Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  It's happiness, I guess.

  I can't remember the last time I felt this good.

  I am, right now—lying naked in the pool of a dead woman's shit, chained to stone, gangrene eating my rotten-meat legs—as happy as I have ever been.

  Maybe it's the smell.

  3

  Now that the stench of the Shaft-- of my life—lives inside my nose and my mouth, now that it's soaked in through my pores and oozed around my cortical folds, I don't really mind it.

  It reminds me .. .

  I can't draw the memory all at once. I tease it out, bit by bit. After a day or a month, I have it all together. I remember what the smell reminds me of.

  It reminds me of the day I came home walking funny.

  This is the smell of 3F that day when I slunk through the door, maybe thirteen years old, with a severely bruised rectum and a storm-surge of tears gathering behind my eyes.

  Dad was having one of his better days, and he was trying to clean out the room off the kitchen where he slept. He'd been in one of his paranoid delusional phases for a while, saving his shit in plastic bags because he was afraid his "enemies" had been trapping the hall toilet we shared with 3A, B, C, D, E, and G. He thought these imaginary bad guys could separate out his stools and use some kind of whackass SF machine to analyze them until they could tell what he'd been thinking; he was convinced they would steal the ideas of some book he was secretly writing.

  That day he was pretty lucid: he'd been trucking the bags down to the storm drain in the alley below the aluminum sill of my window. I guess even his imaginary bad guys would have a hard time figuring out which shit was his, once it was down in the sewer.

  Anyway, one of the bags had ripped open and slopped across the kitchen floor, and when I came in he was trying, in his dizzy, blurred, ineffectual way, to scoop up the turds with a dustpan and pour them into another bag. All I wanted that day was to make it to my little closet and curl up on my cot and forget how scared I was for a while, but somehow I'm never that lucky.

  Or maybe I'm always luckier than that.

  After a few years, it gets hard to tell the difference.

  Dad grabbed me when I tried to hustle past and told me I had to help him clean this up. I remember vividly the pain of trying to get down on my hands and knees, and even as crazy as Dad was, my screwed-shut face and old-man moves woke something inside him. He put his arms around me and held me to his chest and asked me what had happened in a real calm, gentle voice like he really cared about the answer, and I burst into tears.

  There was this kid named Foley. Toothpick Foley. Big kid, maybe sixteen or seventeen, twice my size. He was a courier for a black-market chit trader named Jurzscak, which made him kind of a big deal on my block. Foley always had a couple of guys hanging around him, trying to pick up the odd food or booze chit by gophering and general stooging.

  I thought, in those days, that Foley had a pretty good line of work; I'd been supporting Dad and myself as a burglar, being small and agile and not overly concerned with the niceties of personal property, but it doesn't take too many close calls with big mean drunk Laborers coming through the front door while you go out the back window to make a guy think that there's gotta be an easier way to make a living.

  So I went to work for Jurzscak. My whole life, nobody ever called me lazy; I hustled my ass off for that guy, and he was starting to toss some of the perks and goodies my way that used to go toward Toothpick, and Toothpick took exception to this.

  He and a couple of his boys cornered me in an alley and got me down on the pavement.

  I don't remember Foley's first name. Everybody called him Toothpick—I think it was for his skinny little needledick, but I never knew for sure. When he realized he was never gonna be able to shake the name, he'd decided to attach it to something else: he started carrying around this bigass sheath knife, with a blade something like nine or ten inches long, and started calling it his toothpick.

  That's what he tried to jam up my ass.

  He didn't bother to take down my pants; this was just a warning. While his boys held me down, he took the point of the sheathed blade and stuck it against my asshole and just leaned on it. It's a pain that does not bear describing.

  He told me in very clear words of one syllable that I should get my ass off Jurzscak's team, or next time he sees me, he sticks it in up to the hilt. No sheath.

  I don't think I ever did manage to explain it to Dad. I couldn't get the whole story out between my sobs, and anyway there were no words for how scared I was. The whole long limping walk home, I couldn't think about anything but the ice-slide of razor-sharp steel up my butt, slicing through me from the inside out

  I've never been so afraid of anything in my life, before or since.

  Dad just held me, and rocked me in his crazy stinking shit-smeared arms until I was almost calm again. Then he asked me what I was going to do about it. I told him I was going to quit. What else could I do? I had to quit, because if I didn't, Toothpick would kill me. What Dad said then changed my life.

  He said, "He might kill you anyway."

  I thought about that for a while, until I started to shake all over again. I had just barely enough control of my voice to ask Dad what I should do.

  "Do what you need to do, Hari," he said. "Do what will let you look in the mirror and like what you see. This boy might kill you. He might not. A building might have fallen on him on his way home tonight. Tomorrow, you might get caught in a crossfire, and then you'll never have to worry about Toothpick again. You can't control the future, Killer. All you can control is what you do, and the only thing that's important is that you feel good about it. Life's hard enough without going through it ashamed of yourself. Do something you can be proud of, and let the rest go."

  The words of a madman.

  But he was my father, and I believed him.

  The next day I reported in to Jurzscak as usual. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. And instead of hustling straight out, I hung around for a few minutes until Toothpick showed up.

  I'll never forget the look on his face.

  He stared at me, blank as the moon. He couldn't comprehend what he was seeing. He was four years older than me, he outweighed me by a hundred pounds, and he'd seen that unmistakable stark terror on my face just the day before. He couldn't bend his mind around a reality in which I wasn't running away from him.

  While he stood there trying to figure out what the hell was going on, I pulled two and a half feet of copper pipe out of my pants and played teeball with his kneecap.

  He went down screaming; Jurzscak popped up yelling; Jurzscak's boys all jumped at me; I was spinning and swinging my pipe and howling that if anybody wanted some of this, they should step up to the plate. Toothpick managed to get his blade out and lunged at me off his good leg. I let him have another stroke right on the top of his head and he went down hard, writhing and moaning, blood going all over the damn place, and Jurzscak finally managed to get the pipe out of my hand and he hit me in the belly with it hard enough to fold me over gagging.

  "Michaelson, you crazy little fuck," he said breathlessly, "what in the name of crap is going through that shithouse rat you use for a brain?"

  When I got half my own breath back, I told him. "Toothpick said the next time he saw me he'd jam his blade up my butt," I said. "I believed him."

  So Jurzscak had a talk with Toothpick, which ended up with Toothpick's shattered kneecap bearing the weight of Jurzscak's shoe and Toothpick finally mumbling out the truth through tears as bitter as mine had been the day before. "But it was just a joke," he sobbed. "We was just kidding around."

  "You were?" I said, thinking Ask my asshole how funny it was. "Hey, me, too. Just kidding, Toothpick. No hard fucking feelings, huh?"

  Then Jurzscak turned on me, weighing that pipe with his hand. "I won't say you didn't have reason," he told me a little sadly, apologizing in advance for the stomping he was about to inflict, "but that don't mean I can let it go, either.
You know the rules, Michaelson: Two of my boys have a problem, they bring it to me."

  Nothing Jurzscak could do scared me half as much as what I'd faced to walk in there that day. So I looked him in the eye and said, "Isn't that what I just did?"

  He thought about that for a little while; then he nodded. "I guess you coulda snuck him, you wanted. But why the pipe, kid? Why not just tell me?" "My word against his?" I asked. "You would have believed me?" He didn't answer, but then he didn't have to.

  "The pipe," I told him, "was to let you know I was serious."

  I worked for Jurzscak for most of the next year, until he pissed off the wrong guy and Soapy broke up his gang and put him under the yoke. Toothpick was, as they say, a dead issue: In the Mission District Labor Clinic—the same one where my mother died—the meditech got so interested trying to reconstruct Toothpick's knee that she missed the slow hemorrhage inside his skull, and Toothpick shuffled off this mortal coil about three the next morning.

  Toothpick Foley was the first guy I ever killed. Didn't even mean to; it just happened that way. I knocked him on the head, and a few hours later he died. Like the Cainists say, you can't miring the bell. Not that I'd want to.

  Christ, I was strong in those days.

  What the hell happened to me?

  4

  That statue stays in my head: that David. The more I think about it, the more it makes a creepy kind of sense. David was, after all, the Beloved of God, who fell from grace

  Over a woman.

  It's not exactly a secret that Tan'elKoth's always had a little thing for me.

  Not sexual—I'm pretty sure that sex was one of those things, like eating and sleep, that he gave up to become Ma'elKoth. But I know he is capable of love; he loved Berne. And he hinted to me, all those years ago, that he'd turned to Berne because he couldn't find me. He hinted that I'd been his first choice, all along. And, Jesus, the way Shanna felt about him, you could say she was jealous. And he despised her; he never even tried to pretend he didn't.

  Is that what built this whole pile of shit? A goddamn love triangle? It makes a certain amount of sense.

  Even in For Love of Pallas Ril, you can see it: He was trying to get me to choose him over her—over anyone. And on Earth he moved into that Other Woman position in our lives

  Now that I think about it, he could be behind the whole goddamn thing. The way Garrette was reading off those cards—that stuff sounded like it might have come right out of Tan'elKoth's mouth. He could have done it all out of jealousy and revenge. It hangs together.

  But, you know what?

  All these stories—the stories that I tell myself, to try and understand why what happened happened; the stories that are all I have of my life—

  They all hang together.

  The longer I think about it, the more different ways I can tell it. It's like what Raithe was talking about: He had found a way to trace everything in his life, good or bad, back to Caine. He could just as easily have turned it sideways, and traced everything back to Ma'elKoth, or to Pallas Ril, or to the goddamn weather twenty-seven years ago Sunday.

  Sure, this could have happened because the big bastard was in love with me. I can also swing the same facts around and make it all happen because I wanted to play at being Caine. I can make it all happen because Raithe wanted revenge for his parents. I can make it all happen because a pack of damn fools decided that Caine was really the Devil, or because Kris Hansen wanted to turn himself into a goddamn elf.

  Shit; I can make it all happen because Toothpick Foley bruised my butthole.

  Like that statue: It's an insult. It's a piece of advice. It's a love letter. What it means is a function of who I am when I look at it.

  What anything means depends on how you tell the story.

  5

  Jesus, I remember

  I remember crouching in the supply closet inside the Language Arts shitter, waiting for Kris' setup to draw in Ballinger. I remember how dark it was—just a single line of white light under the door from the shifter's fluorescents—and the smell, the opposite smell from the Shaft: harsh chemical tang of cleaning solvents leaching from the ruck of mops and brooms and the rag-draped bucket. I remember having to keep still, so I wouldn't knock anything over or kick something and give the game away; we couldn't clear a space for me in there, because open floor inside that crowded supply closet might look suspicious to an investigator. I remem­ber how hard it was to breathe in there with the smothering walls close around my face, and how I started doing long slow-motion kneebends to keep my legs from cramping up.

  I remember the prickly ball of needles that rolled over my whole body when I heard Ballinger's voice, and the hot drop of my stomach when I realized he'd brought backup.

  I remember thinking, So: there's four of them. All right. Four Combat cavemen against a pair of Shitschool pussies; we were probably both gonna die, and who cares? Nothing they could do to me would be as bad as Toothpick's knife going into my asshole. And I knew that if I stayed in that closet and listened to Kris die, I could never look myself in the mirror and like what I saw.

  If I ever get a chance, I should tell him the story of how my father and Toothpick Foley saved his life. Shit. I wish I could tell Dad that story, too.

  If any of that other shit hadn't happened to me—if my father hadn't gone crazy, if my mother hadn't died and left me running wild on the District streets, if Dad hadn't beat the snot out of me every other day, if Toothpick hadn't gone for me, basically my whole fucked-up life—I would have stayed in there. All the bad shit that ever happened to me had made me into a nineteen-year-old kid who could jump out against four guys without even thinking about it.

  And I knew it. In those days, I knew it. I even said it to Kris once: I had a great childhood. That's what Kris was talking about—that's exactly what Kris was talking about. Scars are the key to power.

  Each of us is the sum of our scars.

  Because if any of it had been any different, I never would have gotten the chance to be Caine.

  Kris had it right. I should have taken my own goddamn advice. I never wanted to be a fucking Actor, not really. All I ever wanted to be was Caine.

  How's this for irony: I can see now that Caine is who I already was.

  That scene with Jurzscak and Toothpick Foley? Caine, right down to the dialogue. At the Conservatory, Kris could see it already. "When you think about hurting people, when you really let your passion run, you want to do it by hand."

  He understood me better than I did.

  He probably still does.

  I mean, is that fucker ever wrong about anything?

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

  "What if it's Hari Michaelson who is the fictional character? What if the middle-aged paraplegic is just a role that Caine plays, so that he can get along on Earth?"

  6

  Damn.

  God damn.

  That Kris, he is one scary son of a bitch.

  Because when I think about it that way, I can see it perfectly. I can see the exact moment when Hari Michaelson was born.

  I was just out of my freemod debriefing: two weeks of interrogation by Studio brainsuckers going over everything that had happened to me over my almost three years of freemod training at Garthan Hold abbey and elsewhere. I wasn't the first Actor to study with the Monasteries, but I was the first to be sworn to Brotherhood. They made me an Esoteric even though I sucked at mindview. I didn't need magick to be good at stealing stuff and hurting people.

  So the Studio decided they wanted me to rise within the Monasteries for a while. They wanted to feature me as an assassin. I wasn't into this shit at all; I've never been good at taking orders. I wanted to do straight Adventures, explore, see strange creatures, and hunt for treasure and all that kind of crap. I was even thinking about maybe going pirate—y'know, the high seas and shiver me timbers and island girls and shit. But the Studio wanted an assassin.

  I was more tha
n half ready to tell them to fuck off. Assassins are boring. I'd known a couple of contractors when I was little, and met a few more while I worked for Vilo. It's plodding, methodical work. Real killers are not stylish, or dashing, or even imaginative. They're more like accountants with guns. If you do your job right, there's no drama in it at all. Who wants that kind of life?

  They and Vilo had a lot of money invested in me, and I figured that gave me enough leverage to get what I wanted. Then Vilo took me for a ride in his Rolls and explained how the world works.

  He started off trying to placate me. The Studio didn't want me to be a real assassin, he tells me. They wanted me to be a Hollywood-style assassin: kind of a high-fantasy James Bond. Sure, they say that now, I'm thinking, but five years down the road, when my audience numbers suck wind from all the Monastic scutwork I'm doing, they won't be talking to me about James Bond anymore. They won't be talking to me at all.

  Being generally full of piss in those days, I wasn't gonna do it. Let them shitcan me; who cares? Contract violation would get me busted back to Labor, but that didn't scare me at all. Shit, with the skills I'd learned between the Conservatory and the Garthan Hold abbey, I could drop right back into the District and make a solid living as freelance muscle, maybe end up a neighborhood boss and not have to kiss any Studio ass in the first place.

  Vilo, though, didn't get to be the Happy Billionaire by being stupid. He had me tagged and bagged before I even knew I was hurt. The Rolls touched down in a nice, quiet Labor neighborhood, mostly twencen sixflats and courtyard buildings—light-years better than a Temp ghetto like the District—and took me to Dad's apartment.

  I hadn't seen Dad in six years, since I blew the District when I was sixteen to go work for Vilo. The last time we'd been in a room together, it was a roach-infested shithole, garbage six inches deep covering the floors, one whole room converted into Dad's personal septic tank and the damn place only had three rooms to begin with. The last time we'd been in a room together, he'd tried to open my skull with a pipe wrench.