Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  He grasped Tan'elKoth's ankles and started dragging him toward the door, but as soon as he stood the smoke blinded and choked him; he had to sit down and push himself across the floor crabwise, and his soft boots could get little purchase—slow going, at best.

  That high, singing whine began to overpower the rolling thunder in his ears, and he recognized it now: muffled by his stunned eardrums, he was hearing the blare of the Curioseum's alarm but it wasn't the rising wail of the fire alarm.

  It was the tooth-grinding screech of the intruder alarm.

  "Motherfucker!" Hari threw himself backward into a shoulder-roll that brought him up in a low crouch facing the door

  Just in time to see the security gate ratchet down the last few inches and lock in place.

  The intruder alarm kept on screeching, and no fire alarm sounded at all—which meant he couldn't expect any help from the Curioseum's fire-suppression system. Or from San Francisco Fire and Rescue. The security gate was a flex-linked grid of half-inch hardened steel bars: no getting past that without a cutting torch or a hydraulic jack, and the second-floor windows would be gated by now as well. "Okay, I was wrong," he muttered, hacking on the smoke and wiping at tears that streamed from his stinging eyes. "This already sucks."

  Though the rings of flame grew wider, growing toward intersection, the smoke didn't seem to be thickening at all—in fact, now that he'd noticed, he could see that the smoke was being drawn upward along the broad sweep of stairs, as though the light traps in the middle of the second floor and the third formed an accidental chimney.

  Yeah—there'd be ventilators up there, to clear the area of solvent fumes and marble dust. They would be useless for escaping: the Curioseum's outside vents were less than a foot in diameter and heavily baffled—something to do with maintaining the ON field

  The skylight, Hari thought. No need for a security gate: the armorglass skylight was fused with the stone of the roof. It'd take tools to cut it open—but the third floor was Tan'elKoth's sculpture studio. Full of tools.

  It was also two goddamn tall floors straight up through a column of toxic smoke, and Hari's sonofabitching legs only half worked.

  A new swirl of that smoke choked him, and when he coughed he tasted blood. Tan'elKoth had said something about a self-contained breathing apparatus; that was all he needed to make up his mind.

  He grabbed Tan'elKoth's ankles again, took a deep breath and a glance to orient himself, then squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath as he stood up and leaned against Tan'elKoth's weight, dragging the huge man toward the stairs. Heat knocked the strength out of him like a blow from a club. He could barely pull the ex-Emperor along the floor; how in the name of Christ was he supposed to haul this 400-pound gorilla up three fucking floors?

  Hari left him half on the stairs, head at the bottom to keep him below the worst of the smoke, and sprinted upward empty-handed.

  The smoke scalded his eyeballs, blinding him with tears before he'd made it halfway to the second floor. He sagged against the railing—gagging, spitting blood—but shook himself and kept on, driving his failing legs up the steps, hauling himself hand over hand along the rail. When he reached the second floor, he fell outward into the clearer air of Tan'elKoth's bedchamber and lay there, gasping, just long enough to catch a breath that didn't make him convulse, then pulled himself back to his feet.

  He shut his eyes again and pounded up the last flight of stairs, holding his breath. He staggered into the sculpture studio; hypoxia made his head swim and turned his knees to jelly, but right next to the wheeled hydraulic scaffolding that surrounded a sculpture in progress, he found Tan'elKoth's respirator mask and slapped it over his face.

  He spent a grateful ten seconds just breathing; air came hard and slow through the regulator, but it was clean enough to taste like wine. The face-plate cleared, and now he could see, as well.

  A quick glance around the smoke-filled studio gave him half a solution: a crane was mounted on a pivot so that it would swing out over the light trap, bearing a pulley and cable attached to a hand-winch, for lifting Tan'elKoth's raw materials—steel, bronze, and enormous blocks of marble—up to here from the ground floor.

  It was half a solution because there was only one respirator. Hauling Tan'elKoth slowly up through the ascending column of smoke would suffocate him; if Hari left the respirator on Tan'elKoth, he didn't think he could make it up the stairs a second time to crank the damn winch—and the growing heat that blasted up through the light traps might roast Tan'elKoth anyway. What I really need is speed, Hari told himself. Speed is what I really need.

  That thought rang in his head like a mantra by Dr. Seuss, and then he had it. The enormous half-finished marble statue within the hydraulic scaffolding ...

  The idea came to him whole, perfectly formed, audacious enough to make him laugh out loud: because the marble statue stood on a low, square dolly with swivel-mounted wheels.

  He swung the crane arm out over the light trap and knocked loose the winch's ratchet gear so that the cable twisted downward. He let the cable spool out he couldn't see the first floor through the smoke, and he didn't want to get down there and find out he hadn't left himself enough slack. Tan'elKoth—Mr. Efficient—had marked the cable with a big piece of colored duct tape; when that reached the pulley, Hari figured he'd let out enough.

  Tan'elKoth's pneumatic chisel, pressure tank fully charged, rested on one of the scaffolds; Hari ripped the vacuum hose off the chisel and pulled the scaffold over to the winch. A couple of chisel strokes neatly parted the cable strands a few meters back around the spool. Han hauled the free end over to the statue; then he looped the cable under the marble arms and tied it off to itself with a simple loop knot. He skirted the statue once around, unlocking each of the dolly's wheels, and everything was ready to go. He stood back for one moment to look it over and reassure himself that this was gonna work—and found himself staring, mouth hanging open within the respirator mask.

  The figure that struggled free from the block of marble was that of a middle-aged, rather ordinary, conservative-looking man. Something in the texture of the sculpted hair suggested a scatter of grey, and jowls were beginning to soften his jawline. But what held Hari was the look on its face: the sad knowledge within its eyes, a sort of settled melancholy that wasn't even potent enough to be dignified as despair. The statue looked like a man who knows too well he has lost the promise and possibility of youth, who has found nothing with which to replace them—and who doesn't seem to mind all that much. It was the image of a man who'd settled into a comfortable failure.

  Holy crap, Hari thought. It's me.

  The block of marble was labeled in black wax pencil on the side, in Tan'elKoth's bowl scrawl: David the King.

  I don't get it.

  Was he wrong? Was it an accidental resemblance?

  No—on the scaffolding that surrounded it were dozens of black-and-white printouts of digigraphs, everything from Caine's first publicity head-shots to stills from Studio security cameras showing Hari from every conceivable angle and in every possible posture. What the fuck is going on here?

  And with that mental question, another tendril of smoke drifted before his eyes and reminded him of the immediate answer. He'd worry about Tan'elKoth's goddamn art after he'd saved the bastard's life.

  He sprinted to the stairwell and threw himself into it, sliding down the railing with exhilirating speed. He hit the second floor and sprang to the next flight—the flames below crept closer and closer to Tan'elKoth's side as he stirred now, dazedly—and Hari swung himself onto the rail again and skidded down to stop beside him. Tan'elKoth couldn't even look at him; he was too busy coughing blood and trying to wipe smoke from his eyes.

  The cable hung down the middle of the light traps; a few meters of it were coiled within one of the spreading rings of flame—some of it had melted from contact with the white-hot floor near the rim. Hari sprang high over the spitting flame, hooked the cable with his elbow and sprang back again,
letting the cable slide through the crook of his arm so he wouldn't take up any slack.

  Even that brief instant in contact with the heated stone was too much for his boots: they burst into flame. He kicked them off, but they had already ignited the dust that impregnated the fabric of his pants; an instant later his shirt had caught as well. He swore and held the cable with his teeth while he wildly ripped away his burning clothes; they shredded in his hands and he threw them aside, but not before they'd seared his skin. Smoke rose from his flesh like overdone barbecue. That's okay, he told himself. So long as I get out of here before I go into shock.

  Naked now, he brought the cable's hot end to Tan'elKoth. The ex-Emperor was trying to sit up, mumbling something about all this being wrong, that this wasn't what was supposed to happen. "If we start worrying about what's supposed to happen," Hari shouted through the mask above the fire's roar, "we're both gonna die in here? Hold still!"

  "Your clothes ..." Tan'elKoth said blankly. "You're naked."

  "Now I know why everybody says you're a genius," Hari told him. "Don't move." Working swiftly, he looped the cable under Tan'elKoth's armpits.

  "What . . . ? What are you doing? This fire—what? This hurts ..." Hari grinned as he tightened the knot. "Yeah."

  The ex-Emperor coughed, spraying blood; tears streamed down his face. "What are you doing?"

  "Saving your life. You ever hear of a guy who called himself Batman?" "Batman?" Tan'elKoth frowned dazedly, as though he couldn't quite make his eyes focus. "I don't understand."

  "You will," Hari said, and leaped into the air. Past the top of his leap, already coming down, he doubled his legs up under him and grabbed onto the cable.

  High, high above, through the pulley on the crane, the cable pulled David the King rolling on its dolly toward the light trap.

  It reached the railing at the rim, and tipped. For one awful moment, Hari feared he'd mis-estimated the statue's center of gravity—but then it tipped farther, and farther, leaning over like a toppling drunk. For half a second it hung there, balanced on the rail . . . then it slid out into space.

  Hari said: "Going up!"

  The statue came down like a boulder off a cliff.

  Hari and Tan'elKoth shot upward.

  The statue swung wide, jerking and bouncing, raking across the light trap and threatening to tangle the cable upon itself. Hari swore as he watched the statue hurtle down at his head like a giant's flyswatter. Okay, so I didn't really think this through

  He swung his legs high, like a pole vaulter, and met the rim of the descending statue's dolly with the soles of his feet, kicking himself and Tan'elKoth wide—and it gave him a twinge, it really did, seeing his middle-aged self in marble sail into the depths of the column of smoke below.

  Then they were past, yanked up onto the studio—Hari let go of the cable to catch the crane arm—and the statue slammed into the ground floor far below and shattered. One arm hooked over the crane, Han grabbed frantically for the cable, expecting Tan'elKoth to drop like a stone, gritting his teeth against the anticipated pain of having the cable slice to the bone of his hand as Tan'elKoth's weight pulled it through

  But Hari's kick off the statue had set the two of them swinging like a pendulum; as the statue pulled the moment-arm of their pendulum short, the angle of their swing increased—like a yo-yo going Over the Falls—and swung Tan'elKoth just barely wide enough that he could latch onto the rail of the light trap with one massive hand. He slammed hard into the cutaway floor, but managed to hang on while Hari scrambled down off the crane and got there to help him over the rail.

  Coughing convulsively, tears streaming down his face, smoke still spitting from the embers that crawled through his hair, Tan'elKoth roared furiously, "You are ... incapable ... of doing anything . . . the easy way!"

  "Shut up and haul in that fucking cable!" Hari shouted back. "We're not out of here yet!"

  He rolled the hydraulic scaffold—the one that held the pneumatic chisel—over so that it spanned one corner of the light trap, then locked its wheels and cranked it up to its full extension, which took it nearly to the ceiling. He swarmed up the side ladder, picked up the chisel, and jammed its cutting edge against the armorglass on one side of the arched skylight. When he squeezed the trigger handle, the chisel roared to life like a jackhammer.

  Working as fast as he could, he scored a manhole-sized circle in the armorglass--the pressure in the chisel's tank was dropping rapidly. Tan'elKoth coughed his way up beside him, carrying the cable coiled in his fist, as the chisel slowed. Its strokes weakened and finally stopped.

  Hari put his shoulder against the scored circle of armorglass and shoved, but he might as well have been pushing a mountain. Tan'elKoth caught his elbow and pulled him aside; then the big man lifted the chisel's pressure tank like a Social Police battering ram and slammed its curved end against the scoring. A tracery of cracks bloomed from the point of impact like lightning crawling the face of a thunderhead.

  Tan'elKoth slammed it again, a quarter of the way around the circle, and again, and again. His face had gone from bright red to purple, and he hit the circle one more time, in the middle, and the disk of armorglass popped out like the lid of a vacuum pack.

  Hari made Tan'elKoth go out first, and Tan'elKoth turned back to help him through the hole so he didn't cut himself on its razor-sharp edges.

  Once out in the cool darkness of the roof, Hari stripped off the respirator mask and crouched next to Tan'elKoth, who lay on the roof, still coughing, wiping his eyes. Smoke boiled out the skylight behind him, a long column twisting up toward the gibbous moon.

  Hari's hands were shaking, and the inside of the respirator mask was spattered with blood. "Goddamn," he said softly, to himself. "Goddamn if I didn't pull it off."

  8

  He lay down on the roof beside Tan'elKoth and let the heat of his burns drain into the night-cool stone. The pain was only beginning, and he knew it would be bad. Still, though, for this one moment, he was content to lie here under the stars and luxuriate in the sensation of being alive.

  "Why?" Tan'elKoth said; his voice was thick, as though he held back a sob. "Why? I am your enemy. Why did you do this?"

  "I don't know," Hari answered. "I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time." He rolled his face toward Tan'elKoth, smiling with his bloody lips. "Maybe I just wanted to hear you say thanks."

  Tan'elKoth turned away. "My David," he murmured. "Oh, my David—"

  "What, is this about the fucking statue?" Hari made himself sit up. "Your life or the statue," he said. "Which would you rather save?"

  Tan'elKoth buried his face in his hands. "This is a choice no artist should ever have to make."

  "You didn't," Hari reminded him. "Nobody asked you."

  "No more did I ask for your help," Tan'elKoth said bitterly. "No more shall I give you my thanks."

  And while Hari sat there, staring at the ex-Emperor, he realized he wasn't interested in gratitude.

  Old, tired, whipped by life, one leg tied behind his back

  I've still got it.

  He showed his teeth to the moon.

  I've still fucking got it.

  That feeling was worth every one of his burns.

  "Come on, get moving," he said abruptly. "Tie the damn cable to something up here so we can get off this roof."

  While Tan'elKoth slid a loop over one merlon of the Curioseum's crenellated roof and walked himself backward down the wall, hand over hand along the cable, Hari Michaelson triaged the casualties of his life.

  Duncan was beyond help; the bulldog jaws of the Social Police had locked upon him, and his life bled out through their teeth. Faith would keep; bad as her situation was, alone and probably frightened among strangers, she was in no immediate danger. Shanks wasn't the type to torture and kill a helpless child just for fun; she only tortured and killed help-less children when she had something to gain from it. Tan'elKoth didn't need any more help; warned now, aware of the danger he faced, he could go to
his Leisure friends for protection.

  And Hari himself—

  To save himself would cost more than his life was worth.

  Tan'elKoth called up to him from the sidewalk below. "I'm down!"

  Instead of answering, Hari walked past the smoking skylight to an-other one a few yards away; he leaned on it, pressing his palms against the armorglass, and looked down past the actinic blaze from the Pallas Ril figure, down to where the wax Caine leaped upon the blade of the wax Berne. He'd relived that instant so many times in the past seven years that he no longer knew if he remembered it for itself, or if he only remembered remembering; he'd never quite had the courage to play the second-hander cube, to check his recollection.

  He did know this, though, beyond a dream of doubt: on that day, on that sand, knowing he was about to die, he had been as close to happy as he'd ever come.

  All right, he thought, staring down at the wax Caine. All right. I understand now.

  Caine had died, on the arena sand that hot autumn noon. For seven long years, Hari had been no more than Caine's rotting corpse.

  Fuck it. If dying were anything special, they wouldn't let everybody do it.

  Tan'elKoth called from below. "I'm down! Are you coming?"

  Hari went to the edge of the Curioseum's roof. Out across the carhive between the Curioseum and the Studio, security vans roared toward them, and high against the stars wailed approaching fire and emergency rescue vehicles. He looked down at Tan'elKoth. "You haven't seen me," he said as he pulled the cable up, coiling it around his arm. "I was never here. You got out on your own. You hear me?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "No time to explain. I gotta go save the world."

  He pulled the last of the cable up and slipped the loop off the merlon. From below, Tan'elKoth said, "Caine?"

  He almost answered with his reflexive Call me Hari, goddammit but he changed his mind. He stood absolutely still for one long second, savoring the feeling.

  Then he leaned out over the battlement. "Yeah?" he said. "What?" "It's my world, too, Caine," Tan'elKoth said. "Good luck."