Caine Black Knife

by Matthew Stover

I mean, that breeze was on the back of my neck . . . the firefight was fading beyond the shadows down the street . . . any Hunters that would be coming this way must have slipped the armsmen somehow, because the Khryllians sure as hell weren’t chasing them . . . was Kravmik’s nose good enough to scent them from blocks off? Downwind?

  Which was when a tiny voice inside my head whispered, that’s right, dumb-ass, the breeze is on the back of your neck.

  I turned.

  Six were already in the river. Faint shimmering haloes of scarlet witchfire around their heads evoked corpse-lanterns on the Great Chambaygen—except they were coming at us across the current, and at a pretty good clip. Two more right behind, slipping silently down into the black water. One last on the far quay. Standing. Staring at me.

  Naked. Rippling with flames of power.

  He spread arms like the thighs of bulls, and drew air into a chest like a bargeload of boulders—

  And I, for roughly the duration of my entire lifetime in reverse, froze.

  Sort of.

  I didn’t so much freeze as I froze about freezing.

  I was hanging from a wire an arm’s length over my own head: a psychic Sword of Damocles. Because I really didn’t know how I was going to take this. I’ve been having this dream half my life.

  Back in the Boedecken . . .

  The details are different every time, so it doesn’t matter who’s with me or how the place looks, how I’m armed, none of that, all that mattered was that I was back in the Boedecken but I was old and slow and tired with killing.

  And Black Knives were coming for me. Again.

  It felt like some kind of justice. This was where I really started—everything before was prologue—so this was where I ought to end. There was a bitter poetry to it: after all the spectacularly fraudulent mock heroics that had made me a legend, I freeze on a dark street in front of people who’d fallen for that legend so hard that they worship it. That might be the only way to pay for being me. To make my end not a storied, gloried song but the punch line to the bad joke I’ve always been. To go out like a punk.

  Stalton’s eyes . . . opal stars of slivered moon—

  You don’t decide to freeze, or to break, or to crumple in a corner and crap yourself any more than you decide to black out when somebody cracks your head with a pipe. It’s something your brain does without your cooperation. When the demons asleep in the back of your skull wake up hungry.

  Crowmane’s smoking stump and Stalton’s eyes and Purthin Khlaylock, lifting his morningstar to pray—

  So I hung there over my own head, dangling from a golden thread of I think maybe but how am I supposed to know and when the fuck, exactly, does my wave function collapse and leave Whiskers’ corpse rotting in my skull?

  But in the same instant I was remembering—as my dead wife used to remind me, way too fucking often—not everything is about me.

  Kravmik and the Pratt family and a house full of ordinary damn people bobbing downstream toward the fecal falls were counting on me to be the closest thing they had to a canoe, and justice for me wasn’t gonna do them any goddamn good at all, so for a decade-long blink of an eye I saw myself starring in Beau Geste again, this time for real, making a stand here in the hostelry, trying to hold off the Smoke Hunt with a grand total of three guns, two balls, and no brains at all. Which wouldn’t end up doing Pratt & Co. an assload of good either. It’d just make me feel better about dying ugly.

  Which, because in my heart I’ll always be an Actor, made me think of Edmund Kean’s last words, Dying is easy—comedy is hard, and I found myself muttering, “You think so? Just watch how fucking funny this is gonna be.”

  And it had all started and finished in an Ox-Bow Incident half-second, because by the time that buck across the river unleashed the roar he’d been drawing breath for, I had already snapped back into my body and was turning to Kravmik in the doorway. “Forget what I said about fighting them. Get the Pratts and the staff and all the guests up to the roof and have them scatter over the alleys to the surrounding buildings. I mean scatter. Anybody who can’t make the jump? Throw ’em. And give me back that gun.”

  He scowled down at me. “But you say—”

  “Forget what I said. You’re not gonna fight them. Get people going and go with them. I’ll lead the Hunters off—slow ’em down till Tyrkilld and the Riverdock armsmen can get back here—”

  The big chef squinted toward the river. “Maybe I can talk to them—grills are grills. Smoke Hunt’s got no reason to hook red with—”

  “Kravmik.”

  He heard it in my voice. That doubtful scowl crawled back down his crown ridge. “What?”

  Kravmik had to be pushing my age—maybe from the wrong side—which meant he was old enough that this was one of those happy accidents where I could just tell the truth. “Those are Black Knives.”

  His eyes popped to about the size of my hands, and he made a noise like he’d swallowed his tongue. When he could finally get out a word, that word was a half whispered, “No . . .”

  “Yes.”

  His mouth hung slack for a second or two, then his lower lip started to flap. “But—b-but—n-n-no clan sign—”

  “Not where you can see it. Don’t believe me? Go over there and ask Pratt who I am. But give me the gun first.” Because, y’know, ever since I made sure the Khulan Horde went down at Ceraeno, Black Knives aren’t the only grills who have reason to hold maybe a bit of a grudge, and I wasn’t in the mood to take a round or two in the back for being a fucking wise guy.

  “Who you are—?”

  “Just do it. Go on, move!” He frowned like he’d found a rat turd in his almondine, but he put the gun in my outstretched left and jogged heavily back around Whistler’s corpse toward the Pratts.

  A couple of the Smoke Hunters were already out of the river. One loped toward me along the street, slow and easy, trotting on all fours, and the other reared up and spread his arms and expanded a steamer-trunk chest to unleash a contrabasso blast of—“Dizhrati golzinn Ekk!”

  —which somehow, on its twisty cart ride through the funhouse I use for a brain, didn’t do anything like start a freeze; a toasty red glow kindled somewhere around my balls and spread up through my chest and down my legs and into my arms, and when it finally reached my head, what the buck had roared ended up translating Welcome back to the Boedecken, Skinwalker.

  And I felt a whole lot better.

  I nodded a smile back at him as I leaned my left forearm against the boardwalk post in front of me and wedged my right hand down hard on top of it with Calm Guy’s Smith & Wesson braced against the post on the side, because steadied like that with a gun like this, even a crappy shooter like myself can get medium-range accuracy on the order of a carbine, and so my reply to his welcome was a cheerfully warm Thanks; it’s good to be home, which was delivered in a three-round burst to the heart that slapped him down flat and wet and floppy.

  I swung the sights onto the one trotting toward me—who hadn’t even broken stride—and let him have his own burst into the upper lip. His head exploded like a meat grenade.

  Four more were up out of the water and the other three were behind them and I was coolly taking aim, y’know, two down, seven to go; hey, honey, watch me turn Rover into Spot, and generally feeling pretty snappy about myself until the first one got up.

  So I shot him again. More than shot him. I hosed him down—at least ten rounds. Big wet chunks of Smoke Hunter ripped loose and plopped onto the puddled street. Including his right arm.

  Which was when he bent down, picked up his own severed goddamn arm by his own severed goddamn wrist, and swung it around his head.

  “DIZHRATI GOLZINN EKK!”

  He wasn’t even bleeding.

  And I wasn’t feeling all that snappy anymore.

  I remember blinking stupidly until I could finally make my mouth work.

  “Fuck this for a joke—”

  It got even less funny when the one with only a gooey mess of r
aw sausage where his head should be rolled to his feet and loped over to join the others.

  The dream-vision-prophecy . . . that Meld thing . . . how I had spread my mind though different bodies . . . seeing through each other’s eyes . . . plus a sick twist on the Ghost Dancer bullets-cannot-harm-us thing . . .

  Somebody had learned a new trick. No. An old one.

  —the Black Knife camp below my cross alive in the night with shadows leaping, howling, teeth and claws and hunger—Somebody learned Pretornio’s trick.

  No wonder the Hunt could ring up Khryllians wholesale. I’d watched reanimated corpses of Pretornio’s porters rip Black Knives limb from limb—reanimated ogrilloi would be proportionally stronger—

  From the dream: that fantasy of power, stone walls shattering under a blow of my grey-leather fist . . .

  . . . a fantasy of being stronger than a Knight of Khryl.

  Now there’s a new kind of suicide bomber . . . I monologued to my audience of one.

  Now they were all down to all fours, coming at that ground-eating lope, not in any hurry so I had maybe all of three seconds, and across the street an alley mouth yawned darkness, and I remembered another alley up around the corner, and in that two-seconds-left I decided to bet my life that they were connected.

  I ran out into the street, holding down the Smith & Wesson’s trigger, not aiming, spraying low to empty the clip and hope for a boneshot to a leg or two to slow a couple down. The slide racked open before I hit the opposite boardwalk and I dropped it and stopped at the alley mouth to empty Hawk’s pistol at them too before I fell back into the shadows and that’s when shit went really weird.

  Because one of Smoke Hunters said, “Hey, check it out—did you guys see that? I think that was Caine!”

  And another said “No fucking way,” and a third said, “No, man, I think he’s right—”

  They were speaking English.

  “Do we kill him?”

  “Kill him? Before I get his autograph?”

  So there, in the alley, back against the cold wet brick wall, two-handing the Automag up by my cheek, I did freeze. I didn’t have the faintest fucking ghost of a clue what could possibly be going on, or what I should be doing about it. Which led me to do maybe the only really smart thing I’d managed since I got off the boat yesterday morning.

  I called out in English, “Hey—what the fuck, huh?”

  All eight of them clustered at the alley mouth, slowly, squinting into the moonshadow. The one carrying his own left arm let it dangle forgotten by his leg. “Holy shit—it’s you, isn’t it? You’re really you?”

  I replied, “Back the fuck off. All of you.”

  They didn’t.

  I swung the pistol down into line. “You can see well enough to see this gun, right?”

  They all kind of shrugged and nodded to me and each other—except the one with no head—but kept inching tentatively closer. “Yeah—yeah, Caine . . . yeah, it’s not even really dark out here, not for us.”

  “This isn’t one of the civvie pieces I shot you with before,” I told them. “This is a Social Police Automag.”

  They stopped.

  “Hey, no, shit, no—Caine, we’re not after you—” One-Arm said. “I mean, Jesus Christ, this is so fucking awesome, you’re like my hero—”

  “Oh, he is not,” another one said.

  “He is. You are,” One-Arm assured me earnestly. “You’re the greatest—I always said so—”

  “Packard, you are such a buttsuck.” The second one cocked his head toward me confidentially. “He never bought a cube of yours in his life—his whole collection is like some K’Trann and Jhubbar, and some old Pallas softcores from before she met you that he beats off to—”

  “Shut up—!” One-Arm backhanded him with his severed arm hard enough to knock him sprawling. “It’s not my fault—my parents—”

  One of the others snickered in my direction. “Ass-Packard’s mommy won’t let him have your shit because you say fuck all the time and stuff. Doing it’s one thing, but she gets weird when you say it—”

  “Will you drop it? Jesus Christ—!”

  I found myself sagging against the alley’s wall. “Who are you fuckers?”

  They told me. Their names were a roll call of Earth’s Leisure Congress. Packard, Rand, Windsor, two Sauds, a Walton, a Bush, and—the one whose head I’d shot off—a Turner.

  “Turner?” I said, blinking at the headless hulk of ogrillo. “You’re one of Wes Turner’s kids?” Back in the day, Westfield Turner had been the president of Adventures Unlimited.

  My former boss.

  The headless one waved this off and pointed at One-Arm—Packard.

  Packard said, “Leisureman Turner’s his grandfather. Little Turner’s the one who gets us the berths, y’know. Usually he plays really well—it’s hysterical you blew his face off like first thing—you should see how it looks when your eyes explode, it’s so awesome—”

  I let the Automag fall to my side. “How old are you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  The one he’d knocked down—Bush—snickered. “You are not. He’s not.”

  “I will be in two weeks.”

  “Two weeks makes you a lying sack of fourteen-year-old shit.”

  “I am so gonna beat your ass.”

  “Oh, sure.” Bush got up. “Try it, Lefty.”

  “I mean after. I am gonna fly down to your broke-ass daddy’s dinky little white-trash island and I am gonna pound you.”

  “You’re kids . . .” My brain had somehow turned into a wet wool blanket stuffed inside my skull. “You’re all kids.”

  “Well, sure,” one of the Sauds said. “This is still in beta, and they need play-testers, and Turner’s really pretty all right, you know, he set us up, it’s a real party, even though everything’s virtual. The simichair hookup cost my dad a bundle, and he’s itching to play, too. Maybe once they smoke the bugs out and get this ready for release. This is way sweeter than even firsthanding, because, you know, first off, the Studio hasn’t even done that in like forever, and even then, if we were like firsthanding you, we’d just be riding along while you kill people. This way we get to kill them ourselves—”

  “And eat them.” Bush’s tusks gleamed pale and wet in the moonlight. “We get to kill them and eat them. This is way harder core than even your stuff—no offense, y’know; I’m a real fan, not like Ass-Packard. I have your Collector’s Platinum Edition box-set, plus I’ve got a bootleg master of Servant of the Empire—”

  “Just ’cause your mom sucked Turner’s wrinkled old grampadick for it,” Packard sneered.

  I shook my head. “You little shits understand that these are real people? You get it? This isn’t just a fucking game—”

  “Sure it is,” Packard said. “Our pack gets points for every civilian we take out before the Knights knock us to pieces. We get extra points for taking out armsmen, and killing a Knight’s an automatic win, unless another pack gets a Knight too, and they’ve got more civilian kills than—”

  “And you get points too just for duration, you know?” Bush nodded enthusiastically. “We’re short on kills, but just standing here talking to you we’re racking our score, and that’s bone grippy, because we get to meet you and everything, and we can still do our mission objective, because we came down the river—these grills we’re piloting are already dead, y’know, they don’t have to breathe—and the Knights aren’t here yet—”

  I couldn’t get my mind around it. “You’re just sonofabitching kids—”

  Packard smirked at me. “Yeah, right. How old were you the first time you killed somebody?”

  “The first time I killed somebody I was fighting for my life, you little bastard.” Which was a damn lie, but what the hell. “You’re a pack of spoiled Leisure brats sitting in simichairs a universe away—”

  “Well, sure,” the other Saud said, shaking his head at me like I was a goddamn idiot, which was exactly how I felt. “You think our parents wou
ld let us do this if we could actually get hurt? I mean, check it out—” He lifted his loincloth to show a ragged stump where the Smoke Hunter’s cock had been severed at the root. “We can’t even fuck. What are we supposed to do except kill people?”

  “I never killed anybody just for fun—”

  “No, you killed ’em for our fun.” Bush’s smirk was almost identical to Packard’s. “You were good at it too. The best. You know you’re still in the Top Ten? Sure, the Studio hasn’t released anything fresh from anybody in about forever now, but you’d probably hang in there even against the new guys, they’re such pussies—”

  “Shut up. Everybody fucking shut up a minute.”

  I was not going to have this argument with goddamn Leisure brats who were playing at being Black Knives in a virtual sonofabitching game.

  Especially since this was an argument I’d lose.

  I came to Overworld—became an Actor in the first place—to taste the kind of power I could never have on Earth. Sure, wealth. Sure, fame. Adulation, and even some political influence. But all that was just perks, y’know? The real prize was power: to ignore the laws that circumscribe the lives of Earth’undercastes. To live without law altogether. To bow to no law except my own will. But that’s more abstract than it really was; when you get right to the bone, it was about being a god.

  To kill without consequence.

  It’s never been a mystery to me that I’m more than a little crazy. It’s also never been a mystery that if I hadn’t been an Actor, I’d have died in prison. So I got myself to a place where bloodlust is power, and casual murder is the point of the game.

  Same as them.

  They were starting out from a place of power already, that’s all. They get to have everything I busted ass for without putting their butts on the line.

  But y’know, my butt was never all that much on the line either. Half the scars I carry are from wounds that should have killed or crippled me—would have killed or crippled anyone who’s not an Actor. Unlimited access to the most cutting-edge medical treatment in the world, plus the occasional use of flat-out magick: the best health plan in the history of both universes.