Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  Now, the catechism.

  "All right, Adder," I say. "Who's in charge here?"

  "Motherfuck—" he starts, but a twitch of my arms cuts him off. "Let's try that again, huh? Who's in charge here?"

  "You are," he growls.

  "Very good. Who makes the rules in the Pit?"

  "You do."

  "Hey, two for two," I tell him encouragingly. "You're doing great. Now, here's the gristle. I hope you were paying attention. What's Rule One?" "Uh," he begins, and then I kill him.

  He keeps talking while he dies, sort of: the only sound he can make is a wet kh kh kh noise—reminds me of Garrette—because a sharp push of my arms broke his neck, which used his cervical vertebrae to scissor through his spinal cord, which makes him lie there like a marionette with his strings cut while the light goes out of his eyes.

  A shove rolls his corpse off me, and I haul myself back up, onto the cut-stone bench. I look out on the silent mass of prisoners.

  "Any fucking questions?"

  And those couple hundred Serpents gathered around me slowly realize that they're trapped in a stone room with over a thousand people who have their hands in the air and who don't like any of them one little bit, and I watch them each and severally decide—given Rule Three—that maybe they want to be friends of mine, too.

  5

  For a time, Deliann contemplated.

  He could not have said how long this time might have been; the waves of fever that washed over and through him compressed and expanded time unpredictably. He might think for an hour, and find only seconds had passed; some hours did pass during which he could only shiver and sweat, his mind a nightmare jumble.

  As soon as the guards who removed Adder's corpse had trudged back up and the stairs had lifted behind them, Deliann had gone to this strange man who had once been his friend. "I want to help."

  Hari gave him a long, darkly measuring stare. "You used to get a little squeamish. This is gonna be ugly for a day or two."

  "I'm still squeamish. But it won't stop me."

  Hari nodded, remembering. "I guess it never did."

  "No," Deliann had said. He'd felt an icy, tingling non-pain, as though someone had slid a thin, very sharp knife between his ribs. "I guess it didn't."

  Hari hadn't needed his help to pacify the Pit; between the Serpents on one side and t'Passe's Cainists on the other, order came to the prisoners whether they liked it or not. "It is better to be feared than loved," he observed to Deliann once, in an abstracted undertone, "for men love at their own inclination, but you can make them fear at yours."

  This was shortly after the death of Adder. Deliann knelt over Hari's legs, scrubbing dead flesh from his sores with a wad of coarse burlap. If Hari could feel even discomfort from this rough treatment, he gave no sign. "I've read The Prince," Deliann had replied in a matching mutter. "I seem to recall that Machiavelli goes on to point out that best of all is to be feared and loved."

  Hari flashed him a dark grin. "Yeah, that's the trick, huh? Nice work if you can get it." He shrugged dismissively. "Maybe I better stick to what I'm good at."

  "Love isn't so hard, Hari."

  The grin faded, and his eyes went hooded. "Maybe for you."

  "It's a connection, that's all. It's a recognition of the connection that's already there.'' Deliann shook his head. Fever was scattering his meaning. "Show them the connection, that's all. Let them know it works both ways."

  Hari scowled. "Yeah, all right, Confucius. Gimme a fucking hint, huh?"

  Deliann cast a significant glance toward Orbek, who sulked on the wall-bench a quarter of the way around the Pit. "He's been taking abuse all day for the way he let you manhandle him. The right word could get him—and the whole ogrillo faction—solidly behind you."

  Hari nodded thoughtfully. "Worth a try."

  After Deliann finished tying bandages of more burlap over the sores, Hari called a couple Serpents to carry him out into the middle of the Pit, then summoned Orbek. "That was a shitty thing I said about your father, and your clan," he said gravely. "I shouldn't have done that, and I'm sorry for it."

  Astonishment prevented the ogrillo's reply.

  "You were ready to fight and die for your father's honor," he went on. "I respect that; I respect you for that. You are a true Black Knife, Orbek. Your clan should be proud."

  He raised his voice and spoke to the entire Pit. "None of you know that when we were fighting, Orbek could have ripped me a new mouth or two with his tusks. The only reason he didn't was that I made him a deal. I didn't beat him, I bribed him." He held out his hand. "I'd like to claim you as my friend, Orbek"

  "Rule Three, hey?" Orbek said with a smirk around his tusks, but he took Hari's hand. And for a moment, he seemed curiously reluctant to let it go. The ogrillo said, "You, uh, you maybe should have somebody regular to help you get around. Somebody you can trust."

  Hari squinted up at him. "You offering?"

  Orbek shrugged.

  "You want the job, it's yours."

  Orbek gravely swung Hari up onto his back and carried him back to where Deliann sat on the bench. Hari had looked down at Deliann and said softly, "You are one smart son of a bitch."

  Over the hours or days that followed, Hari had seemed to be everywhere all the time; Deliann didn't know if he ever slept. Orbek carried him wherever he went—he insisted upon it, and that insistence somehow transformed his earlier humiliation into a badge of honor.

  The prisoners in general seemed to be actively grateful to have someone telling them what to do. The rare moments of resistance to Hari's rule came mainly from the Cainists themselves. As t'Passe never tired of explaining, "Cainism is not a religion, it is a philosophical stance. Your personal significance is purely symbolic; we've appropriated your iconography—the Prince of Chaos, the Enemy of God—from the Church of the Beloved Children, as our symbol of resistance to everything that Ma'elKoth stands for."

  "If anybody'd asked me," Hari had said to her, "I would have told them to leave my iconography the fuck alone."

  "You are free to disapprove," she'd replied. "Your disapproval means only as much to me as I choose to allow it to mean. I am free to resist your will."

  "Sure Hari nodded at her, smiling. "I respect your right to resist. You should respect my right to break your legs for it."

  "Perhaps respect is the fundamental issue," t'Passe had answered agreeably.

  Hari spent most of his time training his army.

  He had selected a cadre of the strongest, most aggressive of the Serpents, liberally intermixed with ogrilloi and primals. In exchange for the authority to use force in the Pit, they were charged with the responsibility for maintaining order. They also received organized training in unarmed combat, with t'Passe as a demonstrator. This was a strong drawing point for many of the younger and more impressionable prisoners: the opportunity to learn some of the subtleties of infighting from Caine himself.

  The guards, of course, would not have allowed such training if they had understood what was taking place, but the combat practice was carefully stylized so that it looked like a dancing game, conducted in the midst of a ring of prisoners who would sing and clap to keep time. Hari confided to Deliann that he had hooked this idea from an Earth fighting style developed by slaves in Brazil, disguised as dance so that they could practice under the eyes of their Portuguese masters.

  The distribution of food had become strictly regimented. Now, when the woven baskets were lowered, a single prisoner stood to receive each, and portions were carefully doled out to an orderly line of prisoners, one at a time. A sort of economy had sprung up, with the primary media of exchange being food and sexual favors. All were allowed to make any trades they could-his "soldiers" only ensured that all deals were ruthlessly enforced. Extortion or coercion of any kind was swiftly—and unerringly—punished. No innocent was ever wronged by Caine's justice in the Pit; his judicial system was the only one in the history of two worlds in which innocence was an absolute defense.
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br />   The sole judge of truth or lie in the Pit was Deliann's flash.

  Something in his fever had made his flash more frequent. Now, he had only to stare at an individual long enough, and eventually his flash would come; he saw not only the facts of each case, but the character of the claimants. Disputes of any kind became rare, and the Pit's ad hoc police force—despite the criminal propensities of most of its members—became absolutely incorruptible, after an incident of minor extortion by one of Hari's soldiers was punished by a spectacularly brutal execution.

  The Pit was quiet now, as well. When there was no training, conversations could be carried on in a normal tone of voice, instead of the half shouts that had always been required before. The guards overhead had not known what to make of this sudden change; Hari had forbidden his subjects to reply to the guardsmen's taunts and crude insults. He'd directed them to obey any direct order and answer respectfully any direct query, but they were otherwise to ignore all the guards said and did.

  He'd made himself a seat, a roughly padded throne on the bench ledge beside the spillpipe. From there his miniature Peaceable Kingdom spread before him: lions and lambs both too respectful of his uncompromising ruthlessness to even complain, let alone start trouble.

  The arc of water channel to his left had now become the Pit's sole sewer. After one killing and several severe beatings, no one dared relieve themselves in either of the other two. The center channel carried the Pit's bathwater, and each prisoner bathed and washed clothing in that water; even lacking soap, by the end of the first bathing rotation the animal stench in the Pit had faded to a faint and not-unpleasant musk. The channel that curved to the right—scrubbed with rags made of prisoners' shirts, all the way from the pool to the drain on the far side of the Pit floor—carried the drinking water, now clean and clear as the stream that sparkled from the spillpipe.

  Whenever he was not called upon to be a judge or legal oracle, Deliann passed the span sitting on the Pit floor with his aching legs folded beneath him, living in mindview, studying the swirls of black Flow that enwrapped Hari's shadowy Shell, watching his fever make the stone walls ripple in slow, deep swells like the open ocean.

  He spent a lot of time thinking about black Flow. He spent a lot of time thinking about the interplay of chance and will that is misnamed destiny.

  He spent a lot of time thinking about Caine.

  Twice he tried to tell Hari what he had discovered, but circumstances were against him. Hari was caught up in conquering and administering. his tiny demesne; Deliann was able to capture his attention for only moments at a time, and often a surge of fever would half scramble what he was trying to say.

  "Your Shell," he'd begun, the first time. "You know what a Shell is?" "Yeah," Hari had confirmed distractedly. "I was married to a thaumaturge."

  "Yours is black. Someone must have told you yours is black." "So?"

  "It's all about Flow. Stone—this stone, Donjon stone—doesn't stop black Flow. Nothing does, I think."

  "The point, Kris. Let's have it."

  "Your Shell, it's black because of this kind of Flow, don't you understand? You can't stop it."

  "It's not that big a deal. Lots of people have black in their Shells."

  "Everyone has black in their Shells. Everyone. But usually you can't see it for all the other colors. But a Shell that's solid black? It's rare. Rare. I can't tell you how rare that is. The last one, I think—last I know of—might have been jereth of Tyrnall."

  "Ancient history," Hari had muttered. "He's not much more than a myth."

  "Not ancient. Not. Just history. Only ancient for humans. Hari, the Covenant of Pirichanthe—that ended Jereth's Revolt—that was only five hundred years ago. I know people who were there. My father—I mean, the King—T'farrell Ravenlock, he was there, as Witness for the First Folk. Jereth Godslaughterer was as real as you are. Most of what you know of him—most of what the songs and stories tell--is more true than it is false."

  "What's it got to do with me?"

  "Same energy: you decide, and then you do. That's what made Jereth the Godslaughterer, and that's what makes you Caine."

  "You better lie down for a while, huh? You're not making a whole lot of sense."

  "Your power is my power: everyone's power. We all have power; we just don't use it. Black Flow, don't you see? It's mostly a metaphor. Like throwing a punch. Focus. Directed energy. Concentration. No fear. The release of desire. Presence. That's who Caine is."

  "I don't follow"

  Deliann had laced his fingers together in front of his knee and leaned back against the wall of sweating stone. Some of his fever had seemed to drain into the cool stone, and when he had continued, he'd felt a bit more lucid. "Every once in a while," he'd said slowly, "I think about some of the things you taught me, back at the Conservatory. I remember the time you dressed me up in Sorbathane armor so you could demonstrate a real punch. It's been twenty-sewn years, Hari. I've done a lot of fighting—I've been punched by an ogre—and no one, no one, has ever hit me that hard."

  "Power doesn't have that much to do with strength," Hari had said. "A good punch is half physics and half attitude."

  "So is black Flow. Anyone can use it, just like anyone with arms can throw a punch. You're better at it, that's all. You strip away the nonessentials. How hard can you hit if you worry about breaking your hand? How well can you fight if you worry about losing?"

  Hari murmured, " `Do not be concerned with escaping safely—lay your life before him: " He flattened his mouth into a grim line. "Bruce Lee."

  "A philosopher?"

  "Yeah." The grim line stretched a little. "He died young."

  Deliann had shrugged. "Caine didn't."

  Hari had looked away. "Don't talk to me about Caine," he had said. "Trying to be Caine—that's how I ended up here."

  "No, no, no. You ended up here because you were trying to not be Caine."

  Which was entirely the wrong thing to say; Deliann could see it now, too late. Bringing up Caine had battle-axed the conversation. Hari had told Orbek to carry him to a pair of Serpents whose voices were inching upward toward a quarrel, and had curtly suggested to Deliann that they should talk about this some other time, when he was feeling better.

  His second try, some indeterminate hours or days later, had produced only slightly better results. He had led into it more carefully, this time; once or twice, he'd sat down and talked with Hari at some length, without ever mentioning any of this. They had spoken of the lives they had lived since they had parted at the Conservatory, twenty-seven years ago.

  Hari had only briefly sketched some of Caine's adventures, since Deliann knew already the broad outlines of many of these; mostly, he spoke of his wife and his daughter, of his father and of the home that had been taken from them. Deliann had more to tell: from his earliest days on Overworld, when he'd very nearly starved before landing his job as a bouncer at Kierendal's Exotic Love, to meeting Torronell and his Adoption; from his life at the Living Palace and the surrounding lands as the Changeling Prince—the Fist of the Twilight King—to his disastrous journey on the trail of the vanished legation to Transdeia. He had told Hari of Tommie, and was obscurely warmed as well as saddened to learn that Hari remembered Tommie well, with respect and some affection.

  "Tommie died a Cainist?" Hari had said softly, shaking his head. "Hard to believe. He was always so, well, so normal, you know? Practical." "T'Passe would tell you that being practical is the essence of Cainism." "Can we not start that shit?"

  "Tommie was not an ordinary man. He may have been, at one time; but the man who saved me was wholly extraordinary. I can't really say what made him so special. Cainism might be as good a name for it as any."

  "Names," Hari had grunted. "What's that line Orbek likes? You can call a turd a sandwich, but it still tastes like shit."

  "You think there is no power in names, Hari? Tommie wouldn't agree. Tommie gave me a name. One that's too powerful for me. I can't make myself use it, though it seems
to be mine:'

  "What kind of name is that?"

  Deliann had had to look away, to conceal the tears swelling into his eyes. "He named me as the Mithondionne. What humans would call the king of the elves."

  "No shit?"

  Deliann had shrugged helplessly. "Torronell brought HRVP back to the Living Palace. My family is dead. Though Adopted, I am Mithondionne." He had lowered his head and swallowed. "The last of my line."

  Hari had been silent for a long, long time. Finally Deliann had looked back at him, and had been astonished to see stark new pain in Hari's black eyes. "Christ, Kris," he'd said softly. "I'm sorry. I—" He'd shaken his head, scowling, disgusted with himself, and had looked down at his hands. "I forget, you know? I get so trapped in the wreckage of my own life that I forget other people got destroyed, too. I am such an asshole, sometimes."

  Deliann had smiled gently. "That's a name, as well."

  "Kris—"

  "You have to admit that some names have power, Hari. You must see that."

  "Yeah, all right, whatever. Is this important?"

  "It's extremely important. It's incredibly important. There is nothing more important. Think about this. Think about the names you use. Think about the names others use for you. They call you the Blade of Tyshalle, Hari. Do you ever think about that?"

  "They call Caine the Blade of Tyshalle."

  Deliann had waved this aside; he had no interest in arguing the distinction. "Tyshalle Deathgod is also called the Limiter, and the Divider. Tyshalle himself is the energy of change; he is the outer darkness beyond the edges of organized reality. That's why he's the God of Death: death is the primary change. The big one. Change is, itself, the structure of experience. Think about it: The absence of change is stasis--which is also the absence of experience. Experience is reality. That's what reality is to us; no more, no less. That's why you get the quantum observer effect. Reality is change. That's all it is. The Blade of Tyshalle is the leading edge of reality. It's the knife that cuts everything."