TWENTY-FOUR
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.
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?” I shout against the roar-walled air. “Can you still feel him? Is he still coming—or did he stop?”
“You said you’d kill me if you ever got the chance,” he shouts back, “but you saved me, instead!”
“I changed my fucking mind, all right? Don’t make me regret it. Where is he?”
His eyes glaze, fixing on some quiet distance where the blood and smoke and howl of combat is not even a dream. “Stopped,” he says, voice dropping. “He’s stopped. Half a day’s walk, almost.”
Ah, god.
I let go of his shoulders and bury my head in my hands.
I never dreamed I could be so utterly outfought.
A day’s walk, to a friar on a decent road, is about thirty miles. I know why he has stopped, fifteen miles outside the city.
I know what he’s waiting for.
Ah, god.
I prayed I was wrong, and this is Your answer.
5
DELIANN SIGHED.
He lifted Kosall by the quillons, and discovered that he was afraid. He remembered too well the excruciating rip of his mind stretching beyond its tolerance, when he had only flashed upon the goddess; he feared that to touch her directly, mind to mind, would burn his brain in an instant.
Rather than put his hand upon the hilt and confront her, he sought within himself the chain of energy he had created, to bind the gods to the river and the river to the gods. When he found it, he visualized it as a channel, rather than a chain; a long narrow sluice through which flowed the river’s pain. Along that channel he sent forth a tendril of consciousness—gingerly, almost tenderly, attempting only to brush her uttermost periphery.
In a vast darkness of doubt and horror, he found her: clothed in sunlight, weeping tears of blood.
She lifted her head and regarded him. He could not guess what it was she might see; he had no sense of a body, or a face. To himself, he seemed only a disembodied spark of awareness.
I know you. She extended a hand, pierced through the palm, as though offering a kiss of the wound’s bloodless lips. Her other hand she placed upon her breast, above her heart. Have you come to hurt me again?
I hope not, he replied.
My daughter, she said tragically, grey winter closing down upon her robe of light. My daughter is dying.
He thought of Demeter and Persephone, and could not know if that thought was his, or if it had come from her. Many others live. You must save those who can still be saved.
Once I styled myself a savior, she replied. Now I am only the image of a dead woman. Saving is beyond me.
I will not argue. You must act.
How can I? With no body—with no will—
I have a body. Take me as you would have taken Raithe. What you lack, I will provide.
Fresh tears of blood coiled down her cheeks. You do not know what you are offering—
I do not offer. I demand: Take me. Save these people.
He opened his mind to the wounded goddess.
She drifted toward him helplessly.
It will kill you, she wept.
He replied, I know.
He drew her to him, and then she was around him, and she was within him, and she was him. He made her pain his, and he made his intention hers. She reached through him to the river, and the Song of Chambaraya swelled within his heart from a single thin chime of welcome to a titanic symphony of power.
Five minutes.
6
THE GOD FELT the questing tendrils of a mind colored in the shades of the goddess touch briefly upon its inmost nature—
And just as suddenly fade.
The creature that had been Kollberg felt the ghost-echo of the goddess’ pain vanish from its collective consciousness; an instant later, Faith’s silent weeping stilled, and it knew it had been betrayed.
The girl was unconscious, and the link was broken.
A sunburst of rage flashed through him, its glare wiping away the grassy meadow on the bank of the Great Chambaygen, wiping away Ma’elKoth who paced on the grassy verge in his stylish suit, wiping away the limousine, the Social Police, Avery Shanks—wiping away, for one instant, even the power of the god he was.
For that instant, he was again Arturo Kollberg, once an Administrator, once again betrayed.
By a Michaelson.
With a snarl, he lunged across the passenger lounge and grabbed the collar of Faith’s white cotton shift. His arthritic fingers twisted into a fist—and his arm was seized by the impersonal gauntlet of a Social Police officer. He tried to yank himself free, but he might as well have tried to shift a mountain with his wasted arm.
Futility flashed in where his rage had been. He hung, helpless—but that helplessness, so long familiar, brought him back to himself. He was once again the god, and he was happy.
The god understood that the girl had been poisoned; it could feel her slow slide down to death through Ma’elKoth’s magickal perception. The god also knew, now, that the sword was in the Hall of Justice in the Ankhanan Courthouse.
In the same instant that knowledge had been acquired, an impulse had formed itself somewhere in the unimaginable vastness of ten billion subconsciously linked minds. It may have come from Ma’elKoth, or from Kollberg, or from Marc Vilo, or from any of the other mutually anonymous members of the Board of Governors; it may have come from a SynTech chemical engineer, or an undercover operative of the Social Police at an illegally clandestine Labor gathering, from a housewife in Belgrade or a janitor in New Delhi. Perhaps it originated in all of them together; it was another way of sharing guilt. One ten-billionth of the responsibility for this was a light enough burden for even the most sensitive to bear.
The bodies that had once housed Arturo Kollberg and Ma’elKoth shared a single identical smile.
Five minutes from now, the girl would be irrelevant.
Twenty thousand meters above Ankhana, a Bell & Howell AAV-24 Deva completed a long dive-curve, released a MEFNW blast-negative HEW, then generated maximum thrust as it sped away toward the east.
7
MY MOUTH IS numb; my lips barely work. I shout in Raithe’s ear to be heard above the shatter of cannonfire. “Can you talk to him?”
“What?”
I dig one hand hard into his shoulder. “Can you talk to Ma’elKoth? You’re aware of him—is he aware of you? Can you communicate?”
His eyes are still lost in the heavens. “One vehicle—one Bell & Howell AAV-24 Deva, crew of four, effective ceiling twenty-five thousand meters, top speed Mach two-point-one, armament—”
“Stay with me, goddammit!” I give him another shake. “You have to talk to Ma’elKoth—you have to tell him—”
“It dives, falling like a falcon—”
All I can think about for one endless second is how fucking cold the water is as it trickles away around us; I’m freezing in here, my hands are numb and my whole body shakes, and my voice fades in and out behind a roaring in my ears that’s even louder than the battle around us. Because I knew that car would be up there. One, all alone.
One is all it takes.
I want to look up, absurdly, to hunt the sky for the pinprick of titanium that I know will be invisible. I want to look, but I can’t.
I’m afraid.
My mind smokes with cinematically vivid recollection of file footage from Indonesia. Inside my head, that titanium teardrop lays a tiny silver egg before it speeds away toward the rising sun—
“Tell him we surrender!” I snarl. “Goddammit, Raithe, you have to tell him we surrender! Tell him I give up! I’ll give him the sword—whatever he wants—just tell him don’t do it!”
The funny thing is, I’m the one who gave him the idea.
“Shit, they’d nuke the city.”
“One city is a small price to pay for an entire world.”
“Yeah? What if it’s your city?”
“I am willing to take that risk.”
He’s trumped us. Called my bluff.
It’ll kill every single one of the former inmates of the Pit who carry Shanna’s countervirus. It’ll kill every single one of us.
Raithe.
Deliann.
T’Passe.
Orbek.
Dinnie, Fletcher, Arken, Gropaz—
Damon. Majesty. The Faces. The Serpents. The Subjects of Cant.
Me.
One single flash of invisible light will burn our bones, and Ma’elKoth walks in here whenever he feels like it and picks up the sword, and game fucking over. I thought I was hard-core. I thought I was ruthless.
Shit.
I didn’t even know what ruthless looks like.
“Does he hear you? Raithe, goddammit, does he hear you?”
Raithe’s gaze returns from heaven and meets mine. “No,” he says. “No, He doesn’t. I can no longer feel Him. Any of them.”
An ice dagger slips in between my ribs. I make myself ask, “Faith—?”
He gives his head a tiny shake. “Unconscious, at the very least. Possibly dead.”
My head lowers: my neck bending under the brutal weight of the futility of existence.
Before the astonishing pain can take full hold of me, a new thunder blossoms in the sky. I wrench myself over beside Raithe and look up. Above us a coruscant aster of flame spreads its tendrils for an instant, then vanishes into a jellyfish spray of black smoke and falling bits of metal. Even as I watch, another assault car detonates the same way, and another.
Raithe speaks my guess, but in his voice is certain knowledge. “Deliann has joined the battle.”
“You can feel him?” I seize Raithe’s shoulders and bounce his head off the stone. “You have to talk to him! You have to tell him to get the fuck out of here—”
A grin blossoms on his face, the only honestly happy smile I’ve ever seen there. “No.”
“Raithe, you have to tell him! The caverns—he can still make it to the caverns! He can live—he can defend the sword! You have to tell him to defend the sword!”
“No, I don’t,” he says serenely, lying back as though the puddled water is a comfortable bed. “I don’t have to do anything.”
My vision hazes red and the next thing I know I have my hands on his collar, twisting it into a strangle with tension against the chains that connect my shackles. But he’s a trained Esoteric, and he breaks my hold with a leverage move of his left hand against my right wrist—and the oil from his skin burns me like acid. My hand springs open, and he shoves me away.
“I’m free,” he says. “Free.”
Christ, he’s raving. “You’re free to fucking die,” I tell him. “You don’t know what’s coming—”
“I don’t care what’s coming.”
That assault car dives above my head and inside my skull simultaneously; I don’t have time to waste on Raithe right now.
Guess I’m gonna have to do this the hard way.
I leave him lying on the wet stone aiming his idiot’s grin at the sky, and drag myself toward the western edge of the fountain’s bowl, hoping the fountain’s superstructure will give me at least a shadow of cover.
It takes me a long time to get into mindview.
I know I’m there when I don’t care anymore about getting shot or shredded or flash-roasted to death; I only care about getting to the Courthouse. Getting to Deliann. To Kris. Slowly, unsteadily, I climb out of the bowl and stand.
Bullets and shrapnel fan me with turbulence-swirled breeze.
I lean forward, and one of my legs swings ahead to stop me from falling. I keep leaning, and my legs keep swinging, and I don’t fall yet.
I’m on my way.
8
HEW STANDS FOR High Energy Weapon, a centuries-old designation for offensive devices that rely primarily upon nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, or some combination of the two for their destructive effect.
Blast-negative is a somewhat misleading appellation created by the weapon’s design team, reflecting their successful tamping of energetic photon—gamma and hot X-ray—emissions, thus reducing the blast and thermal effects of the individual fireballs to roughly .1 kiloton apiece: a mere hundred times as powerful as a large chemical high-explosive bomb.
MEFNW stands for Multiple Enhanced-Fast-Neutron Warheads. Fast neutron radiation decreases by a factor of ten for every five hundred meters from the detonation point, due to atmospheric absorption; the weapon’s design team countered this effect by using a large number of very small individual warheads that automatically deploy during system activation, spreading a nuclear umbrella over the entire target area that delivers an average of ten thousand rads of prompt radiation to all targets within the deployment radius. Fast neutrons are extremely penetrating; even heavy shielding may only reduce this exposure by two to five thousand rads. A dose of eight thousand rads is instantly incapacitating and fatal; five thousand induces incapacitation within five minutes of exposure, and death within two days.
Enhanced-Fast-Neutron weapons also produce strong secondary radiation, as neutrons striking atomic nuclei in the ground and surviving structures create a broad array of extremely unstable isotopes. Neutron-induced secondary radiation decays by 90 percent within seven hours, but it can still kill; total exposure rises with time. The passage of forty-eight hours reduces radiation to a nonhazardous level, but by this time, any living material that might have survived the initial prompt radiation has suffered mortal damage from the secondary radiation.
This is, in fact, the use for which this particular weapon was designed: to sterilize localized HRVP outbreaks. Part of the rationale for the blast-negative feature of this weapon is that it, unlike conventional thermonuclear weapons, does not generate powerful Mach waves that might scatter viral proteins beyond the lethal radiation zone.
As it fell, the HEW deployed computer-controlled warpable airfoils to control its path and counteract the vagaries of high-altitude winds, and began to shed bomblets with airfoil vanes of their own. Each bomblet carried its own targeting system, comparing the radar signature of the central device against the infrared image of the city below. Cities are always hotter than the surrounding countryside, and this one in particular blazed like a beacon.
Radar-altimeters ticked off the fall of the warheads. Drag created by the airfoils stabilized their terminal velocity at 97.3 meters per second after approximately nine seconds, continually adjusting for increasing air pressure as they fell.
Optimal detonation altitude is two kilometers.
One hundred seventy-six seconds to go.
9
RAITHE LAY ON his back in the fountain’s bowl, savoring the chill of the wet rough limestone against his back. The sky above him was full of lead and steel, smoke and flames, the howls of Boeing VT-17 Air Superiors and the shrieks of the dying. The intimacy of his connection to the waiting god lent him a curiously doubled perspective: his Overworld eyes saw armored giants hurling fireballs at the city while his Earthly knowledge showed him RV-101 Jackson MAATTs—Mobile Armored Artillery and Troop Transports—dug into the street with their recoil-absorbing mounting screws, firing their 122-millimeter main guns; the Air Superiors that strafed the city looked to him like flaming chariots of minor sun gods, though he could at will quote the specifications of their powerplants, armament, speed, and range. At need, he felt sure he could summon the name of each individual crewman. But it was not this that brought the bliss to his thin lips.
He smiled because he could die here.
He had realized it even as he knelt at Caine’s side and watched the first strangely beautiful arc of swooping assault cars. Caine had scrambled for cover, and Raithe had not moved. He didn’t have to. He had answered all his destinies.
He was free.
For more than ten years he had sought only to discover what his destiny required. He had never even asked himself what he wanted. I may not master my destiny, but I don’t have to let my destiny master me.
Raithe smiled up into the infinite sky.
And it took Caine to teach me that.
He rolled over and crawled to the lip of the fountain’s bowl to peer out. Through the smoke and flame and the sizzling death songs of slugs and shrapnel that ripped the air of the plaza, Caine staggered like a zombie that decomposed with every step, heading for the far curve of the Sen-Dannalin Wall. He’d never make it.
Raithe said, “All right, then.”
He gathered himself, and sprang.
Machine-gun fire tracked him as he sprinted across the plaza, the air solid with howling bullets that he knew, abstractly, were 12.5-millimeter armor-piercing rounds tipped with depleted uranium traveling at an average of 423 meters per second. He fully appreciated the reality of these slugs only after one punched through his thigh—a crisp impact like being hit by a rattan practice sword, leaving two thumbnail-sized holes on opposite sides of his leg but missing the bone and not even breaking his stride. Another took him low in the back as he tried to jink and skidded on a puddle of blood; an instant later his foot tangled in loops of intestine that spilled from half a corpse. He fell, and a third round drilled a neat hole in his shoulder blade before exiting an inch below his collarbone.
He rolled with the impact, his shoulder spreading numb fire through his chest—the bone shot would be excruciating, once feeling returned—and came to his feet as a shell whistled overhead and blasted a huge chunk from the Sen-Dannalin Wall just as Caine reached it. Raithe lunged, throwing himself through the air, and his wounded shoulder slammed into the small of Caine’s back, the impact carrying them both out from under a hail of head-sized masonry.
They lay on the ground together for a few seconds, panting air back into their lungs, as more shells boomed and blasted all around.
Raithe struggled to his hands and knees. “Come on,” he said, beckoning. Slowly, still gasping, Caine pulled himself onto Raithe’s back, looping his shackled arms around Raithe’s shoulders. When he was finally able to speak, he said breathlessly, “What the fuck?”
Raithe allowed himself a smile as warm as the blood that ran down his legs. “I changed my mind.”
10
HE CARRIES ME through the twisting backstreets and alleys with artillery blowing everything to shit all around us. Blood pumps out of him at a pretty good rate, but none of it’s spurting—probably missed the arteries. He might live through this.
That is, if he doesn’t do anything stupid, like haul a crippled old man around on his fucking back.
He’s wheezing already, staggering drunkenly. No chance we’ll get to the Courthouse. No chance we’ll get to a pissoir and make it into the caverns—the pissoirs around the fountain are shattered and choked with rubble, and the next nearest is at the foot of Knights’ Bridge, right by the Courthouse. I shout in his ear, “We’re not gonna make it! Tell Deliann to get his ass down into the Pit!”
He stumbles on, grimly desperate. “I . . . can’t communicate . . . and run . . . at the same time. Without Faith . . . there is only the link . . . that Deliann himself created . . .”
Up ahead I see a storefront that looks like it took a direct hit: a jagged gape invites us into darkness. “In there! Go on: maybe they have a cellar!” He shakes his head and tries to keep going, but I wrap my arms around his neck in a modified sleeper. “Do it, or I’ll choke you out and we’ll both die in the street.”
He sags, surrendering, and carries me into the ruined building. It looks like it might once have been some kind of apothecary shop. There is a man-sized wad of bloody flesh just inside the door, and a trail of blood into the back hallway ends with the body of an old woman, dead. Looks like she had tried to drag herself toward the apartment whose door stands open at the end of the hall.
“Put me down.”
Raithe stares at the blood-streaked floor. “Here?”
“Yeah. It’s just blood, kid.”
He nods, and lowers me to the floor so that I can put my back against the wall. He looks like he wants to say something, but a second later he just collapses against the wall and slides down beside me.
“Now,” I tell him. “Talk to Deliann. Tell him to quit fucking around with the goddamn assault cars and get his ass into the caverns.”
Raithe’s eyes defocus for a moment, and when his gaze returns he shakes his head. “He won’t.”
“He has to! Tell him he fucking has to—”
“He won’t. The power of the goddess is upon him, and he fights to save us all. In the caverns, he would be powerless.”
“Tell him about the bomb!” I snarl, sinking my fingers into Raithe’s shoulder. He tries to yank free—fat fucking chance. The rest of me might be out of shape, but I’ve still got a grip like a bench vise. “It’s a fucking neutron bomb! If he stays up here, it’s all for nothing—we should have just handed over the fucking sword in the first place and everybody goes home. What the fuck does he think the goddess can do about a fucking neutron bomb?”
“He says . . .” Raithe murmurs thickly, his voice trailing away. “He says . . .” His face twitches spastically, and his eyes glaze over entirely. I shake him, hard, then again; I grab his face with my other hand and turn him toward me.
“Tell him, Raithe! Fucking tell him—tell him—” But I can see he no longer hears me. My hands fall to my lap, limp, useless, and the chain that links the manacles clatters like distant mechanical laughter. “Tell him that one goddamn person I love has to live through this,” I finish softly.
But Raithe only stares, unseeing, into the invisible distance.
11
FIFTEEN MILES AWAY, senses that belonged to the body of Ma’elKoth showed the blind god a sudden current in the Flow, a trickle that became a tide that swelled to a maelstrom the size of the sky.
The blind god sent Ma’elKoth’s body lunging for the limousine, hammering upon its silvered windows; it could not wait for this knowledge to trickle along the involute pathways of its aggregate mind. “The child! Stimulants—injections—shake her! Slap her!” the blind god roared through Ma’elKoth’s mouth. “Wake the child!”
12
THE GODDESS FELT the downward sweep of the hundreds of bomblets, already below the highest-flying eagles that cruised her skies. She had no leisure for subtlety, or for configuring Deliann’s body as she had Raithe’s; she could use only the sort of skills he already had.
She poured the power of Chambaraya into Deliann’s Shell; she expanded it beyond the Courthouse, beyond Ankhana, beyond the matrix of golden force that sealed the city against the Winston Transfer; she made of it a rising dome that compassed all the land for miles about, and swallowed every individual falling bomblet.
She felt each of them—and each of the assault cars, and the riot vans that rained death on a smaller scale upon the city. She felt even the limousine on that distant grassy riverbank, where a Social Police medical officer had produced an evacuant syringe and forced its flexible plastic tube down Faith’s throat, and now methodically pumped the water and digestive acids that were the only contents of her stomach into a stinking puddle on the limo’s carpet, while another officer injected a stimulant mixture into her IV drip.
The goddess felt the energy that surrounded each bomblet, each vehicle: the crackling power of transmutative force that enclosed each of them within a bubble of local physics like those of Earth. She spent precious seconds examining that energy, letting it speak to her mind. What she must do, she could do only once, and all in an instant: too slowly, and the randomizing boundary effect might bring about the detonation she sought to prevent.
Then she tuned Deliann’s Shell in the same way he had done, those long weeks ago in the white room at Alien Games, when he had tapped into the power of Kierendal’s griffinstone. She touched that energy, all of it. Then she took it.
She drained every joule, every erg, every electron volt.
This was energy that Ma’elKoth—himself a transhuman creature specifically designed to channel energies that would incinerate any mortal frame—had spent many hours summoning and channeling piecemeal; to have done it any faster might have destroyed even him. This unimaginable energy, she drained in an unmeasurable fraction of a second. All that energy had to go somewhere.
And to get there, it had to pass through Deliann.
13
DELIANN WAS CONSCIOUS. More than conscious. More than superhumanly conscious. Transcendently conscious. He had not surrendered to the lack; he had let the goddess flow through him. He remained aware.
He felt his brain begin to boil.
This boiling was the effect of a burst of gamma and hard X-ray radiation originating in his pineal gland; it superheated his cerebrospinal fluid, and in approximately 10-4seconds, his brain, his skull, and the rest of his body would vaporize into a cloud of plasma as high-energy photons ionized his tissues.
He could feel this happen because he was thinking, roughly speaking, at the speed of light.
In his next-to-final ten-thousandth of a second, he used the river’s power to find Raithe, where he leaned against a wall in a darkened building ripe with the stench of blood. Deliann took some of the energy that screamed into him and used it to join that place to this, warping reality and space so that for just a ten-thousandth of a second, he could reach into that dark, gore-smeared hallway.
There, he dropped the sword.
In his final ten-thousandth of a second, he thought of his father, back in Malmo, of his mother, dead these many years. Of his human brothers and his sister. Of T’farrell Ravenlock and the Living Palace, of Kierendal and Tup.
Of Torronell, and Caine.
He said good-bye, and used his last instant of will to transform the radiation that killed him.
He made himself into light.
14
THE SOCIAL POLICE officer who flew the lead car had only an eyeblink to comprehend that his computer-controlled flight surfaces no longer responded to his commands before every molecular logic circuit in the vehicle underwent spontaneous quantum decay and the car tumbled like a wad of paper and crashed into the Old Town wall just below One Tower. The wall held. The car didn’t.
Beside the Great Chambaygen, Ma’elKoth fulminated as the limo’s idling turbines whined down to silence.
The crew of the AAV-24 Deva had several minutes to watch the ground fall up toward them.
Assault cars rained out of the Ankhanan sky one after another, crashing into buildings and streets and the river. The riot vans simply settled into themselves as their electronics shut down: their screens went dark and their turrets froze in place.
And all the surviving soldiers in Old Town, Social Police and Ankhanan regular alike, all the primals and the treetoppers, the stonebenders and ogrilloi and trolls and ogres—every creature that still lived—stopped and stared in awe.
The roof of the Courthouse peeled back like a rose opening toward the sun.
From it burst a vertical shaft of pure white light as big around as the Colhari Palace. It roared into the sky louder than thunder, expanding as air ionized to incandescence along its path; the sheath of burning air concealed the shaft’s killing glare, saving the onlookers from flashburns and blindness.
The Courthouse melted like a snow castle in an oven.
A few seconds later, several hundred depleted-uranium canisters sprouting immobile airfoils fell—in a still fairly precise pattern—across more than a hundred square kilometers, hit the earth, and bounced.
15
CHRIST, IT STINKS in here.
One of my feet trails in a puddle that has the coffee-grounds texture of clotted blood. I’d ask Raithe to move it, but why bother? I roll my head to the side and look at him. He sits with his knees drawn up, hugging them and staring at the wall.
Kosall lies on the cold filthy floor between us.
Raithe isn’t the person I had in mind to spend my last few seconds with, but then nobody ever promised me I’d have a choice. So I’ll stay here, in this anonymous hallway with its anonymous corpses. Here is good enough. Right here, next to the sword. Because if I’m about to die, I want to do it beside my wife.
Or something.
What a thing this sword is. I can still feel it sliding in below my navel. I can still feel the buzzing hum in my teeth when it severed my spine. Berne’s sword. Lamorak’s sword.
I wonder where Lamorak got it, all those years ago. I wonder if he ever felt the weight of its future dragging at his arm. This sword killed my career; this sword took Shanna’s life. Kosall is all that’s left of her.
All that’s left of all of us.
It passed from Lamorak to Berne to Raithe to Deliann—
To me.
To each of us, it’s been something different, yet somehow all the same. Like what Kris said about that whole Blade of Tyshalle bullshit: it’s the knife that cuts everything. It lies on the splintered hardwood between me and Raithe, and that’s where it should be. It’s where we should be: on opposite sides of the blade that cuts everything, waiting for the end of the world.
So much pain—
So much hatred—
Everything between us cuts like this sword, but here we are anyway, together. Pretty much all either one of us has left is each other. There is no one else I could share this moment with. There is no one else with whom I could simply wait, and have it be all right.
“It’s so quiet out there,” I murmur. “Think it’s over?”
Raithe shrugs, and turns his face away.
Yeah.
I look down at the sword. I’m afraid to touch it. I guess I knew what it meant when the sword fell out of nothingness and landed right between us.
That was Kris, saying good-bye.
First time I saw him, in that goddamn mad-scientist mask of his, standing over me in the weight room, I knew he was gonna be trouble. How astonished I felt, how bereft, when I came back to Earth after my freemod, and they told me Kris hadn’t made it—
I guess I went through my grieving then, because right now, all I can feel is grateful. All I can feel is how lucky I have been, to know a man like him. One Kris Hansen makes up for a shitload of Kollbergs, and Marc Vilos, a shitload of Majesties and Lamoraks and all the other fucking scum that swim in the pool where I live. I wish Shanna could have met him—really met him, when they were both human. I think she would have liked him.
More than that: She would have admired him.
I think I’ll just sit here for a while, and tell myself some of the stories I know about him. I can tell myself about that cold courage of his, where he could just stand there and do what had to be done.
I guess that’s how I say good-bye.
Tell myself? Shit.
“Raithe?” I say softly. “Let me tell you a story, huh?”
16
THE BODY OF Ma’elKoth rested upon the riverbank, arms enwrapping knees, as though it were a boulder exposed by eonic erosion of the grassy meadow behind. A Social Police officer approached uncertainly, unsure of his balance on this alien ground.
“Stimulants have been administered. She’ll wake soon,” the officer said. “But not for long.”
“I know,” the blind god replied with Ma’elKoth’s voice.
“She’s very weak,” the officer said. “The strain on her heart—I don’t think she’ll live out the afternoon.”
The body continued to stare downriver. “Get in the limo.”
The officer retreated. The blind god caused Ma’elKoth’s body to follow. It stood outside, still staring toward distant Ankhana. The part of the blind god that was Ma’elKoth could feel what had happened there through the senses of its worshipers: only Beloved Children are permitted to serve in the Imperial military. “Seal the door,” it said.
Without power, the officer had to manually drag the gullwing door down and latch it into place.
The part of the blind god that was Ma’elKoth now touched the power of His divine Self: the incorporeal image to which His worshipers prayed. He conjoined that power with his physical form and drew upon it to telekinetically anchor himself to the bedrock beneath the meadow, and to bring him strength.
“Wait for me in the car,” he said. Then he picked up the limo and threw it in the river.
The limo—airtight, and constructed of modern titanium alloy—bobbed like a cork, spinning slowly as it drifted downstream. He could have pushed the car into the river with a mere shrug of his power, but some things, as Caine once notably observed, cry out to be done by hand.
He reached into the clay of the riverbank with his mind and drew forth a hundred kilos. The knife of his mind carved it into shape: a medium-sized man with the build of a boxer, somewhat tall for his weight, gone now perhaps a bit to seed—a thickening of the waist, a suggestion of jowls along the jawline—but with eyes penetrating and cold, and a slant of scar across a twice-broken nose.
He summoned his will, and he Spoke.
“Caine.”
And as he Spoke, he thought: Some things cry out to be done by hand.
17
A WHITE THUNDERBOLT blasts though my brain in the middle of telling Raithe about Ballinger, and for one nerveless second I think the bomb’s gone off after all. But the shattering agony goes on and on in a ringing and a roaring that’s splitting my fucking head, and it gathers itself into a voice. A Voice. I know that Voice.
It’s calling my name.
“Caine—what’s wong?” Raithe reaches for me, but I hold him off with one hand while the other presses against my temple to keep my brain from exploding.
“I hear you,” I answer.
I AM COMING FOR THE SWORD. I AM COMING FOR YOU, CAINE.
“I knew you would.”
AND I, TOO, KNEW THAT YOU WOULD BE THERE TO MEET ME.
“Yeah, you’re a fucking genius.”
Raithe stares at me like I’ve gone completely shit-swallowing loopy.
I CAN BRING MORE TROOPS. I CAN BRING MORE VEHICLES. I CAN BRING MORE BOMBS.
“Don’t bother. I give.”
Silence inside my head.
“You hear me, you bastard? I said I give. I surrender. Bring whatever you want. I’ll give myself up. The sword’s yours.”
Raithe’s expression transforms into understanding tinged with awe, and then gathers dismay.
AND IN RETURN?
“Faith,” I tell him. “I want my daughter. Alive.”
Silence.
“And while we’re talking deal, there are a lot of innocent people still on this island, and in the city. Let them go, huh?”
WHY SHOULD I?
“Because that’s the deal, motherfucker. Your word: I get Faith, and everybody else walks. You get the sword, and you get me. Otherwise, I run. It’ll take you a long time to catch me.”
Silence.
“The longer you wait, the more expensive this is gonna get.”
VERY WELL. I ACCEPT YOUR TERMS.
“Your word on it.”
YOU HAVE IT.
Then the Presence is gone from the inside of my skull, and I sag back against the damp stone.
Raithe is no waster of words. “Ma’elKoth?”
“The blind god. Same thing.”
He scowls doubtfully. “You think his word is good?”
I pick up the sword, and it snarls to life in my hand. I squeeze its hilt until its hum matches my memory: it buzzes in my teeth.
“Who gives a shit?” I turn Kosall so that its blade catches sunlight along the edge. “Mine isn’t.”
ON THAT DAY of prophecy fulfilled and transformed, the plain of Megiddo has become a cobbled street, and the Fimbulwinter a firestorm, and all the echoes and shadows of truth were gathered: Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman, Satan and Yahweh El Sabaoth, Thor and Jorgmandr, the Prince of Chaos and the Ascended Ma’elKoth.
It was the hour of battle for the dark angel and the god of dust and ashes. The heavens would break, and the earth be torn asunder, and their pieces cast into the winds of the abyss. On what new shape the universal shards might find when they came once more together, every prophecy, tale, and legend disagreed.
And all of them were wrong.