Caine Black Knife

by Matthew Stover

  Annnnnd . . .

  When the world comes to life, I’m off the cross.

  Under my back—

  —night-cold stone—

  Oh god—

  Oh god oh god I made it. I’m off the fucking cross.

  I made it.

  Thank you. Oh, thank you.

  The night gathers force in my ears: roars and screams. Smell of burning shit and hair and rotten meat.

  Pressure on my chest crushes my sobbing down to thick gasps, then to a choked hush. I open my eyes. It’s Crowmane’s foot.

  Long as my forearm. Wide as my hand span. Toenails hooked enough to draw blood from my chest. Her eyes smoke yellow into the stars around her head. Reality pulses around her right hand. Talk now, little rabbit. Talk of this Chi’iannon’s Cauldron. Tell me how I stop it.

  Shit.

  Gahh. She left—

  Fucking spikes’re still in my wrists—

  And—ahh, fuck me, fuck me, she left my ankles nailed together, ahh, fuck—

  Guess I can give right the hell up on that quick getaway.

  Talk now, little rabbit.

  So I meet her eyes and give her the truth I promised. “You can’t stop it.”

  Without transition her huge foot is on my throat—so goddamn wide she’s breaking my sonofabitching neck—

  Tell this again, little rabbit. Tell this for the last time.

  If she weren’t crushing my throat right now, I’d tell her I love her.

  With weakly trembling hands, I scrabble at her ankle, then let my arms fall back, right thrown across my face to mask what she’s got to think is despair.

  Hands work. So do arms. Maybe even legs, if I can take the pain.

  She did this for me. And I’m off the cross. She did that for me too.

  I love her very, very much.

  I don’t need Control Disciplines. The singing in my ears makes the night a wonderland of shimmer and fades the screams and roaring into a distant melody of blood.

  Darling . . . they’re playing our song . . .

  From behind my right elbow I manage some whimpering gasps around her huge clawed foot on my neck. “Y’can’t . . . stop the spell—’s done—all y’can do . . . ’s chop ’m up and burn ’m . . .”

  She leans over me, shifting weight onto the foot-wide paw on my neck. My cervical vertebrae pop and crackle as the ligaments stretch. Her drool drips down across my face. It smells of rot. Been too gentle with you, little rabbit.

  I shift my left hand three inches. Her eyes never flicker. She didn’t pick up the motion. The heel of my left hand is now against the head of the spike through my right wrist.

  Oh, my god, how I love this bitch.

  Some ideas I save. Something special.

  I love her so much, I’m going to fuck her.

  Special just for little—

  Right swinging backhand from my left armpit, left jamming like a short shovel-hook and I can’t get much on them but together I don’t need a whole hell of a lot. The spike through my right wrist spears deep into the side of her knee.

  It grates on bone and I can’t tell if it’s mine or hers but I’m balls-up adrenoamped far beyond feeling any fucking pain.

  She jerks like I clamped a high-tension line to her nipples and says—

  “. . . hurkk . . .”

  —and I give the head of the spike another good whack with the heel of my left hand, and this time the bone it grates on is the inside of her kneecap because when she yanks back her leg, the spike rips down and jams behind her patellar tendon, so her yank of the leg yanks me with it by the spike, which sits me up and plants her foot within the loop of my pinned-together legs and slams my battered nervous system hard enough to grey the world down by better than half—

  But there is a fundamental difference between her and me. On the street, in the ring, on Adventure—so many times I’ve been half out or better, so greyed I didn’t know where my fucking legs were, hurt, cut, bleeding, having to use one hand to hang onto my guts while I try to cover my head with the other—

  I can deal.

  Crowmane, though—what is she? She’s no Marade, no Pretornio. She’s not even a Tizarre. When you carve all the way to nuts and guts, Crowmane’s just a bitch with a shitty attitude, playing games with somebody else’s power.

  Which is why when some of the world is slipping back into focus she’s still screaming like a brain-damaged howler monkey and trying to shake me off her leg.

  It’s only now that she remembers she’s got better than a hundred pounds on me and a razor-sharp fighting claw curving around the fist that is directly over my head.

  All I can do is bring up my left as her right comes down and in the last infinitesimal fraction of a second I register the relationship between her fist and my forearm and an image blossoms and my forearm adjusts its angle without interference from my brain.

  Her fist comes down. Her fighting claw spears into my trapezius and scrapes my collarbone but goes no deeper because my block braced my left forearm across my head which set the spike in that forearm against my skull like a spear grounded to receive a horseman’s charge.

  The horseman, in this case, is Crowmane’s fist.

  She takes the spike between the second and third knuckle and she jerks again, rearing up, yowling—

  Which is when we both remember that the fist she just punched me with, the fist I just spiked, was her right.

  The one holding that ball of Reality—

  The world darkens back into existence . . .

  Still pinned together—my forearm to her knee—

  Not pinned forearm to fist anymore. She doesn’t have a fist. Just a stump of charred bone.

  A snap of my left arm whips the white-hot remnant of the spike out of my charring flesh, and there is a bleak red light shining up on her and from the smell and the pain I’m guessing that my hair’s on fire, and I don’t give half a mouthful of shit. That spike was grounded against my skull.

  We’ve been joined by the Outside Power.

  She’s looking down at me, and in those yellow eyes now is the greatest gift she will ever give me.

  Fear.

  Because we Know each other now. And the punkass bleeding heart who said “To understand all is to forgive all” wasn’t from my fucking neighborhood.

  I grin up at her. “Shaikkak Nerutch’khaitan . . .”

  I roll her name around in my mouth.

  “Skaikkak Nerutch’khaitan—” My left hand spasms with nerve shock from the burn through my forearm; I let the spasm beckon to her. “I believe this is my dance.”

  Her stump and her left hand make an off-balance pinwheel when she tries to backstroke into the night sky. I throw my weight forward when her heel hits my nailed-together ankles, and my forearm spike comes free from behind her kneecap and I keep the momentum going forward so that I can roll up onto one shrieking foot and shove myself up her leg and hook my left arm behind her neck. My weight captures her balance, and she keeps on staggering backward.

  Behind her is the perimeter wall and beyond that there is nothing but coils of black turd smoke spinning toward the sky.

  Guess this is my star exit.

  Finally.

  Good-bye, fuckers. Good-bye all of you sacks of shit who’re watching at home with your dicks in your hand or a thumb up your snatch.

  Hope you had a good time, and kiss my ass.

  The perimeter wall hits her above the knees, crushing my nailed ankles into a snarling white flare inside my head, and the wall’s just barely high enough to hold her, so I crook my arm behind her neck and croon lovingly into her rumpled mass of ear—

  “When you wake up in Hell, you festering slab of rat cunt, I’ll already be killing you again.”

  —and I backhand the point of my forearm spike at her right eye.

  Nothing wrong with her reflexes: she jerks her head back and away from the point—

  —and so the spike—

  —which I hadn’t really expect
ed to get her eye with, y’know, anyway, so there’s no point in shitcanning my follow-through—

  —takes her just under the cheekbone, above her upper jaw, into what on a human would be a savagely sensitive nerve cluster around the trigeminal—

  —triggering a transcendently satisfying airhorn shriek and instant stiff hyperarch of her back—

  Guess ogrilloi keep a nerve cluster there, too.

  —and we topple over the wall.

  With a kick that’s half convulsion I yank my ankles apart as we start our long slow tumble into the darkness.

  Why not? Like our Garthan Hold personal combat Brother used to say—

  Hurts now. Be over soon.

  Gahh—

  —’d like to hear that fucker say it again with a fifty-penny nail behind his motherfucking Achilles tendon—

  But I still swing my legs around and wrench her thrashing underneath me as we fall free, because I am for ass-raping sure gonna land on—

  Wham.

  —tumbling flailing clawing—

  WHAMWHAMWHAM

  . . . .

  . . .

  . .

  .

  stars in the dust

  breathe

  —whoop—

  breathe goddammit breathe

  —whoop—

  stars

  hrakchakh

  stars come out like a window

  dusty sand settles around me and

  on me

  into my eyes and up my nose and

  fuck my bleeding ass I’m still

  alive

  One minor—

  hrakchakh

  —minor flaw . . . in the whole sonofabitching plan . . .

  The vertical city isn’t exactly vertical, exactly.

  More of a steep slope.

  I’m in one of the houses . . . still has walls . . . hasn’t had a roof in a thousand years or so . . .

  With the kind of effort that would have gotten Sisyphus to the top of his motherfucking hill, I roll my head sideways.

  The city above catches enough of the firelight from the camp that I can pick out Crowmane’s body crumpled on the rubble maybe ten feet away.

  She looks worse than I feel.

  That is to say: dead.

  I figure that between my two half-working hands, I oughta be able to chopstick a big enough piece of rock to make sure. And I will.

  I will.

  Just—

  Just as soon as I get my breath . . .

  Yeah.

  Someday this week.

  All right, fuck breathing. I’ll go . . . I’ll go—

  Just as soon as I can make my eyes work.

  Because I can’t blink away those haloes—migraine-aura prismatic splinters of starlight crystallizing over the rubble, crawling Crowmane’s bloody face, shimmering along my hands and arms—

  That’s not my eyes. That’s the fucking universe slipping out of focus . . .

  This isn’t happening.

  This isn’t happening . . .

  But no denial can keep the stars in the sky.

  No denial can stop the freefall sideways-inside-out

  yank

  that puts a ceiling of acoustic tile and recessed fluorescent tubing over my staring eyes—

  —that replaces the rubble under my back with a Winston Transfer platform—

  —and the crumbling millennial walls of the abandoned city with the white latex gloves and surgical masks and blue antimicrobial cap-and-gowns of Studio EMTs—

  —who heave me onto a crash cart in a bone-wrenching hurricane of stat this and amp of epi and no narco, no narco, adrenocorts only and thunder me out into some corridor of anonymously sterile tile, and there’s only one guy among them with a real face, and I reach over to him and grab his arm with my right hand.

  “Am I—is this for real—? I’ve been having this dream—on the cross, I don’t know how many times—this dream where you pull me—”

  The guy with the face—a mid-thirtyish flabby pale kind of guy, with colorless eyes and too-fleshy lips, already losing his hair—can barely keep up with the EMTs pushing my crash cart while he stares down at the bloody spike through my wrist with a creepy revolted fascination, like it sickens him and gives him a hard-on at the same time. “Oh, oh, no, Entertainer Michaelson,” he says, “oh, this is entirely, ah, for real, I assure you. Really.”

  “I’m home . . . ?” The new tears that find the crusted trails down my cheeks are hot enough to burn me. “You brought me, brought me home . . .”

  “I’ve been in touch with your, er, Patron, that is, mm, Businessman Vilo,” he says, jogging alongside the cart, already going breathless. “He underwrote your emergency transfer, and he has, mmm, authorized me to, ah, renegotiate your contract—once you’ve been stabilized, of course . . .”

  “I don’t care,” I tell him, “I don’t care. Just . . . thank you, that’s all . . . thank you. Oh, god. Oh, god, thank you. I don’t even know your name . . .”

  “Oh, I am . . . ah.” He surrenders trying to keep up and stops with a little wave.

  “Kollberg,” he calls after me. “Administrator Arturo Kollberg, Entertainer. Get yourself patched up. We have a, ah, great deal to talk about . . .”

  He waves again. “A great deal.”

  PRATT AND REDHORN

  The Pratt & Redhorn was a small but well-appointed hostelry of three floors and maybe twenty-odd rooms that occupied a lively corner of the River-dock parish not far from the vigilry. I paid off the cartboy and tracked rain through the foyer.

  A sign on the table in the tiny lobby advised me in three languages to ring the bell for service, so I did. Tobacco and meat smoke and considerable noise—voices raised in drunken song, accompanied by the planking of tuneless metallic percussion—billowed through a half-doored archway, which was blocked by a sign that advised, with apologies in the same three languages, that the dining hall was reserved for a private function. My sigh was more than half growl when I rang the bell again, louder.

  I was in no mood. For anything.

  I don’t know what reaction I’d been expecting out of t’Passe. It sure as hell wasn’t a gleam in her hard bright eyes and a nod and a brisk I’ve been wondering how it might turn out.

  I didn’t make a hassle over it at first; after all, she’d been still unconscious in the Monastic Embassy infirmary on the day I’d driven Kosall into the stone at the upstream tip of Old Town and let Ma’elKoth’s flame flow through my hands to destroy that fucking blade forever. But when I reminded the World’s Greatest Living Expert On Me of this detail of trivia, she just shrugged. “Destroyed? Not while you live, I suspect.”

  She was making my stomach hurt. “You better explain what you mean by that.”

  “It is so intimately linked with your legend that the two of you are inextricable. Think: this is the blade that killed you, Caine, on Assumption Day, and thus plowed the field for your rebirth into—”

  “Except I wasn’t exactly dead.”

  She shrugged again. “Seven years in what our hosts name the True Hell? Argue semantics if you like. This is also the weapon that slaughtered the goddess Pallas Ril—”

  “Except she’s not exactly dead either.”

  “We speak of legend. Of what is known. It is known that you used this same blade to bring her back from beyond even Hell, and on the Day of the True Assumption you—again with the sword—unbound the Ascendant Ma’elKoth to make Him Master of Home. Kosall and you are virtually one and the same. Even its name—I’ve done a bit of research on that—”

  “Of course you have.”

  “Do you want to hear it?”

  “Would it matter if I don’t?”

  “ ‘Kosall,’ ” she’d said with a slightly malicious smile, “turns out to be a Westerlicized corruption of the Lipkan Kh’Hohtsanjanell, which means, in their usual straightforward fashion, Blade That Cuts Everything.”

  I’m not ashamed to say that I actually flinched. “Deliann—Delia
nn once called me that—”

  “I know.” The malice in that smile had faded back behind the smug. “I was there.”

  “But—that’s just a name—those are just stories—”

  “You,” she said severely, “are fighting the hook. Are you—you of all men—trying to claim that names do not signify? That there is such a thing as just a story?”

  I had plenty of wriggle left in me. “Are you claiming that stories count for more than what actually happened?”

  “What ‘actually happened’ depends on whom one asks, doesn’t it?” She grinned at me. “And once you explain what ‘actually happened,’ aren’t you merely replacing their story with yours?”

  “Fuck that.” I was getting angry all over again. “No story is gonna make something unhappen. No story is gonna turn a fucking pile of slag at the tip of Old Town back into a magick sword and drop it five hundred years in the past—”

  “Unless,” she said, all seriousness now, shading into grim, “a god is telling it.”

  I didn’t answer. She poked her goddamn cane at my chest. “You know it’s true. That’s what’s really been on your mind. That’s what has you at a rolling boil.”

  “This is exactly the kind of shit Jereth and Jantho started killing gods over,” I said.

  She nodded. “Using, if your intuition is correct, a sword that had already been and would someday be used to slay three gods anew.”

  “Three—?”

  “Pallas Ril, Ma’elKoth, and—”

  I interrupted her with a maybe unnecessarily forceful “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Still . . .” She got up and limped toward a stack of books on the floor by the inner doorway. “Are you certain it was Kosall? Could it not have been the black runeblade?”

  “The what?”

  “The one you found in the chamber . . .” She opened one of the volumes and started leafing through it. “It was in your report . . . I have notes on it, let’s see—”