Blade of Tyshalle (7 page)

For all its terror and savagery, for all its howled agony and
whimpered despair, the flesh that bruised and bled was only shadow:
translucent, incorporeal, more rhythm than reality, a semivisible
expression of energy at play. That energy followed laws of its own
making, in a system as ordered as a galaxy and as random as a throw
of dice, an ever-shifting balance of the elegant with the raw.

For the first time, he understood Hari. He understood his passion for
violence. He could see how Hari could love it so.

It was beautiful.

But it’s his eyes that see that beauty,
Deliann thought.
Not mine.

Because with the sense of the river, Deliann felt each slash and
smack of bullet and shrapnel into flesh; he saw through the eyes of
men and women who clutched futilely at the spurt of blood from their
own wounds and the wounds of their friends, who tried to stuff
spilled guts back into the gape of ripped-open bellies, who tried to
kiss life back into staring dust-coated eyes; he felt their terror,
and their despair, and he decided that he was going to have to do
something about this.

It was this decision that killed him.

He had six minutes to live.

4

I PULL MYSELF up to the lip of the fountain, and the limestone
shivers with impacts of fragments and slugs and the air is alive with
zips and zings and shrieks of jagged shrapnel and the hand-clap
hypersonic pops of 50-caliber slugs: the open space above the
fountain’s lip is itself a predator and it’s got my
scent. I have looked death in the eye plenty of times, but this is
different: it’s random, unconscious. Unintentional.

Impersonal.

This is
not
my kind of fight.

Poking my head up to get a peek over the rim is the hardest goddamn
thing I’ve ever done in my life.

Pretty much everybody who can still move has cleared the plaza by
now; a few scarlet-smeared shapes of anonymous flesh drag themselves
inch by shivering inch toward any shadow that might promise cover. At
the far end of Gods’ Way the main cannon of the riot vans
ca-rump
whistling shells that blast house-sized chunks out of
the row of temples and government buildings lining the Way; the East
Tower of the Colhari Palace overlooks the massacre with a lopsided
face of gaping ragged empty eyes and smoke-drooling idiot’s
mouth before one more shell blasts out the cheek and the whole damn
thing topples sideways and collapses in a mushroom cloud of masonry
dust to the courtyard nine stories below.

The Folk are starting to fight back now, with the kind of heroism
that would be inspiring if it wasn’t so pathetic: firebolts
splash harmlessly off the radically sloped ceramic armor of the riot
vans, and some ogrilloi have figured out how to shoot the soapies’
assault rifles. They’d do more damage with harsh language and a
stern look.

One lone treetopper flutters up into the path of an assault car, and
she and her birdlance get sucked into one of the turbocells. What’s
left of her sprays out the back in a crimson mist, but that birdlance
was steel. The turbocell chews itself into a metal-screaming burst of
junk, and the assault car slews sideways and dips and hits the street
and bounces, skipping up over my head in a thundering meteor-trail of
flame that skips one more time before it slams into the Financial
Block and explodes, which takes out the whole building, and the damn
thing just keeps on exploding as its munitions pop off like a
full-scale fireworks display: rockets and starshells and mortar bombs
and showers of flame.

And fucking Raithe is still sitting where I left him: in
seiza
right in front of the fountain, calmly picking the locks on his
shackles while he stares at the carnage around us with a dreamy smile
on his face. The next assault car swoops toward us and strafes a line
of cannonfire that’s gonna go right up his nose, so I reach
over and grab the back of his collar and haul his ass into the
fountain next to me.

He still has that dreamy smile after I dunk us both in the water and
three or four 25-millimeter rounds blow chunks out of the fountain’s
bowl but somehow manage to miss our tender flesh. He lies on his
back, the dirty water swirling bloody mud clouds around him as it
drains out from the fractured bowl. He says something—the roar
of turbines and artillery fire blows it away, but I can read his
lips.

You saved my life.

I give him a shake that bounces his skull off the limestone.
“Where’s
Ma’elKoth?â€

HE COMES OUT of the clouds, down from a line of thunderheads that
advance from the east: clouds that keep on rolling right into the
teeth of this wind that blows on the back of my neck.

First comes a glossy black-and-chrome meteor—a Mercedes
stretch, bigger than the apartment where I grew up. It comes down
with a rumbling growl like distant turbines, but it’s not
turbines. It’s thunder.

That sonofabitch rolls thunder the way other guys clear their
throats.

The limo settles into place between the two dead riot vans down where
Gods’ and Rogues’ Ways intersect. Then the clouds swell
until they swallow the sky, and a darkness falls upon the ruins; a
single rift parts to admit a golden shaft of autumn sunshine.

Down through that rift, riding that clean light, comes Ma’elKoth,
glowing with power: Superman in an Italian suit.

He trails streamers of black Flow—he is the center of a tangle
of pulsing night-threads that twist into massive cables before they
vanish in a direction my eyes can’t follow.

Some of them I
can
follow, though. Some of the biggest cables
connect to me.

My own tangle makes a fantastical rats’ nest around me, dense
and interwoven, impenetrably opaque, yet somehow it doesn’t
obstruct my vision, which I guess makes sense because I’m not
seeing it with my eyes.

He touches down like a dancer, light and perfectly balanced, posing
in his sunlight halo. The warm taupe of his Armani suit complements
the tumbled char-blackened blocks of limestone that choke the street.
Huh. He’s let his beard grow.

Yeah, well, so have I.

His eyes find me at this end of Gods’ Way, and his electric
stare surges through me like an amphetamine bloom: waves of tingling
start at the back of my neck and jangle all the way out the ends of
my fingers and toes.

He smiles vividly.

He reaches behind his head and unbinds his hair, shaking it free in
sun-streaked waves. He rotates his shoulders like a wrestler
loosening up, and the clouds part: above him, infinite blue opens
like a flower. The clouds retreat in all directions, flowing out from
the city as they flee the center of all things that are Ma’elKoth.

He’s brought his own kind of spring, drawing life from the
city’s fallow earth: the ruins sprout cardinal-red, maroon and
gold, scarlet-streaked saplings that uncoil toward his solar
presence: Social Police and Household Knights and good old Ankhanan
regular infantry digging themselves out of their burrows of rubble,
helping each other up, even the wounded, even the dying, so that all
can rise in respect, then kneel in reverence, at the arrival of God.

And it’s weird.

Weird is the only word for it.

Not in the debased and degraded sense of the mere peculiar. Weird in
the old sense. The Scottish sense. The Old English root.

Wyrd.

Because somehow I have always been here.

I have always sat in the rubble of the Financial Block, facing down
the length of Gods’ Way over the carnage and ruin of Old Town,
perched on a blast-folded curve of assault-car hull with Kosall’s
cold steel across my lap. The rumpled and torn titanium wreckage
permanently ticks and pings as it eternally cools under my ass. A few
hundred yards to my left, there has always been a smoldering gap
where the Courthouse once stood, surrounded by a toothed
meteor-crater slag of melted buildings; even the millennial Cyclopean
stone of the Old Town wall sags and bows outward over the river, a
thermal catenary like the softened rim of a wax block-candle.

It’s from that direction that the shade of Kris Hansen
whispers, in a voice compounded of memories and grief.

I have always been here because there is no past: all that exists of
the past is the web of Flow whose black knots are the structure of
the present. I will always be here because there is no future:
everything that is about to happen never will.

Now is all there is.

There is a folktale—I can’t dignify it with the name
prophecy, or even legend—that’s popular with the common
mass of uneducated elKothans; true believers are all pretty much of a
type, I guess, no matter what they believe. They’ve been
telling each other for seven years that the Prince of Chaos will
return from beyond the world, to face the Ascended Ma’elKoth in
a final battle.

On Assumption Day.

I used to get a chuckle out of that every time one of my ISP Actors
heard it. I’d shake my head and laugh. Those poor ignorant
bastards—if they could only see me and Tan’elKoth going
out for a drink at Por L’Oeil. If they could only see me in my
wheelchair; if they could see Tan’elKoth at the Studio
Curioseum, jazzing the tourists with his fucking party tricks, two
shows a day. Poor ignorant bastards.

I say that, and I can’t tell if I’m talking about them,
or us. Because I should have known. Shit, I
did
know.

Dad said it to my face: A powerful enough metaphor grows its own
truth.

So those poor ignorant bastards ended up closer to right than us smug
cognoscentic motherfuckers who used to laugh at them. This eternal
now in the ruins of Ankhana, facing the god across the wreckage of
his city and the corpses of his followers—

Impossible. And inevitable.

At the same time.

I touch one of the black threads, a simple one, almost straight:
that’s Deliann, dropping Kosall into the shattered hallway
betweeen me and Raithe. That thread is tied to an infinite number of
others, progressively more tangled: that’s me, screening Shanna
to summon her back from Fancon. Here is Raithe, shaking hands with
Vinson Garrette, which is tied to me standing over Creele’s
body at the Monastic Embassy, which is tied to me giving Shanna a
battered black-market copy of a Heinlein novel, which connects to
Shanna standing over me in an alley, staring at Toa-Phelathon’s
head lying on the shitstained cobbles, but all these strings are tied
to many others, and the others to others still, some of which splice
back in closed loops, some of which curl outward into the invisible
distance.

A lot of them trail back to the Language Arts shitter, but even that
one is a tangle of Toothpick and Dad, and a kid named Nielson hitting
me in the head with a brick, and somebody knocking over a vial of
HRVP two hundred years ago and Abraham Lincoln and Nietzsche and
Locke and Epikuros and Lao-Tzu—

Sure looks like destiny from here.

Try and tell me that Dad could have had the faintest fucking clue I
would end up here when he wrote the passages on the Blind God in
Tales of the First Folk
. Try and tell me I should have seen
this coming when I brained Toothpick with that length of pipe, or
when I proposed to Shanna, or when I lay chained on dark stone in a
puddle of my own shit and thought life back into my legs. Destiny is
bullshit.

Your life only looks like fate when you see it in reverse.

The universe is a structure of coincidence, Kris told me, and he was
right. But that doesn’t make it random. It only feels that way.
The structure is real: strange attractors ordering arrays of quantum
probabilities. I can
see
them.

I can see the threads of black Flow that bloom and curl outward in
time, connecting every event to every other, each acting upon every
other in a matrix of force so complex that there is no such thing as
a simple progression from one to the next—but even when the
whole structure of reality is laid bare, all you can see is the
outline of the past.

The future cannot be predicted. It can only be experienced.

Because one single thread as infinitesimal as what some lab tech had
for breakfast one morning two hundred years ago exerts enough
pressure to have bent all of Earth toward the Plague Years and the
Studio; because the Butterfly Effect of a thirteen-year-old boy named
Hari deciding that he wasn’t gonna live in fear has tied the
history of two worlds into the knot that is today.

And that, when you come right down to nuts and guts, is the most
infinitely fucked-up part of this infinite fucked-up now: They
finally got me. In the final minute of my life, I’ve become a
Cainist.

Christ.

All right. Enough.

I’m ready for this to be over.

Mortality is a gift: It’s never a question of whether you’ll
die. It’s just a question of how.

2

FOUR STRAIGHT BLACK lines crossed by a succession of shorter
lines—like dead centipedes with their legs smashed flat—pointed
into the ring of light from the darkness around it. They did not
quite meet in the center, but it was clear where they would, if
extended: in that center-point was Ma’elKoth’s right eye.

Orbek slipped the yellow hooked talon of his right index finger
through the trigger guard.

This weapon was not designed for ogrilloi; his fingers were too thick
to squeeze the trigger properly, and to use the aiming tube mounted
above the grip required him to crick his neck in a very uncomfortable
way: his right tusk came hard up against the weapon’s stock.
But ogrilloi are gifted with weapons, and this was not so different
from a crossbow. Orbek could make the necessary adjustments.