop thinking about it."

  Duncan's gaze twisted out of focus, and his mouth twitched spastically, releasing another foamy wad of drool. Hari pulled a tissue from the nightstand box and gently mopped his father's chin. At his touch, the focus in Duncan's eyes returned. "Was this. While. Soapies. Had you?"

  Hari jerked like he'd been stabbed with a straight pin. "How—how—" he stammered incredulously. "How did you know?"

  Duncan looked up at him past his hairless eyebrows. "Crazy," his digivoder rasped. "Not. Stupid."

  "Yeah, Dad, I know, but—"

  "Nets. All day. Been. Watching. Overworld. Shanna. HRVP. Social. Police." He snorted as though his nose might be dripping. "Makes. Sense." "Not to me."

  "Get. Tales. Read. Know Your. Enemy."

  Hari leaned over the bed to turn the screen toward him. "Here, I'll just call it up."

  Duncan lifted his strengthless free hand and let his arm fall across Hari's. "Not. Netbook," the digivoder rasped. "Book book book Netbook. Edited. Stupid. Kid."

  He waved his twisted hand toward a small bookshelf under the window seat, pointing with the back of his wrist. "Book book book"