Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  The poleboys were ogres; a pair of them were able to swiftly and quietly enlarge the space where the young man lay. Once done, the afterdeck second instructed one of them to give the young man a poke with his pole—thirty feet of sturdy oak, as big around as a man's knee. The poleboy gave the young man a hesitant nudge on the shoulder.

  The young man writhed, and the humming buzz got briefly louder and lower in pitch, and the pole was now twenty-seven and a half feet of stout oak; its terminal thirty inches rolled slowly across the deck and came to rest against the afterdeck second's feet.

  The afterdeck second recalled that he had been considering giving the young man a kick, and he imagined what the rest of his life would have been like if thirty inches had come off his leg.

  "Go wake the captain," he said grimly. "Tell him we gotta send somebody back up to Ankhana, to the Monastic Embassy. Right now"

  5

  In silence so absolute that he had no memory of sound, the Caineslayer fought for his life.

  At its most basic level, this was a battle for the physical territory of his nervous system. From her beachhead in the palm of his left hand, she scaled his nerves like leprosy: tiny incremental snippets of death creeping beneath his skin. He fought back with a fiercely vivid mindview image of his body, but

  He could no longer imagine his left hand.

  Intellectually, he could remember details: the curve of new hangnail on his little finger, the arc of scar across one knuckle, the deep-etched battle cross in the center of his palm—but these had become mere description, abstract and juiceless. He could no longer put them together into the image of how his hand had looked. His self-image ended at his wrist. The hand beyond had become a clouded shape, mostly undefined . . . but slim and long and clearly a woman's. Seen with physical eyes, the hand would appear unchanged; but within, where it counted, the life of that hand now resonated to a different mind.

  She had taken his hand and made it her own.

  At its broadest, most metaphysical level, this battle was symbolic. The Caineslayer had made of himself a knot: a gnarl of memories and intentions, of love and rage, hate and fear and desire. She enclosed the knot, turning it this way and that, teasing out its raveling ends, patiently untying him. He clenched himself against her every touch: this knot was the pat-tern of his identity, the structure of consciousness maintained by the resonance of his nervous system. Maintained by the runes painted upon the blade they both now held. To be untied would be to vanish into undifferentiated Flow. It would be death.

  Absolute death. Consciousness and identity extinguished.

  The permanent lack.

  Up and down the spectrum between these two extremes their battle raged, and their primary weapon was the logic of pain: This hurts, doesn't it? How about this? Don't you know how easy it is to stop the pain? Just let go

  He hit her with , his father's fist; she tore his belly with childbirth; he scorched her with the humiliation of Dala's scorn, when the woman who had taken his virginity had laughingly called him a child in the presence of her new man; she smothered him with the drowning grief of knowing she would always come second in her husband's heart. In sharing pain, he learned her, and she him; they became more intimate than husband and wife, or parent and child, and this intimacy made their fight more savage. They fought with the passionate frenzy of betrayed lovers.

  And the Caineslayer was losing.

  Sucked into the darkness

  Eaten by the Aktir Queen.

  On one thing, the antagonists were perfectly agreed. When he felt an approach of any kind, he lashed out wildly, and she helped guide his hand. If his concentration were to break, she would eat him whole. If hers faltered, he would cast her back into the outer darkness. Only gradually did he come to realize that his eyes were squeezed shut, that the sense he used to detect intrusions was not his, but hers: some malign perception of the life that animated the meat around him, and made it men.

  That was when he knew she had taken too much of him already. If he had seen one slim chance of survival, he might-have clawed for it in wild panic, but he had no chance at all. He became calm. Even serene.

  In that serenity, he found strength.

  He would go down into the darkness, but he would go down fighting.

  His own powers of mind gave him unexpected resources: just as she fought to tune his nerves to resonate with the pattern of her mind, he could tune his own mind to hers. He drove his attention into the void that had been his left hand, and he found her perception there. He felt the barge captain and the deckers and the poleboys and the wider sweep of illness and burgeoning insanity that was the city upstream; he felt the fish in the river, and he felt the weeds and algae on which they fed.

  Now, he understood her. The theft of his body was not her goal, it was only a stepping-stone, a staging area. She wanted the river, and more than the river: She wanted all that the river touched and all that touched the river. She wanted the Flow of life that sluiced through him. She wanted to hold him under that river until all that they both were had been washed away.

  Among the lives he could now feel, he sought one that might capture even a fringe of the Aktir Queen's attention: anything that might turn the edge of her scalpel mind. Far, far away—muffled yet painful, a splinter in a frostbitten finger--so distant and faint that he doubted the Aktir Queen could have felt it without the focused refinement of his own powers of mind, he detected a tiny wail of absolute terror.

  It was a little girl, screaming for her mother.

  6

  Dossaign of Jhanthogen Bluff, Master Speaker of the Monastic Embassy in Ankhana, had set up the Artan Mirror atop its own brass-bound carrying case within a, small shelter on the barge's deck. The shelter was made of crate slats and tar paper, hastily appended to the similar structure the barge crew had constructed to keep the autumn rains off the rigid form of Ambassador Raithe.

  Around Raithe circled four Esoterics armed with staves; at intervals, one or more of the Esoterics extended his staff. None ever came closer than arm's length before the humming blade flashed out and sheared away the staff's tip. Raithe's eyes never opened, and his catatonia never altered, save for the instant convulsive slash that met each approach.

  The deck was littered with small cylinders of fresh-cut wood. Just inside the door stood two more friars, each bearing an armload of fresh staves. Just outside the door stood another four friars, who grimly barred the shelter's entrance to the curious barge crew and the increasingly belligerent captain.

  Dossaign glumly looked askance at his two lieutenants---a Keeping Brother and a Reading Brother—who responded with uncertain shrugs. Dossaign rubbed his eyes exhaustedly; the jarring bouncing coach ride from Ankhana to where the riverbarge had moored had taken more than a day and had left him exhausted and feverish. He suspected that he might be coming down with the same fever that had kept Acting Ambassador Damon in bed in the embassy, despite the Acting Ambassador's express desire to come here personally and see the situation with his own eyes.

  Damon had been obsessive in his search for his Transdeian counterpart ever since Ambassador Raithe had failed to present himself at the embassy days before. He had spoken privately to Dossaign of his growing conviction that something was going hideously wrong in Ankhana, in the Empire as a whole, and that Raithe was somehow at the center of it. He had mumbled disjointedly of Caine and the Patriarch and how he felt the surreptitious gathering of enemies around the Monasteries and around himself personally, and Master Dossaign had successfully dismissed all this as fever-induced raving—right up to the point when he'd boarded the barge.

  Certainly he'd never suspected the bargeman's wild story might be exactly true. Finding that unlikely truth had made him uneasily worry that some of Damon's mutterings might have more truth to them than a reasonable man would reasonably expect.

  Dossaign had already Mirrored the embassy, and had been given assurance that Damon himself would be on hand to receive his next transmission.


  Reluctantly now he began the cycle of breath that tuned his Shell to match the power of the griffinstone within this Mirror; a moment more, and his Shell tuned their shared energy to the specific color and shape of the Artan Mirror's Shell in the Ankhanan Embassy. His own image in the Mirror was replaced by that of a Speaking Brother from Ankhana; Dossaign greeted him formally and asked for Acting Ambassador Damon.

  Damon's hair was rumpled and his brows slick with sweat; his eyes looked like scalded oysters, and he seemed unwilling to meet Dossaign's gaze squarely.

  "We have made our first inspection, Master Ambassador. The circumstance is—" Dossaign shifted uncomfortably. "—exactly as the bargeman described. Ambassador Raithe is locked in some kind of rictus. He does not speak or move, except to lash out with the sword he holds when anyone attempts to approach him. Our antimagick net is useless, and now needs repair; on our attempt to net him, he cut through the net before it could enclose him."

  Damon coughed harshly and wiped his mouth. "And the sword?"

  Dossaign turned to the Keeping Brother. "The Acting Ambassador wishes your assessment of the sword. Take my hand and look into the Mirror."

  As the Keeping Brother complied, Dossaign watched the focus of his eyes shift from seeing his own reflection to the image of Damon. The Keeping Brother twitched with an imperfectly suppressed flinch at what he saw, and spoke uncomfortably. "The Reading Brother and his assistant both agree with my provisional assessment barring closer, uh, study of this, mmm, situation. This is most probably, almost certainly, the enchanted blade Kosall—now known as the Sword of Saint Berne—though there is no record of a possessive or an, er, a convulsive effect in the history of this particular blade, which is, as you might imagine, extensive. This is, in itself, a contraindication; also, the figures on the blade, which appear to be a runic or magickal script of some sort, which we have been, as you might imagine, unable to examine closely—well, Kosall is known to appear as plain steel. Other than that, however—"

  "So," Damon said solidly, his voice strong and dark despite his illness. "You don't know what is happening to Brother Raithe, and you don't know what can be done to stop it, or even if such an attempt should properly be made."

  "I, ah, well . . ." The Keeping Brother swallowed. "Mm, no. But—" He waved weakly toward where Raithe lay rigid upon the deck. "—Brother Raithe's, er ... radius of reaction ... continues to increase, as it has ever since we began the examination this morning. We expect his reaction-radius to stabilize at five to six feet, this being the maximum reach he can achieve with the blade, unless he somehow manages to get to his feet."

  "And if he does reach his feet?"

  "I, ah, well—"

  Damon scowled. "You believe this to be a magickal effect?"

  The Keeping Brother nodded. "Both of our available mindview-capable friars have confirmed it—although their reports present some difficulties of their own. While he clearly manifests an abnormal Shell pattern—indicating probable magickal causation—there is no discernable current in the Flow-surround; which is to say, if it is a magickal effect, we cannot say from whence the power might be coming."

  Damon sighed. "There is only one solution. We must put him, sword and all, into the Secure Vault."

  Dossaign understood Damon's thinking. The Secure Vault was part of the Keeping Brother's domain within the embassy: a basement room built entirely of plated steel, with a door two feet thick Carefully shielded against Flow, it was the storage vault for dangerous magickal artifacts. The vault itself—and its doorway—were quite large; it might be possible for Raithe to be brought into it without triggering his deadly defensive reflex. Within, Raithe would be entirely sealed off from the general Flow, and he might be able to break the hold of whatever magick gripped him now.

  "But, but, but," the Keeping Brother protested, "how are we to get him to the embassy? We can't even move him off the barge!"

  "First," Damon said, "we need not move him off the barge—we need only move the barge."

  "The captain will be difficult, Damon," Dossaign murmured. "He is fractious already, and muttering of reparations from the Monasteries for the days he's lost. I think if he could have, he would have simply dropped Ambassador Raithe in the river and continued to Terana."

  "Buy his cargo," Damon said. "Buy his damned ship, if need be. Get Raithe back here. I don't know what is happening, but I do know that Raithe is at the center of it."

  "But—but, the expense—" the Keeping Brother protested. "Ambassador Raithe is a Monastic citizen in distress," Damon said through clenched teeth. "Do as you are told."

  "But," Dossaign said mildly, "assuming the Ambassador's situation is unchanged when we arrive, we still have no way to get him off the barge."

  "That's not your concern. Get him here."

  The connection was broken.

  Dossaign sighed. "Well, then. We're on our way back to Ankhana."

  7

  In the end, it was what They were doing to the little girl that turned Hannto the Scythe against Them.

  He had decided, in the vague and foggy muddle that passed for thought among the shades, that he would have melted the damned crown of Dal'kannith down for scrap metal, had he known that transforming himself into Ma'elKoth would bring him here: a ghost within his own skull, and an unwilling participant in the permanent, infinite rape of this innocent child.

  Sometimes, Hannto felt as though he were part of a great sticky web of mucus—glassine slime that clung to the naked body of this little girl, dripping on her eyes, forcing itself into her mouth, her nose, her ears, every drop searching for the orifice that would let it leak into the river. At other times, it felt as though the child had been slit open through the belly, and he drew her entrails out one slow length at a time, examining every inch in turn for any hint of her link with the mind of Chambaraya. Sometimes it had been a pure and simple rape, a punishing insertion, inflicting agony to force surrender: Let us into the river.

  Sometimes it felt as though the child had been skinned, and her living flesh draped around him like a costume, as though he might gain the river by a grotesque imposture.

  Hannto was not conscious, exactly; he was a personality, but not a person, in any real sense. Like many of the shades, he was a group of interrelated experiences and memories, attitudes and habits of mind, that Tan'elKoth maintained to attend to particular tasks that might otherwise occupy too much of his attention. Hannto in particular was a specialized subroutine that Tan'elKoth used to access the art- and esthetics-related subset of his stolen memories and skills.

  But he was also more than this: he was the baseline, the original, the core of the creature that had become the god Ma'elKoth. Hannto, when he could think, liked to think of himself as Ma'elKoth's soul.

  Hannto the Scythe had never been a pursuer of women, or of men; lusts of the body meant little to him. He had never pursued wealth, for wealth was at best only a tool, never a goal. He was not a lover of ease and leisure, not interested in a life of endless play; he did not seek power over others.

  His sole passion had been beauty.

  Perhaps this had come of being saddled by the circumstance of his birth with a twisted body that inspired only pity, with a face that women compared unfavorably with horse turds; perhaps. He had never cared to analyze the roots of his obsession. It was a simple fact of his existence, like the sun and the wind and his crooked spine. He had never been able to concern himself with right and wrong, good and evil, truth and lie. Beauty was his life's sole meaning.

  Not long after he had taken the enormous step from mere acquisition to true creation, he had even created a new self he had made of himself the icon of beauty and terror that was Ma'elKoth. But even at his most terrible, there had been nothing of ugliness about him. Until now.

  It was this that made what had been done to Faith Michaelson so repugnant to Hannto the Scythe. It was ugly.

  Overwhelmingly, irredeemably, fatally ugly.

  He could not close his eyes,
for he had no eyes; he could not turn his head, for he had no head. Due to the peculiar specifics of his existence, there was no way he could avoid a savagely intimate knowledge of the endless rape of this child. Hannto found this unendurable, but he could not in any way affect it; he was only a set of traits, skills, and memories, after all. He had no will of his own. He was a personality, not a person.

  All the shades resonated with loathing; poor Lamorak could do nothing but sob. Even Ma'elKoth—formerly a god, now merely the splinter personality charged with securing the link to the river—seemed to hate the whole process, but he, too, had no choice.

  It had become so crowded in here.

  Tan'elKoth's mental world was crammed to bursting with innumerable, almost insignificant lives: the faceless traces of the faceless masses of Earth, tiny bits of virtually will-free mind.

  But virtually is not the same as entirely; their sheer numbers made the power of their aggregate will overwhelming. Hannto felt sure that Tan'elKoth would never have continued to brutalize this child, if not for their ceaseless pressure; but whatever scruple might still have existed within him had drowned in an ocean of people—the ocean of people that Hannto had come to call Them.

  Tan'elKoth could no more resist Them than he could turn back the tide.

  Every one of Them was hungry for the river, for what it represented: open space, breathing room. Wealth. Land. Clean water, clean air. Fresh food—real fruit right off the tree, real vegetables, real meat. And They didn't care how They got it.

  Individually, perhaps, They might have been repulsed by the thought of harming a child, any child—but each of Them could blame her pain on millions and billions of others as well as themselves, and so each was willing to pour himself into this little girl until their combined pressure ripped her to bloody rags.

  One ten-billionth of the guilt for her terror and agony was easy enough to bear.

  And so, when the tiny searing pinpoint of the link had opened upon her forehead, like a single star in a vast black sky, Hannto had discovered that one does not need eyes in order to weep. From his rage and despair, from his love of beauty, from somewhere beyond the wall between the worlds, he found an unfamiliar strength. He found, for the first time, the power to say no.