Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  6

  He must have lost consciousness, perhaps more than once. Some indefinable interval later, the beating had ceased.

  Awareness gathered within him, correlating with the surge of sense impressions that grew as though he had reached out and toggled up the volume on the world. A mild discomfort, of the sort he might have suffered while he sat too long motionless in meditation, swelled into a burning, throbbing ache along his ribs, into his kidneys; at his groin it became a spike driven into his testicles—sharp and dull simultaneously, familiar already, but still twisting his guts until he might vomit.

  Light now: a dim bloody glow through closed lids. Squinting against it tightened flesh across his raw and swollen face and screwed down a band of pain across his brow. Someone cradled his head on a lap warm and wet; he feared to open his eyes. And the smell—that feculent carnivorous stench

  The smell told him more than he could bear to see.

  "Do you understand now?" Kollberg asked, stroking Tan'elKoth's face like Mary in the Pieta "Are we on the same page?"

  Tan'elKoth flinched.

  He couldn't help himself

  His face flushed with sudden shame, with the humiliation of discovering himself to be so fragile. Some dispassionate part of his mind considered this, abstractly wondering at the emotional power of a merely physical beating.

  Kollberg waited with reptilian patience, but Tan'elKoth could not answer. "Well," Kollberg said vacantly. "You might guess that I didn't find your interview with Entertainer Clearlake very funny. Not funny at all. You think that I might not come through on my half of our bargain. That's in suiting. You think that you can use public opinion and political pressure to make me do what you want. That's more insulting."

  He bent his neck over Tan'elKoth's immobile face, close enough to kiss. "Don't insult me. I don't like it."

  Tan'elKoth tried to speak, but the residue of the shock baton's randomizing pulse allowed only a thick "Nnnh . . . nnnh ..." to pass his lips.

  It was as well; he was not yet in sufficient command of himself. He thought of Faith, of her link to the rivergod, and hugged that thought to himself. If he could hold on to that, keep it safely buried behind his eyes, he could still come through this. All he had to do was survive. He would be Ma'elKoth again, and on that day he would have the power to repay abuse a hundredfold.

  "But that wasn't what really made me angry." Kollberg didn't sound angry. He didn't sound human. "I got angry when you started that drivel about Michaelson being still alive. Then, when we reveal that he is still alive, you have the public's confidence. You thought that was very clever. It was very clever. There is another thing you need to understand about me."

  He leaned forward and took Tan'elKoth's wrist. "Clever people make me hungry."

  He lowered his face as though he might chastely and reverently kiss the ex-Emperor's hand—but instead, he closed his lips upon Tan'elKoth's smallest finger, sucking it fully into his mouth like a five-copper whore warming up for a blowjob. Tan'elKoth tried to speak, but still he could produce only a series of bestial grunts.

  Kollberg bit down.

  Tan'elKoth said "... gunhg.. guhh ..."

  Kollberg chewed on the finger, worrying it, cracking the bone like a dog sucking marrow; he turned his head to one side, wedged the finger back between his molars, bit down again, and yanked his head from side to side until the bone splintered at the knuckle and he could rip it free. Blood sprayed, and Kollberg fixed his lips to the wound, sucking greedily.

  Tan'elKoth's guts spasmed, and he retched rackingly across Kollberg's knees. Thin, clear vomit came out of the emptiness of his unused stomach, trailed down his legs, and trickled into his shoes. Kollberg shrugged and let Tan'elKoth slide to the floor; one of the officers took his hand and pressed a rag to the spurting stump.

  Kollberg chewed on the severed finger for a moment longer, then swallowed it. He smiled at Tan'elKoth with blood-smeared lips. "Now," he said thickly. "Now you understand."

  Tan'elKoth trembled, aching for breath, trying to stop the new surge of vomit that forced its way up his throat. Faith, he told himself. He still doesn't know about Faith.

  "Say it. Say you understand."

  Tan'elKoth looked away, down, anywhere but at the creature's face. Clearly outlined through Kollberg's dungarees was his stiffened penis, straining against the fly.

  "Say it," Kollberg repeated. "I'm still hungry."

  Tan'elKoth struggled to make his numb, slack lips and tongue form the words. "I ... unners'an' ..." he mumbled. "I unners'an'."

  Kollberg gestured, and gauntleted hands dragged Tan'elKoth's twitching body across the room and balanced him on a tiny swivel chair in front of a child-sized desk. The screen on this desk was already fully lit, showing the Adventures Unlimited logo: the armored knight upon the back of a winged horse, rampant.

  Hot breath slid down the back of his neck, and that meaty voice came thick and wet beside his ear. "I believe you wanted to have a word with the Board of Governors, isn't that right?" he murmured warmly, almost lovingly. "You wanted to tell them about me, mmm? Would you be interested to know that they have been watching us, all this time?"

  The gradual return of motor function made Tan'elKoth shudder uncontrollably. "T-t-true?" he stammered. "Is-z-z-z it?"

  "Professional Tan'elKoth," the digitized voice from the screen replied, "you were told that Laborer Kollberg has our full confidence in this matter. Are you not wise? Is not a word sufficient?"

  "Th-th-th-this m-m-monster—th-this fiend you employ—"

  "Mmm, it seems there has been some ... misapprehension ... on your part, Professional. Laborer Kollberg does not work for us."

  "N-no? But, but—"

  "Not at all. Quite the contrary, in fact; we work for him."

  Tan'elKoth, at that moment, wished only that he could use his arms well enough to stuff his fingers in his ears, wished he could use his voice well enough to howl, wished he could do anything at all to shut out the words he knew would come next.

  "And so do you."

  The logo vanished. The screen was as blank as Tan'elKoth's stare.

  He did understand. Finally, fatally, he did. He had thought he was the master of history, that his fractal world-tree had grown according to his will. He had allowed himself to be deceived.

  He had let himself believe that the Board of Governors was rational, when in truth it was only hungry.

  The Bog, he thought. Caine's joke: the acronym BOG. A word, in English, for swamp. A word, in a dead Slavic language, for God

  Kollberg sighed. "You're thinking that Pallas is dead, and Caine is destroyed. You're thinking, What other use can he have for me? Why am I still alive?"

  Slowly, unwillingly, Tan'elKoth forced himself to meet Kollberg's glassy dead-fish stare. "Yes."

  "Well, first, you're still alive because we made a deal, and I don't break my deals—not with my friends. And second, there is still something I need you to do, before we send you back to Overworld."

  Tan'elKoth closed his eyes.

  "I need you to help me decide," Kollberg said, "how we should use Faith Michaelson."

  Tan'elKoth lowered his head. He no longer had even the strength for anguish.

  "Talk to me," Kollberg said. "Talk."

  Tan'elKoth talked.

  The dark angel's spawn was a created thing, a golem, a half-silvered reflec­tion of its sire in a mirror of flesh. In the mind that dreams the world, each was a symbol of the other, and in such dreams, symbol is reality; this is what is called the law of similarity.

  Each was the other.

  In their mortal struggle, the dark angel and his spawn each fought against himself.

  TWELVE

  The Caineslayer leaned on the silvery weather-split rail that surrounded the roof of the barge's deckhouse and stared out over the docks of Ankhana with eyes the bleached blue-grey of a frozen river under a cloudless winter sky. He could have been made of carved oak and knotted rope upholstered with leather;
his hair was shaved to an eighth-inch fuzz over his scalp, and muscle jumped at the corners of his knife-edged jawline.

  He squinted one eye against the side-glare of the rising sun and thought about destiny.

  He wore a simple tunic and pants of brown suede, loose and baggy, a shade or two lighter than his skin. In the case by his cot in the deckhouse cabin were the scarlet robes of a Monastic Ambassador, but he no longer wore them; he planned to resign his diplomatic post as soon as he reached the Ankhanan Embassy.

  But after that—?

  For the first time in longer than he could remember, he didn't know what to do next.

  The city around him now had been his home for more than twenty-four years; he had been born here, had passed his childhood in a neighborhood of the Industrial Park that could be seen from where he now stood. Behind him, across this channel of the Great Chambaygen, rose the massive walls of Ankhana's Old Town, great cliffs built of limestone blocks each near the size of the barge on which he'd ridden the river from the God's Teeth, towering eight times the height of a man, blackened with a thousand years of smoke and weather, dropping sheer to the river's channel.

  The smithy built by the man he had called his father still stood, not far from here; if he closed his ice-pale eyes, he could see the small room, off the overhead chamber, where he had slept. With his powers of mind, he could view himself at any age there, could see his parents as if they still lived, or could cast forth his sight to capture the face of someone sleeping in that tiny windowless room even on this bright morning. He could spy upon the tenement where his first love had lived, or the cell beneath the Monastic Embassy where he had spent so many hours kneeling in meditation. The city had been a part of his family, a parent, the older brother he'd never had. And now the city was sick.

  Ankhana was coming down with a virus.

  The city had been feeling poorly for some days now, feverish fancies invading its collective dreams, but it did not yet comprehend just how ill it was. The city's immune system—the Imperial constabulary and the army—had geared up to fight off a bacterial infection: a growing internal colony called Cainism, a philosophical disease that attacked the citizenry's faith in the Church of the Beloved Children of Ma'elKoth, and in the Empire itself. This particular infection, as it spread, emitted toxins that had caused painful abcesses of disorder at the city's extremities of Alientown and the Warrens, and that had occasionally pocked Old Town itself.

  The city's immune system was admirably suited to battle infections of this type; these were swiftly contained, sequestered, and concentrated in only a few places, where each individual. bacterium could be sanitized in turn. Yet aches continued to settle into the city's joints, and its fever continued to inch upward every day, for the city's true illness came from a virus.

  A virus is a wholly different order of disease.

  A black pall of smoke twisted upward from the northwest quadrant of the capital, the Alientown ghetto. All the still-standing buildings that fronted the river were blackened; most others had partially collapsed and still others had burned to the ground. What little he could see of Alientown from here looked like the scorched-earth shell of a castle after a marauding army has slaughtered all within.

  All this meant little to the Caineslayer; he merely gazed incuriously at the wreckage. The Caineslayer had been born in the mountains, five days ago. He did not yet know his new life well. He could still be surprised by how the world made him feel, because he did not react to it in the familiar patterns of his former life; he was almost continuously startled by how different he had become.

  Now, for example: standing here, he surmised that he was alone, or very nearly so, in the knowledge of the city's illness. Perhaps only one or two of the hundreds and thousands of people around him even understood the concept of viral infection; he himself had not, until it had been explained to him in detail by the late Vinson Garrette. And instead of leaping to the docks to cry the city's doom, instead of racing to the embassy to warn the Acting Ambassador of the danger, instead of taking any action at all upon his knowledge, he simply leaned upon the rail, picking at its splinters with his fingernails, and watched.

  On the dock below him was assembled the capital detachment of the Imperial Army Band, two hundred strong, their instruments' brass gleaming gold in the bright noontide sun. They stood at parade rest, horns and pipes slung like weapons, their tall cylindrical caps white as clouds and festooned with braid as iridescent as sun dogs. Within the band's broad arc stood a half century of Household Knights at attention, their long hauberks shining under mantles of maroon and gold, their halberd blades of scarlet steel flashing like torches.

  He wondered how many of them were sick: how many already had that boil of madness festering within their brains.

  A ribbed gangplank joined the barge's deck to the dockside. At the gangplank's foot waited a pair of stolid, thick-shouldered draft horses harnessed to a large cart. A platform had been built upon the cart, rising perhaps four or five feet above its bed, and on the platform was a sort of rack hastily improvised out of splintery; warped scrap lumber. Waiting at the corners of the cart were four friars, Esoterics despite the dirt-brown robes that proclaimed their Monastic citizenship. Such robes are worn ordinarily only by Exoterics, the public faces of the Monasteries. These robes served admirably to conceal the Artan springless pellet bows that each man bore.

  The ice in the Caineslayer's eyes glinted with a new reflection: Down the long ribbed gangplank from the deck to the dock, two friars—real Exoterics, these—bore a litter. On the litter lay a medium-sized, ordinary-looking man of middle age, black hair showing streaks of grey that matched the grey scattered through his untrimmed week's growth of black beard. The man's arms dangled, limp, over the litter's rails, as though he were unconscious; the Caineslayer knew that he was not.

  The man did not move because only immobility could hurt more than motion: the man held himself still because to move might lessen his suffering, and that he could not bear. For him, only pain had meaning.

  For five days—since the moment of his birth—the Caineslayer had kept company with this man, first on the train down the western slope of Khryl's Saddle to the riverport of Harrakha, then on the barge downriver from Harrakha to the Empire's capital. The Caineslayer had taken his meals in the ugly deck shelter of scrap wood and filth-crusted canvas that had served this man for his cabin, had slept there, read there, had done his daily exercises there; the Caineslayer had knelt beside this man's rude cot for his daily prayers to the Savior, the Ascended Ma'elKoth.

  He had never left this man's side, because to leave would be to miss the pain. The Caineslayer ate this man's pain, drank it, breathed it, soaked it in through his pores. It was his reason for existence. This man had many names, of which the Caineslayer knew some few; he numbered them in his head while he watched the friars who had borne the litter lift the crippled man and chain him upright to the rack upon the wagon's platform.

  Dominic, this man said he had been called by the slaver from whom he claimed to have escaped, in the days before his arrival at the abbey of Garthan Hold; in Kirisch-Nar, where he had fought in the catpits, he was known as Shade; among the surviving remnants of the Khulan Horde, he had once been k'Thal, and was now known only as the Betrayer, or the Hated One. In the Ankhanan Empire, he had been called the Blade of Tyshalle, and the Prince of Chaos, and the Enemy of God. In the land of Arta, the Aktiri world, he had been named Administrator Hari Khapur Michaelson.

  But everywhere he was known by one of these names, he was better known by another name, his true name, the name he'd been given by the Abbot of Garthan Hold.

  Caine.

  It was the Caineslayer's greatest pride that he had taken this name of legend and made of it a mere sound: a monosyllabic grunt of contempt.

  2

  On the cold dawn of his birth, when he had let himself into the railcar compartment where the cripple who had once been Caine lay, dumb with misery like a wounded dog, the
Caineslayer had sat across from him and asked, "How, then, should I call you?"

  The cot on which the cripple lay was bolted to the compartment's wall, to the splintered woodwork where seats had been ripped out to make room for it. The cripple was strapped to the cot with leather bands across his knees, hips, and chest, to keep him in his place against the jolting sway of the train. The compartment stank of human waste; the Caineslayer could not tell if perhaps the cripple had fouled himself, or if this stench was only a reminder of the dunking he'd taken in the polluted headwaters of the Great Chambaygen, where it drained away the sewage from the construction camp on the crest of Khryl's Saddle.

  The cripple was covered with a filthy blanket, half sodden already with seepage from the oozing burns that splotched his body like patches sewn onto tattered clothing. He did not turn his head or make any indication that he had heard the Caineslayer's question; he stared out the grime-streaked window at the billows of coal smoke that rolled backward from the locomotive, smoke that had stained the leaves of trees that lined the winding railway a uniform necrotic grey.

  The Caineslayer settled himself onto the surprisingly comfortable cushion of the opposite bench. For a long, wonderful moment he merely sat, staring, savoring the sight, breathing the smell, letting the cripple's aura of rank despair settle into his bones like the warmth of his home hearth on a winter's night. But there was something missing, something the Caineslayer still needed. He could see a blind lack in the cripple's hollow gaze.

  In the face of his pain, the cripple had sunk into some inner circle of animal incomprehension; he had found a state of dreamlike semiconsciousness where his suffering seemed removed, distant, the anguish of a fictional victim in some old half familiar story. But the Caineslayer had armed himself against even this pathetic defense. He had been forewarned.

  The Caineslayer had a device.