Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  The Caine Mirror, he called it privately; a box shaped roughly like a medium-sized valise, filled with tangles of fine cabling and a bank of transparent glass bulbs, powered by a chip of griffinstone smaller than the nail of the Caineslayer's little finger. On its front were a pair of handgrips covered with thin-beaten gold; between the handgrips was a mirror of silvered glass. To hold those handgrips, to direct his disciplined mind into that silvered glass, was to enter an intimacy so extreme that it transcended obscenity: as though he'd gouged out the man's eye and fucked his bloody socket.

  It let him inside the man who had been Caine.

  The Caineslayer leaned forward and dug his fingers into the blanket that covered the scorched flesh of the cripple's ribs, grabbed, and twisted. "Perhaps you didn't hear me. How should I call you?"

  The cripple's response was to roll his head to one side. His face was as empty as his heart.

  "Should I call you Hari?" the Caineslayer asked pleasantly. "Viceroy Garrette called you Administrator"—he pronounced the foreign words with careful precision—"Michaelson. Is that what you'd prefer?"

  Consciousness swam up to the surface of the man's eyes, and with consciousness came suffering; he stared at the Caineslayer through a haze of pain, and the Caineslayer smiled. "It wouldn't seem right, to call you Caine," he said. "Caine is dead, you told me—and I know this to be true. I killed him."

  Those suffering eyes drifted away, back toward the windows, and the cripple spoke in a half whisper still ragged with residual screams. "Whatever."

  "Ex-Caine? Perhaps—" The Caineslayer's smile widened into a grimace of happy malice. "—Tan'Caine?"

  "It doesn't matter."

  "You think not? I say it does. Perhaps I shall use Hari, after all. That is how Pallas Ril calls you, isn't it? Mmm, your pardon, Hari: I meant to say, called you."

  A brief, almost invisible twist flickered over the cripple's features; if the Caineslayer hadn't known better, he might have fooled himself into believing it the trace of a smile. "You're wasting your time," the man he had decided to call Hari said. "I don't know why you think you can hurt me more than I've hurt myself."

  "There are many things you don't know," the Caineslayer observed. Hari shrugged and turned once more toward the window.

  "Aren't you curious?" The Caineslayer leaned forward to give Hari a theatrically sly sidelong look. "Don't you want to know who I am? Why I have destroyed you?"

  "Don't flatter yourself, kid."

  The Caineslayer frowned. "You don't care? You don't care why this has happened?"

  Hari drew a deep sigh and rolled his head back to meet the younger man's eyes. "You don't know why it happened," he said. "All you know is why you did what you did."

  The Caineslayer's frown deepened into a scowl; he had not come this far to be lectured like a boy at the abbey school.

  "And second? Yeah." Hari shrugged. "I don't care."

  The Caineslayer's hands twisted into fists. "How can you not care?"

  "Why is bullshit," Hari said exhaustedly. "Why won't bring back my wife. Why won't save my father, or return my child, or let me walk again. Fuck why. Reasons are for peasants."

  "Perhaps," the Caineslayer said through his teeth., He slid sideways to place himself beside the window out which Hari stared. The trees had closed around the tracks until the train seemed to be rocking through a tunnel of smoke-poisoned leaves. "Perhaps I am a peasant. Then it is a peasant who has brought you low."

  "Yeah, whatever."

  "I was born to Marte, wife of Terrel the blacksmith. They named me Perrik," he began, speaking with the slow, deliberate cadence of an elKothan priest reciting the daily liturgy.

  "You're wasting your time," Hari repeated. "I don't want to know."

  The Caineslayer's fist struck like his father's hammer, a long powerful arc of force that exploded against Hari's face, smashing his nose into a splatter of blood and tissue. Hari grunted and his eyes went glassy for a moment. When their focus returned, he expressionlessly licked blood from his mouth and watched the Caineslayer, silently waiting for what he would do next.

  The Caineslayer's fist ached with the fierce need to hit him again and again and again; he burned to kill this man, to beat the life from him flesh to flesh and bone to bone—but killing would not answer his need. "This isn't about what you want. Nothing is about what you want, not ever again. This is about me. About what I want"

  He clutched his fist with his other hand, trying to massage the bloodlust out of it. "Think of this as a reverse interrogation. There are some things I want you to know. I'm going to tell you. If, at any time, I think you're not listening, I will hurt you. Do you understand?"

  Hari's response was a blood-smeared stare, blank as an empty plate.

  The Caineslayer once again dug his fingers into a twist of the filthy blanket and scraped the rough fabric of Hari's tunic against the moist scabs of his burns. "I know you've been tortured before, Hari. The, mmm, Black Knife Clan of the Boedecken ogrilloi, wasn't it? And I am not insensible to the fact that only last night you tried to force my men to kill you. I suspect that pain means as little to you as your life—but both your life and your pain are very important to me."

  He settled into himself and took a deep, slow, patient breath. "Five days from now, we arrive in Ankhana; once there, you will be delivered up unto the civil authorities for execution. In the meantime, I want you to hurt—and I want you to listen."

  Outside, the trees had fallen away, revealing rugged hills of gorse and bracken rolling toward a blue-misted reach: the unforgiving Kaarnan Wilderlands. Inside, the Caineslayer had begun again.

  "I was born to Marte, wife of Terrel the blacksmith. They named me Perrik, and for much of my childhood, I expected to be ordinary—and happy, very much like they themselves seemed to be. My mother was from Kor, and she was older than my father; she had secrets that neither of us understood, but we always knew she loved us ..."

  3

  For days—through the whole trip out of the God's Teeth, through the layover in Harrakha while the barge was prepared, on the first days of the maddeningly slow journey down the lazy curves of the Great Chambaygen to Ankhana—the Caineslayer had told the tale of his parents. He rarely spoke of himself at all; instead, he told every incident he could remember of his father and his mother, sparing nothing: from the first belt Terrel had laid across his legs to the honeycakes Marte would bake as the summers faded into autumn rains, from the time Baron Thilliow of Oklian had had Terrel whipped for cutting the frog of his favorite mare's hoof, to the season of savage rows his parents inflicted upon each other when he was ten: when he first learned that Marte had been pregnant when Terrel married her—and pregnant by another man.

  Good and bad, dramatic and trivial, he told every faintest detail; he wanted to bring his parents to life for Hari, even as they lived in his own heart.

  Strangely, Hari seemed to somehow divine the Caineslayer's purpose; he never enquired why the Caineslayer wanted him to know all this. Only occasionally did he speak through his haze of inner pain; sometimes to offer a comment, or to ask for a clarification of some obscure detail—sometimes a mere grunt of understanding.

  Late one afternoon, as the barge drifted through a slow curve that divided low, rolling hills of grassland, Hari said, "I'm guessing, from all this, that I'm never gonna get a chance to meet your folks, huh?"

  The Caineslayer met his gaze squarely, and his voice was dry as the desert stone of his mother's homeland. "Both my parents were in Victory Stadium at the Assumption of Ma'elKoth."

  "No shit? Died there, huh?"

  "Yes."

  "How about that." His eyes fixed on some misted reach, miles away and years ago. "Y'know, I can remember thinking, while I was getting ready to go out on the sand—I was hiding in a vent from the gladiator pen, and the wagon with Ma'elKtoh and Toa-Sytell and ... and everybody .. . was just rolling through the gate—I was thinking, that if somebody I loved had died because someone did what I was about
to do, I wouldn't rest until I hunted the bastard down and killed him with my bare hands."

  "How about that," the Caineslayer echoed expressionlessly.

  "So where were you?"

  The Caineslayer stared a question at him.

  "You weren't there," Hari said. "You weren't at the stadium." "How do you know this?"

  "I know you can fight. If you'd been there, either your parents would be alive, or you'd be dead."

  "I was—" The Caineslayer was forced to take a pause, to swallow his old, familiar pain. "—otherwise engaged."

  Hari turned his palms toward the canvas tenting overhead. "You're an elKothan, right? A Beloved Child of Ma'elKoth?" "I am"

  "Yeah." For a moment, another of those flickering, bitter almost-smiles passed over his features. "Me, too."

  The Caineslayer frowned. "You?"

  "Yeah. I went through the very last Ritual of Rebirth before the Assumption. Baptism of blood and fire—signed, sealed, and sanctified, that's me."

  "I don't believe it"

  "Ma'elKoth did." He shrugged and waved this digression aside. "He summoned his Beloved Children to the stadium that day. How come you weren't there?"

  "I—" The Caineslayer had to look away; the pain this memory brought was astonishing, a savage stabbing ache undiminished by the passage of seven years, unassuaged by his sure knowledge that his pain and loss had been the knife that carved his destiny. He could not have changed events then any more than he could reach back through seven long years and change them now.

  But the pain

  He had one defense against this pain: he reminded himself that this pain belonged to Raithe of Ankhana. I am the Caineslayer, he told himself. That pain is a revenant of someone else's life.

  "I was in the scriptorium of the Ankhanan Embassy," he said, "copying my report on your murder of Ambassador Creele."

  Hari made a grunting noise that could have been a snort of incredulous laughter; after all these days, recognition finally flared within his shadowed eyes. "I remember you ..." he said wonderingly. "You were one of the kids who frog-marched me up to his office. You had some silly-ass melodramatic shit to say about the Monasteries coming after me; something like that. Yeah, that was you—I remember the eyes."

  "I would have hunted you for Creele's sake alone," the Caineslayer said softly. "He was a great man."

  "He was an asshole. He deserved what he got."

  "And I?" the Caineslayer asked. "What did I deserve?"

  Hari rolled over far enough to turn his face to the canvas wall of the deck shelter. "Don't come crying to me, kid. You got more out of life than most ever do: when the world hurt you, you got the chance to hit back. Count yourself lucky, and shut up."

  "That's it? That's all you have to say?" The Caineslayer found his hands had become convulsive fists once more. "That I'm lucky?"

  "What do you want from me? An apology?" Hari twisted back to look at him, black rings of bruise around his eyes, his nose still swollen from the blow that had smashed it three days before. "Or forgiveness?"

  The Caineslayer's fists trembled, and he could not take his eyes from the bulge of the thyroid cartilage in Hari's throat; he could feel an arc of energy from the hammer edge of his hand to that still target, as though Hari's larynx and the Caineslayer's fist were two pieces of the same lodestone.

  Slowly, the Caineslayer forced his fists to open, and he choked back his taste for blood. "So," he murmured. "So."

  He rose and folded his hands behind his back, pacing the floor of Hari's deck shelter as though even walking was a wound he could give this man—and perhaps it was. Perhaps the best pain he could offer was the reminder of everything this man would never do again. "So," he said again, "finally, you understand what you have done to me. Now, I wish to understand what I have done to you."

  He made himself smile, and he turned that smile upon Hari like a weapon. "Talk to me now. Tell me of Pallas Ril."

  4

  Of course he had refused, at first; for hours he refused, while the Caineslayer amused himself with a cheerful alternation of questioning and mild torture. On that day, the Caineslayer had addressed his attention to the nerve cluster in the pad between the thumb and forefinger; even a moderate pinch on it could bring tears to the eyes of a strong man without causing any lasting damage, and the Caineslayer had a grip like his father's furnace tongs. He kept Hari strapped to his cot—he had seen the lethal skill that still inhabited those hands graphically demonstrated upon the late Artan Viceroy. He sat beside him, holding one of Hari's hands in both of his, like a dutiful son. Sometimes he would alternate this with pressure on the radial nerve just above the elbow.

  One of the charming features of these excruciation is that—with proper timing and intervals of rest—these particular pressure points become more sensitive as they are abused, rather than less. After an hour or two, the subject feels his whole arm burning from within, as though his blood had turned to acid.

  In the end Hari had submitted, as the Caineslayer had known he would. The questions themselves—How did you meet? Where was your first kiss? What did she wear on your wedding day? What was the scent of her hair? would bring the anguish of memory fully to the forefront of Hari's consciousness. It was clear that to speak of these things hurt Hari more than keeping silent could have—yet once he had begun, he seemed disinclined to stop. Nonetheless he did stop from time to time, requiring the Caineslayer to encourage him again with nerve pressure, as though he wanted the pain, as though he welcomed it, as though he required both the pain of speaking and the pain of keeping silent; as though to hide from any scrap of his suffering would be a betrayal, a crime, a sin.

  The Caineslayer accepted Hari's shattered heart as a sacrament. He had never been so happy.

  He kept the Caine Mirror alongside Hari's bed; he could dip into Hari's head at will—immerse himself in Hari's torment. This he did only at intervals; the Caineslayer felt keenly the danger of swimming those deeps. They tugged at him awake and called to him in dreams, whispering of sinking forever from the memory of light.

  Hari spoke through two days, and the Caineslayer listened—prompting occasionally with questions, and more rarely with physical coercion. He heard of many faraway and unlikely places, from the depths of the Boedecken Waste to the gleaming brass streets of Lipke's capital Seven Wells, from the jungle kingdom of Yalitrayya to the ice fields of the White Desert. Later, they spoke of places even more exotic and unimaginably distant: places such as Chicago and San Francisco—and alien names such as Shermaya Dole and Marc Vilo and Shanna Leighton and Arturo Kollberg.

  We have a very simple, straightforward relationship, the Caineslayer reflected from time to time. He and Hari shared a single need: the need to experience Hari's pain.

  That simplicity created a sort of understanding, almost a bond: they cooperated to give each other what each wanted. All the caustic hatred that had corroded his veins for seven years was slowly and surely drained away; his victory had lanced a boil on his soul. Caine was no longer the icon of evil, the Enemy of God, the author of all the world's ills. He had become simply what he was: a ruthless, amoral man, now beaten—crushed by the world, just like any other.

  Only human, after all.

  And Hari, too, seemed to take some relief; profoundly attuned to his prisoner's moods, the Caineslayer could not help but notice that the needle point of Hari's pain seemed to be slowly blunting. Late on the final night of the journey, the barge lay up along the bank, anchor chains attached to trees that grew beside the Chambaygen's lazy channel, only a few hours upstream from Ankhana. All was quiet as the crew slept—even the two poleboys on watch drowsed atop the deckhouse—and Hari seemed almost at peace.

  The Caineslayer squatted beside him. "You are calm, now."

  Hari's sole response was to work the back of his head on his pillow and chafe his wrists against the straps that bound him to his cot.

  "You have been calming ever since we began on the river," the Caineslayer said. "D
id you love your wife so little that you no longer suffer her loss?"

  "Well, y'know ..." Hari murmured. "It's the river. It's her river." The Caineslayer said, "Not anymore."

  "Are you sure? We drift downstream, and how much has really changed? The leaves still turn, the birds still fly. Fish jump. The river goes on." Hari closed his eyes and gave a sleepy sigh. "Shanna used to tell me that life is a river; a person is like a little eddy that spins in a backflow for a little while, until it uncoils and the river washes it away. Nothing is lost. Maybe a little farther downstream, another eddy spins up, and nothing is gained. Life is just life, like the river is just a river. Other times, she'd say that the river is a song, and a person or a bird or a tree or whatever—an individual—is really just a scatter of notes, a little subtheme, like what they call a motif. That motif might play loud or soft, might be part of the song for a long time or just a little, but in the end, it's all still one song."

  "So which is it?" the Caineslayer asked softly. "A song, or a river?"

  Hari shrugged. "How the fuck should I know? I'm not sure she really meant either one. She was a goddess, not a philosopher. But she knew a little bit about life and death. She was never afraid to die; she knew that dying was part of the whole cycle—that her little eddy would untangle itself back into the current of the river."

  The Caineslayer nodded his understanding. "So: you can bear your loss, because you feel that you haven't really lost her."

  "It's her river, kid."

  "As I have observed already," the Caineslayer said, "not anymore." Hari's eyes slitted open; he watched the Caineslayer without turning his head.

  "You must have noticed the silver runes painted on the Sword of Saint Berne," the Caineslayer went on. "What do you think they were for?"

  Hari didn't answer, didn't move, only watched: a predator become aware of being stalked by something larger and more fierce.

  "I confess that I do not know the actual use of these runes," the Caineslayer continued. "It did not seem important enough that I should ask. But consider: If the Viceroy wished merely to destroy her body, would not the bare blade have been sufficient?"