“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“It’s not important. And I don’t think I could make you understand.” He draws a deep, shuddering breath. “It really is just the choice. The thing-in-itself.”
“Yeah. Would you risk the universe to change one thing?”
“God help me …” The calm in Duncan’s voice chokes on his tears. “You can’t … I’m only a man. You can’t ask me to make this choice. Not if it really counts for something.”
“Except I do.”
“… gods …” He finds himself reduced to pleading with figments of other people’s imagination. “… have mercy …”
“No gods here, Duncan. Just you.”
He hangs his head. This is not a place for lies.
“Then yes.”
His truth is barely a whisper.
“Yes, I would. For even a chance. For the hope of a chance.”
“Okay. Thanks, Duncan. I appreciate your help. Sorry it had to be like this, but you’re the only guy in either universe I can trust to give me good advice.”
“What? Advice?” His eyes blink open. “Is that all this is?”
“No.”
Caine holds the sword in both hands. If it burns his hands with interstellar cold, he gives no sign.
“Hari …? Hari, what is this? What are you doing?”
“I told you.”
Caine lunges with casually brutal expertise. The blade spears through Duncan’s sternum and carves his heart in half, and as darkness falls upon his life, he hears only this:
“I don’t go by that name anymore.”
“See, the whole point of being a god is that there’s no such thing as consequences, right? You don’t like how something turned out, you reach into reality and stir it around until you get something you like better.”
— POSSIBLY SOMEBODY
Potentially Somewhere
This time, they sit together on a bench in the Railhead, Thorncleft’s largest structure, and the headquarters of the Transdeian Heavy Rail Company.
“It’s because I’m going to make a deal with your god.”
“My god? Ma’elKoth?”
“No. The Black Knife god. Out in the Boedecken. I don’t think it has a name.”
“So? You say going to, hey? Then don’t. Y no hay problema.”
“It’s not that simple, big dog.”
Usually, the young ogrillo leans back into a pillar with one leg up and resting on the bench between them, his other foot on the bulging bundle of his pack on the floor. Usually, the man leans forward on his elbows, stares off through the smoky gloom half-lit by dim greenish globes of coal-gas lamps, and speaks in a low, flat voice that draws no attention from idle passersby or the patient fellow passengers who wait there for the Thorncleft Falcon, the express train that speeds to Ankhana and back twice a day.
Usually. Not always.
In the past, this conversation has occasionally taken place in a haze of sleet below the Monastic Embassy in Lower Thorncleft. Several times it has happened among the vast stacks of creosote-soaked timbers waiting for transport to the Battleground Spur, still under construction. Once it was on a cliff-ledge at night, so dark the mountains around weren’t even shadows; it might have been nowhere at all, except for the sweet copper scent of freshly spilled blood.
“The deal isn’t the problem,” the man says. “It might be the solution.”
“So?”
“So it might blow up the fucking planet too. Or worse. Or nothing at all, or anything in between. I don’t know. I can’t know.”
“You talk too much about what you don’t know, little brother.”
“Everybody does.” A rasp of bitter chuckle. “The difference is I know I don’t know. Everybody else is blowing smoke out their assholes and they can’t even smell fire. See, the thing is, I shouldn’t be able to make a deal at all. Not with a god. Especially not with that god. But I will. I already have. Even though it hasn’t happened yet.”
“And that’s where you lose me every time.”
“Yeah, that’s where the mortal brain generally takes it in the butt. The Monasteries have some technical jargon and shit, but even having the right words doesn’t help all that much. Look, in the Breaking—the Horror, right?—there came a, kind of, a turning point. I don’t know what else to call it. Your guys had us all captured, and you were doing your usual shit, which was torturing people to death. An offering to your god, because the old Black Knives worshipped a demon that was Bound in the vertical city. By the vertical city.”
“Demon? Just now you say god.”
“Same thing. Well, not exactly, but there isn’t time to recap the whole Abbey school Intro to Applied Deiology seminar. So look, the top bitches had me nailed to a cross, which is a slow and shitty way to die, and they were doing some other things that weren’t much fun either, and I should have died there. All of us should have. Instead I escaped.”
“You escaped? From being nailed to a cross? Nice trick.”
“Fucking impossible trick.” The man hangs his head and sighs. “What happened was, the head bitch took me down herself. Then I killed her and the Studio pulled me out and whatever. You know the rest.”
“What, she just lets you go? And stands around while you kill her? How’s that work?”
“It was the answer to my prayer.”
“You pray? What, Tyshalle gets wet and sloppy for you all of a sudden?”
“No. I prayed to your god.”
The grey-leather lumps of muscle that serve ogrilloi as eyebrows rippled and knotted. “And why does the Black Knife god give a shit for you?”
“That’s one question, but there’s one more important. The real one is how. Not why. Somehow the god made the head bitch do what I was praying for. That’s what the Monasteries call an Intervention, and it’s supposed to be impossible. It’s exactly what the Covenant of Pirichanthe is supposed to prevent.”
“What, gods aren’t allowed to do miracles?”
“Exactly. Exactly. The power of a god can be expressed only through the intercession of a living creature. That’s the fundamental principle that underlies the Covenant: a god can grant power or take it away and that’s fucking well it. Again, it’s complicated—the Monasteries call it theophanic attunement, and there’s a shitload of variable specifics, but basically the more you’re like what the god wants you to be, the more of its power you can channel. So the god doesn’t even tell you what to do with its power, because the reason you have the power in the first place is that you’re already the kind of person who’d use it the way your god wants you to. You follow?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Better with nose than with brain, hey?”
“Interventions—what people call miracles—are direct actions by a god. Direct expression of the god’s will. An Intervention literally changes reality. That’s the problem with gods. Human gods. Ideational Powers, the Monasteries call them. Natural Powers are expressions of natural law. Outside Powers exist beyond reality. More or less in the middle are the gods of humanity. It’s kind of like they’re half Natural and half Outside. They don’t dramatically violate natural law at any given moment, but they exist outside time. Some religions teach that to their gods, time is a dream, which is as good a way of thinking about it as any. A god can choose any moment—past, future, whatever, to them it’s all the same—any moment they happen to feel like, then reach in and stir shit up to make something happen somewhen else.”
“Somewhen.”
“Yeah, I know.” The man shrugs apologetically. “Say a god wants to destroy the Railhead here. Say it’s pissed at me and wants to make the whole fucking building fall on our heads. Something really spectacular—an earthquake, a meteor strike, whatever—that takes a shitload of power. It’s a hell of a lot easier to pick a couple seconds ten years ago and give some poor bastard a heart attack right when he was making some critical load calculation and so here we are, ten years later, and the weight of this ice storm finally ove
rtakes its structural fatigue limits and the whole fucking thing collapses and kills us all. Control the past, control the future.”
The ogrillo rolls his eyes toward the ice-packed armorglass vault above. “Just an example, hey? Serious-like.”
“It gets worse when there’s more than one. Say some other god wants us to live through it, or maybe just wants to fuck with the first one, so he reaches back ten years and has some other guy spot the dead guy’s error and correct it, and then the Railhead’s sturdy and solid and warm and here we sit. But then the first god can go back and kill the other guy, and we’re back to being buried in rubble and glass.
“When an assload of gods are fucking with the past so they can control the future, shit goes crazy. Nothing is real. Not for very long. The only thing you can count on is that people are going to get hurt, because the stronger the god, the bigger changes it can make, and the strength of a god is a function of the number and devotion of its worshippers, so priests become evangelical and they start holy wars to burn down other gods’ power and the other gods get pissed and shit goes back and forth until the whole universe is the worst fucking nightmare you’ve ever had. Except nobody never wakes up.
“That’s what Panchasell Mithondionne saw coming. That’s why he created the dil T’llan. But it was too little too late. There were too many of us here already, and when you put enough humans together, one thing you can count on is that pretty soon some smart fucker’s gonna start a religion. I think that’s why most human creation myths have reality being born from infinite chaos.
“Infinite chaos is exactly where we’d be without Jereth and Jantho of Tyrnall.
“Jantho Ironhand and Jereth Godslaughterer. Brothers. Twins, the story goes. They decided to stop the bullshit, and they were the guys to do it. They might have been gods themselves; some stories have it one way, some the other. In Abbey school, we’re taught that their power was time-binding—that what made them capable of standing up to the gods was that shit they did was permanent. Even against the gods.
“Jereth carried a weapon they called the Sword of Man. Jantho never used a weapon. Two sides of the same power, right? Jereth the Destroyer. Jantho the Preserver. That’s why, at the Monasteries, they want us to master the use of weapons, and to master ourselves, because the real weapon is the weapon we are, and a lot of other metaphorical mystic bullshit. So anyway, Jereth and Jantho take the fight to the gods up close and personal, and they start carving these fuckers up left and right, back to front and top to bottom. To the gods, this comes as a nasty surprise.
“See, the whole point of being a god is that there’s no such thing as consequences, right? You don’t like how something turned out, you reach into reality and stir it around until you get something you like better.
“So gods start dying. Dying isn’t a big deal; lots of gods die and come back to life. Harvest gods, fertility gods, moon gods, sun gods, whatever. But when dead gods stay dead … well, that’s a different thing.
“When the gods realize they might be in actual danger, the gloves come off. They get serious, and millions of people start dying—and dozens of gods, if not hundreds. The turning point comes when it gets so bad that the gods ask for a truce; they send one of their heavy hitters to negotiate terms. This heavy hitter is Khryl, the Lipkan god of personal combat, because the gods aren’t stupid and they’ve figured that if gods Jereth kills stay dead, maybe if a god kills the Godslaughterer, Jereth just might stay dead too.
“Khryl, though, he’s also god of honor and justice and virtue and shit. So he can’t tell a lie. So the plan the gods come up with is for Khryl to offer his right like he wants to shake hands. I offer my Hand of Peace. Let there be true peace between us, right? So He holds His Hand out there without actually giving Jereth permission to touch Him, so when Jereth shakes His Hand, Khryl can punish his presumption by striking him down with a blast of deific spooge or whatever.
“Jereth, though, is a suspicious bastard by nature, and instead of shaking Khryl’s Hand he whips out the Sword of Man and lops it off at the wrist. Khryl’s Hand falls on the ground, Jereth says, And I take your hand to demonstrate my wish for all you shitswallowing scumhumpers to fuck off and die. But I’m willing to talk peace. When there is true peace between us, I will happily shove this so far up your ass you can scratch the backs of your eyeballs.” The man coughs. “I’m, ah, paraphrasing a little here.”
“No, really?”
“So this is another nasty shock. Especially for Khryl, who discovers that He can’t make His Hand grow back, and neither can any of the other gods.
“Now, there are a couple of conflicting stories about how the Deomachy ends. The Lipkans will tell you that their god of war—Dal’kannith Thousandhand, father of the whole pantheon, including Khryl, patron of Lipke and every fucking thing else—challenges Jereth to single combat to resolve the quarrel, Jereth takes Him up on it and after three days of furious combat on top of a mountain called Pirichanthe, Jereth’s own treachery betrays him: the blood of Khryl that stains the Sword of Man eats the blade like acid, Dal’kannith strikes the traitor down, and then magnanimously decrees that the gods will honor an agreement he names after the Glorious Battle—the Covenant of Pirichanthe, which basically is an armed truce. Gods don’t fuck with reality, and mortals don’t fuck with gods.
“As you probably guess, the Monasteries’ version is a little different.
“Our version is that the gods decided to gang up on Jereth all at once and just crush him with numbers. The Monasteries say that Dal’kannith picked up the epithet Thousandhand as a metaphoric reference to the thousands of gods he gathered to his side, hoping to slaughter the God-slaughterer without having to face the Sword of Man personally, because, y’know, a god could get hurt doing shit like that.
“Again as you probably guess, I favor the Monasteries’ version.
“Jereth and Jantho know they’re done for. They have an army of millions, but no mortal force can stand against the massed might of every living god. On the other hand, Jantho’s every bit as clever as Jereth is suspicious, and he has this idea to stop the war, a trick that can bind the gods beyond the universe if only somebody can keep their attention long enough for him to pull it off.
“There are a lot of different things Jereth is supposed to have said then. I like to think he just lifted the Sword of Man to check its edge against the sunrise. How long will you need? and when Jantho tells him Mostly forever, Jereth only shrugs and says, Done.
“But, y’know, I made up that dialogue myself. I hate the flowery speech shit.
“What we do know is that Jereth and Jantho dismissed their army. Sent them home to their families for whatever time they might have before their lives are ripped apart into insanity and chaos.”
“That’s what this is? You send me off home because it’s the end of the world?”
“Pretty much.”
“Fuck home. My home is you, little brother. You think I’m letting you fight this alone?”
“It’s not gonna be a fight. There’s nothing to fight. This isn’t something someone is doing. It’s just how shit is.”
“So? How’s it end for your twin god ass-whippers?”
The man shrugs. “They faced the end of their war as they had its beginning: brothers, shoulder to shoulder. Giving their lives to save the world.”
“Now, that part I like, hey?” the ogrillo says. “Brothers together.”
“We’re not them.”
“Can die like ’em, though.”
“It’s a story, Orbek. It’s not exactly factual.”
The young ogrillo shrugs heavy shoulders. “What is it you tell me your sire says about metaphors growing truth?”
“Leave Dad out of it. Look, if fighting could fix this, it would have been over five hundred years ago. Jereth’s Revolt would have settled it permanently. I would have died twenty-five years ago, on the cross in the Boedecken, and the Black Knives would rule there right now. But I didn’t, and they don’t
. The whole second half of my life is about whatever fucking deal I’m gonna make with your god. You don’t want to be anywhere in the neighborhood. And by neighborhood I mean continent.”
“When does this deal supposedly happen?”
“Probably soon. I won’t know till the god Calls me.”
“And what’s this deal do, hey? What do you give and what do you get?”
“I wish I knew. One of the things I get is off that fucking cross. I don’t know what else. And I don’t know what it’ll cost.”
“A lot you don’t know, little brother. You don’t know so much, how can you know it’s gotta be such a catastrophe?”
“Orbek, Jesus Christ. Who are you talking to?” The man shakes his head, still looking only at the polished marble floor of the Railhead. “You’re gonna sit here, Orbek Black motherfucking Knife, and ask how I know I’m about to set off a nuclear shit bomb? Seriously?”
“Maybe I can help.”
“Don’t. Just go. You got cousins and stuff, family you haven’t seen in years. You want to die without ever seeing them again?”
“You’re family.”
“Yeah. That’s why I need you to go. Orbek, please.” His fists open and he hangs his head. “Please. One person I love has to live through this.”
“It’s just a fucking metaphor. Don’t beat it to death, huh?”
— CAINE
Blade of Tyshalle
Nonexistence has no duration, and so it is that when Duncan Michaelson opens his eyes, no time has passed.
His son—the man who refuses to be his son—stands over him, silhouetted against a sky so featurelessly blue that it might have been a solid thing within the reach of his hand. Between him and the man who looks like his son stands the plain black blade with its simple crossguard and its salt-stained leather grip.
The blade and the guard and the grip belong to the sword his non-son had driven through his chest into the stone on which he lies, and still pins him there like an insect on a mounting board.