Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  Where he lived now was a pristine one bedroom, with cream walls and honest-to-Christ wooden molding around the doors and windows. Curtains. Furniture. A dining-room table. A refrigerator with real food in it, a kitchen sanitary as a surgical theater. A bathroom—his own private toilet, right inside the apartment, and even a stall that would measure out ten minutes of hot shower every day.

  And Dad.

  Dad: shaved and dressed in clothes that were clean and whole, if not actually new. With hair gone entirely grey and cut close to his scalp, and the light of reason in his eyes. Dad: who could shake my hand and tell me he hoped we could get to know each other again, now that he was sane. Who could put his arms around me and smell like a man, instead of a slaughterhouse.

  I don't even remember what we talked about that day; I was lost in marveling at this man who was simultaneously so Dad and so alien. He almost made me feel like I was five years old again, like he was normal and Mom might just walk into the room and give me a hug.

  After we left, Vilo took off his velvet glove.

  Vilo, y'ousee, took real good care of his undercastes. He was famous for it. He'd started looking after my father only a few months after I went to work for him. Turned out that Dad's condition wasn't curable, but it was treatable; with the right combination of drugs and therapy, he was able to hold down a steady job as a net research assistant could pay for that apartment and even get a decent meal at a diner every once in a while.

  Vilo explained to me that Dad's employment was contingent upon mine. If I screwed him on my contract, he'd cut Dad loose. It wouldn't take a week for Dad to be back in 3F, or worse.

  So I swallowed my piss and did what I was told. It was the only way I could keep that smell out of my head.

  That's who Hari Michaelson is, I guess: he's the guy who will do anything to stay out of 3F.

  No, Hari's more than that. He's the good guy, I think.

  He's the guy who thinks that if he does what he's told, the people he loves will all be okay. He's that profoundly unhappy man who sits at his desk at 3 A.M., head full of bitter smoke from the ashes of his heart. He's the guy that Shanna wanted me to be.

  He's the model for David the King.

  Funny: Shanna fell in love with Caine, but she couldn't live with him. She could live with Hari. Did she love him? I really can't remember. If only I could ask her.

  7

  All the damage we did each other

  Christ, I remember the first time I saw her: at the table in that conference room at Studio Center. I had just come off back-to-back megahits, Retreat from the Boedecken and Last Stand at Ceraeno; and I had just been approached by Hannto the Scythe to locate and recover Dal-kannith's crown. Kollberg had decided to put together a serial Adventure, a multiparter featuring an entire team of Actors with me playing lead. There were six of us, and Kollberg had even set up a romance for me—he was always on my back to put more sex into my Adventures. I was supposed to spend my idle hours dallying with Olga Bergman, a big gorgeous Nordic blonde who played a Khryllian knight named Marade. Olga was a good kid, a rising star with a booming laugh and a spectacular Ms. Olympia physique, and she was more than willing to play along.

  But Shanna was sitting at the end of that table.

  She was shy for an Actor, at least in those days. Reserved. Intense. A little spooky.

  Luminous.

  They all knew me, of course; I was the hottest property in the whole Studio System. They'd all rented Last Stand, and every one of them had to tell me how great they thought it was. Standard showbiz stroke-up. All through the whole meet-and-greet, they were laughing and joking and asking each other which was their favorite part. All but Shanna. She never said a word.

  When Kollberg himself finally pushed her on it, she said quietly, "My favorite part isn't on the cube."

  She blushed, and dropped her eyes like she was embarrassed. Kollberg didn't let up. Finally, she revealed her shameful secret: "My favorite part is thinking about all the people in Ankhana who get to go to bed at night, who get to get up in the morning, who get to kiss each other and hug their children. All the people who will never know what you did to save their lives."

  "Ah, grow up," I told her. "I didn't do it for them. I did it for audience share."

  She shrugged. "They'll never know that, either," she said, and gave me that incendiary little half smile of hers that made my chest go tight and my heart stutter, and I was pretty well done for.

  The shitty thing is, we never had a chance. If we'd lived together for a hundred years, she never could have comprehended 3F. I look back on my life with her, and I cannot believe I didn't understand what was happening to me.

  I wanted a world where there is no such thing as 3F—where it belonged to the frozen past, entombed in millennial dust, never to rise again. I wanted my world forever purged of that smell.

  So I built my own 3F and called it the Abbey, and locked myself in, and tried to pretend I was happy about it. Shit, the Abbey was worse. My old room was something I could run from. I could fight the smell.

  The Abbey had me fighting to stay there.

  Now that I'm down here, now that 3F is my whole reality in the bottomless stench of the Shaft, I'm so much happier it makes me want to laugh out loud. I can't remember the last time I was this happy.

  No, wait: Yes, I can.

  I remember

  8

  A few of the costumed mock revelers see me now, and still themselves, hands drifting toward folds of clothing for the weapons concealed there.

  I keep walking toward them, slowly, offering a friendly grin.

  The golden sand of the arena crunches as it shifts slightly under my boot heels. The sun is hot, and it strikes a reddish glow onto the upper reaches of my vision, where it glistens in my eyebrows.

  All my doubts, all my questions fly away like doves in a conjurer's trick. Adrenaline sings in my veins, a melody as familiar and comforting as a lullaby. The thunder of blood in my ears buries all sound except for the slow, measured crunchch . . . crunchch of my footsteps.

  Toa-Sytell sees me now; his pale eyes widen and his mouth works. He tugs upon Ma'elKoth's arm, and the Emperor's head swivels toward me with the slow-motion menace of the turret of a tank

  That was the last time I was truly, utterly, completely happy: seven years ago, on the sand at Victory Stadium.

  Happy. For the same reason I'm happy now.

  I knew I would die there.

  It's not death that cheers me, though; it's not death that draws a stinging smile from my battered mouth. It's that I get to die on Overworld. It's that I don't have to go home.

  I'll never have to go home again.

  Shit, y'know what?

  I even kinda like the smell.

  It smells like running the streets on a San Francisco summer night; it

  smells like stickball and fistfights, like rolling ragfaces for loose change and dodging down blind alleys to skip over a fence one step ahead of the cops. That's why I'm happy.

  Oh, Shanna .. .

  If only

  That's one bell I wish I could unring.

  I wish I could have gotten to this while Shanna was still alive. I wish I could have shared it with her. She might not have understood—shit, I know she wouldn't have understood but I'd like to think she would have been glad to see me happy.

  I'm gonna die a free man. Is anything better than that?

  I'm free.

  9

  I think of Kris, and his stuff about names. I think I understand a little better what he meant. Dad once told me that I am more than Caine, and he was right. But he didn't understand that I am more than Hari Michaelson, as well. Hari was a good guy. He loved his wife, loved his daughter, loved his father and this world. He was in over his head, that's all. This wasn't his fault. He didn't have a talent for it.

  He never really had a chance.

  I never gave him one.

  The corner of the manacle around my right wrist makes an imperfect
tool, and I have no light by which to work. On the other hand, I have nothing but time. The wall of the Shaft is that same porous limestone, much softer than the iron that binds me to it. I work slowly, and do a good job, even though I'm working entirely by feel.

  Once in a while the trusty comes by with the soaked bread that passes for dinner, and by the dim flicker from his lamp's flame I can see my handiwork grow.

  It reads simply:

  HARI MICHAELSON

  And a pair of dates.

  The first is the day Vilo took me to see my father.

  The second is my best guess at today's.

  He deserves an epitaph, but I don't scratch one in the stone. I am his epitaph.

  10

  The world wants to call me Caine. But that does not encompass me. I must remember that Caine is the name for only part of what I am. Someday, that name will grow to name me more truly. Right now, it names all of me that I need. Caine is an Actor. An actor.

  One who acts.

  I need something to work on. Something to try to do.

  To be shackled here in the Shaft, dying—it's a gift: I don't have to waste time trying to make up my mind. There is only one thing I can even try.

  Kris said that black Flow comes through even this Donjon stone. That it comes through everyone; that we draw it and direct it without even knowing what we do. That it is energy in its most fundamental form. Energy is energy, he said. No reason why Flow can't go through wires and microcircuits, I guess. It only needs to be properly tuned.

  Calling upon skills buried for a quarter of a century, I curl both of my hands into the Three Finger mudra and begin to cycle my breathing in that ancient, ancient rhythm. Mindview won't come right away, but Caine can find it. Years and years ago, he was trained for it. I was trained for it.

  I will find it.

  That middle-aged paraplegic was just a part I played, so I could get along on Earth. I don't need him anymore.

  I will move my fucking legs.

  The part-time goddess passed into the lands of the dead, and there she strove with monsters. She brought with her the dark angel's spawn, and the man who had been a god. They fought sometimes beside her, and sometimes against her, for in that land of shadow and illusion one cannot always distinguish friend from foe.

  In the lands of the dead, there is only one certainty. It is the certainty of self. This is why tales and legends people those lands with monsters.

  It has been written that when one contends with monsters, one risks becoming a monster. This is not true.

  The true risk is that one might discover the monster one has always been.

  EIGHTEEN

  Ankhana embraced Damon of Jhanthogen Bluff with a jungle of dreams.

  An oak shouldered him aside as it lashed upward from a crack in the flagstone dockside, shoving him stumbling into a head-high corn patch; the stalks crackled and burgeoned with young ears that grew from fingerlings to the size of his hand while he stood and watched with open-mouthed awe. Pumpkin and watermelon vines snaked along the stone and coiled around his ankles. Intertangled apple and peach and willow leaped from the Chambaygen so fast that the reeds festooning their upper branches dripped chill river water onto Damon's feverish brow. Barges and boats and floating piers were shoved and twisted and overturned.

  In minutes the river had become a marsh, and the great wall of Old Town had become a vertical forest of leaves and brilliant blossoms.

  I have done this, Damon thought.

  The buzzing in his veins—a strange fizzy bubbling up and down his neck that swirled into his head and out again—had started as a tiny hiss, but had boiled and burst since the green had come to devour the city. He walked in a dream, and knew it was a dream; this could not happen, except in a dream.

  The friars Damon had detailed to patrol the dockside and watch for any sign of Master Raithe and the Sword of Saint Berne were all Esoterics: veterans, experts in covert operations skills ranging from hand-to-hand combat to demolitions to magickal counterespionage. At the first creak and rustle of the foliage that sprang to life around them, they had scattered and taken cover like the professionals they were.

  He was alone.

  Damon couldn't see them anywhere within the riot of waving, weaving green, and he wasn't sure he wanted to. He wasn't sure of anything. I've been sick, he thought. I've had a fever.

  I must still have a fever; this must be a fever dream.

  He'd been at the dockside for days, he guessed. He couldn't bear to be away. He'd posted his guards and watchmen, but he couldn't trust them to watch and guard, not really; whenever he left the riverside he was tormented by visions of Raithe slipping away, sneaking, escaping

  And Raithe, he knew, was at the core of what was happening to Ankhana; let him go, and all hope of answers would be lost with him. So Damon always came back, to pace and brood and contemplate the river, because the only man in Ankhana he could still trust was himself.

  Because this is my dream.

  His stomach had been troubling him, and now in the green storm his guts twisted, and he retched: a brown-traced milky fluid spilled from his lips. How long had it been since he'd last eaten?

  What had he last eaten?

  The streaks of brown in his vomitus looked like blood.

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and its touch stung him sharply. His lips had cracked and split and smeared his hand with fresher blood. He was thirsty, dreadfully thirsty ... He knelt and cupped river water to his mouth, but his tongue turned the cool water to nails and broken glass. He could feel it tearing open his throat, shredding him inside

  Maybe what I need isn't water.

  He looked back at the pool of his vomit, at the swirls of brown; he looked down at the smear of red across the back of his hand. Blood, he thought.

  Blood.

  He would have to hunt.

  A flash of furtive motion caught his eye. He rose to a stalking crouch, parting reeds with his hands, then slipped forward through the stand of corn. There it was again was it again? Was it the first time? Had he seen this before, or was he remembering an older dream?

  The flash of a boot heel, as it vanished behind the trunk of an ash; a startled glimpse of a woman's face, eyes wide and staring for one brief second until screened by rustling corn, the smell of unwashed crotch and armpit, the mouthwatering earthmetal savor of blood

  His dreaming jungle was full of, people.

  Slowly, his jungle came to life in his ears. Grunts and growls, screeches and screams, all manner of bellows and howls and shrieks echoed near and far: calls not of beasts, but of men. Calls of the beasts that men had always been.

  He followed a crackle of motion and was brought up short by a yell that was chopped to a thin moan. Thrashing a clearing in the reeds was a tangle of human flesh: a man and a woman and a knife struggled together near the river, and Damon couldn't make his eyes interpret who was doing what to whom. He could see only limbs, and metal, and blood.

  Blood

  The blood pulled him forward, and he followed, thirsting. This was only a dream, after all.

  He entered the reeds, and something struck him from behind.

  Overborne, crushed to the ground, he tasted the viny resin of the bro­ken reeds that jabbed his face, while what might have been a knee dug painfully into his back and frantic hands scrabbled at his clothing. He lay unresisting, abstractly wondering how this happenstance figured into his dream, until dully ripping teeth latched into the joining of his neck and shoulder and gnawed at his flesh. The pain—real pain, too-real pain—woke him from his daze. This is no dream of mine.

  Damon reached back and gripped with one hand the head of the man who chewed on him, while his other hand sought the man's eyes with stiff­ened fingers. The fellow grunted into Damon's trapezius, and his fists flailed ineffectually. Damon's fingers drove slowly deeper into his eyes, and the man stopped punching and started trying only to get away, thrashing and pushing and moaning. Damon let him go, and
heard a grunt of im­pact and a wet gurgle; before he could roll over and sit up, one of his Eso­terics had tackled the man, pinned him, and cut his throat.

  "Master Damon!" the Esoteric gasped, springing to Damon's side with his bloody knife still in hand. "Master Ambassador, I'm sorry—I couldn't get to you—all this—" He waved his bloody knife at the riot of green around them.

  Damon couldn't take his eyes off the knife: rivulets of red trickled from the blade along the friar's wrist. It looked so warm, so ... satisfying-He

  He had to remind himself that this was not merely a dream. He still had duties here. "I'm hurt," he said distantly. He took his hand away from the bite wound on his shoulder, and more blood spilled down his robe. "This must be washed, and bandaged."

  The young friar gasped; reaching for Damon's shoulder to examine the wound, but Damon pulled away. "Your knife," he said, averting his face. "Master?"

  "Clean your weapon, Brother," Damon said thickly. "First, clean your weapon. Always."

  The friar flushed. "I, I, I'm sorry; Master—" he stammered. "It's just—" His defeated wave took in the jungle around them, the towering cliffside forest of the wall, the throat-cut corpse two steps away, the man who lay on

  the riverbank with a knife handle sticking out from his eye socket, the bloody trail of broken reeds that led to where a woman lay pumping out the last of her life a few yards away. "—everything's so crazy . . . What's happening—it's driven everyone mad."

  "What's happening has driven no one mad." Damon pushed himself exhaustedly to his feet, and the fizzy buzz in his head got louder and louder. "It's merely given us permission."

  "It's like a dream," the young friar said helplessly.

  "Yes," Damon said. "But not my dream. Or yours." The buzz in his head fizzed louder still, bubbling in his arteries, gurgling through his heart.

  "Yes, that's it," the younger man murmured. "That's exactly it. We're not even real. We're trapped in someone else's dream."