Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  "Thanks." Looking down, he touched his brow in a sketch of a salute. "Same to you," he said, then turned and ran like hell, streaking across the roof, heading for the skywalk that connected to the Studio.

  9

  The rescue squad paramedic piled out of the emergency services vehicle before the turbines had even spun down; he staggered through the backblast to reach the side of Tan'elKoth. "Are you hurt, sir?" he shouted over the declining roar of the turbines. "Do you need medical attention?"

  "Yes, I do," Tan'elKoth said grimly. "But more than that, I need your palmpad."

  "What?"

  Tan'elKoth seized the paramedic's shoulder in one titanic hand, his grip so sudden and powerful that it short-circuited the startled man's will; he didn't even try to move while the ex-Emperor yanked the palmpad from his belt holster. Tan'elKoth shoved the man stumbling backward and gave him a volcanic glare that told him to keep his distance. "Initiate telecommunications," he spat into the device's microphone. "Studio two five X-ray zulu four. Execute."

  A moment later, the tiny screen shimmered with a view of Kollberg's wasted, leering face. "Well?"

  "Not at all well," Tan'elKoth growled. "To what manner of fool did you assign this task? I was nearly killed, as was he—mortal danger to us both was never part of the plan."

  "Mortal danger makes it convincing" Kollberg said. "Don't presume to lecture me on the mechanics of entertainment."

  "This is not entertainment—"

  "Of course it is."

  "Your incompetence nearly destroyed the entire—"

  "Did it work?" Kollberg interrupted hungrily.

  "Are you listening to me?"

  "Only cowards and weaklings whine about what almost happened," Kollberg said. "Is he coming?"

  Rising fury swelled the flesh around Tan'elKoth's eyes; he had made similar pronouncements himself in the past, and he discovered that he disliked them profoundly from this side.

  "Yes," he said slowly. "Caine is on his way."

  10

  Inside the Studio, Hari discovered that his priority override codes still operated the palmlocks. He slipped into the deserted infirmary and treated his burns to a liberal dosing of anesthetic salve and himself to a couple of potent analgesic caps; after a moment's thought, he picked up the whole bottle, two extra squeeze tubes of the burn ointment, and a bottle of broad-spectrum antibiotics.

  They think they have me, he thought. They think I'm trapped.

  He piled his loot onto the seat of a wheelchair and pushed it out into the hall, jogging along briskly toward the elevator. Inside the elevator, he swiftly tucked the stuff into the magazine pockets alongside the wheelchair's arms, because he was gonna need to sit in this thing in a minute or two.

  His next stop was the Studio ON vault

  The vault's armored door swung open with a barely audible whirr of actuators. Hari sat down before he rolled inside. The twitching and jerking of his legs as the boundary effect shut down his bypass didn't matter a damn; he had more important things on his mind.

  He picked out a sturdy leather tunic and pants, a pair of boots that didn't fit him too well—which, after all, wasn't really important; you don't get blisters when you can't walk. He found a knapsack full of jerky, hard biscuits, and dried fruit belonging to a swordsman called Manic, and took his canteen as well. A broad belt with a couple of large sheath-knives strapped to it turned out to have five gold royals in the concealed coin pouch sewn inside it. A quick rifling of the rest of the costumes produced three more royals, seventeen silver nobles, and a double handful of copper peasants.

  I'm rich, he thought.

  He held all this in his hands a moment, grimly reflecting how Caine had once taken pride in the fact that though he might be a killer, he'd never been a thief. Things change, I guess.

  He rolled back out of the vault, closed it behind him, then went to the greenroom lavatory to reboot. It was a little bit complicated, with Rover still in L.A.—he had to access Rover's controls over the net through his palmpad, and route the return commands through the appropriate subdirectory—but it only took him about three minutes, all told, before he could walk out of the bathroom and dress in his stolen clothes. He filled the canteen and put it in the knapsack along with the medicines, and all the coins that wouldn't fit in the belt's concealed pouch.

  When he went to pull on the boots, he was slowed for a moment by the sight of the Mantrak bracelet around his ankle. Designed for durability, the Mantrak had come through the fire with only a little surface blackening. Its diode winked at him like an eye, reminding him of everything he had posted for his bail.

  Everything he was about to throw away.

  Wink: there goes the job you paid for with your legs and your self-respect, Chairman Michaelson. Wink: there goes the caste you clawed your way up to, Administrator Michaelson. Wink: there goes every goddamn mark Caine's blood and pain and sweat and courage and rage and joy and victory and defeat ever gave you. Wink: there goes the Abbey, built from your dreams, the perfect symbol of everything you have achieved in your life, the only home your daughter has ever known.

  Hari thought it over, just for a second; then he shrugged.

  None of that shit ever made me happy, anyway.

  He pulled the knives from their sheaths. He examined the gleam that ran like water along their edges—fresh and keen, no nicks—and spun them through his fingers, leather-wrapped hilts cool and soft against his skin. He checked their balance, decided they were throwable, if less than ideal; he swung his arms back and forth, loosening his shoulders, then turned the motion into a liquid kali flurry that transformed the blades into arcs of barely visible silvery flickers. He resheathed the knives, warm now from the heat of his palms, and rested his hands upon their pommels for just a moment, allowing himself half a smile. Like a chance meeting with an old friend, it was bittersweet: memories of better days.

  He saw in his mind Tan'elKoth's statue David the King. He saw again that middle-aged jowliness, the bags of defeat below the tired eyes, the aura of comfortable failure. You, he said to the image in his mind—the image of Administrator Hari Michaelson, Chairman of the San Francisco Studio--can fuck off.

  He walked out of the greenroom, strong and sure, but they were waiting for him in the corridor.

  11

  By the time the first shock baton swung at his ribs, Hari was already beaten. He never had a chance, but that didn't stop him. It didn't even slow him down.

  The baton sparked, whistling toward him just as he cleared the green-room door. The instincts of a lifetime moved him faster than thought: his hand slashed down, striking the gauntleted wrist, bending its arc below his ribs to miss his thigh and trigger harmlessly against the doorjamb. His hand stayed with the wrist as though it was glued there, turning it over so that he could lever his other forearm against the elbow in an arm bar. He yanked back on the wrist as he shoved with the forearm, and the elbow snapped with a splintery crunch—muffled by the blue body armor even as the grunt of shock and pain was muffled by the mirror-masked helmet.

  That's when Hari figured out he'd just broken the arm of a Social Po-lice officer—and there were five more of them bracketing him in the corridor. Assaulting an officer of the Social Police is a capital crime.

  If I wasn't already fucked he thought, I'd be pretty upset about this.

  He lunged back for the greenroom door, where they could only come at him one at a time, but the soapy whose arm he'd broken sagged against him, clawing with his good arm and letting the rest of his body go limp so that Hari had to shove him off. In that half second when his hands were busy a shock baton triggered against his lumbar vertebrae.

  Right over his bypass.

  His legs went dead, and he dropped like a sack of fish, flopping and twitching uncontrollably. Only his left arm still worked a little; he snarled a wordless wolverine growl and dragged one of the knives from his belt, but the officer that stood over him slapped it away with another stroke from a shock baton. Enou
gh charge was conducted through the blade to make his arm flail wildly and send the knife skittering down the corridor.

  "Hit him again." This was a human voice, not the digitized soapy drone. The sound of it scorched Hari's throat with vomit; the voice hurt him, burned him like acid poured into his ear.

  He had spent too many years listening to it tell him what to do.

  The soapy gave him another shot with the baton, and Hari bucked and thrashed like a depressive taking ECT. Darkness closed in around his vision, narrowing the lights of the corridor to a shrinking pool of fluorescent white. A wasted scarecrow caricature of Arturo Kollberg stepped into the pool.

  Hari moaned. Kollberg licked his lips like a bum at a Dumpster. "Give him another."

  Hari could no longer feel the shock of the baton; he was barely even aware of his own convulsions. As the light of the world slipped away from his eyes, Arturo Kollberg bent low and kissed him on the mouth.

  "You know what?" Kollberg said, making a face. "You don't taste good. I'm not even getting hard."

  12

  Much of the Curioseum's menagerie was devoted to species that once had roamed the land and sky and seas of Earth. Shuffled among the wyverns and draconymphs, the griffins and the unicorns were creatures now nearly as exotic, nearly as much the stuff of legend: otters and seals, frogs and salamanders, wolves and foxes and hawks, cougars and lions, elephants, an eagle, even two small inbred whales and a pod of dolphins. The menagerie occupied the central rotunda within the Curioseum's arboretum, beneath an immense dome of armorglass that allowed a pale filtering of moonlight to trickle wanly over the cages. But that greasy light was the limit of the menagerie's contact with the environment of Earth; even those creatures capable of surviving without the trace Flow available within the Overworld-normal field would not have found healthful what passed for air outside.

  A scent hung in the recirculated, chemically scrubbed atmosphere, even through the acidic back-of-the-throat sizzle remaining from last night's fire: a trace of musk and dung and urine that interlaced the perfumes of chokeweed and marsh poppy and complemented the constant chuckle of living voices, from the chirps of otters and belches of frogs to the whistle of the songtrees and the hissing snarl of a wyvern in rut.

  To Tan'elKoth, it smelled almost like home.

  He stood in the center of it all, his mighty arms spread wide, his Shell agape like the mouth of a hungry chick, drinking every flutter of wings and rustle of leaves and splash of fins or tail, for in this place was the greatest concentration of the life of his world—and the life of his world breathed out Flow. He was battered and burned, bruised and bandaged; though he had cut away his long chocolate curls that had been scorched to black crinkles, the smell of smoke clung to him. His mighty chest was wrapped tightly to keep his sprung ribs in place, and his fashionable, freshly dry-cleaned clothes bulged oddly here and there with the bulk of burn dressings beneath. An ordinary man would have required potent narcotics to dull the pain of his burns; Tan'elKoth did not. All he needed to salve his wounds, he could draw from the Flow.

  Though the Flow here was but a trickle, he was Tan'elKoth. For Tan'elKoth, a trickle would suffice.

  At his feet knelt Gregor Hale Prohovtsi, twenty years old, the finest student ever to participate in Tan'elKoth's Applied Magick seminar, a slim intense youth with long dark hair and penetrating hazel eyes. His Shell shimmered bright with the saturated spring green of transcendent concentration, and it grew larger, brighter, and more vivid as Tan'elKoth fed it power. Gregor knelt with his head lowered, his hands folded before him on the inverted hilt of a broad-bladed bastard sword, its tip grounded into the marble tile of the rotunda, staring at the cruciform guard like a Knight Templar at prayer.

  This blade was Kosall.

  Beside Gregor's knees was a small paintpot of liquid silver—it looked black, in suspension. A small brush of ash and sable lay across the paintpot's open mouth, the end still dark with paint. The liquid silver had been used to paint the gleaming runes that spidered down both flats of the blade, not quite connecting at the tip.

  Tan'elKoth stroked an image into shape with the pale fingers of his mind: the last. five runes, interlinked and joining the patterns on the two faces of the blade. He affixed this image to his student's Shell and added power to burn it in; Prohovtsi would be able to see this image overlaying the blade as long as he remained in mindview. Slowly, carefully, minding his breathing, Prohovtsi lifted the brush, dipped it into the liquid silver, and began to trace the mental image onto the steel.

  "Well done, Gregor," Tan'elKoth murmured, watching. "Well done, indeed. If anything, your hand is more sure even than my own."

  Without the Flow of home to energize them, these runes were as silent as was Kosall itself. On Overworld, they would spring to eldritch life when the touch of flesh links their patterns through the conductive salts of living tissue; with one cut of the irresistible blade, the runes would inescapably trap the consciousness that flees as the body dies--a quite simple variant of the spell that Ma'elKoth had used to capture Lamorak, and so many others.

  Even as magick had been scribed in patterns along the blade, so, too, had magick been scribed in Prohovtsi's mind; at the touch of the proper trigger, Prohovtsi would speak the proper words—in a language he does not understand—and his body would perform the proper gestures. Hours had passed in intensive mindwork under the yellow glare of the caged wyvern, as Tan'elKoth had meticulously, painstakingly layered and sequentialized each syllable, each turn of the palm and cant of the head; it was, not to put too fine a point on it, a masterwork. Tan'elKoth was certain that no other man alive could have equaled this feat.

  This was an exquisitely satisfying process; infinitely more so than creating sculpture over which the ignorant wealthy might coo could ever be.

  He had made of Prohovtsi a puppet no, more precisely, a waldo: an engine through which his will would work, even at a distance. Submerging his student's will beneath his own had required only the slightest effort; through the months of the Applied Magick seminar, Prohovtsi had been ineluctably conditioned to accept Tan'elKoth's orders without question. By now, he could not even dream of resistance. Almost as though I have planned for this all along, Tan'elKoth thought. Curious.

  This was the fulfillment of his bargain with Kollberg and the Board of Governors: he would gift them with the destruction of Caine and the death of Pallas Ril. Occasionally, he allowed himself the luxury of hoping that the Board would keep their own end of the bargain, but he did not rely upon it. Their perfidy had peeked around the corner of their proclamations last night. Perhaps they would not murder him outright rather like Caine, ironically enough, he had many admirers among the Leisurefolk, and some few in. the Leisure Congress itself—but the Board obviously did not place a high value on his life, or their word.

  This distressed him not one whit. He had seen this fork in the fractal branches of the world-tree that he tended with his will, and he had prepared already the graft that would bear the fruit of his desire.

  While Prohovtsi brushed the runes onto Kosall, Tan'elKoth turned and walked briskly way. Consumed by the challenging—for him—task of maintaining mindview while painting, Prohovtsi would never notice his teacher's absence. The ubiquitous Social Police, attached to him like limpets since the fire, had been temporarily banished; Tan'elKoth had been able to claim, entirely truthfully, that their mass of electronic gear and armor and weaponry would interfere with the delicate traceries of Flow in the menagerie. Kollberg had ordered them to stay away from him until the spellcasting—spell programming—was complete.

  So now, if only for the nonce, Tan'elKoth was free.

  He slipped through the arboretum to its twinned field-lock doors of armorglass, then out into the vacant echoic space of the Curioseum's atrium, beyond the ON field. Carbon-fiber bomb shutters were in place across the public accessways, englooming the atrium with artificial twilight; the entire Curioseum was closed during the make-believe "internal arson invest
igation" of last night's fire. Tan'elKoth paced past the vast empty ring of information and ticket booths to the bank of public screens that filled the wall beside the coat check.

  Lamorak's memory provided the Shanks private code: thus this call would be billed to SynTech, and any security captures set to monitor Tan'elKoth's communications would continue their peaceful slumber on the net, undisturbed. He smiled when the personal acknowledgment came back. He had no desire to leave a recorded message. This matter was some-what too delicate to be committed to a datacore.

  Avery Shanks herself answered; her predatory gaze cycled from blankly hostile suspicion through recognition to open hatred. She was really very attractive, he decided. Stark, forbidding, all sharp edges and bleak contrast, yet somehow perfect, as though nature had intended her as precisely this: like a mountain on the Moon. "You," she said flatly.

  "Me," Tan'elKoth agreed. "I'm gratified that you know me, Businessman."—and thus have no need to speak my name, he thought. The Studio's security captures would certainly register any mention of his name; should the phrase Tan'elKoth be spoken, he would instantly close the conversation with the blandest of trivia, and sign off.

  "How did you get this code?"

  "You know how," Tan'elKoth reminded her gravely. "You must have seen some of Kollberg's trial."

  Her gaze lost its needle focus, and for an instant the hard lines of her face softened toward an actual human expression of grief, but for an instant only. "Yes, I did." Her eyes iced over. "What do you want?"

  "Tomorrow morning, within an hour or so of dawn, your granddaughter will suffer a traumatic shock entirely unlike anything you can imagine. It may manifest as schizophrenia, autism, even catatonia—I cannot say precisely. What I can say, however, is that there is no one on Earth who will be able to help her—" Tan'elKoth tilted his head just slightly, a barely perceptible nod to his presumption. "—except me."