Permission to be who you are.
Standing by the figurehead of the Mithondion flagship, looking out upon the Ravenlock’s landfleet spreading across a fair chunk of the northern Boedecken, I can’t help reflecting for the thousandth or millionth time that the Living Palace should have been my first clue that this family doesn’t do anything small.
The flagship isn’t really the size of an aircraft carrier, or even a battleship, but it still kind of feels like one because it’s the biggest fucking thing I ever thought to see rolling over grassland. The main deck would make a fair approximation of a football field, and the abbey, my mansion from my superstar days in San Francisco, could get lost in a corner of the main hold. I don’t know how the gigantic rollers it rides on are engineered, but the sheer size of the thing gives it an almost ridiculously smooth ride—not to mention flattening and compacting the earth over which we roll into a reasonable facsimile of pavement. Where we pass, we leave a road.
The landships aren’t built, they’re grown, woven of living trees—some kind of banyan, I think, given that the massive hawsers trailing from its hull are braided of peripheral rootlike tendrils that seek out the earth whenever we stop, and dig into the ground to nourish the ship as well as anchor it. Those same hawsers connect to the yokes of the landships’ motive power: instead of engines, we have ogrilloi.
Lots of ogrilloi.
The flagship complement alone must be four or five thousand. They make a solid mass just barely wider than the flagship and almost a mile long—maybe two thousand to haul at any given time, with some insanely complicated substitution system, continuously moving fresh grills in to take over so tired grills can fall out and rest … which they do by jogging along our freshly flattened trail.
I can’t even guess how fast we’re actually going; I mean, I know how fast unburdened ogrilloi can run, but judging by how the distant mountains are getting visibly less distant, we’re going a lot faster than that. The Ravenlock—in his cabin preparing the ritual—can’t be bothered to explain how, and none of the rest of the bastards will talk to me at all. To be fair, they’re all busy too—over a hundred primal mages on the flagship alone, all conjuring like hell, throwing out so much power I can see it even without mindview: heat shimmer and miragelike mirror flashes and somehow it’s like every step counts for ten or something. Twenty. So fast I start to worry we’ll get there before the horse-witch, Angvasse, and Dad.
I really don’t want the Ravenlock to think we’ve been stood up.
Needn’t have worried—when the sun one morning sparks the cliffline into view, the trail of smoke twisting up into the sky’s blinding blue is visible even to me. It comes from the tip of the escarpment, probably right by the little passage that is the only way from the vertical city into the upland.
The landfleet spreads out like a wave that’ll break against the base of the cliff.
We’re here.
Dusk shades blue into the softly falling snow. My knees hurt from sitting here on the ground so long, at the tip of the escarpment, but I don’t feel inclined to move.
Spread below me is the vast Mithondion landfleet, ground-tethered, campfires and roasting meat and tens of thousands of ogrilloi. Bigger than the Black Knife Nation. Smaller than Purthin’s Ford. A couple hundred yards behind my left shoulder, the flagship looms like a Mission District Labor tenement.
Everything comes back to here.
There’s enough snow on the ground now that Angvasse’s boots crunch a little as she comes up behind me. “Are you well?”
“I’m all right.” Not really, but what’s the point yapping about it? “I wish she was here.”
“Ogrilloi make her witch-herd nervous.”
“They make me nervous too.”
Angvasse lowers herself to the white-dusted grass beside me, with a sigh as faint and hopeless as the wind. “It is … eerie,” she murmurs, staring down at the badlands. “To see the lights, and know that they are not lamps and hearths of goodmen in city windows, but instead campfires of elves and their brutish warriors …”
“Yeah.” I twitch a nod back toward the yurt that stands alone beyond our tiny fire. “Any progress? Anybody say anything? Anything at all?”
“Nay. No sound. No motion. Doubtless some eldritch magicks let them commune in silence.”
“Or they both fell asleep.”
She tilts her head. “Do elves sleep?”
I shrug. “When they want to, I guess.”
They’re not asleep. Whatever else T’ffarrell Mithondionne and Dad have been doing in there all these hours, it hasn’t been sleeping. I don’t even really want to know.
I just want it to be over.
“I never …” Angvasse gives another of those faint sighs, and starts again. “I never knew my father.”
For a while I watch her, while memories of Dad—some good—unspool behind my eyes. I can’t imagine my life without him.
Eventually all I can say is, “I’m sorry.”
She nods, pensive rather than melancholy. “But I did know love, in my uncle’s house. I was loved.”
I match her nod. “So was I. In my father’s.”
“Somehow it seems that should make things easier.”
“Yeah.” I stare out into the darkening snow. “Except it’s mostly the opposite.”
Sometime later, a subtle shift in the light draws her eyes. She glances over her shoulder, then heaves herself to her feet. “He’s coming out.”
I don’t look. “Okay.”
“I’ll withdraw.”
Which tells me which him we’re talking about. “Okay.”
The crunch of his footsteps is uneven, almost erratic—like he keeps stopping but then keeps deciding he should come a little closer. “That was … quite the conversation.”
I don’t bother to answer.
“The Ravenlock … well, he’s an extraordinary creature. What he proposes to do …”
“Did you agree? Are you going through with it?”
“I … didn’t want to.”
“But you will.”
“What we talked about—”
“Yeah, I know, all the lore and shit. You can write a fucking book.”
“He says I will write a book. Tales of the First Folk.”
It’s kind of like being slapped on the top of my head. Now I do turn and look without knowing really what the fuck I’m expecting to see. All I get is his big shadow silhouetted against the campfire behind him … but I can read his posture like most people read road signs. “You want to give me that again?”
“We didn’t talk about lore,” he says. “The lore—he put it in my head. He says it’s the only thing I’ll remember. He says I’ll wake up back in Thorncleft with the worst headache I’ll ever have, but I’ll be able to transcribe everything he gave me. Which will get me my doctorate and a professorship, and marriage to the woman I love. And a son.”
“So you were really talking about—”
“My future. Our future.” His silhouette shifts like he wants to reach for me but he’s afraid I’ll rip his arm off. “He told me who you are.”
Fuck.
My head gains a couple tons.
“I’m not your son.”
“He explained that. May I sit?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Want me to spell it?” Now I’m on my feet and I don’t remember getting up. I don’t remember getting angry either. “No, we’re not having this fucking conversation. We’re not gonna talk about my childhood. We’re not gonna talk about Mom. We’re not.”
“But—” His shoulders droop, and his weight rocks back on his heels. “But I don’t even know your name …”
“Fucking make one up when I’m born. It doesn’t matter. You won’t remember me when you wake up, and by tomorrow morning I’ll be fucking dead. Leave it alone.”
“Dead—? He didn’t say anything about anyone … well, dying …”
“I’m not anyone. I
’m anything. And I shouldn’t say dead. It’s more like destroyed.”
“I don’t understand …” His palms turn upward as though he can cup comprehension and drink it like water from his hands. “A thousand primal mages. Twenty-five thousand ogrilloi. And me. For a day, and then he puts me back where you got me from, with a book’s worth of stories in my head. That’s the deal. He didn’t say—”
“He didn’t say anything about the True Relics?”
“What, the Sword and the Hand? Well, yes, he said they’ll be destroyed in the ritual—but they’re mostly symbolic, aren’t they? Like pieces of the True Cross, or the Holy Grail.”
“Not symbolic. Metaphoric. It’s not the same thing.”
“Of course it isn’t, but I’m not sure about the pertinence of the distinction you’re making here.”
“It’s pretty straightforward.” I wave a hand toward Angvasse, a dim ghost-shape in the snow. “Angvasse there. You probably got to know her a little on your way up here. Notice anything strange about her?”
“Beyond being a superhero?”
“She’s not human. Neither am I.”
“What is she, then?”
“She’s the Hand of Khryl.”
“The hell you say.”
“And me …” A little sigh, and little shrug, and an all-over weird-ass chill from finally, after all this time, actually saying it out loud …
“I’m the Sword of Man.”
“Some of our theoretical thaumatologists have speculated that unhappened events cast a shadow on reality—an echo—that might be expressed as fiction, or legend, or myth.”
— READING MASTER OF THORNCLEFT
Kris kneels in the snow, his head lowered. He neither moves nor speaks, and from his face drip tears that chime faintly as they strike ground, where they become a scatter of glittering gemstones.
Duncan watches him for some considerable time before he turns his head back toward Caine. “You’re the Sword of Man?”
“Maybe.” He shrugs. “A lot depends on who you let draw that blade from your chest. Those conversations with the Ravenlock might be among the consequences. Besides, the Sword-of-Man thing—remember how I was talking about metaphors? I think it’s close enough to say I might be—potentially—a physical expression of the same metaphysical energy that the Sword of Man expressed.”
“Kind of a mouthful.”
“It gets worse from here.”
“He’s just warming up,” the horse-witch says. “He thinks that the more words you use to explain something, the better you understand it.”
Duncan lifts an eyebrow at her. “A little hard on him, aren’t you?”
She smiles. “He likes that in a woman.”
And when he looks at Caine, the killer wears a smile so fond and happy and playfully wicked all together that Duncan finds himself smiling with them. “He probably gets that from my side of the family.”
“Of course.”
“Hari …” Kris is there, a hand on Caine’s shoulder.
Caine rises, and Kris gathers him into an embrace. “Whatever happens, Hari, thank you for this. No matter what. Just to … see my family again. Just once. To see them whole and hale … it means more to me than I can say.”
“You’re welcome,” Caine says. “It gets better.”
“It does?”
“You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.”
“The … project … you asked my father to attempt … did he succeed?”
“Dunno.”
“It’s one of those, then.”
“Yeah. We’ll find out when we try. It’ll work, or it won’t.”
“The Power you hope to Bind, to control the dil T’llan … what is it?”
“I’m not telling.”
“Hari—”
“No. Sorry.”
“You told me once that there were only three people you ever really trusted. One of them was your father and the other two were me.”
“Still true.” He nods toward the horse-witch. “Except now it’s four.”
“Four?”
“Five. You remember Orbek.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Six. Avery Shanks.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Seven. Raithe.”
“Raithe?”
“It’s complicated. Look, I didn’t tell any of them either, all right? All I need from you is a yes or a no. Go or no go. What you saw? I can make that real.”
“You treated Rroni very badly.”
“Yeah, and I paid for it.”
“You were very cruel and demeaning. And you thought worse than you said.”
“Soliloquy. Not thought.”
Kris nods, and a gentle smile takes over the sadness in his face. “Rroni … I suppose it might be worth allowing to happen. Just for your astonishment when he kicked the shit out of you.”
“I wouldn’t go that far—”
“He beat you like a rented mule he rode to an old-fashioned country ass-whuppin’.”
“All right, all right.” Caine waves a hand. He’s done playing. “You need to take this seriously, Kris. You need to think it through. It’s not a choice you get to take back. And you’re just about the only person in recorded history who can say ‘Caine, don’t do that,’ and have the slimmest chance I won’t.”
“I can’t imagine why I would say no.”
“That’s because you haven’t thought it through. The issue for you here isn’t my plan. It’s not what I want the Ravenlock to do. Succeed or fail or something in between. The issue for you is what I did by accident.”
“By accident?”
“I got in a fight with your brother.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Rroni’s got skills. He also had an assload of sharps that ended up with my blood all over them.”
His eyes pop wide. “Your blood …”
“I asked you if you’d take back the worst thing you ever did,” Caine says darkly. “What’s in my blood?”
“Oh, my heart …” Deliann’s knees buckle. Caine catches him and helps him sit down instead of fall down. “Rroni …”
“Yeah. So entirely due to my own fucking stupidity, I potentially infected the most sought-after whore in Ankhana with Pallas Ril’s countervirus to HRVP.”
“He’ll never catch it at all …” Deliann whispers. “Ever …”
“Yeah. Neither will Kierendal, or Tup. Or Toa-Sytell. Or anyone else. And after Torronell meets you thirty years later, you take him back to Mithondion …”
“Oh, my god.”
“You understand this isn’t exactly good news. When you get to that village, all your friends will already be immune. Hell, the feyin in the village might be immune already. They might never get it in the first place. No HRVP outbreak might mean you never kidnap J’Than. I never recognize you. Caine never returns to Overworld. And there’s no way to know what comes after that.”
“Hari, my god—my god! You could unhappen Shanna’s murder!”
“Maybe. There’s no way to know. This is what the Giant Brains at the Monasteries call an acausal loop. Curing HRVP before anybody here catches it might mean Pallas Ril never creates the countervirus in the first place.”
“What happens then?”
“Nobody knows for sure. There are theories. People think most likely the unhappening will itself unhappen … though there are complications there too, and basically nobody agrees with anybody else. Best case? She or somebody else still creates the countervirus for some other reason, and the rest of the shit goes close enough to the previous events that we end up more or less here.”
“Except my family will be alive. My people.”
“They might die from something else.”
“Deliann.” The horse-witch gives him an infinitesimal don’t worry headshake. “There are better best cases.”
“Don’t help.” Caine scowls out into the snow like something’s wrong. “Kris, we’re up against it. Yes or no.”
&nb
sp; “Up against it? Up against what?”
“It’s stopped snowing.”
Duncan twists his neck to look around. Not only has it stopped snowing, there is grass softening what had been naked rock, and wildflowers uncoil new blossoms toward the sun.
“Company.” Angvasse sounds grim.
“Oh, you think?”
“Caine. I await your word.”
“Don’t wait. If this goes south, nail that bitch to the fucking ground. I’ll sort it out later.”
“Hari—Caine,” Duncan says, “what bitch? What’s happening?”
“The gods have found us. They’re sending an enforcer. To stop us. To kill me, probably.”
Angvasse puts on her helm. “You shouldn’t have spoken Her name.”
“An enforcer? Are you in danger? Are we?”
Up from the grassy earth spring saplings that creak and groan as if in agony as they twist upward, flowering and leafing and multiplying into the distance: hickory, birch, and elm and maple and walnut and oak, and the escarpment has become a glade filled with green, sunbeams, and birdsong.
“Um, yeah.” Caine sighs. “It’s my wife.”
“Late wife,” the horse-witch says.
Now in that glade a Presence arises, gathering Itself of sunlight and blossom and the dark earth rich with every life returning, and here She is in the midst of them.
“Because there is a time to be smart and careful and look before you leap, and there is a time to just rock and fucking roll.”
— CAINE
Blade of Tyshalle
The sign on the padlocked roller gate read—
CLOSED FOR THE JUSTICE
REOPEN TWO HOURS PAST SUNSET
—in Westerling, Lipkan, and English. He thought this was uncharacteristically generous of the Actors and Social Police who ran this place, as all but the overseers were grills and thus had virtually no rights at all. On the other hand, Tourann had implied that the miners at BlackStone were Intacts, which might mean that the mine had been closed in self-defense. Keeping a couple thousand ogrilloi away from the show could turn ugly in a hurry. The extra two hours were probably cushion to give management enough time to see if there would be riots.
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