Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  It ended with unexpected swiftness. Practically in midlunge Berne saw her concentration slip, saw her mouth drop open and her eyes go wide. He leaned into the lunge, and sweet release flooded his body as Kosall’s thrumming blade entered her belly through the golden skin just below her navel, thrusting in to the very hilt.

  She said, “Oh, Great Mother . . .”

  Berne pressed his body against her slackening flesh, and he kissed her on her bloody lips, savoring their soft fullness and the copper taste of her blood. Then he stepped back and twisted Kosall’s hilt so that the blade sliced outward through her side, opening a massive, gaping wound, from which spilled her uncoiling intestines.

  She gasped and fell to her knees. Berne stepped back, panting, and watched her fingers gingerly explore the huge extent of the mortal wound, this incredible gape that split her front to back, watched her follow the ropes of her guts out onto the dirt and grit of the bridge span. Her face was utterly blank with disbelief.

  “Never thought it could happen to you, huh?” Berne said hoarsely, breathless. “Sorry I won’t get to fuck you. Don’t really like ’em cold, y’know? But this, this was almost as good.”

  He thought for a moment she was going to say something to him, but then he realized that she wasn’t looking at him, hadn’t been looking at him from the moment he’d stabbed her. She looked behind him, over his shoulder, east along the river. Berne turned to follow her gaze, and his breath stopped.

  He thought, Fuck me like a goat.

  Coming toward him, along the river, thundered a wall of green-foaming water a hundred feet high, a titanic wave that bore before it boats and crates and the bodies of men. Berne looked up, and up, unable to comprehend the enormity of the catastrophe that rushed down upon him. The sun struck gold on the unutterable mass of water that still grew as it approached, not yet cresting. High up upon its face rode the river barge, sliding down the face of the wave yet borne up by its rolling progress—and high above the river barge, standing like a god at the very crest of this mountain of water, stood a lone figure, a woman . . .

  Pallas Ril.

  His reaction was instant: he knew he’d never make it if he tried to clear the bridge. There was no time.

  He said, with perfectly enunciated calm, “Ma’elKoth.”

  I AM WITH YOU, BERNE.

  High above him, on the crest of the wave, Pallas Ril rode toward him—without any sign of a Shield.

  Berne said, “I’ll take that firebolt, now.”

  Flame burst from his skin, and he lifted his fist.

  13

  SHE SANG IN her mind, without words, without images: pure melody and pure desire. She sang a wave that would carry the lives within that barge far, far to the sea in a single wave, a rolling sweeping falling that would strike bottom only in the Teranese harbor.

  And men fired upon her as she rode the crest of this wave, but their target was only a single note of an eternal song. The song had a life of its own that would not allow her harm. She lifted her arms, and water sprang up around her as though it were castle walls. Quarrels plunged bubbling into these walls, lances of air that trailed to nothing.

  Far, far below she saw Berne, and Talann’s body beside him on the bridge. The westering sun struck off the face of the wave that reared high above him, reflected from it and lit his face as though with fire; she saw the pulse of the channel that linked him to the Colhari Palace, and felt the surge of Flow.

  His firebolt clawed toward her.

  She could not match their power, even now; but matching power with power was no longer required. A shrug of melody, a twitch of rhythm raised a mighty arm of foam to take the bolt. It exploded into hissing steam, a warm twisting cloud of purest white that broke around her and below her as she soared ever higher on the crest.

  Knights’ Bridge trembled as the wave approached, and shattered when it struck. With a thunder that shook the Cyclopean walls around the whole of Old Town, the wave rolled on, carrying the barge and half a dozen smaller vessels high over the top curve of the antiship chains, and sent them spinning downstream for freedom.

  I did it, Pallas thought. I did it, and that second’s thought brought her back to herself—

  Standing at the crest of a wave two hundred feet high, looking down on the rooftops of Ankhana, looking down even upon the Colhari Palace itself, looking down at incredible destruction along the wharf from the very edge of Fools’ Bridge to the ruin of Knights’ Bridge: ships and boats overturned, splintered against each other; dozens of men in the water, some struggling, some only floating facedown; front walls of warehouses all along the riverfront staved in, water still pouring out from them; fish flopping desperately on the dockside . . .

  She cried out involuntarily at the sight of the shambles she had made. In that instant of shocked immobility, as the wave started to fall and she came down with it, an unknown bowman fired his weapon from the city wall, and his quarrel slammed into her chest, shattering a rib and spearing into her lung.

  She fell in a dream, tasting blood that bubbled up her throat along with her breath. Her hand lazily investigated the steel flanges of the quarrel that were stuck hard up against her light leather body armor.

  I’m hit, she thought numbly. I’m hit, and: I did it.

  This was all she could think during the long tumble to the river below; when she reached bottom, the impact with the roiling water snuffed her consciousness like a fist on a candle flame, and she knew no more.

  14

  THE UNIFORMED LABORER who piloted the smooth-humming cabin apparently did so simply by shifting a floor-mounted lever: forward for go, back for stop; otherwise, the car directed itself. Beyond this shifting of a lever, the Laborer’s only duty seemed to be to stand at attention and hold himself smilingly available for polite conversation with his passengers.

  Neither of his passengers was interested in talking: Marc Vilo had the upcaste ability to make himself selectively blind to anyone below Professional, and Hari passed the ride concentrating on a meditative cycle of breath, hoping that he could loosen the knots in his stomach and swallow the acid tension at the back of his throat.

  Marc had picked up Hari in his own Rolls. He had chattered with bluff good-fellowship across nearly a quarter of the Pacific Ocean, nattering on and on about his acquisitions and under-the-table deals, about undercutting this competitor and putting a regulatory squeeze on that one. As the cloud-topped islands came into view, though, his chatter had gone hollow, and finally stopped. Despite his presumed affair with Shermaya Dole, no one was entirely at ease while approaching the airspace of a Leisure compound—and the Doles were one of the original First Families.

  Hari took the blessed silence as a gift. Had he always found Vilo this tiresome, and somehow managed to repress his irritation all these years? Did the man never think of anything beyond his balls and his bank balance?

  It wasn’t until the Rolls was spiraling in for a landing at the Kauai carport that Vilo even thought to ask why Hari had asked for this interview.

  His tone made it clear that this was a courtesy question, the way a man might give a distracted pat on the head to his dog in passing. How important, really, could anything be that would come out of the mouth of a downcaster? The question, even the entire trip to Kauai and the interview itself, was an indulgence, and Vilo probably expected Hari to squirm like a happy puppy at this show of avuncular affection.

  If so, he was disappointed. As the Rolls settled onto the grassy landing field, Hari had given him a flat stare and answered the question through his teeth.

  “I’m gonna ask her to find a way to get Arturo Kollberg’s dick out of my ass.”

  Before Vilo could come up with a response, a uniformed attendant had stepped out of nowhere and undogged the Rolls’ hatch from outside. He’d ushered them out and across the lush grass of the landing field. Hari had had time to get only a breath or two of the rich, floral-scented air, only a glimpse of the riot of greens that climbed the ridge of mountains
before him, before a section of volcanic stone at the edge of the field swung back, and the attendant led them inside to the waiting cabin.

  The cabin moved on a computer-directed path through tunnels cut into the earth, cut through the rock of the ridges and up the mountains. Since the days of Shermaya’s great-grandfather, machines more complex than a bicycle had been forbidden in the interior of Kauai. Surface transport within the Dole compound was by horseback. But this was mostly make-believe, a show of back-to-nature simplicity, that let the Doles and their guests pretend to enjoy the raw outdoors without sacrificing the full comforts of a modern home. On Kauai, all those comforts and then some were there. An entire subterranean town complex spread like cancer through the bones of the island, thousands of servants and technicians and every imaginable luxury, carefully concealed but omnipresent.

  During the smooth, silent ride to wherever the hell it was that Dole awaited them, Hari managed to quiet his nerves a little bit by observing Vilo’s. The stumpy Businessman shifted uneasily in his seat, chewing on the end of his unlit cigar, glancing at Hari from the corner of his eye and glancing away again. Clearly, he’d suddenly become very unsure that bringing Hari here was a good idea, but he also clearly felt he couldn’t say a damn thing about it, not in front of the servant—God only knows what kind of rumors would spread . . .

  When the cabin hummed to a stop and the doors opened, Vilo leaned over to Hari and glared at him, his face as full of threat as a loaded pistol.

  Very softly, almost whispering, he growled, “You behave yourself, Hari, and I’m not kidding,” then rose and stepped out of the cabin, his face clearing with practiced swiftness into a lickspittle grin. Hari shrugged, sighed, and followed him.

  He stepped out into a rainbow.

  The door had opened from a mossy stone outcrop onto a broad ledge, two-thirds of the way up the wall of a mist-bottomed canyon. The opposite wall of the narrow canyon seemed close enough to touch. Everywhere he looked there swarmed foliage of unimaginable variety, a vertical rain forest of every conceivable shade of green, shot through with ropes of brilliant flowers and punctuated with the iridescent shimmer of tropical birds that flitted back and forth among the vines.

  High above the ledge where he stood, another outcropping divided a waterfall, so that a pair of hushing streams fell to either side and a sun-prismed spray filled the air.

  Only when Dole herself rose from behind a twisted knee-height juniper, wearing loose-fitting clothing that was smeared with greens and browns, and calling out a hearty “Marcus! Over here!” did Hari notice that the ledge on which they all stood had been landscaped as a Japanese garden. Carefully cultivated dwarf shrubbery clumsily accented an array of colored stones and a trickling watercourse that must have sprung from underground pumps.

  Dole beckoned to them with a pair of sap-stained garden shears. “One of my projects,” she called, waving the shears at the garden around her. “What do you think?”

  Hari again trailed in Vilo’s wake, his wounds making him move stiffly and slowly, and listened silently to Vilo’s effusions about the garden. The Businessman sat on a rock near where Dole had once again knelt to hand-trim a bush, as near as he dared without risking her dignity with uninvited contact. Hari stood a respectful distance away and waited to be acknowledged.

  Dole’s cheeks colored at Vilo’s praise, and she waved away his enthusiasm. “Well, you know, one must keep busy. It’s work that makes you happy, you know—I’ve never understood why our Laborers seem to dislike it so. Entertainer,” she said, waving Hari closer. “How do you like my garden?”

  It’s a thumb in the eye of this place, Hari thought, but he said respectfully, “Your entire home is a garden, Leisurema’am.”

  “Ah, a diplomat. Come, sit with us.” Once Hari had painfully settled in next to Vilo, she went on. “I was so enjoying your Adventure, Entertainer. You’ll be continuing tomorrow, in the morning? Yes, and I’m sure Marcus will squire me once again; I am so looking forward to a successful conclusion. I’ve been dreadfully worried about Shanna, you know.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Hari said. “Me, too.”

  Inch toward daylight, he thought. “I’m not sure that they’ll let me succeed,” he went on. “That’s, uh, that’s kind of why I asked to be allowed to come here and talk with you.”

  “Oh?” she said with a polite lift of the brow.

  “Yeah, it’s a pretty tough spot,” Vilo put in. “Especially now that Berne has all these magic powers and that sword and everything. How do you think you’re gonna handle him?”

  Hari shook his head. “I’m not talking about Berne. Him, I’m hoping not to handle at all. It’s the Studio. They want Shanna to die. It’ll make a better story.”

  “Hari—! Jesus Christ!” Vilo said, choking on his cigar.

  “Entertainer,” Dole said severely, “that is a very serious charge. If believed, it could harm their business; repeating it in public would leave you open to downcasteing for corporate slander.”

  “Even if it’s true?”

  “Especially if it’s true. In corporate slander, truth is not a defense. Besides, I hardly think—”

  “That technical malfunction,” Hari interrupted her desperately, “the one that pulled me out last night—it wasn’t a malfunction at all. I had this from Kollberg’s own mouth. I was too close to saving Shanna, and they pulled me. Deliberately. Kollberg himself hit the switch.”

  “I can’t be hearing this,” Vilo said, jerking to his feet. “Don’t you understand that what you’ve just told me is a legitimate corporate secret? Do you have any idea how compromising this is? Now I have to either report you or face accessory charges—!”

  “Oh, Marcus, sit down,” Dole snapped. “Stop fluttering. Nothing said here need ever leave this place.”

  “I notice,” Hari said, “that you haven’t said you don’t believe me.”

  “I, ah . . .” Vilo shifted uncomfortably, then finally dropped back down onto his rock. “Well, shit—your pardon, Maya. Everybody knows the Studio, kind of, ooches things around, to make the Adventures more exciting.”

  “And that is,” Dole pointed out, “a perfectly legitimate business practice. Shanna is under contract to the Studio, as are you, Entertainer. If the legitimate pursuit of their business requires that they send you to your death, they are perfectly within their rights under contract law. It’s no different than if I ordered one of my pilots to fly into a storm; if he is killed, that is simply a consequence of his employment, and I am not criminally liable. Any grievances must be addressed in civil court.”

  “I know all that,” Hari said. “I know that legally there’s nothing I can do to stop them doing whatever they want to her. That’s why I came to you. I know you care about Shanna. I came to ask you—to beg you, if necessary—to intervene for her.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Vilo said. “You think the Leisurema’am has nothing better to do than—”

  “Marcus, please.” Dole turned to Hari, a look of well-intentioned helplessness on her face. “I’m sorry, Entertainer, but I don’t believe that there’s very much I can do.”

  “He—Kollberg—he sent Lamorak over there with orders to betray her. He sent someone he knew she trusted. Lamorak’s been tipping off the Grey Cats at every turn. And you know why? Because she was too good at this—she’s too smart, too skilled. She was going to be able to save all these people without taking any big risks, without any big battles, without any innocents being killed—and Kollberg wouldn’t have been able to sell enough second-fucking-hander cubes!”

  Hari trembled with the effort of keeping his fury under control. “He fucked her: he sent Lamorak there to betray her, for no other reason than a few extra marks.”

  “Well, that’s reprehensible behavior, certainly, but still . . . Oh, was that it? Right before you were pulled?”

  She leaned forward, her face lighting with more interest than he’d yet seen from her. “You realized that Lamorak was the traitor, and yo
u were about to kill him! My goodness. That wouldn’t have been a very fair fight.”

  “I don’t care much about fighting fair,” Hari said. “I’ll settle with Lamorak later. What I care about is saving Shanna’s life.”

  “Oh, well, I too, of course, but I still don’t see any way I can intervene. They’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “They’ve done nothing illegal,” Hari said. “They’ve done a lot that’s wrong.”

  “From your point of view, certainly, I can understand.”

  “Couldn’t you just—lean on him a little?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Put some pressure on Kollberg. Make him behave.”

  Dole spread her hands. “I don’t think so. There’s very little pressure I can bring. The Studio is a public trust,” she said simply. “It was created to be immune to outside pressure. I’m sorry.”

  Hari hung his head, but at his thighs his fists clenched spasmodically. Caine snarled within the tightness that bound his chest, and for a wild half instant he teetered on the verge of snapping and slaughtering them both.

  He ground his teeth and tried to remember that these were not his enemies. His chest burned; he couldn’t stop remembering that if he tuned in Adventure Update right now, he could watch the seconds tick away on the Pallas Ril Lifeclock.

  There had to be something, had to be. . .

  “Wait a second,” he said, lifting his head. “You’re Shanna’s Patron. She’s the spokesman for three or four of your companies. That makes her a, ah, a corporate symbol, right?”

  “Yes . . .” Dole said dubiously.

  Vilo shook his head. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”