Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  He became very still, and from within that shifting shadow that pulsed in the middle of his face Deliann could feel Tommie's eyes upon him. He brushed the edges of mindview and found Tommie's Shell to be streaked with spirals of brilliant green: tight-wound vortices like the symbols that the First Folk use to mark the dillin, the gates between the worlds.

  Tommie's voice was low and tight. "So. What do you want?"

  Deliann's reply was a blank stare.

  "C'mon," Tommie said with an encouraging nod. "Simple enough question, huh? What do you want?"

  "I, uh . . . I guess I don't really understand what you're asking me ..." "Sure you do."

  Deliann shook his head helplessly. "With everything that's happened—everything I've done to ... to Kier ... and Alien Games, and the city, to . . . to you, even though you saved my life—I've, I guess I've ... killed everyone ..."

  "Listen, I'm tryin' to teach you somethin' here. Pay attention, huh? What do you want?"

  Deliann pulled the prickly wool blanket higher around his neck and hung his head. "What do you want me to say?"

  "Not that," Tommie said, chuckling and shaking his head. "Sometimes it's you bright guys that have the hardest time followin' this. All right, look: What I'm askin' is for you to make a decision. Make a choice. Decide what you want. Shit, you don't even have to tell me, you don't feel like it; just decide. Two hours ago, you were tellin' me you wanted to die. Was that true? Is that what you want?"

  Deliann offered a weak smile. "I'd settle for it."

  Tommie shook his head again, but this time there was no amusement in the gesture or his voice. "This ain't about what you'll settle for. It's about what you want."

  Deliann shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and let it trickle out again. "I suppose what I really want is for none of this to have ever happened. I want to wake up and find out it's all been a bad dream."

  "Mm, sorry, man," Tommie said with true regret. "You can't wiring the bell. The past is what it is; all you can change is what you think of it. The future, though, that's a story that ain't been written yet, y'know? You were talkin' about justice awhile ago, too. How about that?"

  "You said you don't believe in justice."

  Tommie shrugged. "Depends. You gotta be a little more specific—gotta get right down to dowels and dovetails, Changeling. Don't say justice, say: `The guy who stole my purse, I want him locked up,' or `The guy who raped my sister, I want him dead: That I can believe in. You see what I'm sayin'? You gotta be specific. Listen, didn't you ever want somethin' so bad you didn't care what it took to get it?"

  With sudden, overpowering, inexpressible pain, Deliann thought: I want to be a primal mage.

  Staring into the pool of shadow on Tommie's face, more than a quarter century of Deliann's life was wiped away. Hari Michaelson asked to be remembered to you, the goddess had told him, in the bedchamber where she had brought Kierendal back from the brink of death, and then she had warped reality around her and stepped outside the world .. .

  What a strange place his life had become.

  "Yes," he murmured in answer to Tommie's question. "Once, a long time ago, I wanted something so much I did some very bad things to get it."

  "What happened?"

  Deliann lowered his eyes. "I got it. Sort of. It didn't turn out quite the way I was expecting."

  "Nothin' ever does, huh? That's no reason to bitch. Listen, dintcha ever do somethin' where shit just went way wilder than you coulda ever guessed? Y'know, somethin' little that turned out huge?"

  "Yes," he said, his throat knotted with pain, thinking of a dead primal village in the eastern foothills of the God's Teeth—of stealing in at twilight with his bow in his hand, of a feyal's corpse on the ground with maggots on its tongue. How could he possibly have known where those few short steps from the village edge to its center would lead him?

  Tommie shook his head, chuckling. "Nah—I can see that's an ugly story, just from your look. Go the other way. Find a good story." Deliann closed his eyes. "I don't know any good stories."

  "Sure you do, ya lyin' bastard. They just don't look so sweet right now. Think about it."

  "No. It's ..." He shook his head helplessly. "Even the best thing that ever happened to me—my Adoption—even that turned hideous. If I wasn't a Mithondionne prince, I would never have been on that expedition. I would never have gone into the village. I wouldn't have carried this disease down the river—"

  "You're a prince?" Tommie asked, squinting at him sidelong.

  "Sounds unlikely, doesn't it ? It's ... I don't know. It wasn't something I planned on. I just fell into it, I guess."

  "That sounds like a good story. Got at least a laugh or two, huh?"

  "You think so?" Deliann looked down at the blanket; without meaning to, he'd twisted its ends into ropes knotted between his fists. Torronell ... ah, gods, Rroni, if only you could be here now .. .

  Torronell would have known how to turn this story into something darkly comic. With his dry, ironic wit, he could spin the most bitter thread into pretty cloth; he had a genius for it. Rroni could take the sting out of a knife wound. Deliann had no such gift. The bitter, aching futility of existence—that's what this story was about, really. Try to raise a laugh with that.

  But Tommie's kind eyes never wavered, and after a moment, Deliann cast a sigh into the air between them. "The finniannàr," he said. "Have you heard that word before?"

  Tommie shrugged. "It's, like, the elvish code of hospitality, right?—er, primal, sorry."

  Deliann waved this aside. "It's a complex system of obligation, very formal and so ancient that it's almost a natural law. It spells out—specifically and in detail—what the duties are of a guest to his host, and of the host to his guest, and the guest of someone you have hosted in the past, and the host of someone for the second time without a return invitation, and so on and so forth until it's hard to believe that anyone can actually keep them all straight. I became a prince of House Mithondionne because I thought I understood the finniannàr well enough to get clever with it."

  He remembered entering the Heartwood Hall, that long low cavern of oak that served as the throne room of the Living Palace; he remembered the glittering infinity of the ranked primal nobility—and the hush as they stared at his ragged, travel-stained clothing, and at the hooded figure of Torronell who trembled by his side, who clutched Deliann's hand with both of his own.

  He'd reached the small open disk of floor called the Flame, ten paces from the Burning Throne; then he'd raised his head and had met the fierce falcon eyes of T'farrell Ravenlock, the Twilight King. At the age of twenty-three, Deliann had spent more than a quarter of his life preparing for this moment.

  He could not possibly have guessed how unready he was.

  The voice of the King had seemed to come from the high-sloping walls of the hall, as though the Living Palace itself asked the questions in the Ravenlock's heart. And he'd had his answers ready: his tale of being a weary traveler, asking only hospitality for the night, but bringing one humble gift that he begs the King to accept

  "I gave the King a present,' Deliann said, staring past Tommie into the fire. "Something, ah, I was afraid he'd refuse, if it was offered in any ordinary way, so ... I framed it as a guesting gift, which the finniannàr requires him to accept. His response was ... extravagant."

  "I'd say so," Tommie grunted. "He adopted you? Over a gift?"

  "It was a pretty good gift," Deliann admitted. "I gave him back his youngest son."

  Tommie squinted at him silently.

  "I met him twenty-five, maybe twenty-six years ago, when I was working at Kierendal's old place, the Exotic Love—I kind of had your job in those days, I guess: I was Kier's best thug. No offense."

  Tommie shrugged. "You don't often see primal royalty in the whorehouses around here."

  "It was . . . ah, a special circumstance. It doesn't bear explaining."

  The special circumstance had been that the Youngest of the Twilight King had been a l
acrimatis addict, pale and twitching and semipermanently divorced from reality, and he'd fed his habit by working as one of Kierendal's whores. He'd been with her for half a century, and he'd had a substantial following among the whip-and-branding-iron crowd. He had been famous, legendary; he'd had third-generation clients—men of particular tastes brought to him by their fathers, who had in turn been brought by their own fathers. He had been a bottomless abyss of self-loathing covered by a shield of impenetrably dry, occasionally savage wit, and he'd been entirely successful in erasing his past; no one suspected his true identity—no one suspected he'd ever had any identity other than the whore's face he showed the world.

  But he couldn't hide from Deliann's flash.

  With scorching grief, Deliann recalled his slow months-long persuasion, the gradual erosion of Torronell's determination never to make con-tact with his family again. He remembered—with the kind of piercing clarity that seems reserved for bitter hindsight—Torronell sitting on a tangle of bloodstained satin sheets, the floor around him strewn with brightly studded leather straps and boots and collars and harnesses, twisting a black silk hood between his fists.

  "I can't go home," Torronell had said, his eyes spilling first one tear, then another, and one single tear more. "I can't ever go home. Don't you understand? This—" A despairing wave of the hood took in this suite of opulent decadence, the Exotic Love, the whole life that Torronell led. "—is what I like This is what I'm good for—all that I am good for. How can I live at Mithondion? How can I meet my father's eye? I'm sick, Deliann. That's why I cannot go home. I can never go home, because I'm sick"

  And Deliann had been so reasonable, Deliann had been so rational, so patient and understanding . . . so persuasive .. .

  "Sure, I knew the King had to reciprocate," Deliann said to Tommie, in a distant, abstracted tone bleached clean of pain, "but I was half expecting his return gift would be a swift boot in the ass on my way out the door. From what Torronell had told me, he hadn't been welcome at court for something like three hundred years. The whole idea had been to box the Ravenlock into a corner, so that he'd have to let Rroni come home whether he wanted to or not. What neither of us could have known was that the scandal that had ruined Rroni's life had blown over centuries ago; the Ravenlock had been looking for an excuse to overturn the banishment for decades."

  "So," Tommie said, "that's a pretty good story, huh? Happy endin', anyway."

  "Sure," Deliann said. "If you end it there. But the problem is, it's a true story." He closed his eyes. "All true stories end in death."

  Though Deliann could see the scene in memory as dearly as if it were a Fantasy of his own creation, he could not hear the voices, the cheers that had arisen from the assembled Court when Torronell had lowered his hood and revealed himself to his father. This memory was as silent as Kierendal's message stick.

  That message stick had shown him the end of the road he had followed for twenty-five years, from those very first days on foot out of Ankhana, holding Torronell as he sweated and shivered and vomited through his lacrimatis withdrawal. It had shown him the end of the months and years of the pain-filled bond with that profoundly unhappy fey; he had had nothing to offer Torronell save his understanding and his friendship, to which Torronell had responded with loyalty so fierce it had become a byword at court. No one had dared breathe any word against Deliann where the faintest hint of it might reach Torronell's ears. For a quarter of a century they had been inseparable; Deliann and Torronell had become a single word.

  "Here's the real end of the story," Deliann said slowly. "Because I knew Kierendal all those years ago, I came here. I brought my disease to Alien Games. And because I was his best friend, his brother, Torronell caught my disease from me, and he carried it back to Mithondion. The real end of the story is Tup is dead, and Pischu, and the others." He stared bleakly into the fire. "And my whole family."

  "Your family?"

  "Yes. Between the two of us, Rroni and I, we have wiped out the entire royal line of the First Folk." He met Tommie's eyes, daring him to answer. "How happy is that?"

  Tommie gave him a sidelong look. "No shit? The whole House Mithondionne? You sure about that?"

  "That's what Kierendal thought. That's what the message stick seemed to be telling us," Deliann said brokenly. "I can only pray that I'm wrong."

  "Well, spank me purple," he said, shaking his head. "Talk about shit goin' bone wild."

  "What? What are you talking about?"

  He spread his hands. "Maybe I'm wrong," he said. "I'm no friggin' expert on this Folk shit"

  "Expert on what shit?"

  Tommie started and stopped and started again; he scratched his thinning hair, frowned, and cleared his throat a couple of times. Finally, he managed, "Don't this, well, I mean ..." He made a face as if to say, You don't have to tell me how silly this sounds. "Don't this make you the, like, the king of the elves?"

  Deliann stared.

  Tommie shrugged at him. "Hey, like I said, I'm no expert."

  Deliann's voice came out so stunned and tiny that it could barely be heard above the crackle of the brick-ringed fire.

  "Oh," he said. "Oh, my god."

  7

  Some time later, people began to join them in that small windowless room. A nondescript knock, a grunt of "Whaddaya want?" from Tommie, a brief reply, and another man or woman would sidle through the half-opened door. Some were large and hard-looking like Tommie; some were smaller, softer, clerkish types; a couple could have been respectable shopkeepers; one might be plump and solemn, the next skinny and full of laughter.

  They had in common a certain presence: an air of being profoundly engaged in whatever it was they did, whether talking to each other, or staring at him, or simply warming their hands at the fire. They didn't appear to be thinking about where they would be later tonight, or whatever might have happened this morning, or how their clothes looked, or whether the person to whom they spoke liked them or thought they were witty.

  All they were doing was what they were doing.

  They reminded Deliann of a saying Hari Michaelson had liked to quote sometimes, all those years ago: When you eat, eat. When you sleep, sleep. When you fight, fight.

  Slowly, through the dazed whirl of his fever and everything that had happened that day, Deliann pieced together a pattern in the responses to Tommie's growled Whaddaya want? at the door. Each answer had been different, which was why Deliann hadn't noticed the pattern at first. One said, I want to come in; another simply said, A choice. A third had said, A big fire and a comfortable chair; a fourth, A good father for my children.

  What Deliann gradually came to realize was this: Tommie's grunt was more than a rude greeting. It was a question. The same question he had asked Deliann.

  It was a recognition code.

  "This room," Deliann said wonderingly. "That's why this room has no windows ..."

  Tommie grinned at him. "Well, sure. It's not too healthy for us all to be seen together these days."

  "You're Cainists .. Deliann breathed.

  "Like I tolja before," Tommie said, chuckling, "sometimes it's you bright guys that have the hardest time figurin' shit out."

  The laughter this brought from the group was warm as a hug. Another knock came, and Tommie growled, "Whaddaya want?" and the reply that came back wasn't an answer.

  "It's Caja, Tommie. Let me in."

  The room fell deadly silent.

  Tommie sighed. "Shit, they broke him," he said, and the door shattered open and shouting men in grey leather flooded the room, firing crossbows in a stuttering drumroll as they came. Quarrels hit chests and faces and heads from so close that they burst out the far sides in sprays of blood and splinters of bone. The impact slammed men and women into each other, going in screaming tangles to the floor, and Deliann could only stare, his mouth shaping a silent No.

  "Get down get down get down get down!" screamed the men in grey. "On the floor hands in sight get down!"

  Deliann found his
voice, and the voice he found said, "No."

  Now more men came through the door, and crossbows swung to cover him. "On the floor!"

  Deliann rose from his chair, and the fire at his back haloed him with a red-gold gleam. "There's been too much killing."

  "There'll be more if you don't lie down," one of them said.

  "I suppose you're right," he said sadly, as the fire behind him roared up from its ring of brick and spread phoenix wings that spanned the room: wings that enfolded him, and held him in an embrace of flame.

  Quarrels leaped from crossbows, and Deliann did not lie down.

  8

  The slow, sticky drizzle was just strong enough to keep the birds off Tup's corpse.

  It was an old, tired, swampy kind of rain, warm as spit, dirty and half jellied with the ash and smoke it halfheartedly tried to wash from the sky. It left faint wandering rings of grey like reverse-image sweat stains across the white cotton of Deliann's tunic. The rain sank into the Great Chambaygen with barely a ripple; here at the downstream fringe of Alientown, the river was permanently oiled with industrial, sludge and grease and human waste. The Chambaygen's surface looked slick and flexible; it shifted and rolled like a plastic bag full of guts.

  Deliann stood on the sand of Commons' Beach, a few steps outside the cordon of PatrolFolk that closed off the ceremony. Their line blocked the whole width of the beach and sealed the mouths of both Ridlin Street and Piper's Alley—a living barrier of alternating scarlet and black bodies, keeping at bay the mass of curious humanity that peered toward the funerary barge. Here and there along the cordon Deliann could see a face he recognized—but he always glanced away before eye could meet eye, and pulled his broad-brimmed hat a touch lower over his brow.

  The PatrolFolk—alternating human Knights of Cant with unhuman Faces—were armored, and bore staves bound with bright brass rings for crowd control. Each also carried a personal sidearm slung to his or her belt: broadswords, axes, maces, and warhammers were all in evidence, and the gleam in many a coldly suspicious eye was a clear invitation to bloodshed. They looked chilled and wet and miserable, and they were begging each and every unwelcome human gawker to give them any excuse.