Blade of Tyshalle (4 page)

In minutes the river had become a marsh, and the great wall of Old
Town had become a vertical forest of leaves and brilliant blossoms.

I have done this,
Damon thought.

The buzzing in his veins—a strange fizzy bubbling up and down
his neck that swirled into his head and out again—had started
as a tiny hiss, but had boiled and burst since the green had come to
devour the city. He walked in a dream, and knew it was a dream; this
could not happen, except in a dream.

The friars Damon had detailed to patrol the dockside and watch for
any sign of Master Raithe and the Sword of Saint Berne were all
Esoterics: veterans, experts in covert operations skills ranging from
hand-to-hand combat to demolitions to magickal counterespionage. At
the first creak and rustle of the foliage that sprang to life around
them, they had scattered and taken cover like the professionals they
were.

He was alone.

Damon couldn’t see them anywhere within the riot of waving,
weaving green, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He wasn’t
sure of anything.
I’ve been sick,
he thought.
I’ve
had a fever.

I must still have a fever; this must be a fever dream.

He’d been at the dockside for days, he guessed. He couldn’t
bear to be away. He’d posted his guards and watchmen, but he
couldn’t trust them to watch and guard, not really; whenever he
left the riverside he was tormented by visions of Raithe slipping
away, sneaking, escaping—

And Raithe, he knew, was at the core of what was happening to
Ankhana; let him go, and all hope of answers would be lost with him.
So Damon always came back, to pace and brood and contemplate the
river, because the only man in Ankhana he could still trust was
himself.

Because this is
my
dream.

His stomach had been troubling him, and now in the green storm his
guts twisted, and he retched: a brown-traced milky fluid spilled from
his lips. How long had it been since he’d last eaten?

What had he last eaten?

The streaks of brown in his vomitus looked like blood.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and its touch stung him
sharply. His lips had cracked and split and smeared his hand with
fresher blood. He was thirsty, dreadfully thirsty . . . He knelt and
cupped river water to his mouth, but his tongue turned the cool water
to nails and broken glass. He could feel it tearing open his throat,
shredding him inside—

Maybe what I need isn’t water.

He looked back at the pool of his vomit, at the swirls of brown; he
looked down at the smear of red across the back of his hand.
Blood,
he thought.

Blood.

He would have to hunt.

A flash of furtive motion caught his eye. He rose to a stalking
crouch, parting reeds with his hands, then slipped forward through
the stand of corn. There it was again—was it again? Was it the
first time? Had he seen this before, or was he remembering an older
dream?

The flash of a boot heel, as it vanished behind the trunk of an ash;
a startled glimpse of a woman’s face, eyes wide and staring for
one brief second until screened by rustling corn, the smell of
unwashed crotch and armpit, the mouthwatering earthmetal savor of
blood—

His dreaming jungle was full of people.

Slowly, his jungle came to life in his ears. Grunts and growls,
screeches and screams, all manner of bellows and howls and shrieks
echoed near and far: calls not of beasts, but of men. Calls of the
beasts that men had always been.

He followed a crackle of motion and was brought up short by a yell
that was chopped to a thin moan. Thrashing a clearing in the reeds
was a tangle of human flesh: a man and a woman and a knife struggled
together near the river, and Damon couldn’t make his eyes
interpret who was doing what to whom. He could see only limbs, and
metal, and blood.

Blood—

The blood pulled him forward, and he followed, thirsting. This was
only a dream, after all.

He entered the reeds, and something struck him from behind.

Overborne, crushed to the ground, he tasted the viny resin of the
broken reeds that jabbed his face, while what might have been a knee
dug painfully into his back and frantic hands scrabbled at his
clothing. He lay unresisting, abstractly wondering how this
happenstance figured into his dream, until dully ripping teeth
latched into the joining of his neck and shoulder and gnawed at his
flesh. The pain—real pain, too-real pain—woke him from
his daze.
This is no dream of mine.

Damon reached back and gripped with one hand the head of the man who
chewed on him, while his other hand sought the man’s eyes with
stiffened fingers. The fellow grunted into Damon’s trapezius,
and his fists flailed ineffectually. Damon’s fingers drove
slowly deeper into his eyes, and the man stopped punching and started
trying only to get away, thrashing and pushing and moaning. Damon let
him go, and heard a grunt of impact and a wet gurgle; before he could
roll over and sit up, one of his Esoterics had tackled the man,
pinned him, and cut his throat.

“Master Damon!â€

WITHIN ITS SMOTHERING blanket of sudden jungle, Ankhana writhed.

This was an instant holiday, a festival, a Carnevale: a suspension of
the ordinary rules of life and society. How could one go to work or
to the market, when the streets were choked with trees? Grain bins
had burst across the city as mills vomited sprouts, and shoots sprang
from drying seeds. Door planks shot forth branches that burgeoned
with leaves; dungheaps transformed instantly into high-mounded
gardens.

For some it was a time of joy and release and childlike play, to
dance among the waves of new-sprung life; for others, it was a time
of profound contemplation, a time to wonder at the irreducible
strangeness of the universe. For most, it was a time of terror.

Most people cannot face a world without rules.

Those rules of life and society—rules that are so often railed
against as stifling and degrading—serve a profound purpose:
they provide patterns of behavior that allow one the comfort of
believing one understands the rules of the game. Without rules, there
is no game. There is only the jungle.

This particular jungle swarms with tigers.

Humanity is the only species that is its own natural enemy. The virus
that had eaten its way into so many brains had digested already most
of the inhibitions and repressions that make civilization possible.
The instant jungle dissolved the final trace of even the most
elemental animal caution, which had been the last restraint.

Now was the time to hunt and feed.

Two types of people best dealt with the sudden jungle. The first were
the sort for whom rules never change. To a bishop of the Church of
the Beloved Children of Ma’elKoth, for example, the laws of his
god transcended any temporal consideration, even such a shattering
transformation as this; to the soldiers finally charged with the
arrest of Duke Toa-M’Jest, orders were orders, whether issued
in a garrison, a tent, or the branches of an oak that had sprung from
bare earth ten minutes before.

The second were the type of people for whom there never had been any
rules: the ones who had
always
lived in the jungle.

The last few Cainists still at liberty banded together to defend
their families at a warehouse in the Industrial Park, waiting grimly
with spear and sword and bow, dispatching each human tiger who hunted
too near; His Grace the Honorable Toa-M’Jest, Duke of Public
Order—who had once been His Majesty the King of Cant, and
before that had been Jest, a young pickpocket, petty thief, and
aspiring thug—scented the approach of pack hunters with
instinctive animal wariness.

He, like the others of the second type, actually felt safer now than
he had before, when he’d still had to pretend to be following
the rules.

For the rest of Ankhana, there was only the jungle.

2

WHEN HE FIRST glimpsed the line of infantry picking their way through
the rubble-choked streets of Alientown toward his improvised
stockade, Toa-M’Jest realized that he’d held on too long.

The stockade wall on which he stood rose from the ruins of what once
had been a dry goods store at the corner of Moriandar Street and
Linnadalinn Alley. It was overspread by a broad canopy of antisprite
netting, now burdened with a new growth of spreading hemp leaves
sticky with resin; Toa-M’Jest parted the jungle of dangling
weighted ropes and squinted at the advancing troops.

In their vanguard strode an officer in the formal dress-blues of the
Eyes of God.

Toa-M’Jest clenched his teeth to keep a string of curses behind
them. He knew exactly what was going on, and it was bad. Their orders
must have come from the Patriarch himself, and he had a pretty damned
good idea what those orders were.

The crazy old bastard had fucked him.

The Duke turned to the Grey Cat alpha at his side. The alpha, like
the pride he commanded, wore the latest in experimental antimagick
combat technology: a full bodysuit of overlapping jointed steel
plates, painted with protective runes of silver. It made the usually
lithe and nimble Cats lumber like overweight bears, but in the
close-quarters combat of the war in the caverns below the city,
mobility counted for less than did protection.

“This is what I’ve been worried about,â€

THE CLUB COMES down from somewhere in the outer darkness: from the
Oort Cloud of shadow behind and beyond the guard’s head. It
floats: a feather pillow dropped from the moon: the terminal velocity
of a mother’s kiss. It’s a flash, a thunderbolt: the
blast of a shotgun shoved in my face. It comes down cleanly,
efficiently, professionally: a butcher’s stroke, a
guillotine’s. The club comes down in every possible shade of
lethal delight, and none of them matter one thin slice of goddamn.

Because when the club comes down, my leg moves.

Just a twitch, a sudden kink of the knee: no more than the reflexive
spastic jerk of a dying man rattling his heels on the floor: but
enough. That’s the victory, right there. The rest is mop-up.

Because he steps into the stroke—in his solid, professional
way—and puts his right ankle just inside my left knee, and when
my left leg suddenly doubles it pulls him a bare two inches closer to
me, so that the blow that should have splattered my brains into the
shit on the floor instead slams the iron-ringed knob against the
stone wall on which I rest my head, and stings the fucking club right
out of his hands.

It also pulls him a trace off balance, a happy trend that I
encourage: I take one of his wrists with my free hand and yank him
down on top of me. His helmet and the head inside it hit the wall
with a cartoon
ker-blank
, and before he quite understands
what’s happening I’ve turned his back to me and the chain
that links my right wrist to the wall now wraps his throat.

He tries to shout, but the chain is tight. He tries to struggle, but
I used to murder people for a living. Nothing in his professional
experience has prepared him for someone like me.

While I throttle him, I consider if maybe somehow I can get away with
letting him live. Maybe it was the mindview, I don’t know, but
. . . watching him come down the Shaft, I felt like I knew him. Like
I could read him, somehow. I mean, I do know him, sort of
secondhand—Habrak, I think his name is. A couple of Actors from
the ISP have bumped into him now and again. He always seemed like a
decent guy, and more than that: he seemed like the kind of guy who
was doing what the gods intended for him when he was born. Maybe it’s
not a high destiny, being a sergeant in the Donjon Guard, but it’s
his.

I mean, how can you not like somebody who’s so good at being
exactly who he is?

I count the seconds after he goes limp. Too few, he’ll wake
right up; too many, he won’t wake up at all. I make good use of
this necessary pause by unbuckling the girdle that holds his hauberk
close around his waist and getting my free hand on his ring of keys.
I grip the chain with my right as I fit one key after another into
the simple lock on my manacle: it takes only seconds to find the
right one, and the manacle swings open.

Some ugly sores there, where the iron has scraped away skin. Yeah,
big deal. The infections on my legs’ll kill me before I have to
worry about my wrist.

Pretty soon, I let up the pressure on the guard’s throat. He’s
limp as a hunk of liver. Getting his hauberk off him is simple in
concept, complex in practice, but I manage. I clip his wrist into the
manacle before I slide his armor over my head.

It’s a goddamn luxury to have clothes on after all this time,
even if those clothes are made out of cold slimy iron links. I give
the guard’s ankle a grateful pat, and he stirs.

He’s not awake yet, but he will be soon. So I’ll let him
wake up. So what? He’s not going anywhere, and no Pit guard
will hear his voice; anything he might yell will smother in this
blanket of lunatic screams. They’ll find him the next time they
sweep the Shaft for corpses, but by then I’ll be out of here,
or dead. Call it my good deed for the day.

I don’t think I’ll manage another.

I lay the girdle out on the floor and roll myself onto it so I can
buckle it around my waist. Huh. Nice knife. I tie the club to the
girdle by its leather thong, and contemplate my next move.

I have no fucking clue how I’m going to get through the Shaft
door, how I can get past the guards outside it, or what I can do out
in the Pit, but:

First things first.

That Shaft door is a long hundred feet or more above me, up a slope
of unevenly worn slick stairs, and a twitch or two of my
no-longer-entirely-dead legs is a few damn miles short of an evening
stroll.