Heroes Die

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  He said once, softly, “Ahhh . . .”

  Caine took a breath, then another. Ma’elKoth wasn’t moving, wasn’t even breathing: he stared into some impossible distance, his face as blank as a river-smoothed stone.

  For a long moment, Caine was held every bit as tightly as Ma’elKoth; then he forced himself to look away, forced himself to turn and move, to walk over beside the altar upon which Pallas Ril was bound.

  Her eyes stared wide and vacant; they looked as empty as Caine’s chest felt, hollow and lifeless. Dried blood crusted her nostrils, and her hair was matted, still tangled with twigs and scraps of weed from the river. His hand went to her face, to gently pull a weed from her hair, but some savagely cynical part of his brain sneered at him, Sure, you can touch her now, now that she’s tied down. He jerked his hand back, his face heating up with unaccountable shame.

  “Pallas . . .” he murmured, softly so that Ma’elKoth might not hear, and he lowered his head over her to gaze into her empty eyes. “Pallas, where are you?”

  At his words, her chest filled as though with an incoming tide, and she inhaled consciousness along with her breath.

  “Caine . . .” she said. In her voice were distant inexpressible echoes of meaning, far beyond anything he’d even attempt to interpret. “You’re so alive . . .”

  His eyes stung madly. “I don’t understand—”

  “I’m safe, Caine,” she said, barely audible, looking at him as though from far, far away. “I cannot be harmed . . . Save yourself . . .”

  “Pallas . . .” he said helplessly.

  As the light faded once more within her eyes, she said faintly, “I understand now, so many things . . . We should have been happier . . . I’m so sorry for your pain . . .”

  She returned to whatever mysterious place within herself from which she had just come, and she took all of his heart with her.

  I swear to you that I will make it right. All of it. I swear.

  He could only stand and stare, immobile, frozen with agonizing dreams of happiness, until a step came behind him and Ma’elKoth’s monstrous hand closed on the back of his neck like the jaws of a dragon.

  “What have you DONE?”

  The weight of the Emperor’s arm forced Caine to his knees beside the altar. The power of his grip strangled Caine’s voice. “Ma’elKoth . . . what . . . ?”

  “My Children scream in pain and fear; they writhe in panic and bleed out their lives in misery and terror; and you have done this!”

  Maybe I should have killed him while I had the chance, Caine thought with a sickening lurch.

  And then, belatedly: How does he know?

  He tried to struggle, to speak and deny the truth, but Ma’elKoth’s grip had crushed the speech from his throat and blocked his blood flow like a garrote; the room darkened around him.

  “Their torment echoes within My heart; it tears like savage talons into My belly. I brought this upon them, I, I who would hang from the Tree of Gods for them! This has happened because I brought you to Ankhana, because slaughter follows you as inevitably as crows pursue an army. I, who knew this, Drew you to My city to rid Me of a minor irritant, something less than a thorn, less than the prick of a spider’s bite, and now I am undone . . .”

  His voice scaled down from apocalyptic fury to a kind of puzzled anguish, and his glorious eyes filled with gemlike tears. “My people cry out to Me to save them, to ease their suffering. Others plead with their lesser gods, but to whom do I turn? To whom? I have set Myself among the gods, and now there is no one upon whom I can call to bear witness to My pain.”

  The hand released his neck, and Caine collapsed bonelessly, sucking in great gulps of air while the room brightened within his eyes.

  He understood now: Ma’elKoth didn’t know of Caine’s direct involvement, here. This was some sort of metaphorical responsibility; Ma’elKoth seemed to think that Caine had caused this simply by being here, and Caine didn’t see any reason to correct this delusion.

  Towering above him like the titanic icon in the Great Hall, the Emperor raised a fist as though to crush Caine like a roach and lowered it again. His face sagged into painful loathing, as though Caine were a mirror in which he saw himself and could not bear the sight. “I will make of Myself something worse than you, if I slay you for this, My crime,” he said.

  Caine pushed himself back up to his knees, waited another moment for the spinning in his head to subside, then rose and dusted himself off again.

  The trick to handling this guy, he thought, is to keep him so pissed he can’t think straight. All the brains in the world do you no good if you’re too angry to use them.

  “What I want to know is,” he said deliberately, “when did you turn into such a whiner?”

  Ma’elKoth’s mouth opened, then closed again. His eyes bulged like the veins in his neck. “You dare?”

  “I dare fucking near anything,” Caine said. “That’s why you need me. Why don’t you stop whimpering and do something?”

  “Do—?” Ma’elKoth said, while lightning flickered within his eyes. “I will show you what I can do.”

  Ma’elKoth reached for Caine with such smooth inevitability that he couldn’t even think of dodging the Emperor’s grasp. His fingers once again closed upon the front of Caine’s tunic and lifted him into the air.

  Y’know, Caine thought numbly, I’m getting pretty damn sick and tired of being manhandled like this.

  Ma’elKoth raised his eyes to the ceiling and gestured with his free hand; then without warning his knees bent and he leaped, springing upward as though Caine’s weight and his own bulk had no meaning to him, up through the solid stone of the ceiling.

  Caine flinched involuntarily as the limestone rushed down toward his head, but he passed through it as though it were nothing more than thick pale mist, up into the smoke-reeking air of the city’s night. Ma’elKoth set him gently on the once-again-solid stone beneath him; they now stood together atop the Dusk Tower of the Colhari Palace.

  From the city around them volcanic columns of smoke and ash boiled upward, straight toward the clear, still stars—stars that faded one by one behind the thickening pall, until the only light on the streets of Ankhana was a frenzy of nightmare orange cast by the flames of burning buildings.

  “Not the faintest breath of breeze,” Ma’elKoth growled to himself, “and still it spreads. Still it grows.”

  “Yeah, no kidding,” Caine said dryly. “Did you think any of those are accidents?”

  Ma’elKoth drew himself up, and his chest expanded as though it would burst. Something wild and elemental entered his eyes; they cast a light that Caine could see upon stone around him, green as sunshine through an emerald.

  “Do they think I’ll stand idly by and let them burn My city?”

  Before Caine could answer, Ma’elKoth raised his hand to the heavens as though grasping power from above. Caine had seen this gesture before in the Great Hall, and he threw himself out of the way as Ma’elKoth’s fist stroked forward. Thunder cracked around them so loudly that the very stone trembled beneath their feet.

  Far, far away, at the easternmost tip of Old Town below Six-tower, the flames that leaped from a huge building suddenly stilled—snuffed as though they had never been; not even smoke rose from its hulk.

  Christ Almighty, Caine thought, shaking his head against the ringing in his ears that was nearly as loud as the thunder had been. He couldn’t even imagine the mechanism behind this feat. Nothing he knew of magick would allow it.

  Does he have any limits at all?

  As Ma’elKoth once again lifted his hand to the sky, Caine said, “That’s kind of stupid, don’t you think?”

  The Emperor wheeled on him, his hand still upraised, and his glare smoked green. “Have a care, Caine—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Threaten me some other time, all right? Think about what you’re doing, Ma’elKoth! Are you planning to stand up here all night and throw power around for nothing? An hour from now, less probably,
every fire you snuff will be burning again, bigger and better than before.”

  His hand slowly lowered and the light in his eyes began to fade. “This is true. This is too true; I attack a too-limited area of the problem. A storm,” he said desperately, “a storm is the answer, a thunderhead to douse the fires and drive the rioters indoors, but . . . but I have sent the weather to Kaarn. It will take hours to call a storm . . . And meanwhile Ankhana burns; I cannot snuff the fires while I call the storm, and I cannot call the storm while I . . .” His voice trailed off; Caine could almost feel sorry for the man, for the real anguish he so obviously felt.

  “Yeah, too bad. I got news for you. That’s not the worst of your problems.”

  “There’s more?”

  Caine nodded. “See, you’re only looking at the outside. All you’re seeing is the results. You have to look deeper for the causes. You know where these riots come from?”

  “From, from, I suppose from fear—”

  “That’s right,” Caine said. He squinted out over the city and took a deep breath to time the pause just right.

  “Fear that you’re an Aktir.”

  He swung his gaze back toward Ma’elKoth, letting it sink in.

  The Emperor looked like he’d been clubbed. Some constriction of the throat allowed him only a monosyllabic gasp. “How?”

  “You did it to yourself,” Caine explained, trying not to look like he was enjoying this. “Your Aktir hunt has your people terrified. You did such a good job, whipping up fear of the Aktiri, that it was pretty simple to twist that around into fear of you. I’m telling you, it’s the King of Cant behind it all.”

  He squinted at the Emperor’s face, trying to read comprehension behind the pain. Was he getting through to him? He had to deliver this information now, while it still had value as intelligence; the King’s Eyes would be reporting all this within hours, and then it would be too late.

  “It’s easy to spread a rumor in this town: at least half the beggars in Ankhana are Subjects of Cant,” he went on. “And it’s no wonder people believe it. Your Aktir hunt has trained people to be suspicious of anything that is unusual or inexplicable about their neighbors, trained them to be constantly on the lookout for Aktiri. And, y’know, there’s a lot of stuff about you that people find a little creepy.”

  Was he buying it?

  “But this is absurd—!” Ma’elKoth insisted. “Why would I, who have done so much . . . ?”

  Caine reached out and laid a hand on the Emperor’s sweat-slick arm. He looked into Ma’elKoth’s eyes and shook his head pityingly. “You’re looking at it rationally, Ma’elKoth. You’re looking for a reasonable answer to an unreasonable situation. You’ll never get there from here.”

  “But surely, eventually, they’ll remember—”

  “Yeah. Eventually. But by that time, the city’s in ashes, and every last surviving noble is openly at war with you. The whole Empire goes down in flames. The way I see it, you have one chance. Break the Kingdom of Cant. You have maybe twenty-four hours, no more.”

  Ma’elKoth’s hand blindly sought Caine’s and engulfed it. “Twenty-four hours . . .”

  “You have to stop him now, before it gets out of control. You have to stop him before the nobles get into the act.”

  “I will. I will stop him. I will flood the city with troops; I’ll burn the Warrens to the ground if I must. This should have been done years ago.”

  “And you’ll fail.” Caine licked blood from his lips and forced down a creeping smile.

  It wasn’t so different from fighting, what he did here on this tower—combat of another sort, perhaps, but still combat. He was fighting for his life, for Shanna’s life, and for Majesty’s. Hours ago, he had thought he was betraying his best friend; now, if he could only swing Ma’elKoth in the right direction, he would reverse that betrayal. He’d make every lie he had told Majesty into the truth.

  He had to keep Ma’elKoth away from the military solution for one simple, awful reason: it would work.

  Think of this as combat, he told himself. His usual tactics would serve him as well here as they did in hand-to-hand. Attack attack attack—come at your target from every possible direction and press until his defenses overload. Never give him time to recover his balance: never give him time to counter.

  Looking at this like a fight gave him confidence. He knew that every solution Ma’elKoth offered was only a parry, a block, and like their combat equivalents these parries and blocks created other openings through which he could strike. An all-out military assault on the Kingdom of Cant would certainly succeed; Caine had to ensure it wouldn’t be attempted, at least not yet.

  “You can’t catch the King with the army,” he said. “The Subjects of Cant are masters of the caverns under the city. There’re miles of them, y’know. At the first hint of military response they’ll go underground—literally—and it’ll take days, maybe weeks to root them out. You don’t have that much time.”

  “I do not need it,” Ma’elKoth said. “I can Draw this man as I Drew you, Caine. I will put forth My power—”

  “Yeah? If it’s so easy, why couldn’t you find me this past day or two?”

  A vein pulsed in Ma’elKoth’s forehead. Muscle bulged at the corners of his jaw, and he made no answer.

  “I’ll tell you why,” Caine said. “I was with the King of Cant.”

  “Where? Where was this? Where were you?” Ma’elKoth lunged and once again those gigantic hands shot out to grab him, but this time Caine slipped aside and skipped behind the Emperor’s rush. Ma’elKoth wheeled on him, and Caine stepped back with his hands up.

  “Now just fucking stop it,” Caine said. “You don’t want to put your hands on me again, Ma’elKoth. I’ve been very understanding so far, but don’t push me. You’re starting to make me angry.”

  Ma’elKoth drew himself up. “You will give the answers I require or I shall teach you what anger is, Caine.”

  “Guess I should have known better than to expect an apology, huh?” Caine said without humor. “It’s like this: you know how the rock around the Donjon impedes Flow? All the rock beneath the city acts the same way, and the Subjects know it—that’s why they use the caverns. The King of Cant’s house thaumaturge, Abbal Paslava, is a sharp character—a lot of this has been his idea from the first—and he’s found some caves that are so deep that Flow never touches them at all.”

  “The power of My will, foiled by mere rock? I don’t believe it.”

  “No? Then how come you couldn’t find me?” Caine said simply.

  Ma’elKoth scowled and didn’t answer.

  “It’s this simple: the only way you will root Majesty out of those caverns is by brute force, and you don’t have time. Go for him now with the army and you’re throwing away the one real advantage you have right now: He doesn’t know what you know. He doesn’t know that you know he’s Simon Jester, that he’s behind the whole thing. It’s your shot, Ma’elKoth. It’s your big chance. You have to bait him out.”

  Ma’elKoth looked out over his city, and its fires burned within his eyes. “But how? How can I do this in time?”

  Caine chuckled. “That’s the easy part. You have Pallas Ril, right?”

  Ma’elKoth turned to him, frowning, his eyes clouded once again. “Pallas Ril? Yes . . . yes, she is here. What has she to do with this?”

  “There’s no way to explain it, Ma’elKoth. You’ll just have to trust me on this. She’s in this up to her neck. She was captured while helping the Aktiri escape, remember?”

  “Yes, ah, yes. This is the action of that spell . . . I feel its pull—”

  “Anyway, listen, this doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you what does: Majesty is counting on that spell to frustrate your interrogation. He has no way of knowing that you’ve got a way to beat it with that silver net of yours.”

  “Right, yes, the net—”

  “You’re still the Emperor. When you talk, people will listen. You have all the pages of the Imperial Messenge
r-News to carry your word. You can summon the storm. Save the city. Then at dawn, you send every page and crier out with this call: At noon, you will answer your critics. You will show who the evil genius behind our current troubles truly is. And you’ll do it this way: At high noon, you’ll take Pallas Ril out into public somewhere—say, the new stadium, Victory Stadium on the south bank, where thousands upon thousands of your citizens can bear witness—and you’ll do that spell on her, the one that you used on the Aktiri that you captured within the palace. You’ll kill her and magickally capture her memories. You’re doing it publicly so that everyone can see. You have nothing to hide, right?”

  “But, but what good will this do . . . ?”

  “None at all. You won’t learn anything that you don’t already know, but Majesty doesn’t know that. See? He’ll have to act to cover himself. He can’t afford this kind of exposure. If he’s publicly associated with the Aktiri, the nobles won’t rise with him, and none of this comes off. You load the crowd with Grey Cats in civilian dress, and they take him when he moves.”

  “You think he’ll try to rescue Pallas Ril?” Ma’elKoth asked skeptically.

  “Shit, no,” Caine said. “She’s not even really the bait. You are.”

  “Ah . . .” Ma’elKoth’s eyes went distant again. “Ah, I think I begin to understand . . .”

  “He’s not interested in her at all. Oh, sure, he’ll kill her if you give him the chance. But what he’ll really go for is the chance to kill you.”

  “Will he have a chance, Caine? Is this Paslava a thaumaturge of Pallas Ril’s strength?”

  “Maybe, but I’ll handle him tonight. Listen, I have a better idea,” he said, as though it had only now occurred to him. Caine knew Ma’elKoth would think of this on his own soon enough; he might as well bring it up himself and score another point or two. “Why put yourself in danger at all? You’re too important to the Empire to do anything reckless. You can do those substantial illusions—Fantasies—can’t you? Like what’s her name, that elf dyke who runs the Faces?”

  “Kierendal,” Ma’elKoth said musingly. “Yes . . . yes, I believe I can.”