Caine Black Knife

by Matthew Stover

  I pulled the chamber pot from under the bed and opened the lid, reflecting that somebody on this planet really ought to invent twenty-four-hour room service. As I settled my bare ass onto the night-chilled steel, I decided I could live without the room service. What Home really needed was a couple million union plumbers.

  And plastic goddamn toilet seats. With heaters.

  I spent a while staring at my hands. Soft and pink and small. Far too small: flimsy fingernails barely thick enough to crack a flea. Forearms smooth and bare where I still vaguely sensed that fighting claws should be. And clean. Too clean. No crust of drying blood, no shreds of ripped manskin—It could have been just a dream.

  Sure it could. Really. It was possible.

  I finished with the chamber pot, flipped the lid shut and shoved it over by the door. The day porter’d take it from there. If there still was a day porter. I sat on the bed and laced up my breeches. Left in its holster patch overnight, the Automag jabbed into the small of my back. I was about to yank it out and toss it on the bed, but I stopped with my hand on its butt.

  A dream-echo of the drumming pounded inside my head.

  This hadn’t been like the vision of being Orbek. That had been real as waking life. This was the gradual leakback of memory after a bad drunk.

  But maybe just as real. I hadn’t been that drunk.

  Some kind of ritual. I couldn’t quite tease it up to the surface of my sleep-fogged mind. Flames in a cave. Leaping and stomping and whirling. Chanting. A house-size bonfire and the savory tang of burning rith. A stone chalice, filled with blood.

  Kaleidoscopic. Hallucinatory. The three D’s: drums, drugs, and dance—

  Dad, wearing his anthropologist hat, would have called it ritual frenzy: a deliberate, systematic breakdown of self, of the ego’s defenses of recursive inhibition, shredding self-awareness to open a religious communicant’s mind to the infinite. Unreserved, unconstrained, enthusiastic pursuit of transcendant union with—

  What?

  I had a sick feeling that I knew.

  The textbook answer was a higher power. But this hadn’t felt like transcen-dance. Not like emptying myself into the infinite. Just the opposite.

  It had felt like summoning.

  I am the Smoke Hunt.

  I still had that nagging presqué vu. This should remind me of something. The Wild Hunt, maybe. I’ve always had warm shorts for the mythology of the Wild Hunt: a storm of chaos sweeping across the land, destroying all in its path. What’s not to like?

  Reminds me of my Acting career.

  But the Wild Hunt wasn’t it. At least not all of it. This was a different kind of hunt.

  The dream or vision or whatever hadn’t stopped with the drumming and the dancing but had flowered into an effortless lope through moonlit streets filled with scents of piss and rainwater, spilled wine and human sweat—A sense of connection . . . like the Meld the primals do, a sense of being more than one person . . . or being one person spread through different bodies, all the bodies, so that in my pack I could look at myself through different eyes at the same time, and see myselves wreathed in flickering scarlet flames that cast no light, and the flame was the connection, and the connection throbbed thick and hot with shared werewolf lust.

  Hitting a building. A door ripped from its hinges. Lamps shattering, flames licking wide: real flames here, crackling and scorching flesh. A casual punch splintering through a wall. Burying my jaws in soft screaming pink-fleshed humans tangled in bedsheets that leaked bright sweet blood into shredded mattress ticking.

  More flames, and more terror, and more sweet copper blood.

  Grey-fleshed fists crushing meat and bone with the same wet ripping crunch as the seven-bladed morningstars in the hands of men in chainmail that bore the sunburst of Khryl, the thunder of their long guns, the shirr of buckshot and the shree of rifle slugs, the clatter of steel-shod hooves on cobbled streets and no fear, no pain, just impact: blows given, blows received.

  And draped over a crumple of ruined wall, shreds of corpse so battered it could have been ogrillo or human or pieces of both, freshly dead, sharp-slanting moonlight catching wisps of steam curling up from open gleaming meat—

  Steam from the wounds . . .

  My dad, maybe forty years ago, had told me an anthropologist’s theory about the origin of the myth of the human soul: that water vapor rising from deep wounds might have been mistaken by ancient humans for the soul escaping from the body. Probably the origin of ghosts, too. The word spirit comes from a root meaning breath; in most traditions, ghosts resemble the curling fog you see from your own mouth on a chilly day. All the crap about the afterlife, about Heaven being in the sky . . . all from nothing more than wisps of condensing vapor, coiling upward like smoke—

  Like smoke.

  I said, “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.”

  Sure. That was it. Had to be. Had to be. Drummming. Dancing. Mind-altering substances. Ecstatic union with a higher power . . . no fear, no pain—

  Even bullets can’t hurt you. They can only kill you.

  Take a pacifist Earth-human millennial religious movement, filter it through the consciousness of sentient pack-hunting carnivores, and what do you get?

  The Smoke Hunt.

  “They’re Ghost Dancers, for shit’s sake. Fucking ogrillo Ghost Dancers.

  Crazy fuck my ass Horse and Jesus stinking bloody Christ on a stick.”

  I ground my face harder into my hands. “Orbek—what the fuck have you gotten your stupid dog ass into?”

  It was a rhetorical question. Because there had been more to the dream.

  There had been her.

  Armor like a mannequin of convex mirrors. Out from the shadows of a street’s mouth across the plaza, a massive two-handed morningstar propped casually over one shoulder. Reflected firelight dancing on façades. Three of me sprinting across the flagstones to meet her, smeared with the blood of the finest soldiers of Home. Casually removing her helm, shaking loose her hair. On her face, no fear. No anger. Only a reserved, remote sadness.

  Her scent: human, female, thick with death. Red-smeared mirror-curves of armor rumpled with fist-shaped dents and pocked with bullet holes. Hair caked black with clotted blood. A morningstar rising with mechanical precision, falling in steel thunderbolts. Shreds of meat plastering cheekbones and forehead into unhuman texture around her vivid eyes.

  Vasse Khrylget, they called her. I had a pretty good idea why.

  “Yeah, okay,” I muttered. “What d’you want me to do about it?” Not that I really expected an answer. Or needed one.

  I scowled at the pulse of orange dawnglow on the frame of the skylight. Too early for coffee for sure. Maybe I could snag some beans from the kitchen, chew them like aspirin . . . which was another goddamn thing this world could use—the pounding in my head was turning out to be less drums than migraine again . . .

  Still only half awake, I had already pulled on my boots and was looking around for my tunic when it finally occurred to me that dawnglow doesn’t pulse. “Oh,” I said. “Oh, crap.”

  And what was that noise? Voices?

  I stood on the bed and shoved the lower edge of the skylight until it squealed loose from the rust on its rim.

  Yeah: voices. Faint, empty with distance, but clear—

  Dizhrati golzinn Ekk!

  Okay: not a dream. Not a vision.

  Prophecy.

  I sagged, hanging from the skylight’s lower rim. “Son of a bitch.”

  Did I have to deal with this before I even got coffee? “Son of a bitch.” I rubbed my stinging eyes. “Yeah, okay. Whatever.”

  Fixing the prop to hold the skylight open, I turned around and grabbed the rim underhand; with a groan of middle-aged morning, I heaved my legs up through the opening and back over the lip. As I slid through the skylight belly-down, I collected a soot-greased scrape on the stomach from a sharp slate and a bang on the skull from the lead-framed pane, so when I pushed myself up to my knees I was already pis
sed as hell, rubbing the back of my head and looking around for somebody to take it out on.

  A distant surf of ogrilloid roaring half-drowned shrieks of terror and agony and rage. Human shrieks. Probably.

  There: three or four blocks over, toward the voices; that was the glow I’d thought was dawn.

  Buildings on fire.

  My breath smoked. Splashes of the water I’d wiped from my face trickled goosebumps across my bare chest. I glanced longingly back down through the skylight at my warm rumpled bed—but the false dawn caught my eye again. Looked warm enough over there.

  I was already backing up to get a running start for the leap across the alley to the rooftop beyond when I finally thought, What in the name of sweet shivering fuck am I doing?

  I was fifty years old, for shit’s sake. Fifty years old and about to run the rooftops toward some kind of goddamn free-for-all massacre. For no reason. Just because it was there.

  Without even a shirt on.

  I shook my head and lifted a hand as though telling some pushy asshole to back the hell off. “Not my business.”

  I didn’t sound convinced, or convincing.

  “Not my business.” That was better. Good enough.

  Now the shouts and screams picked up a soggy kettledrum backbeat. Gunfire. Full-throated: heavy-caliber stuff. The Khryllians had arrived.

  Anything I needed to know, I could find out in the morning. After the shooting was over.

  *You want me to stuff my aging ass into that meat grinder?* I monologued to my audience of one. *Make me a fucking offer.*

  God did not reply.

  I shrugged. “Have it your way,” I said aloud. “I’m going back to bed.”

  Sitting on the edge of the bed. Leaning on my knees. Staring at the floor. At the splotch where I’d spat that mouthful of water. Just a blot now, about the size of my hand, darker in spots where water had soaked into wood through worn-down varnish.

  It had tasted like blood . . .

  Now, in the dim pulse of fireglow through the skylight, it looked like blood, too.

  Gunfire and screams.

  Dizhrati golzinn Ekk!

  And bubbling up out of that soggy black swamp of that dream: stone walls crumbling beneath my fists and two of me leaping into a bedroom full of screams and blood—A thin pale human dying across the body of a young trim redhead—

  And the saliva that pumped along my tusks when both of me heard howls coming from the twin bassinets beside their bed.

  This prophecy thing pretty much sucked dog ass.

  I put my shirt on. After a second’s thought, I added the rest of my clothes:my knives, the spring-loaded baton, the garrote, and the spare clips for the Automag. Even the flatpack of picks. Because you just never fucking know. Then I headed for the stairs.

  At the landing below the second floor, I heard Pratt’s voice. He didn’t sound happy. He sounded like he was trying not to crap himself.

  “I’m sorry, goodmen. Please, the hostelry is closed, you’ll have to come—no, Kravmik, don’t—!”

  A stranger’s voice drawled, “Yeah, Kravmik. Don’t.”

  The period on the sentence was the cold double-click of a single-action hammer going to full cock.

  The stranger had an Ankhanan accent.

  Somebody else said calmly, “Go sit down. Both of you. Next to the girl.”

  On the landing above the lobby, I stopped and muttered, “Shit.”

  There was a window at the far end of the hallway behind me. I was already turning for it, already seeing myself dropping the four, maybe five meters to the alley, when I heard “But he’s not even here.”

  Pratt sounded desperate. “He ate, changed his clothes, and went right out again—he had something to do with Knight Aeddharr—I don’t know what it was—”

  “Put it away, Hawk,” the calm voice said. “There’s no need for that. Yet. Whistler?”

  “I’ve got him.”

  “What are you doing? What is that thing?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  The voice of Whistler: “Now. Did Freeman Shade really go out?”

  “No, not really,”

  Pratt said sheepishly. “I just made that up, because I was afraid you guys might want to hurt him or something.”

  “Pratt?” Kravmik’s rumble sounded blankly astonished, and a woman’s voice said, “Lasser, what are you doing?”

  “Oh, it’s all right,” Pratt told them. “These are good people. Really.”

  “That’s right,” said the voice of Hawk. “We’re good people. Now shut up, both of you.”

  “Hey—” Pratt lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Hey, do you know who he really is? I mean really?”

  “Yeah,” Calm Guy answered. “We know. We’re friends of his.”

  “Oh, good. Everything’s better when everybody’s friends.”

  Up on the landing, I wasn’t feeling friendly.

  A professionally laid-in Charm. At least one handgun. Three in the lobby, one a thaumaturge. That meant probably one in reserve on the street out front and two more covering the alley. That’s where they’d have the heavy stuff. And the Smoke Hunt was on its way.

  “Pratt, let’s take a walk up to his room. Whistler, on me. Hawk, watch the grill and the girl.”

  “By myself?” Hawk sounded bemused rather than worried. “This could get interesting.”

  “If he slips us, use them. Use the girl.”

  “He’ll give a shit?”

  “Sometimes he gets sentimental. Especially when they’re pretty.”

  “I’m feeling a little sentimental, myself . . .”

  “Keep your pants on. She won’t live that long.”

  “I can be real fast—”

  “Yeah. If there’s time we’ll all get a turn. But I’m first, get me? Whistler. Come on.”

  I pulled up the rear of my tunic, drew the Automag and very gently racked the slide. Holding the big pistol tight against the back of my right leg, I started down the stairs.

  Sometimes I do get sentimental. Especially about people who work for a living. Pretty or not.

  To my left, through the posts of the bannister: Kravmik sat half hunched across Yttrall Pratt next to the dining-hall door, shielding most of her tiny figure with his huge curve of shoulder. In front of them slouched a nightclub-pale junior featherweight with glossy black hair, his compact efficient-looking frame loaded into a slashed-velvet doublet and hose under a loose knee-length cape. Hands empty. Loose.

  Hawk. The gunman.

  Middle of the lobby: Pratt, hurricane lamp in one hand, turning toward the stairs, catching sight of me, face lighting with a smile of pure uncomplicated welcome. At his side another smallish man, thin, long-faced, balding, folds of flesh sagging under eyes mournful as a bloodhound’s, wearing a thigh-length hunter’s vest, all pockets, a twist of thread between thumb and little finger on which spun gemstone flashes.

  Whistler. The thaumaturge.

  And half-turned toward the stairs, left hand extended to usher Pratt and Whistler past, bigger, solidly into cruiserweight, head shaved and polished the color of tea-stained mahogany, also doing the slashed-velvet doublet thing but his worn open like a jacket, no hose here—the pants would look normal enough on a darkened street, but even in Pratt’s lamplight they jumped up and bit: close-fitting heavy leather, flapped at the ankle to overlap instep and heel tendon, jointed at the knee, thick boiled panels over hamstring and quads joined by heavy wire, not much against a bullet or a Khryllian morningstar, but they’d turn most blades—and it was a good bet the jerkin under that open doublet was made the same way because that’s what Grey Cats favor when going out for red work. Or ex-Cats gone merc.

  No-name. Calm Guy. Giver of orders. Whose right hand was out of sight.

  This might turn out to be a bit of a trick.

  Another step down the stairs and Pratt’s pure uncomplicated welcome burst out with pure good nature. “Hey, here he is now!”

  “Hey, here I
am now.” The Automag was cold through the thin cotton of my breeches. “Let’s nobody get stupid.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” Calm Guy didn’t move. Didn’t even blink. “You first.”

  Another step down the stairs. “Civilians can walk, huh?”

  “Maybe they could have,” Calm Guy allowed, “if it had been my idea. Since it was yours, I like them where they are. At least until I see both your hands.”

  “You first.”

  A shrug. “I’m easy.”

  Calm Guy turned and spread empty hands. The ruffled cuffs of his doublet draped his wrists and half his palms. The drape along the insides of his forearms was just exactly the wrong shape.

  “Those blades up your sleeves’ll get you pounded by a Knight.”

  Another shrug, and a tilt of the head at the kettledrum backbeat of gunfire in the night streets beyond the lobby’s lamplight. “Knights are busy.”

  “Yeah. That’s exactly the problem.” I took another step. “We can still get out of this with nobody dying.”

  “Dying?” Pratt looked from me to Calm Guy in growing distress. “What exactly is going—?”

  Whistler said, “Shut up. Don’t worry about it.”

  Pratt relaxed. “Oh. Oh, sure. I forgot: you guys are all friends.”

  “Yes,” Whistler said, spinning his gemstone. “Yes, we are friends.”

  Calm Guy squinted up the stairs. “Still haven’t seen your hand.”

  “Yeah. I appreciate the invitation, but—”

  “You think this is an invitation?”

  “If you were here to kill me, we wouldn’t be talking.”

  “Killing you’s Plan B. Moving up toward Plan A-and-a-Half. You’re coming with us. Peacefully. Peacefully in our company or peacefully in a bag.”

  “I like peacefully.” I can play nice, when I have to. “Peacefully works for me just fine.”

  “Come on, then.”

  I didn’t move. “Where we going?”

  “Simon Faller has requested the pleasure of your company. Forcefully.”

  “Faller?” I tried them in English. “Y’know, I’ve been wanting a word or two with Mr. Faller myself—”

  He gave me a what the fuck? smirk, and spread it around to his friends. “You talk too much already,” he said. In English. He had a Brooklyn accent. “We’re not here to talk.” He chuckled and made a slight, ironic bow. “Just guys with a job to do, you get it? Deliverymen.”