Of Torronell, and Caine. .
He said good-bye, and used his last instant of will to transform the radiation that killed him.
He made himself into light.
14
The Social Police officer who flew the lead car had only an eyeblink to comprehend that his computer-controlled flight surfaces no longer responded to his commands before every molecular logic circuit in the vehicle underwent spontaneous quantum decay and the car tumbled like a wad of paper and crashed into the Old Town wall just below One Tower. The wall held. The car didn't.
Beside the Great Chambaygen, Ma'elKoth fulminated as the limo's idling turbines whined down to silence.
The crew of the AAV-24 Deva had several minutes to watch the ground fall up toward them.
Assault cars rained out of the Ankhanan sky one after another, crashing into buildings and streets and the river. The riot vans simply settled into themselves as their electronics shut down: their screens went dark and their turrets froze in place.
And all the surviving soldiers in Old Town, Social Police and Ankhanan regular alike, all the primals and the treetoppers, the stonebenders and ogrilloi and trolls and ogres—every creature that still lived—stopped and stared in awe.
The roof of the Courthouse peeled back like a rose opening toward the sun.
From it burst a vertical shaft of pure white light as big around as the Colhari Palace. It roared into the sky louder than thunder, expanding as air ionized to incandescence along its path; the sheath of burning air concealed the shaft's killing glare, saving the onlookers from flashburns and blindness.
The Courthouse melted like a snow castle in an oven.
A few seconds later, several hundred depleted-uranium canisters sprouting immobile airfoils fell—in a still fairly precise pattern—across more than a hundred square kilometers, hit the earth, and bounced.
15
Christ, it stinks in here.
One of my feet trails in a puddle that has the coffee-grounds texture of clotted blood. I'd ask Raithe to move it, but why bother? I roll my head to the side and look at him. He sits with his knees drawn up, hugging them and staring at the wall.
Kosall lies on the cold filthy floor between us.
Raithe isn't the person I had in mind to spend my last few seconds with, but then nobody ever promised me I'd have a choice. So I'll stay here, in this anonymous hallway with its anonymous corpses. Here is good enough. Right here, next to the sword. Because if I'm about to die, I want to do it beside my wife.
Or something.
What a thing this sword is. I can still feel it sliding in below my navel. I can still feel the buzzing hum in my teeth when it severed my spine. Berne's sword. Lamorak's sword.
I wonder where Lamorak got it, all those years ago. I wonder if he ever felt the weight of its future dragging at his arm. This sword killed my career; this sword took Shanna's life. Kosall is all that's left of her.
All that's left of all of us.
It passed from Lamorak to Berne to Raithe to Deliann
To me.
To each of us, it's been something different, yet somehow all the same. Like what Kris said about that whole Blade of Tyshalle bullshit: it's the knife that cuts everything. It lies on the splintered hardwood between me and Raithe, and that's where it should be. It's where we should be: on opposite sides of the blade that cuts everything, waiting for the end of the world.
So much pain
So much hatred
Everything between us cuts like this sword, but here we are anyway, together. Pretty much all either one of us has left is each other. There is no one else I could share this moment with. There is no one else with whom I could simply wait, and have it be all right.
"It's so quiet out there," I murmur. "Think it's over?"
Raithe shrugs, and turns his face away.
Yeah.
I look down at the sword. I'm afraid to touch it. I guess I knew what it meant when the sword fell out of nothingness and landed right between us.
That was Kris, saying good-bye.
First time I saw him, in that goddamn mad-scientist mask of his, standing over me in the weight room, I knew he was gonna be trouble. How astonished I felt, how bereft when I came back to Earth after my freemod, and they told me Kris hadn't made it
I guess I went through my grieving then, because right now, all I can feel is grateful. All I can feel is how lucky I have been, to know a man like him. One Kris Hansen makes up for a shitload of Kollbergs, and Marc Vilos, a shitload of Majesties and Lamoraks and all the other fucking scum that swim in the pool where I live. I wish Shanna could have met him—really met him, when they were both human. I think she would have liked him.
More than that: She would have admired him.
I think I'll just sit here for a while, and tell myself some of the stories I know about him. I can tell myself about that cold courage of his, where he could just stand there and do what had to be done.
I guess that's how I say good-bye.
Tell myself? Shit.
"Raithe?" I say softly. "Let me tell you a story, huh?"
16
The body of Ma'elKoth rested upon the riverbank, arms enwrapping knees, as though it were a boulder exposed by eonic erosion of the grassy meadow behind. A Social Police officer approached uncertainly, unsure of his balance on this alien ground.
"Stimulants have been administered. She'll wake soon," the officer said. "But not for long."
"I know," the blind god replied with Ma'elKoth's voice.
"She's very weak," the officer said. "The strain on her heart—I don't think she'll live out the afternoon."
The body continued to stare downriver. "Get in the limo."
The officer retreated. The blind god caused Ma'elKoth's body to follow. It stood outside, still staring toward distant Ankhana. The part of the blind god that was Ma'elKoth could feel what had happened there through the senses of its worshipers: only Beloved Children are permitted to serve in the Imperial military. "Seal the door," it said.
Without power, the officer had to manually drag the gullwing door down and latch it into place.
The part of the blind god that was Ma'elKoth now touched the power of His divine Self: the incorporeal image to which His worshipers prayed. He conjoined that power with his physical form and drew upon it to telekinetically anchor himself to the bedrock beneath the meadow, and to bring him strength.
"Wait for me in the car," he said. Then he picked up the limo and threw it in the river.
The limo—airtight, and constructed of modern titanium alloy—bobbed like a cork, spinning slowly as it drifted downstream. He could have pushed the car into the river with a mere shrug of his power, but some things, as Caine once notably observed, cry out to be done by hand.
He reached into the clay of the riverbank with his mind and drew forth a hundred kilos. The knife of his mind carved it into shape: a medium-sized man with the build of a boxer, somewhat tall for his weight, gone now perhaps a bit to seed—a thickening of the waist, a suggestion of jowls along the jawline—but with eyes penetrating and cold, and a slant of scar across a twice-broken nose.
He summoned his will, and he Spoke.
"Caine."
And as he Spoke, he thought: Some things cry out to be done by hand.
17
A white thunderbolt blasts though my brain in the middle of telling Raithe about Ballinger, and for one nerveless second I think the bomb's gone off after all. But the shattering agony goes on and on in a ringing and a roaring that's splitting my fucking head, and it gathers itself into a voice. A Voice. I know that Voice.
It's calling my name.
"Caine—what's wong?" Raithe reaches for me, but I hold him off with one hand while the other presses against my temple to keep my brain from exploding.
"I hear you," I answer.
I AM COMING FOR THE SWORD. I AM COMING FOR YOU, CAINE.
"I knew you would."
AND I, TOO, KNEW THAT YOU WOULD
BE THERE TO MEET ME. "Yeah, you're a fucking genius."
Raithe stares at me like I've gone completely shit-swallowing loopy.
I CAN BRING MORE TROOPS. I CAN BRING MORE VEHICLES. I CAN BRING MORE BOMBS.
"Don't bother. I give:'
Silence inside my head.
"You hear me, you bastard? I said I give. I surrender. Bring whatever you want. I'll give myself up. The sword's yours."
Raithe's expression transforms into understanding tinged with awe, and then gathers dismay.
AND IN RETURN?
"Faith," I tell him. "I want my daughter. Alive."
Silence.
"And while we're talking deal, there are a lot of innocent people still on this island, and in the city. Let them go, huh?"
WHY SHOULD I?
"Because that's the deal, motherfucker. Your word: I get Faith, and everybody else walks. You get the sword, and you get me. Otherwise, I run. It'll take you a long time to catch me."
Silence.
"The longer you wait, the more expensive this is gonna get" VERY WELL. I ACCEPT YOUR TERMS.
"Your word on it."
YOU HAVE IT
Then the Presence is gone from the inside of my skull, and I sag back against the damp stone.
Raithe is no waster of words. "Ma'elKoth?"
"The blind god. Same thing."
He scowls doubtfully. "You think his word is good?"
I pick up the sword, and it snarls to life in my hand. I squeeze its hilt until its hum matches my memory: it buzzes in my teeth.
"Who gives a shit?" I turn Kosall so that its blade catches sunlight along the edge. "Mine isn't."
On that day of prophecy fulfilled and transformed, the plain of Megiddo was become a cobbled street, and the Fimbulwinter a firestorm, and all the echoes and shadows of truth were gathered: Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman, Satan and Yahweh El Sabaoth, Thor and Jorgmandr, the Prince of Chaos and the Ascended Ma'elKoth.
It was the hour of battle for the dark angel and the god of dust and ashes. The heavens would break, and the earth be torn asunder, and their pieces cast into the winds of the abyss. On what new shape the universal shards might find when they came once more together, every prophecy, tale, and legend disagreed.
And all of them were wrong.
TWENTY-FIVE
He comes out of the clouds, down from a line of thunderheads that advance from the east: clouds that keep on rolling right into the teeth of this wind that blows on the back of my neck.
First comes a glossy black-and-chrome meteor—a Mercedes stretch, bigger than the apartment where I grew up. It comes down with a rumbling growl like distant turbines, but it's not turbines. It's thunder.
That sonofabitch rolls thunder the way other guys clear their throats.
The limo settles into place between the two dead riot vans down where Gods' and Rogues' Ways intersect. Then the clouds swell until they swallow the sky, and a darkness falls upon the ruins; a single rift parts to admit a golden shaft of autumn sunshine.
Down through that rift, riding that clean light, comes Ma'elKoth, glowing with power: Superman in an Italian suit.
He trails streamers of black Flow—he is the center of a tangle of pulsing night-threads that twist into massive cables before they vanish in a direction my eyes can't follow.
Some of them I can follow, though. Some of the biggest cables connect to me.
My own tangle makes a fantastical rats' nest around me, dense and interwoven, impenetrably opaque, yet somehow it doesn't obstruct my vision, which I guess makes sense because I'm not seeing it with my eyes.
He touches down like a dancer, light and perfectly balanced, posing in his sunlight halo. The warm taupe of his Armani suit complements the tumbled char-blackened blocks of limestone that choke the street. Huh. He's let his beard grow.
Yeah, well, so have I.
His eyes find me at this end of Gods' Way, and his electric stare surges through me like an amphetamine bloom: waves of tingling start at the back of my neck and jangle all the way out the ends of my fingers and toes.
He smiles vividly.
He reaches behind his head and unbinds his hair, shaking it free in sun-streaked waves. He rotates his shoulders like a wrestler loosening up, and the clouds part: above him, infinite blue opens like a flower. The clouds retreat in all directions, flowing out from the city as they flee the center of all things that are Ma'elKoth.
He's brought his own kind of spring, drawing life from the city's fallow earth: the ruins sprout cardinal-red, maroon and gold, scarlet-streaked saplings that uncoil toward his solar presence: Social Police and Household Knights and good old Ankhanan regular infantry digging themselves out of their burrows of rubble, helping each other up, even the wounded, even the dying, so that all can rise in respect, then kneel in reverence, at the arrival of God.
And it's weird.
Weird is the only word for it.
Not in the debased and degraded sense of the mere peculiar. Weird in the old sense. The Scottish sense. The Old English root.
Wyrd.
Because somehow I have always been here.
I have always sat in the rubble of the Financial Block, facing down the length of Gods' Way over the carnage and ruin of Old Town, perched on a blast-folded curve of assault-car hull with Kosall's cold steel across my lap. The rumpled and torn titanium wreckage permanently ticks and pings as it eternally cools under my ass. A few hundred yards to my left, there has always been a smoldering gap where the Courthouse once stood, surrounded by a toothed meteor-crater slag of melted buildings; even the millennial Cyclopean stone of the Old Town wall sags and bows outward over the river, a thermal catenary like the softened rim of a wax block-candle.
It's from that direction that the shade of Kris Hansen whispers, in a voice compounded of memories and grief.
I have always been here because there is no past: all that exists of the past is the web of Flow whose black knots are the structure of the present. I will always be here because there is no future: everything that is about to happen never will.
Now is all there is.
There is a folktale—I can't dignify it with the name prophecy, or even legend—that's popular with the common mass of uneducated elKothans; true believers are all pretty much of a type, I guess, no matter what they believe. They've been telling each other for seven years that the Prince of Chaos will return from beyond the world, to face the Ascended Ma'elKoth in a final battle.
On Assumption Day.
I used to get a chuckle out of that every time one of my ISP Actors heard it. I'd shake my head and laugh. Those poor ignorant bastards—if they could only see me and Tan'elKoth going out for a drink at Por L'Oeil. If they could only see me in my wheelchair; if they could see Tan'elKoth at the Studio Curioseum, jazzing the tourists with his fucking party tricks, two shows a day. Poor ignorant bastards.
I say that, and I can't tell if I'm talking about them, or us. Because I should have known. Shit, I did know.
Dad said it to my face: A powerful enough metaphor grows its own truth.
So those poor ignorant bastards ended up closer to right than us smug cognoscentic motherfuckers who used to laugh at them. This eternal now in the ruins of Ankhana, facing the god across the wreckage of his city and the corpses of his followers
Impossible. And inevitable.
At the same time.
I touch one of the black threads, a simple one, almost straight: that's Deliann, dropping Kosall into the shattered hallway betweeen me and Raithe. That thread is tied to an infinite number of others, progressively more tangled: that's me, screening Shanna to summon her back from Fancon. Here is Raithe, shaking hands with Vinson Garrette, which is tied to me standing over Creele's body at the Monastic Embassy, which is tied to me giving Shanna a battered black-market copy of a Heinlein novel, which connects to Shanna standing over me in an alley, staring at Toa-Phelathon's head lying on the shitstained cobbles, but all these strings are tied to many others, and the others to
others still, some of which splice back in closed loops, some of which curl outward into the invisible distance.
A lot of them trail back to the Language Arts shitter, but even that one is a tangle of Toothpick and Dad, and a kid named Nielson hitting me in the head with a brick, and somebody knocking over a vial of HRVP two hundred years ago and Abraham Lincoln and Nietzsche and Locke and Epikuros and Lao-Tzu
Sure looks like destiny from here.
Try and tell me that Dad could have had the faintest fucking clue I would end up here when he wrote the passages on the Blind God in Tales of the First Folk Try and tell me I should have seen this coming when I brained Toothpick with that length of pipe, or when I proposed to Shanna, or when I lay chained on dark stone in a puddle of my own shit and thought life back into my legs. Destiny is bullshit.
Your life only looks like fate when you see it in reverse.
The universe is a structure of coincidence, Kris told me, and he was right. But that doesn't make it random. It only feels that way. The structure is real: strange attractors ordering arrays of quantum probabilities. I can see them.
I can see the threads of black Flow that bloom and curl outward in time, connecting every event to every other, each acting upon every other in a matrix of force so complex that there is no such thing as a simple progression from one to the next but even when the whole structure of reality is laid bare, all you can see is the outline of the past.
The future cannot be predicted. It can only be experienced.
Because one single thread as infinitesimal as what some lab tech had for breakfast one morning two hundred years ago exerts enough pressure to have bent all of Earth toward the Plague Years and the Studio; because the Butterfly Effect of a thirteen-year-old boy named Hari deciding that he wasn't gonna live in fear has tied the history of two worlds into the knot that is today.
And that, when you come right down to nuts and guts, is the most infinitely fucked-up part of this infinite fucked-up now: They finally got me. In the final minute of my life, I've become a Cainist.
Blade of Tyshalle Page 83