Free Blade of Tyshalle by Matthew Woodring Stover Page B

sword:
as a weapon, sworn in the service of the Human Future.
    At twenty-five, he was the youngest full Ambassador in the
Monasteries’ six-hundred-year history—and not even the
Council of Brothers could guess how much their decision might have
been influenced by the subtle power of a young friar’s dreams.
    Now in Thorncleft a haze began to obscure his vision, as though he
peered through a twisty veil of gauze, while the great doors of the
hall swung wide and in marched a double column of the Artan Guards,
their curious springless pellet bows held at ready aslant their
scarlet-armored chests. They spread out into the wide arc of an honor
guard.
    The elves gazed at them with bald curiosity, not yet aware of their
import. Lord Kithin, for his part, sprang hastily from the Gilt
Throne and dropped to one knee, inclining his head to welcome the
Artan Viceroy, Vinson Garrette. Lord Kithin could be trusted only to
handle situations of purely ceremonial nature. No business of import
could be conducted in Transdeia without the presence of the
representative of this land’s true rulers.
    Raithe’s heart began to pound.
    Garrette seemed to speak cordially to the elves as he walked among
them. Raithe felt a surge of anger at the mental haze that prevented
him from fully experiencing the meeting—if he could only hear
what Garrette said, perhaps he could understand the import of these
legates. He burned for that understanding.
    With a need as sharp and immediate as hunger to a starving man, he
ached to understand where, in all this, was the connection to Caine.
    But his sudden swell of desire ruptured his concentration and
scattered his vision; now he saw only the view from this window in
the half-completed embassy. He snarled at himself, then shut his
eyes, laid his hand across them, and forced himself to concentrate
once more. He slowed his breathing, a measured count of nine to
inhale, hold for three, exhale for twelve, and the Hall of State
began to coalesce once more inside his skull.
    â€œHeadache, Master Ambassador?â€

THREE
    HARI SLID A hand inside the back of his toga, reaching for the ripple
of scar at his lumbar vertebrae. He massaged it fiercely through his
chiton, trying to rub away the ache; his back felt as if he were
lying on a rock the size of his fist. That dull pressure was as dim
and rounded as painkillers could make it without knocking him out
altogether. He had work to do.
    His scar always hurt when he was at work these days; maybe it was
this goddamn new chair. It had looked good in the catalog, but
somehow he couldn’t get comfortable. His back usually started
to ache while he rode his private lift down to his office—buried
in the bedrock below the San Francisco Studio Center—anticipatory
twinges shooting up into his shoulders while the lift sank its silent
three stories. The ache would grow all day long, most days; usually
it was bearable.
    Lately it had been brutal.
    This goddamn chair . . .
    I should have kept Kollberg’s, he thought. He was a
sack of fucking maggots, but he knew how to be comfortable.
    One of the first things he’d done, when he’d finally won
his struggle to actually direct the operations of the SF Studio, was
redecorate his office.
    It was something he’d always been—vaguely, more or
less—planning to do, ever since the Studio installed him here
six years ago. At first, he’d taken a very real malicious
pleasure in sitting inside Arturo Kollberg’s office suite, in
using the disgraced former Chairman’s chair, his desk, staring
at the ocean through Kollberg’s Sony repeater. But that kind of
petty shit swiftly pales. Kollberg’s office furniture had been
rounded, organic, womblike, no sharp corners anywhere—kind of
like Kollberg himself. Hari had loathed this office just as he’d
loathed its former occupant, but for years it hadn’t occurred
to