Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  I want to look up, absurdly, to hunt the sky for the pinprick of titanium that I know will be invisible. I want to look, but I can't.

  I'm afraid.

  My mind smokes with cinematically vivid recollection of file footage from Indonesia. Inside my head, that titanium teardrop lays a tiny silver egg before it speeds away toward the rising sun

  "Tell him we surrender!" I snarl. "Goddammit, Raithe, you have to tell him we surrender! Tell him I give up! I'll give him the sword—whatever he wants—just tell him don't do it!"

  The funny thing is, I'm the one who gave him the idea.

  "Shit, they'd nuke the city."

  "One city is a small price to pay for an entire world."

  "Yeah? What if it's your city?"

  "I am willing to take that risk"

  He's trumped us. Called my bluff.

  It'll kill every single one of the former inmates of the Pit who carry Shanna's countervirus. It'll kill every single one of us.

  Raithe.

  Deliann.

  T'Passe.

  Orbek.

  Dinnie, Fletcher, Arken, Gropaz

  Damon. Majesty. The Faces. The Serpents. The Subjects of Cant. Me.

  One single flash of invisible light will burn our bones, and Ma'elKoth walks in here whenever he feels like it and picks up the sword, and game fucking over. I thought I was hard-core. I thought I was ruthless.

  Shit.

  I didn't even know what ruthless looks like.

  "Does he hear you? Raithe, goddammit, does he hear you?"

  Raithe's gaze returns from heaven and meets mine. "No," he says. "No,

  He doesn't. I can no longer feel Him. Any of them."

  An ice dagger slips in between my ribs. I make myself ask, "Faith—?" He gives his head a tiny shake. "Unconscious, at the very least. Possibly dead."

  My head lowers: my neck bending under the brutal weight of the futility of existence.

  Before the astonishing pain can take full hold of me, a new thunder blossoms in the sky. I wrench myself over beside Raithe and look up. Above us a coruscant aster of flame spreads its tendrils for an instant, then vanishes into a jellyfish spray of black smoke and falling bits of metal. Even as I watch, another assault car detonates the same way, and another.

  Raithe speaks my guess, but in his voice is certain knowledge. "Deliann has joined the battle."

  "You can feel him?" I seize Raithe's shoulders and bounce his head off the stone. "You have to talk to him! You have to tell him to get the fuck out of here—"

  A grin blossoms on his face, the only honestly happy smile I've ever seen there. "No."

  "Raithe, you have to tell him! The caverns—he can still make it to the caverns! He can live—he can defend the sword! You have to tell him to defend the sword!"

  "No, I don't," he says serenely, lying back as though the puddled water is a comfortable bed. "I don't have to do anything."

  My vision hazes red and the next thing I know I have my hands on his collar, twisting it into a strangle with tension against the chains that connect my shackles. But he's a trained Esoteric, and he breaks my hold with a leverage move of his left hand against my right wrist—and the oil from his skin burns me like acid. My hand springs open, and he shoves me away.

  "I'm free," he says. "Free."

  Christ, he's raving. "You're free to fucking die," I tell him. "You don't know what's coming—"

  "I don't care what's coming."

  That assault car dives above my head and inside my skull simultaneously; I don't have time to waste on Raithe right now.

  Guess I'm gonna have to do this the hard way.

  I leave him lying on the wet stone aiming his idiot's grin at the sky, and drag myself toward the western edge of the fountain's bowl, hoping the fountain's superstructure will give me at least a shadow of cover.

  It takes me a long time to get into mindview.

  I know I'm there when I don't care anymore about getting shot or shredded or flash-roasted to death; I only care about getting to the Courthouse. Getting to Deliann. To Kris. Slowly, unsteadily, I climb out of the bowl and stand.

  Bullets and shrapnel fan me with turbulence-swirled breeze.

  I lean forward, and one of my legs swings ahead to stop me from falling. I keep leaning, and my legs keep swinging, and I don't fall yet. I'm on my way.

  8

  HEW stands for High Energy Weapon, a centuries-old designation for offensive devices that rely primarily upon nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, or some combination of the two for their destructive effect.

  Blast-negative is a somewhat misleading appellation created by the weapon's design team, reflecting their successful tamping of energetic photon—gamma and hot X-ray—emissions, thus reducing the blast and thermal effects of the individual fireballs to roughly .1 kiloton apiece: a mere hundred times as powerful as a large chemical high-explosive bomb.

  MEFNW stands for Multiple Enhanced-Fast-Neutron Warheads. Fast neutron radiation decreases by a factor of ten for every five hundred meters from the detonation point, due to atmospheric absorption; the weapon's design team countered this effect by using a large number of very small individual warheads that automatically deploy during system activation, spreading a nuclear umbrella over the entire target area that delivers an average of ten thousand rads of prompt radiation to all targets within the deployment radius. Fast neutrons are extremely penetrating, even heavy shielding may only reduce this exposure by two to five thousand rads. A dose of eight thousand rads is instantly incapacitating and fatal; five thousand induces incapacitation within five minutes of exposure, and death within two days.

  Enhanced-Fast-Neutron weapons also produce strong secondary radiation, as neutrons striking atomic nuclei in the ground and surviving structures create a broad array of extremely unstable isotopes. Neutron-induced secondary radiation decays by 90 percent within seven hours, but it can still kill; total exposure rises with time. The passage of forty-eight hours reduces radiation to a nonhazardous level, but by this time, any living material that might have survived the initial prompt radiation has suffered mortal damage from the secondary radiation.

  This is, in fact, the use for which this particular weapon was designed: to sterilize localized HRVP outbreaks. Part of the rationale for the blast-negative feature of this weapon is that it, unlike conventional thermonuclear weapons, does not generate powerful Mach waves that might scatter viral proteins beyond the lethal radiation zone.

  As it fell, the HEW deployed computer-controlled warpable airfoils to control its path and counteract the vagaries of high-altitude winds, and began to shed bomblets with airfoil vanes of their own. Each bomblet carried its own targeting system, comparing the radar signature of the central device against the infrared image of the city below. Cities are always hotter than the surrounding countryside, and this one in particular blazed like a beacon.

  Radar-altimeters ticked off the fall of the warheads. Drag created by the airfoils stabilized their terminal velocity at 97.3 meters per second after approximately nine seconds, continually adjusting for increasing air pressure as they fell.

  Optimal detonation altitude is two kilometers.

  One hundred seventy-six seconds to go.

  9

  Raithe lay on his back in the fountain's bowl, savoring the chill of the wet rough limestone against his back. The sky above him was full of lead and steel, smoke and flames, the howls of Boeing VT-17 Air Superiors and the shrieks of the dying. The intimacy of his connection to the waiting god lent him a curiously doubled perspective: his Overworld eyes saw armored giants hurling fireballs at the city while his Earthly knowledge showed him RV-101 Jackson MAATTs—Mobile Armored Artillery and Troop Transports—dug into the street with their recoil-absorbing mounting screws, firing their 122-millimeter main guns; the Air Superiors that strafed the city looked to him like flaming chariots of minor sun gods, though he could at will quote the specifications of their powerplants, armament, speed, and range. At need, he felt su
re he could summon the name of each individual crewman. But it was not this that brought the bliss to his thin lips.

  He smiled because he could die here.

  He had realized it even as he knelt at Caine's side and watched the first strangely beautiful arc of swooping assault cars. Caine had scrambled for cover, and Raithe had not moved. He didn't have to. He had answered all his destinies.

  He was free.

  For more than ten years he had sought only to discover what his destiny required. He had never even asked himself what he wanted. I may not master my destiny, but I don't have to let my destiny master me.

  Raithe smiled up into the infinite sky.

  And it took Caine to teach me that.

  He rolled over and crawled to the lip of the fountain's bowl to peer out. Through the smoke and flame and the sizzling death songs of slugs and shrapnel that ripped the air of the plaza, Caine staggered like a zombie that decomposed with every step, heading for the far curve of the Sen-Dannalin Wall. He'd never make it.

  Raithe said, "All right, then."

  He gathered himself, and sprang.

  Machine-gun fire tracked him as he sprinted across the plaza, the air solid with howling bullets that he knew, abstractly, were 12.5-millimeter armor-piercing rounds tipped with depleted uranium traveling at an average of 423 meters per second. He fully appreciated the reality of these slugs only after one punched through his thigh—a crisp impact like being hit by a rattan practice sword, leaving two thumbnail-sized holes on opposite sides of his leg but missing the bone and not even breaking his stride. Another took him low in the back as he tried to jink and skidded on a puddle of blood; an instant later his foot tangled in loops of intestine that spilled from half a corpse. He fell, and a third round drilled a neat hole in his shoulder blade before exiting an inch below his collarbone.

  He rolled with the impact, his shoulder spreading numb fire through his chest—the bone shot would be excruciating, once feeling returned—and came to his feet as a shell whistled overhead and blasted a huge chunk from the Sen-Dannalin Wall just as Caine reached it. Raithe lunged, throwing himself through the air, and his wounded shoulder slammed into the small of Caine's back, the impact carrying them both out from under a hail of head-sized masonry.

  They lay on the ground together for a few seconds, panting air back into their lungs, as more shells boomed and blasted all around.

  Raithe struggled to his hands and knees. "Come on," he said, beckoning. Slowly, still gasping, Caine pulled himself onto Raithe's back, looping his shackled arms around Raithe's shoulders. When he was finally able to speak, he said breathlessly, "What the fuck?"

  Raithe allowed himself a smile as warm as the blood that ran down his legs. "I changed my mind."

  10

  He carries me through the twisting backstreets and alleys with artillery blowing everything to shit all around us. Blood pumps out of him at a pretty good rate, but none of it's spurting—probably missed the arteries. He might live through this.

  That is, if he doesn't do anything stupid, like haul a crippled old man around on his fucking back.

  He's wheezing already, staggering drunkenly. No chance we'll get to the Courthouse. No chance we'll get to a pissoir and make it into the caverns—the pissoirs around the fountain are shattered and choked with rubble, and the next nearest is at the foot of Knights' Bridge, right by the Courthouse. I shout in his ear, "We're not gonna make it! Tell Deliann to get his ass down into the Pit!"

  He stumbles on, grimly desperate. "I ... can't communicate ... and run ... at the same time. Without Faith . . . there is only the link . . . that Deliann himself created ..."

  Up ahead I see a storefront that looks like it took a direct hit: a jagged gape invites us into darkness. "In there! Go on: maybe they have a cellar!" He shakes his head and tries to keep going, but I wrap my arms around his neck in a modified sleeper. "Do it, or I'll choke you out and we'll both die in the street."

  He sags, surrendering, and carries me into the ruined building. It looks like it might once have been some kind of apothecary shop. There is a man-sized wad of bloody flesh just inside the door, and a trail of blood into the back hallway ends with the body of an old woman, dead. Looks like she had tried to drag herself toward the apartment whose door stands open at the end of the hall.

  "Put me down."

  Raithe stares at the blood-streaked floor. "Here?"

  "Yeah. It's just blood, kid."

  He nods, and lowers me to the floor so that I can put my back against the wall. He looks like he wants to say something, but a second later he just collapses against the wall and slides down beside me.

  "Now," I tell him. "Talk to Deliann. Tell him to quit fucking around with the goddamn assault cars and get his ass into the caverns."

  Raithe's eyes defocus for a moment, and when his gaze returns he shakes his head. "He won't."

  "He has to! Tell him he fucking has to—"

  "He won't. The power of the goddess is upon him, and he fights to save us all. In the caverns, he would be powerless."

  "Tell him about the bomb!" I snarl, sinking my fingers into Raithe's shoulder. He tries to yank free—fat fucking chance. The rest of me might be out of shape, but I've still got a grip like a bench vise. "It's a fucking neutron bomb! If he stays up here, it's all for nothing—we should have just handed over the fucking sword in the first place and everybody goes home. What the fuck does he think the goddess can do about a fucking neutron bomb?"

  "He says ..." Raithe murmurs thickly, his voice trailing away. "He says ..." His face twitches spastically, and his eyes glaze over entirely. I shake him, hard, then again; I grab his face with my other hand and turn him toward me.

  "Tell him, Raithe! Fucking tell him—tell him—" But I can see he no longer hears me. My hands fall to my lap, limp, useless, and the chain that links the manacles clatters like distant mechanical laughter. "Tell him that one goddamn person I love has to live through this," I finish softly.

  But Raithe only stares, unseeing, into the invisible distance.

  11

  Fifteen miles away, senses that belonged to the body of Ma'elKoth showed the blind god a sudden current in the Flow, a trickle that became a tide that swelled to a maelstrom the size of the sky.

  The blind god sent Ma'elKoth's body lunging for the limousine, hammering upon its silvered windows; it could not wait for this knowledge to trickle along the involute pathways of its aggregate mind. "The child! Stimulants—injections—shake her! Slap her!" the blind god roared through Ma'elKoth's mouth. "Wake the child!"

  12

  The goddess felt the downward sweep of the hundreds of bomblets, already below the highest-flying eagles that cruised her skies. She had no leisure for subtlety, or for configuring Deliann's body as she had Raithe's; she could use only the sort of skills he already had.

  She poured the power of Chambaraya into Deliann's Shell; she expanded it beyond the Courthouse, beyond Ankhana, beyond the matrix of golden force that sealed the city against the Winston Transfer; she made of it a rising dome that compassed all the land for miles about, and swallowed every individual falling bomblet.

  She felt each of them—and each of the assault cars, and the riot vans that rained death on a smaller scale upon the city. She felt even the limou sine on that distant grassy riverbank, where a Social Police medical officer had produced an evacuant syringe and forced its flexible plastic tube down Faith's throat, and now methodically pumped the water and digestive acids that were the only contents of her stomach into a stinking puddle on the limo's carpet, while another officer injected a stimulant mixture into her N drip.

  The goddess felt the energy that surrounded each bomblet, each vehicle: the crackling power of transmutative force that enclosed each of them within a bubble of local physics like those of Earth. She spent precious seconds examining that energy, letting it speak to. her mind. What she must do, she could do only once, and all in an instant: too slowly, and the randomizing boundary effect might b
ring about the detonation she sought to prevent.

  Then she tuned Deliann's Shell in the same way he had done, those long weeks ago in the white room at Alien Games, when he had tapped into the power of Kierendal's griffinstone. She touched that energy, all of it. Then she took it.

  She drained every joule, every erg, every electron volt.

  This was energy that Ma'elKoth—himself a transhuman creature specifically designed to channel energies that would incinerate any mortal frame—had spent many hours summoning and channeling piecemeal; to have done it any faster might have destroyed even him. This unimaginable energy, she drained in an unmeasurable fraction of a second. All that energy had to go somewhere.

  And to get there, it had to pass through Deliann.

  13

  Deliann was conscious. More than conscious. More than superhumanly conscious. Transcendently conscious. He had not surrendered to the lack; he had let the goddess flow through him. He remained aware.

  He felt his brain begin to boil.

  This boiling was the effect of a burst of gamma and hard X-ray radiation originating in his pineal gland; it superheated his cerebrospinal fluid, and in approximately 10-4 seconds, his brain, his skull, and the rest of his body would vaporize into a cloud of plasma as high-energy photons ionized his tissues.

  He could feel this happen because he was thinking, roughly speaking, at the speed of light.

  In his next-to-final ten-thousandth of a second, he used the river's power to find Raithe, where he leaned against a wall in a darkened building ripe with the stench of blood. Deliann took some of the energy that screamed into him and used it to join that place to this, warping reality and space so that for just a ten-thousandth of a second, he could reach into that dark, gore-smeared hallway.

  There, he dropped the sword.

  In his final ten-thousandth of a second, he thought of his father, back in Malmo, of his mother, dead these many years. Of his human brothers and his sister. Of T'farrell Ravenlock and the Living Palace, of Kierendal and Tup.