Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  Finally he stopped, panting. This wasn’t what he needed. He knew what he needed.

  He needed to go back to Overworld.

  He needed to be Caine.

  He needed—finally, inescapably—to hurt somebody.

  And as always, when lacking a better target, he turned on himself.

  He said, “Abbey: Call Shanna. Audio-out only.”

  The wallscreen lit up with her face, and the soft green hazel of her eyes stabbed him like a knife.

  This was her message dump, of course; she no more answered her screencalls personally than he did.

  “Hi there,” her image said brightly, cheerfully, sincerely glad-to-see-ya. “I’m Pallas Ril, adventuring mage. I’m also Shanna Leighton, Actor.”

  Shanna Leighton Michaelson, Hari said silently.

  “If you have a message for either of me, start talking.”

  His mouth tasted of dust. He could only stare: at the subtle curve of her neck, the line of her jaw, the thick curls of her short-cut hair. His fingers twitched with the memory of its softness. If he closed his eyes, right now, he could fill in every line of her body, every faintest freckle.

  I’ll change, he told her digitized image, but silently; he knew this was hopeless. Perhaps she’d help him put up a pretense, just a few days to satisfy Vilo, perhaps she still cared enough for him for that, but he couldn’t even ask.

  It’d hurt too much to be refused, and it’d hurt more if she went along with it.

  She’d claimed, more than once, that their separation was painful for her. He didn’t know if that was true; he didn’t know if she still hurt as much as he did. He hoped not.

  And here he was, and the tingling in his hands and the stutter in his chest told him that he’d been wanting this for a long time. He’d only been waiting for an excuse.

  The pressure from Vilo gave him something to say that would gloss over the unspoken truth: that no matter how hard he tried to pretend otherwise, no hour passed in which he did not ache for her. He didn’t know what to say, how to put it that wouldn’t sound too cold, that wouldn’t sound like My Patron and your Patron have decided we should be together.

  But he had to say something. He cleared his throat. “Uh, Shanna, this is Hari, and I’ve—”

  “One moment,” her image told him, and it swiftly morphed into a new view of her, in her rich blue and steel gray Overworld costume, the one she wore as Pallas Ril. “Congratulations! You’ve made my Friends File.”

  Friends? he thought. Is that what we are?

  “Being in the Friends File means I can tell you that I’m currently on Adventure, and I expect to be back on the evening of November 18. Don’t expect a return call before then, and you won’t be disappointed.”

  Hari sagged, defeated. He’d forgotten; today’s avalanche of memory had buried it entirely. She’d left for the latest installment of her ongoing Adventure a week ago. He canceled the call with a weary slap against the wallstud. She wasn’t on Earth. She wasn’t even in the same universe.

  My life, he thought, is a short dive into deep shit.

  6

  THE SQUEAL FROM his wallscreen stabbed him like a knife in the ear. He started upright, head spinning. He’d been drinking into the late hours of the morning, sitting alone in his empty house, and now his eyes were crusted shut and he couldn’t make sense of that shrieking. He rubbed his eyes until the lids parted with a dull ripping sensation that brought the taste of blood to the back of his throat, and the brilliant sunlight that streamed in through his bedroom window threatened to burst his skull.

  What the fuck time is it? Noon?

  “Abbey,” he croaked thickly. “Polarizers. Twilight.”

  “Please rephrase your command, Hari.”

  He cleared his throat and spat a wad of phlegm into the disposall under the nightstand. “Abbey: Polarize the windows. Twilight.”

  As the room gradually darkened around him, he raised his voice so he could hear himself over the shriek. “Abbey: Query. What is that fucking noise?”

  “Please re—”

  “Yeah, yeah. Abbey: Delete word fucking. Retry.”

  “That noise is your priority alarm, Hari. It indicates a screencall coded Extremely Urgent.”

  “Abbey: Query. Which code?”

  “It is the code labeled King Bleeding Studio Asshole, Hari.”

  “Shit.” He shook the cobwebs out of his head. King Bleeding Studio Asshole was the label of the code he’d given to Gayle Keller, the personal assistant of the Chairman of the San Francisco Studio, Arturo Kollberg. It meant this was bad news. “Abbey: Audio only. Answer.”

  The shrieking suddenly cut to creamy silence. Hari said, “Yeah, Gayle. This is Hari.”

  “Entertainer Michaelson?” The Chairman’s secretary sounded uncertain; like most people, he was uncomfortable talking to someone he couldn’t see. “Uh, Administrator Kollberg wants you in his office ASAP, Entertainer.”

  “In his office?” Hari repeated stupidly. Kollberg never saw people in his office. Hari hadn’t been in the Chairman’s office in ten years. “What’s this about? My next Adventure isn’t until after the first of the year.”

  “I, ah, don’t really know, Entertainer. The Administrator wouldn’t say. He only told me that if you asked, I should tell you it’s about your wife.”

  “My wife?” What isn’t about my wife? he thought sourly, but that was only his hangover talking. “What is it? Did something happen?” His heart thumped once, heavily, and kicked into a faster beat. “Is she all right? What happened?”

  “I can’t really say, Entertainer Michaelson. All he said is to tell you—”

  “Yeah yeah yeah,” Hari snapped. He swung his legs out of bed and stood up, and suddenly he didn’t feel hungover at all. How fast could he shower and dress? No, fuck showering; he had no time. Brush his teeth? See the Chairman with stale scotch on his breath? Shit, pull it together. “I’m on my way. Tell him half an hour. Tell him . . . just tell him I’m on my way.”

  DAY ONE

  “Hey, I’m not the only guy who kills people.”

  “Nobody said you’re the only one, Hari. That’s not the point.”

  “I’ll tell you what the point is. The point is: that’s how I became a star. The point is: that’s how I pay for this house, and the cars, and get us a table at Por L’Oeil. That’s how I pay for everything!”

  “It’s not you who pays for it, Hari. It’s Toa-Phelathon. His wife. His daughters. Thousands of wives, husbands, parents, children. They’re the ones who pay for it.”

  1

  “HIS NAME IS, ah, Ma’elKoth,” said Administrator Kollberg. He licked his thick, colorless lips and went on. “We, ah, believe this to be a pseudonym.”

  Hari stood stiffly before the Chairman’s massive desk. Inside his head he snarled, Of course it’s a pseud, you moron. Out loud, he said, “ ‘elKoth’ is a word in Paquli that means ‘huge,’or ‘limitless,’ and the Ma prefix stands for the nominative case of to be. It’s not a name, it’s a boast.”—and if you weren’t a fucking idiot you’d know it.

  None of his commentary showed on his face; years of practice kept his expression attentively blank.

  The wide, rectangular Sony repeater behind the Chairman’s desk showed a view that roughly corresponded to what a window would have shown—the late-autumn sun sinking toward the bay—had this vaultlike office not been buried deeply beneath the Studio complex.

  This inner office was a sanctum that few ever saw; in the eleven years that Kollberg had been Chairman, even Hari—San Francisco’s number one star and perennial member of the Studio Top Ten in earnings worldwide—had been in here only once before. It was small, with curving walls and ceiling, and no sharp corners; climate control kept it nearly cool and dry enough that Kollberg wouldn’t sweat—but not quite.

  The Chairman of the San Francisco Studio was short and sloppy, not fat so much as soft and thick. Pale grey strands of hair strung themselves across a scalp pitted with the scars of
failed transplants, and his watery eyes were surrounded by rolls of flesh the color and consistency of spoiled bread dough.

  Hari had seen flesh like that once before, when Caine had liberated some human slaves of an ogrillo tribe in the Gods’ Teeth. The ogrilloi had been breeding them as cattle, underground in their stinking lair; there were teenage boys there who had never seen the sun—and they’d been gelded to keep their meat juicy and sweet. Their skin had looked very much indeed like Kollberg’s.

  If Hari let himself think about it too much, it could give him a serious case of the shudders.

  Kollberg’s star had risen along with Caine’s; he’d gotten behind Hari when Hari had pitched the Adventure that later became known as Last Stand at Ceraeno. That was Caine’s big break, and Kollberg’s—with Last Stand, Caine cracked the Top Ten, and Kollberg was the Chairman who had put him there. Since that time, Kollberg’s almost preternatural sense for the rhythms of public taste had driven San Francisco to its current world prominence; he was popularly considered to be the heir apparent to Businessman Westfield Turner, the Studio President and CEO. Kollberg, more than any person save only Hari himself, was responsible for Caine’s success.

  Hari despised him with the sort of personal loathing most people reserve for cockroaches in their breakfast cereal.

  Kollberg had been babbling on about this Ma’elKoth, who called himself the Ankhanan Emperor. “You might pay a little attention to this, Michaelson,” Kollberg was saying. “After all, you put him on the throne.”

  This was vintage Kollberg: the clammy bastard might waste an hour building up to the real reason he’d summoned Hari. On his way in, Hari had tried the usual downcaste whispering gallery, casually questioning doormen, security, secretaries—even that smug worm Gayle Keller. Nobody knew anything about Shanna; whatever had happened, the Studio lid was screwed down tight. Kollberg hadn’t so much as mentioned her name. Hari’s palms burned with a suicidal lust to beat it out of him.

  “First,” he said tightly, “I didn’t put Ma’elKoth on the throne. He did that for himself.”

  “After you murdered his predecessor.”

  Hari shrugged; he’d had his fill of that subject already this week. “And second, I don’t do assassinations anymore.”

  Kollberg blinked. “I’m sorry?”

  “I. Don’t. Do. Assassinations. Anymore.” Hari articulated every word slowly and clearly, skating on the dangerous brink of caste-violating insolence. “I’ll only do straight Adventures, like Retreat from the Boedecken.”

  Those heavy lips pressed together. “You’ll do this one.”

  “Are you a betting man, ’Strator?”

  Kollberg’s chuckle was as moist as his watery eyes. “Quite, ah, impressive, this Ma’elKoth is—military sorcerer, fine general. Here, look at this.”

  The repeater behind his desk flickered and relit with a computer-stabilized view through some anonymous Actor’s eyes. Hari knew the scene: it was the travertine-faced address deck, three stories up the sheer wall of the Temple of Prorithun, shining in the rich yellow glare of the Ankhanan sun. The Actor who’d viewed this had stood with his back to the Fountain—from the angle, he must have been practically leaning on the statue of Toa-Phelathon—and it was clear from the lower fringe of the view that the Court of the Gods was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with folk of all description.

  The man who stood on that deck and exhorted the crowd dwarfed the Household Knights who flanked him; he was as tall as their blood-colored halberds. The fist he shook in anger could have crushed coal to diamonds.

  He wore some sort of armor that gleamed with the black semi-translucency of obsidian, and to his shoulders was fixed a cape of pure and gleaming white that spread behind him like the wings of an eagle. Hair the color of burled maple curled across his shoulders and rippled in some unfelt breeze, and a beard shot through with bars of iron grey and shimmering with oil framed a face wide-browed and clear-eyed, a face of obvious honesty and translucent nobility.

  Even without the sound, Hari couldn’t look away. When Ma’elKoth’s brow clouded in anger, it seemed that the sky did as well; when he looked down with love upon his subjects, his face brought light to them like the first dawn of spring.

  Someone there was subtly manipulating the sunlight, Hari realized; a good illusionist can do it, even over a substantial area like this, but making it look as natural as this did—

  Hari grunted, impressed despite himself. “He’s good at this.”

  “Oh, yes,” Kollberg said. “Yes, indeed he is. He’s also, ah, rather frighteningly brilliant.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It seems, well . . .” Kollberg coughed into his hand. “It seems that he’s independently rediscovered the police state.”

  “Good for him,” Hari murmured absently, still watching. He’d glimpsed Ma’elKoth once or twice before, on victory parades after the stunning campaign that had won the Plains War, but he’d never seen the man in action. There was something vaguely familiar about him now, though, about the way he moved, the way he gestured. This would bug him until he worked it out, a little finger poking at the back of his mind.

  Where had he seen these mannerisms before?

  “. . . an internal enemy,” Kollberg was saying. “The Nazis had the Jews; the Communists used the ‘counterrevolutionaries’ we have the HRVP virus. Ma’elKoth has hit upon, ah, a rather novel internal enemy. When he needs an excuse to eliminate political enemies, he, ah, well, he accuses them of being ‘of the Aktiri.’ ”

  Aktiri was a Westerling word having a number of pejorative meanings: insane, evil, homicidal, alien baby-eater, and endless variations on that theme. Aktiri are evil demons who take the form of men and women to deceive honest folk into trusting them so that they can rape and steal and murder with mad abandon; when slain they vanish in a burst of shimmering colors.

  The word was a linguistic borrowing from English. The early Actors, making the transfers to Overworld in the cruder, more direct Studio style of thirty years ago, had left a lasting impression on the culture.

  “A witch-hunt.”

  “Aktir-tokar,” Kollberg corrected. “An Actor hunt.”

  “Not bad,” Hari said. He touched the spot on his skull, just above and in front of his left ear, over his brain’s language center. “The only way to prove you’re innocent is to let them dig around in your brain until they decide they won’t find a thoughtmitter. By that time you’re dead anyway. Then if your corpse doesn’t slip out of phase, I guess they apologize.” He shrugged. “Old news. The Studio’s put out a couple circulars on updated Ankhanan protocols. I’m still not going to kill him for you.”

  “Michaelson—Hari, please understand. It’s not only that he’s actually caught some Actors—no one very successful, at least not yet—but that he’s using the Aktir-tokar in a rather decidedly cynical fashion, to eliminate his political opposition, folk that he knows quite well are entirely . . . ah, well, innocent.”

  “You’re talking to the wrong Michaelson,” Hari said. “You want my wife.”

  Kollberg put a chubby finger to his lips. “Ah, well, your wife, . . . mm, in her capacity as Pallas Ril, she’s already taken a certain interest in this problem.”

  Just hearing her name finally come out of Kollberg’s mouth felt like someone had slipped a needle into the back of his neck. “Yeah, I heard,” he said softly, through his teeth. “She’s been doing her Scarlet Pimpernel act.”

  “I feel I must make this entirely clear, Hari. Here at the Studio, we must look to the long term. This Aktir-tokar business will blow over soon enough, and the Ankhanan Empire will be safe for Actors once again. Entirely too safe, if you see my meaning. If the Empire were to become truly organized, they would certainly put down the ogrilloi and the human bandits, and kill the dragons and trolls and griffins, possibly the elves and dwarves and all the other things that make Adventuring entertaining in the first place. Do you see? If Ma’elKoth is successful, the Empire will be essentially lost to
us as an Adventuring environment. Already, Ankhana itself is hardly more exotic than, say, New York. This, ah, trend cannot be allowed to continue. The Studio System—and this Studio in particular—has far too much invested in the Ankhanan Empire. Fortunately, this Ma’elKoth has gathered most of the reins of power to himself; you could call it a classic cult-of-personality thing. If he is eliminated, the Empire should balkanize in a very satisfactory way.”

  “Shanna’s heated up about this; why don’t you have her do it?”

  “Oh, come now,” Kollberg murmured. “She’s a save-the-innocents type; you said so yourself. You know very well that Pallas Ril doesn’t do assassinations.”

  “Neither does Caine. Not anymore.”

  “Michaelson—”

  “If you have a problem with that,” Hari said heavily, “you can take it up with Biz’man Vilo.”

  The mention of Hari’s powerful Patron didn’t make Kollberg so much as blink. In fact, it brought a faint smile to his rubbery lips. “I don’t believe that will be necessary.”

  “Believe what you want, Administrator,” Hari said. “And you still haven’t explained what this has to do with my wife.”

  “Haven’t I?” He rose and clapped his hands together, rubbing them against each other with a mock-regretful sigh. “Perhaps you’d better come with me.”

  2

  THE 270-DEGREE FLOOR-TO-CEILING screen that faced the simichair in the Chairman’s private box showed only a uniform grey when Kollberg led Hari inside. Another first, Hari thought, scuffing his sandals across the burgundy cashmere of the deep-pile carpet.

  The Chairman’s simichair was done in walnut and kidskin, filled with bodyform gel and more comfortable than your mother’s arms. Reach-around swingarms held a bewildering variety of refreshments—from beluga on toast points to Roderer Cristal on tap—for those occasions when the Adventure feed was directed to the screen, rather than the induction helmet that hung over the back like the cap on an electric chair.