Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  But instead Raithe shouts, "Stop! Don't shoot!"

  Garrette scrabbles at my legs with clawed fingers, but I don't have much feeling there anyway. His throat works desperately against my choke; the back of his neck is bright red and he's starting to convulse, and still the bastards aren't shooting

  "Don't you see it's a trick?" Raithe says calmly. "It's a complicated form of suicide: he wants you to shoot him." He compresses his mouth like a disappointed schoolmaster. "We need Caine alive more than we do Garrette."

  He shrugs, and sighs. "Sorry, Vinse."

  Well, crap.

  On the other hand, that's no reason to let him live.

  A friar says something that I don't catch, and Raithe answers, "Certainly. But Caine must not be slain. You're welcome to hurt him all you like."

  A burly arm comes over my shoulder; I tuck my chin and squeeze my arms against my sides to keep him from getting a choke on me like the one I'm using on Garrette; his forearm clamps across my face just below the cheekbone in a thoroughly professional neck crank that hurts like a sonofabitch and is gonna separate my cervical vertebrae if he doesn't slack up. "Let him go," he growls into my ear in Westerling, tightening the neck crank gradually, to give me plenty of time to think about what my life would be like if my arms were as dead as my legs are.

  "Yeah, sure, what the fuck," I grunt through the pain.

  One sharp twist levers my wrist against Garrette's throat hard enough to crack his voice box. I release him and he jerks backward, gagging on his own blood, and as he straightens I get both hands on Kosall's hilt in the scabbard behind his shoulder.

  The enchanted blade buzzes to unstoppable life.

  It slices out through the scabbard, parting it like soft cheese, and deep into Garrette's shoulder. He staggers away, spurting blood, clutching his throat, making sounds like khk ... khk . . . khk The friar at my back curses sharply when he sees the blade humming around toward his head; the arm that had clamped my face slips away. He must have dropped to the ground, because I don't feel the blade meet any resistance as I wave it around behind my chair.

  Garrette looks at me, blood jetting from the gaping wound in his shoulder, his voice strangled by his broken larynx, his eyes wide with horror. I shrug. "Nothing personal, Vinse."

  For a moment, we're at a standoff. Everyone stays back; the Artan Guards have their rifles leveled, but they don't want to shoot me, and nobody is willing to get within reach of Kosall.

  And I sure as hell can't go anywhere.

  Garrette teeters on the crater's rim. He's still standing, but his knees tremble, going rubbery he doesn't have long to live. Nobody but me pays any attention to him at all.

  "Caine, put the sword down," Raithe orders, and he must be enforcing that order with some kind of power; invisible fingers pluck at my will. "Put it down," he repeats, and my hand loosens. His eyes reflect starfire, and he steps closer. "That's it. Drop the sword."

  "One more step—" I tell him, raising the blade. It's covered with some kind of unfamiliar design: runes painted in silver. "—and I'll drop it right down your fucking throat."

  The runes on the blade seem to take the fire out of his eyes, and he retreats.

  What the fuck do I do now?

  Before I can decide

  Like a maggot crawling froth the mouth of a dead man, Berne's corpse climbs over the lip of the crater.

  7

  The corpse rises: a slow unfolding like cereus opening toward the stars. Painted designs like Celtic knots of metal spiral across its naked flesh and catch the moonlight in golden shimmers. The stitching that closes its belly where my knife had opened him up looks like a steel zipper; lacking the wig that had topped it when it was on display, the crown of its head is all exposed bone, skin fixed to skull with aluminum staples around the vanished hairline. In the center of the top of its skull is the jagged gap where my little leafblade went in—no reason to patch it on a dead man—and within I can see something glassy and black, as though the preservative gas turned what's left of Berne's brain to obsidian. When it finally lifts its head, its dead eyes quest blankly, fastening on nothing, wheeling with the generalized slow threat of a snapping turtle waving open jaws through water impenetrable with murk.

  Somehow it holds us, all of us, even the secmen: we can only watch, breathless. Down on the platform, Prohovtsi lies motionless: unconscious or dead, no way to tell from here. The corpse of Berne stretches out its arms, fingers waving like the tentacles of anemones clutching at half-sensed prey.

  Garrette, dying, twists away from it, spraying blood from the deep gash that opens his shoulder. Blood splashes the corpse's face, and a dark meaty tongue darts out, lizardlike, to lap it away. Something in the taste brings light into its eyes.

  I don't even see its hand move—somehow, instantly, it has Garrette by the unwounded shoulder in an unbreakable grip. Garrette's grunting turns to a long splintery hkkkkkkkk—which I can only guess is his attempt to scream—as it pulls him into a lover's embrace. The demon-ridden corpse latches onto Garrette's face with teeth opened to a jaw-cracking yawn, covering the Viceroy's mouth with its own: a rapist doing CPR.

  Demons feed on pure Flow, but the only kind they like is Flow tuned to the specific frequencies of anguish, terror, and despair by the Shell of a living creature. Usually, they lurk around in their incorporeal way, kind of like vultures, circling and waiting for something to suffer, unable to do much more than nudge a depressive's Shell toward a darker mood, that kind of thing. The chance to actually inflict pain and death—which goes along with inhabiting a physical form—must be quite a treat.

  The demon that animates Berne looks like it's having a good time, anyway: the corpse has a hard-on like a raw bratwurst the size of my forearm.

  Garrette is screaming into the corpse's open mouth.

  The corpse's free hand shreds Garrette's clothing, stripping him naked while he still lives—then keeps on clawing at him, ripping away jagged scraps of flesh, tearing into his belly to yank whole handfuls of muscle out of his guts. Garrette's bowels let go, flooding their intertwined legs with shit, but the corpse doesn't seem to notice. It drives its hand through the Viceroy's ravaged abdominal wall, blood gushing over its forearm as the fingers go in, and then the wrist, and then it slides the arm in like a penis, reaching up toward Garrette's heart.

  And somehow I know what it's doing. I know I'm right.

  Cardiac massage.

  It's manually pumping Garrette's heart, to keep the brain alive, to keep it sending out those frequencies of pain and terror and despair. I can't imagine what it must feel like to Garrette—the inconceivable intensity of such violation—and I sure as hell never want to find out.

  Finally Garrette's struggles fade into nerveless 'spastic twitching, and the demon casts his body down into the crater, one-handed: a kid tossing away a licked-clean popsicle stick. Berne's corpse stretches like a sleepy cat, and its eyes now fix upon me with impersonal malice.

  From its open mouth comes a mineral clacking like rocks knocking together. The clacking stops for a moment as the dead chest fills with air—lacking the breathing reflex, it hadn't inhaled before trying to speak. Now the clacking returns, gets faster and faster, becoming a stutter, gradually developing into a dry, inhumanly passionless voice. "You havvvve my sworrrrd."

  It's not Berne. It's not him inside that body at all—I can keep telling myself that, but the look in its eyes and the sound of its voice sucks at my strength in a way that Raithe's commands could not. I can't even hold Kosall up anymore, and when Raithe steps close, one hand taking the pommel and the other levering between my forearms to twist my wrists in a very efficient aikido-style disarm, I don't even try to resist.

  The demon turns to Raithe. "It waszzz dyinnnnng." It must be talking about Garrette. "I hungerrrr. Not-t-t-t a violationnnnn?"

  Raithe shrugs, and mumbles what sounds like the Westerling version of Waste not, want not. He goes fearlessly to face the demon, reverses Kosall, and offers the hilt
to its dead hand. "You understand your task?"

  Idiot fucking moron motherfucking idiot—!

  I could have killed myself with the fucking sword. I could have swung it at my own head

  But I didn't think of it in time.

  The corpse takes Kosall by the hilt—and its blade does not buzz, with-out the grip of a living hand to trigger its enchantment. The demon lifts it, examining the gleam of moonlight along its edge and the liquid shimmer of the runes painted on the blade from quillons to razor point. "Pallasss Rilllll," the demon clicks, and some abstract image of remembered lust around its eyes makes me wonder if there might not be some of Berne in there after all. And suddenly, without transition, the demon's right in front of me. Its eyes glitter like marbles—which I guess they might be—and from its throat comes a slow, low groan like an old, tired lover on the verge of a blood-spurting orgasm.

  It says, "Heyyy, Cainnne."

  Deja vu claws at my throat, twists my guts toward vomiting. This isn't happening. This has to be some kind of dream.

  "Whyyy donn't youuu runnn? Youuu alllwayszzz used-d-d to runnn," it says, the blade of Kosall rising to exactly the same angle as its stiffened penis. It leans close enough that I can smell the remnants of Garrette's blood and the preservative gas on its breath. "Whazzza mat-terr? Sssommmethinnnng wronnnng with yourrr legszzz?"

  Small sick noises come out of my throat. I try to push myself down into the chair.

  Raithe touches its shoulder. "Pallas Ril," he reminds it firmly. "Hunngerrrr. Ssshe mussst... die fasst-t-t-?"

  "Yes," Raithe says firmly. "Swiftly. Instantly. And precisely as you were instructed; otherwise, she will destroy you herself, without effort."

  "Nnnhh. Hunnnngerrrrrr . . ." Its voice trails into a mechanical growl like an idling turbine.

  "Yes, I suppose you are," Raithe says thoughtfully, and then his colorless eyes swing round to me, and he stretches his lips into what he probably thinks looks like a smile. "And, I think, I have in mind the perfect snack."

  8

  I don't know how long it takes the demon to haul me up the mountain. Hours, probably—an endless nightmare of bouncing facedown over its rock-hard shoulder. I fade in and out of consciousness, blacking out from pain and fatigue and a fucking incredible migraine from hanging upside down: like I'm birthing wasps inside my skull. I puked out the last of whatever was in my guts a long time ago; now, whenever I wake up I retch and dry-heave until my eyes uncross. When I cough, I can taste blood.

  And the goddamn sword keeps knocking me in the eye. They found another scabbard from somewhere and tied Kosall into it before they strapped its harness across the corpse's back. I twist my wrists against the thin unbreakable strap of the stripcuffs that bind them together behind my back; it slices through the flesh, and blood trails down my inverted arms to the elbow, then trickles up my back and around my neck to drip along my jaw.

  If I can just get one hand loose, and get hold of Kosall's hilt

  The demon jogs upward at a steady lope. There is no such thing as fatigue for its dead muscles, which do not rely on chemical reaction for their energy. It skirts the pass, avoiding the easy road, clambering high up the facing slope of Cutter Mountain, inhumanly agile among the crags, even with bare toes and single free hand.

  Hanging down over its shoulder, I can see nearly all of Khryl's Saddle below me. The crest of the pass has become a rat's nest of rail spurs sprawl ing around the stark skeletons of a half-completed depot; a customs office roughly marks the official border between Transdeia and the Ankhanan Empire. There are tents everywhere, from small two-man wall tents to enormous canopies: a mess hall, a corrugated machine shed large enough that you could dismantle a pair of steam locomotives inside it and not get the parts mixed up, latrines, a Company store and god knows what all.

  An Overworld Company base camp: they're laying rail down the western slope of the Saddle. Into the Empire. That goddamn rail line looks like a tongue, lapping out to get a taste of Ankhana.

  The top curve of the sun lifts out of the eastern foothills, sparking a gold shimmer in my eyelashes. I guess that having this demon burst into flame or something at the first touch of sunrise was too much to hope for.

  High on the western face of Cutter Mountain—not far below me, now, where I should have been able to spot the spring—all I can see is a low brick cylinder out of which runs a long, twisting sluice pipe, new enough that the leaking joints haven't yet begun to rust. The pipe empties into a slats-and-pitch watertank on stilts, which in turn sprouts a number of smaller pipes that spider down into the rising skeleton of the depot.

  Down in the tangle of rails, a shifting crowd of workmen form a long, disorganized queue—too tired and bleary from a night spent at this elevation even to bother looking up, where they might see us. Now, at dawn, the construction people have come stumbling and scratching out of their tents to line up for water from a spigot-fed trough, churning the soppy earth around it into ankle-deep muck.

  That ankle-deep muck is now the headwaters of the Great Chambaygen.

  Raithe stayed behind, keeping out of the watershed with his secmen—fake secmen, I realize now. They had to be Social Police in drag, because no secman ever born—let alone four of them—would have stayed cool through what happened down there at the crater. Soapy, though, he never gets nervy; the fucking Apocalypse wouldn't make a soapy blink.

  They have to stay on the far side of the crest of the pass, because Shanna will be able to feel their hostile intention if they come into her watershed. They'll be around, though. I don't know what it is about that Raithe fucker—I don't know why he hates me the way he does—but real hate, bone hate, is something I understand. He'll be watching.

  The demon carries me northwest, paralleling the wash of wastewater that trails from the trough to join the overflow from the tank above it. A few minutes' hike takes us down a quarter mile west of the camp, where the sewage and overflow reenters the original stream' bed: a small, shallow wash that leads to a tiny waterfall, tumbling maybe fifteen feet to a rocky pool in a crevice. The demon carries me carefully around the folds of rock, out of sight of the camp, moving into the wash beside the stream. The surface of the stream is flattened, its ripples rounded and smoothed and thick with grease, and the water smells of urine and sulphur.

  The demon clambers down the rocks beside the falls, then tosses me onto the jagged stone like a sack of dead cats. Hands cuffed behind me, useless legs, there's nothing I can do to break the fall except tuck my head and hope I don't fracture my skull. My head bounces off the rock, showering stars through my vision and actually driving off the migraine for about five seconds before it comes roaring back hard enough to kill a bull.

  The corpse dips one hand into the stream, and tilts it above my face, drizzling the filthy water across my lips. Then it cups water into its hand again and lifts it to my brow, letting the slime drip down through my hair, baptizing me with the foulness the Overworld Company has made of the headwaters of the Great Chambaygen.

  In seconds, my nerves begin to tingle with a warm here-ness, an odd and undefinable sensation of being hugged and held and comforted by something inside me. Scabs peel from my burns as my flesh begins to renew itself.

  This is her way of telling me she's on her way.

  Oh, Christ, if only I could die before she gets here

  If only

  And as scalding tears etch my face like acid, the demon crouches beside me and begins to feed.

  9

  Outside the world Mommy sang with the river; when Faith got too scared, she could snuggle her head a little deeper into these amazing silky sheets and pull the covers up over her head and close her eyes and let the music carry her away. She had been really scared at first, when the man had grabbed her and Daddy got so angry, but you couldn't stay really scared very long, not with the river singing in your head.

  Cause the river was always gonna be the river, so there was nothing to be scared of.

  Besides, this was
a really amazing house, bigger than home even, and it was in the middle of Boston, which Faith had never been to before and she hadn't seen very much of it except from the window of Grandmaman's big car, but she was still pretty sure that Boston was amazing, too. She didn't mind too much staying here for a while, because there were all these people who were really really nice to her all the time, and she didn't have to put away her own clothes or make her bed or anything. There was an old lady whose name was Laborer Dobson who didn't seem to have anything to do except follow Faith around and pick up after her. Laborer Dobson was a pretty nice old lady, though she didn't say much, but she smiled all the time and didn't seem mean and once already had slipped Faith a piece of the most amazing candy that was called a chocolate truffle.

  Mommy had been working really really hard on the Overworld sick people, and she'd been singing the whole time, a new kind of song that Faith didn't recognize but that she loved all the same. Mommy was content, she was happy, and so Faith was happy too, even when Laborer Dobson came in and made her get out of bed and get all dressed up for Sabbath Breakfast. Faith knew it was supposed to be capitals from the kind of serious way everybody looked when they said it, and from the dress she was supposed to wear, which was a big white fluffy dress that went all the way down to the floor, with puffy sleeves and a really amazing satin shirty kind of thing.

  A couple of Laborers, whose names she didn't know yet, neatened up her room while Laborer Dobson fixed her hair, and pretty soon she was ready for Sabbath Breakfast. Laborer Dobson held her hand all the way down the three flights of really really big curvy stairs, through the front hall to the dining room.

  The dining room was really big, with wood paneling up higher than her head, and satiny-looking wallpaper above that. The table was really big, too, with candles on it and everything. Her uncles—whose names she had forgotten already—and Grandmaman were already sitting down, and there were more Laborers standing behind each chair with fancy uniforms on and real serious looks on their faces. Laborer Dobson showed Faith to a place that was set for her with a special chair, so that when she climbed up into it she was sitting all the way up at the big table just like a grown-up. She clambered up onto the chair and suddenly started to giggle.