Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  Now, lying in a pool of her own filth on the jagged floor of her cell, watching the colors in her eyes explode in fantastic geometries against the blank darkness, she struggled to believe that this would still happen, that this was still in her future.

  That she still had a future.

  She fought to believe that her story, the song of her life, wouldn’t end with a fading whimper in this endless night.

  Unknown. Unsung.

  Dead.

  Eyes open, or eyes closed? She could no longer tell, and it no longer mattered. She summoned again her favorite memory: ten years ago, when she’d been an adolescent page running messages for Abbot Dartheln on Thorny Ridge above the great battlefield of Ceraeno, through those three days when the combined might of Ankhana and the Monasteries strove, outnumbered, against the infinite savage warriors of the Khulan Horde and was losing, had lost the battle, and desperately tried to organize a retreat in good order.

  She would never forget the surge that had slammed up her spine when a shout of dismay had risen from the vast ranks of the Horde, and she had looked down to the battlefield to see the huge banner of the Khulan himself burn with smoking yellow flame.

  Among Talann’s gifts was extraordinary vision; like an eagle, she could see—even from a mile or more away—the black clothes and fringe of beard on the man who held the burning banner up for a moment longer, then cast it down to the mud-churned earth at his feet. She had watched breathlessly, mesmerized, her duties forgotten, as the Bear Guard closed around him like the jaws of a dragon, and a tear had tracked through the dust of her cheeks for the death of this unknown hero—but an instant later, she saw him again, still alive, still fighting, cutting through the finest warriors of the Khulan Horde as the prow of a warship cuts through waves.

  She’d seen him only once more, a month later, when she’d stood in the company of the Ankhanan Abbot to watch Caine make his formal refusal of the Barony offered him by King Tel-Alcontaur. He’d moved stiffly, still hampered by slow-healing wounds he’d taken in the battle, a splint on his left arm. Dartheln hadn’t missed the look on her face as she’d watched; he’d smilingly offered to introduce her, and later after the ceremony he’d made his offer good.

  Caine had gravely gripped her hand as a comrade in battle, and had listened with solemn attention to her stammered words of admiration. But there were hundreds of folk more important than she was all waiting to do him honor, and as he walked away he’d dragged her heart along with him.

  Since that day she’d lived her life in emulation, refusing the offers of Monastic posts, requesting her Release from Obedience, traveling in search of adventure, endlessly honing her skills so that someday, when she met him again, they could meet as equals; so that she would be worthy of the respect he had generously granted her so long ago.

  She’d reached an age now to be embarrassed by the adolescent passion of this dream, but she’d never been able to bring herself to leave it behind—she summoned it to comfort her in her darkest hours.

  She had never even approached an hour so dark as this one.

  So lost was she in dreamlike contemplation of an impossible future that she only barely noticed the scrape of the bar to her cell being shifted. It was a series of scratching clicks that caught her attention: this was not the sound of a turnkey.

  Someone was picking the lock.

  And she heard the door open, and in the dim and distant light that leaked all the way from the Pit, she saw the silhouette of a man as he slipped inside her cell; and after the scratch of flint on steel and a shower of sparks, a lantern was gently puffed to life.

  Talann’s heart stopped, and her vision swam.

  He wore the loose robe of a trusty instead of his customary black leathers, and his face was caked with soot, but the fringe of beard and the slight angle of the broken nose were exactly as she had seen them in ten years of dreams. And she knew that this was a dream, that this could only be a fantasy, that she’d finally lost her senses.

  But if this had been a dream, he would have gathered her into his arms; he would have whispered her name as the shackles fell away. Instead, as the light grew in Talann’s tiny cell, Caine looked like he’d been clubbed.

  He stared at her with shock and loathing, and some kind of stunned disappointment. Then he shook his head and covered his eyes with his hand, resting his forehead against the webbing between thumb and forefinger.

  “You’re Talann,” he murmured hoarsely. “Of course. It would have been too easy.”

  Her heart sang; these puzzling words and wounding expressions meant nothing beyond one simple, surging fact. She said, “Caine—you remember me . . .”

  “Hah?” His head jerked up, and his eye fixed hers with a penetrating stare—an instant later he grimaced and began rummaging within the trusty’s robe that he wore.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” he muttered. “I remember you.”

  “And I’m not dreaming. I’m not. You’ve come to rescue me.”

  Across his half-averted face flickered the shadowplay of a conflicted interior struggle; it came to some resolve when he found what he’d sought within his pockets. When he spoke to her again, he looked her full in the eye, and his face was grim and set.

  “Yeah. Yeah, you better believe it. I’m gonna get you out of here.”

  He held out a shallow ceramic pot only slightly larger than the circle of his thumb and forefinger, its wide mouth stoppered by a piece of cork. “Grease your wounds with this, and eat a little. It’ll take away the swelling and relieve some of the pain. Don’t use too much—Lamorak might be in worse shape than you are.”

  She held the pot while he picked the simple locks of her manacles and shackles; then she swiftly followed his instructions. Whatever magick powered the ointment seemed to be a potent one: almost instantly the redness and swelling of the infected sword cuts began to recede, and she could literally feel the fading of her fever.

  “This was,” she said, rubbing a last bit of the ointment onto the torn flesh of her wrists and ankles, “not exactly the way I’d imagined meeting you again. I’m not the kind of girl who needs to be rescued very often . . .”

  This sounded bad, and the hollow laugh that she forced to follow it sounded worse, but thankfully Caine barely seemed to notice. He pulled the trusty’s robe off over his head, revealing his familiar knife-studded costume of leather, and tossed the robe to her.

  “Dress. We have less than ten minutes to spring Lamorak and get out of here.”

  For a bare instant she lost herself in the blessed feel of clothing once again covering her body. “Thank you. Mother’s Curse, Caine, I can’t even—”

  “Save it. We’ll have time for speeches after we get out of here; shit, you can give me a testimonial dinner. Let’s go get Lamorak.”

  “Lamorak,” she said slowly. “Do you know—” that he’s screwing Pallas Ril? her mind finished, but she couldn’t say it aloud, not to his face, not here.

  “What?”

  “—where his cell is?” she amended hastily. “I haven’t seen anyone—did anyone get away? Pallas—did she make it? Is she well?”

  “Yeah, I . . . ah, I guess so,” he said, looking like his stomach suddenly hurt him. “So far. Come on, let’s go.”

  But instead of opening the door, Caine’s fingers opened, and the lantern clattered to the floor; an animal snarl scraped up his throat as his hands went to his head. His face twisted into a rictus of agony, and he doubled over an instant before he collapsed against the wall, clawing at it for support; his fingernails scraped across the limestone, and he crumpled to the floor.

  4

  KOLLBERG LEAPED BOLT upright from the stage manager’s chair, chins quivering. “What in Christ’s name was that?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” said one of the frantic techs, “but it must hurt like hell. Look at this!”

  Caine’s brain chemistry had gone berserk, and his pain-response telemetry was off the scale; it was incredible that he was even co
nscious. On Soliloquy there came only a low back-of-the-throat moan.

  “Is it some kind of seizure?” Kollberg barked. “Somebody tell me what’s going on!”

  Another tech looked up from his keypad screen, shaking his head. “For that, sir, we’re probably going to have to wait for Caine.”

  And then Caine’s Soliloquy came back on-line with a phrase that shot ice into Kollberg’s chest.

  *Everyone seems to want me to let Lamorak die.*

  5

  BERNE THUNDERED UP to the courthouse at a full gallop, and even as a young and nervous sentry unshouldered his pike and snapped at him to halt and declare himself, he swung from the saddle and stalked toward the sentry like a hunting wolf.

  “Look at me. You know who I am, don’t you?”

  The sentry nodded mutely, eyes wide.

  “I’m giving you a gift, soldier. I’m handing you a promotion.”

  “My lord?”

  “You haven’t seen me. We’ve never met. This is what happened here tonight. As you were pacing your post, you heard a sound—a muffled cry, the thud of a falling body, it doesn’t matter. Make something up. All you have to do is go to your watch commander and get him to send men to check every sentry. Understand?”

  The sentry nodded, wide eyed.

  “One of your men is probably dead, now, as we speak. The man that killed him is in the Donjon.”

  The sentry frowned. “I don’t understand. If he’s in the Donjon, how could he—”

  Berne cuffed him on the side of the head hard enough to make him stagger. “He’s not a prisoner, you idiot. He’s helping a prisoner escape.”

  “Escape? That’s impossible!”

  “Only if you make it so, soldier. If this man is caught and killed, I’ll be your friend, you follow? You understand what it can mean for a common soldier to have, for a friend, a Count of the Emperor?”

  Ambition seemed to light the sentry’s eyes from within, and again he nodded.

  “But if anyone ever learns I was here tonight, I’ll be your enemy. You might understand what that means, too.”

  “I wouldn’t know you if you bit me, m’lord.”

  Berne patted him on his reddening cheek. “Good lad.”

  The sentry clattered off, and Berne remounted his blowing horse. He wanted to be back at the palace before this particular kettle exploded.

  6

  THIS WAS THE thunder that threatened to burst Caine’s skull:

  I APOLOGIZE FOR THE SHOUT, DEAR BOY; THE ROCK OF THE DONJON IMPEDES FLOW, AND SO I MUST ROAR.

  FORGET LAMORAK. HE IS IN THE THEATER OF TRUTH, AND YOU CANNOT REACH HIM IN TIME. IF YOU CAN BRING OUT THE WOMAN, SHE MIGHT SUFFICE.

  OTHERWISE, RETURN AND WE SHALL DEVISE A NEW AND BETTER STRATAGEM.

  The Presence was gone from his mind as thunderously as it had appeared. Caine remembered what Kollberg had said in the greenroom before his transfer, remembered as clearly as if he was hearing it now for the first time. “And, ah, about Lamorak. If he’s not dead—if, for example, he was captured—you are under no circumstances to attempt a rescue.”

  He couldn’t look at Talann, couldn’t stare into those deep violet pools of her eyes.

  He coughed once, harshly, and monologued, *Everyone seems to want me to let Lamorak die.*

  He thought, Kollberg, you cocksucker, though his Studio conditioning prevented him from bringing the words to his lips. If there’s any way, any way I can show people what you are, you just better fucking watch out.

  Caine said, aloud, “How do we get from here to the Theater of Truth?”

  7

  TALANN’S EYES GO wide: violets blooming at twilight. “I, I, I’m not sure,” she stammers. “Ah, are you, are you well?”

  I rest my aching head against the cool limestone behind me and try to look calm and confident—must have scared the shit out of her, when I collapsed like that. Sure as death scared the shit out of me.

  “Have you been there? The Theater of Truth?”

  She nods uncertainly and can’t meet my eyes. “That’s where Lamorak is?”

  “Yeah, well, his cell was empty when I got there,” I lie smoothly. “Unless you think he’s having dinner with Ma’elKoth, the Theater of Truth is about the only choice.”

  She runs grimy fingers into her matted, greasy hair. “I don’t, I don’t really know how to get there. When they took me, they tied a sack over my head. I couldn’t see.”

  And we’ve only got about five minutes left.

  So there it is, something snarls in the back of my mind. You win, Ma’elKoth. You win, you other, you grey-fleshed flabby maggot of a man whom I cannot name.

  You win. Lamorak dies. Game over.

  I don’t know how that spell works, I don’t know if anyone could hear Ma’elKoth’s voice roaring into my mind to say that Lamorak lies in the chamber of horrors, that he’s too far away and too well guarded. Not a medieval torture chamber, oh, no; a very modern, very clean and efficient torture chamber, run by a Lipkan expatriate whose very name has become a byword for conscienceless brutality.

  And yet, something wet and sticky squirms in my chest, telling me it’s easy to leave him. Easy, simple.

  He’s been fucking my wife.

  Leave him, let him die. There’s no chance to save him. My hands are clean.

  Even Pallas wouldn’t fault me for this.

  I push up to my feet, swaying a little, my head still ringing from Ma’elKoth’s roar.

  “How do you feel? Can you run? Can you climb? The rope out of here is a hundred and fifty feet. Can you do it?”

  “Caine,” she says feelingly, “to get out of here, I can do anything.”

  “Stay two strides behind my right shoulder, and keep up. You’re Monastic, right? You can friarpace?”

  She nods. Within her filth-streaked face, her eyes shine with a hero-worshiping promise of a knight’s reward. This time it’s me that looks away.

  “Let’s go, then.”

  I close the door behind us, swing the bar into place, and we run.

  Friarpace is a form of meditation as well as a method for moving fast over uncertain terrain. We bend forward from the hips and hold our backs straight, running flat-footed while bringing our knees straight up toward our chests with each stride. The arms go limp at the sides, not pumped for balance, and the hands are kept curled in three-finger shape. I watch the floor three paces ahead in the muted gleam from a bare crack in my lantern’s cover. I breathe slowly and steadily—three steps in, three steps out—feeling the universal breath like a current that carries me along. A good pacer can run at marathon speed through a woodland and never tire, never stumble on uneven ground, never trip on a root hidden in underbrush, and make very little noise. In abbey school, we’d open each fighting day with a three-mile friarpace into the forest; the gouges and ridges of unevenly cut limestone down here are no danger, even in the dark.

  Talann keeps up without difficulty. “Where are we going?”

  “Shut up.”

  I count side passages as we pace, chanting our path under my breath as a mantra. Straight straight right straight left straight straight right— as each leg or turn passes I cut it from my chant. None of the passages down here are quite straight, and some of them curve much more than is apparent as we move along them. I spend substantial concentration on this; if I miss one, we’re fucked. Even as it is, we’re cutting the timing too damned close.

  When my chant reduces to straight, right, I stop and hold out an arm to catch Talann at my shoulder.

  “Around that corner,” I say, low, “there’s a door with no bar on it. That’s the mess. We go in there; there’s a rope tucked up inside the flue. It’ll take us right up to the courthouse roof, but we have to hurry. If the day cooks show up and relight the fire, we’ll smother. Understand?”

  She nods, frowning. “But . . . where’s the Theater of Truth? What about Lamorak?”

  I shake my head grimly. “We can’t help him. There’s no time. If he�
�d been in his cell . . .”

  She seems to shrink a little, to collapse in on herself, and she looks away. “So we have to leave him,” she says hollowly. “There’s nothing you can do?”

  She wants me to tell her she’s wrong; she turns back to look at me with so much nakedly worshipful hope in her eyes it makes me want to belt her.

  “That’s right—” A horrible thought leaks into my brain. “You, ah, you and Pallas, you have a meetpoint? You know, a place you can link up if you’ve been separated?”

  She squints at me. “Of course we do. Why should you ask? Didn’t Pallas send you?”

  “No. It’s a long story.” I breathe a little easier—it would have been too harshly ironic to leave Lamorak down here and later discover he was the only one who knew where to find Pallas.

  But somewhere, deep in my guts, I feel an unexpected twinge. It’s not just that I know Lamorak, that I even kind of like the guy—it feels like, I don’t know, disappointment?

  I see it now: I was hoping Lamorak was the only one who knew the rendezvous.

  I’m looking for an excuse to rescue him.

  We shouldn’t even be having this conversation. I should have taken her into the kitchen and up the chimney and worried about this shit once we were out of danger.

  Ma’elKoth told me to let him die; that other maggot gave me the same order.

  Everyone wants me to let Lamorak die.

  A pretty smart guy said to me the other day: “They think they own you. They think you have to do what they say.”

  And, y’know, there is one other way out of here . . .

  I set the lantern on the floor and reach for Talann’s arms in the deep shadows. Her face seems to glow, faintly; back over my shoulder a hundred paces or so is the torchlight and the constant prisoner-mumble of the Pit. Her breath catches in her throat, and her eyes shine.

  “You go up that rope,” I tell her. “You find Pallas Ril and say these words to her: Caine says you’ve been off-line for four days. She’ll know what to do.”

  Her eyes narrow, and she gets a hardass set to her mouth. “Tell her yourself.”

  “I hope I’ll get the chance.”