Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  "Get up. Gather the others. We still have duty, here."

  "Duty? What duty can we have in a dream?"

  "This is a dream. It is also real. It is the dream of a god, and the gods dream reality."

  The buzz became a growl, then rose to a grinding whine.

  "What god?" The young friar grimaced disbelief. "What god would dream this—this insanity?"

  For answer, Damon pointed out over the river.

  The long grey blade snarling in his hand, water streaming from his buckskin tunic and pants, Raithe of Ankhana strode along the surface of the river as though the rippling waters were carved of stone. He walked awkwardly, half stumbling, his legs barely able to support his weight. He headed upstream, and on his face was thunder.

  Damon said, "That one."

  2

  "... so beautiful ..."

  Avery Shanks rolled over and locked her jaw against a groan. The expanded-foam pallet that had been her bed on the cold tile floor of the veterinary surgery had been comfortable enough to let her sink into occasional periods of exhausted sleep, but every time she awoke she felt as though someone had removed all her cartilage and replaced it with industrial-grade sandpaper.

  Her sleep had been plagued by nightmares of being seized and fondled, her elbows and knees and hips grabbed by bony fingers fleshed with rotting meat, her breasts and buttocks and crotch squeezed and rubbed by a mass of Laborers who crowded around her, 'stealing her air with their horrible breath, and all of their faces had Kollberg's empty leer. She rubbed grit from her eyes and tried to remember what had awakened her. "I never knew ..."

  It was Tan'elKoth: a reverent whisper. Avery took her hands away from her face, and caught her breath.

  A new light had entered the surgery: a light softer, more full, more golden than had been seen on this planet in a thousand years: as though someone had captured the first breaking dawn of a preindustrial May, bottled it like brandy, and decanted it only now, aged and mellowed and purified into a glow that shouldn't exist outside of sonnets and fairy tales: a light that is felt with the heart more than seen with the eye, a light that draws the spirit upward beyond the dull confines of Earth. It was the light that poets write of, when they describe the transfiguring brilliance of a lover's smile; it was the light that painters dimly echo with the secondhand image called the halo.

  This light shone from Tan'elKoth's face.

  "Is it done, then?" Avery whispered, afraid to speak aloud. "Have you done it? Is she safe?"

  Tan'elKoth's gaze was farther away than miles can measure: he looked into a different universe. "How could I have dreamed—?"

  Avery's eye, though, was drawn to the slow writhe of Faith, where she lay strapped to the table, a IV drip keeping her in permanent nightmare. "Is it over?" she asked, more insistently. "Can she rest now? Tan'elKoth, can she rest?"

  Slowly Tan'elKoth's gaze returned from that unimaginable distance, and to his lips came a smile of gentle satisfaction that threatened to become triumph.

  "Soon, Businessman," he murmured. "Soon:'

  3

  The only light in the techbooth that served the Interlocking Serial Program came from the heart of Ankhana itself, translated into the cold electronic glare of eleven POV screens. In the center of the booth sat the creature that had been Arturo Kollberg; its eyes could have been mouths, swallowing the raw uptangling of Ankhana's unnatural spring.

  The creature never moved as the techbooth's door opened behind its chair. The Social Police officers who ushered Tan'elKoth inside said nothing, nor did the creature acknowledge this arrival. The door closed again.

  Electronic screens gleamed moss green and sky blue and stone brown.

  Tan'elKoth said, "It is done."

  The creature closed its eyes for a moment, enjoying the fountain of power it could taste flowing into Tan'elKoth and out again.

  "It is well," Tan'elKoth said, "that you have sent for me now. We have much of which to speak"

  A filth-crusted hand waved at a screen, where a skeletal young man armed with a shimmering sword walked unsteadily upon the surface of a river, between trunks of saplings that twisted out from the water as though in pain. "Have you seen this?"

  "Seen it?" Tan'elKoth snorted. "I created it."

  Eyes closed and opened again: chewing.

  "The goddess walks within that body," Tan'elKoth said. "By my will she died; by my will, she lives again." His voice carried subterranean echoes of triumph. "It is time, I believe, to renegotiate our deal."

  "Oh?"

  "I pledged to neutralize both Caine and Pallas Ril. This I did. You pledged to return me to my people. This you did not. Instead, I was kidnapped. Threatened. Beaten. And maimed. Had I known your nature, there would have been no agreement between us. Now, though—now!" The triumph rose from the caverns beneath his tone into full dark malice. "Now the goddess walks the fields of home. Forewarned. Forearmed. Unbeatable. Your only hope is to deal with me. Only I can influence her. Only I can counter her power. Only I can save you."

  "Where is Avery Shanks?" the creature said tonelessly.

  "With the child." Tan'elKoth made a slicing gesture with the edge of his hand, dismissing any possible threat. "Businessman Shanks gives you no leverage. Your sole hope of success is the link I have with the goddess through the child. This link depends entirely upon the child's wellbeing: It is a function of a certain configuration of her nervous system, both physical and chemical. If Faith even falls too deeply asleep, the link will be severed; more convulsions—of the sort that separating her from Avery Shanks seems to cause—may destroy the link altogether. Permanent brain changes result from even mild emotional trauma; the effect on the link would be entirely unpredictable. You cannot risk harm to any of us."

  The creature did not answer.

  "Further, you dare not delay. The goddess' connection to the river is also a function of nervous configuration—right now, this connection is tenuous and unreliable, but it will become progressively less so as she reconfigures the body she has possessed. With the power she already has, she can reshape the body she now wears, or duplicate her former one: at that time, she will have regained all of her former power. Even I, perhaps, could no longer resist her."

  "Then now is the time to act."

  "There will be no better time. With every minute of delay, your task grows more nearly impossible."

  "All right. I'm convinced."

  Tan'elKoth scowled; it seemed he had not expected to win so easily. "These, then, are my demands—"

  "Screw your demands," the creature said, its voice gathering humid lust. Tan'elKoth shook his head pityingly. "Do you understand anything of what I've said?"

  The creature rose, and offered the chair to Tan'elKoth. "Sit."

  "Don't think that you can continue to bully me," Tan'elKoth began, but the creature walked to one of the techbooth's control boards. "Stand, then," it said emptily. "Here, look at this."

  Tan'elKoth glanced reflexively at the bright bank of screens. The creature touched a control stud, and from each screen lanced a searing blade of light. Tan'elKoth shielded his eyes against the glare, but from inside his skull, just beneath that short arc of stitching that circled behind his left ear, a burst of power slashed his brain to ribbons, and he fell facefirst to the techbooth floor.

  The creature looked down at his twitching body as though it wanted to say something, but could not remember what.

  4

  Shattered, slashed and burned, broken, deep in the shadowed retreats of his mind, Tan'elKoth at last began to see the truth.

  I have been a fool.

  The implanted thoughtmitter was doing something to him—doing something to his mind, to his spirit—calling to him, revealing both itself and him in a way that the limitations of his physical senses would never have allowed him to perceive. The blades of light had sliced away his eyes, but in robbing him of sight they had gifted him with vision.

  He saw, vague as a half-remembered dream, the Face in
the Lesser Ballroom of the Colhari Palace: the Face that had been the highest, purest expression of the dreams of a sleepless god. That Face had been a jigsaw sculpture, pieced together of the clay-formed shapes of his Beloved Children, layered and built one laboriously perfect figure at a time, into a face. A Face: the Face of Ma'elKoth. His greatest work: The Future of Humanity.

  Now, as he reached forth his metaphoric hand toward that icon of his vanished godhead, he saw that his art had been instead prophecy. This hand, with which he reached for that ghost of a dream, was no hand of flesh and bone, but was some shifting agglomeration of tiny figures, thousands of them, naked and clothed, birthing and dying, eating, screwing, shitting, killing.

  Those tiny shapes had become his flesh and bone.

  He had become a hive of humanity, a structural framework that organized and shaped and gave purpose to the millions of tiny lives that fed him their devotion. A dizzy shift of perspective brought him an inch closer to the truth: The jigsaw figures were fully life-sized. He himself was an unimaginable giant, built of a dozen million people, twenty million, more

  Laborers and Leisuremen, Investors and Artisans, all burning for a taste of Home. Their hunger overpowered him, left him shivering, gasping, sweating tears of human blood.

  He had been blinded by his eyes: This world of gleaming steel and glass, of toxic sludge and chirping electronic voices, was a fraud. A confidence game. A sucker play. The institutionalized alienation that was the metastructure of modern Earth had deceived him into believing him-self an individual—a deception directed not specifically at him, but generally, over each and every one of the millions who together made him what he was.

  Each of the millions who organized themselves into his body wore blank white fabric tied across their faces: Magritte's lovers, kissing through eyeless hoods.

  They could not even guess that they were each part of one greater form; they had been veiled so that they could not see what they had become. Those sheets were tied about each neck with a hangman's noose. Tan'elKoth felt about his own neck an identical noose, even as he became aware of an identical sheet tied over his own head.

  He lifted his agglomerate hands and tore the veil from his eyes.

  He found that he, himself, was only a small part of something as much greater than he as he was greater than the man who formed a curl of hangnail upon his thumb: a titanic shapeless mountain of blind humanity, and more than a mountain. Tan'elKoth was himself a mountain

  This amorphic pulsing mass was the size of a planet.

  The size of Earth.

  And in its roiling, shifting pseudolife, it shaped itself into a Face of its own, a face with blankly staring eyes like lakes of people, nostrils greater than whole nations, a mouth like the ocean, wide with an idiot's gape.

  A face like Kollberg's.

  And the hoods that cloaked the uncountable billions comprising this amoebic groping Kollberg-mass covered only their individual eyes: their tens of billions of mouths were open, and every single one of them howled to be fed. This was the shared hunger for Home that burned within him: not homesickness, but starvation indeed. That bright, sweet world on which he'd built his Face, was to this great hungry mass only food.

  How bitter, bitter, to be so easily deceived

  He had thought he was leading them; he had thought he was deceiving them; he had thought he was entering an alliance of convenience . . . But in truth, he had surrendered himself years before he ever came to this world; he was only an expression of this blind god writ small. He was nothing more than a link between this conglomerate creature and its supper: a hand, a tongue

  How has this happened, that I must feed my world to the monster I have become?

  He stood upon the blind god's finger, as it lifted toward its slack oceanic mouth. He was finally—inarguably, revoltingly—only a crust of snot that this creature had picked from its nostril and was now about to consume once more. Those gargantuan writhing lips closed around him.

  The blind god licked him from its finger, chewed him up, and swallowed him.

  The god who had been a man opened the eyes of its new body, where it lay on the techbooth's floor. Kollberg sat on the -edge of the control board, swinging his bare feet and holding his hands clasped between the knees of his filth- and bloodstained dungarees.

  Tan'elKoth's prophecy had come fully to pass: The god within him lived.

  For one long, long suspension of movement, Kollberg stared at Ma'elKoth, and Ma'elKoth returned his gaze: the blind god regarded itself thoughtfully, like a man gazing at his image in a mirror—except that here, the mirror gazed back.

  5

  Pallas Raithe stumbled forward, driven by screams.

  She—for Pallas Raithe was female in ways more profound than any detail of anatomy—clung for a moment to the branch of a willow that had sprung from the river's bed only minutes ago, and that already suffered the slow murder of drowning. She held the buzzing blade of the sword out away from her stolen body and wrapped her other arm around the branch to keep herself upright on the river's shifting surface. Her halting spray of melody within the Song of Chambaraya limped painfully among the contrapuntal shifts of harmony and rhythm; it lurched from offbeat to discordant and back again, a squeal of random noise that befouled the music, tainted and twisted it.

  She pressed her palm against her ear and pushed as though she could squeeze the screaming out of her head.

  Her spring had quickened the virus as well.

  Because each life within the city was its own motif within the Song of Chambaraya, Pallas Raithe was acutely aware of each cold slide of steel into flesh, of each crunch of bone beneath a hammer, of each panted breath half held behind a barricaded door, each erratic drumbeat of a terrified heart. She ached for every one, and she could help none of them. Those screams were only human.

  In the symphony of agony that was the Great Chambaygen, they were barely a whisper.

  One can think of an individual mind as a specific radio signal within the broadcast spectrum that is the universe; following the same metaphor, a living nervous system is a receiver, tuned by birth and experience to capture just that signal. In seizing Raithe's body, Pallas had been able to detune his nervous system so that it no longer captured his signal; she had warped it close enough to her own frequency that it could receive hers.

  Like a detuned radio, where one signal bleeds over another, it received her badly indeed, through bursts of static and waves of interference that made her blast at shrieking overdriven volume one moment, while in the next she was buried in a white hissing wash. Her feedback shrieks had transformed Chambaraya's Song from stately Bach to a postmodernist screech of pain.

  She spun crazily from the willow to a nearby oak, then threw herself into the cattail thicket along the bank. She fell to her knees, clutching the cattail stalks to her hard, breastless chest, and vomit clawed up her throat.

  Mommy . . . Mommy, why won't you help?

  Something was happening to Faith, something Pallas Raithe had not the power to comprehend. This body limited her perception until she could barely make out her daughter's voice.

  Touching the river through Raithe was analogous to broadcasting a live netshow over an antique voice-only radio: information could be exchanged, but only in the most limited way. To reconstruct him for the necessary range of broadband infinite-speed access, she would have to steal everything about him that made him who he was, replace each piece with a new creation, and make everything fit and work together in a viable living creature. Simpler to build herself a whole new transceiver.

  Simpler, to build herself

  She knelt with her knees still in the water, and dug a trembling hand into the clay: drawing forth minerals into the crystalline structure of bone. Even as she shaped the bone into vaguely female form, she gathered amino and aliphatic acids from the unnatural plant life around her. The river's water itself would serve for blood and bile and lymph.

  Kosall within it contained the perfect te
mplate of her mind at the instant of her death. Mind and body are expressions of each other; the pattern stored within the blade was a template for a new body, as well.

  A single human body is not such a complex thing, when compared to a full ecosystem.

  She built the body from within, beginning with the brain and spinal cord; the more properly tuned nerve tissue she had, the more power she could draw to speed her self-creation. She began to experience a certain doubling of perception: a blurred parallax, like the vision of a person partly blind in one eye.

  With the clearer perception of the brain and nerves that lay half complete within their cradle of clay, she felt the blind god enter her.

  6

  It flowed into her like oil. She choked on grease that seeped in through her nostrils, that slid between her lips and poured like poison into her ears, that cupped her breasts and slipped up through her rectum and oozed into her vagina. At the same instant, it seemed a huge abscess had burst within her belly, spilling pus and yellowish corruption; the oil in her mouth and nose and between her legs oozed out from within her, poisoning the world.

  There was no mystery for her here: she comprehended instantly what this suppuration truly was. She knew the blind god, and the blind god knew her. The channel that joined them was an inextricable part of what she was; through this channel the blind god poured itself into the Song.

  This was what had been making Faith scream.

  The blind god flooded into and through her, and Pallas cried out as she opened Raithe's eyes. The blind god looked out upon the jungle Ankhana had become, and within her it murmured in Ma'elKoth's baroque contrabasso. Mmm, spectacular. We love what you've done with the place.

  For an answer, she lashed back with the scream of the river's agony.

  Please, dear girl. The suggestion of a wince: not of pain, but of distaste. This jungle is merely random; of course it hurts. Growing pains, no more. Just imagine what you might do if you act, instead, with purpose.