Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  "Yes," he said. "I've heard that."

  "The question is not what you hope might happen, or what you wish had happened differently. Tell me what you want to do."

  He lowered his face to his knees. "What I want doesn't matter," he said, his voice half muffled by his legs. "You're wasting your time with me, t'Passe. Ask a dying man what he wants, he'll tell you he wants to live. You say, `Oh, sorry. What's your second choice?' " He made a twitching gesture with his head, as though he wiped his eyes against the scraps of his trousers. "I'm just sitting here waiting to die."

  "We can each sit and wait to die, from the very day of our births. Those of us who do not do so, choose to ask—and to answer—the two questions that define every conscious creature: What do I want? and What will I do to get it? Which are, finally, only one question: What is my will? Caine teaches us that the answer is always found within our own experience; our lives provide the structure of the question, and a properly phrased question contains its own answer."

  "I need you to leave me alone, t'Passe," Deliann said, his mouth pressed to his knees as though he would gnaw his own flesh. "I can't .. . talk about this right now. Please."

  She rocked back on her heels, her mouth a thin horizontal line; then she nodded. "Perhaps we can take this up again later, when you're feeling better."

  "Yes," Deliann said. "Maybe later."

  She could hear in his voice that he did not expect her to live that long.

  4

  Deliann lifted his head as t'Passe delicately stepped from bit to bit of open floor, her broad back stiffly erect, her shoulders square as cut stone. Most of the prisoners in the Pit passed their days sitting or lying down; he could follow her with his eyes until she found a place to squat, among a knot of fellow Cainists beneath one of the hanging lamps.

  Deliann had flashed on her when they had first met, shortly after he had been prodded down the stairbridge by the bluntly insistent business end of a Donjon guard's iron-bound club. His flash had shown him more than he wanted to know of her.

  He had learned how it felt to have been a girl of plain, square face, a teenager with a sturdy, strictly functional body as graceless as a mallet, but cursed with a nature as sensitive as her mind was sharp. He had learned how it felt to use a bitter tongue to turn men aside before she could even look for any spark of interest in their eyes. Before she could be wounded by its absence.

  He had learned how it felt to turn to the Monasteries, because she'd believed they were a different world, a separate reality where mind counted above beauty, scholarship above flattery—and how it felt to age slowly in a minor diplomatic post, while smaller, duller minds, those more facile with hypocrisy, those that chanced to inhabit more attractive bodies, received promotion and honor that should have been hers.

  He had seen how it felt to devote one's entire life to the Future of a Humanity one has discovered, too late, that one despises.

  Cainism answered needs she'd never even known she had. As a philosophy, it was elitist, radically individualistic; such a brilliant woman, who had taken such bitter disappointment from every form of society, could not possibly resist, Perhaps Cainism was purely a philosophy, as she constantly reminded everyone in the Pit—but for her, it was theology, too.

  She needed it to be true.

  When he had asked her, shortly after she had begun her explication of Cainist philosophy, the most obvious question, "What if everyone behaved that way? What if everyone just made up their own rules as they went along?" she had only shaken her head sadly.

  "What if everyone could shoot lightning bolts from their arses?" she'd countered. "It's a specious question; very few people are capable of behaving this way. It's like asking, What if everyone had perfect pitch? Or an eidetic memory? The capacity for personal freedom is a rare talent. Talents exist to be used. We do not ask the sheep to be wolves; we, the wolves, do not ask ourselves to be sheep. Sheep can make such rules as happen to suit them—but it's foolishly naive to expect wolves to obey."

  And in the name of this gospel of freedom, she had imprisoned herself; in the name of "living life honestly," she would go to her death. It was, he supposed, the only way she could make herself feel special.

  Deliann trailed his fingers in the befouled water that trickled along the trench beside him. He could not discuss Cainism with t'Passe; he had known what he wanted, and had done everything he could think of to make it happen. The outcome had been, would be, unimaginably hideous death on a scale this world had never seen.

  Whenever Deliann looked up, all he could see was a roomful of corpses.

  There's where your whole system breaks down, t'Passe. In this room, we're all dead. Free or slave, hero or victim—dead is still dead.

  When he brought his damp fingers to his lips, he could smell the urine and feces that stained the water. He was desperately, bitterly thirsty, but he couldn't summon the energy to come to his feet and struggle through the mass of prisoners toward the cleaner water near the source. When he got there, the group of Serpents members of a Warrengang who had taken over that prime real estate—would make him beg on his knees for a drink of pure water. Or worse: begging was innocuous enough that most of the prisoners no longer minded, and the Serpents seemed to have gotten bored with such petty, everyday humiliations.

  No chance of help from above; the Donjon guards left the Pit entirely alone, so long as nothing reached the point of open riot. Even murder was tolerated roughly once a day, the stairbridge would come clanking down and a team of litter-bearing guards would descend, covered by crossbows from above, to clear away the accumulated corpses. Not that most of these died by violence—disease and malnutrition were the prime killers in the Pit—but the guards made no distinction for cause of death. Starved or strangled, a corpse was a corpse.

  In the past day or so, the price of water seemed to have risen from begging to the kissing of bared asses; an hour or so ago, a desperate woman had given one of the Serpents oral sex in exchange for a single drink. Deliann had turned away, sickened; he hadn't had the courage to look back since. He couldn't face whatever the current asking price was going to be.

  He let his fingers trail in the water beside him once more, as though he could soak enough moisture through his skin to take the edge off his bitter thirst. Those Serpents, it seemed to him, were a clear example of what Cainism really was: they had the power to make their own rules, and look what they did with it.

  On the other hand, he seemed to hear t'Passe's voice whisper in his ear, Cainism also says that you can fight them, if you choose. Might doesn't make right; this isn't a question of right; it's a question of what you want to do.

  And what did he want to do? Everyone kept asking him that, just as though it were important.

  5

  My cell is just down one of the corridors that radiate off the Pit. They keep a lamp in here, but I can't light it; it's on the little writing desk across the room from my cot, and I don't have the energy to drag my dead legs over there. Besides, enough dull orange glow trickles through the window vent in the the door—leakover from the big brass lamps that light the Pit—that I can see better than I really want to, anyway.

  I am haunted by that statue of me Tan'elKoth made, his David the King. I can see every sagging line of its jowl, every defeated droop of the bags under its eyes. A calculated, deliberate insult: he used my image for an icon of comfortable failure. The slow slipping-down life of a finally insignificant man.

  If only I could have understood .

  He knew better than I did, all along.

  I would give anything if I could be that insignificant, comfortably failed man one more time.

  That image wasn't an insult. It was advice.

  It was, You have better than you deserve. Be grateful, and don't rock the fucking boat.

  6

  Day and night have no meaning in the Pit. New prisoners were shoved down the bridge now and then; occasionally guards would descend to remove corpses and those who would soo
n be corpses. For a long time, the only benchmark had been the arrival of Caine. They'd been fed a few times since then, but Deliann found he couldn't remember if the food baskets had been lowered four times, or six . . . or two .. .

  His fever worsened. He'd thought he was getting better for his first few days in the Pit, but that was only because the forced inactivity had taken the edge off his exhaustion. Deliann slept when he could no longer keep his eyes open, and he woke when jostled or kicked.

  Though he was well downstream of the Pit's midpoint, and he no longer risked the brutally whimsical Serpents who guarded the source of clean water, he'd managed to keep his thirst mostly at bay; he'd found that by sniffing fingers he'd trailed in the water trench, he could tell when the incoming flow was relatively free of the shit of upstream prisoners, and he would then risk a swallow or two. He imagined that he was exposing himself to infections that could range from hepatitis to cholera, but he couldn't make himself care.

  During most of his waking hours, he passed the time by listening to t'Passe and her growing band of Cainists proselytize the other prisoners and argue with each other; there were almost as many different interpretations of Cainism as there were Cainists. T'Passe's position seemed to carry a certain authority, though; her fierce intellect was supported by an extremely penetrating voice and an aggressive temper, and few dared to argue with her.

  She would from time to time cast a glance in Deliann's direction, implicitly asking permission to approach him once more; he rarely met her eyes. Like right now: someone objected that the goal of Cainism was mere anarchy, and she stared directly at Deliann as she answered. "Cainism is not anarchy, but autarchy," she said. "Not the absence of rule, but self-rule."

  "It's the same thing."

  "It may appear so," t'Passe allowed serenely, "if you think of Cainism as advocating autarchy; but we do not. We do not advocate, we merely de-scribe. Autarchy is simple fact. Every day, every thinking creature decides which rules to follow, and which to break. Our reasons for following or breaking these rules may be wildly different, but the fact of choice is identical. Perhaps the only difference between a Cainist and anyone else is that we make these choices consciously, instead of allowing habit to guide us along with the herd. The elKothan Church says: Obey. Love each other. Serve the good of your neighbor. Do not lie. Do not steal. Do not kill.

  "It is certainly possible for a Cainist to be a faithful elKothan, and a `good person' by the standards of the Church—the only difference being that the Cainist is aware he is making a choice. He does not obey Ma'elKoth or His Church, he obeys himself."

  T'Passe spread her hands, and from across the Pit offered Deliann a gently knowing smile. "You might say that the real key to Cainism is nothing more than paying attention."

  7

  Lying in the cell, staring at the rock above my cot

  My legs rotting like week-old hamburger

  Coughing up blood

  And the worst part is that I can still hear that fucker yapping about Cainism.

  I can't tell if this particular fucker is a man or a woman or something roughly in between; all I know is, this fucker has a voice that can chip my goddamn teeth. All the fleshy jabber from the Pit, all the muttering and grunting and farting and the occasional scream, this voice slices through like a knife, but I'm the bone.

  If there's anything that hurts worse than steel on bone, I don't want to know about it. It's a pain so intense you can't even feel it at first; it's a sear ing numbness, a shivering empty shock that ripples along your nerves and turns your body to jelly. That's what this fucker is doing to me, every time I hear that goddamn voice remind somebody that Cainism is not theology, but philosophy.

  I got some philosophy for that fucker, and plenty of it: the trusty hasn't been around to empty my bedpans in two days.

  Jesus, it stinks in here.

  Isn't your nose supposed to numb out after a while? Mine did before, waking up in bed with the goddamn spinal bypass fritzed out, not being able to smell whether I'd crapped the sheets. But this place smells like a slaughterhouse.

  Some of the burns on my legs have gone necrotic, soppy with greyish goo. That's gonna be a pretty good joke on Raithe and the Church, if gangrene kills me before the execution. And it might not be gangrene that kills me, the way I've been coughing; I was bringing up a lot of bloody snot for a few days, but now I just keep coughing and nothing much comes out. I'm guessing it's chemical pneumonia from breathing the smoke from whatever that incendiary dust was.

  I don't really mind any of this. It just means that I'm gonna die pretty soon, and I'm all for it. It's the only thing I've been looking forward to since they murdered Shanna.

  But for for some reason I keep on living, and I don't know why.

  It's not that hard to kill yourself, even for a paraplegic. I've got plenty of strength left in my arms and hands; it'd be easy enough to tear this sheet into strips and braid them into a reasonable facsimile of rope. The inside of the bronze-bound wooden door that seals my cell has a couple of age-warps gapping the timbers that an experienced climber could wedge his fingers into, to pull himself up high enough to slip a rope around one of the bars in the small window vent. Then when I tie the rope around my neck, I can haul myself up, hold my breath long enough to tie off the rope—then I'll strangle fast enough that I probably won't even have time to change my mind.

  But I don't do it. I can't.

  I can't seem to make myself give up.

  Oh, I can come close enough—I can make myself lie here and do nothing but smell the goo from my festering wounds; I can make myself stare emptily at the trusty when he comes to exchange my uneaten dinner for a fresh meal that I will also not eat; I can lie in my own filth and remorselessly enumerate all the multiple uselessnesses of my existence.

  I can hate myself, and the world, and everything in it.

  But in the end, Shanna's still dead and I'm still alive, still locked alone in this stone box, still lying on this goddamn cot, still listening to that fucker in the Pit yap about the "core of all freedom."

  "It's that voice, the quiet inner whisper of intransigence, that anyone can hear if one listens hard enough. It's the voice that whispers My will, or I won't. That is the voice of the Caine Within: it is not the Caine's voice, but it is the voice of that small part of each of us that is the Caine."

  Does this fucker have any idea what an idiot he is?

  Tyshalle, if my prayer swings any weight with you at all, kill that yappy sonofabitch. Hurt him some, first.

  But despite my prayers, he keeps talking and I can't stop listening.

  You could work a thousand years and never come up with a more perfect hell.

  8

  Deliann opened his eyes when the shouting started, and he managed to lever his aching back far enough off the stone to see that the guards were lowering food baskets from the catwalk again. He had some impression that it had been a long time since the last feeding, and his stomach confirmed this hypothesis with an unhappy snarl.

  The healthiest and strongest of the prisoners had already mobbed the baskets. Deliann stayed on the floor; he wasn't at all sure that he'd be able to walk that far. The rock of the Donjon impedes Flow, and his degrading health made mindview difficult. He was no longer able to suppress the infection within the meat of his thigh, and the constant pain wore on him even more than his gnawing hunger did.

  The only other prisoners who did not scramble for food were those too weak to do so—and, of course, the Serpents who guarded the water source. This enterprising group had found that there were plenty of prisoners who would enthusiastically serve their every whim in exchange for more frequent drinks of the cleanest water; the Serpents had taken to letting these volunteers compete with each other for this privilege. Those who offered the largest and most appetizing morsels from the food baskets got the longest and deepest drinks of water. A particularly choice hunk of sausage, and the Serpents might even allow the supplicant to wash himself—an almost un
imaginable luxury. The Serpents never had any shortage of eager auxiliaries.

  Often, now, the only way to get more than just a mouthful of food was to fight for it.

  Deliann also feared that if he did manage to struggle over in time to grab a bite or two before everything was gone, he might return to find someone had taken his spot beside the water trench. Reasoning that, on balance, dying of thirst would be swifter and uglier than starvation, he lay back down on the cold damp stone and closed his eyes.

  Some undefinable time later, a soft voice at his side spoke his name.

  He opened his eyes. T'Passe stood beside him, a fist-sized crust of bread in one hand and a chunk of hard cheese in the other. "Here," she said, offering him both. "Can I buy the chance to talk with you?"

  Deliann sighed and struggled into a sitting position. He bent his neck to look up at her; she was perceptibly thinner now, as though the Donjon carved away her flesh, but her eyes gleamed even brighter. She had been having more than a little success in her evangelizing of the other prisoners; she had a sizable following now the Cainists were almost as numerous as the Serpents, and Deliann more than half expected to see a power struggle develop between the two groups for control of the Pit—but she had never given up on her attempts to win him over.

  "What is it about me, t'Passe?" he asked slowly. "Why am I so impor­tant to you?"

  She squatted beside him and placed the bread and cheese in his lap. "I don't know," she said. "You're so profoundly unhappy ... I think there's something wrong with the world, that a person like you should be in so much pain."

  "And you want to use food to bribe me to cheer up," he said, smiling wistfully at the recollection of scrambled eggs at the stall on Moriandar Street. "You know what? That's how I got into this place." A strengthless wave of his hand indicated the Pit. "I let somebody cheer me up."

  9

  And I sleep and wake and sleep again, my bedpan is emptied and I refill it, and still that fucker in the Pit just never seems to shut up. "Consider, for a moment, the lazy blacksmith: In shoeing a horse for a stranger, he finds that he is one nail short. Rather than trouble to make another, he leaves the last shoe without its last nail. Is his laziness good, or is it evil?