Blade of Tyshalle

She was only a goddess part-time, but she loved her job, and she was good at it. She went to and fro upon the earth and walked up and down in it, and where she strode bloomed flowers and sprouted grain; when she spread her hand, the winter was mild and the harvest bountiful, a summer storm brought showers warm and sweet as a sunlit pond, and the spring sang of things green and growing. The First Folk called her Eyyallarann, the Flowmind; the stonebenders called her Thukulg'n, the Drowner; to the treetoppers she was Ketinnasi, the Riverman; to mankind, she was Chambaraya, the Water Father; but her name was Pallas Ril. It was said she had a human lover, in some far-off place; that for half the year she took the form of mortal woman and lived in peace with her lover and her human child. Others said her lover was himself a god, her shadow-self, a dark angel of slaughter and destruction, and that the half of each year she spent at his side was the world's ransom: that she paid with her body to keep him beyond the walls of time, and preserve the peace of the good land. As is common with such tales, both were true; and false; and to the same degree. The part-time goddess had no church, no religion, no followers; she could not be propitiated by sacrifice or summoned by invocation. She walked whither she willed, and followed the course of her heart as though its turns were the twists of her riverbed; she loved the land and all things in it, and all prospered under her hand. The only prayer that might sway her was the sob of a mother over her ill or injured childbe that mother human or primal, goshawk or bobcat, elk or rabbitand this only because the human part of her remembered what it is to be a mother. This was probably, in the end, the real reason why she and her lover both had to die. For the scent of her green and growing land troubled the slumber of another god: a blind and nameless god, a god of dust and ashes, whose merest dream can kill. One The severed head of a child bounced once on his mattress, then rolled against his ribs, and Hari Michaelson began to wake. He groped for it, struggling upward through smothering blankets of hungover sleep. His gummed-together eyelids parted with the slow rip of shredding meat. Layers of dream shredded into smoke tatters, leaving behind only wisps of melancholy: He had been dreaming of the old days again. Of his long-dead Acting career. Or even earlierhe could not quite grasp the details, but he might have been dreaming of his student days at the Studio Conservatory, more than twenty-five years ago, when he was young, and strong, and full of hope. When he'd still been riding the upward swing of his life. He found the foreign object on the bed, his fingers flapping blindly across it. Not a head, of course it wasn't a head; it was a ball, that's it, just a kid's ball, like the one he used to play rugger with, centuries ago in those bright and happy days before his mother's death and father's breakdown. With the abstract certainty of the dreams he shed, he knew the ball was Faith's. She'd sneaked into the master suite, and this was her way of encouraging him to get his lazy ass out of bed and take her to Saturday morning soccer practice. He rolled over and coughed a wad of phlegm out of his cottony lungs. "Abbey: Clear th' windows," he said thickly, in a tone the housecomp would recognize. "Get s'm fucking light in here." Strange ball, though, he thought fuzzily while he waited for the windows to depolarize. Weird shape, kind of irregularbumpy and malformedand the texture was strange, too, smooth and soft over a hard surface within, almost like bone And what was this shit here? HairStover, Matthew is the author of 'Blade of Tyshalle' with ISBN 9780345421432 and ISBN 0345421434.