Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  So I don't even try.

  I lift Kosall to vertical, turning the flat of the blade toward him in a fencer's salute. He replies with an ironic bow. "I have always known we would come to this, Caine. We are natural enemies, you and I; this is why I have loved you so."

  Instead of sweeping the blade down to my right—the traditional acknowledgment of the returned salute—I lift it, swiftly but without haste, above my head.

  There is a principle in some of the Japanese fighting arts that translates as appropriate speed. It's one of the most difficult elements to master. To move with appropriate speed is to act slowly enough that you don't trigger your opponent's defensive reflexes, so that he doesn't feel like he's being attacked: so that he doesn't flinch, or even feel threatened. We are all conditioned by a bazillion years of Darwinian heredity to interpret sudden movement as a possible threat. On the flip side, you can't give him time to think Hey wait—if that hand gets any closer he could hurt me with it. It's a delicate balance; appropriate speed varies according to the situation, and to the psychology of your opponent.

  Screwing it up is a short trip to the land of the seriously dead.

  So while he's still a hundred yards away, watching that sword shine in the sunlight over my head, still talking, still saying, "I have always been fortunate in my—" I twist the black Flow that I've been feeding into the sword in a way that will make my right foot swing forward in one long step.

  Which is the signal to the ghost of my dead wife in the sword to use the energy I've been channeling into it to warp space in that seven-league-boots way of hers, and bring the rubble where I stand and the cobbles in front of Ma'elKoth within one step of each other so that the foot I picked up from Nobles' Way comes down a little less than a meter from Ma'elKoth's Gucci Imperiales, and the sword I had lifted over my head comes down at his collarbone, edge striking his Shield as my weight falls forward.

  Ma'elKoth finishes blankly, "—enemies—" as we both discover that, in fact, its edge powered by black Flow, Kosall can indeed cut through anything, including Shields.

  Including gods in Armani suits.

  8

  Ma'elKoth's eyes go wide and his mouth works silently, and I let my weight carry the stroke all the way down till the blade comes free somewhere around his hip bone.

  I stagger—goddamn bypass, goddamn legs—but manage to catch my balance and step back. I want to watch this part.

  In a kind of Alpine-avalanche ponderously majestic natural slow mo tion, his head and his right arm and about half his torso slide off the other half down a fountaining scarlet slope. His legs stand there for a second or two, empty bowels and quivering organs half unrecognizable from this high-side view, and y'know what?

  He doesn't stink.

  The smell is like ground beef, fresh from your local butcher. I never realized: Since he hasn't eaten for something like fifteen years, I have misjudged him ever since we first met.

  He's not full of shit after all.

  I have maybe two more seconds before Soapy shoots my ass off. I make good use of those seconds. I lift Kosall again, but this time let the blade swing down, hanging vertically below my clasped hands upon its hilt.

  Ma'elKoth looks up at me. His mouth makes empty popping noises; he's left most of his lungs in his other half

  At the speed of thought in the permanent now, I bring an image of Shanna to the front of my mind—a vision of Pallas Ril, a ghost-shadow of the goddess shining and strong upon a field of night. The dash of sunlight off a rippling stream comes from Her eyes, and the hand She extends to me is the color of a peach in leaf shade. Is it time? She murmurs within my heart.

  I reply, Take my hand.

  Her ghost hand touches mine, and our flesh flows together; Her warm summer skin shades sun dew into my Donjon-bleached arm, and my death-sealed heart draws Her season down to skeletal autumn. We mingle and swirl, surface tension and turbulence, touching at every geometrically infinite point but forever apart.

  Because everyone lives together, and everyone dies alone.

  In that single second, when We join in a union of which Our marriage had been only a pale time-reversed ripple of echo, We regard Ourselves and say

  Oh. I understand, now.

  One instant of searing melancholy

  If only I could have been the man you needed me to be.

  If only I could have accepted the man you are.

  —then the river blossoms inside me, from the trickling sewage runoff at Khryl's Saddle to the mighty fan of half-salt flow where We join the ocean beyond the Teranese Delta‑

  -and my heart cracks because my only wish is that I could stay here with them forever, but as infinite as now might be its end still comes when Shanna says

  Good-bye, Hari.

  —and I cannot even reply.

  Instead, I give farewell to the man trapped within the dying god at my feet.

  "Happy Assumption Day, fucker."

  Then I fall to one knee and let my weight drive Kosall's rune-painted blade through his forehead into his brain.

  Right between the eyes.

  And power blasts back up through the blade, through my fists, my arms, my shoulders—it hits my heart, slams up my neck, and blows away the world.

  A tale is told of twin boys born to different mothers.

  One is a dark angel of slaughter and destruction, a death's-head moth arising from mortal cocoon; one is a crooked knight of flame, a heart of ashes thunderstruck and smoldering.

  They each live without ever knowing that they are brothers. They each die fighting the blind god.

  They are tethered by moon threads, woven of love and hate, the stronger for their invisibility: tied to the god who had been a man and to the dark angel's spawn, to the dragoness and to the child of the river, to the dead goddess and to each other.

  Where these threads spin a single weave, they knit the ravell'd fate of worlds.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I don't remember being dead.

  I remember some of the dreams that flitted in and out of my slowly reassembling mind as I woke, though, and what I remember of them seems to be about drowning, or being strangled by hands of inhuman strength, or having my head stuck inside a plastic bag. Trying to scream, but without enough breath to give sound to my voice

  Perhaps that should be taken as a hopeful sign about the afterlife. It must be lovely, if I was so reluctant to leave.

  I suppose I'll never know.

  I'd like to keep this roughly chronological, if I can. It's not easy; there are connections here more subtle than simple sequence. And I'm not always sure in what order everything happened, and I'm not sure it's always important. Somebody wrote once that the direction of time is irrelevant to physics. I'm sure this half-remembered physicist would be pleased to know that my story only makes sense when it's told backwards.

  That seems much more profound when you have a fever.

  I sometimes catch myself thinking that life is a fever: that the universe fell ill two or three billion years ago, and life in all its fantastic improbability is the universe's fever dream. That the harsh intractability of the inanimate is the immune system of reality, attempting to cure it of life. That when life is extinguished, the universe will awaken, yawn and stretch, and shake its metaphoric head at its bizarre imagination, to have produced such an unlikely dream.

  But I get over it when I cheer up.

  It's not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.

  One might suppose that I would now be immune to melancholy, but that is not so; I seem to be immune only to senescence, and to death. It's better thus—to be eternally happy would deprive me of the bulk of human experience. And, for all else, I am still human.

  More or less.

  But to give the story a moral before I recount its events will rob the moral of meaning. Meaning is the goal. I sometimes think the greatest danger of immortality is the infinite leisure to digress.

  So:

  I cou
ld write page after page on the process of waking up that very first time in my new life. I could string together fading details of dreams with the incredibly soft warmth of the wool-felt blankets and the finewoven linen of the sheets, and shuffle the bracing sting of sunlight through closed eyelids with the faintly animal musk of the goosedown that filled the feather bed on which I lay. It's a powerful urge to recount these things, because each individual sensation of living has become indescribably precious to me; though each breath is as sweet as the last, there comes always something wistful, because I cannot forget that this breath is a single thing, as discrete as I am, and no matter how wonderful the next will be, this will never come again.

  I was lucky, though: the antidote for such wistfulness was waiting for me beside my bed, grinning like a wolf.

  When I opened my eyes, he said, "Hey."

  I smiled, and thus discovered I had lips; I squeezed his hand, and thus discovered I had arms. A moment later, I found my voice. "I'm not dead, then?"

  "Not anymore."

  "Oh, that's good," I said with a feeble chuckle.

  "What's funny?"

  "Well—finding you here, I was pretty sure this can't be heaven."

  His wolf-grin widened: his substitute for a laugh. "It's close enough for me."

  I thought about that for a while, while I watched dust motes drift through slanting sunbeams. The window was enormous, nearly the size of the titanic eight-poster bed. Lamps of gleaming brass topped each of the posts—which were ornately carved from some luminous stone like translucent rose marble, and slowly the name for this stone surfaced inside my head: thierril.

  That was when I understood that we were on Overworld.

  "Caine?"

  "Yeah?"

  "I was wrong," I said. "This is close enough to heaven for me, too." Closer than I deserve, I finished silently.

  He heaved himself to his feet and walked to the window, his gait only slightly unsteady. The window faced west, and the afternoon sun painted him with scarlet and gold.

  "I'm glad you feel that way, Kris," he said, "because this is as close as you're ever gonna get"

  "I don't understand."

  He stared beyond the sunset. "Let me tell you a story."

  2

  It really was the end of the world.

  In less than an eyeblink, the world as it had known itself had been destroyed and replaced with a new world, a different world, so like unto its predecessor that a man might fool himself into believing the two were one. The time of nonexistence that separated the two was itself nonexistent; no one saw or heard or even felt the interval, but everyone knew.

  Things were different, now.

  I understood well enough what had happened, as Caine explained it, at the instant when the world became new: The spell painted in runes upon Kosall's blade had captured Ma'elKoth's pattern of consciousness even as it had that of the goddess—but because the goddess had, in that moment, been touching the river's Song through Hari, the Ma'elKoth-pattern had been channeled through them both. That pattern, that shade, that consciousness would have dispersed like smoke before a wind, sunk back within the Song, save for the idea of the Ascended Ma'elKoth: the image to which millions of Beloved Children pray every day: the Power they endow with the energy of their devotion. That Power was so nearly coresonant with the pattern of Ma'elKoth that harmonic entrainment caused them to merge in an instant—and through Hari and the goddess, they touched the Song of Chambaraya.

  At that moment, He became both a god of humanity, and a limb of the Worldmind: a power which had no precedent in all the aeonic history of Home. Given that place to stand, He moved the world.

  He became the world.

  But not the world that the Blind God had desired.

  The Blind God's grip upon Ma'elKoth was physical: a function of the physical thoughtmitter implanted within Ma'elKoth's physical skull—left behind in Ma'elKoth's physical corpse. And though in one sense Ma'elKoth is as much an agglomerate entity as is the Blind God, in a greater sense He has always been an individual; that individual is, above all else, an artist, and He could not bear to destroy a thing of beauty.

  With the conjoined power of his human worshipers and Chambaraya, he could pattern himself even to the matrix of the Worldmind. He flowed outward from the river, and sent His will into the great symphony that is T'nnalldion—Home—itself.

  His stroke had been elegant: He had taken the transfer shield—the patterning of force that blocked the Winston Transfer from Ankhana—and extended it over the world entire. In that fraction of a second, every transmission from every Actor on Overworld had ceased.

  In the next fraction of a second, He had sung a new note in the Song of Home. Neither Caine nor I have a very clear way to describe its effect. It was, one might say, a minor alteration of local physics.

  He made the Blind God improbable.

  Extremely improbable: down to the quantum level.

  The small segment of the Blind God that had stretched to Overworld disintegrated, and its remnants burst into a scattering flight of night-black shards. The rest recoiled like a knife-cut worm, back to its nest, to lick its wound and brood.

  The Social Police in Ankhana felt the difference as a sudden surge of panic, real panic, the ancient panic: the unreasoning terror of being lost and lone in the deep forest of night, in the grip of its unhuman god. Many screamed; all twisted and staggered; most ran; and some fired their weapons into the air, or at each other.

  Some turned their weapons upon Caine, where he knelt on Gods' Way; some upon the limousine; some upon any targets they could find. All who did so died before they could squeeze their triggers.

  Some of the Social Police still live. I have not yet decided what to do with them.

  For now, they are in the Pit.

  I wondered at the irony of it, when Caine had finished describing the end of the world: "You made him a god. You transfigured him, and he ascended. On Assumption Day."

  "Yeah."

  "You took the fiction of Caine and Ma'elKoth, and made it truth." "Fiction," Caine said, "is a slippery concept."

  "You defeated your enemy by granting his fondest wish."

  He shrugged. "I'm not sure enemy is the right word," he sighed. "Our relationship is . . . complicated."

  "But I don't understand," I said. "How did I get here? Why am I alive? What does all this have to do with me?"

  His smile faded then, and he looked down at his hands. He laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles in swift succession. "That's a different story," he said.

  3

  His new story began some few days after the end of the world: after the dead had been collected, in their hundreds and their thousands, after graves had been dug and pyres lit. It began at the prow of Old Town: a jumble of rock that once had been Six Tower, overlooking a blunt spit of river sand. Caine stood upon the sand, his daughter riding his hip, while from the broken rocks above watched an honor guard comprising the whole of the surviving Household Knights.

  But I will not transcribe the story he told; the story I care most about is my own. His gift to me, of the device he calls the Caine Mirror, later let me see for myself the events that he then described. Though I saw them through his eyes, what's important, to me, is how I tell the story.

  It begins:

  One arm about Faith's shoulders. Her hands locked around his neck and her forehead tucked into the hollow beneath his jaw. Faith in the white-tasseled shawl of Ankhanan mourning; Caine in a tunic and pants of new black leather, belted with a thin cord, and low soft boots.

  He held the blade of Kosall so that it reflected the rising sun, while he said good-bye to his wife.

  I will not recount what passed between the three of them there. The device—which sits on my desk as I write this—shows me less than all, but more than I can bear to know. I will say only that their good-byes were private, and brief. The details are Caine's story to tell, if he chooses; any who might wish to know them will have to
ask him.

  I will say this: Pallas Ril chose to pass on.

  She could not be both goddess and woman; though she could build a mortal body for herself once more, she could not make herself wholly woman. To have been a god is to be forever less than human, but to be wholly goddess was within her grasp.

  And she had no better way to keep her family safe.

  When their good-byes were done, Caine drove Kosall into the stone before him until the hilt alone projected.

  "Faith, honey, get down for a minute," he said, lowering her to the sand. She dutifully found her feet and took a step away from him. He said, murmuring as though to himself, "Let's do it."

  And the power to which he spoke answered him with fire.

  He extended his hands, and from his palms burst flame like the surface of the sun; all had to shield their faces, and even Caine was forced to close his eyes. When the flames died, the great stone block had been reduced to a pool of slag, and Kosall was no more.

  Pallas Ril had gone to join the river forever.

  That was her happy ending.

  The only music that marked her passing was the plash of the Great Chambaygen, the chatter of a pair of foraging squirrels, and the scream of a lone eagle, far, far above.

  After a moment, Caine looked down at Faith. "You ready?" She nodded solemnly.

  He held out his arm to help her back up onto his hip, but instead she took his hand. "I'm big enough to walk," she said.

  "Yeah," he agreed, slowly and with some reluctance. "Yeah, I guess you are."

  As the two of them helped each other negotiate the tumble of rock, a dry voice spoke within Caine's mind. Touching.

  "Have some respect," he muttered.

  Ironic: that the man least likely to show respect is the first to ask for it. "Shut the fuck up."

  Faith blinked up at him owlishly. "Are you talking to God again?" Caine said, "Yeah."

  She nodded, solemnly understanding. "God can be a mean bastard sometimes."

  "You got that right."