Blade of Tyshalle

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  Second, there was the matter of the sword.

  The sword had been seen in the possession of this man Raithe—several of the Eyes of God confirmed it—but it was now nowhere to be found. Scouring the Courthouse turned up nothing, even when the irregulars attached to the 82nd consulted their bewildering array of graven crys­tals and divining wands, runestaves and silver stilettos, needles that swung on balance points, and pendula of crystal, copper, gold, and iron. Eventually, all agreed that whoever held the sword must have carried it off into the caverns beneath the Courthouse and the city, the rock of which is well known to baffle and defeat such magick. A good deal of their urgency could be relaxed, however; if someone did indeed hold the sword down there, it could not be used, and if this person or persons unknown brought the sword back up to the surface, the seeking items of the irregulars would locate it instantly.

  With this the brigadier was forced to be satisfied, for a certain amount of protocol must be observed. As emissaries of the divine Ma'elKoth, the 82nd Force Suppression Unit would be expected to join with the army in receiving the blessing of the Patriarch from the Address Deck of the Temple of Prorithun, high above the Court of the Gods, as soon as the Patriarch had a chance to change his clothes and have some of the bruises of his ordeal treated by his healers.

  One possibility disturbed him, however. It was brought to his attention by a particularly subtle thinker among his irregulars that an adept of sufficient skill might be able to have the sword above ground, and use his power to conceal not only himself and it, but also conceal the fact of his concealment. Such an adept might hide in plain sight: the sole method of detection might be the naked eye, as shielded by the silver-meshed helmets of the Social Police.

  For example, the irregular pointed out with uncanny accidental accuracy, an adept could be holding that sword right behind the Ebony Throne in the Hall of Justice, and no one might ever know.

  8

  With the refined sensitivity of a mewed falcon, Avery Shanks felt the attention of her captors shift away from her.

  She could still see her face in their silver masks, stretched and half lit by the fleshy glow of bonfires outside, but she felt the eyes behind those masks follow the stare of Arturo Kollberg, who had his face pressed against the window, misting it with the slow grey-pulsing pseudopodia of the fog from his breath.

  For indeterminate hours she had sat, silently patient, refusing thought. Her watch did not work, and the clouded night beyond the armorglass windows of the limousine gave no hint of time's passage. Her only clock was the occasional slow drizzle of urine down Faith's catheter tube. In the faint reflected firelight, she could see that Faith's relief bag was nearly half full.

  She had hung that bag herself, a fresh and empty polyethylene sac, on its hook in front of one of the chair's large, incongruous wheels minutes before she and Faith and the Social Police and the Kollberg-thing and the whole limousine had gone through the mind-twisting silent roar of non-explosion that had blown away the Studio's freemod dock and replaced it with the stinking gas-lit railyard. The limo's soundproofing had not sufficed to close out the appalling clatter of the enormous mechanized crane that had lifted the limo in a freight sling and lowered it onto a flatbed car of what Avery could only assume—from her limited exposure to historical dramas on the nets—to be a train.

  Every few minutes for what seemed like hours, the train had chugged and clanked and jerked itself forward a few meters, only to stop again, perhaps as more cars were loaded behind her.

  One of the couches had been ripped out of the limo's passenger lounge so that Faith's wheeled chair could be lashed to eyebolts screwed crudely through the carpeting. Avery knelt beside her, mopping fever-sweat from Faith's brow with a kerchief, giving the girl an occasional sip from a white plastic water bottle--a product of the SynTech subsidiary Petrocal—to moisten her mouth.

  Finally the train had rattled out of the huge gas-lit dome of armor-glass, through a forest of night-black buildings, under the startling walls of a medieval castle that had blossomed in moonlight through a chance break in the clouds, and finally up a long, long grade to stop here, in this meadow, overlooking a crater with five enormous bonfires spaced evenly about its rim.

  Down in the crater, on a platform supported by spidery scaffolding, Ma'elKoth stood with arms upraised to the invisible stars. He was now Ma'elKoth unquestionably: the Ma'elKoth of old, the Ma'elKoth of For Love of Pallas Ril. His first act upon leaving the Railhead had been to summon the power of his Ascended Self, as he put it: his bruises shrank, and faded, and the stitched wounds across his brow and from the corners of his mouth consumed themselves and vanished. A beard of burnished bronze sprouted curling from his cheeks and jaw, and his eyes of mud brown became an astonishing emerald green. Now, in the crater, the air around him was the source of the new light: a globe half as large as the crater itself glowed with power, shimmering like a ghost-image of the moon in a rushing stream.

  Deliberately, matter-of-factly, without any furtiveness of motion that might attract a suspicious silver-masked eye, Avery opened her shoulder bag and pulled out her bottle of Teravil caplets. She opened the bottle and shook three of them out into her palm.

  But even that small motion was too much. "What is that?" a half muffled voice hummed, sounding strange indeed without electronic digitization from the mask speaker—almost human.

  The former Avery Shanks might have jerked guiltily; the former Avery Shanks might have ventured a bold lie. This Avery Shanks had been too far reduced. Instead, she extended them toward one of the Social Police officers at random, for she could not know which one had spoken, and she was not certain that it mattered. "Teravil," she said numbly. "My sedatives. I need to sleep."

  "Very well."

  She could feel the patient stare of the eyes behind the mask as she put the pills in her mouth, and she opened her hands to show them empty. She bit down, wincing slightly at their alkaline bitterness. She chewed them well, and held the gummy saliva-pudding they became under her tongue while she pretended to swallow.

  She picked up the white plastic water bottle and pretended to sip from it, as though to wash down the pills, while she instead spat the wad of half-dissolved sedative back down the straw into the water inside. Then she did drink from it, to rinse her mouth; the fraction of a pill she would ingest from this wouldn't have the slightest effect on her high-tolerance system.

  But combined with the hypnotics that dripped from the W bag, a few mouthfuls of this poisoned water should more than suffice to kill Faith.

  Sometime in this endless night, Avery had realized that she didn't need to kill herself. Once Faith was dead, the Social Police would take care of that small detail. Slowly, tenderly, she again moistened Faith's mouth with water from the bottle.

  Outside, Ma'elKoth gestured, and the glowing sphere within the crater bulged and stretched forth an amorphous limb. When that haloed limb touched a vehicle on a flatbed railcar behind the limo, its running lights flared to life, and the vibration of its turbines hummed in her bones. Ma'elKoth's limb of light swept along the train, touching vehicle after vehicle, and one by one the bulky shapes of Social Police assault cars roared to life and lifted into a sky now clearing of clouds, high above the mountains, becoming blazing stars themselves as they climbed out of the horizon's shadow and met the first scarlet rays of the rising sun.

  9

  "He comes."

  Raithe's voice is flat, and as chill as the chunk of blue ice that's pretending to be the sky. The season's changed overnight, and it's colder than a gravedigger's ass out here.

  For a second or two I don't take his meaning; I'm thinking, What is this, some kind of freaky sex joke? because the he I think he's talking about is Toa-Sytell, who's standing up on the Address Deck of the Temple of Prorithun in his nice fresh clean Patriarchal robes with that big pointy hat, flanked by a couple Thaumaturgic Corps officers and a brigadier in the Social Police, giving his speech to the army, describing his rescue from
the Enemy of God—that's me—and the evil conspirators of the Monasteries—that's Raithe, Damon, and the rest of the friars—by the astonishing hero-ism of the subhumans gathered below.

  The blackened stonework of the Fountain of Prorithun against my back gives off some residual warmth from the overnight fires—like the bricks we used to heat on the woodstoves back at the abbey school, and put on our bedcovers to keep our feet warm in the wintertime—and the stone under my rapidly numbing ass is warmer than the air above. The closest we get to clouds today is the coils of smoke that still trail upward here and there across the city.

  In the unforgiving dawn, Ankhana is a wasteland of blackened stone, charred giant's jackstraws of tree trunks and cornstalks and ashes and all kinds of shit everywhere. When the soldiers marched us here from the Courthouse-well, marched them, carried me—a lot of what people stepped on crackled like bone. Even from here, I can see six or seven bodies, curled into that burn-victim ball: the fetal contortion created by tendons shortening as they cook. Just across the street, beyond the Sen Dannalin Wall around the Colhari Palace, the Temple of the Katherisi—once one of the jewels of Ankhanan architecture, its graceful spires topped with beaten gold, its high-vaulted walls supported by flying buttresses—is now a pile of smudge-blackened rock that half chokes Gods' Way.

  It's hard on. my eyes: they keep trying to see the city the way it was the first time I walked these streets, twenty-some years ago. I can only imagine what it must be doing to Raithe, who's lived here his whole life.

  But if it bothers him, that desert-prophet face of his gives no sign. He sits impassively at my shoulder, staring into the sky, his legs folded in seiza beneath him, while Toa-Sytell rocks on through his speech.

  Toa-Sytell gives an impressive performance; I guess being the Patriarch sharpens your public-speaking skills. He even manages to get a little weepy, nicely choked up, when he recounts all the abuse that the elves and dwarfs and the rest have taken at the hands of the Empire, the terrible oppression inflicted upon them, and how great and true their patriotism and love of the Empire must be, to have overcome their perfectly natural resentment and risked their lives to save the Patriarch yadda yadda yadda horseshit.

  Down here in the Court of the Gods, I can't stop myself shivering, and the shackles on my wrists are burning me with cold. The friars around us look stoic, if not actually comfortable, huddled sullenly on the plaza flagstones—maybe they're in better practice with the Control Disciplines than I am. The Ankhanan regulars who guard us shift and stamp their feet, restlessly trying to keep their blood moving. The dawn is so bright that the glare off weapons and armor slices my eyes—but it brings only light today, not heat.

  Raithe stares to the east, his bleached gaze seeking blindly somewhere near the rising sun. "So fast ..." he murmurs. "Faster than the wind .. . faster than a falcon . . faster than the noise of his passing. He comes with swiftness beyond imagining."

  Now I finally understand who he's talking about. "You can feel it?"

  He rattles his shackles, which shakes loose a few droplets of the black oil that continues to leak through the skin of his left hand; his sleeve is black with it up above the elbow, and I can see a splotch soaking through at the shoulder.

  I wince. "Doesn't that hurt?"

  "Yes," he says expressionlessly. "It does."

  Fast. Faster than a falcon, he says. A fact floats up from the cesspit buried in the part of my brain where I leave useless trivia. A peregrine falcon can dive at something over three hundred kilometers per hour.

  Oh, crap.

  If Tan'elKoth's got a way to make cars work in Overworld physics, this is gonna get ugly. I don't even want to think about the other shit he might be able to make work. "How long do we have?"

  Raithe shakes his head distantly. "I cannot say. They move with speed that baffles my judgment. They are so far—days away—yet they come so quickly that I cannot believe they are not already here."

  A second later, I remember that I'm supposed to be the confident one. "We'll deal," I tell him. "Somehow, we'll deal."

  "Or we'll die."

  "Yeah. Probably both."

  Toa-Sytell goes on, "And because these Folk—the folk we call subhuman—could so give of themselves as to accomplish what even the great warriors sent to us by Ma'elKoth from beyond the world—" A gesture toward the soapy brigadier at his side. "—could not: to save not only me, but through me the Imperial Church itself, I declare here, on this Assumption Day morning, the word subhuman to be banished from Ankhanan tongues. There shall be no more elves, but primals; no more dwarfs, but stonebenders; no sprites or goblins, but treetoppers and ogrilloi. Henceforward, these heroes of the Empire shall be known by the name they call themselves: the Folk. Hear me, Ankhana! Today, the Folk become our brothers, and we theirs: citizens all, Ankhanans all, equal before the law and in the eyes of God Himself."

  That part was my idea: a little nod toward Deliann, a seed for the future. If any of us have a future.

  But

  "It's Assumption Day?" I mutter at Raithe out of the side of my mouth. "Today?"

  He shakes his head slowly. "I do not know. I have been further removed from the normal calendar than even a prisoner in the Shaft. But, if it isn't—"

  He turns his leather-colored face toward me, and his ice-pale eyes see me all the way down to the crud between my toes.

  "If it isn't Assumption Day," he says, "it ought to be."

  Yeah.

  Seven years ago today

  Seven years ago right now, I was asleep at the bottom of the latrine in the old gladiator pens at Victory Stadium. I remember opening my eyes in the gloom, down there in the fecal dust and petrified turds; I remember the toilet-shaped hole of daylight overhead. I remember monologuing, as I went up, that I seem to spend most of my life climbing out of other people's shit.

  Not today.

  Today, it's my shit. That's progress, I guess.

  I guess.

  Christ, has it really been seven years? So much has changed, and so little; I can't decide if it feels like yesterday or ten lifetimes ago.

  Toa-Sytell's winding up his speech: heading for the punchline of our little prank.

  "And we have been tried, as our city has been tried, in the crucible of faith, tested by the Enemy of God, and by traitors from within—and we have not been found wanting."

  A chuckle sneaks past my lips before I know it's coming. Raithe gives me a look of wintry astonishment, and I shrug at him.

  "Toa-Sytell wanted an Assumption Day that Ankhana would never forget." My nod takes in the blackened ruins of the city. "And this is how he thanks us."

  Raithe's expression stays as cold and disbelieving as before. Some people have no sense of humor.

  "And now, in gratitude to the divine Ma'elKoth for our deliverance," Toa-Sytell proclaims, "let us now join together in one voice, one Folk, Ankhanans all, in the Imperial anthem."

  Here's the payoff: he reaches up, and takes off his hat.

  What puts the punch in our punchline is that he's the Patriarch; as soon as his hat comes off, every single Ankhanan soldier is obliged to uncover his head in respect. They unstrap their helms and tuck them under their left arms, and everybody takes a deep breath while they wait for Toa-Sytell to begin the hymn.

  Toa-Sytell, though, holds his tongue—he's staring at the Social Police brigadier next to him. Expectantly. The brigadier, after all, is an "emissary of the divine Ma'elKoth."

  Slowly, with obvious reluctance, the brigadier takes off his silver-wire-inlaid helmet.

  A brigadier of the Social Police

  Exposing his face

  Christ, I can't look. I can't not look

  He's got kind of a moon face, large protuberant eyes, thinning mouse-colored hair, and I get a sick feeling from looking at him, as he blinks and squints and tries to shade his eyes against the dawn glare, which must be blinding, absent the smoked armorglass face shield.

  He's so ordinary. It's shameful.

&
nbsp; I can't look away.

  A humiliated fascination has me hooked through the' jaw. It's like seeing your father naked for the first time—Jeez, he's flabby, and he's got a little knobby dick, and his chest sags, and what are these tufts of hair in embarrassing places? and he's not really much like a father at all anymore. There is something so peeled about the brigadier: now that he's lost the power of his soapy anonymity, he's been shucked like a flicking oyster.

  It's like the Patriarch said Shazam! and Captain Marvel vanished, leaving a middle-aged bookkeeper in his place.

  The whole battalion follows suit—and now, as their helmets come off and they stand before us all with naked faces, they're not Social Police anymore. They're just a bunch of guys in armor with guns.

  So the Patriarch starts in on the opening bars of "King of Kings," and the army joins in, and up on the Address Deck, the brigadier decides to lie on the floor and have a little nap. Below, all the soapies yawn, set down their rifles, curl up on the ground, and fall right to sleep.

  They do this because the adepts of the Thaumaturgic Corps, good as they are, can't read Toa-Sytell's Shell. They can't read his Shell because a couple of primal mages—who have the advantage of a few hundred years' experience apiece—built a Fantasy that the Patriarch's Shell was 100 percent A-OK normal. They had to do this, because it's not.

  This Fantasy is powered by a little chip of griffinstone, in a technique once used by Kierendal to get the whole Kingdom of Cant into Victory Stadium. This means not only that their Fantasy pulls no perceptible Flow, but that it'll keep right on going even if the adepts cover the Patriarch with a silver net or examine him using griffinstones of their own in a magick-negative room—both of which we guessed they might try, since Thaumaturgic Corps adepts are nasty and suspicious by nature—because the griffinstone in question is secreted on the Patriarch's person.

  We had some discussion on where to put the stone. My own suggestion was vetoed on the grounds that the Patriarch might have an unexpected bowel movement and give away our plan.