Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

The news gets worse: suffocating déjà vu closes around my throat as L'jannella describes the machines in the mining pits: huge hulking metal scoops that belch black smoke and roar with hunger, plows on wheels connected by linked metal treads. I can see them in my head, more clearly probably than she can. I grew up with these machines.

  My father—my first father, my birth father—runs a corporation that builds machines like these, and so I know, instinctively, who the Artans are.

  And she tells of the fence that surrounds them, a fence supported on steel posts, built of interlocking vertical zigzags of wire; she traces the shape in the air with her finger and tells of the wire coils that top it, coils with sharp blades sticking out along their curves. This, as well, I can imagine too clearly: chain-link fence, topped with razor wire.

  Torronell catches my gaze, and accusation glares through the pale sweat that coats his face; he has guessed the truth. His mouth opens as though he would speak, but then closes; he pretends to look away, sneaking a crafty glance at me from the corner of his bloodshot eye.

  Oh, god—all gods, human gods, any who will listen—please let that sweat be from fear and disgust, and not from fever. Let his crafty glance bespeak mere hatred.

  L'jannella continues mercilessly. At intervals along the miles of that fence, bodies hang—corpses, skeletons, some still in scraps of clothing, mostly stonebenders, some primals, even a few tiny treetoppers—their feet off the ground, arms wide, wired to the fence by their wrists. Crucified.

  Crucified by the Artans.

  I can't face Torronell now; if I even glance at him, so much as glimpse his face, I might start to explain, words might start to tumble from my mouth no matter how hard I try to stop them. But those aren't my people, I want to cry. Its not my people who have done this. It's someone else, someone alien, someone who does not partake of my blood, of my world. Even now, old enough to know better, I find myself stunned with astonished revulsion at the horrors of which we are capable.

  After twenty-seven years as a primal mage, I can still hate myself for being human.

  But I must not show any of this before L'jannella. The secret of my heritage belongs to House Mithondionne, to T'farrell Ravenlock himself, as it has since the day of my Adoption; it is not mine to reveal.

  My mind has wandered on these matters, but now L'jannella recaptures my full attention. I gather that she is now relating why she returned alone to make this report, why Kyllanni and Finnall remained behind: "They watch, and wait for us to join them. While they watch, they compose a Song of War."

  I can feel Torronell's glare burning against the side of my head; I dare not face him. "They can't do that."

  Torronell speaks for the first time, a harsh throat-scuffing rasp. "How can they not?"

  "This Song will not be sung without leave of House Mithondionne," L'jannella says, "but Changeling, Diamondwell has been under the protection of your House for more than a thousand years, since the days of Panchasell Luckless. The Diamondwell stonebenders are our cousins; isn't this rape of their land alone a strong enough theme for a Song of War?"

  "That's not the point."

  "What is the point, then?" Torronell rasps bitterly. "What? Tell us."

  L'jannella goes on before I can find the words. "Changeling, the humans of Transdeia make war on us already. The legates your father sent—did you not hear me? Their bodies hang on that fence! Finnall's brother hangs on that fence: Quelliar. Murdered. Can you recall the sound of his laughter, and not burn for war?"

  It doesn't matter. A grinding pain in my chest threatens to close my throat and choke off these words, but I get them out anyway. "No war. There will be no war."

  Torronell stands. "That is not for you to say. I am Eldest, here. We will go and hear their Song."

  "Rroni, no, dammit! You don't know what you're getting into." "And you do? How is this? Do you want to explain?"

  He knows I can't, not in front of L'jannella; is he really sick? Is that why he's baiting me like this?

  Am I going to have to kill him?

  He looks at me as though my thoughts are written on my forehead. He's waiting for me to decide.

  I know already: I'm going to cave. What choice do I have?

  "All right," I say, defeated. "Let's go hear their Song."

  7

  "I feel fine," Rroni says thinly. He licks his lips and stares into the flames, and I let myself believe that the flush in his face comes from sitting too close to the campfire. "It's been four days. If I have it, I'd be feverish by now, wouldn't I?" His eyes are raw with dread. "Wouldn't I?"

  Our clothes are new, spares from the saddlepacks of the two horses that stand hobbled nearby. We squat on fallen logs around our tiny fire. My hair has begun to grow back, a pale stubble that makes my scalp feel like warm sandpaper; Rroni is still bald and scorched.

  Rroni's lip is split, his face swollen with purple bruise where I hit him. Ever since he woke up he has resisted, more and more, opening himself to the comfort of the Meld; we've used our voices in conversation more over these four days than we have in the past ten years.

  I miss the Meld, miss the closeness I shared with my brother. I wish, pointlessly, that I could use it now, but I don't even bring it up. I can't. A sick pain that pools in the hollow of my stomach tells me that I don't really want to share the feelings that Torronell conceals. So I can only nod uncertainly, trusting to the night and the campfire's flicker to conceal my expression. "Yes, four days, I think so. I'm not sure."

  "How can you not be sure?" Rroni hisses.

  It's not like I can flick on a wallscreen and look it up.

  I can't say that Rroni's in too much pain.

  I have no secrets from my brother. Rroni knew the truth twenty-five years ago, even before my Adoption. These things could not be spoken of, in front of our companions; my true heritage remains a closely guarded secret of House Mithondionne. Everybody—nearly everybody, at least, our companions included—knows I have a secret, but they have never suspected the truth. Everyone thinks I'm a Mule, one of those rare and pitiful creatures born from a human rape of a primal female. It is generally supposed that Changeling is a polite euphemism.

  The truth is worse.

  I have to face it now: with everything that has happened, I can't run from it, can't deny it. I am an Aktir.

  Not an Actor, no: my sense experiences have never been transmitted to Earth to be sold by the Studio as entertainment. But an Aktir, yes: I was born on Earth. Born human. Surgically altered at the Studio Conservatory on Naxos to pass for primal.

  My name was Soren Kristiaan Hansen. I lived as a human for twenty-two years, long enough to graduate from the Studio's College of Battle Magick, long enough to make the freemod transfer to Overworld, ostensibly for training—and then I shed my human skin like the dried husk of a butterfly's chrysalis, and spread my elvish wings.

  In my first few years as Deliann, I could barely even think my former name, let alone say it; but the conditioning imposed by the Studio fades over time, if it is not renewed. For dozens of years I have been free to speak the truth of myself, but I never have.

  I'm not sure what my truth might be.

  I barely remember Soren Kristiaan Hansen: he exists solely as a recollection of a boy who passed his childhood pretending to be the bastard son of Frey, Lord of the lios alfar—a boy who'd never wanted anything so much as to be a primal mage. I've been Deliann the Changeling for twenty-seven years, more than half my life—have been Prince Deliann Mithondionne, adopted son of T'farrell Ravenlock, for nearly twenty-five.

  My human family will have given me up for dead long ago, and shed few tears. There were other Hansen sons, and in a prominent Business family like the Hansens of Ilmarinen MachineWorks, Soren Kristiaan had been as much a marketable commodity as he had been a son and brother.

  I don't miss them. I didn't like being human, being Business. I am incapable of the kind of nostalgic illusion that would make me homesick for the shallow, narrow-minded world of pri
vilege and profit in which my abandoned family lives. I left Earth behind, shook it off like a nightmare, and have lived my dream for more than half my life. I never expected that quarter-century-old nightmare to reach out, grab me, and crush my heart.

  Ah, my heart, Rroni . you can't do this to me. You can't die.

  Torronell is the next-youngest prince of House Mithondionne. He was born three hundred and seventy-three years ago, and from my forty-nine-year-old perspective, anything that old should be indestructible. For the love of god-he was born the same year Darwin sailed-on the Beagle how can he be dying?

  "I told you," I say, "it's not like I learned about it in school; HRVP was wiped out a hundred years before I was born."

  "Supposedly," Rroni supplies bitterly.

  I nod. "All I know about it comes from Plague Years novels I read when I was a boy. Novels are like ... like epics. You know a lot about Jereth's Revolt, say, but you can't quote the actual text of the Covenant of Pirichanthe."

  Rroni looks away. "That's a human story."

  "So the best I can remember is that HRVP incubates in something like four days. It could be ten, or two weeks, or a month. I just don't know. Novelists aren't always too careful with their facts—and this might not even be the same strain. Viruses mutate—ah, they change characteristics, and symptoms, and effects. That's how they say HRVP happened in the first place."

  We've been over this a dozen times in the past four days. Each time, I repeat what I know, and detail what I don't know, with identical slow, patient precision. It's become a bitter ritual, but it seems to help Rroni, to ease his mind somehow, to let him believe that I might be wrong. I have no other comfort to offer.

  "How can I die of a human disease?" Rroni has asked, again and again. "We're not even the same species!"

  I have always the same answer. "I don't know."

  All I can say is that rabies—the naturally occurring, original baseline of HRVP—was infectious in all mammals. And, once the infection has developed, it's fatal. No percentages, no treatments, no appeals. HRVP is worse: vastly faster, vastly more contagious. HRVP is persistent in the environment; in the absence of a warm-blooded host it sporulates, remaining potentially lethal for months.

  And airborne.

  I can only pray that I acted fast enough.

  The primal male I killed in the village haunts the back of my mind, asleep and awake; I can't stop thinking about the days-long progress of the disease. How much longer would he have lived in agony? Days? A week? I can't imagine a more hideous death. Sometimes, in my head, the male has Rroni's face.

  Sometimes he looks like the Twilight King himself.

  I remember standing in line, five years old, with a dozen other Business children. I remember the pressure of the airgun against my hip, and the sudden sharp sting of the inoculation. Tears welled in my eyes, but I had blinked them back, and I had not made a sound. It was a solemn occasion, a rite of passage of my Business caste; the inoculation was my passport to the world, and I had accepted it as a Businessman should. I never dreamed that now, after more than forty years have passed, the fate of a world might hinge on that brief pain.

  "And so," Rroni mutters, lacing his fingers into white-knuckled knots, "how long must we wait? How long before we decide whether I shall die, or live? The others will be back from their scout at any moment they should have been back by yesterday's dusk. Then what? What shall we tell them? How shall we prevent their exposure?"

  He nods miserably toward the horses. "If I am infected, then even Nylla and Passi must be destroyed, as you destroyed the village."

  Rroni and his horses—he often liked to comment that the horse was the perfect expression of T'nallarann: strong, swift, loyal, fierce in defense, faithful beyond the limits of its strength. Now the gaze he turns upon them is freighted with the anticipation of their deaths.

  "Any living thing might carry this disease into our villages, and our cities. So we must kill, and kill, and kill. We must make a wasteland of this place, for your HRVP may spread through any creature alive in this land—except you," he finishes bitterly.

  I look at the ground. "We'll stick to the curse story."

  "They will know we lie."

  "They know that already," I remind him. "But they don't know what we're lying about."

  In the time crunch after I burned the village, the story I came up with had been embarrassingly weak; I'm not a gifted liar. I shouted to my friends a confused tale of a potent curse laid on the village—a curse that had slain the villagers one and all—a curse that had now fallen upon Rroni and me as soon as we walked in; I told them I was afraid that the magick of the curse might be able to bridge through the magickal link of the Meld, and so I refused all contact, mental or physical.

  I ordered them to continue northeast into the mountains and complete the reconnaissance. Remember the mission, I told them; nothing was more important than the mission; we have to find out what happened to Diamondwell. Rroni and I would stay here and investigate the action of the curse, and see what might be done to counter it. They could not argue. Improbable as it sounded, the story could have been true, and I am, after all, their prince.

  "I don't like it," Rroni says. "They are our friends. They deserve the truth."

  I shake my head, still looking at the ground; I can't face him. "This isn't about what they deserve. We tell the truth about HRVP, we'll have to tell them how we know. We'll have to tell them why I'm immune. And once that's out, they'll forget the rest. All they'll be able to think about is how we've betrayed them."

  Rroni turns away, offering me only the back of his bare, scorched skull, and his voice is low and hoarse. "Perhaps we have."

  I stare into the fire. I don't trust myself to answer, and I'm afraid to meet my brother's eyes.

  "It's your people who have done this," Rroni goes on. The words leak out like drops of gall, slow and bitter, as though forced from his lips by pressure that gradually builds inside his head.

  "Rroni, don't. You are my people—"

  "Your people ... made this horror. The ignorant say that Aktiri rape and slaughter and defile everything they touch, for each other's amusement; and perhaps they who say such Things are not so ignorant, after all. How else can this be explained? Why else have you done this to me?"

  My heart thuds painfully once, then again. "Is that what you think, Rroni? Do you really think I did this to you?"

  Torronell turns his face silently away from the fire, toward the night; he has no answer that I can bear to hear.

  Many, many years ago, when I rejected both my Business heritage and the prospect of an Acting career, I liked to tell myself that I did so from some unexpected nobility of spirit, because I couldn't bear to profit by inflicting harm on others--I was, after all, very young.

  I saw the use of cyborged Workers in Ilmarinen's heavy-machinery factories as being morally equivalent to the brutal violence against Overworld natives that drove all successful Acting careers, because both required a certain objectification of the people they exploited. Ilmarinen MachineWorks used its cyborg Assemblers as replaceable, easily programmed robots; Actors, even those usually considered "heroes," had to cultivate a similar disregard toward the native Overworlders they inevitably killed and maimed during their Adventures. Expendable—replaceable--"bad guys" were the staple of Studio success.

  As years passed, though, I came to understand myself somewhat more precisely, and I realized that my decision had had little to do with morality, and less to do with nobility; that it was really, in the end, a matter of taste.

  I hate killing. I cannot bear to inflict pain, or even to know that pain is inflicted on my behalf. Perhaps this comes from the gift I have, the ability to flash into another's life; perhaps my empathy has become so acute that I feel each hurt in advance. The reason, finally, is irrelevant. The fact remains: I am not, have never been, could never be a killer.

  The First Folk do not pray. We do not have gods in the human sense. Our spirituality spri
ngs from our inextricable, ineradicable place in the interconnected web of life itself We touch the source of the Flow, and we find that source within ourselves; the fundamental breath of the world breathes through us, as it does through all living things. We do not ask favors of life, we participate in it.

  But I was born human, and in ultimate distress I can't help returning to the ways of my childhood.

  In the depths of night that follow the dying of the campfire's embers, I find myself praying desperately to T'nallarann that I will not be forced to kill my brother.

  8

  The scent of blood hangs in the silver dusk.

  I balance on tiptoe at the edge of the dead village, long hair the color of moonlight floating free in a translucent halo around my ears. As T'ffar sinks toward the western horizon and day fades from the sky, my surgically enhanced eyes respond, bringing the sagging, skeletal hulks of the rude shanties before me into relief as bright and sharp as a chromed knife.

  This is a bad idea. This is a stupid thing to do.

  But I send, in the octave of the Meld, an image of my companions remaining hidden in the forest, and an image of me being very careful as I enter the dead village: Stay here. I'm going in.

  The backflow from the Meld, in response, is primarily echoes of alarm and disapproval from L'jannella, Kyllanni, and Finnall, strong enough to make the horses uneasy, overlaid with the acerbic vinegar flavor of my brother Torronell's contribution: a dead ape with my face, rotting for a season on a pile of oil-soaked logs: Don't expect me to light the pyre when your manblood finally gets you killed, monkey boy.

  I grin sourly. My answering image is of Rroni holding the reins of a horse while I streak from the village like a cat with its tail on fire: Be ready. I might come out of here a lot faster than I'm going in.

  The faintest of breezes stirs the forest around me, shifting the canopy of branches and making the green aural Shells of the living trees pulse like shadows cast by candlelight. The village swarms with the smaller, brighter Shells of forest animals, many of them fading now with the day, shading to the earth tones of sleep. Small birds flutter to their nests among the branches; ground squirrels and field mice and their numerous cousins burrow snugly into the earth to hide from the silent swoop of awakening owls. The forest is alive, but this village is dead.