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Authors: Matthew Woodring Stover

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Blade of Tyshalle

BOOK: Blade of Tyshalle
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Blades of Tyshalle

Acts of Caine – Book 2

Matthew Woodring Stover

This book is dedicated to the memories of some of the best friends
any man could ask for. I only wish you could have lived to read it.

For Evangeline, Aleister, and Friedrich;
for Lev, John, Clive,
and Terence;
for Roger and Fritz and both Bobs (Robert A. and
Robert E.).

Even today, some still listen.

But we have
soothed ourselves into imagining sudden change as something that
happens outside the normal order of things. An accident, like a car
crash. Or beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We do not
conceive of sudden, irrational change as built into the very fabric
of existence. Yet it is. And chaos theory teaches us . . . that
straight linearity, which we have come to take for granted in
everything from physics to fiction, simply does not exist. . . .

Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change
those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way. .
. .

That’s a deep truth about the structure of our universe. But,
for some reason, we insist on behaving as if it were not true.

—“>Ian
Malcomâ€

A TALE IS told of twin boys born to different mothers.

One is dark by nature, the other light. One is rich, the other poor.
One is harsh, the other gentle. One is forever youthful, the other
old before his time.

One is mortal.

They share no bond of blood or sympathy, but they are twins
nonetheless.

They each live without ever knowing that they are brothers.

They each die fighting the blind god.

ZERO

THE ONLY WAY I can explain why you’ll never see me again is to
tell you about Hari.

This is how I visualize the conversation that ended up pushing me
into Hari Michaelson’s life. I wasn’t there—I don’t
know the details—but the images in my head are vivid as a slap
on the mouth; to be a good thaumaturge, your imagination must be
powerful and detailed—and I’m the best the Conservatory
has ever produced.

This is how I see it:

“It’s all here in the telemetry,â€

ONE

THE SEVERED HEAD of a child bounced once on his mattress, then rolled
against his ribs, and Hari Michaelson began to wake.

He groped for it, struggling upward through smothering blankets of
hungover sleep. His gummed-together eyelids parted with the slow rip
of shredding meat. Layers of dream shredded into smoke tatters,
leaving behind only wisps of melancholy: He had been dreaming of the
old days again. Of his long-dead Acting career. Or even earlier—he
could not quite grasp the details, but he might have been dreaming of
his student days at the Studio Conservatory, more than twenty-five
years ago, when he was young, and strong, and full of hope. When he’d
still been riding the upward swing of his life.

He found the foreign object on the bed, his fingers flapping blindly
across it. Not a head, of course it wasn’t a head; it was a
ball
, that’s it, just a kid’s ball, like the one
he used to play rugger with, centuries ago in those bright and happy
days before his mother’s death and father’s breakdown.
With the abstract certainty of the dreams he shed, he knew the ball
was Faith’s. She’d sneaked into the master suite, and
this was her way of encouraging him to get his lazy ass out of bed
and take her to Saturday morning soccer practice.

He rolled over and coughed a wad of phlegm out of his cottony lungs.
“Abbey: Clear th’windows,â€

TWO

AS THE CRISP late-summer afternoon faded to evening, the shadow of
the God’s Teeth mountains stretched to the east and swallowed
first the mines, erasing their billowing towers of smoke, then wiped
across the Northwest Road and engulfed Thorncleft, the tiny
Transdeian capital city.

The Monastic Ambassador to Transdeia, a young man the world named
Raithe of Ankhana, sat in a straight-backed, unadorned, unpadded, and
exceptionally uncomfortable chair, staring out at the shadow’s
grope with blank unseeing eyes.

Most unsettling, those eyes were: the pale blue grey of winter ice,
set in a face as dark and leathery as that of a Korish desert
tribesman. The startling contrast made his stare a disturbing, almost
dangerous thing; few men could bear to match his gaze. Fewer still
would care to try, if they knew just how deeply those pale eyes could
see.

Late in the afternoon, five elves had come to Thorncleft. Raithe had
seen them first from this very window: dusty, in clothing travel-worn
and stained, mounted on horses whose ribs showed even under their
mantles of green and black. Those mantles had been embroidered with
the star-browed raven that was the standard of House Mithondionne.

Raithe had stared at them, memorizing every discernable curve of
shoulder and tangle of hair, every faded patch where the sun had
bleached color from their linen surcoats, all the details of posture
and gesture that made each of them individual, as the elves walked
their horses up high-sloping Tor Street. He had stepped from the
shadow of the half-built Monastic embassy into the street, shielding
his eyes against the lowering sun, had watched them answer the
challenge at the vaulted gate of Thornkeep, had watched as the gate
swung wide and the elves led their horses within.

Then he went back into the embassy, into his office, and sat in this
chair so that he could see them more clearly.

He held himself perfectly erect and controlled his breathing, timing
it by the subtle beats of his own heart: six beats in, hold for
three, nine beats out, hold for three. As his heart slowed, so did
the cycle of his breath. He built their image in the eye of his mind,
drawing details of their backs from his trained memory, since their
backs were what he had seen most clearly: a spray of platinum hair
pricked through by the barest hint of pointed ears, a diagonal
leather thong to support a waterskin, the inhuman grace of stance,
the way shoulders move when hands swing in small, light gestures.

Slowly, slowly, with infinite patience, he fed details into the
image: the dark curls hand-tooled into their belts, the lace of scar
tissue across one’s forearm, the sideways duck of another’s
head as he whispered to one of his companions. These were details he
had not seen, could not have seen; these were details that he created
in his powerful imagination. Yet as he refined them, and brought them
more vividly before his mind’s eye, they became plastic,
shifted, and finally organized into plain, visible truth.

Now ghosts of their surroundings materialized in his mind: the marble
floor, deeply worn but highly polished, on which their boots made
almost no sound, the long tongue of pale blue carpet that entered the
doorway before them. He got a vague sense of huge, high-vaulted
space, oaken beams blackened by years of smoldering torches below.

He hummed satisfaction under his breath. This would be the Hall of
State.

He had been inside that hall many times in the few months since he’d
been posted here from Ankhana; using his recollection of the details
of the hall brought the scene inside it into sharper and more
brilliant focus than he could have seen with the eyes of his
body—from the glittering steel of the ceremonial weapons that
bedizened the walls to the precise color of the sunlight that
struggled through the smoke-darkened windows. There before the elves
was the Gilt Throne, and upon it lounged Transdeia’s lazy,
spineless puppet lord: Kithin, fourteenth Duke of Thorncleft. Raithe
could see even the stitching on Duke Kithin’s shirt of maroon
and gold; with that as a mental anchor, he swung his perception to
see the room as Kithin saw it. Now, for the first time, he could get
a good look at the faces of the elves.

He didn’t trouble to study these faces too closely; elvish
features lack the creases that time and care paint upon human
physiognomy, and thus reveal nothing of their character. Elves, in
Raithe’s experience, looked very much alike.

He was rather more interested in what had brought them to Thorncleft,
and so he studied the silent motions of lips and tongue; though he
spoke little Primal, they would be conversing in Westerling for the
benefit of Duke Kithin, and lipreading is easy, when practiced
through the pristine vision of his mindeye.

His mindeye had always been one of his most useful talents.

Raithe had been only a boy when he’d discovered his gift:
thirteen years old, barely into adolescence. One golden morning he
had lain in bed, in his room above his father’s tiny smithy,
slowly awakening from a dream. In the dream, he’d kissed Dala,
the raven-haired sixteen-year-old girl who sold sticky buns on the
corner of Tanner and the Angle; as he lay in bed fingering the
erection this dream had given him, he’d imagined her rising for
the morning and pulling her nightdress off over her head, imagined
her round, swelling breasts bouncing free, her nipples hardening as
she splashed herself with water from the pitcher beside her bed. In
his mind, he saw her stand naked before the mirror, braiding her hair
in a new way, coiling it into a gleaming black helmet instead of the
long strands she usually allowed to trail down her back; he imagined
that she chose her oldest blouse to wear that day, the one he loved
the best, its fabric so worn and supple that it clung to her curves
and gave a hint of the dark circles of her nipples.

Sheer fantasy, of course: the vivid daydreams of an imaginative boy
in lust.

But when he’d gone that morning to buy buns for his father’s
dinner, blushing so that he hardly dared even to look at her, he’d
found that she was wearing that very blouse, and she had chosen that
morning to coil her hair up in a new style, tight and shining around
her head—exactly as he had imagined it.

That had been Raithe’s first hint that he was destined for
greatness.

Mastering his gift had not come easily. In the days and weeks that
followed, as he spied on Dala’s naked body at every
opportunity, he found that his vivid imagination was more hindrance
than help. Too often, his mental image of her would lift hands to
breasts, to fondle and squeeze them as he wanted to do. Too often, he
would fantasize one hand creeping down to the silky nest between her
legs . . . and the vision would scatter into the random eyelights of
total darkness. He discovered that clear imaging required a certain
coldness of mind, a detachment; otherwise, his sight became murky,
clouded with his own desires, with ghosts of wish-fulfilling
fantasies.

Those wish-fulfilling fantasies had a power of their own, though, as
he discovered one day when Dala met his eye with a shy smile, when he
gazed at her while he held a perfectly formed mental image of their
naked limbs entwined in a tangle of sheets—and she reached out,
took his hand, and led him to her room on a clear, hot summer’s
afternoon, and took his virginity with exactly that same shy smile.

That had been the sweet brush of his destiny’s lips, as well.

He’d entered his novitiate at fourteen, using the advanced
education available only at the Monastic Embassy to sharpen his
powers; the Esoteric training of both body and mind gave him the
self-discipline to ruthlessly strangle those desires that crippled
his gift. Now he used his mind as another friar might wield a sword:
as a weapon, sworn in the service of the Human Future.

At twenty-five, he was the youngest full Ambassador in the
Monasteries’ six-hundred-year history—and not even the
Council of Brothers could guess how much their decision might have
been influenced by the subtle power of a young friar’s dreams.

Now in Thorncleft a haze began to obscure his vision, as though he
peered through a twisty veil of gauze, while the great doors of the
hall swung wide and in marched a double column of the Artan Guards,
their curious springless pellet bows held at ready aslant their
scarlet-armored chests. They spread out into the wide arc of an honor
guard.

The elves gazed at them with bald curiosity, not yet aware of their
import. Lord Kithin, for his part, sprang hastily from the Gilt
Throne and dropped to one knee, inclining his head to welcome the
Artan Viceroy, Vinson Garrette. Lord Kithin could be trusted only to
handle situations of purely ceremonial nature. No business of import
could be conducted in Transdeia without the presence of the
representative of this land’s true rulers.

Raithe’s heart began to pound.

Garrette seemed to speak cordially to the elves as he walked among
them. Raithe felt a surge of anger at the mental haze that prevented
him from fully experiencing the meeting—if he could only hear
what Garrette said, perhaps he could understand the import of these
legates. He burned for that understanding.

With a need as sharp and immediate as hunger to a starving man, he
ached to understand where, in all this, was the connection to Caine.

BOOK: Blade of Tyshalle
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