Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  Hari's eyes glittered.

  "So: as you go to your death at the hands of your enemies, do not console yourself with vain dreams of Pallas Ril in some misty afterlife where she might be happy, or at least content. The best she might have experienced is an absolute extinction of consciousness. More likely, she screams even now in some unimaginable hell, and will continue to do so. Forever."

  They passed a long interval in which the only sound was the soft plash of the river against the barge's hull, and the only motion the gentle rocking of the deck.

  "You," Hari said finally, hoarse and slow, "have a gift for hating."

  The Caineslayer inclined his head in a grave sketch of a bow. "If so, it is a gift I received from you."

  For a moment, he found himself wanting to reach out and grasp Hari's shoulder—to touch him in some way that was not intended to cause pain. In many ways, he was closer to this man than he'd been to the mediocrities with whom he's studied at the abbey school, and to the spineless Exoterics who had staffed the Thorncleft Embassy. He and Hari were joined in ways forever inaccessible, forever incomprehensible, to those grey souls.

  He rose and turned away.

  "You know," he said distantly, staring out the flap of the shelter at a spray of brilliant stars, "under other circumstances, I shouldn't have been too surprised to find that we had become friends."

  "Kid, we are friends," Hari told him with a bitter laugh. "You mean you haven't noticed?"

  The Caineslayer met his dark glare across the still, pale flame of the lamp between them and thought for a moment of all they had shared in these past five days. "No, I hadn't," he said slowly, frowning and nodding together. "But I suppose you're right."

  "Fucking right I'm right. Not that it'll stop me from killing you if I ever get the chance."

  "Mmm, of course not," the Caineslayer replied, "any more than it shall stop me from giving you to the Imperial authorities for execution." "Yeah. Tomorrow morning, right?"

  The Caineslayer felt a surprising pang of melancholy as he nodded. "Yes. Tomorrow."

  "You sound like you're not looking forward to it."

  "Truly, I'm not," he said. "But I am ready for it. You are part of my former life, Hari. I am ready to move on."

  "Yeah, whatever. You ready to move to your goddamn bed?"

  Another glance at the stars—and at the scant oil remaining in the lamp—reminded him how late the hour had become. "I suppose I am."

  "Then shut up and go to sleep."

  The Caineslayer smiled almost fondly. "Good night, Hari"

  "Fuck off."

  5

  Early the next morning, as the barge had swung sluggishly out into the Great Chambaygen's current with the first sparkling rays of the rising sun, the Caineslayer had carried a trencher of thick lentil porridge flavored with salt pork into Hari's deck shelter, set it beside his cot, and unstrapped one of Hari's arms so that he could feed himself with the large wooden spoon. Hari took a listless bite or two, then set down the spoon.

  "You should eat it," the Caineslayer said. "It's better than you'll get in the Donjon."

  "Yeah, whatever. How about the bedpan?"

  The Caineslayer shoved the bedpan within Hari's reach, waited patiently while he relieved himself, then carried the pan out and dumped its contents into the river. When he came back, Hari still wasn't eating; he lay on the cot, staring expressionlessly at the canvas overhead. "What's it gonna be today, then?" he said. "You gonna start on my hand again?"

  "No," the Caineslayer said. Slowly, he lowered himself into the Warrior's Seat, his legs doubled comfortably beneath him. He rested his hands on his thighs, left cupping his right with thumbs touching: the Quiet Circle meditation posture.

  "This is our last time together, Hari; in perhaps two hours I will de-liver you to the Household Knights who await us on the Ankhanan docks, and then I shall never see you again—mm, no. I mean to say I'll never speak with you again, since I do intend to witness your execution."

  "Huh. Don't get all sentimental; you'll make me blush."

  The Caineslayer gave his victim a level stare. "I have only one question for you today. I don't even insist on an answer."

  Hari eyed him uncertainly; this change in their routine had awakened his animal wariness. "Yeah, all right."

  "Was it worth it?"

  Hari scowled. "Was what worth what? Is this some of that If I had my life to do over again horseshit?"

  "Not exactly. I'm not interested in your life, Hari, but in the effect you've had on mine. I want to know: Saving Pallas Ril in Victory Stadium seven years ago—was it worth what you've suffered since?"

  "Of course it was," he responded with instant certainty. "I'd do it again in half a fucking second."

  "Would you? Would you really? With all you've told me: the destruction of your career, the loss of your legs, of your father, of your home, your daughter ... and your life. Are you sure?"

  "I ... I mean, I, uh ..." His voice faltered, and he turned his face away.

  "You weren't even happy together, you and she," the Caineslayer said. "You told me so yourself And so: Your sole accomplishment was to postpone her death for seven years. If you had known, then, how that single act would inexorably destroy you, would you have done it?"

  Hari's free hand covered his eyes, and he did not respond.

  "You need not answer. I merely want you to consider the question." "Faith," Hari murmured.

  "Ah, yes, your daughter," the Caineslayer said. "And have you done her such a kindness, bringing her into your world? Sometimes, in these nights, you cry out in your sleep, do you know that? Do you know that what you say is Faith, I'm sorry?"

  Something faded then from the man who had been Caine: some spark of the flame that had made him loom so large dwindled and winked out. For the first time, he looked old, and tired, and truly, undeniably, finally: crippled.

  After a long, long moment spent savoring this extinction, the Caineslayer rose and moved to leave the tent, but Hari turned toward him once again, his face bleak as winter stone.

  "I guess I could ask you the same question."

  6

  The Caineslayer stopped; he looked back past his shoulder. "What do you mean?"

  "Ever think about what destroying me is gonna cost you?"

  "Hari, Hari," the Caineslayer chided, "have we not passed the time when you can expect me to take your threats seriously?"

  "It's not a threat, kid. Sure, let's say I took your parents from you. You took my wife from me, and you're gonna watch me die. Whatever," he said with a one-armed shrug. "Fair enough. I don't really give a shit; I'm dead already. But how will you live with what you've done?"

  "What I have done?" The Caineslayer snorted. "I have saved the world from the Enemy of God."

  "Kid, kid." Hari echoed precisely the Caineslayer's chiding tone. "You didn't save shit. When you and Garrette managed to kill Shanna, you wiped out the Ankhanan Empire. And the Monasteries, and Lipke and Kor and Paqula, too. Pretty much everyone on this continent will be dead by this time next year."

  "That's ridiculous."

  "Sure it is. What do you think Pallas was doing here, you fucking idiot?"

  A spectral shiver trickled down the Caineslayer's spine, a frictive half-hot frisson like the whisk of fingertips across unvarnished wood. "You're talking about Viceroy Garrette's disease—the one he gave to the subs."

  "You knew?"

  The Caineslayer met Hari's blankly astonished gaze and thought, Well. At last I have succeeded in impressing him. He wished he could take more pleasure in it; wished he could coolly reply I know many things, like a wizard in a campfire tale.

  Instead, his stomach dropping, he could say only, "Yes."

  "Damn, kid." Han shook his head, squinting disbelievingly. "Damn, I thought I was hard-core. So this all started with Garrette, huh?"

  The Caineslayer shook his head. "It all started with you. With Creele." "What did Garrette tell you?"

  "He ... said it's ca
lled aitcharv ... aitcharvee ..."

  "HRVP," Hari supplied. "That's right. How much did of Vinse tell you about it?"

  The Caineslayer suddenly found the air to have thickened under this canvas tent—thick as water, thick as stew; he could barely force it into his lungs. "Enough," he replied thinly.

  "And you still went through with it"

  "I don't understand."

  "Garrette was dead. You had me. Why did Pallas have to die?"

  The Caineslayer allowed himself a thin, chill smile. "Reasons are for peasants."

  But Hari's gaze stayed level and steady until the Caineslayer had to look away. "I could say it was because I thought she might rescue you from me," he said. "I could say it was because I had made a bargain in the name of the Monasteries, and that bargain must be kept. But neither would be true. The truth is simpler, and more complex: She was killed because you loved her, and I wanted to watch you watch her die."

  Hari nodded at this, frowning, as though he understood and could respect such a desire, but then he squinted upward once more. "You ever wonder why Garrette wanted her dead?"

  "He said—he said she would have protected the elves from the disease."

  "Not just the elves."

  That spectral shiver near his spine threatened to become trembling. "The Viceroy assured me that humans aren't in any danger—"

  "Humans. Yeah." An echo of Caine's wolf-grin stretched Hari's lips. "You just gotta remember that for Garrette, human meant Artan."

  A sick understanding gathered itself in the Caineslayer's belly.

  "Here's a question. Garrette had you inoculated, didn't he? Probably shot up most of the people in Transdeia: they take this black thing and press it against your shoulder and pull a trigger and it makes a sound like fssst. You get that?"

  "Yes . . . yes, I did. And the embassy staff, and a lot of the miners and rail porters ..."

  "You're today's lucky winner, kid. First prize: a front row seat for the end of the world."

  "He said—he said it was just a precaution—"

  "And just because this stuff came from this world—my world—and he's got all this fancy technology and shit, you thought he knew what the fuck he was talking about."

  "I—" The Caineslayer shut his eyes. "Yes."

  "That's the problem with you shitheads who think you're educated," Hari said with brutal mockery. "You always think that if somebody talks the same way you do, he's not a moron. But he was a moron, and so are you for thinking he wasn't."

  The Caineslayer found he could not answer.

  "It's loose in Ankhana," Hari said. "That's why Pallas came here. People are sick with it. Human people. Dying already. Killing each other. Locking themselves away with their fevers, because they're already so crazy that they figure everybody's out to kill them. Shanna, Pallas, she was the only hope the people of this continent—probably the whole world had. You killed her. Congratulations. You get to watch everybody die."

  The Caineslayer reached blindly to his side and gathered a handful of the tent's canvas wall to steady himself "Watch ..." he murmured.

  "Sure. That's what that little black fissy thing did for you. You won't get sick. You're immune, just like me. Lucky you, huh?"

  "You're lying," the Caineslayer muttered. He liked the sound of that, so he said it again, more strongly: "You're lying. You're making this up."

  Of course he was lying—was this not the man who had been Caine? The Caineslayer had been hurting him for days, and this was the only way a crippled man could devise to hit back at his tormentor: a silly, vicious lie.

  "Yeah, all right, sure. I'm lying," Hari said, maintaining his bleak predator's grin. "You're the one with the mind powers—use them, you stu­pid sack of shit."

  "I don't have to," the Caineslayer said firmly. "It's an obvious lie; why would the Aktir Queen turn one hair to help the people of Ankhana?"

  "Maybe because she wasn't the goddamn Aktir Queen. Maybe because the Church has been lying about her all these years. Maybe because she cared about every living thing, even useless pinheaded weaseldicks like you."

  Hari looked him over then: a long, slow scan from head to toe and back again, as though measuring his every quality, tangible or not. Then he said, "You took an oath when they made you a friar. You took an oath to support and defend the Future of Humanity with every breath of your body from that day forward. And this is how you kept it. You killed them. All of them. Because you wanted to hurt me, you wiped out the fucking human race."

  The Caineslayer gripped the canvas with both hands; his stomach heaved, and bile scorched the back of his throat. "You swore that oath, too," he insisted desperately. "And look at all the uncountable lives you have taken, all the suffering you have caused—!"

  "Yeah, well, you said it yourself," Hari replied with a shrug. "I'm the Enemy of God."

  7

  On the dockside below the Caineslayer's position, the military band struck up "King of Kings" while marching in place, and the first martial strains of the Imperial anthem brought him back to the present. At the refrain following the first verse, the band's diverse elements swung into order like gears interlocking, and sunlight flared golden spikes from polished brass in time with the anthem's ponderous beat. The Household Knights marched themselves into order around the wagon, expressionless as dolls under the gold-filigreed steel of their helmets; their blood-colored halberds swung in identical arcs like the moment arms of fifty perfectly synchronized metronomes. The Exoterics who had borne the cripple's litter took the lead ropes of the horses that drew the wagon and walked alongside.

  The man who had been Caine sagged from the harness that bound him to the platform's rack, swinging gently with the wagon's sway, his head down as though unconscious. The band segued smoothly from "King of Kings" into "Justice of God."

  The Caineslayer straightened; slowly, thoughtfully, he pulled a splinter of the deckhouse rail out of the flesh of his palm and frowned down at the bead of blood that welled from this tiny wound. How had he been so easily beaten?

  He no longer doubted that Hari had told him the truth. Whatever had happened in Allentown was only a prelude. This city was sick, festering with madness. He could feel it, smell it on the air. He could close his eyes and see it: see sweat on pale and clammy brows, see eyes parboiled by fever casting hooded glances while trembling hands sharpened carving knives, see the flecks of foam at the corners of dry, cracking lips. He did not need his powers to show him these things. He knew they were there. He knew, because a lie would have been too easy. Too cheap.

  And he knew, from long years of study, that Caine's victories are never cheap; they always cost, in the end, more than God Himself can afford.

  Awe stole over him, a tingling sense of the uncanny, when he numbered the days and nights of their journey down from the mountains. Hari had known this all along. With a single phrase, the man who had been Caine had spiked the Caineslayer's triumph through the heart and burned its corpse to toxic ash. All that time, through all that pain, he'd hugged it to himself, waiting. Waiting until its stroke would kill.

  His destiny had betrayed him, had made him a destroyer on a scale that humbled even Caine. Destiny, he understood with bitter certainty, could not be trusted.

  He had no idea what he should do now. Without destiny to guide him, he was lost in a vast, whistling darkness. Any direction he might choose was purely arbitrary; it would make no more sense, offer no more hope, than would sitting still. Which offered neither sense nor hope at all.

  He swung himself over the rail and dropped, catlike, to the barge's deck. He had a need that burned in him like breath to a drowning man. For this need, there was only one answer, and that answer was within the crude deck shelter that had served Hari as a cabin.

  He slipped inside. His possessions were enclosed in three packages: one, the trunk that held his clothes; two, the case that held the Sword of Saint Berne, brought from the mountains to the safety of the Ankhanan Embassy; and three, the valise-sized dev
ice with two handgrips covered in beaten gold, with the silvered glass mirror between. It was these handgrips that the Caineslayer now took, and this mirror into which his ice-pale eyes gazed.

  This is the last, he told himself—promised himself, like a drunkard lifting yet another glass of whiskey to admire its amber glow in the sunlight. One last time.

  And he moaned like a lover in passion, low in the back of his throat, as he entered the man who had been Caine.

  8

  I think it's the roar of the crowd that brings me up from the pit. People everywhere, all around me, staring, shouting, cheering, pointing. There's a band in the neighborhood somewhere ... There they are, marching up ahead while they play some fucking awful piece of crap that sounds like a Max Reger dirge transcribed by John Philip Sousa.

  Chained—they've got me chained as though there were actually some chance I could get away, wrists manacled to my waist, a kind of gallows vest pegged to the block in front of me with about two feet of links thicker than my finger, chains hooked to straps at my shoulders that hold me up to some kind of scrap-wood rack so that everybody can get a goddamn good look.

  People hang out of windows, waving, throwing stuff—a wad of something wet hits my right arm and splashes across my chest, and the thick retchy stench of it brings a word up out of my raddled memory: tumbrel. That's what they used to call the cart, the kind I'm riding in this nightmare parade, a tumbrel. French for shit wagon. They've chained me to the shit wagon.

  Nice day for a parade. The sun always looks bigger, yellower, hotter here, the rolling cottonball clouds cleaner and more solid as they tumble through a sky so deep and blue it makes you want to cry Hot for this time of year, Los Angeles hot in autumn, Ankhana is usually more like London.

  Fog and rain, that's what I'd wish for—something to drive the crowds indoors, something that really says England. That's what I'd wish for, if I had any wishes left. Instead, I've got Hollywood.