So he swallowed it.
He swallowed it because that chip of griffinstone is also powering another effect, and the action of that effect, roughly speaking, is to make Toa-Sytell willing to do just about anything—even swallow a griffinstone, even accept the Folk as full citizens of Ankhana, even get a whole rifle battalion of Social Police to take off their magick-resistant helmets so that a hundred-odd primals could hit them all with a shot of mental fairy dust—to please his new best friend.
While the whole Ankhanan army looks dumbly at the snoozing So cial Police, Toa-Sytell beams a smile down toward us and gives Raithe a little wave.
I nudge him with an elbow. "Congratulations, kid. You just took over the Empire."
"I have taken over nothing," Raithe says. "We have accomplished nothing."
His voice is bleak and fatal, so empty that the orders bawled by the Patriarch—bind these Aktiri traitors; disarm them; bind them hand and foot—fade into a background wash of white noise; while the astonished Ankhanan soldiers gradually bestir themselves to comply, I'm lost in the vast echoic hollow of Raithe's stare.
"I wouldn't call this nothing, kid. We took the city ..." But the forced whistling-in-the-dark tone of my own voice muzzles me, and the words trickle away.
"Did you think He wouldn't know?" Raithe asks. "Did you think we could surprise Him?
"I have before."
"No," Raithe says, "you haven't."
Dark thunder rumbles in the east and becomes a buzzing whine that threatens a roar.
"He is no longer the man you defeated," Raithe says, his voice mirroring the rising howl that curdles my stomach, because I know the sound, a sound I never dreamed could shimmer Ankhanan air.
Turbocells.
"He is no longer a man at all."
He lifts his eyes to the east, and I follow his gaze, and the howl of turbocells becomes a shattering roar.
The sun weeps lethal titanium tears.
All true stories end in death.
This is the end of the tale of the crooked knight.
TWENTY-FOUR
Deliann sat upon the Ebony Throne, the blade of Kosall rough-crusted and cold across his knees, and the Hall of Justice throbbed with pain.
Pain shimmered starkly in the brilliant sunbeams that struck like spears through the clerestory; pain sizzled in the black oil that seeped from the abcess on his thigh and burned the flesh of his leg to the smoking bone. The granite countenance of the giant carven Ma'elKoth had gone blank with agony, and the sand on the arena floor below the dais stung as though it had been rubbed into an open wound. The air itself snarled and snapped and bit at his flesh, and his every breath inhaled white flame.
The hall was empty, ring upon ring of vacant gaping benches climbing the sides of the bowl; Deliann was alone with the pain.. But the pain was not alone with Deliann. With the pain, threading among and through its every splinter,-came terror and panic, despair and the bleak surrender that is the bottomless abyss of death.
Some small portion of this pain and terror and despair and death was Deliann's; the rest came from outside. It rode the river's pulse into his heart from the brilliant sunlit morning, in the crisp autumn air, where assault cars swooped and spun and spat fire.
Deliann had less than nine minutes to live.
2
Those sun-tears blossom in four petal-perfect wingovers, and laser-straight lines of tracers from their gatling cannon stitch geometric gouts of exploding stone into the streets below. They claw pyrotechnically along Gods' Way toward us, and the air hums with shrapnel, and I
I can only sit and watch.
The assault cars sweep overhead, spraying missiles and HEAP rounds. The western curve of the Sen-Dannalin Wall shrugs like it's tired after standing five hundred years; it decides to sit down in a landslide of masonry and limestone dust. The cannon rounds hit the street like grenades with splintered flagstones for shrapnel. They shred the army, the primals, the soapies indiscriminately: shrapnel has no friends.
I still don't move.
I am paralyzed by how badly I have miscalculated.
Up on the Address Deck, Toa-Sytell stretches his hands toward the assault cars. He could be ecstatic at the power of his returning god, or begging for mercy, or panicked and crapping his robe. Nobody will ever know, because a missile takes him right through the chest—an eyeblink of astonishment at the gape of his guts to the morning sky—before it detonates against the wall at his back. The Patriarch, the soapy brigadier, the Household Knights, and most of the wall of the Temple of Prorithun vanish in a fireball that spits blood and bone fragments and chunks of stone into the sky.
And that's it, right there: that's what Raithe was talking about. Tan'elKoth wouldn't do this. He loves this city more than the world. He would never do this.
Pieces of the Patriarch and the Temple and the rest rain over us in clatters and liquid plops, and I can't really hear anything anymore except a general roaring in my ears and I know the assault cars are banking around for another pass, and now some riot vans swing into view over Six Tower and settle toward the middle of the far end of Gods' Way, seeking solid earth beneath them to absorb the recoil of the heavy artillery that sprouts from their turrets.
The riot vans open up with their twin forward-mount fifties, taking chunks out of the stonework along the whole street, enfilading the fuck out of us—the heavy slugs popping through plate mail sound like God's shaking a tin can full of rocks—and somehow that finally gets my attention. I twist around so my shackled hands can grab the lip of the Fountain of Prorithun behind me, and I drag myself over into the bowl, leaving skin behind on the smog-corroded limestone. I fall into the shallow fountain water that's now turbid with dirt and blood, and
Oh
Oh, my good and gracious motherfucking god.
I get it now.
He can make the cars work, he can fucking well make anything work—The Courthouse—maybe Deliann—maybe if I can
Christ, my legs, I'll never make it
I could be wrong. I have to be wrong.
Jesus—Tyshalle----anybody who's listening: Please, please, please let me be wrong.
3
From deep within the oceanic boil of pain and fear, using the whole of the river for his senses, Deliann watched the slaughter. It became for him an ebb and flow and tangle of conflicting energies, an abstract action-painting come to life. The sky erupted incarnadine and amethyst that swept against the sunflower, azure, and viridian of the lives in the city below. The colors met and mixed, broke apart and blended together again in a rith dream of astonishing beauty: a living Mandelbrot set spiraling into itself and out again: a spray of wildflowers springing fresh and lovely from a shitpile of ugly, desperate brutality.
For all its terror and savagery, for all its howled agony and whimpered despair, the flesh that bruised and bled was only shadow: translucent, incorporeal, more rhythm than reality, a semivisible expression of energy at play. That energy followed laws of its own making, in a system as ordered as a galaxy and as random as a throw of dice, an ever-shifting balance of the elegant with the raw.
For the first time, he understood Hari. He understood his passion for violence. He could see how Hari could love it so.
It was beautiful.
But it's his eyes that see that beauty, Deliann thought. Not mine.
Because with the sense of the river, Deliann felt each slash and smack of bullet and shrapnel into flesh; he saw through the eyes of men and women who clutched futilely at the spurt of blood from their own wounds and the wounds of their friends, who tried to stuff spilled guts back into the gape of ripped-open bellies, who tried to kiss life back into staring dust-coated eyes; he felt their terror, and their despair, and he decided that he was going to have to do something about this.
It was this decision that killed him.
He had six minutes to live.
4
I pull myself up to the lip of the fountain, and the limestone shivers with impacts of fr
agments and slugs and the air is alive with zips and zings and shrieks of jagged shrapnel and the handclap hypersonic pops of 50-caliber slugs: the open space above the fountain's lip is itself a predator and it's got my scent. I have looked death in the eye plenty of times, but this is different: it's random, unconscious. Unintentional.
Impersonal.
This is not my kind of fight.
Poking my head up to get a peek over the rim is the hardest goddamn thing I've ever done in my life.
Pretty much everybody who can still move has cleared the plaza by now; a few scarlet-smeared shapes of anonymous flesh drag themselves inch by shivering inch toward any shadow that might promise cover. At the far end of Gods' Way the main cannon of the riot vans ca-rump whistling shells that blast house-sized chunks out of the row of temples and government buildings lining the Way; the East Tower of the Colhari Palace overlooks the massacre with a lopsided face of gaping ragged empty eyes and smoke-drooling idiot's mouth before one more shell blasts out the cheek and the whole damn thing topples sideways and collapses in a mushroom cloud of masonry dust to the courtyard nine stories below.
The Folk are starting to fight back now, with the kind of heroism that would be inspiring if it wasn't so pathetic: firebolts splash harmlessly off the radically sloped ceramic armor of the riot vans, and some ogrilloi have figured out how to shoot the soapies' assault rifles. They'd do more damage with harsh language and a stern look.
One lone treetopper flutters up into the path of an assault car, and she and her birdlance get sucked into one of the turbocells. What's left of her sprays out the back in a crimson mist, but that birdlance was steel. The turbocell chews itself into a metal-screaming burst of junk, and the assault car slews sideways and dips and hits the street and bounces, skipping up over my head in a thundering meteor-trail of flame that skips one more time before it slams into the Financial Block and explodes, which takes out the whole building, and the damn thing just keeps on exploding as its munitions pop off like a full-scale fireworks display: rockets and starshells and mortar bombs and showers of flame.
And fucking Raithe is still sitting where I left him: in seiza right in front of the fountain, calmly picking the locks on his shackles while he stares at the carnage around us with a dreamy smile on his face. The next assault car swoops toward us and strafes a line of cannonfire that's gonna go right up his nose, so I reach over and grab the back of his collar and haul his ass into the fountain next to me.
He still has that dreamy smile after I dunk us both in the water and three or four 25-millimeter rounds blow chunks out of the fountain's bowl but somehow manage to miss our tender flesh. He lies on his back, the dirty water swirling bloody mud clouds around him as it drains out from the fractured bowl. He says something—the roar of turbines and artillery fire blows it away, but I can read his lips.
You saved my life.
I give him a shake that bounces his skull off the limestone. "Where's Ma'elKoth?" I shout against the roar-walled air. "Can you still feel him? Is he still coming—or did he stop?"
"You said you'd kill me if you ever got the chance," he shouts back, "but you saved me, instead!"
"I changed my fucking mind, all right? Don't make me regret it. Where is he?"
His eyes glaze, fixing on some quiet distance where the blood and smoke and howl of combat is not even a dream. "Stopped," he says, voice dropping. "He's stopped. Half a day's walk, almost."
Ah, god.
I let go of his shoulders and bury my head in my hands.
I never dreamed I could be so utterly outfought.
A day's walk, to a friar on a decent road, is about thirty miles. I know why he has stopped, fifteen miles outside the city.
I know what he's waiting for.
Ah, god.
I prayed I was wrong, and this is Your answer.
5
Deliann sighed.
He lifted Kosall by the quillons, and discovered that he was afraid. He remembered too well the excruciating rip of his mind stretching beyond its tolerance, when he had only flashed upon the goddess; he feared that to touch her directly, mind to mind, would burn his brain in an instant.
Rather than put his hand upon the hilt and confront her, he sought within himself the chain of energy he had created, to bind the gods to the river and the river to the gods. When he found it, he visualized it as a channel, rather than a chain; a long narrow sluice through which flowed the river's pain. Along that channel he sent forth a tendril of consciousness—gingerly, almost tenderly, attempting only to brush her uttermost periphery.
In a vast darkness of doubt and horror, he found her: clothed in sunlight, weeping tears of blood.
She lifted her head and regarded him. He could not guess what it was she might see; he had no sense of a body, or a face. To himself, he seemed only a disembodied spark of awareness.
I know you. She extended a hand, pierced through the palm, as though offering a kiss of the wound's bloodless lips. Her other hand she placed upon her breast, above her heart. Have you come to hurt me again?
I hope not, he replied.
My daughter, she said tragically, grey winter closing down upon her robe of light. My daughter is dying.
He thought of Demeter and Persephone, and could not know if that thought was his, or if it had come from her. Many others live. You must save those who can still be saved.
Once I styled myself a savior, she replied. Now I am only the image of a dead woman. Saving is beyond me.
I will not argue. You must act.
How can I? With no body—with no will
I have a body. Take me as you would have taken Raithe. What you lack, I will provide.
Fresh tears of blood coiled down her cheeks. You do not know what you are offering
I do not offer. I demand: Take me. Save these people.
He opened his mind to the wounded goddess.
She drifted toward him helplessly.
It will kill you, she wept.
He replied, I know.
He drew her to him, and then she was around him, and she was within him, and she was him. He made her pain his, and he made his intention hers. She reached through him to the river, and the Song of Chambaraya swelled within his heart from a single thin chime of welcome to a titanic symphony of power.
Five minutes.
6
The god felt the questing tendrils of a mind colored in the shades of the goddess touch briefly upon its inmost nature
And just as suddenly fade.
The creature that had been Kollberg felt the ghost-echo of the goddess' pain vanish from its collective consciousness; an instant later, Faith's silent weeping stilled, and it knew it had been betrayed.
The girl was unconscious, and the link was broken.
A sunburst of rage flashed through him, its glare wiping away the grassy meadow on the bank of the Great Chambaygen, wiping away Ma'el-Koth who paced on the grassy verge in his stylish suit, wiping away the limousine, the Social Police, Avery Shanks—wiping away, for one instant, even the power of the god he was.
For that instant, he was again Arturo Kollberg, once an Administrator, once again betrayed.
By a Michaelson.
With a snarl, he lunged across the passenger lounge and grabbed the collar of Faith's white cotton shift. His arthritic fingers twisted into a fist—and his arm was seized by the impersonal gauntlet of a Social Police officer. He tried to yank himself free, but he might as well have tried to shift a mountain with his wasted arm.
Futility flashed in where his rage had been. He hung, helpless—but that helplessness, so long familiar, brought him back to himself. He was once again the god, and he was happy.
The god understood that the girl had been poisoned; it could feel her slow slide down to death through Ma'elKoth's magickal perception. The god also knew, now, that the sword was in the Hall of Justice in the Ankhanan Courthouse.
In the same instant that knowledge had been acquired, an impulse had formed itself som
ewhere in the unimaginable vastness of ten billion subconsciously linked minds. It may have come from Ma'elKoth, or from Kollberg, or from Marc Vilo, or from any of the other mutually anonymous members of the Board of Governors; it may have come from a Syn-Tech chemical engineer, or an undercover operative of the Social Police at an illegally clandestine Labor gathering, from a housewife in Belgrade or a janitor in New Delhi. Perhaps it originated in all of them together; it was another way of sharing guilt. One ten-billionth of the responsibility for this was a light enough burden for even the most sensitive to bear.
The bodies that had once housed Arturo Kollberg and Ma'elKoth shared a single identical smile.
Five minutes from now, the girl would be irrelevant.
Twenty thousand meters above Ankhana, a Bell & Howell AAV-24 Deva completed a long dive-curve, released a MEFNW blast-negative HEW, then generated maximum thrust as it sped away toward the east.
7
My mouth is numb; my lips barely work. I shout in Raithe's ear to be heard above the shatter of cannonfire. "Can you talk to him?"
"What?"
I dig one hand hard into his shoulder. "Can you talk to Ma'elKoth? You're aware of him—is he aware of you? Can you communicate?"
His eyes are still lost in the heavens. "One vehicle—one Bell & Howell AAV-24 Deva, crew of four, effective ceiling twenty-five thousand meters, top speed Mach two-point-one, armament—"
"Stay with me, goddammit!" I give him another shake. "You have to talk to Ma'elKoth—you have to tell him—"
"It dives, falling like a falcon—"
All I can think about for one endless second is how fucking cold the water is as it trickles away around us; I'm freezing in here, my hands are numb and my whole body shakes, and my voice fades in and out behind a roaring in my ears that's even louder than the battle around us. Because I knew that car would be up there. One, all alone.
One is all it takes.
Blade of Tyshalle Page 81