Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  He turns to me, and there’s a glimmer of ambitious lust in his eyes. I have his full attention.

  “Do what for you?”

  “I need so much going on in the streets that Ma’elKoth can’t spare any attention trying to figure out what I’m up to, you follow? I want a riot. Not a little disturbance in the Warrens, understand? I want the Constabulary, the King’s Eyes, even the bloody army all tied up trying to get things under control. I want the city in flames.”

  “You’re asking a lot. You’re asking more than a lot. It could expose the whole Kingdom.”

  “Listen, you don’t have a lot of choice. I mean, Pallas can’t hold out under interrogation forever. When Ma’elKoth breaks her, he’s gonna learn who’s been bankrolling her operation. He’ll have the goddamn army in here to mop you up. It spun out of your control the instant Pallas was taken alive. It’s too late to roll up her network or whatever because Ma’elKoth is going to do that without your help, and then he will fall on you like the wrath of a god, and that’s no fucking exaggeration. You have to hit first. You have to hit now. It’s your only chance, Majesty. Like the saying goes, opportunity is a nettle—grasp it boldly, or get stung.”

  He stares consideringly into the middle distance, and I give him the space of a breath or two to think it over.

  “We can set fires,” he says finally, “but that won’t be enough. The kind of riot you want has to get plenty of support from the straights. It has to be self-sustaining after my boys start it up. People need to be angry, and afraid—”

  “That’s easy,” I tell him. “They’re already afraid. Ma’elKoth’s got them all whipped up with his Aktir hunt. Turning fear into anger is the easiest thing in the world.”

  “Yeah? How?”

  This part, at least, I already have figured out.

  “We can beat on Ma’elKoth with his own stick. Ma’elKoth—” I spread my hands like I’m preparing a conjuring trick. “—is one of them.”

  Majesty frowns, and I grin at him.

  “He’s an Aktir himself,” I say. “The whole Aktir hunt is a dodge, a cover, a point-at-you-so-nobody-looks-at-me con.”

  Majesty’s eyes go wide, and his hand clutches blindly at my sleeve. “Hot staggering fuck. . .” he says breathlessly. “Is it true?”

  “Does it matter? When you tell a story loud enough and long enough, a story that plays right into people’s worst fears of betrayal, it grows its own truth.”

  “But, but . . . Could it actually be? I mean, if there was such a thing as Aktiri. . . It’d make sense; it’d make perfect sense. It’d fit together just right . . . With some kind of proof, some kind of evidence, you could bring him down all at once. The nobles hate him anyway; they’d turn on him in a light breeze. The army wouldn’t fight for him . . . But without it . . .”

  I can see now what I have to do.

  This is gonna hurt like a bastard. This is gonna hurt for years.

  But a choice between my integrity and Pallas’ life is no choice at all.

  I clasp his shoulders with both my hands and gaze into his eyes with every ounce of level, direct, plainspoken sincerity I can muster.

  “All right, Majesty,” I say slowly. “It’s true. Think about it: Ma’elKoth came out of nowhere during the Plains War. How can you look like that, be that size, have that face and that kind of raw power, without anyone ever hearing a whisper of your name until you’re what, forty? Where was he all those years? How in the name of every living god did he end up Emperor less than five years after he dropped out of the fucking sky? Where did he come from? Where are his boyhood friends? Where’s his family? There’s your answer: no family, no friends, no history. He’s an Aktir, Majesty. He’s one of them.”

  “I can see it,” he says softly. “Tyshalle’s Blood. I can see it! But I’d need proof, Caine, something I can take to the nobles, make them rise against him.”

  I say, with the perfect conviction of an honest man: “I’ll get you your proof.”

  His eyes go vague, looking past me. He’s looking at the view of the Great Hall of the Colhari Palace, as seen from the seat of the Oaken Throne.

  “Put that evidence in my hands, and you’ll have your riots.”

  I shake my head. “It’ll take a couple of days. We need the riots now. Two days from now Pallas will be broken or dead, and Imperial troops will be camped all over the Warrens. The whole Kingdom will be wiped out. We have to hit now, today, within the hour. Act boldly, act now, and you win it all. Fire those riots, and you’ll have all the proof you need within two days. I swear it.”

  He looks into my eyes, searching for truth that he’s not gonna find there. I look back at him, trading more than ten years of friendship, trading all the trust I’ve earned at his side for one massive act of betrayal.

  By the time he finds out I’m lying, Pallas and I will either be home, or we’ll be dead.

  Even if it’s wearing off, the residue of the Charm will make him inclined to help, but his natural pragmatism tells him he’ll be wasting the lives of his men in a lost cause. He balances on the knife edge between them, teetering.

  He weighs our years of friendship and trust for a long time. He weighs his mental image of my reputation—Caine would rather kill a man than lie to him—then finally he nods, sharply, as he falls from the edge of the knife into the abyss below.

  “All right,” he says firmly. “I believe you. The riots will start within the hour.”

  I can only nod.

  I look down at Lamorak’s unconscious face, which seems to sneer back at me with malicious contempt.

  Go ahead and sneer, asshole, I mutter inside my head. I never claimed to be any better than you in the first place.

  “Burn the whole city,” Majesty muses, shaking his head in slow disbelief. “That’s pretty extreme for the life of one woman.”

  “Fuck the city,” I tell him. “I’d burn the world to save her.”

  That, at least, is not a lie.

  8

  THE WORD WENT out like an impulse through the nerves of a human body, a body whose head was the Brass Stadium in the Warrens. A Knight patrolling the border with the Face spoke with a family of leprous beggars. One of the beggars ambled onto Rogues’ Way and had words with a pack of dirty-faced street urchins. One of the children skipped into the Industrial Park to find a playmate who picked up pocket money paging for Colin’s Pages and Current Events. The page spoke to a workman lounging with his mates in front of Black Gannon’s Charcoalers at the corner of Lackland and Bond. The workmen scattered through the dockside. One of them murmured to a carter who carried the word with his goods across Fools’ Bridge and onto the island of Old Town.

  They knew the drill, these clandestine Subjects of Cant: each of them spoke with at least three others. Within the hour, a beggar at Nobles’ Beach on the south bank of the Great Chambaygen said to a passing patron, “Y’know what I think? I think Ma’elKoth pushes a little too hard on this Aktir thing. You ever wonder where he came from? You ever wonder if maybe he’s covering something up? Thieves fall out; that’s what I think.”

  Almost the same words could be overheard in taverns and inns from the Snakepit to the Financial Court. Most who heard them scoffed. It was inconceivable. It was ridiculous. But when they’d laughingly tell their friends of this outrageously silly rumor they’d overheard, there was someone in nearly every group who could say with an honest frown, “Well, I dunno. I heard it somewhere else already today. Maybe there’s something to it. I mean, you gotta admit it’s not impossible. . .”

  The story took on a life of its own, though it might very well have died a natural death in a day or two. A few days of calm and quiet lets sudden fears relax and outrageous rumors dissipate.

  But only an hour past noon, on that short autumn day, flames licked up the back of the Nobles’ Playhouse on the south bank. Even as a bucket brigade engaged that fire and began to quiet its roar, an apartment block half a mile away burst into flames. Half an hour later a stable bu
rned in the shadow of Thieves’ Bridge. By that time, the bridge captains had already begun detailing regular troops to fight the fires and sending requests to the garrisons for replacements.

  By midafternoon, soldiers were spread throughout the capital, sweating and red faced from the heat of the scattered fires they fought. More than a few of them griped to each other that “the Emperor can send rain to save a few peasants’ crops in some province a hundred leagues away, but he can’t spare even a squall to put out these damned fires? Maybe he wants the damned city to burn.”

  The captain at the gatehouse of the shattered Knights’ Bridge pulled his men off their salvage duties and sent every one of them to help; he led them personally. He was overheard to observe to his aide as they quickstepped across the island, “There’s a bad smell to this, a bad one for sure. This’ll be worse before it’s better, no mistaking.”

  No one in the city needed to be told this; they could feel it for themselves.

  The entire city drew in a breath of fearful anticipation, and held it for the shout that everyone knew would come at nightfall.

  9

  KIERENDAL SAW THE current in the Flow a full minute before the knock came on her apartment door. This current resembled not at all the stringy lace of the pull of a thaumaturge; this was something vast and turbulent that seemed to organize all the Flow around her into something oceanic, something tidal; the current that rolled through her walls seemed only the tiniest portion of some unimaginable leviathan.

  Perched on the back of the chair behind her, braiding Kierendal’s fine silver hair, Tup sensed her mistress’s tension through her tiny fingertips. “Kier? Is something wrong?”

  “Get Zakke. He’s in his room.” Kierendal uncoiled from the chair like a releasing spring, her long pale limbs stretching into an arc as graceful and as tense as a bent longbow. Her money-colored eyes looked far beyond the walls. “Wake him up and both of you take cover. Something’s about to happen.”

  “Kier—”

  Kierendal whirled on her tiny companion. “Don’t argue! Go!”

  Tup’s bandaged wing didn’t allow her to fly, but her arboreal people were also as agile as monkeys. Infected by the urgency in Kierendal’s voice, she scampered and sprang from the back of the chair to a sofa, then skittered across the carpet and through an inner door.

  Kierendal draped a robe over her angular form, afraid to spare the concentration she’d require to hold an illusion of clothing. She extended her Shell and tapped into the rushing pressure of this current, gasping as power entered her like a rough lover. It had a curious flavor, this Flow—one that she couldn’t quite identify, but felt she should somehow recognize . . .

  She put these thoughts firmly aside and patterned the Flow with her powerful mind; when the knock came in one of the Faces’ codes, she was ready for anything.

  She reached out with an imaginary hand, and Flow flicked back the door bolt and opened the door.

  In the hall, their Shells lemon with nervous energy but overlain with amethyst triumph, stood a pair of her coverts, one human and the other stonebender. “Pardon, Kierendal,” the human said, “but we caught this one coming in the back, and we thought you might want to talk with him.”

  Between them, his hands bound by manacles of steel and his Shell pulsing dangerously with lethal ebon life, stood Caine.

  His Shell was vastly darker than it had been before: he was barely visible within the midnight shadow that surrounded him. Kierendal’s mouth opened in silent awe as she saw the shift in the direction of Flow: it moved toward Caine, as though he himself were a thaumaturge of godlike power. It didn’t pass into him as it would an adept; it swirled and eddied around him and beat back against the incoming currents. She could see that he wasn’t doing it purposefully—he wasn’t even in the mindview trance that humans needed to perceive and direct the Flow. What, then, could this be?

  “Security’s gettin bettar, nah Kier?” the stonebender said. “Caught un dis time, didna we?”

  “Don’t be idiots,” she snapped. “Cease this ridiculous act, Caine. Show them.”

  Within his cloud, Caine shrugged, and the manacles dropped clattering to the floor. The two coverts jumped like they’d been goosed and went for their weapons. Caine raised his hands.

  “Do we talk? Or do I break your puppies, here?”

  “Leave him be,” she ordered. “Caine, come inside. You two, guard the door. And do a better job of it, this time.”

  Caine stepped casually within, his half smile blurred by the raging Flow that whirled around him. He closed the door behind himself and leaned against it. Those shadow forms were back again, those ghostly Caine doubles that his every motion seemed to spawn. He was so utterly prepared for any possible action that the ghost doubles took on a solidity in the Flow around him. She could see them now, vague shifting patternings of force, where before she had only imagined them.

  “Stay there,” Kierendal told him sharply. “This is a new day, Caine, and I am ready for you. Any threatening move will be your last.”

  He spread his hands. “Don’t come all hostile, Kierendal. I’m here to apologize. I let them take me so I wouldn’t have to hurt anyone on my way in.”

  “Apologize?”

  “Yeah. Busting up your place like that—belting your houseboy, knifing the little treetopper . . .”

  Kierendal squinted. His expression was half hidden by the ghost-Caines around him; she couldn’t decide how sincere he might be. “Money is love, Caine,” she said. “If you meant it, you’d say it with gold.”

  “I plan to.”

  “You cost me five hundred royals.”

  One black-brushed eyebrow arched. “That’s a lot for a broken table and an eyepatch.”

  “That’s how much I’d fronted to Berne. After your . . . departure . . . he cashed out and left.”

  “I’ll double your money back,” Caine said with an easy shrug. “Turn me in.”

  For a long frozen moment Kierendal could only blink. Had she heard him correctly?

  Caine went on. “I’m serious. You know my new head-price. Send a runner to the Eyes, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Toa-Sytell himself shows up to put the gold in your hand.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Look, somebody’s gonna collect that money. Might as well be you, huh?”

  “What kind of game are you playing?”

  “That’s not your business. You want the money or not?”

  “What I want,” Kierendal found herself saying with unexpected heat, “is some damned idea what’s going on.”

  Caine grinned at her. “Don’t we all?”

  “My agents report that there are fires all over the city; that everywhere they turn someone’s arguing over whether or not Ma’elKoth’s an Aktir—a rumor I hear was started by the Subjects of Cant, by the way. And everyone says there’s a riot heating to a rising simmer. Yesterday, a human thaumaturge raised the whole bloody Great Chambaygen to half drown the dockside and wipe out Knights’ Bridge—something that I would have sworn was impossible. And I hear that this thaumaturge, who has more power than any human has a right to, turns out to be your old girlfriend Pallas Ril. Now you show up at my place, asking to be turned over to the King’s Eyes. Why do I get the impression that this is all connected, somehow?”

  “You have good sources,” he said impassively. She waited for him to offer more, but he might as well have been carved from stone: he didn’t even blink.

  “Why do you want this?”

  “I have to get into the palace.” He winced as though at a sudden shooting pain. “Ahh, bad pun, sorry.” At her blank look, he shook his head irritably. “Forget it. You don’t have to understand. You want the money?”

  Kierendal hissed frustration through her overly sharp teeth. “If I don’t?”

  Caine’s words were throwaway casual. “Then I go someplace else.” But the Flow that boiled around him darkened and roiled alarmingly, and Kierendal suddenly wondered why she’d
resisted the idea; she’d never been averse to easy money. Watching the Flow pattern itself around him, she found herself suspecting that by far the safest course was simply to do whatever Caine wanted. Opposing power of this magnitude might crisp her like a moth in a candle flame.

  “All right,” she said quickly. “I’ll send the runner, and I won’t ask any more questions. Someday, you’ll sit down and tell me the whole story.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “There are,” she said carefully, “powers at work in your life that beggar my imagination. I see them, a small part of them, but I don’t understand them. You are at the nexus of forces beyond comprehension.”

  He gave her a cynical, knowing smile. “Everybody is, Kierendal. We just don’t notice, most of the time.”

  “I pity anyone who gets in your way.”

  “Yeah, me too. Let’s do this, all right? I don’t have all fucking day.”

  10

  WHEN HE HEARD Berne enter the room behind him, Toa-Sytell turned away from the window only long enough to acknowledge the Count’s presence with a cold flat stare, then turned back.

  This window overtopped not only the Sen-Dannalin Wall around the Colhari Palace, but the intricate spires of the neighboring Temple to the Katherisi; it commanded a fine view of the western reach of Gods’ Way. Close enough to be visible below the glare of the sinking sun, an iron-caged carriage drawn by four black horses rolled slowly through the heavy traffic. With Knights’ Bridge destroyed, all the poor folk and subhumans that resided on the north bank were forced to crowd toward Fools’ Bridge to beat the curfew at dusk. The day was unseasonably hot, and ending far too swiftly; it was clear to Toa-Sytell’s eye that there was no way for all these folk to crowd out of Old Town before nightfall. Fights had already broken out in several places along Gods’ Way alone, as a sweating townsman had his foot trodden upon one too many times, as another took one too many elbows in the ribs, as another took a gentleman’s whip across his face for blocking the path of a horse. The few constables in view looked nervous and harried. The army should have been out, helping to maintain order, but most of the available troops were occupied fighting the fires scattered across the city, which sent thick smothering coils of black smoke toward the cloudless sky.