Blade of Tyshalle (5 page)

Well, y’know: you have to crawl before you can walk.

I stick the sheathed dirk under the girdle at the small of my back,
because I’m going up on my belly. Lamp in my left hand, keys in
my right, I start pulling myself up the Shaft with my elbows.

I head for daylight, an inch at a time.

2

ORBEK RUBBED HIS stinging eyes with his free hand, then stared again
at the jerky hook-and-pause of the point of light far below. He
couldn’t figure out what could be making it move like that; it
looped and stopped and looped again, a stuttering spiral like the
beckon-lamp of a hungry marshghoul.

The hot damp air of the Shaft became a snort of winter down his back.

He’d never heard of a marshghoul coming into a city. They stick
to their swamps, where they can lure a guy off the road with their
beckon-lamps till the unlucky bastard gets lost, then they suck out
his eyeballs and all his juices and push his corpse down into the
bogs and nobody ever sees them again, except maybe someday when
somebody’s cutting peat a hundred years later they find him,
his skin gone to leather and his empty eye sockets slick and gummy,
and if a marshghoul ever did come to a city, it’d sure as shit
start in the Shaft, because the Shaft was as good as a bog and you
can’t get away and now it was coming for him like his dam
always said it would—

And if he kept thinking about it, he would start to scream, and he
didn’t have much voice left anyway. He’d pretty well used
it up a couple hours after they chained him here.

These other guys, though, their voices never did seem to go out. They
were
still
screaming—and these screams and sobs and
moans and shit were sounding different, now; not so hopeless, not so
scared, not at all like he figured a guy’d howl when a
marshghoul started sucking out his eyeball.

Orbek didn’t really believe in marshghouls, anyway.

The light came closer, rising through the Shaft’s murky gloom,
and it
was
a lamp: a lamp in the hand of something that pulled
itself up the steps of the Shaft with its elbows. And as it
approached it might as goddamn well have been a marshghoul,
considering the sizzle of superstitious terror it sent down Orbek’s
spine when he picked up the glint of its eyes and then the gleam of
its teeth, and Orbek figured out what it was.

It was Caine.

And he was smiling.

Orbek had a fair amount of time to figure out what he would say,
while he watched Caine inch his way up the Shaft. When Caine got
close enough that he might be able to hear through the din of the
Shafters’ howls, Orbek hid his maimed hands behind him and
said, “Hey.â€

WHEN HIS CONSCIOUSNESS intersected the world once more, he lay prone
on dirty flagstones, his face turned to the left, rocks warm as blood
digging into his cheek. Flame roared on all sides. Someone with
agonizingly strong hands compressed his back to pump river water out
of his lungs. He opened his mouth to speak, but instead retched forth
a gout of water mixed with blood. It splashed across his right arm,
his right hand, and he made a fist.

“I think he’s awake,â€

THAT FUCKING SWORD—

A steel crucifix, head wrapped in sweat-stained leather—

It swung like that—in exactly that gentle arc—through the
waterfall’s spray below Khryl’s Saddle. Mist collected
into droplets and trickled down the blade, and washed her staring
eyes—

They wouldn’t even let me wash off her blood . . .

I can still taste it.

I carry the countervirus. She must have created it in her own
bloodstream. Shit, it makes sense. That’s why nobody in the Pit
has HRVP.

That changes things. That changes a lot of things.

Sitting around here waiting for somebody to come down and kill us is
no longer an option.

“You.â€

THE FIRST AMBUSH was, in broad outline, representative of all the
encounters between the friars of the Ankhanan Embassy and the Social
Police. It came as the last boats of the Bauer Company of the 82nd
Force Suppression Unit cleared Fools’ Bridge.

The boats had proceeded without haste but steadily, threading their
way through the dead and burning trees that studded the river; a man
in the lead boat of each lashed-together triad held a large canister
of pressurized foam that could be sprayed liberally onto any burning
oil that came too close. The rest crouched watchfully, weapons at the
ready.

The friars who lay in ambush had no time to make a concerted plan,
but what they lacked in coordination they made up for in firepower.
The men in the lead boats had no chance.

As the first triad of lashed-together boats hummed silently toward
Knights’ Bridge, close along the sheer Old Town wall, a
shimmering blue-white plane of energy flared out from the dockside.
This plane of energy fanned horizontally for barely a second, but in
that time it sliced neatly through the heads and shoulders of several
of the dozen riflemen in the first boat, and sheared exactly in half,
just below the navel, the mage who guided the boat. His torso slid
backward and toppled into the river, and the power he had been
channeling through his staff exploded into a jagged ball of lightning
that conducted well enough through wire-inlaid armor to roast several
more riflemen.

Instantly the other three triads turned for the dockside, but the two
remaining boats from the first triad drifted powerlessly while
riflemen within them frantically pulled collapsible oars out from
storage pockets. Before they could use them effectively, ionizing
radiation made a laser-straight blue line from the arch of Knights’
Bridge to the surface of the river.

Spreading in a fan upstream from where that line touched, the water
instantly congealed to frosted glasslike solid that looked like ice,
but was warm to the hand. The boats stuck fast within it, and now
nut-sized pellets streaked toward them from several directions. These
pellets stuck to what they struck, and an instant later they erupted
in gouts of flame intense enough to melt the plastic components of
the rifles, set fire to the ballistic cloth that covered the
riflemen’s armor, and ignite the flesh beneath it.

However, the thin line of radiation also marked its point of origin
and gave the riflemen their first target.

Their reply was a stackfire volley from a double handful of
Heckler-Colt MPAR-12 assault rifles. These rifles were a century and
a half out of date, requiring manual sighting and carrying only
sixteen stackfire cartridges in each of their dual magazines, but
since a stackfire cartridge comprised a tube of eight 5.52 millimeter
solid-block caseless rounds that fire sequentially in slightly more
than a tenth of one second, a single volley proved adequate.

The friar who stood on Knights’ Bridge, whose staff flamed with
the power that had gelled the river, was exposed over the low
retaining wall from his groin to the crown of his head. The exposed
parts of him vanished into a spray of bloody mist and bone fragments,
and his legs fell in opposite directions. The detonation of his staff
bit a buckboard-sized chunk out of the stone arch; the river below
melted into ordinary water and flowed once more.

Before the lead boat of the second trio could reach the bank, it was
seized as though by a giant invisible hand and yanked into the air.
The adept and most of the riflemen bailed out, but a few unfortunate
soldiers had gotten their gear tangled in the boats’ nylon-net
storage pockets, or had foolishly chosen to hang on, and were hurled
hundreds of yards up into the night sky.

As the boats fell, still lashed together, the rope that joined them
caught on a bartizan of the Old Town wall; they swung down and
slammed against the wall like clappers of a giant stone bell,
crushing the men inside. Other men fell from the sky to their deaths
on the streets; some landed on rooftops or in the branches of burning
trees.

The Telekinesis that had seized the boat was invisible to ordinary
eyes, but to an adept in mindview it blazed with furious light—as
did the stream of Flow that poured through the hand sculpted of
diamond that a friar, hidden around the corner of a warehouse, used
to create it. The three surviving Artan adepts communicated his
location, and a scant second later that location was the intersection
of three expanding spheres, each comprising several thousand
sewing-needle-sized flechettes, produced by three RG 2253A
antipersonnel rifle grenades in simultaneous airbursts at an altitude
of precisely 3.5 meters.

What remained of the friar was not recognizable as human.

The other two triads had reached the docks, and seventy riflemen
fanned out among the burning trees that were the last of the
unnatural jungle that still stood, here at the epicenter from which
the fire had spread. Those riflemen who had bailed into the river
were left to swim as best they could; they made inviting targets for
the ambushers, and now each time magick flared the man who used it
could be located and killed.

Bauer Company methodically and deliberately secured the dockside.
They were in no particular hurry; they knew, as their opponents did
not, that they were only the first of the 82nd’s reinforced
rifle companies to enter Ankhana. The whole of their job was to
spring ambushes and probe the strength of resistance, and they had
done it well.

The surviving friars fell back individually, winding through the
streets and alleys toward the Courthouse, harassing the riflemen at
every opportunity. They, too, had done their job well.

2

EARLY ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN Ankhanan citizenry and the advancing
elements of the Social Police 82nd Force Suppression Unit were
bloody. So many voices shouted in the streets that even the fluent
Westerling commands and curses of the irregulars went unheeded, and
the various companies of the 82nd were forced to resort to nonverbal
means of clearing their respective paths.

On Earth, the hammer of automatic rifle fire aimed over the head is
universally understood, but Ankhanan citizens, inexperienced with
chemically propelled projectile weapons, could not interpret the loud
but apparently harmless noise and flashes coming from these odd
broken-crossbow-like devices. By lowering their point of aim a few
degrees, the Social Police undertook to educate them.

But each lesson sufficed only upon those near enough to see the blood
spurting from shattered limbs and riddled torsos, and to smell the
voided bowels; thus, the lesson was regularly repeated as the Social
Police advanced. Through the streets and along the gutters, blood and
oil swirled red and black, immiscible, tracing fractal geometries of
turbulence.

It was one of the irregulars who suggested the use of concussion
grenades. This was more successful; not only does the airburst of
such a device resemble a mage’s fireball closely enough to send
magick-leery Ankhanans diving for cover, these devices are
so
loud and
so
bright as to trigger the human animal’s
instinctive panic response: run and hide.

The 82nd now made better time.

The various companies converged, following the lead of one or more
irregulars, each of whom carried some variety of seeking item: graven
crystals and divining wands, runestaves and silver stilettos, needles
that swung on balance points, pendula of crystal, copper, gold, and
iron.

Some of these items were sensitive enough to trace the path of Kosall
back to the mountains; some were sensitive enough to indicate the
location of every hand that had ever touched its hilt. These items
had been tuned, detuned, and retuned to filter out the mutilated
barge that had been the blade’s home, the rocks where it had
rested on the river’s bed, the headless corpse of a man who had
once borne it, now buried in the potter’s field southwest of
the Cathedral of the Assumption.

Now, the seeking items all pointed toward the Courthouse.

3

ONLY MORGAN COMPANY—approaching from the southwest, through the
stately homes of the South Bank—encountered resistance from the
Ankhanan Army. When they reached the foot of Kings’ Bridge, a
mailed officer ordered them to halt; his order was backed up by a
triple row of shoulder-to-shoulder pikemen supported by archers
farther up the bridge’s arch.

Invisible fingers poked dozens, then hundreds, of sudden holes in
breastplates and helms, making a rattle like a bucket of stones
emptied onto a griddle. Bloody wads of flesh burst from the Ankhanans
as they danced to a clattered half rhythm of rifle fire. The
survivors chose to allow Morgan Company to pass without further
interference.

Once in Old Town, however, their progress became much more dangerous,
as they came under magickal fire from a small contingent of friars
who were somewhat more successful at keeping themselves under cover.
Slowly, mechanically inexorable, Morgan Company beat back their
attackers.

Morgan Company was the first unit to reach the Courthouse. Riflemen
methodically began to disperse the crowds while the irregulars loudly
announced that Kings’ Bridge was now open, which produced a
tidal surge toward the east and south. A hastily assembled column of
Ankhanan infantry was scattered by two grenades and several
well-aimed bursts that shredded their standard and their officers.
The panic of fleeing men-at-arms was sufficient to awaken the caution
of the other infantry columns; their commanders decided to delay
engagement with these invaders until the situation could be
investigated.

Shortly, the survivors of Bauer Company suppressed the flames of
Knights’ Bridge with foam spewed from handheld canisters and
marched across. No one challenged them.