Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  He pushed Damon aside, stood on his own two feet, and brandished Kosall at the sky; power shouted from the blade like lightning.

  He thought, Well. All right, then.

  He lowered the blade, and the glare around him faded. "No siege engine will be required," he said with grim satisfaction. "Come, Damon-"

  Damon screamed: a raw, animal scream of agony and terror. He staggered away, clawing at his chest and shoulder, then fell to his knees. He tore at his clothing, his scream already ragged, hoarse, going choppy as he gasped for breath. Raithe was at his side in an instant.

  A dripping patch of black oil the size of a fist stained Damon's robe; before Raithe could even wonder whence this oil might have come, flesh beneath the cloth began to smoke, and then to burn. As Damon tore at his clothing, the oil smeared across his hands, raising blisters so fast they burst before his skin could stretch over them, and his fingers began to swell, trailing streamers of acrid smoke.

  Raithe grabbed a handful of Damon's robe and slashed it off with a swift stroke of Kosall, then ripped the rest of the robe free. He wadded it up and roughly scrubbed at Damon's chest and hands, wiping away as much oil as he could one-handed, since he dared not put down the sword.

  At last Damon huddled on his side on the cold stone, crumpled fetally around the oil burns on his chest, shivering with pain, tears streaming from his eyes. Raithe stared numbly at the wadded cloth in his hand, unable to comprehend what he saw: the robe was nearly soaked through with oil, now, and oil dripped from its torn hem to stain the bridgestones at his feet.

  He dropped the robe, and it landed with a sodden slap. He lifted his left hand, staring; he turned his hand this way and that, seeking some glimpse of human skin within a slick, wet-gleaming glove of jet.

  He made a fist, and out through the pores of his skin flowed thick syrup ripples of the blind god's black oil.

  4

  In a shadowed doorway of the Financial Block across Ten Street from the Courthouse, Raithe let Damon slide slowly to the doorstep. With an empty sigh, Damon settled onto the oil-slick stone and curled around the chemical burns on his chest. His eyes held the horizon-fixed glaze of the Control Disciplines. Raithe pressed back into the shadows, Kosall humming along his thigh.

  Ten Street was choked with people: people with packs on their backs and bundles in their arms, people pushing carts and people pulling wagons, people who clutched the hands of children or the leashes of pets, people who sought this way and that in tears or red-faced rage, crying names indistinguishable from all the other shouts and screams.

  With Fools' Bridge and Thieves' Bridge already in flames—as well as many of their homes and businesses—thousands had bundled whatever they could carry of their precious possessions and rushed to the west side of Old Town, only to find Knights' Bridge burning as well; the forest of oak that had sprung from its bascule had ignited only seconds after Raithe had carried Damon through. Now the only way off the island was the long arch of Kings' Bridge—and Kings' Bridge was held by a company of heavy infantry whose captain was grimly determined to keep this rabble of potential looters off the South Bank.

  Flames slowly crept westward through twisting alleys and around rooftop peaks, behind water troughs and under boardwalks: anywhere the wind was broken. The whole city east of Rogues' Way burned, and the approach of the flames pushed more and more people into the Financial District. People were dying on the street already: now and again the press parted to reveal a body trampled or clubbed or surreptitiously knifed. The river itself stretched arms of flame around Old Town as oil flowed in from upstream, becoming a moat of fire.

  Kosall hummed in Raithe's left hand, shedding tiny droplets of black oil in a continuous rain; Raithe watched them fall. He remembered, foggily, the agony he and the goddess had suffered when the black oil had first flowed forth; the right side of his body—the clean side—was blistered and scorched, and had the stiff swollen thickness of parboiled meat. Part of what frightened him was that he wasn't in much pain.

  Far, far back behind his eyes, faint but persistent—a melody stuck in endless obsessive cycle within his brain—throbbed the lives of all within the river's bound: ghosts of the living. The clearest of them were the men and women who crowded the street around him; he could also feel men—soldiers, he presumed—within the Courthouse. He even got faint corner-of-the-eye afterimages of the confusion and anger among friars who struggled to arm themselves, blocks away at the embassy: fights broke out among them, and a number of the embassy's rooms held victims of virus-spawned murder.

  He could feel other ghosts as well: terrified ghosts, cringing behind locked shutters; lunatic ghosts, giggling with gore-smeared mouths; even a few stolid, comfortably ignorant ghosts, snoring within bedlinens never tangled by any troubling dream, far from the fires and the madness that gripped the city.

  And he could feel ghosts below him: unhuman ghosts that boiled through the caverns, terrified and savage; he felt their mad queen and heard the thump of her murderous command echo in the heart of ogre and primal, troll and treetopper. He could see the image of their destination and feel their bloody intention, and he knew that if he delayed, Caine might have no blood left with which to save the world.

  Another part of what frightened him was what he saw across the street: The Courthouse doors were open, and on the verandah at the top of a broad sweep of stairs, two armored officers of the Eyes of God stood guard.

  The facade of the Courthouse pulsed orange with reflected firelight and gleamed with black oil; the ivy that once had climbed its walls had become a jungle of knotted woody vines that now rotted and dripped oil that flowed across the broad railed verandah in syrupy waves. The Eyes of God officers shifted uncomfortably, trying to keep their boots out of the oil, and threw many nervously longing glances toward the crowded street, as though only fear of something worse than fire kept them at their posts.

  The rest of what frightened Raithe was that he knew what frightened them. He could feel it.

  With the same sense that tracked the approach of the Artan Guard along the river and through the outlying streets, he felt something huge and dark and rabid within the Courthouse: a wounded beast that licked it-self in hungry silence. These Eyes of God feared this beast, not knowing that they themselves were parts of its limbs; Raithe feared the beast, for he knew that he was.

  He felt the dark power's flow through the sword into his brain, and with his own powers of mind he seized upon it. Power is power, he thought. I need all I can get.

  He felt the gate that the goddess had closed in his mind, the gate that his touch upon the sword had reopened. He turned his will upon that gate, and shattered it so that it would never close again. He would bear the ache, the legion of rats that chewed into his guts. He would bear the black-oil stigmatum.

  Small enough penance, for his great sins.

  He shifted his grip upon Kosall so that he held it by one quillon, and its eldritch hum died. He still could make a fist of his left hand, and his left leg still held his weight. Slowly, careful not to brush the sword's hilt, he slid the naked blade behind his belt. "Damon," he said. He yanked the semi-conscious man to his feet and shook him roughly. "Damon, come up. Now. That's an order."

  Slowly the Acting Ambassador's eyes drifted into focus.

  "Yes." Damon's face was blank with returning pain. He hugged his bare, burned chest as though he were chilled. He wore only his breeches and boots. "Yes—Raithe? Aren't you Raithe? What—what—? I'm hurt, Raithe," Damon said, blankly plaintive. "I must get to the embassy. I'm hurt, and they need me."

  Raithe laced his fingers together into a specific knot, which tuned his mind in a specific way. The oil from his left hand made the skin of his right sizzle and smoke, but his mind was master of his flesh; he could accept this pain, too, even welcome it, and in doing so he found he could accept his fear as well. His fear, like his pain, became a mere fact.

  "You will stay here and await the embassy's soldiers," he said. "When they
arrive, you will take command. Secure the Courthouse. Take it, and hold it. You will allow no one to enter until you are so ordered, by either myself or another who, to your certain knowledge, wields the full authority of the Council of Brothers. Do you understand these orders?"

  "But—"

  "Do you understand these orders?"

  "Yes. Yes, sir. Yes. But—but—"

  Raithe left him in the doorway and strode out into Ten Street. Most people in the crowds gave way before him; those who didn't, he brushed with a fingertip of his left hand. Their screams and the smoke that rose from their burns were more than enough to convince everyone else to let him pass.

  "But—" Damon called after him. "What you have ordered—it's an act of war!"

  "This is already a war," Raithe said softly, more to himself than to Damon. "And it is time for us to act."

  He mounted the Courthouse steps, to face the Eyes of God.

  5

  As Raithe climbed the steps, one of the officers said, "You can't come up here."

  Raithe reached the oil-stained verandah and stopped a nonthreatening five paces from the door. "Why not?" he asked mildly.

  "Go on, back into the street, chummie," the other guard told him, pointing down into the mass of people with his sword. "Nobody's allowed on the steps."

  "But I want to go in."

  "Back on the street," the officer insisted. He took a step toward Raithe and lifted his sword. "Courthouse's been closed since dusk. Get moving." "But the door is open."

  "That's not your concern—" the officer began, but Raithe again knotted his fingers together, again ignored the sizzle of the skin on his fingers, and interrupted.

  "Tell me why the door is open," he said.

  "Because the Patriarch has a thing about doors, these days," the officer said. "He doesn't like doors closed on him when he's inside—" His partner gaped at him. "Dorrie! Are you mad?"

  The officer looked back, puzzled. "What?"

  Raithe said, "The Patriarch?"

  "Dorrie, shut up," the other officer said. He stepped in front of his partner and pointed his own sword at Raithe's belly. "And you, get out of here. You didn't hear anything, you understand? The Patriarch isn't anywhere near here, and if you say otherwise, I'll find you and kill you."

  But he didn't sound as certain of that as he might, and his eyes were fixed upon Raithe's oil-covered left hand. "You—uh," he said, with a frown that was half a wince, "and you, you better wash your hands. I mean—don't you know that stuff is dangerous?"

  Far better than you, Raithe thought. He reknotted his fingers. "I am Ambassador Raithe of the Monasteries. The Patriarch sent for me. You will direct me to him at once."

  "I, uh, I uh ..." the officer stammered. "Your Excellency, your clothes, I didn't—"

  "At once," Raithe repeated. Without waiting for an answer, he swept past the officers and entered the darkened Courthouse.

  "The chapel," the officer called from behind him. "He's in the chapel. I'd—uh, I have to stay on post, I'm—"

  "I can find it," Raithe said, and strode into the darkness.

  The atrium of the Courthouse was an immense vault of shadow, striped with dancing orange crosses cast through the cruciform slot-windows by the flames that approached outside. Raithe limped through the atrium, his boot heels clacking cavernously. He'd been inside the Courthouse dozens of times; in boyhood, he'd worked as a page for the Imperial Messenger-News to help his father pay for the cost of his education at the embassy school. But seeing it gloomed in flame-tattered shadow—and the smell

  The Courthouse had always had a peculiar odor of its own: the colognes and powders and flower-oil sachets of the noble judges half captured by the fear-sweat of guilty men, then soaked permanently into the limestone. That blend of perfume and guilt had always been, for Raithe, the smell of justice.

  Now the Courthouse smelled only of rotting plants and burning oil.

  The chapel had once been a shrine to Prorithun, the sky god who was the keeper of men's oaths and the defender of Ankhanan law. Here the judges would pray and purify themselves before presiding in court. A Prorithar priest had always been present, empowered by the sky god to bestow upon the judges His Blessing, to render them temporarily proof against persuasive or compulsive magicks. Though Prorithun no longer reigned in Ankhanan courts, the chapel remained. Now it was a shrine to Ma'elKoth.

  Here, too, the door stood open, flanked by Eyes of God.

  "Hey, you," one of them said, intense but low, as though he feared to be overheard. "I don't know how you got in here, but you have to leave. Get out."

  Raithe stopped in a column of firelight that painted half of him scarlet and left the rest in black shadow. He knotted his fingers. "I am Ambassador—"

  "I don't give a squirt who you are, pally." The officer paced forward, stripes of firelight rippling over him as he approached up the long dark hallway. "If you're still here when I count three, I'll kill you. One."

  Raithe frowned. Could some of Prorithun's influence still linger? Again, he knotted his fingers. "Put away your sword," he said.

  "Two."

  "Go on, get out of here," the other officer said. "He means it."

  Raithe settled into himself. He sighed, and shifted his balance forward onto the balls of his feet. Reluctantly, he put his right hand near the hilt of Kosall. "I don't want to fight."

  "That makes one of us." The officer took another step; now one long stride from Raithe, he said, "Three."

  Yet he did not strike. Perhaps from this close, he could see death in Raithe's sad, wintry eyes.

  "Your Radiance?" Raithe called, pitching his voice to carry. "Your Radiance, it's Raithe—Ambassador Raithe."

  "Sure you are," the officer said.

  "Your Radiance, I must speak with you."

  From beyond the chapel's open door came a sepulchral croak that hummed with the resonance of an empty room. "Go away."

  "You heard the man, pally," the officer said, edging even closer. He raised his sword like a boy cocking a stick to threaten a strange dog.

  "Your Radiance, it's about Caine," Raithe said. "I must speak with you about Caine."

  For a long-stretched moment, no one moved.

  "Let him pass."

  The officer took a step back, and swung his sword to wave Raithe on. Raithe passed him without a glance, but as he did, he felt a shift of weight in that hungry wounded beast.

  He said, "Don't."

  He stopped, waiting. Oil from his left fist gathered into thick droplets that spattered on the floor.

  The guard at his back slowly lowered the sword he had swiftly raised. "You can't scare me."

  "No," Raithe agreed, without turning. "But I can kill you, though I would rather not."

  He felt again the shift of that hungry wounded beast this time a settling back, a slow uncoiling. He nodded to himself, and walked on.

  6

  The high vault of the chapel glowed with faint, reflected firelight; it leaked through the colored glass from the airshaft outside and rippled on the rows of padded knee-benches to either side of the aisle. The shift and pulse of the reflected light gave an eerie aspect of life to the stone Ma'elKoth that stood, double manheight, in the chancel. A bundle of filthy rags, stinking of oil and smoke, lay at the foot of the altar.

  Raithe stood motionless in the transept, staring up at God.

  A tear rolled from his right eye, tracing the fold beside his mouth to fall silently from his chin. Slowly, feeling suddenly old, ancient, Raithe dropped to one knee and lowered his head. He made a fist of his clean right hand. He struck himself on his chest, above his heart, and opened his palm toward the image of his god. Father, forgive me, he prayed. I have no choice.

  More tears pricked his eyes.

  Forgive me.

  Yet somewhere in his heart, a secret flame burned. Even his tear felt forced—felt performed—as it rolled down his cheek. What have I become? "Raithe . . ."

  The voice came from the chancel.
He lifted his head to find that the bundle of rags at the foot of the altar had opened to reveal a fatigue-seamed face smeared with muck. The rags shifted and moved in unpleasantly liquid ways, as though they covered some soft-boned sea creature that was barely more than a sac of jelly.

  "Your Radiance," Raithe said. "Thank you for receiving me."

  The bundle of rags shook itself and gradually unfolded to the height of a man. "I know why you're here."

  I doubt it, Raithe thought. Remaining on one knee, he said, "I have come to save the city, and the Empire."

  "Don't lie to me, Raithe." The rags shambled toward him along the nave. "Everyone lies to me. I can't understand why everyone thinks I don't already know the truth." A hand like that of a corpse in rigor extended from the rags, pointing with immobile fingers. "You've come for Caine. You were in this with him from the beginning."

  "Your Radiance, I can help you. I have a cure. I can make you well."

  "Don't lie to me!" The hand jerked at him as though casting a curse. "You came to me with this idea—this plan to bring him here. You came with him. You inflicted him upon me, and upon my city. All this—" The hand circled high, drawing in the boundless ravage of the city and the Empire around it. "All this is your doing. You made this happen, Raithe!" White flecks of spittle sprayed. "You! You! You!"

  Each shout brought the swing of the accusing hand a step closer. Raithe could only lower his head once more; eyes directed at the ragged oil-stained hem that half masked a pair of cut and bleeding bare feet, he said, "Your Radiance, please—"

  The shouts became a screech for the Eyes of God; a rattle of boots answered—many boots.

  "Your Radiance, there is a cure. You can be saved. The Empire can be saved—"

  The rigored hand swung down to point. "Arrest this man! Arrest him and kill him!"

  Raithe finished softly, "Humanity can be saved ..