Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  Believe me.

  On a broad dais above the arena stands the Ebony Throne, brother to the Oaken Throne in the Great Hall of the Colhari Palace. Since the Assumption of Ma'elkoth, though, the Patriarch has passed judgment from a smaller, unadorned, unassuming chair—the Steward's Seat—on a dais of its own, below and to the right: the proper place for he who is only a servant of the God above.

  But the Ebony Throne has a better view.

  It's pretty comfortable, too.

  I sit with the blade of Kosall naked across my knees, and survey my new kingdom.

  The seating sweeps upward in a steep bowl, broken by an imposing prow of limestone that rises behind the Ebony Throne fully to the vault overhead. This bigass wedge had once been carved with the figure of Prorithun, but now bears the current face of Ankhanan Justice, such as it is: Ma'elKoth. Only Ma'elKoth can look over the shoulder of whatever judge might sit below.

  Big bastard always did like to kibitz.

  Row after row of those cut-stone benches are filled with my people, sitting, watching silently. Waiting for the show to begin. Almost two thousand, all told, human and primal and ogrillo, from the Pit and from the private cells. A few from the Shaft. Of those two thousand, maybe five hundred really feel like they owe me something, like they owe each other something. Of those five hundred, there's maybe fifty I can count on, when the shitstorm breaks. Maybe fifty, if I'm lucky.

  Maybe twenty will actually fight.

  The others just want to get the hell out of here. They want to live. I can't blame them. I don't blame them.

  I don't need them.

  For fighters, I've got those guys on the sand.

  A hundred and fifty armed friars, at least a quarter of them Esoterics. They bristle with swords and spears and carry short compound-recurved bows, and who knows how many wands and magicked crystals and crap like that. Shit, I'd match them against the Cats, and put three-to-one on the friars.

  Cash.

  The guy that Raithe speaks quietly with, down there in the middle—Acting Ambassador Damon—is twitchy as a street Temp on crank, but Raithe tells me he's solid. They all are. That's Monastic training for you: homicidal paranoia doesn't really get in the way. Might even be an advantage.

  You have to be crazy, to fight the Social Police.

  Raithe mounts the steps of the dais slowly, a little unsteadily. He's weak, shaky with blood loss, but his Control Disciplines keep him moving: biofeedback maintains his blood pressure, and he can mentally goose his endocrine system to release hormones that give him strength and suppress the pain. He can walk, talk, even fight, right up till he passes out again.

  He gets close and nods to me. "They will perform as required," he says softly. "Damon is a good man. He knows how to follow orders."

  I squint at him. "That's your definition of a good man?"

  His wintry eyes meet mine steadily. "What is yours?"

  Instead of answering, I look down into the five-gallon tureen some- body snagged from the commissary. It sits on the side table to my right, half full of water, warm as spit, in which my right hand soaks. I work my hand into a fist and out again. Ragged flaps of my knuckle skin drift like scraps of jellyfish, trailing straw-colored billows of blood.

  "All right," I tell him, pulling my hand out. "Take it."

  On the dais at my left side, I have Toa-Sytell, still chained, a huddled ball of feverish misery. Every once in a while he writhes, or makes a little whimpering noise; sometimes a tear or two trickles down his cheeks. Raithe makes a complicated gesture, knotting and unknotting his fingers like a cat's cradle of flesh and bone, and Toa-Sytell relaxes into unconsciousness.

  Raithe unties the gag and gently frees it from Toa-Sytell's slack mouth; slowly, almost reverently, he rinses the rag in the blood-tinged water of the tureen, then wrings it out before retying it between the Patriarch's teeth.

  I wave a hand at the tureen. "Here, take the soup down to your boys there. It's time for them to get to work."

  Expressionlessly, he picks it up and carries it down to the arena. "Line up," he says. "By rank. Damon: you are first."

  The Acting Ambassador steps up obediently. Slowly, with a kind of ritualistic solemnity, he cups some of the water in one hand and brings it to his lips, then steps aside to let the next friar come. Yeah, he'll take Raithe's orders.

  Raithe will take mine.

  Voluntarily.

  Faithfully.

  That's our deal: his obedience for my blood. And he is a man of honor. What does that say about me, if I can trust my enemies more than my friends?

  Raithe sits on the dais below me, pressing a hand against the wound in his side. "It is done, then," he says, dark and doom-haunted. "It is done. I am yours."

  "Relax, kid," I tell him. "It's not like you sold me your soul." His gaze is bleak as tundra. "What is a soul?"

  5

  Orbek comes through the arch at the back of the Hall at the head of a gaggle of Folk. He flicks a tusk back toward the corridor behind and gives me a nod.

  "Stay calm," I say generally. "Let them come."

  Folk flood through the door: a spume of madness whitecapped with the foam that trickles from their mouths. A lot of them are pretty far gone, so deep in the dementia that it's jangling their nerves, making them twitch and limp, stagger and spastically jerk. It's a testimonial to Kierendal's leadership that they haven't turned on each other; somehow she holds them together, somehow she directs their HRVP-spawned lunacy outside their group: toward the Imperials. Toward the humans.

  Toward me.

  And they smell: they carry a stink of bad meat and acid urine, of unwashed armpit and rotten teeth. It precedes them, an oily wave that flows into the Hall of Justice and fills it and closes over our heads. We could drown in this stench like rats in a rain barrel.

  They smell like Dad.

  Two weeks ago, that alone could have beaten me.

  Funny how things change.

  I lean to my right so I can see Kris in the Steward's Seat below, a step above and to the left of where Raithe sits. "Showtime."

  He makes no answer. Only the irregular hitching of his breath shows he's alive. "Hey," I mutter. "Come on, Kris. The party's starting." His eyes roll open, and he offers me a weak smile.

  "How're you doing?"

  His answer has the spooky distance of mindview. "Better. Much better, Hari. Up here—" A limp gesture takes in the whole world outside the Donjon. "—I can draw Flow to manage my fever. I am . . . grateful . . . that you brought me out of there."

  "How's the leg?"

  "It hurts," he admits with a wistful shrug, still smiling. "But only down in the bone, where it has always hurt. The flesh above ... well—" I get the picture. It's ugly. "Can you fix it?"

  "You see here—" He lays a hand upon the pus-soaked rag that serves as a bandage over the gaping abscess on his thigh. "—the result of my healing skill."

  "Hold your shit together. I need you lucid. None of this can work without you."

  "Frankly, Hari—" He coughs, and turns up his palm in a shrug of apology. "—I don't see how it can work with me. You haven't even said what you want me to do—"

  "Too late to argue about it now," I tell him, because here comes Kierendal, cradled like a bundle of sticks in an ogre's bridge-girder arms. She's naked, wasted, starved, smeared with filth. Her hair, her signature, that elaborate platinum coif, has become the straggled, finger-ripped wisps of a cartoon witch; what remains of it is plastered wet and greasy down the sides of her face. Her eyes like tarnished coins flick with foggy wariness. She didn't expect to find me waiting for her, and in her world, there's no such thing as a pleasant surprise.

  Then I watch her eyes track the leash that stretches from the arm of the Ebony Throne to the prison collar, and I watch her squint, and blink, and bring a trembling skeletal hand to her eyes to see if she can wipe away the image of Toa-Sytell chained to my chair like a dog. Her whole body starts to shake.

  That, right there, is a goo
d sign: some rationality remains. She's sane enough to be freaked out by how crazy this all is.

  At the ogre's heel comes Majesty, arms bound behind him, prodded along by an ogrillo bitch whose' neck is bigger around than my thigh. Dried blood flakes across his chin. His eyes bulge and he mouths silently: Caine. Hot staggering fuck.

  I acknowledge him with a glance, and squeeze my eyes into half a smile at Kierendal. "Have a seat, Kier," I say. "Tell your people to make themselves at home."

  She glazes over like I hit her with a club. "Caine—" she croaks through the general rumble and mutter. "I don't—how did you—why have—I don't understand!"

  "It's not that complicated," I tell her. "I'm doing some business in Ankhana right now, and I can't get it done with you trying to slip a knife in me every time you see my back. We need to reach an understanding."

  I can read her lips. "You know—?" she breathes. "You know I came here to kill you?"

  "You came to the Donjon to kill me. Here? You came because I invited you.

  "I—I don't—"

  "Look, it's simple," I tell her. "We're all here. We have maybe half an hour to settle this shit. Before anybody leaves this room, you and I need to be on the same side." I can't feel the Social Police closing in around the city—not like Raithe can—but I know they're there, closer every minute. Half an hour might be optimistic.

  "You you're asking me to join you?"

  "Asking, shit. We need you. We need your people. I'd be on my knees begging, but you might have heard my legs don't work so well."

  "You think I will accept this? Are you so naive?" Her voice has lost the croak, taking on instead a weird echoic nondirectional resonance, as though she's talking from inside my skull. She's recovering her self-possession in a hurry, and her eyes rake the room disdainfully. "To join you would make me an accomplice to your crimes."

  "Let's not start about my crimes, huh?"

  "Is that why you have brought me here?" she resonates acidly. "To protest your innocence?"

  "Fuck my innocence." I'm losing patience with this; maybe I didn't have much to begin with. "Are you willing to stand and listen to what we're up against? Yes or no. That's all I need out of you right now. Yes or no or shut up and fight."

  "Don't think you can bully me, Caine. I know what you are. Murderer. Liar. Aktir."

  I can feel the blood coming up my neck. "As long as we're calling names, why don't you try traitor on for size, you fucking slag?"

  This generates a warning rumble from the Folk she brought with her. "What are you talking about?"

  "Treason," I say. "Your treason."

  The rumble gets louder, but that weird voice of hers overrides it effortlessly. "Is treason really the word you want to use, Caine? When you have the Steward of the Empire chained like a dog?"

  I shrug. "He's not my king. On the other hand—" I nod toward Kris in the Steward's Seat, who goggles back at me in open horror, mouthing Hari, don't! "—Deliann, here, is yours."

  "You must be joking."

  "Yeah, that's me: a laugh a minute. We could all use a chuckle. Go ahead and tell everybody how you tried to murder the Mithondionne."

  That warning rumble from the Folk thickens, but it's met by a colder, darker growl from our guys, Folk and human alike: Kris is a popular guy. Kierendal's nonvoice overrides the swell of anger. "He is no king. He's a vile, murdering Aktir—as are you!"

  "Yeah. So what? He's also the Youngest of the Twilight King, and you fucking know it. You knew it then. You knew he was the last Mithondionne, and you ordered him killed."

  "He's not even primal," she snarls. "He's a human in disguise!"

  "You've got it backwards," I tell her. "The human is the disguise."

  Deliann crumples on the Steward's Seat as though something is eating his guts from the inside out and covers his face with his hands. "Hari," he murmurs, lost and empty and for my ears alone. "Hari, how can you do this to me?"

  "It's midnight, Kris," I tell him simply. "That's all."

  He lifts his head and shows me the question in his eyes.

  I explain, "Take off your mask."

  His eyes go wide and fill with sick pain. "They will never accept me." "Who gives a rat's ass what they accept? You know what you are. Fucking act like it."

  His gaze retreats inside his head, and I lift my eyes to meet Kierendal's disdainful stare. "I know you're not yourself these days, Kier. I know you've been sick, and it's hard for you to get shit straight in your head. This is your chance to make good. If you're willing to help, we can use you."

  Her eyes shimmer like fish scales. "And what's in it for me?"

  I shrug. "Your life."

  "Is that all you have to offer?" she says with scalding contempt.

  Raithe casts a surreptitious glance toward me from the arena floor. I give it back expressionlessly, then return to Kierendal. "I don't know what the penalty for attempted regicide is supposed to be among your people, but you're not among your people now. This is my court. You have a choice to make, Kier. Right now."

  "My people are ready to die for me, Caine. How many of these .. . creatures . . . are ready to die for you?"

  And that, I guess, pretty much says it all.

  "There's one way to find out," I say evenly.

  Her hands coil. "I do not bluff, Caine"

  "Yeah, I've heard that about you." Then simply, coldly, finally, all I have to say is: "Raithe."

  He claps his hands together as though he dusts sand from them in her direction. A spray of black droplets falls before him. Kierendal tries to speak, but her voice becomes a thick gargling roil of bodily sounds. She gapes at me for half of one blankly astonished second; then a rusty hinge-squeal hacking comes from her throat. Her sides heave, and she vomits blood down the legs of the ogre who holds her.

  "You bazztidz!" the ogre cries as though its heart is breaking. "You bazztidz—whaddid you do to Kier?" It falls to its knees and cradles Kierendal like an infant to its breast.

  Throughout the hall, my guys are on their feet. Below me, Raithe issues soft-voiced instructions to the friars; they spread out, closer to the cover of the arena wall, checking their weapons. He mutters at me over his shoulder, "Have you ever done anything that did not end in violent death?"

  "Sure, lots of stuff," I tell him. "I just can't think of any right now."

  This is gonna be one fucking ugly brawl. And maybe I knew it was gonna come to this. Maybe I was looking forward to it.,

  Maybe I am what they say I am.

  But a new light grows within the Hall of Justice, paler, steadier than the lamp flames and the scarlet flicker of the fires outside: a softly penetrant moonglow that does not admit of shadow. It gathers strength, intensifies, and the hall falls quiet as it touches each and all among us here, and every eye turns to find its source.

  It's coming from Deliann.

  He rises from the Steward's Seat, slow with infirmity. In the throbbing quiet, his voice is soft enough to break my heart. "No. No fighting. Not among us. No killing. I can't stand it."

  He sounds like he's standing at my shoulder. I have a feeling he sounds like he's standing at everybody's shoulder. The light gathers itself into a shining cloud around him and wreathes his brow with cold coronal flame. Then that light from his face flares out and grabs us all by the brain.

  For one infinite second that light drowns me with everything everyone else is feeling: pain and fear and bloodlust and anguish and fierce fighting joy and everything else, and the light makes them feel what I'm feeling, and all of us feel the lives of each of us and together we make a world of pain that he somehow draws out and ties together into a giant ball of misery, and he hugs it and holds it and that doesn't make it okay—it's not like that, nothing could ever make all this okay—but somehow it's not so bad, now, because it's spread out a little, shared a little, and no matter how alone we all are he knows exactly, exactly, what we're going through, how scared and hurt we all are, and he kind of says

  All right, you
're scared and hurt. It's okay to be scared, and it's okay to be hurt, because your life is a scary, painful place.

  Deliann says softly, "Rugo."

  The ogre lifts his head.

  "She need not die," Deliann says. "But there is only one hope of life for her. She must be restrained from any interference in the battle to come. She must be taken into the Donjon, and placed in a cell, and kept there until what is to come has passed over us all. Will you do that?"

  Rugo turns his face away. "I do thizz, she lives? You promizz?" "I have said so."

  Rugo's neck bends, and tears streak the globular surface of his eyes. "I guezz—she can't hate me more than zzhe doezz already."

  Deliann searches the hall like he's expecting to see someone he can't find; after a second or two, he nods to himself. "Parkk," he says to a rugged-looking stonebender up in back, not far from where Majesty stands. "Save her. Stay with her in the Donjon, and tend her when she wakes."

  The stonebender holds his place sullenly for a long moment like he's expecting a trick; then he shrugs and nods and makes his way to Kierendal's side. Stonebender magick should work even in the Donjon.

  Deliann lowers his head like he can feel my disapproval against the back of his neck. "Is it so wrong," he says softly, "that I would not have my first act as king be the execution of a friend?"

  "Did I say anything?"

  "No," Deliann replied. "But you were thinking very loudly. What do you want me to do, now?"

  All her people are still standing, staring, waiting. I can still use their help, if Deliann can get it for me. "You could start," I offer, "by telling everybody what the hell is going on."

  "Tell—?" he murmurs faintly. "How can I possibly tell? It's so huge—there's too much. How can I know what's important, and what's just detail?"

  "You don't have to know," I say. "Just decide."

  His feathery brows pull together.