Blade of Tyshalle (8 page)

Sunlight shining through the blown-open roof above warmed his legs;
he lay prone on the rubble of what once had been priests’
quarters, on an upper floor of a temple to Urimash, a minor god of
good fortune. The shell that had destroyed the roof had taken a
substantial chunk out of the third-floor facade but had left some of
the walls intact, providing stark shadow to conceal his head and the
barrel of his weapon.

It had taken him a good long time to haul his ass up here, with his
leg half dead—goddamn fuck-me chunk of pavement came outa
nowhere while he was diving around a corner when everything blew up,
slammed his thigh like a fuck-me morningstar. It took most of the
battle for him to crawl out of the street. Everybody else—pretty
much all the Folk, the prisoners, probably all the fuck-me Monastics
as well—they took off, scattering over the bridges and into the
caverns, getting the fuck out of here while they had the chance.

Orbek had never been one for running.

Besides: with this leg, he could barely walk.

Then he’d found this weapon clutched in a dead human hand,
pried it out, and decided the best way he could be a real Black Knife
was to find a quiet spot where he could shoot some humans before they
killed him.

That shimmer in the air—fuck-me Ma’elKoth had a fuck-me
Shield going. Orbek didn’t know how to tell how many shots he
would have with this weapon, but he calculated that even if he
couldn’t overload the Shield, he should be able to knock the
fuck-me bastard down.

That counts for something.

His talon tightened against the trigger, and the aiming tube went
suddenly black, and a soft human voice said, “Don’t.â€

I DON’T REMEMBER being dead.

I remember some of the dreams that flitted in and out of my slowly
reassembling mind as I woke, though, and what I remember of them
seems to be about drowning, or being strangled by hands of inhuman
strength, or having my head stuck inside a plastic bag. Trying to
scream, but without enough breath to give sound to my voice—

Perhaps that should be taken as a hopeful sign about the afterlife.
It must be lovely, if I was so reluctant to leave.

I suppose I’ll never know.

I’d like to keep this roughly chronological, if I can. It’s
not easy; there are connections here more subtle than simple
sequence. And I’m not always sure in what order everything
happened, and I’m not sure it’s always important.
Somebody wrote once that the direction of time is irrelevant to
physics. I’m sure this half-remembered physicist would be
pleased to know that my story only makes sense when it’s told
backwards.

That seems much more profound when you have a fever.

I sometimes catch myself thinking that life is a fever: that the
universe fell ill two or three billion years ago, and life in all its
fantastic improbability is the universe’s fever dream. That the
harsh intractability of the inanimate is the immune system of
reality, attempting to cure it of life. That when life is
extinguished, the universe will awaken, yawn and stretch, and shake
its metaphoric head at its bizarre imagination, to have produced such
an unlikely dream.

But I get over it when I cheer up.

It’s not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and
a bad mood.

One might suppose that I would now be immune to melancholy, but that
is not so; I seem to be immune only to senescence, and to death. It’s
better thus—to be eternally happy would deprive me of the bulk
of human experience. And, for all else, I am still human.

More or less.

But to give the story a moral before I recount its events will rob
the moral of meaning. Meaning is the goal. I sometimes think the
greatest danger of immortality is the infinite leisure to digress.

So:

I could write page after page on the process of waking up that very
first time in my new life. I could string together fading details of
dreams with the incredibly soft warmth of the wool-felt blankets and
the fine-woven linen of the sheets, and shuffle the bracing sting of
sunlight through closed eyelids with the faintly animal musk of the
goosedown that filled the feather bed on which I lay. It’s a
powerful urge to recount these things, because each individual
sensation of living has become indescribably precious to me; though
each breath is as sweet as the last, there comes always something
wistful, because I cannot forget that this breath is a single thing,
as discrete as I am, and no matter how wonderful the next will be,
this will never come again.

I was lucky, though: the antidote for such wistfulness was waiting
for me beside my bed, grinning like a wolf.

When I opened my eyes, he said, “Hey.â€

ALL ACTORS HAVE A PRECISELY DEFINED ROLE—

to risk their lives on Overworld
in interesting ways.
It’s
not personal; it’s just market share.

Caine has long been the best of the best.
A generation grew up
watching the
superstar’s every adventure.
Now he’s
chairman of the world’s largest
studio and he’s
making changes.

Higher powers of Overworld and Earth don’t
approve. It’s
just business.

But for Caine, it’s his wife, their daughter,
his invalid
father, his status, his home.

And it’s always personal.

HEROES DIE

by Matthew Woodring Stover