Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  He took a deep breath. "I was thinking we could maybe work something out."

  "Is that what you want? Is that what has brought you here? You are once again interested in my favors?"

  "I, ah—" Damp as these goddamn caverns were, how could his lips be so fucking dry? He licked them again, and said, "Hey, I won't pretend I haven't missed you."

  "Have you?"

  "I mean, think about it: you and I? In some ways, we were made for each other."

  "I remember ..." that eerily toneless simulacrum of Kierendal's voice murmured. "I remember what it is to be desired."

  "And I," Jest ventured, sensing an opening, "remember what it is to desire you. We were great together. You know we were. No other woman has ever made me feel—"

  "I am not a woman."

  "No female of any species," Jest amended smoothly. "No human, no primal or stonebender or whatever, has brought out of me what you did. I dream about you at night, and wake up in a sweat. I panic when I think I might never see you again."

  "To see me? Is this your wish?"

  "That, and more," he asserted. "I mean, we could turn all this around. There are still men loyal to me within the Eyes, and the Cats are mine to a man. Not only that, but I know where the Thaumaturgic Corps stockpiles their remaining griffinstones—"

  "There is nothing to turn."

  "Well, then ..." Jest tried a smile. Could she see him that clearly? "Then maybe we can just . . . be together again. You know?"

  "So." Her voice came back languid and earthy. "You wish once again to touch my breast, to lay your hand along my hip."

  "More than anything else in the world," he said, thinking, except maybe getting out of here alive.

  "Very well: I accept your devotion. Kiss me once, and it is done." Hands like branches of a winter-killed tree seized his face and held him motionless. Something crusted and hard pressed against his mouth, oozing with a thick coppery goo like—no, not like anything; it was. Half-clotted blood.

  The crust parted into needle teeth that pierced his lower lip. A tongue like a bark-covered stump forced its way into his mouth, and it tasted like this cavern smelled: old meat, black and webbed with decay. The rough claws released him, and Jest sank to his knees, gagging, both hands at his throat.

  "My kiss no longer wakes that familiar passion?" the voice asked with blank mockery.

  "No, I ah ..." Jest coughed, and coughed again. "No. You startled me, that's all. I was just startled. I didn't know you were already so, ah, close to me. I can't tell where your voice is coming from."

  "This isn't my voice. It comes from inside your ear. I no longer speak." "I don't understand."

  "Of course you don't. Understanding is my curse. My gift."

  A brighter patch gathered itself within the darkness: shapeless still, but slowly self-defining as the illumination grew.

  "It was the gift of an old, old friend," the voice murmured. "He, too, once desired me. He gave me understanding at the same time he gifted me with death."

  As it brightened, the shape seemed to resolve into a gruesomely mutilated spider: some sort of emaciated arachnoid creature with half its limbs cut off. The spider-shape's head tilted slowly, hypnotically, back and forth, as though it worked to swallow some half-choking chunk of meat.

  "Can you imagine," the voice continued, "what it is to go mad, and to know you are going mad? Can you imagine understanding precisely what makes you want to murder your friends and eat their corpses—and yet to want it anyway?"

  "No, I—ah, no."

  "You will."

  The pale glow from the mutilated spider increased until Jest could now make out her features: sunken, skeletal, skin of translucent parchment mottled with weeping sores, stretched over fleshless bones. Naked, sexless, a squirm of internal organs within the abdomen, pale mats of hair clotted across the scalp, blackened lips, cracked and oozing, that did not move though the voice went on. "I have shared this with you, Toa-M'Jest .. . Majesty . . . what you will. You'll become as I am."

  "Yeah, all right," Jest said. She was beyond fucked, but maybe he could still manage to make enough of a deal to get himself away. "You've shared. I can tell you're a, yeah, a little under the weather, but that doesn't mean we have to lose the war."

  She neither moved nor changed expression as that disembodied voice roared, "There is no war!"

  "Then I guess I was wrong after all," Jest said with a small sad smile. He sagged back, losing hope. "I always said that every time Caine comes to town, we end up in a fucking war. Hah. I should be so lucky."

  "Caine?"

  The word was a hurricane blast, and with it exploded light so dazzling Jest cried out and covered his eyes with both hands.

  "Caine is here? Caine is here now?"

  Jest roasted in the savage glare. He couldn't take his hands away from his face. "I, ah—"

  "Answer me!"

  "Yeah," he said, flinching from the thunder in his ears. "The Monasteries caught him, and they delivered him to the Patriarch a couple days after the battle at Commons' Beach."

  "It was him. All along. I knew, and yet I didn't know. It's so clear now. It's so obvious what we have to do."

  Jest slowly managed to pull his hands down, and he squinted away from the light. The cavern was the size of the Great Hall, and it was filled with bodies.

  Primals, stonebenders, ogrilloi, trolls and ogres and treetoppers, dressed in rags or wholly naked, sick, maybe dying, many already dead, vomit pooled in hollows of stone—and over them all rose Kierendal, naked and madder than the rest, the crippled spider queen. "Up, children! Awake and arm!—Do you not hear? This is our chance to revenge our own murders! We can kill the man who killed us!"

  As her tattered rabble gathered themselves, her burning glare pinned Jest like a javelin through the eye. "You know where he is."

  Jest licked his lips. He'd known Caine for twenty years. Caine had saved his life, had made him Duke. What he had said to Toa-Sytell was the truth: He loved the man like his own brother.

  But...

  Jest was who he was. He was a survivor.

  He said simply, "He's in the Donjon."

  With a shout, the darkness returned: darkness that clattered with boots and horn-soled feet, that snarled and shouted with fierce voices in unknown tongues, that clanged with weapons and rustled with armor. He was seized and dragged over stone, lifted and dropped and lifted again, passed up shafts from hand to hand and allowed to slide down steep bruising slopes.

  And he knew: Darkness hides everything except who you really are.

  6

  There had been a carefully orchestrated crescendo to the public clamor for Michaelson's rescue. When it reached its peak, Westfield Turner once again addressed the world, live on the net.

  He explained that the Studio had spent these past days in frantic preparation for a rescue mission, but that Michaelson's position in the Donjon made direct action by Actors virtually impossible: the rock from which the Donjon is carved has a randomizing effect upon the Winston Transfer. Actors can neither be transferred in nor out.

  A sizable minority of the concerned citizens found this difficulty puzzling. They had viewed, for example, For Love of Pallas Ril, and the rock had seemed to have no adverse effect on Caine's thoughtmitter transmissions during the rather extended action sequence inside the Donjon. On the other hand, the Studio people should know what they were talking about, shouldn't they? A few wondered if the Studio might be mistaken. Only the most paranoid of conspiracy theorists suspected that Turner's tale might be a direct lie.

  But now, it seemed, some side-effect of the calamity overtaking Ankhana had cut the city off entirely from the Studio's technology. Sources across the net speculated that it might be related to the ongoing war in the caverns below the city. The Faces clearly had been able to strike back: the last images out of Ankhana had been of the whole city in flames. Now even those Actors with the ISP were off-line and in terrible danger. "But don't lose hope," Westfield Turner told t
he world. "As Caine himself once said: Never surrender.

  "We will not surrender. I ask you now to lend your support to my petition before the Leisure Congress. With the consent of the Congress, we can move combat troops into position for instant action. I ask for authorization to mount a full-scale military rescue, if need be. This may be Chairman Michaelson's only hope.

  "He put himself on the line for us over and over again. Now it's our turn. We can't let him down.

  "We won't let him down.

  "We may not be able to save him, but we won't let him go without a fight."

  President Turner failed to reveal that many of these preparations had begun days before, well in advance of the first confirmation that Caine was even alive.

  At the very moment he made that speech, the first elements of Bauer Company of the Social Police 82nd Force Suppression Unit--a reinforced rifle battalion, accompanied by a number of Overworld-trained irregulars drawn from the ranks of the most reliable Actors worldwide—were already in inflatable boats, on their way down the Great Chambaygen into Ankhana.

  7

  Habrak found Caine propped against the sweating limestone, legs splayed in the filth that slickened the step. He looked like a naked wooden puppet Habrak had found in an alley, once upon a wintertide many years ago. Some angry child had thrown it against a wall, and it had landed broken in a dungheap. Habrak had taken it home, cleaned it, and mended its broken back, and his daughter's eyes had glistened on her birthday morning

  The sergeant stood over him, scowling. Caine or no Caine, he didn't much like this idea of clubbing a helpless man to death. After twenty years in the army followed by seventeen years in the Donjon Guard—twelve of them as sergeant—he calculated that he had a clear idea of his duties. He was to see that prisoners in the Donjon stayed in the Donjon. That's all. He wasn't the bloody Imperial Executioner, was he?

  No use trying to explain that to the bloody Patriarch.

  But he couldn't duck or ditch, either. He sighed. He'd given this a fair think-on, and he couldn't get comfortable ordering any of his boys to do a job too dirty to do himself. Besides, he wasn't sure he could trust any of them to do it properly. Too many of them would make it personal. A lot of his boys had been in the Guard long enough to remember Caine's last visit.

  It was on Habrak's watch that Caine had come, seven years ago. It was the men of Habrak's watch who had been killed and maimed in the riot Caine had sparked to cover his escape.

  The warm weight of his club brushed against his leg. He swung it by the leather loop around his wrist, spinning it up into killing position, then held it for a moment before his eyes: a rod of oak as long as his forearm, leather-wrapped butt, its business end knobbed with rings of iron. He paused for a moment, there in the Shaft, and the tip of his tongue stroked the inside of his cheek, following the thick rope of scar that connected the corner of his lip to the hinge of his jaw.

  He could see it as though it happened again this instant: the Shaft door springing suddenly open, the black sparks of Caine's eyes, the white flash of his knife blade. In memory, the thrust came slow as a cloud across the summer sky; in reality, the blade had shattered his teeth and sliced through his cheek before he had even realized he was its target.

  He had more reason to make this personal, maybe, than any of his boys. He had more reason to take his time, to hurt the man before he killed him. But he wouldn't.

  The city might have burned down over his head—the whole bloody world might be going up in bloody smoke—but the bloody Donjon would stay in order, and Habrak and every man under him would do their bloody duty until ordered to do otherwise.

  He swung the club back down to his side and jangled his keys where they dangled from their steel ring at his belt. He'd bash in Caine's head and feed him to the grinder. He didn't have to enjoy it. He just had to do it.

  That's what being a soldier is.

  Caine's eyes were open, glassy and staring; they remained still when Habrak passed his lamp before them. His pupils didn't react to the changing light.

  Dead.

  Habrak nodded to himself. Not too surprising, given the wet grey rot chewing away those legs. Looked like he'd scratched something in the wall before he died. Lot of Shafters did that kind of thing. Habrak always calculated these forgotten folks were just that desperate to leave some mark of their passing. Sometimes they wrote something interesting, or even funny.

  Habrak squinted at the scratches, but he couldn't tell what Caine might have wanted to say. He seemed to recall that Caine was supposed to be Pathquan. Maybe that's what this was, something in Pathquan; maybe those Pathquans used a different alphabet or something. Couldn't even tell if these were supposed to be letters or numbers or some kind of picture writing.

  He grunted to himself. So, sure, Caine left his last words graved in stone—but there was nobody who could read them.

  Just another deader, anonymous as the rest.

  Well, that was a relief.

  Still, dead or not, he had his orders.

  One good overhand to the top of the skull. No point trying to smash the frontal bone—and besides, he didn't want to damage the man's face; he needed Caine recognizable to get himself out of here. He hooked a toe under one of Caine's knees and shoved it to the side, seeking better footing. Seemed a bit indecent, bashing a corpse like this

  Habrak frowned, squinting critically at Caine's head. Maybe he'd do better with a two-handed stroke. He turned and set the lamp down on the step behind him, and when he turned back he found that Caine's fixed stare had fixed on him.

  "Hey," Habrak said uncertainly. "Are you alive, or what?"

  Caine didn't answer. He didn't seem to be breathing.

  The huge shadow Habrak cast on the wall shrank as the sergeant took a tentative step closer. He adjusted his grip on his club, to hold it with both hands before him, like a sword.

  "Hey, you," he said. He nudged Caine's suppurating knee once more with the toe of his boot. "Hey, you are alive, aren't you?"

  A slow stretch of Caine's lips showed teeth gleaming with the flame that shines in the eyes of wolves.

  "Know what?" Caine said slowly. "When you kick me in the leg?" His voice scraped like a handful of cinders.

  "It hurts."

  On the day the dead man named himself, the great stone that had sealed his tomb was shattered. Its shards were cast into the abyss, for what he breaks can never be mended, and what he opens can never be closed. This is the power of such naming.

  He came forth from his tomb, glowing and strong as a morning sun that comes out of dark mountains.

  TWENTY

  The club comes down from somewhere in the outer darkness: from the Oort Cloud of shadow behind and beyond the guard's head. It floats: a feather pillow dropped from the moon: the terminal velocity of a mother's kiss. It's a flash, a thunderbolt: the blast of a shotgun shoved in my face. It comes down cleanly, efficiently, professionally: a butcher's stroke, a guillotine's. The club comes down in every possible shade of lethal delight, and none of them matter one thin slice of goddamn.

  Because when the club comes down, my leg moves.

  Just a twitch, a sudden kink of the knee: no more than the reflexive spastic jerk of a dying man rattling his heels on the floor: but enough. That's the victory, right there. The rest is mop-up.

  Because he steps into the stroke—in his solid, professional way—and puts his right ankle just inside my left knee, and when my left leg suddenly doubles it pulls him a bare two inches closer to me, so that the blow that should have splattered my brains into the shit on the floor instead slams the iron-ringed knob against the stone wall on which I rest my head, and stings the fucking club right out of his hands.

  It also pulls him a trace off balance, a happy trend that I encourage: I take one of his wrists with my free hand and yank him down on top of me. His helmet and the head inside it hit the wall with a cartoon ker-blank, and before he quite understands what's happening I've turned his back to me and the ch
ain that links my right wrist to the wall now wraps his throat.

  He tries to shout, but the chain is tight. He tries to struggle, but I used to murder people for a living. Nothing in his professional experience has prepared him for someone like me.

  While I throttle him, I consider if maybe somehow I can get away with letting him live. Maybe it was the mindview, I don't know, but ... watching him come down the Shaft, I felt like I knew him. Like I could read him, somehow. I mean, I do know him, sort of secondhand—Habrak, I think his name is. A couple of Actors from the ISP have bumped into him now and again. He always seemed like a decent guy, and more than that: he seemed like the kind of guy who was doing what the gods intended for him when he was born. Maybe it's not a high destiny, being a sergeant in the Donjon Guard, but it's his.

  I mean, how can you not like somebody who's so good at being exactly who he is?

  I count the seconds after he goes limp. Too few, he'll wake right up; too many, he won't wake up at all. I make good use of this necessary pause by unbuckling the girdle that holds his hauberk close around his waist and getting my free hand on his ring of keys. I grip the chain with my right as I fit one key after another into the simple lock on my manacle: it takes only seconds to find the right one, and the manacle swings open.

  Some ugly sores there, where the iron has scraped away skin. Yeah, big deal. The infections on my legs'll kill me before I have to worry about my wrist.

  Pretty soon, I let up the pressure on the guard's throat. He's limp as a hunk of liver. Getting his hauberk off him is simple in concept, complex in practice, but I manage. I clip his wrist into the manacle before I slide his armor over my head.

  It's a goddamn luxury to have clothes on after all this time, even if those clothes are made out of cold slimy iron links. I give the guard's ankle a grateful pat, and he stirs.

  He's not awake yet, but he will be soon. So I'll let him wake up. So what? He's not going anywhere, and no Pit guard will hear his voice; anything he might yell will smother in this blanket of lunatic screams. They'll find him the next time they sweep the Shaft for corpses, but by then I'll be out of here, or dead. Call it my good deed for the day.