Blade of Tyshalle (6 page)

The Social Police owned Ten Street, and the balance of the 82nd was
mere minutes away.

Those friars who had been cut off on their retreat toward the
Courthouse now slipped away into the flame-smeared night, descending
the mucker shafts alongside each public pissoir. At the bottom, they
were met by the Folk who had waited below, and were led swiftly
through the caverns.

4

DESPITE THE URGINGS of caution from the irregulars attached to his
command, the 82nd’s brigadier ordered a standard attack.

Initially, all went as expected. A handheld launcher lobbed a shaped
sticky-charge across Ten Street; the charge flattened against the
Courthouse’s bronze double doors, and three seconds later
detonated with a resounding
whang!
that blew the doors into
twisted hunks of fist-sized shrapnel.

It also managed to ignite the black oil that painted the building,
and set the Courthouse on fire. Antipersonnel grenades arced up
through the flames to explode above the roof.

Several canisters of airborne nerve agent sailed through the doorway,
to finish up whatever hostiles the shrapnel may have missed.
Chemically propelled grapnels shot toward the roof from the street,
the Old Town wall behind, and the roof of the nearby Ankhanan
officers’ quarters. While their power-reels would not work in
Overworld conditions, these soldiers were in superb physical
condition, and teeth on their gloves meshed with the toothed cords to
provide an effortless slip-proof grip. Hand over hand, they walked up
the Courthouse wall at the speed of a moderate trot, while below
fifty riflemen rushed the atrium.

This might have worked as a surprise attack; but the Social Police
were part of the field of power that was the blind god, and Raithe of
Ankhana could feel their every step.

They never had a chance.

The first hint that this operation may not go smoothly was the empty
atrium itself. The riflemen found no bodies, no blood—only a
stone floor littered with chunks of bronze, spent and flattened
slugs, and chips of rock. The white vapor that served as a visual
marker for the nerve agent hung in the air, swirling slowly; it had
not dispersed farther into the Courthouse, nor did it eddy back
toward the blown-open doorway.

The second hint was somewhat more dramatic.

As the riflemen who had reached the roof gathered themselves into
order and approached the access stairs, some of the more sensitive
among them noted a vibration—like a subaural hum—that
seemed to come through their boots. Before they could call others’
attention to this, the stone beneath their feet softened, and sagged,
then bellied downward like an overloaded trampoline, sweeping the
whole group off their feet into a muddled pile at the bottom; the
stone then ruptured and dumped them in an unceremonious tangle on the
floor of a small room below. The roof continued to collapse, pouring
into the room like mud down a funnel.

As this mud fell upon the riflemen and oozed under and around them,
the humming rose in both pitch and volume as the four stonebender
rockmagi sang the mud back into stone once more. None of the riflemen
managed to stand up before the stone closed over their faces; they
barely had time to scream.

The riflemen in the atrium found all the doors to be closed, and
sealed, by some invisible force that prevented them from even getting
their hands within a span of the handles. Further, they found the
blown-open doorway to be sealed by a similar force. The same inlay of
silver wire that rendered them resistant to many forms of magick also
rendered most magick quite invisible; they could not see the Shields
that trapped them.

Most primals can make light: it’s a simple enough conversion of
Flow. As they become more skilled, they can make light in specific
colors, from indigo far down into the reds; a mere extension of this
ability enables them to produce electromagnetic radiation at a
substantially lower frequency: that of microwaves.

Coherent beams of microwaves heated several earthenware pots that had
been looted from the Courthouse’s commissary. Within these pots
was lamp oil. As the lamp oil boiled, it released a considerable
amount of aromatic volatiles into the Shield-sealed atrium. The
riflemen, wearing self-contained breathing apparatuses to protect
them from the nerve agent, had no warning at all before the team of
microwave-producing primals turned their attentions to a small piece
of wood that lay on the floor near the center of the atrium. The wood
caught, sparked the oil vapor, and turned the atrium into a homemade,
crude—but effective—fuel-air bomb.

Bits and pieces of the riflemen returned to the street riding a
shattering blast of flame.

Having kept, as any good commander would, men in place to observe the
results of his probing attack, the brigadier now decided it was time
to enlist local aid. He instructed his irregulars to approach the
officers of the encircling Ankhanan Army under flag of truce.

He needed troops who had more experience with magick: troops who had
thaumaturges of their own.

5

FOR THE TABERNACLE: a Mylar dome tent of stainless white, standing in
the fireglow of the Financial Court, stretched over gracefully arched
poles of black graphite fiber.

For the congregation: the commanders of the Ankhanan army, met under
flag of truce with Artan officers.

For the priest: an Artan adept stripped of armor and cloaked in cloth
of gold, a bishop’s vestments from the Church of the Beloved
Children of Ma’elKoth.

Within the tabernacle, the congregation knelt, for God was among
them.

Taller than the moon, He stood upon a sapphire sky, and the stars
played about His shoulders. His face was the sun: blindness
threatened any impertinent stare. His voice thrummed in their blood;
it spoke with their heartbeats; it was the voice of life itself.

LIVE EACH FOR ALL, His voice told them. EACH OF YOU BELONGS TO ALL OF
YOU. LOVE EACH OTHER, AND AWAIT MY RETURN.

And His voice told each of them, severally and together: THOU ART MY
OWN BELOVED CHILD; IN THEE I AM WELL PLEASED.

Within the tabernacle, Ankhanan commanders embraced officers of the
Artan force that had invaded their city, that had slaughtered their
men and the citizens those men had been sworn to defend. They
received Artan embraces in return without shame; were they not, in
truth, Children of the same Father?

Were they not brothers?

6

A SHEET OF flame fills the window—the oil on the outside of the
Courthouse still burns merrily—but one of the two feys sitting
on clerks’ stools has enough of a Shield going that the heat’s
no worse than the sunshine on a summer afternoon.

The window’s tiny, not much bigger than a wallscreen. This drab
little clerks’ chamber is grey and airless, and I can imagine
the drab little grey and airless men and women who have occupied it
over the centuries, hunched over the copying table, the only music in
their hearts the
scritch-scratch-scritch
of ink nibs on
vellum.

Are people like that
born
soulless?

Christ, I hope so.

Otherwise, it’d be even worse.

We all have our chairs gathered around the window, despite the heat.
For a long time, we sit and stare out into the flames.

It’s what the fey on the other stool is doing that makes for
such an interesting view.

Its name translates roughly as
firesight
; within the flames
are red-gold shapes of buildings and soldiers and sundry weapons,
from longbows to machine pistols; sometimes I can even see the
Courthouse from the outside. It’s a hell of a lot more
efficient for reconnaisance than taking a physical look around; the
last guy to stick his head above a windowsill took a bullet through
the eye.

Say what you want about the Social Police, but don’t ever try
to tell me those fuckers can’t shoot.

They don’t seem too organized out there just yet; the fire
shows me a lot of Ankhanan garrison troops holding off to either side
of Soapy’s perimeter, but they don’t look like they’re
about to start killing each other. There’s a couple squads on
the wall already, too, and it looks like they’ve got RPGs on
Two Tower as well as on the Knights’ Bridge gatehouse.

Deliann’s eyes open emptily, and he stares through the ceiling.
He has to maintain mindview to keep our little game of Chicken going;
he’s holding himself in contact with the river. He lies on the
writing table along one wall, Kosall across his lap. The same two
feys who cleaned up my legs had tried to work on his, but when they
put their hands on that abscess, black oil like from Raithe’s
hand came bubbling out and burned the living shit out of them; now
they’re downstairs getting healing of their own.

“Raithe?â€

DELIANN SAT UPON the Ebony Throne, the blade of Kosall rough-crusted
and cold across his knees, and the Hall of Justice throbbed with
pain.

Pain shimmered starkly in the brilliant sunbeams that struck like
spears through the clerestory; pain sizzled in the black oil that
seeped from the abcess on his thigh and burned the flesh of his leg
to the smoking bone. The granite countenance of the giant carven
Ma’elKoth had gone blank with agony, and the sand on the arena
floor below the dais stung as though it had been rubbed into an open
wound. The air itself snarled and snapped and bit at his flesh, and
his every breath inhaled white flame.

The hall was empty, ring upon ring of vacant gaping benches climbing
the sides of the bowl; Deliann was alone with the pain. But the pain
was not alone with Deliann. With the pain, threading among and
through its every splinter, came terror and panic, despair and the
bleak surrender that is the bottomless abyss of death.

Some small portion of this pain and terror and despair and death was
Deliann’s; the rest came from outside. It rode the river’s
pulse into his heart from the brilliant sunlit morning, in the crisp
autumn air, where assault cars swooped and spun and spat fire.

Deliann had less than nine minutes to live.

2

THOSE SUN-TEARS BLOSSOM in four petal-perfect wingovers, and
laser-straight lines of tracers from their gatling cannon stitch
geometric gouts of exploding stone into the streets below. They claw
pyrotechnically along Gods’ Way toward us, and the air hums
with shrapnel, and I—

I can only sit and watch.

The assault cars sweep overhead, spraying missiles and HEAP rounds.
The western curve of the Sen-Dannalin Wall shrugs like it’s
tired after standing five hundred years; it decides to sit down in a
landslide of masonry and limestone dust. The cannon rounds hit the
street like grenades with splintered flagstones for shrapnel. They
shred the army, the primals, the soapies indiscriminately: shrapnel
has no friends.

I still don’t move.

I am paralyzed by how badly I have miscalculated.

Up on the Address Deck, Toa-Sytell stretches his hands toward the
assault cars. He could be ecstatic at the power of his returning god,
or begging for mercy, or panicked and crapping his robe. Nobody will
ever know, because a missile takes him right through the chest—an
eyeblink of astonishment at the gape of his guts to the morning
sky—before it detonates against the wall at his back. The
Patriarch, the soapy brigadier, the Household Knights, and most of
the wall of the Temple of Prorithun vanish in a fireball that spits
blood and bone fragments and chunks of stone into the sky.

And that’s it, right there: that’s what Raithe was
talking about. Tan’elKoth wouldn’t do this. He loves this
city more than the world.

He would never do this.

Pieces of the Patriarch and the Temple and the rest rain over us in
clatters and liquid plops, and I can’t really hear anything
anymore except a general roaring in my ears and I know the assault
cars are banking around for another pass, and now some riot vans
swing into view over Six Tower and settle toward the middle of the
far end of Gods’ Way, seeking solid earth beneath them to
absorb the recoil of the heavy artillery that sprouts from their
turrets.

The riot vans open up with their twin forward-mount fifties, taking
chunks out of the stonework along the whole street, enfilading the
fuck out of us—the heavy slugs popping through plate mail sound
like God’s shaking a tin can full of rocks—and somehow
that finally gets my attention. I twist around so my shackled hands
can grab the lip of the Fountain of Prorithun behind me, and I drag
myself over into the bowl, leaving skin behind on the smog-corroded
limestone. I fall into the shallow fountain water that’s now
turbid with dirt and blood, and—

Oh—

Oh, my good and gracious motherfucking
god
.

I get it now.

He can make the cars work, he can fucking well make
anything
work—

The Courthouse—maybe Deliann—maybe if I can—

Christ, my legs, I’ll never make it—

I could be wrong. I have to be wrong.

Jesus—Tyshalle—anybody who’s listening: Please,
please, please let me be wrong.

3

FROM DEEP WITHIN the oceanic boil of pain and fear, using the whole
of the river for his senses, Deliann watched the slaughter. It became
for him an ebb and flow and tangle of conflicting energies, an
abstract action-painting come to life. The sky erupted incarnadine
and amethyst that swept against the sunflower, azure, and viridian of
the lives in the city below. The colors met and mixed, broke apart
and blended together again in a
rith
dream of astonishing
beauty: a living Mandelbrot set spiraling into itself and out again:
a spray of wildflowers springing fresh and lovely from a shitpile of
ugly, desperate brutality.