Caine Black Knife

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  And then the river was graciously allowed to boil out from beneath the fortress and wind its way through the canal system into the city and the estates beyond, and frankly, the whole thing made me a little sick to my stomach.

  Because that was where we were going. I knew it from the very steps of the vigilry. “Straight to the Spire, huh?”

  “The Eternal Vaunt of the Order of Khryl is our destination,” Markham affirmed stiffly. “Only the vulgar name it the Spire.”

  “The vulgar name it some other shit too.”

  Markham’s selective deafness still seemed to be working just fine. “It would serve you, as an Ankhanan, to show reverence; you may not be aware that the Eternal Vaunt was created for us by your own patron god Ma’elKoth, after our Glory at Ceraeno—”

  “Before he was a god, even. Yeah, I know.” I couldn’t help but know: the story bubbled to the surface of my mind like a fart in a bathtub. “ToaPhelathon had him build it for the Order to keep you out of the Plains War. Biggest bribe in the bistory of Home.”

  Markham’s nearside eyebrow arched a millimeter. “The Prince-Regent gifted the Order with the Eternal Vaunt out of gratitude for the Order’s role in crushing the Khulan Horde—”

  “Yeah. Sure. Toa-Phelathon gets Jheled-Kaarn, Harrakha, and Ironhold, and the Order gets the most spectacular fortress on Home. Smartest thing the old bastard ever did; probably won the war for him.”

  “If so,” Markham murmured with a sidelong glance, “it is a pity he did not live to enjoy it.”

  “Yeah. Pity.”

  “There is a persistent rumor,” he said consideringly, “that the Prince-Regent’s death did not come at the hands of agents of the disaffected nobility hoping to control Tel-Tamarantha—that he was, in fact, assassinated by a Monastic Esoteric.”

  My voice went as empty as Markham’s eyes. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “The rumor goes that the First Ankhanan Succession War was actually engineered by the Council of Brothers for the express purpose of placing the Incarnate Ma’elKoth on the Oaken Throne.”

  Behind my blandly disbelieving smile, I monologued to my audience of one, *Somehow it’s always about you and me, huh?*

  An edge of uneasiness shaved away the irony. I don’t often let myself think about the fractal web of destiny that interweaves my life with Ma’elKoth’s. Examining it too closely only makes me queasy. And fucking pissed. There’s a reckoning I owe, there.

  One of these days . . .

  “For my part, I find it an unlikely tale,” Markham said. “The Monasteries would hardly be interested in increasing the power of a god.”

  “He wasn’t exactly a god at the time.” Which is part of what made me a little sick. Still does. He’d built the fucking Spire while he was still human. More or less.

  “A god is a god, always and entire, incarnate or no. To the gods, time is a dream.”

  “It’s a swell theory.”

  Markham sniffed. “I will not debate theogony with an Ankhanan.”

  “Good thing, too. On this subject I can kick anybody’s ass.”

  The sinking sun cast bloody shadows across half-empty streets. Humans made way for us with inclined heads and tugged forelocks. Ogrilloi crumpled into instant submission and kept to their knees until the regard of the Lord Righteous had passed them by.

  The whitestone approach to the Spire’s main gate was a maze of interleaved sandbag berms, piled chest-high; every fold of the long winding queue was exposed to the silver-chased barrels of rifles that made sunset flames along the first rung of battlements, and to the black gapes of cannon above. Mounted armsmen paced their snorting horses around sandbag-walled paddocks, long guns propped on hauberked hipbones. Wagons and carts drawn by yoked teams of ogrilloi inched through inspection at a single checkpoint staffed by two Knights and a scurrying crew of examiners who wore metal-framed goggles that looked like simplified versions of the customs officers’ loupes. Wagons passed through by the inspectors were walked to a broad parking area. Gangs of ogrilloi unloaded them case by case and barrel by barrel and box by box, hand-carrying each piece into the Spire.

  I got it when I finally caught sight of the main gate. What was left of the main gate.

  A shattered gape in the Spire’s face. Blackened and empty.

  Desk-size blocks of dressed stone stood in huge stacks to one side. Some had been fitted already to mend the walls and build again the missing archway. The join of new stone and old was clearly visible, despite what must have been a week or two of scrubbing; the older stone bore brownish ghosts of scorchmarks.

  Must have been one serious bomb.

  I sidled close to Markham and nodded at the gate. “A wagon, right? Maybe a carriage. No driver. Just horses. A runaway, right up the street—”

  “Freeman Shade—”

  “That why ogrilloi haul your wagons?” I admired the efficiency: hostages as draft animals. And the reverse.

  “Freeman, the Champion awaits.”

  I was still looking at the shattered gate. “What’re you gonna do once they decide it’s worth dying to take a chunk out of you?”

  The Lord Righteous squinted down at me as though something had unexpectedly come into focus, but he made no reply.

  That was answer enough.

  Berms and bunkers. Checkpoints and sharpshooters.

  More than enough.

  Fading echoes, inside my head—

  a good death.

  honor on my clan.

  “All right, shit. I am a dumbass.” My wave took in the desperately screweddown antiterror fortifications. “Orbek figures into this somewhere, doesn’t he?”

  Markham didn’t answer.

  My mouth had gone dry, and the fist in my guts had turned to brick. “Markham?”

  Markham only kept walking.

  “Hey, goddammit, I’m talking to you—”

  “And I am not answering, Freeman Shade. I am tasked to see to your wounds and deliver your person unto the Champion. And no more.” The unsubtle emphasis was accompanied by a quickening of his already brisk pace.

  “Come on, give me a hint, huh?”

  Markham stopped. His oiled-steel stare followed his long Lipkan nose. “Why should I?”

  “Maybe to not be an asshole one day of your life?”

  “Freeman, you are rude, disrespectful, and vulgar. Not to mention foulmouthed. Where in your manner will I find an inclination to do you a favor?”

  “Shit, if I said something like that to you, we’d have to fight now—”

  “If you said anything like that to me,” the Lord Righteous replied in a tone that could freeze beer, “you would be a liar.”

  “Ooh, good one.” I rolled my eyes. “So this is because I haven’t sucked enough butt? Shit, why didn’t you tell me? Hey, nice armor, Markham. You make that yourself? And I really like your fucking hair . . .”

  I was talking to his retreating back.

  “Y’know,” I muttered as I dragged the travel trunk clattering after, “maybe there is something in the goddamn air.”

  If there was, it was getting into my head: the headache was ramping up again. A hot swollen mass of hurt gathered behind my eyes, thumping in time with my heart. I winced with its pulse as the Lord Righteous turned away from the berm-baffled gatewalk toward the face of Hell. “What, we’re not going in?”

  “The Champion awaits on the Purificapex atop the Eternal Vaunt. You will require transport.”

  The hot throb inside my head when I tried to lift my gaze up the thousand feet of whitestone behind wouldn’t let me argue. I shut the hell up and followed the Lord Righteous across the whitewashed flagstones toward the jitney landing.

  A thin misting drizzle had ridden into town on the dusk. Watch flames hissed and spat atop single-foot braziers. Lanterns swinging from half a dozen jitneys’ overhead lighthooks splashed shadows across the landing. Near the first tier’s face stood bulky freight carts, ogrilloi wrestling crates and casks up onto their beds. Heavy-linked chain
served the carts for traces, hooked through yokes of eight. Ogrilloi chained in the traces sat quietly, heads down, breath smoking in the evening chill.

  The twin thoroughfares that laddered either side of the face of Hell in vast switchbacked zags had been widened and repaved since my time: four lanes of ogrillo-drawn traffic could grind up or down the ten-percent grade without locking wheels. The thoroughfares’ long folded slant emptied onto a broad plaza crowded with bundle-laden ogrilloi, returning from jobs or shopping in the city below, waiting to load their burdens onto the jitneys, silent and patient in the rain.

  Mounted armsmen made sure they stayed that way.

  One of the water wranglers saw us coming. The grill dropped his cask on the flagstones and fell to his knees. “Knight!”

  Then another, and another. Water cart drovers jumped down from their seats and cracked urgent whips at the heads of the dray-gangs. Bundles and sacks fell unheeded to the wet stones. Water casks rolled as the wranglers threw themselves down.

  And for some reason, this had me thinking about Marade whittling the splinters off a broken shinbone.

  I saw her in my mind as if she were doing it right now: planing the shinbone down with a little knife to make a kind of flat toothpick about two fingers wide, then using it to scrape the joints of her sabatons free of black mashed-potato muck. Sticky black mashed-potato muck that smelled like meat—

  Rock dust and sand and clotted blood.

  I stopped and shook my head, looking up and around to ask the wet twilight what the fuck had reminded me of that right now, and the shape of Hell above and the angle of the lamp-sparked cliff face snatched memory—

  And I stopped breathing too. All I could do was blink.

  Here. Right here. The Khryllians had built the jitney landing over it. The gateway.

  The ambush.

  Fire and spears and arrows and screams and the schannk of short swords licking along steel rims of linked shields and Marade’s morningstar showering shredded flesh—

  Whatever the earth remembered of that clotted mush of sand and blood was under these whitestone flags. Right here. Right now. Where these hundreds of ogrilloi knelt in submission to a single Khryllian Lord.

  The last of my breath hissed out in a shuddering Holy crap, and when I breathed in again, I inhaled more headache.

  “Freeman Shade? Are you unwell?” Markham sounded like he hoped so.

  “I, uh—no. No. I just—I forgot something, that’s all.”

  “Is there some emergency?”

  “What?”

  “This matter you recall—does it require attention?”

  “I, uh—”

  I looked down. My boots shone in the rain, the whitestone flags beneath them grey with damp. In an open joint, a tiny anthill: mounded crumbs of the black earth beneath.

  “Yeah. Yeah, it probably does.” I scuffed the anthill into a smear of mud. “But it’s too fucking late to do anything about it now,” I said, and walked on.

  My headache got worse when we reached the jitney queue. As near as I could guess, I was standing right on top of where Pretornio had buried the porters. The two who died springing my trap on the Black Knives. I wondered if anyone had ever found the bodies.

  I didn’t think so. Somehow I didn’t think so. Somehow I could feel them down there: tangles of worm-scoured bone an arm’s length beneath my soles. Perry? Pivo? Something like that. One of them had started with P. I was sure of that much.

  Pretty sure.

  The other—?

  The deepening throb in my head drove off any hope of recall. My eyes drifted closed and I put the heel of a hand to my temple, rubbing in small circular motions that didn’t touch the pain, but also didn’t make it any worse. I kept doing it. It was something to do.

  “Freeman Shade?”

  Christ, my head hurt. “What?”

  “Please embark, freeman. You are delaying the queue.”

  I opened my eyes. The five grills in the jitney team knelt against their yokes, traces taut, their breath coming harsh and slow, arms slack and trembling: primly fascist autoerotic asphyxiation. They weren’t locked in: not convicts. This was a job. Four grills yoked in tandem, with a bitch single-yoked in the lead. Maybe watching her ass helped keep them trotting. The lead bitch had her forehead pressed to the insteps of Markham’s sabatons.

  The Lord Righteous didn’t seem to notice. “Freeman Shade?”

  i give myself to you.

  I watched drizzle trickle like spit across the back of her grey-leathered skull.

  fuckbitch

  I shook my head and had to look away before I could speak. “Y’know what? I think I’d rather—”

  But ogrilloi knelt everywhere, beside and before and behind, and the only direction I could look away was up . . . and up was the third tier, and I followed with my eyes a walkway I had once followed afoot toward wet strangled moans and porcine grunting in a black bloody midnight, and from down here I could see the angle just above the shattered chamber where I found Black Knives rooting into Stalton’s belly . . . bagged in his own armor, hauberk over his face like a rape victim’s skirt . . .

  “Fuck it anyway.” I waved a hand. “Make sure the bitch takes it easy with my trunk.”

  I rode. Markham walked—well, jogged—alongside, one hand on the cart’s bed rail like he belonged in a Social Police LeSec detail. The jitney team trotted around the steep switchbacks of the thoroughfare fast enough that just watching them made me tired. We weaved up the slope, overtaking other weather-splintered grill carts with their sullenly dead-eyed dray teams and ignoring the grills on foot; they’d scatter at the rattle of Markham’s sabatons on the stone, dropping their bundles into the drizzle-churned muck to take to their knees and lower their heads.

  Off the thoroughfare the levels of Hell slipped down around us, each shabbier and more crowded and more throat-choking with the overpowering stench of grill shit than the one below, as if the ogrilloi had organized themselves into instinctive castes. Down at the first level, they at least had clothes and lanterns and roofs over the ancient walls. Higher, the open gutters were packed with gnawed-down bones and rotten greens and sick yellow turds that melted slowly away in the rain; the only general improvement I could see that the Khryllians had made was to carve drains that emptied the gutters into sluices channeling the solid waste away from the river.

  Even all those years ago, I remember being puzzled why the First Folk would have built a city without sewers.

  Of course, now I pretty much know.

  By the time I stepped off the jitney at the fifth tier vault, I was whipped. Wrung out. The beating was barely half of it. This was worse. This was more. I’ve been beaten before. This was being beaten down. Beaten down by age, and by memory.

  Everything looked too different. Nothing looked different enough.

  The switchbacked thoroughfare still threaded high-arched tunnels to end at the vast almost-Gothic vault carved from the escarpment’s heartrock, but now, twenty-five years later, there were none of the shadows and dry must and sand, none of the lichen and gnawed-clean bones of small animals. The mica-flecked stone of the vault was scrubbed and spotless and polished to a mirror finish that threw back the light of dozens of lamps. Dual gates of filigreed iron closed both the lower entrance and the arch of the broad ramping tunnel that led to the surface of the escarpment above. The whole place had the air of a busy railhead, full of armsmen, clerks and porters, wagons, and chain gangs.

  The last time I’d been in this vault—

  I didn’t let myself think about it.

  “From here you walk,” Markham said. “You may safely leave the trunk anywhere you like. I will have it sent on to your hostelry.”

  “Shit. You could’ve done that back at the vigilry—”

  “Yes,” Markham said. “I could have.”

  The jitney bitch had her team backing the cart down the thoroughfare almost before my feet hit the rock. An attentive page was instantly on hand to take char
ge of the trunk. Markham directed me toward a new tunnel, broad as the thoroughfares, that had been cut the dozen meters or so through to the face.

  It opened onto a cargo aerie: a broad oval cliff of cut-smooth rock, twilight sky, and the creak of oiled hemp as three massive cranes lifted whole wagons and their loads over the lip of the plateau above, swinging them wide over the half-kilometer drop. On my left the escarpment fell away down the levels of Hell to the twilit map of Purthin’s Ford and the flat indigo snake of the river, and ahead—

  Ahead the Spire jabbed another hundred and thirty feet of swollen whitestone god-cock into the darkening sky.

  To my right the world was eclipsed by the buttress wall that supported the final sally bridge. From the city below, those sally bridges looked delicate as rainbows; up close, its arching buttress was a cliff of rain-slick whitestone too vast for comprehension.

  The whole thing was just way too fucking big.

  I tried to remind myself that I’m not exactly educated—that really, I know a grand total of dick about materials science. I tried to remind myself that for all I knew, maybe granite and whitestone really could support the stress of a fortress fifteen hundred feet tall. Maybe it could hold up open spans of bridge a couple hundred yards long. Not to mention however ungodly many bazillion gallons of water under whatever hellish pressure must be inside. Maybe Ma’elKoth just knew a lot more about engineering than anyone else. Anywhere. Ever.

  Maybe it was magick.

  Maybe that magick wasn’t going to unexpectedly decay while I was way too fucking close to that fucking thing.

  Markham led me along the cliff face toward a stone command house that had been built out from the base of the buttress. Like all official Khryllian structures, it was immaculate, all clean white lines and perfect white angles, and looked like it could double as a bunker. The outer room held regimented copying tables staffed by regimented Khryllian clerks making regimented lines of notes on the regimented contents of every wagon going up or down above the aerie; the back office held a pair of standard-issue back office types, distinguished only by their Soldier of Khryl crewcuts and the sunburst blazons on their blouses.