Caine Black Knife

by Matthew Woodring Stover

“I require this office,” Markham said, and the back-office types gathered their papers and their charcoals and vanished without a word. Without so much as a glance. At either of us. Or each other.

  “They don’t ask why? Who I am? They don’t even ask how long?”

  “It is not their duty to know.”

  The door closed behind them. He moved to the rear wall of the office, which was tiled with the same brilliant whitestone that made the whole Spire shine—probably was the buttress wall itself. He ran the flat of his hand over the stone in a long smooth curve that could almost have been a caress.

  He said, “Phy’nyll tin Pinèsh,” and the sunset around his hand took on a faint wash of blue that flowed from his outstretched fingers. A rectangular section of wall swung backward into darkness. From within came a subterranean thunder, almost subsonic: a slow permanent earthquake in the absolute black:my river rumbling past.

  Oh, for shit’s sake. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “Please follow me.” Walking through, Markham was instantly swallowed by night.

  I squinted into the darkness. “What am I, a fucking bat? How about a lamp?”

  “The way is straight and smooth, with hazard to neither head nor foot.” Markham’s voice echoed with the patience of the stone around us. “If you like, I will carry you.”

  The way my head felt, I was tempted to take the bastard up on it. Instead I only sighed. “Anybody ever tell you you’re a funny guy?”

  “No.”

  “There’s a reason for that,” I said, and followed into the night-shrouded passage. As soon as I entered, the panel swung shut behind me and the way was dark as a cave.

  Even this took me back. Walking along smooth flat stone in absolute black, left hand brushing polished wall cold and dripping with what I hoped was just rock sweat, I was twenty-five again with Marade at my side, walking out cold iron calm from midnight into screaming bloody dawn . . .

  I could still feel the spring steel of muscle under the velvet skin of her thigh. I could still smell my blood on her hand, feel her tongue between my lips . . .

  Sometime later another panel opened onto lamplight. Markham stepped aside to let me pass first through the doorway.

  It was the first place in Purthin’s Ford that didn’t smell clean. It was also the first Khryllian place that wasn’t white. Some kind of Roman-style bath, tiled in brown terra-cotta—a long curving pool of rusty-looking water lay flat and still below a shallow flight of steps. The steps continued into depths invisible in the rusty murk. The room smelled stale and old—far too old for a place built less than twenty years ago—thick with must and decay, lampblack and a meaty butcher-shop funk.

  Three steps led up to a narrow walkway that hugged the inner curve of the wall above the pool. The light in the room came from lamps hung on chains above this walkway; there were no windows. The wall near the steps was hung with clothes hooks, the first three holding towels and the rest empty. An array of armor racks stood nearby, all empty save one, and that one was hung not with chain or plate but with ordinary clothing, a tunic and pants that might have been of raw silk.

  Markham had stopped in the passageway. “This is the Lavidherrixium. From here,” he said from the half light, “you will continue alone.”

  I shrugged and turned for the walkway stairs.

  “No,” Markham said from behind me. “You approach the Purificapex of the Lord of Valor.”

  I looked over my shoulder. The Lord Righteous pointed at the pool.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “You may disrobe here, and hang your clothing. You will find a robe on the far side.”

  “What am I supposed to do, swim? In that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are batshit insane.”

  “The taints of Cowardice and Compromise must be washed from you before you may approach.” Upper-case emphasis was clear in his tone. “You must be made Clean.”

  “That’s gonna make me clean? Are you pulling my dick? It smells like—” I squinted along the curve of the wall and saw the robes hanging on the far side, and the robes weren’t white either; they were terra-cotta brown. The same brown as the tiles. The same brown as the rusty tinge of the water.

  The butcher-shop funk finally got through to me.

  “Oh, for shit’s sake.” My head pounded. I rubbed my eyes. “I remember this from Abbey school—that fucking Khryllian Sanctified by the Blood of Heroes crap . . . it’s supposed to be just a metaphor—”

  “Freeman, the Champion awaits.”

  I looked at the water for a long moment. I tried to imagine so much as dipping in a toe. My stomach churned.

  I turned for the door. “Tell the Champion I appreciate the sentiment and thanks very much for the Healing and the three-peasant tour, but this is a little bit way too motherfucking much, and I am out of here like a—”

  I came to a sudden stop. The doorway was full of Khryllian. The Khryllian said, “No.”

  “Markham, get out of my way.”

  “You may make the attempt to move me.”

  “I’m telling you I’m not doing this—”

  “And I am telling you, Freeman Shade, that you are.”

  The Lord Righteous’s stare was full of cold possibility.

  “You pull this swim-in-the-blood shit on everybody who comes up here, or is this something special just for me?”

  Something flickered through Markham’s eyes then, something I hadn’t seen before: something cold and hot together. Something angry, and frightened. Wounded.

  Dangerous.

  “Fuck me.” I suddenly had a little trouble getting my breath. “There is no ‘everybody who comes up here,’ is there? That’s the going up Hell instead of inside the Spire, the secret passage, the no introductions, all of it. It’s so nobody starts running around yelling there’s a non-Khryllian desecrating Our Holy Pukinsuckmydick or whateverthefuck you call it. You’ve never done this before—”

  “I am tasked to deliver you to the Champion.” Markham’s voice had gone as dangerous as his eyes.

  “You don’t know what’s going on either.” I jabbed a finger at the Khryllian’s petrifying face. “You don’t have a fucking clue.”

  Markham’s jaw worked like he was chewing rocks. “It is not my duty to know.”

  “And it’s killing you. It’s eating you alive.”

  The progress of his self-control could be traced by the slow drain of flush from his cheeks down into his neck. He wrapped himself in supercilious Lipkan disdain. “It is not my duty to know.”

  So I turned away and stripped off my tunic. I threw it to the floor under the clothes hooks with a short dark laugh. “Gonna be here on my way out?”

  “Perhaps,” Markham said warily to my back. “Why?”

  “Maybe I’ll fill you in,” I said as I kicked off my boots and unbuckled my belt, “or maybe—”

  I dropped my pants. “Maybe I’ll just give you one more chance to kiss my ass.”

  LEGEND

  RETREAT FROM THE BOEDECKEN (partial)

  you are CAINE (featured Actor: Pfnl. Hari Michaelson)

  MASTER: NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.

  © 2187 Adventures Unlimited Inc. All rights reserved.

  They roar toward my back like a tornado on crank.

  To hell with the jinking, the juking and the fuck-my-ass serpentine: I take the last ten meters at a dead sprint. A clattering rain of barbed arrows rattles onto the gateway’s stone. One of them clips my butt as I dodge around the upright and stumble into the linked shield-wall of a dozen porters. The guy I slammed into doesn’t blink. None of them do.

  Twelve identical thousand-yard stares: they don’t even see me.

  Guess I bought Pretornio enough time after all.

  Three faces peer over the wall-top. Fuckers. Wish I had something to throw at them. “What happened to my Cloak?”

  Tizarre grimaces a baffled apology that I’d like to pound into her face with a rock. Stalton hisse
s, “Come on, they’re-right-behind-you come on—!”

  The hand I grabbed my ass with comes back red. “Fucking right.”

  A few centuries’ neglect have chewed back mortar a span deep between the huge dressed-stone blocks of the gateway; I jump, grab on, and scramble up the rest of the eight meters as fast as most guys can climb stairs.

  Black Knives boil into the gateway. Shouting. Roaring. Bellows of bloodlust and rage below my feet. I flick a glance down behind me—

  Ogrilloi surge and snarl around the twin formations of the porters. The porters stand braced in kratrio to either side of the crumbled gate arch: locked shield to shield, the rear rank’s shields held flat overhead like a steel-tiled roof, leaving just enough of a slit for their long-bladed stabbing spears to lick outward at any Black Knife stupid enough to stumble into reach.

  As I’m clawing over the lip onto the top of the wall, Pretornio lifts his arms as though delivering a benediction. The kratrii begin to move.

  Leaning into their shields, the porters force their way into the boil of Black Knives in perfect lockstep. Vertical cracks open in their shield wall to pass the short thick hacking-blades each man carries in his right hand. Where they strike, Black Knives bleed.

  No wonder Lipke could bitch-hump this whole continent. Half an hour with a priest of Dal’Kannith, and twenty-five surly, untrained, lazy goddamn packbearers are suddenly a Roman fucking legion.

  They grind toward each other, pinching off the inflow of Black Knives like a sphincter with razor-blade teeth. On the wall, Stalton leans around the broad curve of the panel shield he’s covering Rababàl with. A stack of sword-bladed spears lean in the crenel next to him, and he’s got my hauberk in his free hand. “You are one stone batshit son of a bitch.”

  I flash him a grin and keep moving. He hefts my armor. “Suit up, kid. They’ll be climbing—” but I’m already past the shield and in Rababàl’s face.

  “Now, goddammit! Now!”

  Rababàl’s got a thousand-yard stare of his own: mindview. He reaches out, and the charged buckeyes he scattered in the rocks outside the wall blast flame. The air shirrs with stone-shard shrapnel. Burning, bleeding Black Knives howl and claw at each other, trailing meat-scented smoke.

  Huh: smells like burnt duck.

  Rababàl’s expression stays blankly remote and he starts mumbling under his breath. A couple Black Knives leap for the farside wall. Rababàl snaps a smoking buckeye at them like he’s flicking a booger, and it erupts into flame that blasts them back to the ground, on fire and howling.

  Stalton drops my hauberk and grabs a spear with a very stylish one-handed flourish that slashes a hand off the first Black Knife up our wall. The ogrillo roars as it tumbles toward the jagged masonry below. “Caine, your armor—”

  “Leave it. Pass me one of those spears.”

  “The arrows—”

  “Have you seen those arrows?” I may not be the most educated cockknocker in this city today, but I know the story of Agincourt.

  For answer, he hands me his spear and reaches for another. Bright bloody steel jabbing and slicing at their hands and faces convinces the Black Knives to take their chances on the ground.

  Good fucking luck. They’re about to learn how it feels to be iron.

  The porters re-form into a single rectangle that corks the gate mouth, front two ranks facing the smoldering ogrilloi out in the badlands, rear rank facing the broad corridor of the gateway. That’s the anvil.

  The Black Knives trapped inside—a dozen, maybe fifteen—surge and snarl and roar.

  Through the deep-shadowed arch at the inner end of the gateway, jauntily spinning a four-kilo morningstar as lightly as a majorette’s baton, strides the unstoppable human battle tank that is Marade.

  Already got the hammer part figured, huh?

  There is a cheerful abandon in the way she goes to work on the mass of panicked flailing screaming Black Knives, and y’know what?

  I think I’m in love.

  >>scanning fwd>>

  They stand in little clusters out in the badlands, well beyond bowshot. Watching.

  Down below, Marade tosses another dead Black Knife onto the growing pile outside the gate mouth.

  That’s it, you fuckers. Watch. Not one ogrillo will come back out that gate alive.

  Watch, you bastards. You cocksmoking asswhores. Watch.

  And think it over.

  Tizarre’s still babbling about her Cloak. “I don’t understand—it doesn’t make any sense . . . the more power I threw into it, the weaker it got—”

  “Yeah, I know. Shut up about it, will you?” She makes a little noise like half a whimper, and I wave a dismissing hand. “Look, forget it. Didn’t get hurt, did I?”

  Except for the crease on my buttcheek that stings like a bastard every time I take a step, but forget that too. “Go help Marade, huh?”

  “Help her do what?”

  “I don’t give a shit. Just go.” Do I have time for her wounded fucking feelings?

  I turn away and screw the spyglass back into my eye. Wish I knew enough about ogrilloi to read the expressions on their faces. What bugs me: none of the Black Knives carry packs. Only a few even carry water skins. And there’s no koshoi, and there’s none of the little sorta-almost-burros Boedecken ogrilloi use to carry supplies and loot. I don’t think this is a raiding party. I don’t think it ever was. I’ve got a sinking feeling that it might be a short-range reconnaissance-in-force.

  Or worse: like a, y’know, like a posse . . .

  Now one of them squats. Just drops, right where he is, bouncing down in that Asian peasant-in-the-paddy crouch, balancing comfortably between his knees. And another one. A few more—

  And there they go. All of them, dropping in a weirdly beautiful not-quite-random ripple like a crowd settling in after a standing ovation.

  Settling in to wait.

  No: not all. Three of them peel off and lope away, off into the badlands. Along their backtrail.

  Time to go.

  My eye socket aches. I need to lay off the Zeiss before I pop an eyeball right the hell out of my face. “Rababàl. We need to get people together. Is Pretornio still dicking around?”

  “I wouldn’t call it—”

  “How long does it take to bury a couple bodies?” Yeah, yeah, respect for the dead, sure. Petro and Lagget were good guys, greater love hath no man, whatever. They’re dead, we’re not, and I want to keep it that way. “Rababàl?”

  No answer. He’s staring out at the mass of Black Knives, flicking that fucking coin through his fingers again. “What are they doing? Just sitting there. Staring at us. Did it work? Will they leave, now?”

  “If they were leaving, they’d be gone already.”

  “Your brilliant plan,” he mutters. “What are they waiting for?”

  I shrug. “Dark.”

  He squints at me.

  “Ogrilloi are—what’s the word? You know: twilight hunters.”

  “Crepuscular.”

  “Yeah. So they’re gonna wait till dark, because their night vision’s a lot better than ours. Not to mention their sense of smell. And they won’t come in a rush this time. It’ll be scouting parties. Little ones, and maybe a lot of them: ogrilloi like to hunt in packs of seven to ten. They’ll come in quiet. Infiltrating, if they can. Find out where we are and what we have.”

  “And how do you expect to stop them?”

  “I don’t. I expect to be gone.”

  “Now we run?”

  “If this had just been about chasing those two guys in the badlands, they’d have left already. There’s something here they want.”

  “Other than us?

  I shrug again and poke my chin at the pile of Black Knife dead. “Something worth getting another chunk of their collective dick chopped off. I don’t think we qualify.”

  “I pray you’re right.”

  “You do that.”

  He makes a face at me. “And now?”

  I bite down on a sigh
; it comes out a flat hiss between my teeth. “Tell Stalton to have Kess and the grooms start tacking up the horses.”

  >>scanning fwd>>

  Oh.

  Well.

  That’s it, then.

  I take the Zeiss from my eye and hold it balanced on my grimy blood-caked palm. It’s a goddamn nifty little thing. Seamlessly linked ovoids of brushed stainless steel. Kidskin-padded eye cup. Laser-ground polarized optics. A little crust of dried blood mars its softly gleaming surface, and I absently rub it clean with my thumb.

  Man, I have seen a lot of shit with it today.

  Somebody in my line of work must have brought it from back home. Had to be a long time ago. On freemod. One of the old-timers, maybe even one of the guys I grew up watching. The bosses those days were a lot looser about high-tech contraband. This nifty little piece of quality craftsmanship has probably been knocking around this world longer than I’ve been alive. Getting lost, getting stolen. Traded. Pawned.

  Looted.

  I remember how startled I was when I first saw it, when Hoppy Spinner pulled it out of his kit bag that afternoon in the God’s Teeth. I remember wondering if Hoppy might be another like me: a struggling second-rater nobody ever heard of. I figured he must be in my line of work. I remember how I found out he wasn’t.

  There were ogrilloi there too.

  I remember finding what was left of his body after they let their khoshoi strip his bones. How the shreds and tatters left behind lay quietly decomposing.

  I found this monocular in a pool of khoshoi vomit between his fang-scored pelvis and splintered ribs. Khoshoi are as conservative as wolves; whichever one yarked up this hunk of indigestible metal had gone ahead and eaten whatever else had come up with it. All that was left was the Zeiss and a handful of clotted bile.

  This little fucking thing is all I still have of old Hoppy. Wonder where he got it.

  From the anxious crowd of partners and porters half crouching within the shadowed mouth of the crest passage, Rababàl says hoarsely, “What is it? What do you see?”

  I drift away from the passage mouth, through the scrub toward the brink of this vast escarpment. My boots crunch through sand and loose gravel. Below, the vertical city spreads in descending rings like a peeled-open map of the Inferno.