Read Online Blade of Tyshalle by Matthew Woodring Stover - Free Book Online

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