Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  The power throbbed inside him, and he raised his fist to strike fire along the street and roast her in her own juices. But Nobles’ Way was lined with townspeople, fearfully crowded against storefronts, but still there, still watching; and there was a knot of them around one or two who must have been hit by the errant quarrels and were down on the street. And Ma’elKoth became furious when innocent citizens were harmed.

  His instant’s hesitation on seeing this, on thinking this, cost him his shot. She’d already sprinted up the long arching span of Knights’ Bridge. Behind her, in his literal line of fire, were the pursuing Cats.

  He cast a glance back toward the barge. No Shield was up—the enemy thaumaturge was probably unconscious from feedback through his broken Shield—and he could see his Cats cautiously advancing from cover to cover toward it. They’d reach it long before it rocked clear of the dock; why not indulge himself?

  He said to the Catseye at his side, “Take her, Mikli. Don’t kill her, just take her.”

  The Catseye smiled through his silver netting as he drew his sword. “My pleasure, my lord Count.” He slipped the hood off his head and gave a happy sigh.

  He stepped out onto the middle of the bridge to wait for her, balancing his weight forward with his knees slightly bent. Mikli was a superb swordsman; he’d always been lightning fast and very precise, and for the past few months, Berne had personally overseen his training. Berne had no doubt that Mikli would perform exactly as ordered.

  The wild-ass bitch never slowed. She sprinted straight for him as though she planned to run him down. At the last instant Mikli slipped to one side and cut at the back of her neck as she passed, swinging with the flat of his blade for the quick knockout. Once again, her almost prescient reflexes saved her: she threw herself under his strike into a dive roll that brought her to her feet with her back to Mikli, only a couple of paces from Berne.

  She gave him a grin that held no hint of reason. “First him,” she said to Berne, violet eyes burning with manic fire. “Then you. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “And miss this?” Berne said with an answering grin, keeping his eyes on her so as not to warn her of Mikli’s swift approach at her back. “Never.”

  She lifted her hands as though to show Berne the pair of knives that she held reversed, their blades along her forearm; then she whirled and cut at Mikli’s leg as he fired a side kick at her spine.

  Her knife-edged forearm parried the kick, but the wire that reinforced Mikli’s leather leggings turned the blade. He followed with a slanting neck cut that she blocked with the knife along her left forearm as she stepped into him and sliced down with her right, hooking his sword wrist between the blade and her forearm. A push with her left while she pulled with her right twisted the sword out of his grasp, but she paid for it: Mikli was too experienced to try to hang on to the sword. Instead he let it go and slammed his doubled elbow into the side of her head.

  She rolled with the blow, letting it drive her to the ground; then her legs shot out and tangled Mikli’s ankles, and he fell. As he twisted to turn the fall into a roll, the wild-ass bitch backhanded the point of a knife deep into the base of his skull.

  It went in with a crunch; bone and ligament crackled as she twisted it out, neatly severing Mikli’s spine.

  He spasmed on the ground, flopping spastically, moaning, “No . . . no . . .” as the light slowly faded from his eyes.

  Berne watched this for a cold moment before he pushed himself off the wall and reached over his shoulder for Kosall.

  “Y’know, little girl, I’m starting to think you might be good enough to dance with me.”

  She slipped her knives back behind her belt and picked up Mikli’s sword as she rose. She nudged his body with her toe. “I’d imagine he’d agree with you, if he could. So would my last four dance partners, back down there on the boat.”

  “Five?” Berne said, eyebrows lifting, pretending to be impressed as his juices began to flow, his heartbeat picked up, and heat gathered in his loins. He pulled Kosall free of its scabbard by the quillions, and only then did he activate its magick by grasping the hilt; a second later its humming vibrated up his arms and into his teeth.

  “Five of my boys already today?”

  She looked upon this weapon with respect, but no surprise: she must have known already he carried this sword. She nodded toward the other Cats, her pursuers, who now had arrived at the center span.

  “Want to go for ten? Fifteen? Want to bet I can’t kill every single one of them?”

  Berne shook his head and lifted a hand to hold them back. “You already know there’s no way for you to get off this bridge alive,” he said slowly, his voice thickening with lust. “So I’m not just gonna kill you. You’re ready for that, I guess. Instead, I’m gonna fuck you. Right here in the middle of the bridge, for everyone to watch. I’m gonna bend you over this wall and fuck you. And when I’m done, each one of them—” He nodded toward the waiting Cats. “—gets a turn. Then, if you’re still alive, maybe we’ll give you to some of the passersby, y’know? The bridge traffic. What do you think about that?”

  She shrugged carelessly. “You have to beat me, first.”

  He matched her shrug. “Yeah, all right. You know, I never did get your name.”

  “No reason to tell you now,” she said. “You won’t live long enough to use it.”

  “Come on, then,” he said. “Whenever—”

  She sprang at him, her neck cut so fast he barely saw the blade move. He made no attempt to parry, just shifted his Buckler to protect the joining of his neck and shoulder. Her borrowed sword rang as though she’d struck metal, and her eyes widened.

  He shifted his Buckler to his hand and grabbed her blade. She tried to yank the blade away, to slide it slicing through his fingers, but his magickally strengthened grip held it as though it had been driven into stone. He laughed and cut at her arm with Kosall. She released the blade in time to save her arm and dropped into a back-roll away from him, coming to her feet and staring with widened eyes out of which that manic confidence swiftly drained.

  Berne flipped her sword into the air and sliced it in half with a stroke of Kosall. The pieces rang on the limestone and skittered away.

  “Tell me,” Berne said in his richest, oiliest voice, “are you starting to think you might have made a mistake?”

  11

  IN MINDVIEW, PALLAS had examined and discarded options with computerlike speed and dispassion. Only seconds passed until she knew beyond all doubt that nothing in her experience could save the tokali—and the barge crew, for whom she’d also now become responsible—from this trap.

  She didn’t have it, and that was all. No spell, no trick, no power she had or had ever held at her command could save them. This knowledge did not bring dismay, though, or fear, or sadness: it had entirely the opposite effect.

  It brought clarity and perfect freedom: the freedom one can only feel on the very knife edge of death.

  The fear, that familiar paralyzing apprehension, would have come from seeing only one chance, one slim opportunity to escape if everything came together just right. A choice between two chances, equally slim, would have been even worse; then she would have been in terror of making a tiny mistake that would cost the lives she had sworn herself to save. Having no chance at all—that allowed her the ice-and-high-mountains freedom to do exactly what she chose, with no attachment to the outcome.

  If all paths lead equally to death, what’s left to direct you at the crossroads except pure whim?

  With a mental shrug, she settled on a course of action based solely on a childish, fairy-tale metaphor: cats hate to get wet.

  Seeking a way to move the barge out from the dock, to make them swim for it, she sent a tendril of her Shell downward, into the river. She felt the life there, felt it pulse into her Shell; the tiny flickering aurae of crayfish, sluggish rivercats, gleaming, thick-bodied carp. And she felt something else, faintly, like a bare, fading echo of memory, something that see
med to link all those Shells together, as though it were a field upon which they all played.

  Pallas sought that echo, diving deeper into mindview, no longer merely visualizing her Shell but inhabiting it. That same sense of letting go, of releasing her attachment to her body, came instantly and easily now; she shifted beyond her physical self, became a matrix of pure mind, patterned by her body but no longer bound to it, a matrix tuned to the pulse of Flow itself.

  Down within the river, everything she found was Flow.

  Flow proceeds from life: it powers life and is powered by life, and here in the river, everything lived. As she sought the echo, the field, she seemed to move downward, ever deeper, not in the physical sense of farther under the water, but deeper than the Shells of the carp and the crayfish, deeper than the murky green aura of the trailing weeds, down and down and down, not below but through. . .

  Through the moss and the algae, through the protozoans, through the bacteria and the most basic molds themselves, she went farther and farther without finding what she sought. Her consciousness expanded, questing outward, following the dimly sensed links back up—

  Another level of Flow lived here.

  Behind and below was a slower, deeper pulse, far beyond the busy foreground of species’ competition. Far, far deeper than the clash of Shells as a carp takes a newt, far deeper than the silent struggle between two varieties of river weeds fighting for the same stretch of sandy bed, this was Flow of a sort she’d never dreamed existed. Tentatively, she tuned her Shell to its pulse, surrendering herself into its powerful rhythm.

  Wonder wheeled inside her with the majestic spiral of a galaxy.

  The whole river was alive.

  She’d found the Shell of the Great Chambaygen itself, the life aura of the entire river system from its farthest springs high in the Gods’ Teeth to its mighty delta at Terana on the western coast. This Shell swelled with not only what lived within the river itself, but its entire watershed: the grassy plains it meandered through, the forests that drank from it and returned their rich soil to it, the whole ecosystem that supported it and was in turn supported by it.

  The staggering power of the life it contained threatened to burn Pallas’ brain within her skull, and would have, had she struggled against it. Instead she relaxed; she surrendered; she sought her own place within that life and found it. The jewel of her consciousness hung there, fit with perfect inevitability into precisely the place where it belonged, slowly turning, regarding the life of the river with awe.

  For there was more than life here: there was Mind.

  And there was Song.

  The river sang its life, from the freshening trickle of snowmelt in the summer of a geologic age ago, from the bubble of a mountain spring to the soft crackle of corn growing in the night, the crash of an oak toppling with roots undermined by the river’s flow to the roar of a vernal flash flood, the whisper of reeds and the rustle of cattails in the backwaters; birdsong was there, from ducks and geese, herons, kingfishers and cranes; the splashing flutter of fish, the flashes of color in the muscular arc of trout and spawning salmon, the slow patience of a snapping turtle waiting in the mud.

  The river sang of men, too, poling their boats along its banks, sang of the primal folk who spoke to it with songs of their own in days of old, of the stonebenders who dammed and diverted its waters to power their mills.

  And it sang of Ankhana, the massive boil that straddled its middle, the aching running sore that poisoned it for miles downstream.

  And now into that song came a new note, a strengthening; the song shifted from the murmur of a lonely under-the-breath sighing to the warm, pure notes of the old singer who’s suddenly found that he has an unexpected audience. Note slid against note, the echoing call of a distant moose blending with playful chirps of young otters, underscored by the splash of a sudden autumn wind across a ripple . . . and became charged with meaning.

  No words flowed in this song; none were required. Melody became meaning, and meaning became Song.

  I KNOW YOU, PALLAS RIL, AND YOU ARE WELCOME IN MY SONG.

  Where Pallas hung, she had neither breath nor mouth, but from within her came a melody of answer: Chambaraya. . .

  MEN NAME ME SO, AND IMAGINE THAT THEY KNOW ME. JOIN YOUR SONG TO MINE, CHILD.

  And song poured from her, an effortless counterpoint that became perfect harmony. Here within the song there was no dissembling, no hiding or shading the truth of her; everything that she was flowed into the river’s song, and the river knew all of her. Chambaraya took all her strength, all her weakness, the shameful tangles of her jealousies and pettiness, the purity of her courage, and accepted them all with the same perfect serenity.

  There was no judgment here, could be no judgment: all was one single current from the mountains to the sea.

  In her song was the melody of her need, of the desperation that had driven her to dive so deeply and search so far. The river did not understand why men wished to hurt her, did not understand even why she feared them; death and life were both parts of the same endless wheel, out of one cometh the other, everlasting. Why should she resist returning to the earth from whence she came?

  But she asked, nonetheless: Please, Chambaraya, save us. Show your power.

  I CANNOT/WILLNOT. THE COVENANT WITH THE LESSER GODS, THAT DAMMED JERETH GODSLAUGHTERER’S REVOLT, CHANNELS ME AS WELL.

  Lesser gods? she thought, as though to herself, but within the song nothing separated her from the river, nor it from her; there were no private thoughts, nor need of any.

  YOUR GODS: WHO REQUIRE THE WORSHIP OF MEN: WHO CONCERN THEMSELVES WITH MORTALAFFAIRS: WHO ARE SMALL ENOUGH TO SUFFER BOREDOM AND PLAY GAMES OF POWER TO RELIEVE IT.

  Pallas understood with perfect clarity; Chambaraya was far beyond any concern with the lives of individuals. To the river, a human life was no more than the life of a single minnow in a flashing school—but also, no less. To the river, life is life. What could she offer, what could she do to persuade the river? All that it needed, it had already, in perfect sufficiency.

  The Covenant of Pirichanthe had bound the gods outside the walls of time, limiting their actions to providing their priests with power and occasional guidance—and perhaps that was an answer.

  From deep within her self came her offer: Make of me your priest. Grant me some small measure of your power, and I shall be your voice. I shall teach men the proper respect for you.

  I NEED NO VOICE: THE RESPECT OF MEN IS WITHOUT MEANING: THIS REQUEST HAS NO MEANING. A SONG DOES NOTASK ITSELF FOR POWER.

  A song does not ask itself for power . . . She was the song; asking the river for power was like requesting of her hand that it make a fist. It had been only the vestiges of her human viewpoint that had created this separation, this I and Thou, this conversation of Pallas Ril and Chambaraya as two separate beings.

  While she was in the song, her need, her will, her fierce devotion to the lives that were in her charge, these were all in the song as well, threads of its most basic melody. With this realization, her final remnants of separateness, of personal identity, blew away like cobwebs before a storm.

  She herself was the only part of the river that could suffer this desire . . . but there were no parts here. All was one, was wholeness. Her desire became the river’s.

  While she was in the river’s song, she was the song, she was the river, and her will touched its waters with power unimaginable.

  She surfaced within herself and regarded this single tone within her song: one small grace note with its curling spray of hair, with this cloak of blue and clothes of grey. It seemed very small, and somehow distant, but very present as well. She felt the lives within the barge with the same sense that felt an early snowfall high in the Gods’ Teeth, with the same sense that felt the death struggle of a trout and a carp in the Teranese delta. She saw that the danger that threatened these trembling humans was purely local; moving the barge would remove the danger, and moving the barge was no effort at all—it was p
recisely her nature.

  Was she not a river?

  She breathed in, and the flow from mountain to sea stilled along its span entire.

  She breathed out, and power gathered beyond any dream of resistance.

  12

  THE WILD-ASS BITCH drew her knives and came at him again, flourishing them in an intricate flurry, blank translucent concentration on her face. Berne let her come, waiting; when she came within Kosall’s reach he cut at her head. She slipped beneath the stroke—for all his magicked strength, Kosall was a large and rather unwieldly weapon.

  As she drove in under the cut, Berne whipped a straight-leg roundhouse kick at her ribs while holding his Buckler across his solar plexus to stop her knife thrust. Her point slashed through his shirt and skirred across his skin, and his roundhouse crumpled her like a doll, lifting her off her feet and sending her rolling across the bridge.

  She rose unsteadily, blood on her lips. His kick had probably ruptured something in her midsection. But she offered a grin that displayed her bloody teeth, and she pointed to his leg.

  “You’re not invulnerable,” she said.

  Berne looked down. She’d cut his leg, the leg he’d kicked her with, with the other blade. The cut was shallow, only a skin-deep slice: his serge breeches soaked up the blood that seeped into them.

  “Maybe not,” he replied, “but I’m a long fucking way closer to it than you are.”

  Now for the first time, he advanced, attacking, slashing. She was a ghost, even injured: with more than human speed and grace she slipped away and around every stroke, never parrying, never blocking, avoiding Kosall’s irresistible edge by inches.

  It became a dance, a whirling ballet, and sweat began to prickle across Berne’s forehead and shoulders. She’d lean back to let Kosall sizzle past the end of her nose, then whip forward, both knives slashing, to score another thin line of blood across Berne’s body before he could recover for the backstrike. She was the most extraordinary fighter he’d ever seen, let alone faced, but skill is only one element of battle. Her skill wouldn’t save her forever—the internal injury that brought a trail of blood down her chin to her chest would tire her, and slow her. Berne had no doubt of the outcome.