Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  When he returned to Ankhana, he’d be able to explain away the bruises as battering from the fall down the Shaft sump. It was a good story: the media believed it already, and so did the meditechs who’d treated his wounds.

  He stared at the rolling lines of raindrops that slid vertically down the windowpane as though his future could be read there. It always seems to rain, when I come here, he thought.

  “I don’t see how it could be going any better for him,” he said. “He even opened my infirmary room to the media—they were on me from the instant I opened my eyes. In the cab, on the way here, I couldn’t find a channel that didn’t have a story about me on it. If they didn’t have one of my quotes, they had an interview with the meditech, or they had retired Actors offering odds on my Final Confrontation with Berne, or some flack from Studio Marketing talking about the record advance orders for the secondhand cubes, or some other asshole claiming to know something about the ‘malfunction in the Winston transfer mechanism.’ ”

  He set his left fist on the glass and leaned on it, examining the folds of skin on his thumb and forefinger, the thick pads of callus across his knuckles.

  “Some guy in Chicago managed to get an interview with Shanna’s parents. They, y’know, they—” He had to cough away a sudden huskiness in his throat. “—Alan and Mara can’t get seats, y’know? They don’t get their next-of-kin comps because this is my Adventure, not Shanna’s. They’re Trade, y’know. They can’t afford a first-hander berth. Shit, I’d give them the money, but I didn’t even think of it, and they’re too proud to ask me . . . So this Chicago asshole, he’s asking for donations, a worldwide sympathy plea to get the Leightons on-line for the rest of my Adventure. Doing well, too, they say—makes you wonder who’s gonna keep the leftover profits.”

  Once he’d managed to fight his way free of the media feeding frenzy at the Studio infirmary, Hari hadn’t even bothered to do a fly-by on the Abbey: he knew damned well the place would be shoulder to shoulder with news crews. Marc Vilo wouldn’t return his calls: he’d left the Studio the night before, while Hari was still unconscious in the infirmary. Hari guessed he’d probably had his usual luck with Dole and was currently happily humping away at some Leisure tail. And Vilo would have only been good for shielding him from the press. Even with Vilo, Hari couldn’t have spoken what was in his heart, couldn’t have said the things that he needed so desperately to say.

  Many of these words, these thoughts, were dangerous; he needed to say things that could get him cyborged if they were repeated to the Social Police. Vilo couldn’t protect him, and Hari wouldn’t put his Patron in that position.

  So he went to the one place he could always go, turned to the only man who could safely hear whatever he needed to say. He went to the Buchanan Social Camp, to the Mute Facility, where nothing he said could possibly be taped, or even overheard, and told it all to his crazy father.

  “How could he have put it all together so neatly? I mean, was he planning this when he sent Lamorak to betray her? When he approved her Adventure in the first place? How far back does it go? Back to Toa-Phelathon? What does he care about more, eliminating Ma’elKoth or getting the ratings?”

  Duncan Michaelson had lain nervelessly in his bed, listening to Hari in silence broken only by his occasional rasping cough. Veins twitched across his forehead, and as always Hari couldn’t tell how much Duncan could understand until he spoke.

  “Does . . . does it matter?”

  Hari looked at his father’s pale and ghostly reflection in the rain-streaked window. “No, I guess it doesn’t. I’m dead either way.”

  “Not . . .” Duncan coughed harshly, convulsively, his mouth filling with phlegm. Hari came to his side, loosened the straps that held his wrists, and pulled out a paper handkerchief for his father to spit into. He wiped Duncan’s lips gently.

  “. . . not dead,” Duncan murmured painfully. “You’re winning . . .”

  What’re you, nuts? Hari barely kept the reflexive words from his lips, and he had to fight down a bitter laugh.

  “Winning? Dad, I’m barely walking. Shanna dies in two days. She’s in love with the bastard who’s going to kill her, and I’m getting crushed between the Studio and the fucking Ankhanan Empire. Even if I can get back to Shanna in time, even if I live that long, she doesn’t want to be saved . . .”

  “What, what about . . .” The effort of speaking seemed to be exhausting him. “. . . what about Kollberg?”

  Hari lowered his head. “He’s too smart for me, Dad. He’s been two steps ahead of me the whole way.” His fingers laced together and twisted, cracking his knuckles in a machine-gun stutter.

  “When I woke up in the infirmary, it took me half an hour to really believe that I’d been about to kill him. It took me another hour to get over failing.”

  “Stupid . . . stupid kid. Didn’t I tell you . . . didn’t I tell you once what your problem is?”

  “Yeah, whatever. You’re always telling me what my problem is. I’m a slave, right?”

  A thin and bloodless smile stretched Duncan’s withered lips.

  “Not anymore . . .”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He . . . Kollberg, he’s not smarter than you, Hari. Very few people are . . . He just . . . He goes for what he wants, y’know? He’s always shaving the odds, always taking another baby step toward where he wants to go, even when he doesn’t know how it’ll all pull together in the end . . . When you do that long enough, hard enough, eventually things fall into place and . . . and you look like a genius, when you never really planned anything . . .”

  “I still don’t get—”

  “Listen.” Duncan’s trembling hand gripped Hari’s wrist with surprising strength. “You do the same; you always have. Caine does it; so do you. When Caine wins, that’s how you do it every time. You inch toward daylight, and then when it comes together, you take it all, one fast move puts it all together—right?”

  Hari frowned. “Well, yeah, I guess—”

  “That’s how you’ll beat him.”

  Hari narrowed his eyes, suddenly thinking hard.

  “See?” Duncan went on. “. . . not a slave. You’re thinking . . . how you can beat him. A real slave can’t even think like that—slaves can’t fight back; they won’t let themselves fight back. He doesn’t own you . . . in your mind. You can fight him now. You’ve won.”

  “Hardly—”

  “No no no. Think. I couldn’t teach you much, but I tried at least to teach you to think. Beat Ma’elKoth—there’ll be other Ma’elKoths. There’ll be other Kollbergs. You’ve already beaten the worst enemy you’ll ever have—that voice in your head . . . It tells you the fight’s already over . . . whispers there’s nothing you can do . . . If you beat that voice, it’s a victory that can’t be taken from you. You might die, but you’ll die fighting.”

  Or I might end up here, in the next room in the Buke, he thought. Duncan had taken his own baby steps, had beaten that voice—and had been crushed like a roach under a boot heel.

  Hari sighed and shook his head. “I haven’t beaten it, Dad. I’m trying, but so far I haven’t been able to lay a fist on it.”

  Duncan’s eyes drifted closed, and he allowed himself a rusty chuckle. “You will . . . Identify the enemy—it’s half the battle . . . Take that step, Hari. Take that first step, and then just don’t stop.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Hari muttered under his breath, looking away. “It’s over for you. You lost a long time ago.”

  “Nothing’s over,” Duncan said. His brain might have been out of order, but there was nothing wrong with his ears. “And I haven’t lost yet. I’m still in there pitching, Hari.”

  Hari stared at his father’s ruined face, at his withered smile that showed a gentle confidence that was so out of place, so ludicrous from this shattered straw man, that it defied argument.

  “Still taking those baby steps, kiddo,” Duncan said, wiping phlegm from his lips with a crippled hand. “I took anoth
er one, just now.”

  7

  HARI SPENT HOURS in Duncan’s room that day; he had nowhere else he needed to be. Kollberg had already scheduled his return to Ankhana for tomorrow morning, and Hari had only a single Studio obligation in the interim, a follow-up interview with LeShaun Kinnison on DragonTales.

  They had much to talk of, father and son. Hari had heard other men speak of finally coming to know their fathers as men; for those other men, this slow process had begun in their twenties. Duncan’s madness, Hari’s career—any number of things had stripped this opportunity from Hari’s life. Nothing he could do or say would bring it back, but that day he felt as though he made a beginning, like he began to have the faintest glimmer of how Duncan’s students must have felt about him thirty-five years ago.

  He knew, too, that a beginning was all he could ever have; he’d waited too long. Duncan was too far gone in his cycle of madness.

  They tried to spend the day discussing Hari’s problem, exploring options for getting Hari and Shanna out from under the hammer that poised trembling over their heads. Hari used up a lot of favors that day, promised kilos of cocaine, to keep himself within the room, to keep the attendant passing by with his occasional injections.

  Duncan cycled in and out of lucidity according to a very delicate balance of his medications; much of the time Hari spent in that room was taken up with Duncan’s fantasies of a different time, of the years before and just after Duncan’s downcasteing, when Hari’s mother still lived, when they were still a family. Duncan would grill Hari on his geometry lesson or send him to the bedroom to check on his mother’s fever. Hari found it frighteningly easy to slip back into that dream-surfing process of riding the advancing wave of Duncan’s fantasy, to be precisely what Duncan expected him to be.

  Duncan mentioned the same thing, in one of his lucid cycles. “You’re so good at playing along, Hari—seamlessly, faultlessly good . . . I know I beat that skill into you with my fists, before you were big enough to fight back—I remember that, sometimes . . . It’s made you wealthy, and famous—but now it’s going to get you killed. See, you’re so good at being what they want you to be that nobody remembers you don’t have to do it. Not even you. You’ve fooled them all into thinking that you are Caine; you’ve even fooled yourself. You don’t have to solve every problem with your fists, Hari. That’s Caine’s way. That was Caine, down there in the Chairman’s office. The Chairman hurt you, and your reaction was to beat him to death with your bare hands—but that was Caine’s reaction because Caine doesn’t have any other option. It’s the only problem-solving strategy he has.”

  “What else is there?” Hari sighed with a weary shrug.

  “Plenty. There’s plenty. Dammit, you’re too smart to kid yourself this way. You’ve been taken by your own con, Hari. The whole world thinks that Caine is all of you, and you’ve let them talk you into agreeing. But it’s not true. It never was true. Aren’t you the one who’s supposed to be looking the world square in the eye?”

  Hari shifted uncomfortably. “That’s the general idea—”

  “Well, it’s crap. You’re pretending to be less than you are. You’re pretending the world is worse than it is. You’re kidding yourself just as much as any Pollyanna optimist does. You know what it is? It’s an excuse to lose. And you can’t afford it. Not this time. The stakes are too high.”

  “But what am I supposed to do about it? I mean, really do?” Hari said tiredly. “I’m fucked from every direction.”

  “First, quit whining. Then quit kidding yourself. Let the Chairman, let the Emperor, let everybody think that Caine is who you are—just don’t let yourself think that. That’s your edge. People have been watching you almost twenty years, and nobody knows yet how smart you really are. Take those baby steps, Hari—inch toward daylight. Trust that if you just don’t quit, eventually you’ll find yourself on the pivot, you’ll be in a spot where one bold stroke will lock everything down. You know your enemy, but he doesn’t know you. Kollberg thinks that as long as you can’t get your hands on him, he’s safe.”

  “Dad . . . you, uh . . .” Hari said, shaking his head. “You make it sound so simple . . .”

  “Maybe it is,” Duncan rasped. “Hey, being crazy doesn’t automatically make me wrong.” He rolled his head sideways on the pillow, so that he could look out the window.

  He said distantly, “And a man . . . a man can be excused . . . taking a certain amount of pride in his only son.”

  Hari swallowed hard and blinked past the sudden heat at the corners of his eyes. “Well,” he said, “I guess the first thing I need to figure out is who might take my side in this, who’s big enough that the Studio can’t just step on them.”

  They’d talked for a long time more; it was midafternoon before Hari left. From the cab on his way home, he keyed Marc Vilo’s private number, and this time the stubby Businessman answered.

  “Hari! What news, kid?”

  “Marc, I need a big favor.”

  “Anything, kid, anything. You really pulled it through for me. She signed over Green Fields this morning—”

  “Is she still there?”

  Vilo shook his head. “Back to Kauai. Why?”

  “That’s the favor,” Hari said. “I need an audience with Shermaya Dole.”

  “That’s not a big one, kid,” Vilo said with a broad grin. “This’s one old widder lady that’s real happy to oblige, you follow?”

  Hari took a deep breath. Inch toward daylight, he thought. “How about this afternoon?”

  8

  BERNE’S STRAWBERRY SERGE stood out among the grey leather of the Cats. They gathered within the bridgehouse on the Old Town side of Knights’ Bridge, nearly two hundred men of closely matched height and build, the entire capital detachment.

  Gone was the horseplay and revelry that characterized their nights; every man in the room wore a face of deathly determination. Every man in the room knew that they were about to go into action against Simon Jester; every man in the room felt the loss of the six men who’d been slaughtered in the failed raid less than a week ago; every man in the room had lost a comrade, a friend.

  Every man in the room swore in his heart that he’d be the one to avenge them.

  Behind Berne stood what he’d decided to call his Catseyes—four of his bravest, steadiest men wearing flat caps draped with veils of silver netting. The procedure he’d improvised to take advantage of Lamorak’s tip was simple: One Catseye would accompany each pride, and he’d describe to the pride alpha at his side each and every person he saw. If the tip was true, and this netting rendered a man immune to Cloaks and other mind-altering magicks, eventually one of the Catseyes would begin to describe people and things that the alpha beside him could not see. Encirclement and capture could then begin according to their standard procedures.

  “The Emperor wants the thaumaturge alive; everyone else can die,” Berne said simply.

  This particular instruction had been carefully planned; he had to be able to say truthfully to Ma’elKoth that he didn’t order a massacre. If the boys got a little out of hand, well, that was understandable, considering the losses and humiliations inflicted on them this past week. It was the frustration, don’t you see? And anger—all those boys lost friends this week, and I guess they just had to take it out on somebody . . . He was thinking specifically of Caine, hoping, praying deep in his heart that Caine would somehow be there.

  He thought, privately, that the reason Ma’elKoth couldn’t Speak to Caine was that Caine had truly gone over to Simon Jester—perhaps was himself Simon Jester—and had somehow draped himself with this same magickal fog that still frustrated the Emperor. He planned to keep one Catseye by his own side; he dreamed of facing Caine while the power of Ma’elKoth filled his chest to the very brink of shattering orgasm . . .

  And maybe Pallas Ril would be there, as well. She’d escaped him in the Warrens, humiliated him and his men, but today, just maybe, he’d take her. Take them both.

 
This sweet mirage drifted shimmering at the fringes of his mind and brought a faint curve of smile to his lips, even as he issued instructions to the Cats.

  “Guard the Catseyes: Simon Jester will go for them with everything he’s got. If a Catseye falls—” Berne swept his men’s grim, set faces with a smoldering glare. “—the man at his side will take his veil, and become the new eyes of his pride. There will be no escape for Simon Jester, not this time. To live, he must defeat us all in open combat.”

  He flicked his gaze to a corner of the bridgehouse wall, to where a horns-and-grin graffito of Simon Jester had been scribbled in red chalk. He had, in fact, secretly scratched it there himself, only a few minutes before the Cats had assembled, with precisely this moment in mind.

  “Look at that,” he said darkly, reaching over his shoulder for the hilt of Kosall. “Look how he defies us. Look how he laughs.”

  He slowly pulled Kosall from its scabbard. When he grasped its hilt, its high whine vibrated in the teeth of every man in the room. He extended the blurring edge of the blade to tap the stone where the graffito lay, as though taking its measure.

  “This is our response.”

  A flick of Berne’s powerful wrist snapped Kosall in a sizzling arc around its point as he lunged into the wall, a degage that sliced a cone of shining rock from the limestone; it slid free. Berne tapped it spinning into the air with Kosall’s flat, then caught it neatly in his left hand. He held it up, so that the assembled Cats could see the face of Simon Jester upon it.

  He said, “This.”

  An act of will summoned his enchanted strength, and he crushed the cone of rock within his fist with a sound like cracking bones, crumbling it to gravel, to dust that he allowed to trail between his fingers and trickle to the floor.

  The Cats greeted this display with a fierce stillness, a silence that was far more profound than any cheer.