Blade of Tyshalle (2 page)

But his sudden swell of desire ruptured his concentration and
scattered his vision; now he saw only the view from this window in
the half-completed embassy. He snarled at himself, then shut his
eyes, laid his hand across them, and forced himself to concentrate
once more. He slowed his breathing, a measured count of nine to
inhale, hold for three, exhale for twelve, and the Hall of State
began to coalesce once more inside his skull.

“Headache, Master Ambassador?â€

HARI SLID A hand inside the back of his toga, reaching for the ripple
of scar at his lumbar vertebrae. He massaged it fiercely through his
chiton, trying to rub away the ache; his back felt as if he were
lying on a rock the size of his fist. That dull pressure was as dim
and rounded as painkillers could make it without knocking him out
altogether. He had work to do.

His scar always hurt when he was at work these days; maybe it was
this goddamn new chair. It had looked good in the catalog, but
somehow he couldn’t get comfortable. His back usually started
to ache while he rode his private lift down to his office—buried
in the bedrock below the San Francisco Studio Center—anticipatory
twinges shooting up into his shoulders while the lift sank its silent
three stories. The ache would grow all day long, most days; usually
it was bearable.

Lately it had been brutal.

This goddamn chair . . .

I should have kept Kollberg’s,
he thought.
He was a
sack of fucking maggots, but he knew how to be comfortable.

One of the first things he’d done, when he’d finally won
his struggle to actually direct the operations of the SF Studio, was
redecorate his office.

It was something he’d always been—vaguely, more or
less—planning to do, ever since the Studio installed him here
six years ago. At first, he’d taken a very real malicious
pleasure in sitting inside Arturo Kollberg’s office suite, in
using the disgraced former Chairman’s chair, his desk, staring
at the ocean through Kollberg’s Sony repeater. But that kind of
petty shit swiftly pales. Kollberg’s office furniture had been
rounded, organic, womblike, no sharp corners anywhere—kind of
like Kollberg himself. Hari had loathed this office just as he’d
loathed its former occupant, but for years it hadn’t occurred
to him that he could change it just because he didn’t like it.

It had, in fact, never occurred to him that Kollberg had chosen his
own furnishings; things look different to a man who grew up Labor.
This wasn’t just the office where the Chairman worked, it was
the Chairman’s Office
. It had seemed to him a sort of
mythic sanctum, like the throne room of an Overworld king, its
trappings dictated by millennial tradition rather than the whim of
its occupant.

It was funny, now—looking back on it, he could only shake his
head with a rueful smile. He’d always had a guilty suspicion
that this office wasn’t really his, that he had been installed
here as a piece of replaceable equipment, a temporary plug-in until a
real Chairman came along to take the job. Like a Fool King in the
Kirischan spring carnival, everyone would pretend he was in charge
only so long as he didn’t try to make any laws.

The Chairman’s office was now a place of dark-grained paneling,
deep pile carpet, an immense wraparound desk of burled walnut
imported from Overworld, walls lined with heavy bookshelves filled
with real books. He had a few plays, a few histories, but nearly all
fiction in leather-bound editions: fantasies, mysteries, even some
socially irresponsible, slightly risky works from the vanished genre
of science fiction. Most of them had been brought out from the vault
on Marc Vilo’s estate. If anyone asked—say, the Board of
Governors, or even the Social Police—Hari could claim that he
culled the old novels for Adventure ideas; it gave him a perfect
excuse to maintain a collection here that he could never have kept at
home.

The only problem was, his fucking back still hurt.

The analgesics he used helped a little, but not much. The Studio
doctors wouldn’t give him anything stronger; they didn’t
really believe he was in pain. One of them would occasionally remind
him that the touch/pain receptors around his wound had been severed
when his bypass was installed—which was true; the scar itself
was numb as a slice of steak—and that he really couldn’t
be hurting, not there.

He was willing to allow that the pain might be psychosomatic. So
what? It still hurt.

Hari had given up arguing with them. Instead, he carried a small
bottle of grey-market meperidine hydrochloride in his purse, which
not only took the edge off the pain of his back, but dulled the pain
of his life, as well.

And if it was all in his head, why did it hurt
worse
now, when
he could sit in a chair that he
liked
? His new chair was an
old-fashioned high-backed swivel, upholstered in calfskin over
gel-pack stuffing, more expensive and better designed than the one in
his study in the Abbey. It should have been more comfortable than his
goddamn
bed
, let alone that shapeless blob of a chair he’d
inherited from Kollberg.

He forced his attention back to the display of his deskscreen, which
was filled with the latest inspection reports from the mining colony
in Transdeia. He’d heard some disturbing rumors about shit
going on over there; Garrette, the Overworld Company’s Viceroy,
was ruthless as a child molester, and some people were saying he had
been turning a blind eye to Transdeian pogroms against subhumans on
the duchy’s borders. So Hari could fantasize about a surprise
inspection, dream of writing a report that would really stick
Garrette’s head in the shitpot, and it would keep him happy
enough for an hour or two—

The annunciator on his deskscreen bleeped for attention.

He jumped a little, then shook his head and thumbed the acceptor. His
itinerary vanished behind an image of his secretary’s weasely
face. “Yeah, Gayle?â€

ANKHANA SPREAD LIKE a canker across the valley floor, a rank and
oozing fester that drained its sewage and manufacturing waste into
the river that men called the Great Chambaygen. As the barge lumbered
round a river-bend far to the north and east of the Imperial capital,
the city coalesced out of the pall of smog that covered it: a ragged
blot upon the earth, washed by the haze of intervening miles to the
necrotic grey of dead flesh.

At the bow of the riverbarge stood a fey in woolen clothes tattered
by time and hard travel. He looked as though the clothes may have fit
him once, long ago—he had the frame for it, broad shouldered
for one of the First Folk—but now they hung on him as though on
a rack. His face had been carved into deep lines: scars of privation
and grief deeper than any a true primal ever shows. His hair stuck
straight out from his scalp around his sharply pointed ears: a
platinum brush the length of the first joint of his thumb. His boots
might have been fine, if they were not so battered; for a belt, he
wore a thick-braided hemp throwline, tied around his waist. He bore
no purse, and in place of a gentleman’s weapons he had only the
mop on which he leaned.

He stared downriver at Ankhana, and his knuckles whitened on the
mop’s handle. His lips pulled back over teeth sharp as a
wolf’s, and his great golden eyes, their pupils slitted to
razored vertical lines in the afternoon sun, burned with barely
controlled desperation. Once, not so long ago, he had been a prince.

His name was Deliann.

“You workin’, decker?â€

HARI SAT MOTIONLESS in his uncomfortable chair, the pain in his back
forgotten, listening so hard he barely breathed around the knot in
his guts.

He knew the voice.

This weirdass-looking fey he didn’t recognize, but he still had
an Actor’s ear for voices. This voice stirred old memories,
half buried in passing years; he eased back in his chair and closed
his eyes, shutting out the unfamiliar face, concentrating on the
familiar voice.

“
. . . but this is what you don’t know. At least, I
hope you don’t know. By all I hold sacred, I pray that even the
monsters who control the Studio are not so evil that you would
inflict HRVP on us intentionally . . .â€

“CHANGELING?â€

TAN’ELKOTH SAT ALONE in the stony gloom of the Curioseum.
Motionless, his eyes glittered in the flickering glow from the mirror
that served him as a deskscreen. His fingers were steepled before his
impassive face. The ground floor of his apartment had no windows;
though it was late afternoon outside the Curioseum, black shadows
crowded close around him. He was consumed with the task of waiting.

He had been waiting for this moment for nearly seven years.

The mirror on his desk glowed with a special edition of
Adventure
Update
. Tan’elKoth had watched the recording that
Clearlake played for a worldwide audience. With his usual canny
political touch for self-preservation, Clearlake had seamlessly
edited the recording to eliminate every suggestion that the Studio
itself might be somehow responsible for the outbreak, thus protecting
himself from any charge of corporate slander; other than that, the
recording ran uncensored, and unrelievedly gruesome. Tan’elKoth
stabbed the cutoff. He’d seen enough.

“One supposes the Bog has, as well,â€

A PERFECTLY ANONYMOUS digitized voice cut through the dully roaring
babble on the convention floor.

“
Administrator Michaelson.â€

THE AUTUMN SHOWER we rattle through leaves the window streaked with
diagonal swipes of darker black, bordering swaths almost clear where
the rain has washed away some of the collected soot. Now as the
tracks curve around another switchback, I press my face against the
cool glass and try to get a glimpse of the Saddle through the
backbent plume of coal smoke that makes a contrail of soot behind the
locomotive.

High, high above us, the twin mountains—Cutter and Chopper,
what you might call the incisors of the God’s Teeth—soar
up through the orange-tinged night clouds, but the gap between them,
the pass called Khryl’s Saddle, is hidden behind a pall of
smoke and rock dust. The sedan chair shifts slightly with the rocking
of the railcar, and the steel on steel clicking of wheels over
expansion joints has me drowsy as a baby, but I still wish I could
see the Saddle.

I’ve been here before. Twice. Once as Caine—many, many
years ago—trekking through the aspens from Jheled-Kaarn to
Thorncleft, on my way to Seven Wells, the distant capital of Lipke .
. . And once, only about five years ago, back when we still thought I
might someday walk again, riding in a sedan chair not quite as nice
as this one my best friend gave me. That time, I was with Shanna, and
she took me way up Cutter Mountain to show me the tiny spring, high
on the western slope above the pass—a little washtub-sized gap
through which bubbled hundreds of years of rock-filtered
snowmelt—that was the ultimate headwater of the Great
Chambaygen.

But the image of Shanna walking beside my chair hurts too much to
think about, and I force myself sideways into a different memory.

I can see the Saddle in my head as clearly as I ever saw it with my
eyes: a place of beauty so intense it robs breath from the lungs, a
broad spine of earth and rock buried in forests of aspen, stark
snowbound teeth of stone rising sheer to either side. She stood next
to me that morning, holding my hand, while we watched the sun climb
out of the distant Lipkan plains. The white-capped peaks above us
caught the first direct light and burst into silver flame. Down their
slopes the rock shaded from yellow to orange to deep emberous red,
which became a loamy brown where it brushed the tops of the shadowed
aspens in the pass below.

I put my fist against my mouth through the kerchief, and cough. Like
the four bearers of my sedan chair, I’ve got a kerchief tied
across my face against the coal smoke and furnace smut. That cough
might be lung damage from the fire last night, I guess. I kind of
hope it is. I guess I’d really rather have roasted lungs than
find out I’m coughing because of the damn air below Khryl’s
Saddle.

Things change. Shit, I can see why she went nuts.

We wind upward. All around the railway, the eastern slope of the pass
has become an open wound. The aspen forest has been chewed into
gaping open-pit mines. Thick fogs of coal smoke and rock dust
overhang every valley. Through the dark mist, I can see grimly
threatening silhouettes of huge machines at work upon the land,
belching smoke and flame as they chop and grind and scoop away the
earth. It’s the ugliest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen; it
makes my stomach hurt, and brings a bitter acid to my throat that
probably isn’t just from the sulphur fumes. “Christ,â€

THE KNOCK SOUNDED friendly enough—not too loud, a brisk double
tap like a cheerful hello—but when Deliann opened the door he
got only a brief glimpse of a big, square-bodied human with kindly
eyes and a face roughly the color and topography of a dishful of
overcooked yams. He saw no more than this, because his view was
obscured by the human’s large fist, which got larger much too
fast and hit Deliann’s nose so hard that he didn’t even
remember falling; without a discernable interval, he found himself
lying on the carpet, brilliant white sparks curling through his
peripheral vision and the taste of blood in his mouth.

“Hiya,â€

THE STORY TRICKLED onto the nets in exactly the kind of dribs and
drabs most likely to keep the cauldron of public prurience at a
rolling boil. First the fire at the Curioseum, and the suggestion of
sabotage and arson by a shadowy group of eco-terrorists, the Green
Knights; then came the
Where is Caine?
stories, as a source
within MicroNet confirmed that Hari Michaelson’s Mantrak anklet
had vanished from the satellite position grid and the courts had
presumptively seized his house and all his assets.