Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  Will gathered within her, strengthening with her approach as though she drew it from this man's light; she exerted this will to slow herself, gaining in caution as her awareness congealed. Somehow she knew: This was enemy territory.

  She said to the sun: I know you. You are Kris Hansen.

  The sun replied: I am Deliann.

  Far, far above her—for now, imperceptibly, up and down had come to the lack—circled a bird of prey, soaring upon gleaming wings, proud and lonely. A falcon—perhaps an eagle

  Perhaps the phoenix.

  It struggled toward the sun, drawn forever by light and warmth—only to fall forever back, crippled by a wound to its wing. Its cry echoed in her heart, for it was she who had given that wound. She could feel the wound herself—her arm burned as though she held it in a furnace—yet she knew it was his.

  Within herself, she said, You are the Caineslayer.

  The bird replied, l am Raithe.

  Now on fields that rolled forever beneath that sun she found others: a great dire wolf with dewclaws cut, limping in pain but still fierce and deadly; a woman of volcanic basalt thrust freshly up from the earth, sharp edges not yet rounded by millennial erosion. She found trees and flowers and cats and mice, snakes and toads and fish

  And she found a man. He sat on a rock, elbows on knees, staring at her.

  She knew every inch of him.

  The glossy black hair, sprung grey at the temple above the salted black of his beard: her fingers knew that texture. His darkly gleaming eye, the slanted scar across his twice-broken nose—she had felt these with her lips. Those hard and lethal hands had cupped her breasts and stroked warmth along her thighs.

  He wore a loose black leather tunic open in front, faded and cracked, white salt rings of ancient sweat circling the armpits. His soft black breeches were covered with cuts and tears crudely sewn. Coarse brown thread showed like old bloodstains against the leather.

  Her heart sang, and she flew to him.

  Slowly, deliberately, his right hand went inside his tunic, and when it came out again it held a long, keen fighting knife.

  "That's close enough," he said.

  She stopped, puzzled, hurt sparking somewhere behind what on a mortal body would have been her ribs. Hari

  "Hari's dead." He pointed the knife at her eye. "So are you. Let's skip the happy-to-see-you bullshit, huh?"

  Hari, I don't understand—why won't you let me touch you?

  He flicked the point of the knife toward the circling bird of prey. "Because I have too fucking good an idea what can happen if you do." I only want to share with you. To join with you.

  "No."

  We can be one, here. We can truly share. We can love each other—"Not like that."

  All I want is to be together

  "Tough shit."

  You treat me like an enemy.

  His eyes glittered black and hard: chips of obsidian. "Yeah."

  Hari—Caine— Her mental voice roughened, and deepened; she tried to cough it clear, but instead it swelled within her chest to Ma'elKoth's subterranean rumble. Caine, I love you. We love you.

  "Hold out your hand."

  She hesitated.

  "Come on," he said. "We're a little past playing shy, huh? Your hand." All right.

  She reached out a hand that had the shape of her own, but the size of Ma'elKoth's—and had Kollberg's oiled-parchment skin and arthritis-knobbed joints. He shook his head and pointed to her left—her wounded, burning, all-too-human hand.

  "That one."

  She drew back.

  "Don't you trust me?" His wolf-grin said he didn't really care about her answer.

  She found, astonished, that she didn't—and at first she couldn't say why.

  She didn't trust him; she couldn't trust him. She had been deceived by him before, hurt by him, destroyed by him. He had lied and lied and lied to her, and his lies had savaged her life; he was the source of all her unbearable suffering these long seven years. He had threatened her, and mocked their lawful caste relationship. He had struck her: he had broken her nose, had kicked her in the balls

  In the balls? she thought. Hey, wait.

  Before the other two of the three she was could stop her, she put out her hand. Faster than their eyes could follow, his knife flashed underhand and drove up between the bones to jut through her palm: a conjured apparition of steel, welling black blood from its base.

  The searing ice-steel spike turned to white-hot iron as he twisted it to wedge the blade against the bone; then he used the blade to wrench their hand over sideways and pull them off balance. They gasped in shock that was yet too fresh to be pain, and gaped in astonishment at the blood of black oil that rolled down the blade and dripped from the point.

  Where the black oil touched, the grass beneath their feet curled and blackened and began to smoke.

  What are you DOING?

  His wolf-grin answered. "Holding you steady."

  In the far black distance above, the sun drew an arrow of light back to his heart, and let it fly.

  The arrow's meteor-streak drove through the injured wing of the phoenix and struck her on the hand, where Caine's knife had pierced her. It flashed into her and through her, through the god at her back and the god behind him, joining all of them with the phoenix along a dazzling line of blue-white Cerenkov radiation.

  Power pulsed up the line toward the phoenix, and it gave a heartbreaking cry. From its injured wing, black blood sprayed like rain over all the world.

  "This is a metaphor, you understand," Caine said. "I imagine if you concentrate, you can feel what's really happening."

  She felt

  From the spring near the crest of Khryl's Saddle, a trickle of black oil joined the sewage runoff of the rail camp. In the great forest of the north, needles of spruce and aspen withered and blackened, and the amber that swelled from gaps in bark was black as onyx. In the Boedecken Waste, oil bubbled up out of the buried depths of the marshes and spread necrotic swathes through the living green.

  Her horror spread to the others who shared her consciousness. Stop it—you have to stop it!

  "No," Caine said. "I don't."

  Hari—Caine, please! Stop it now!

  "No."

  She could feel the life draining from her already, deadness climbing her fingers like leprosy. Caine you'll kill me

  His wolf-grin widened, and lost any trace of humor. "You're already dead. We're killing the river."

  You can't! You can't do this!

  "No?" He barked a harsh laugh. "Who are you talking to?"

  Everyone—everything—will die! All of it—every living creature

  "That's right. Then what good does your fucking link do you? You'll have nothing. Shit, you'll have less than you started with. Think about it, Ma'elKoth: How many Beloved Children are gonna survive this? What happens to your precious godhood when all your worshipers are dead?"

  And that was when Pallas Ril understood. Imaginary tears poured from her imaginary eyes. Her eyes said Thank you, but only her eyes.

  His wolf-grin thawed a little. "I told you to trust me."

  Other words held her lips. This is a bluff

  "Sure it is."

  You kill yourself along with the river; this poison will slay you as surely as any salmon or hawk.

  Caine's smile warmed even more. "Ever play Chicken?"

  Outrage gathered within her, but the outrage was not hers. The voice from her lips said, This is no game. Not when the stakes are the lives of all within the Chambaygen's bound.

  His smile went hot. "I wouldn't have come to the party if I didn't want to dance."

  It seemed then that a long time passed, in which the only sound was the distant, thin sobs of a young girl. We still have Faith.

  "Yeah?" His tone was square and warm, but ice in his eyes froze his smile into a mask. "And what can you do to her that's worse than what you're doing right now?"

  You are beyond ruthless. You are beyond criminal. You are a monster


  Caine's presence solidified beyond his mask of ice: he became dark and gleaming, diorite in motion, absolute, unanswerable. "You should have thought of that before you hurt my daughter."

  Stop this. You must stop this!

  "Make me," he said, and vanished.

  With him went the phoenix, and the sun, and the meadow, the world and all the stars.

  She did not fall into the lack. The channel of venom pouring into the river was enough of a living connection to sustain her consciousness. She was herself the universe: vast and minute together, and empty of all save pain and creeping death.

  And hope.

  9

  The Social Police officer at the door to the surgery had stood so still for so long that when he finally moved, Avery Shanks flinched; a tingling shock from the middle of her back shot painfully out into her fingers and toes. She clenched her stinging fingers into fragile, futile fists and hunched her shoulders around the hammering of her heart. All this from the smallest gesture: the officer did no more than step to one side and open the door.

  Through the door came Tan'elKoth, with two more officers behind.

  Something—some subtle difference in his face, his bearing, something bleak and impersonal brought a sick darkness to her chest. Her mouth tasted of tin. "Tan'elKoth," she said, still uncertain enough to hope that she was wrong. "Is it over? Is it finally over?"

  He loomed over her like a granite cliff. "Gather your belongings. We leave within the hour."

  "Leave?" she repeated stupidly. She made her aching joints move enough to let her sit up. "Tan'elKoth—?"

  "Ma'elKoth," he corrected dispassionately.

  Avery trembled. "I don't understand—"

  He had already turned away. He stood beside the table to which Faith was bound, undoing her straps. A pair of Social Police officers pulled Faith's W and catheter-line relief bags from their hooks on the table and hung them on an odd device nearby. This device looked rather like a levichair, but instead of magnetic suspensors, it rode on wheels: two large spoked wheels in back and a pair of smaller ones in front. Tan'elKoth lifted Faith from the table and began to strap her into the wheeled chair.

  And that was the subtle change: she saw it now. He no longer seemed aware of the Social Police, nor they of him, but both worked with common purpose in mechanical coordination, requiring neither word nor gesture.

  "What are you doing? Tan'elKoth—Ma'elKoth—she's too weak! You can't move her, she'll die!"

  He reached her side in a single step, gathered her shirt into one hand, and lifted her to her feet, neither roughly nor gently—more with a kind of impersonal dispassion, as though she were so alien that he could not conceive what might cause her either pleasure or pain. "You will not let her die," he said. "You will provide whatever care she requires."

  "I—I ..." Tears gathered in her eyes, and she could not speak.

  She was stretched too thin; she had lived in this tiny room before the silvered masks of the Social Police for too long; she had charred her heart with too many acid hours helplessly witnessing Faith's endless nightmare.

  She longed for the bottle of Teravil that was still in her bag; chemical comfort was the only kind of which she could still dream. But she hated herself enough already. If she were to give herself rest while Faith stayed there, stayed strapped to that steel table, stayed in the twilight fever dream of the drugs that dripped into her arm, she could never live with herself.

  Would never live with herself.

  She had already decided that when she could no longer resist the pull of the sedatives, she would use them all. When she could find any way out from under the inhuman silver gaze of the Social Police, she would share them with Faith.

  Because she could never leave her here alone.

  She said, finally, softly, "Yes. Whatever she requires."

  Behind him, the Social Police strapped a gleaming metallic harness over Faith's chest.

  "But but, where are we going?"

  "Home," he said, and turned away once more to adjust the harness. "Home?" she repeated, horrified. "Overworld? What has happened to you? Why are you acting like this? You can't just move her like furniture she won't live a day!"

  "A day," Ma'elKoth said distantly, "will be enough."

  The war of the dark angel and the god of dust and ashes came to turn upon a question of battle.

  Of the outcome, there could be little doubt.

  The soldiers of the god of dust and ashes had weapons of unimaginable power. They were the best trained, most disciplined fighters this world had ever seen. Their officers were competent, and their morale was unbreakable.

  The allies of the dark angel were starving and sick, wounded, disorganized, and distrustful of each other.

  Yet there is fighting, and there is fighting: some weapons are more useful than others, and not all battles must be won.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The first ambush was, in broad outline, representative of all the encounters between the friars of the Ankhanan Embassy and the Social Police. It came as the last boats of the Bauer Company of the 82nd Force Suppression Unit cleared Fools' Bridge.

  The boats had proceeded without haste but steadily, threading their way through the dead and burning trees that studded the river; a man in the lead boat of each lashed-together triad held a large canister of pressurized foam that could be sprayed liberally onto any burning oil that came too close. The rest crouched watchfully, weapons at the ready.

  The friars who lay in ambush had no time to make a concerted plan, but what they lacked in coordination they made up for in firepower. The men in the lead boats had no chance.

  As the first triad of lashed-together boats hummed silently toward Knights' Bridge, close along the sheer Old Town wall, a shimmering blue-white plane of energy flared out from the dockside. This plane of energy fanned horizontally for barely a second, but in that time it sliced neatly through the heads and shoulders of several of the dozen riflemen in the first boat, and sheared exactly in half, just below the navel, the mage who guided the boat. His torso slid backward and toppled into the river, and the power he had been channeling through his staff exploded into a jagged ball of lightning that conducted well enough through wire-inlaid armor to roast several more riflemen.

  Instantly the other three triads turned for the dockside, but the two remaining boats from the first triad drifted powerlessly while riflemen within them frantically pulled collapsible oars out from storage pockets. Before they could use them effectively, ionizing radiation made a laser-straight blue line from the arch of Knights' Bridge to the surface of the river.

  Spreading in a fan upstream from where that line touched, the water instantly congealed to frosted glasslike solid that looked like ice, but was warm to the hand. The boats stuck fast within it, and now nut-sized pellets streaked toward them from several directions. These pellets stuck to what they struck, and an instant later they erupted in gouts of flame intense enough to melt the plastic components of the rifles, set fire to the ballistic cloth that covered the riflemen's armor, and ignite the flesh beneath it.

  However, the thin line of radiation also marked its point of origin and gave the riflemen their first target.

  Their reply was a stackfire volley from a double handful of Heckler-Colt MPAR 12 assault rifles. These rifles were a century and a half out of date, requiring manual sighting and carrying only sixteen stackfire cartridges in each of their dual magazines, but since a stackfire cartridge comprised a tube of eight 5.52 millimeter solid-block caseless rounds that fire sequentially in slightly more than a tenth of one second, a single volley proved adequate.

  The friar who stood on Knights' Bridge, whose staff flamed with the power that had gelled the river, was exposed over the low retaining wall from his groin to the crown of his head. The exposed parts of him vanished into a spray of bloody mist and bone fragments, and his legs fell in opposite directions. The detonation of his staff bit a buckboard-sized chunk out of the stone arch; the r
iver below melted into ordinary water and flowed once more.

  Before the lead boat of the second trio could reach the bank, it was seized as though by a giant invisible hand and yanked into the air. The adept and most of the riflemen bailed out, but a few unfortunate soldiers had gotten their gear tangled in the boats' nylon-net storage pockets, or had foolishly chosen to hang on, and were hurled hundreds of yards up into the night sky.

  As the boats fell, still lashed together, the rope that joined them caught on a bartizan of the Old Town wall; they swung down and slammed against the wall like clappers of a giant stone bell, crushing the men inside. Other men fell from the sky to their deaths on the streets; some landed on rooftops or in the branches of burning trees.

  The Telekinesis that had seized the boat was invisible to ordinary eyes, but to an adept in mindview it blazed with furious light as did the stream of Flow that poured through the hand sculpted of diamond that a friar, hidden around the corner of a warehouse, used to create it. The three surviving Artan adepts communicated his location, and a scant second later that location was the intersection of three expanding spheres, each comprising several thousand sewing-needle-sized flechettes, produced by three RG 2253A antipersonnel rifle grenades in simultaneous airbursts at an altitude of precisely 3.5 meters.

  What remained of the friar was not recognizable as human.

  The other two triads had reached the docks, and seventy riflemen fanned out among the burning trees that were the last of the unnatural jungle that still stood, here at the epicenter from which the fire had spread. Those riflemen who had bailed into the river were left to swim as best they could; they made inviting targets for the ambushers, and now each time magick flared the man who used it could be located and killed.

  Bauer Company methodically and deliberately secured the dockside. They were in no particular hurry; they knew, as their opponents did not, that they were only the first of the 82nd's reinforced rifle companies to enter Ankhana. The whole of their job was to spring ambushes and probe the strength of resistance, and they had done it well.