Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  The bilge rang with shouts and screams of alarm as the tokali wailed with a single voice. Talann released the falling Cats before she landed, then skipped back to let them fall in a heap at her feet. As they struggled to disentangle themselves from each other, Talann spun and cracked a heel kick into the back of one’s head; he went down twitching. She jumped high and landed with the heel of one foot on the side of his neck. He flopped like a landed fish as he died.

  The hooded Cat came rolling to his feet, and Pallas’ startled paralysis broke. Even as he drew his sword, she popped out of the Warrior’s Seat into a fighting stance and smoothly slipped her bladewand from its sheath along her wrist; a simple twist of her mind triggered it.

  For the brief second of its existence, the blue-white energy of a bladewand is as irresistible as Kosall; a stroke of her hand sent the bladewand’s immaterial edge through the Cat’s wrist. His sword and the hand that had held it fell together to the slatted floor, and a crimson jet fountained from the stump of his wrist as he howled in disbelief.

  Talann lunged past him, snaked her arm around his neck as she passed, as though to put him in a headlock. She planted her feet, locked her hands together, and twisted, cracking the stunned Cat like a whip. His neck snapped loudly, audible even over the terrified shouts of the tokali.

  The bladewand’s energy flickered out, and Pallas said numbly, “You killed them both . . .”

  Talann offered her a feral grin so much like Caine’s that it hurt her heart. “You had a better idea? What now?”

  Pallas shook herself and answered, raising her voice to be heard over the tokali.

  “How many of them are already aboard?”

  “Couldn’t tell. A lot. Does it matter?”

  “No. If we stay down here they’ll shoot us like rats. We fight.”

  She looked at the metal netting that covered the face of the hooded Cat and understood its significance. “My Cloaks have just become obsolete.”

  Talann spread her hands. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  Booted feet pounded on the deck above, approaching.

  Pallas turned to the tokali. “All of you: stay here and stay down! I don’t know what’s going to happen; whatever it is, it’ll be extreme. Find something to hold on to.”

  Talann said, “They have the hatch surrounded—they’re just waiting for one of us to put our head up.”

  Pallas nodded. “That’s what I’m counting on.”

  A flick of her wrist produced one of the last two buckeyes she had. Talann’s eyes lit with fierce delight.

  “Stand back.”

  The lines of power inscribed upon the buckeye’s surface spoke to her mind, and she touched them with a tendril of her Shell. The buckeye began to trail smoke through her fingers, and she lobbed it gently, underhand, up through the hatch. It triggered five feet above the deck with an earshattering boom and blew the deck around the hatch to smoldering flinders; the ladder fell in splinters to the floor.

  Where the hatch had been was now a smoking hole about six feet in diameter; the waiting Cats would now be scattered across the deck, some unconscious, others madly rolling and slapping at themselves to put out the flames that clung to their leather clothing.

  “There’ll be others, and crossbow fire as we come up,”

  Pallas nodded. “You’ll have to draw fire till I get clear.” Pallas made a stirrup of her hands, and Talann understood instantly. It’s almost like working with Caine, Pallas thought. As though we’ve been doing this for years.

  Without another word, Talann sprang into Pallas’ hands; Pallas continued the momentum with all the strength in her own legs. She heaved upward while Talann leaped again, and Talann shot up through the hole onto the deck, rolled, and came up running.

  Pallas came right behind her, jumping up to catch at the smoking rim of the hole, pulling herself up and out to roll to her feet, so fast and smooth that the smoldering wood could do no more than singe her palms. She dove toward some of the cargo crates lashed to the deck, going over one scorched and unconscious Cat. The whacks of firing crossbows seemed to come from everywhere and were echoed by the loud splintering thumps of quarrels slamming into the deck and the crates around her. Pallas found cover among the crates and cautiously poked her head up.

  Talann fought hand to hand against two Cats on the foredeck, springing, leaping, and tumbling to avoid their slashing blades, slicing back at them with the pair of knives she always carried behind her belt. She was safe enough from the crossbow fire for now—the Cats wouldn’t take the chance of shooting their comrades—but more Cats sprinted toward the barge along the wharfside. Pallas triggered her final buckeye and slung it overhand toward them without a second thought. It was her last, but they wouldn’t know that, and caution would slow them down.

  The fireball exploded above them, flattening three or four and sending a couple tumbling into the river. The other approaching Cats scattered toward cover.

  We’re about as trapped as you can get, Pallas thought. She might be able to escape—especially with Talann along to cover her back—but she was the only hope of the tokali. If she could cut away the ropes that moored the barge to the docks and somehow get the barge to swing out into the current, they’d eventually drift against the downstream antiship net, which she could probably, maybe, cut through with the bladewand, given enough time. She didn’t have a lot of hope for this plan; this would be a long, slow drift in the sluggish current, and she’d have to hold off the Cats the whole way . . . and pass right under Knights’ Bridge.

  Where Berne stood.

  First things first. She had to get the scorched Cats off the barge. They’d be swiftly recovering from their shock and even she and Talann together couldn’t deal with that many Cats in close quarters. A quick scan of the deck visible from her position found the two ogre poleboys squatting behind a stack of crates not far to her right.

  “Hey! You two!” she shouted. “Pick up the guys that are down and toss them overboard!”

  One of them shook its massive head. “Not. They s’oot uz,” it explained in a growl that mushed around the curved tusks that protruded upward from its lower jaw.

  “I’ll take care of the crossbows,” Pallas snapped. “Move!”

  They both shook their heads stubbornly and hunkered down even lower behind the crates. Pallas swore. She once again produced the bladewand and triggered it. A handbreadth plane of shimmering blue-white force sliced through the crate just above one of the ogre’s heads.

  “Do it or I’ll kill you right now!”

  They flinched, and their leathery faces went pale: they believed her. They started to scramble out from around the stack.

  Now Pallas had to keep her end of the bargain.

  She breathed herself into mindview, and the shouts of the battle faded. In her powerful imagination, she structured a shining lattice of golden energy, one huge and powerful and curved around the entire barge. It was far larger than anything she could have charged into a crystal; the quartz would have shattered under the strain of holding so much power. It had to be more, it had to be stronger, larger, to hold against the crossbows, against the fists and feet of the Cats; she pulled Flow far beyond her capacity, far beyond what she’d ever dreamed possible, far beyond the point where another adept would have charred his brain and fallen dead on the spot with smoke leaking from his nostrils.

  She drew Flow into a towering whirlpool of force that passed into her and through her and powered this enormous shield with an energy beyond any she’d ever controlled. Suddenly her mindview shifted; it was as though she stood outside herself, looking on.

  She saw the rigidity of her body, the frown that concentration twisted into her brow, and the titanic energy that flowed through her. A sense of wonder, of awe that was almost religious, entered her along with the Flow. Fatigue and ultimate necessity had combined to thrust her upward into a higher level of consciousness, where she could sluice power through her body to energize the Shield but leave her mind fre
e to look on with a curious sense of release, with what was almost an indifference to the consequences, to the outcome of the battle.

  The purity and beauty of the Shield; the ease with which it absorbed the flight after flight of crossbow quarrels; the astonishing grace of Talann’s combat as she dispatched first one Cat, then the other; the slow, twisting arc of the wounded and unconscious Cats that the ogres tossed spinning into the Great Chambaygen; all these combined into an intricate dance that began with the quantum buzz of electron shells within the atoms that made up her body and extended outward to the mighty sweep of the galactic arm, to the endless dance of the galaxies themselves about the core of the universe.

  This transcendent blossoming of awareness carried her away; her consciousness vanished within the universal dance and swung there for an instant eternity. She might have hung there forever, blissfully one with the infinite, but she was brought back to herself by a white-hot surge of feedback through her Shield.

  Instantly the barge and the river and the wall of Old Town reassembled in her vision, and everything was washed with flame. The flame vanished from the surface of her Shield, but it clung to the decks of the barges nearby, and the crates stacked on the pier. Around the barge, everything burned. The scarlet shaft of power that sprang from the arch of Knights’ Bridge and terminated within the Dusk Tower of the Colhari Palace answered her instant question.

  It had been a firebolt. From Berne. From Ma’elKoth.

  Her Shield had held.

  Yesterday—even this morning—a surprise like this might have dropped her from mindview, but she was far beyond that, now. This must be what Caine feels, she realized, this serene confidence that his art is perfect, this release from fear of the outcome, this knowing that any result, even death, has a beauty of its own.

  Another firebolt followed, a roaring shaft of flame that speared through the air above the river and splashed across her Shield.

  All the troops that watched this battle from the fortified walls of Old Town, all the laborers and common folk who had peered from Industrial Park windows, everyone save the Cats themselves, now found this fight to be vastly more dangerous than it was entertaining. Helmeted heads vanished behind the crenels atop the wall, and the streets and alleys that led away from the wharf were suddenly crowded with fleeing townsfolk, shoving and trampling each other in their sudden terror.

  This firebolt hurt, and she knew that for all her newfound power, she couldn’t hold this Shield forever. She couldn’t match Ma’elKoth strength-for-strength—not yet, maybe not ever.

  They had to move.

  Another shattering roar, and even the sun dimmed behind the fury of the flames that hit her Shield. How could he attack so fast, again and again? She could hold her defense no longer. Blackness danced within her eyes, and her Shield scattered like cobwebs in the wind. Talann was at her side, to catch her as she crumpled.

  Pallas clung to her. “Seconds—we have only seconds before he kills us all.”

  Talann shrugged and bared her teeth. “What would Caine do, if he were here now?”

  Pallas looked gratefully up into Talann’s vivid violet eyes and drew strength from the solidity of the arms that supported her.

  “He’d buy me some time,” she answered, “but—”

  “Done,” said Talann, and before Pallas could say another word Talann whirled and sprinted across the deck of the barge. She sprang onto the pier and across it to the burning deck of the barge opposite, then curved for shore, outracing the flames. Cats angled to meet her across the docks, but she slanted away from them, sprinting with incredible speed along the riverside, west toward Knights’ Bridge.

  Pallas reached for that inexhaustible source again and poured herself into the Flow, building another Shield to defend the barge against the firebolt she knew was coming. She layered it upon itself, thicker and thicker, angling it toward the span of bridge, but the firebolt that came next battered it into nonexistence and blasted away her consciousness.

  When her eyes opened, she picked herself up and knew that she’d been down only a second or two. She caught the last glimpse of Talann as she vanished into the mouth of an upsloping street at the west end of the wharf, and Pallas knew where she was heading: the center arch of Knights’ Bridge. Pallas sighed out a prayer that wished her luck and the blessings of every good god.

  Her Shield had done its work: the barge still floated unhurt. Now to get the thing moving out into the stream . . .

  She looked around, leaning on the crates around her against a wave of dizziness; none of the crew were anywhere in sight, and she didn’t blame them. She only hoped that none of them had gone overboard. She might need them, later.

  The Cats who watched the barge from the wharf were in no hurry to attack; some of their number had raced off in pursuit of Talann, and the rest had no desire to get caught on the fringes of one of Berne’s firebolts. They contented themselves with firing a crossbow quarrel at her now and then. Pallas once again drew her bladewand. She kept under cover behind the crates as she slashed at the ropes that moored the barge to the pier; they parted silently.

  But how was she to move the barge out into the current without the help of the poleboys? Even if they would help, could she protect them from the quarrels of the Cats if Ma’elKoth and Berne kept scaling up the power of their Shield-breaking firebolts?

  She refused to give up; she refused to allow the tokali to die here.

  Now, far to the west, another figure raced out up the curve of Knights’ Bridge, a figure with platinum hair and the lithe grace of a thoroughbred, a figure that ran headlong toward Berne. Tears swam in Pallas’ eyes.

  Talann was buying her this time with her life. She wouldn’t waste it.

  She began once again the circular breath control that would draw her into mindview.

  I will find a way.

  10

  AS BERNE WATCHED her run, he knew her: she was that wild-ass bitch his boys had taken with Lamorak, the one Caine had helped escape from the Donjon. When she pulled away from the pursuing Cats and vanished up one of the streets that sloped from the riverfront to the city above, he pounded his fist on the bridge wall in front of him and cursed savagely enough to make the Catseye beside him flinch.

  The Cats had overcommitted; every one of those bloodthirsty fucking idiots down there wanted to be in on the kill. They’d left no reserve to seal the wharf, and now that wild-ass bitch was going to get away.

  Something sizzled in the back of Berne’s head when he remembered seeing the smooth curve of her muscle, her golden skin stretched out nude on Master Arkadeil’s table. For a long moment he struggled with a compelling temptation to leave the bridge and chase her himself. The sweetness, fantasy rich, of catching her in the crook of an alley, alone, of bending her over against the rough brick of a manufactory’s rear wall . . .

  Arkadeil had pincushioned her with his silver needles; Ma’elKoth himself had put her to the question with all the power of his mind. To neither had she given so much as her name.

  Berne knew beyond doubt that she’d give him that, and more.

  She’d give him everything.

  The heat that came to his groin as he imagined it nearly pulled him from the bridge.

  But down there on that boat was an enemy thaumaturge of incredible power; he couldn’t know for sure, but he dared to hope that this was indeed Simon Jester. Neither he nor Ma’elKoth had truly expected this dock sweep to work, but when that Shield had gone up—that huge fucking thing the size of the Temple of fucking Dal’kannith—when it had held against three of Ma’elKoth’s fire-bolts, Berne knew that his place was here. Ma’elKoth would accept no excuse for another failure.

  After all, half the dockside was on fire down there; he’d damned well better catch an Aktir or two to blame it on. With all the fires and explosions and battles and failed raids of the past week, Ankhanans were becoming more afraid of their government than of the Aktiri.

  And that weasel-dick Toa-Sytell wo
uld be right there at Ma’elKoth’s side, whispering in his ear, telling him how Simon Jester should be left to the King’s Eyes, that the Cats would be better used in the hands of someone else, someone competent. . .

  No, Berne would stay on this bridge until his Cats well and truly cornered and took whoever that was down there.

  A flicker of blue-white force caught his eye, and now the boat rocked slowly away from its mooring. Berne smiled and muttered under his breath, “And just where do you think you’re going, pal?”

  Louder, distinctly, he said, “Ma’elKoth.”

  I AM WITH YOU, BERNE.

  And he was: the Presence, the jittering, buzzing power that filled every crack in Berne’s soul, the melting edge of explosion like trembling on the verge of orgasm hummed in Berne’s ears and stretched an irresistible smile across his teeth.

  “Another firebolt.”

  BERNE: THE POWER THAT I DRAW FROM MY BELOVED CHILDREN FOR THESE FIREBOLTS IS EXTREME. THE LAST ONE ALONE TOOK THE LIVES OF EIGHT OF MY WEAKENED CHILDREN. USE THEM WISELY.

  “I will,” he said through his teeth, on fire with power. “I will. I need it, Ma’elKoth, they’re getting away.”

  VERY WELL.

  And the jittering buzz smoothed, then swelled into creamy heat and seemed to lift him to his toes. The Catseye at his side stepped unobtrusively away. He felt tiny flames course over his skin, flames that did not burn but caressed him like a lover’s fingertips. The barge still rocked ponderously at its pier, moving away by inches, and no Shield was in evidence. Berne raised one fist to the sky and extended the other toward the barge.

  “Yesss,” he hissed, withholding his power for this last sexual instant. “Oh, oh yes . . .”

  “My lord Count!” The harsh cry of the Catseye at his side drew his eye, and he barely managed to halt the stroke. The Catseye swept his hand up to point to the north, along Nobles’ Way, the road that divided the Industrial Park from Alientown.

  Along it, sprinting toward him, ran that wild-ass bitch.

  Ten Cats broke into view in pursuit, pounding after her. Even as Berne watched, four of them split to the roadside, stopped, and fired crossbows. The wild-ass bitch seemed almost prescient, the way she jigged at exactly the right instant to make the quarrels pass in front of her; she came on, hardly having broken stride, and even the six Cats behind her who had not stopped were losing ground.