Caine Black Knife

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  “Rababàl . . .” I managed to say, or thought I did, blinking toward the dead man. “Rababàl, you needme . . .”

  The dead man leaned back into the fog. Rababàl died twenty-five years ago. You didn’t help him, and I need no help from you.

  “You can’t . . .” The words seemed to be sticking in the haze inside my head. I worked harder to push them out into the air. “Turn me over . . . this place . . . gone . . . a few days, that’s all . . . war—war with Ankhana—”

  That made some kind of impression; the grey-fringed face recoiled into a deeper blur. Is he—could that be true—?

  The almost-familiar voice answered, I learned long ago that from this man’s mouth, not even Khryl can hear truth.

  Ah . . .

  So that’s who Almost Familiar was.

  Even to my splintered consciousness, finding him here made everything make sense. I’m just fucking intuitive that way.

  Khryl’s friends within the Infinite Court assure me that his position in Church and Empire is purely symbolic. If war is to come, it will not come on his behalf.

  I tried to shake some use into my brain, and my mouth. “Not . . . about me, dumbass . . . make a deal—we need to deal—”

  Michaelson, I’m sorry. The grey-fringed blur didn’t sound sorry. It’s done.

  “No—no you can’t—can’t send me back . . . can’t give me to them . . . please—”

  I already have. Officers? Time is short. If you’ll bring him this way, please.“

  Stop, goddammit . . . stop—”

  Hanging from the wire-laced gloves of the Social Police, hands stripcuffed behind me, ankles bound together with the same wire-reinforced plastic, naked, retching, unable to stand, unable to see, I still somehow snarled myself an internal sword of sunfire to cut through the fog inside my head and burn it away. No matter how broken I am, somehow I can always get pissed enough to kill somebody.

  Because, y’know, I’ve never been the type to go gentle into that et cetera.

  The room snapped into focus. It looked like the hideout of a half-successful caravan raider. Expensive furniture that didn’t match, delicately carved where it wasn’t notched and starting to splinter, upholstered in beautiful leathers and crushed velvets and brocades that couldn’t hide the stains and wear of careless overuse. The rug that filled the whole room had once been fine as anything I’d put in the Abbey, my San Francisco mansion back when I was a star, but now it bore a grey-brown smear of ground-in wear track between the door and the overlarge, overcarved big-dick I’m The Boss desk in overstained cherry. And there were wall hangings and shit that framed silver hookstands holding blackened glass lamps, but the silver was tarnished and the tapestries smudged with lampblack and the walls they hung on were cheap whitewashed plaster tracked with blue-grey mildew. The whole place looked impermanent, half-abandoned already, like this Faller guy had boosted the best of Duke Kithin’s furnishings before he’d left Thorncleft, then had just stashed the shit in some shack so he could piss on it like a bear before leaving it behind.

  In that raider’s cave of a room—besides me and the Social Police and Markham Lord Situational Fucking Ethics and the middle sixties–looking guy who was Rababàl’s ghost or twin brother or identical goddamn cousin or whateverthefuck that I didn’t care about right then because he was a problem for another time—stood a magnificent man in magnificent armor, the kind of Radiant Mantle of Kingship sonofabitch that doesn’t really exist outside of stories and songs; you know, Arthur, Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, Richard Cour de Lion, all those blood-drunk thugs with good enough press agents to somehow end up heroes to way too many gullible losers.

  Not unlike me, I guess. But let that go.

  The armor was chrome steel, curves and angles of mirror that gleamed like dawn’s own rhodos goddamn dactylos in the lamplight. The guy inside was your basic snow-topped mountain of Biblical Patriarch, but in the blossom of mature strength—y’know, like that white brow and beard salted his face only to give the calm certainty in his eye a translucent shimmer of Revealed Truth.

  When I say eye, by the way, that’s literal.

  Half his face had that carved-from-God’s-Own-Granite agelessly rugged beauty that well befits said legendary king. The other half, well . . .

  His left eye socket was a crumpled ruin of empty scar above a deep ragged dent that once had been nobly jutting cheekbone; it looked a lot like some vicious ghetto punk had, about twenty-five years ago, say, sneak-punched him with his own morningstar.

  This appearance was not, as smart people might have guessed already, coincidental.

  With all the mental and physical clarity my internal sunblade could bring me, I managed to gasp, “I was never his prisoner . . .”

  “All that matters,” the soapy on my left said in very credible Westerling, “is that you’re our prisoner now,” and he and his partner kept on hauling me toward where Rababàl’s ghost twin cousin was holding the door for us until six foot nine of chrome steel and Biblical Patriarch moved into our way with the reluctantly majestic unstoppability of an entire glacier cracking free of a mountainside to slide into an arctic sea.

  The Social Police, wisely, stopped. So did I, perforce.

  Purthin, Lord Khlaylock, Justiciar Impeccable of the Order of the Knights of Khryl, turned that Revealed Truth glare on Markham, Lord Tarkanen, Lord Righteous in service to the Champion of Khryl. “Is this truth?”

  Markham didn’t so much as blink, let alone flush. “I was tasked by My Lord Justiciar to deliver this man without fail,” he said simply. “I did not fail.”

  “Ambushed me . . .” I slurred. “Abducted . . . while I w’s tryin’ t’ save people . . .”

  Now Markham did have the grace to flush, just a little bit. So I twisted the knife. It’s what I do. “While I was doing his duty . . . defending the Civility of the Battleground . . .”

  It was more than moderately gratifying to watch color rise through the face of that supercilious Lipkan asscob all the way to the roots of his crewcut.

  “A direct order—my duty is to the—”

  “Everybody’s got . . . a fucking excuse . . .” Adrenaline sang in my ears. I didn’t know the words but I could sure as hell hum the goddamn tune. “You abandoned your people to danger . . . you swore an oath to Khryl H’mself . . . the word’s recreant, yeah? You ambushed me . . . without warning or Challenge—makes you, ah—craven—”

  The red in Markham’s face had gone white around the eyes. He wheeled on Khlaylock. “My Lord Justiciar—this abuse, my Lord—”

  His niece’s jaw had looked like it could split logs; his could crack rocks. “You need not suffer it.”

  “He seeks only to cheat the carnifex.”

  “It is never wise,” Purthin Khlaylock murmured mordantly around that rock-breaker jaw, “to assume that one knows this man’s intention.”

  He didn’t actually lift a gauntlet to the ruin of his empty eye socket, but I’ll bet my nuts he was thinking about it.

  Markham aimed that Lipkan nose toward my face like a blade at garde, then waved a mailed hand as he turned away. “I see no reason to allow a personal affair of honor to interfere with the course of justice.”

  “Personal . . . ?” I forced out. “I’m an Armed Motherfucking Combatant. . .”

  Markham went still. So did Khlaylock.

  “ ’S your fucking Law . . .”

  “It is Khryl’s Law,” Mount Khlaylock rumbled above me, “and you would do well to mind your—”

  “Yeah . . . sure. Whatever.” My shrug made my head hurt worse, which helped me grin and kept the haze at bay for a few seconds so my mouth could work. “I did not Yield, and I was not defeated in Combat. Markham, Lord Tarkanen, is no true Knight, but is a whatthefuck—a recreant craven ambusher and common criminal, yeah—and I call upon Khryl and His Justiciar to Witness the truth of my charge. I swear by your God and His Law, I am by right a free man.”

  This looks on the page a lot more impressive tha
n it sounded drooling out of the smashed-up mouth of a middle-aged blood- and puke-smeared naked guy with stripcuffed wrists and ankles who was hanging from the grips of a pair of homicidal supercops in high-tech body armor, but it worked.

  Markham stared like I’d invited him to bend over and lube his asshole. Rababàl—Faller—dropped his face into one hand with an English “Ohhh, for Christ’s God damn sake.” The soapies tilted their mirrors at each other, then pointed them back at Khlaylock.

  “Legality is moot,” one said. “Administrator Michaelson is our prisoner now.”

  “No.” If the stone tablets on which God carved the Ten Commandents could talk, they would have sounded a lot like Khlaylock’s voice did then. “Khryl is Lord of Justice. If Our Lord affirms his charge, this man is free. It is the Law.”

  He faced Markham. “Lord Tarkanen, will you Answer?”

  Markham looked appalled. “My Lord, he is but grade six—hardly more than an armsman—and his injury . . . I misdoubt he can so much as stand—”

  “If the Lord refuses my Challenge, I’ll do more than stand.” I tried to sound like I believed it. “I’ll walk right the fuck out of here, and it’s your goddamn duty to make sure I—”

  “Do not presume to instruct me on Khryl’s Law.” Khlaylock’s stare never wavered from Markham. Maybe he didn’t want to dirty his eyes with the image of my face. Deliberate as the planet’s turn, and as relentless, he said, “Will you Answer?”

  Markham sighed. “My Lord, I will.”

  Khlaylock lowered his head. “So let it be. I will Witness.”

  “You were here—you’ll tell them, you have to tell them—” Rababàl was babbling at the soapies, who were again pointing the mirror-masks of those helmets at each other. “He was alive when I delivered him to you—this is not my fault—”

  “And he will be alive when we deliver him to Social Court,” Soapy One said.

  “That remains to be seen.” Khlaylock paused at Markham’s side and set his gauntlet across the top curve of the Lord Righteous’s pauldron. “Markham—entertain no assumptions, and cherish no confidence of victory. He would not make such Challenge had he no stratagem to defeat you.”

  This was true, but hardly sporting of him to bring up right then.

  Markham’s bleak grey stare settled on my presumably short future. “My Lord, your words are heard.”

  “Nor depend upon Our Lord, even with truth on your side. This man uses the Law only to serve his ends. He knows nothing of honor.”

  This, on the other hand, was a damn lie; I know plenty about honor. It just happens to be a luxury I can’t fucking afford.

  He had good enough reason to dislike and distrust me. Twenty-five years ago, when he was still the Knight Captain commanding the Khryllian garrison at North Rahndhing, just outside the southeastern fringe of the Boedecken, and I was nearing the end of the Adventure that was making me a star, we had a minor disagreement about the tactical approach we should take in dealing with the remnants of the Black Knife Nation. This disagreement became a dispute, which I settled in a less-than-strictly-honorable fashion—because in a straight fight he would have killed me before I could blink—and our working relationship ended with me leaving him for dead in the hands of the surviving Black Knives.

  Regardless that it turned out pretty well for him in the end, I admit this was a rotten thing to do. I was a very bad man in those days. I’m not much of a good man now.

  Which is not an excuse.

  I’m not trying to rationalize anything, or even to explain anything. Actions justify themselves, or they don’t. Words can’t make them right or wrong. Dad used to say, “If you need to justify something, you shouldn’t have done it.” Like I said when I started this: it’s about what happened. Not why.

  So this is what happened.

  I met Purthin Khlaylock at the end of the actual retreat part of Retreat from the Boedecken. By my best count—because I don’t make a habit of reviewing my old Adventures, especially that one—it was thirty-four days, give or take, after I destroyed the Tear of Panchasell and unleashed the Caineway.

  I still can’t remember how many people were in Rababàl’s original expedition—thirty-nine or forty, something like that. Ten of us got out of Hell alive.

  Not counting Rababàl himself. But let that go.

  The cook, Nollo, supposedly of Mallantrin; his lover, also supposedly of Mallantrin, Jashe, the guy everybody called the Otter; three “brothers” from Hrothnant, Tarpin, Matrin, and Karthran; a pair of surly “Jheledi” bondsmen, Kynndall and Wralltagg; and Marade and Tizarre.

  And me.

  By the time we made contact with the Khryllian outpost at North Rahndhing, there was Marade and Tizarre, and there was me.

  It was the best month of my life.

  In a straight ride—with water and spare horses—it was seven days from Hell to North Rahndhing. In friarpace—a semimagickal meditative form of running I’d trained in at Garthan Hold—I could have made it alone in five, if I’d been in top form. About as fast as a healthy ogrillo warrior, again assuming I could find water along the way.

  But if we’d gone straight anywhere, they would have run us down and killed us ugly.

  It’s hard to say how many Black Knives died when I unleashed the river, because nobody I’ve talked to really knows how many there were to start with. Some estimates say there were as few as seven thousand in the clan. Some put the number closer to fifteen thousand or even eighteen thousand. I can tell you this, though: those who survived that night were not the old, or the very young, or the weak, or the slow.

  And there were about three thousand of them.

  Three thousand of the toughest, meanest, fastest, strongest bitches and bucks of the Black Knife Nation pulled themselves out of the wreckage of their most sacred holy ground to find themselves standing among the broken corpses of their brothers and sisters. Their parents. Their children.

  The remnants of the Black Knife Nation were, as one might imagine, immoderately pissed at me.

  I was top of my entire novitiate in Smallgroup Tactics at Garthan Hold, but I barely even needed my training. Every one of the seven surviving “porters” had graduated from the Studio Conservatory’s Combat School, so even though none of them were superstar material—except maybe Jashe—they knew their business inside and out. And Tizarre, whose Cloaks could make us more or less invisible, and we had the bladewand, and a shitload of other stuff Kollberg had strategically placed for us . . . not to mention Marade, who was a homicidal Wonder Woman and kinda immoderately pissed herself.

  Screw tactics.

  All I needed was to remember some of those books Dad used to make me read. Such as War and Peace.

  According to Tolstoy, Kutuzov beat Napoleon on the French retreat from Moscow by refusing to do battle. He kept their armies in contact, so Napoleon could never relax—he had to keep his army in battle order at all times—but every time Napoleon would march out to fight, Kutuzov would retire. When Napoleon would go back to his camp, Kutuzov would advance: the military version of Push Hands.

  I combined this principle with some basic concepts of guerrilla warfare I’d picked up from The Life of Geronimo. So when the Black Knives would come out in force, we’d circle behind and murder wounded in their camps. When they’d send out single-pack scouting parties, at least one entire pack, sometimes two or three if they weren’t too far apart, would vanish . . . and be found later as skinned corpses, missing their scent glands. If they posted pickets, we killed the pickets. If they picketed whole packs, well . . .

  Ogrilloi bunch up when threatened. It’s instinctive. So when spooky noises would start coming from the darkness, they’d drift together—then one swipe of the bladewand . . .

  We’d drag the bodies around before we skinned them and piled them up, to make it look to the Black Knives like we’d been able to kill the pack because we’d caught them spread too far apart. Get it?

  And, y’know, the corpses wouldn’t be only skinne
d, either. They’d be partially eaten.

  This was not just for effect.

  I could pretend it was simple pragmatism. We had to be mobile. Our lives depended on it. So none of us carried supplies other than water skins. We lived on what we took off Black Knife corpses. And on the corpses themselves. Sure, blood’s thicker than water. But you get used to it.

  Tastes good, too.

  I’m not into pretending, though. Not anymore. The real reason everyone was eating Black Knife meat and drinking Black Knife blood is because I made them do it.

  Partly it was my innate sense of justice.

  Yes, justice, goddammit. If they want to kill and eat me, I will kill them, and I will eat them.

  Period.

  This was not the argument I made to the rest. I didn’t make an argument. Our first day out, I came back into our cold night camp with a skinned ogrillo leg over my shoulder and told Tizarre to take the bladewand and start carving off chops.

  They weren’t real excited about this idea.

  After all, the only differences between ogrilloi and humans are some details of phenotype; the two species are closely related enough to even be cross-fertile, to a limited extent, kind of like horses and donkeys. Eating ogrilloi was close enough to cannibalism to make everybody but me more than a little queasy.

  I won’t go into the details of the scene, who said what and all, because that’s not what this story is about. Let’s just leave it at this: It started with me telling everybody that we’d be eating ogrilloi because it’d make us all smell more like ogrilloi—we’d be sweating their proteins and crapping their fats, y’know?—which was starting to work until somebody, Jashe, I think, pointed out that it wouldn’t make us smell like grills, it’d make us smell like humans who are eating grills, which was when things started to turn ugly.

  I ended up explaining in a very calm, very quiet voice that we didn’t have enough supplies to survive, and we couldn’t carry people who weren’t pulling their weight, and anyone who wasn’t willing to go all the way with this should just trot on back and give themselves to the Black Knives right fucking now.