“You’re kid—”
“The sword, however, is real.”
I made sure my wrist was relaxed, fingers loose, elbows in, knees bent. No matter how many times you’ve fought, it never hurts to review the basics.
“Oh good,” I said.
That sword.
It was bigger than mine—a two-hander with a plain, simple cross guard. From where I stood, I could make out the blood groove running nearly the whole length.
The guy who didn’t exist seemed to know his business. His movements were careful, precise, and matched my own, the point of that monster weapon pointed at my eye—just the form I’d been taught. The odd thing was that the man’s eyes didn’t seem to be focused on me, or on anything else. It was weird, and it was scary.
Fortunately, I enjoy being scared; sharpens my senses and makes everything tingly and—well, you know.
There was no warning before the non-man struck—no eye or muscle twitches—just, there was that blade going for my abdomen. I parried low, moved, and looked for a place to strike, but there was nothing.
“Ignore the man,” said Daymar. “Insubstantial, you can’t touch him.”
“Then how do I win?”
“Interesting question,“ he said. “I’ll have to think about that.”
Another strike, this one at my head. So very fast. I leaned back and I felt the swish of its passing. With a Morganti weapon, any wound is fatal, and worse than fatal. With one that powerful, any scratch would do.
An ugly, unclean way to go. No Deathgate, no rebirth, just, well, done. Nothing. I didn’t care for it.
But those thoughts were far in the back of my head; mostly I was concentrating on stillness in movement, motion in tranquility, as I watched for the next attack. The minor, unimportant fact that there was no way to actually stop it was annoying, but didn’t change anything. I watched the sword, not the man, which goes counter to everything I’ve learned.
“It is certainly hard to talk to,” remarked Daymar.
“Because it’s an illusion?” I suggested.
The sword came right at my eyes, which should have been an easy parry, but it was so unexpected—yeah, I got my weapon in the way and the strike slid past my head.
“No, no,” said Daymar. ”The sword.”
“It has a mind?”
“It’s what I woke up.”
“Oh,” I said.
“I’ve been trying to talk to it, but it seems not to like me.”
“Hard to believe.”
It came down crosswise, from my left shoulder angled toward my right hip.
I rolled forward, through the non-existent man, and came to my feet.
“What can you tell about it?”
“Does the term ‘pure evil’ bring anything to mind?”
“Not really, no.”
I faced the sword, keeping my own weapon up. It started weaving, small motions. I had to match them, of course. High right, low left, high right, low left. Bugger. Eventually he’d break the pattern, and I’d be out of line.
The piece of metal was a tactician.
“Pure evil,” said Daymar. “Killing for the sake of killing. Pleasure in hearing death screams. Joy in the fear of others.”
“Oh, that’s evil?”
“Yes.”
“I never realized I was evil. Can you be a conduit? Let me talk to it?”
“Hmmm. I think so. I’ll try.”
It broke the pattern, going high twice, then came at me, swinging for my head. I leaned back and swung clumsily.
There was a horrid jarring in my hand. I found myself on my feet again, and I realized I’d rolled backward, then realized it had missed me.
And I was holding about a foot and a half of sword—the other had sheared right through my steel. I was annoyed. It was a good blade, made for me by Hennith two hundred years ago. And this was going to make things significantly more challenging.
“Got it,” said Daymar.
He needn’t have spoken; I felt it.
Does the term “dark spirit” mean anything to you?
I mean, you know me, Sethra. I’m a Dzur. Put me in a place with swords flashing and spells sizzling and plenty of bodies to carve up, and I’m a happy guy. But I tell you, this sword—it likes to kill the way a landlord likes to eat. It’s a being that exists to create as much mayhem as it can. If malice had consciousness, that’s how it would feel.
The illusionary man raised the too-real sword. Parrying with the remains of my sword would be interesting, I decided, but not impossible.
Can we negotiate? I thought at it.
Die, it suggested, and swung at my face.
I ducked, twisted, and more or less threw my blade up in the right direction. Elegant it was not, but I survived.
Now look, I said. Kill me, and then what? You lie here for another ten thousand years. Come with me, and think of all the carnage.
The illusionary man held it motionless; I had the impression the sword was thinking about it.
Do you have the soul of a killer?
Yes, I told it.
How can I know?
You aren’t serious!
It waited.
“Daymar,” I said aloud.
“Yes?” he said, drawing the word out.
“If this doesn’t work, could you get a message to Sethra?”
“What message?”
I told him.
“No,” he said carefully. “I do not believe I would care to repeat that to Sethra Lavode.”
I sighed. “No, I suppose not.”
I lowered the stump of my sword. All right, go ahead.
I made up my mind not to scream, just because Daymar was there. So let’s say I didn’t scream when the sword entered my heart; let’s say I made a very loud, high-pitched, sustained groan.
Great. You killed me even if—
I can heal you. Stop whining.
All right.
It hurt a lot. In case you’ve never had a piece of steel shoved into your heart, it hurts a lot. It had told me not to whine, so I couldn’t ask him if this would take long.
What’s your name?
Call me Nightslayer.
Nightslayer. All right. Do you think—
Do not speak or move.
It was there, it was me, it was disembodied fingers reaching through me, touching, touching—
My memories unfolded like a Yendi glove box.
I remember falling down. I was young, so young the memory is just a haze, but I remember a flagstone floor, and feeling I’d been pushed, and a deep voice saying, “Don’t cry.”
I remember my mother blowing up a stone in a flash of fire and light, and I thought, “I want to do that!"
The first time I drew blood in anger I was ninety, and met a Dragonlord on the narrows of Hondra. We exchanged words, and used some terms that angered. When my sword entered his bowels, I twisted it because I wanted to hear him scream, and I did, and I liked it.
Once three peasants coming toward me on the road didn’t get out of my way fast enough. I didn’t kill them, but I did make the ground under their feet rise up so they fell over.
I did once kill a Jhegaala merchant who tried to cheat me with a quick-count. I don’t feel bad about that.
I served in Yinsil’s Private Army, hoping to learn what war was like, but there was an altercation after two months when I killed three Dragonlords in my squad, so that never went anywhere.
I got drunk once and tried to provoke a wizard into a fight, but he laughed me off. I found out later it was Calfri, who could have burned me to ashes without effort.
Then I decided to destroy Sethra Lavode, so I went to Dzur Mountain, and after she’d immobilized me, she offered to teach me.
You’ll do. Nightslayer pulled out of me.
That hurt too, and I once again did the thing that I’d prefer not be called a scream.
Then the pain was gone, and Nightslayer was in my hand.
Can we start by killing th
at Hawklord?
I guess that’s when I figured out why you made me take the slow way to Adrilankha, and you needn’t have bothered. I don’t need to meet a few peasants to not want to slaughter them, and if I wanted to slaughter them, meeting a few wouldn’t have changed my mind. Uh, where was I? Right.
Sure, I said. Then, Oh, I guess he’s gone.
Smart. Can we go kill some innocents?
Let’s negotiate, I said. How about if we start with the less than completely guilty?
I guess that’ll do, said Nightslayer.
Once we were out of the cave, I teleported. I don’t think you need to know who, I mean, what we did for the next few days. Then I came back here.
So, anyway, that’s the story. You know Nightslayer’s power will stand out like a Lyorn at a harvest festival. Can you help me make a sheath?
Copyright © 2011 by Steven Brust
Fireworks in the Rain, by Steven Brust
Steven Brust and Skyler White's novel The Incrementalists (September 2013) introduces us to a secret society of two hundred people with an unbroken lineage reaching back forty thousand years. They cheat death, share lives and memories, and communicate with one another across nations and time. They have an epic history, an almost magical memory, and a very modest mission: to make the world better, a little bit at a time.
Not an excerpt from the novel, “Fireworks in the Rain” is an original tale about some of the same characters, and serves as an equally beguiling introduction to these mysterious people...and to how they work their small but consequential changes on the modern world.
Ren had gone back to Phoenix for her sugar spoon, leaving me nothing to do except play poker or change the world. I got out of my sadly empty bed, put the coffee on, and stepped into the shower. Usually, it would be an easy choice: The World Series of Poker was going, and the money I made playing the side-games was a truly appalling percentage of my yearly income. But, in the first place, I’d done really well so far, and, in the second, I’d played eight to twelve hour sessions every day for the last eleven days. Even if you’ve been playing poker since the game was invented, which I have, you need breaks from time to time to stay at your best.
Besides, Ren had made a pretty good argument before she left.
So I had to change the world. Trouble was, I didn’t know how. I mean, I knew, in the most general terms, what I wanted to do; but how to go about it stumped me.
Last night, Ren and I stared out our front window at “foreclosure” and “sheriff sale” signs in front of nearly half the houses on my block, sort of like politicians campaign signs in reverse: “Shouldn’t have voted for me!”
“You know,” I said, “I told Jimmy a year ago that I wanted to do something about those.”
“Then do it,” she said. “I’m gone for a couple of weeks, and you’ve hardly done any meddlework since we’ve been together.”
I shook my head. “Do what, though? How? We tried to do something when the bail-out happened, and got nowhere. We wanted the money to go to—”
“Too big,” she said.
I sighed. “Yeah. I could probably pick one of them, and—”
“Too small,” she said.
“I was about to say that. So, Goldilocks, too big, too small; what’s just right?”
“I already had that conversation with Jimmy,” she said, and kissed me. “You’ll think of something. It’s what you do.”
And that was that, and now I was alone in the house, tempted to say “fuck it” and just play more poker. I imagined the conversation when she came back. “What did you come up with about the foreclosures?” “Nothing, but I flopped top set and check-raised a guy with a flush draw.” Yeah, not so much.
I dried myself off, missing Ren and my bathrobe, hoping they were happy together. She’d taken it with her, leaving a note that said, “Dear Phil, I want to feel you all around me. See you in a couple of weeks. Love, R.” Sweet as hell, don’t you think? I should really get a spare.
Bathrobe, I mean. Not lover.
I drank coffee, sitting at my lonely breakfast bar.
She’d taken our Finnish Spitz, Susi, with her too. It’s funny how, after decades of being alone, a year of company can make loneliness suck again.
I opened my laptop and scanned some headlines, vaguely hoping for inspiration. Locally, a drunk driver pled guilty in a kid’s death, an escaped convict was captured, they were closing the North Las Vegas jail, and some teenagers had been arrested for—I kid you not—drowning kittens. The national news had a great deal about the Higgs-Boson Particle and the death of Andy Griffith, and rest was mostly Syria: a lot of sabre-rattling and demonizing and I had no idea what to do about any it. Same with the Arizona Immigration law; we ought to be able to do something, but what? I wished I could figure something out; if there’s anything I hate more than injustice, it’s self-righteous injustice. Yeah, I know; social evils always pass themselves off as social goods; but sometimes it’s just so blatant it sets my teeth on edge.
Good work, Phil. You’ve not only failed to figure out what to do about the foreclosures, but you’ve come up with more problems you can’t fix, and now you’ve gotten yourself so pissed off that your fore-brain isn’t working.
Zero plus one is one. One plus one is two. Two plus one is three. Three plus two is five. Five plus three is eight.
If you’re going to play poker for a living, you need to have a way to engage your cerebral cortex at times when your emotions demand that you let them do the driving.
I took the Fibonacci sequence up to 233, by which time I felt like I was thinking clearly again. While I had the laptop open, I logged onto the board. It was still full of Billy being pounded for meddling with the Supreme Court without talking to anyone first (I mean, Jesus!), and waiting to see how things with Irina would play out. Oskar was being Oskar: demanding we Do More. He wanted gunshots, and the masses in the streets, and fireworks. I can respect that, but it isn’t how I work. I left an insult for Vivian, thought better and deleted it, and logged out.
The Pirates would be playing the Astros at 4PM Las Vegas time. I made a mental note to record the game if I was going to be too busy changing the world to actually watch it. I poured another cup of coffee, toasted a bagel, ate it with cream cheese. I composed and sent an email to Ren, full of in-jokes and sexual innuendo and cute things that are none of your business.
Then I decided that, if I couldn’t find an answer in the real world, there was one other place to check. I closed my eyes, and, as I had so many times before, I imagined the smell of cherry blossoms, and the taste of chive; and then, still with my eyes closed, I looked around.
The typical Roman villa had no stairways, no basement, no upper floor. Mine wasn’t typical; somehow, without my being aware of it, it had changed over the centuries. The peristylium was still there, but now there was, in one corner, a space where, if I chose, I could imagine a stairway going up. And in the opposite corner was a stairway down that was more or less permanent—more or less because this was the Garden, a product of my imagination, and with the imagination, more or less is all you get.
I took myself to the atrium, where a rope hung from the ceiling because I wanted it there. I pulled it, and a wall slid open, complete with grinding sound and the stirring of dust, because I have a very good imagination. This was yet another stairway going down, a circular one. Do not try to make sense of the floor plan; particularly the lower floors. Accept my imaginings if you can, reject them if you must. But remember that we are in a place that is real and unreal at once, and that out of imaginings truth can appear in unlikely places.
There was a torch in my hand because otherwise I couldn’t imagine how I could see, even though, at present, there was nothing to look at. The circular stairway behind me was gone; blackness in all directions, except the floor, which I imagined as a sort of grey flagstone, shining just a little in the torchlight.
There being no reason to chose one direction over another, I walked forward
.
The things I passed had nothing to do with what they were, unless it was happening at some level of my subconscious too deep to access and too obscure to be useful: A portion of wall became fuzzy, and through it I saw a Porsche 911 driving on I15, which I knew was the Nevada State Bank; on a suddenly-appearing counter in front of me was a glass of some amber liquid, and that was a branch of Citibank; a few bars of a symphony by Rachmaninoff were a branch of U.S. Bank; the light from the Luxor, through the same hole-in-the-wall where I glimpsed the Porsche, was the Bank of America. Yeah, okay; there were a lot of banks that owned the mortgages on a lot of houses, full of a lot of people who couldn’t pay. That didn’t give me any clue how to help. I picked one anyway, in hopes a deeper look might inspire something. I passed the antiseptic smell of a hospital and recognized it as Wells Fargo.
I inhaled the scent, and followed it, no longer conscious of which way my feet were going. The yellow apple hanging from the tree was a teller at the branch on Maryland Parkway. The sound of wind-chimes took me all the way to the top of the corporate ladder. Well, okay. Too small, too big, and . . . just right? Say, someone in management who oversaw some of the foreclosures here in Las Vegas? High enough that he could do some good, low enough that it wouldn’t be noticed? I concentrated on what I was looking for, holding it firmly in my mind. I wasn’t as good as Jimmy, but then, this wasn’t a terribly challenging search.
I tasted rocky road ice cream, which has never been a favorite, but I knew that was it. The appearance and the tactile sensation of an ice cream cone appeared, and I took some onto my tongue, and I knew the guy’s name: Peter Washington. From there, it was just a matter of scouring, searching, inspecting, collecting; a long process, but one I’ve done thousands of times. My favorite way to address the metaphor is to imagine myself with a light-weight shoulder bag into which I throw each new discovery, figuring that when the weight gets annoying I’m done.
Peter has two computers—home, and work. The home computer appeared as a table saw; all I had to do was turn it on. The work computer was an icicle, and, after playing around a bit, I licked it like a kid, and that did the trick. I checked his email on both, but the only thing worth making a note of were his plans for the next couple of days. He had some porn on his home computer (like, who doesn’t?), but nothing that was important enough to him for me to exploit.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 214
