Blade of Tyshalle (3 page)

The investigation of the Green Knights led the CID to one
Administrator Kerry Voorhees, the head of Biocontainment for the San
Francisco Studio. Professional Voorhees was unavailable for
comment—but a few of her associates in Biocontainment were
extensively interviewed, and they spoke of certain behavioral changes
that seemed to have begun with Voorhees’ “friendshipâ€

THE CAINESLAYER LEANED on the silvery weather-split rail that
surrounded the roof of the barge’s deckhouse and stared out
over the docks of Ankhana with eyes the bleached blue-grey of a
frozen river under a cloudless winter sky. He could have been made of
carved oak and knotted rope upholstered with leather; his hair was
shaved to an eighth-inch fuzz over his scalp, and muscle jumped at
the corners of his knife-edged jawline.

He squinted one eye against the side-glare of the rising sun and
thought about destiny.

He wore a simple tunic and pants of brown suede, loose and baggy, a
shade or two lighter than his skin. In the case by his cot in the
deckhouse cabin were the scarlet robes of a Monastic Ambassador, but
he no longer wore them; he planned to resign his diplomatic post as
soon as he reached the Ankhanan Embassy.

But after that—?

For the first time in longer than he could remember, he didn’t
know what to do next.

The city around him now had been his home for more than twenty-four
years; he had been born here, had passed his childhood in a
neighborhood of the Industrial Park that could be seen from where he
now stood. Behind him, across this channel of the Great Chambaygen,
rose the massive walls of Ankhana’s Old Town, great cliffs
built of limestone blocks each near the size of the barge on which
he’d ridden the river from the God’s Teeth, towering
eight times the height of a man, blackened with a thousand years of
smoke and weather, dropping sheer to the river’s channel.

The smithy built by the man he had called his father still stood, not
far from here; if he closed his ice-pale eyes, he could see the small
room, off the overhead chamber, where he had slept. With his powers
of mind, he could view himself at any age there, could see his
parents as if they still lived, or could cast forth his sight to
capture the face of someone sleeping in that tiny windowless room
even on this bright morning. He could spy upon the tenement where his
first love had lived, or the cell beneath the Monastic Embassy where
he had spent so many hours kneeling in meditation. The city had been
a part of his family, a parent, the older brother he’d never
had. And now the city was sick.

Ankhana was coming down with a virus.

The city had been feeling poorly for some days now, feverish fancies
invading its collective dreams, but it did not yet comprehend just
how ill it was. The city’s immune system—the Imperial
constabulary and the army—had geared up to fight off a
bacterial infection: a growing internal colony called Cainism, a
philosophical disease that attacked the citizenry’s faith in
the Church of the Beloved Children of Ma’elKoth, and in the
Empire itself. This particular infection, as it spread, emitted
toxins that had caused painful abcesses of disorder at the city’s
extremities of Alientown and the Warrens, and that had occasionally
pocked Old Town itself.

The city’s immune system was admirably suited to battle
infections of this type; these were swiftly contained, sequestered,
and concentrated in only a few places, where each individual
bacterium could be sanitized in turn. Yet aches continued to settle
into the city’s joints, and its fever continued to inch upward
every day, for the city’s true illness came from a virus.

A virus is a wholly different order of disease.

A black pall of smoke twisted upward from the northwest quadrant of
the capital, the Alientown ghetto. All the still-standing buildings
that fronted the river were blackened; most others had partially
collapsed and still others had burned to the ground. What little he
could see of Alientown from here looked like the scorched-earth shell
of a castle after a marauding army has slaughtered all within.

All this meant little to the Caineslayer; he merely gazed incuriously
at the wreckage. The Caineslayer had been born in the mountains, five
days ago. He did not yet know his new life well. He could still be
surprised by how the world made him feel, because he did not react to
it in the familiar patterns of his former life; he was almost
continuously startled by how different he had become.

Now, for example: standing here, he surmised that he was alone, or
very nearly so, in the knowledge of the city’s illness. Perhaps
only one or two of the hundreds and thousands of people around him
even understood the concept of viral infection; he himself had not,
until it had been explained to him in detail by the late Vinson
Garrette. And instead of leaping to the docks to cry the city’s
doom, instead of racing to the embassy to warn the Acting Ambassador
of the danger, instead of taking any action at all upon his
knowledge, he simply leaned upon the rail, picking at its splinters
with his fingernails, and watched.

On the dock below him was assembled the capital detachment of the
Imperial Army Band, two hundred strong, their instruments’
brass gleaming gold in the bright noontide sun. They stood at parade
rest, horns and pipes slung like weapons, their tall cylindrical caps
white as clouds and festooned with braid as iridescent as sun dogs.
Within the band’s broad arc stood a half century of Household
Knights at attention, their long hauberks shining under mantles of
maroon and gold, their halberd blades of scarlet steel flashing like
torches.

He wondered how many of them were sick: how many already had that
boil of madness festering within their brains.

A ribbed gangplank joined the barge’s deck to the dockside. At
the gangplank’s foot waited a pair of stolid, thick-shouldered
draft horses harnessed to a large cart. A platform had been built
upon the cart, rising perhaps four or five feet above its bed, and on
the platform was a sort of rack hastily improvised out of splintery,
warped scrap lumber. Waiting at the corners of the cart were four
friars, Esoterics despite the dirt-brown robes that proclaimed their
Monastic citizenship. Such robes are worn ordinarily only by
Exoterics, the public faces of the Monasteries. These robes served
admirably to conceal the Artan springless pellet bows that each man
bore.

The ice in the Caineslayer’s eyes glinted with a new
reflection: Down the long ribbed gangplank from the deck to the dock,
two friars—real Exoterics, these—bore a litter. On the
litter lay a medium-sized, ordinary-looking man of middle age, black
hair showing streaks of grey that matched the grey scattered through
his untrimmed week’s growth of black beard. The man’s
arms dangled, limp, over the litter’s rails, as though he were
unconscious; the Caineslayer knew that he was not.

The man did not move because only immobility could hurt more than
motion: the man held himself still because to move might lessen his
suffering, and that he could not bear. For him, only pain had
meaning.

For five days—since the moment of his birth—the
Caineslayer had kept company with this man, first on the train down
the western slope of Khryl’s Saddle to the riverport of
Harrakha, then on the barge downriver from Harrakha to the Empire’s
capital. The Caineslayer had taken his meals in the ugly deck shelter
of scrap wood and filth-crusted canvas that had served this man for
his cabin, had slept there, read there, had done his daily exercises
there; the Caineslayer had knelt beside this man’s rude cot for
his daily prayers to the Savior, the Ascended Ma’elKoth.

He had never left this man’s side, because to leave would be to
miss the pain. The Caineslayer ate this man’s pain, drank it,
breathed it, soaked it in through his pores. It was his reason for
existence. This man had many names, of which the Caineslayer knew
some few; he numbered them in his head while he watched the friars
who had borne the litter lift the crippled man and chain him upright
to the rack upon the wagon’s platform.

Dominic, this man said he had been called by the slaver from whom he
claimed to have escaped, in the days before his arrival at the abbey
of Garthan Hold; in Kirisch-Nar, where he had fought in the catpits,
he was known as Shade; among the surviving remnants of the Khulan
Horde, he had once been k’Thal, and was now known only as the
Betrayer, or the Hated One. In the Ankhanan Empire, he had been
called the Blade of Tyshalle, and the Prince of Chaos, and the Enemy
of God. In the land of Arta, the
Aktiri
world, he had been
named Administrator Hari Khapur Michaelson.

But everywhere he was known by one of these names, he was better
known by another name, his true name, the name he’d been given
by the Abbot of Garthan Hold.

Caine.

It was the Caineslayer’s greatest pride that he had taken this
name of legend and made of it a mere sound: a monosyllabic grunt of
contempt.

2

ON THE COLD dawn of his birth, when he had let himself into the
railcar compartment where the cripple who had once been Caine lay,
dumb with misery like a wounded dog, the Caineslayer had sat across
from him and asked, “How, then, should I call you?â€

AVERY SHANKS DABBED blood from the cut on her lower lip, looked upon
her granddaughter, and pondered the fundamental unpredictability of
existence.

This was an unaccustomed pastime for her, and she found it both
difficult and uncomfortable. She thought of herself as active, rather
than contemplative: a doer, a decider. An operative principle. A
verb.

Yet now, unexpectedly, reality had jumped her from behind and knocked
her over; this verb had become an object, held down and pummeled by a
force that was beyond her capacity to resist. This force cared
nothing for her self-image of ruthless decisiveness; it permitted
only an arbitrarily limited range of decision, rigidly bounded by the
fortress walls of her heart. She—who had lived her life in
simple declaratives—must now accept a conditional, no matter
how it stung.

She might possibly love this child.

Few who knew Avery Shanks would ever guess that she was capable of
such an emotion. If asked, she would deny it. For her, love was less
an emotion than a pressure: a physical compression that seized her
heart, her lungs, every part of her, and punished her mercilessly. In
the wilder moments of hallucination occasionally brought on by her
overindulgence in sedatives and alcohol, she saw a monster that rode
behind her shoulder, its tentacles sliding into her chest through
puckered mouths that had opened upon her skin; this monster used its
hideous grip to drive her this way and that, to force her into unwise
choices and ridiculous actions, and sometimes, simply and purely,
maliciously, to inflict pain. This, to Avery Shanks, was love.

She had loved Karl.

Seven years of brutal self-denial had shrunk the monster that had
tortured her since his death, carved away its power over her, until
it could produce only the odd twinge, here and there. But now, fear
pooled in Avery Shanks’ belly when she looked at her
granddaughter. The monster might be coming back.

And it wore the face of a child she had never seen until just a week
ago.

“Faith,â€

A FEW DAYS before the Festival of the Assumption, a new report
detonated like a suitcase nuke in the heart of the net. Actors in
Ankhana had witnessed the riverboat arrival of a Monastic delegation,
an entourage of dozens of functionaries, and servants, and heavily
armed friars with the sword-edged eyes of combat veterans. The
delegation had been met at the Industrial Park docks by an honor
guard suitable for vassal kings and the entire capital army band; the
assemblage had formed a huge parade, a processional that surrounded a
large wheeled cart drawn by four humpbacked oxen.

The band had struck up a solemn hymn, “Justice of God,â€

THE PATRIARCH’S LEFT hand trembled ever so slightly, as the tip
of its middle finger marked a drier line through the sweat that
beaded his brow. Then this unsteady hand slid along his cheek to cup
the corner of his jaw, feeling for fever; a moment later it massaged
the swollen glands in his throat.

“Is His Radiance unwell?â€

TIME.

Long time.

Long, long, long time.

Awareness.

Awareness of a
lack
: something was not there.

Everything.

Everything was not there.

Everything with a name, everything that had a word to describe it,
was not there. Not even darkness. Not even nothingness. Not even
absence.

Only awareness.

At play upon the field of awareness, one random thought:

When I got there, there wasn’t any “thereâ€

THEY CARRY ME down the steps until they find a Shafter who doesn’t
move when the officer kicks her; good odds she’s dead, from the
bloat of her belly, but it’s hard to be sure. There’s so
much filth caked on her skin that the lamp can’t pick up
postmortem lividity. She might only be catatonic. They unlock her
wrist from its wall shackle, and drag her down toward the sump at the
foot of the Shaft.

The officer notices my gaze following her. He smirks.

“Yeah, I heard,â€

ANKHANA EMBRACED DAMON of Jhanthogen Bluff with a jungle of dreams.

An oak shouldered him aside as it lashed upward from a crack in the
flagstone dockside, shoving him stumbling into a head-high corn
patch; the stalks crackled and burgeoned with young ears that grew
from fingerlings to the size of his hand while he stood and watched
with open-mouthed awe. Pumpkin and watermelon vines snaked along the
stone and coiled around his ankles. Intertangled apple and peach and
willow leaped from the Chambaygen so fast that the reeds festooning
their upper branches dripped chill river water onto Damon’s
feverish brow. Barges and boats and floating piers were shoved and
twisted and overturned.