Well, maybe. I had a feeling they wouldn’t be lining up for a chorus of “Ding Dong, the Bitches’re Dead,” though even if my conditioning would have let me tell him that, he wouldn’t have gotten the joke.
His scowl vanished into a pale stone stare colder than the moonlight. “Knights of Khryl are warriors, not assassins.”
“Oh, grow up, for shit’s sake. What’s more important to you: Playing fair? or winning?”
“To act with Honor at all times is the absolute obligation of every Knight. Maintain the Honor of your Person, the Order, and Our Lord. Speak the Truth, though it mean your Death. Defend all those who cannot—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it before.”
He was already turning back toward the topside access stair. “And there is no need for attack, nor to fear escape of the Black Knives below. Two Knights alone—three perhaps at most, given resupply up the rope we have ourselves lately employed—might hold this shaftway ’gainst the Black Knife Nation entire.”
He was right, of course, which was the problem. Well . . . not exactly a problem . . .
The only reason I was arguing with him in the first place was that I kind of liked the guy. I had a soft spot for the true-blue Honor-and-Justice types. Still do, a little.
When I was a kid, second-handing pirated Adventures bootlegged off the Net, I was as big a Jhubbar fan as the next guy—even though I couldn’t admit it, exactly. Or even at all. Not in my neighborhood. In the Mission District, you pretty much had to worship Mkembe, though he was long dead; Jhubbar—Raymond Story—was too goody-goody, y’know, noble and courageous, defend the weak and Show the Power of Truth through Righteous Action and all that shit. I was a sucker for it. Though I couldn’t tell anybody—not even Dad—I even wanted to be him when I grew up. He was a Knight of Khryl.
Sometimes I still want to be him.
Sometimes I wonder how much of the stupid shit I’ve done was just to punish myself for not growing up to be Jhubbar Tekkanal. I wonder sometimes if that’s why I married my late wife: because, down deep, we both despised the man I really am. It was the only thing we had in common.
I got over hating myself. Mostly. She didn’t. But let that go.
The point is, I hadn’t brought Khlaylock up there to sell him the plan. My plan wasn’t my plan. My plan was to bring him up there and kill him so I could tell the rest of the Knights he’d been taken by the Black Knives, and then I could lead them in a “rescue” raid; basically, to con the Knights into killing the Black Knife priest-bitches before they found out Khlaylock was dead. Liking the guy was giving me a little trouble pulling the trigger, that’s all.
And that wasn’t the only issue; I had my audience to consider.
We were close enough to the lip of the escarpment that a grab of his arm and a drop to my back for a simple tomenage would have done the trick—and that’s exactly how I’d have handled it, later in my career. But this was early days, and I had no idea just how popular Retreat from the Boedecken had become.
Kollberg was a genius at marketing; he was selling first-hander seats on a per-day basis, with discounts for multiple-day purchase and an option to re-up for extra days if the audience member processed the credit request before he or she left the building. He was also licensing the Adventure to other Studios across Earth, along with a cut-down second-hander cube of highlights starting when I spotted the Black Knives coming across the badlands, so new first-handers could get up to speed on the story arc. Every Studio in the world ended up splitting out some excess capacity; the Studio system hadn’t seen an extended Adventure with this level of nonstop slaughter since Mkembe and Mast in Westmarch Raiders.
By the time I was standing on the escarpment next to Khlaylock, I was already an international star; I just didn’t know it yet. So I was still looking to turn the High Drama volume knob up to eleven.
Which is why I said, “Wow. So Khryl loves cowards now?”
There are lots of clichés for how he took it—pillar of salt, turned to stone, that kind of shit—but none of them capture his eerily explosive stillness; he was locked down like a vault around a bomb. Somebody took the millisecond pause between triggering the detonator and the blast and stretched it into a long, long silence empty of everything but the waterfall’s roar. It really kinda gave me a shiver.
A hot black shiver, just above my balls.
I took that shiver in both fists of my Control Disciplines and jammed it into my adrenals. The night went bright and sharp and loud. Electric jolts along my arms and legs whispered that if I needed to, I could fly . . .
When he finally spoke I could barely pick out his voice; it sounded like boulders grinding together in the river beneath our feet.
“You are no Knight, Caine Lackland, and I am not in Khryl’s Battledress—”
“I know a coward when I see one. Khryl does too.”
The look he sent over his shoulder shot those hot black jolts all the way up to the top of my skull. “Were you Armed—”
“Fuck Armed.” I pulled the knives out of my sleeves. A sharp flip of my wrists shot them both hilt-deep into the earth. “You have Khryl’s Strength. I have the truth. You think I’m wrong, prove it.”
“A Challenge? With you?” He stared, morning star hanging slack as his mouth. “Are you mad?”
“Yeah. Crazy too.” He finally turned toward me, slowly, considering, rolling it over in his head to get a good look at the angles. “You claim Khryl favors your plan—?”
“I claim,” I said, “you’re a gutless butt-weasel. You’re a Knight Captain, for shit’s sake. Even if you didn’t have Khryl’s Strength and Khryl’s Speed and Khryl’s Farts and who knows what else, you’re twice my fucking size. What are you afraid of?”
“My reluctance,” he said slowly, “arises of the debt you are owed by the Order, in the rescue of Knight Tarthell, and your aid against the Black Knife Nation. Do you understand that should I choose to Challenge and you Answer, your health, limb, and life itself are at peril? That even should Khryl favor your cause, you may be injured beyond the capacity of His Love to repair?”
I grinned. “Likewise.”
He stared a moment longer. “Will you not retract? You cannot hope to stand against me, Caine Lackland, and I would not willingly do you harm.”
“Sacrilege along with cowardice.” I wasn’t even talking anymore. It was the black jolt working my lips and tongue and throat. “Khryl decides who wins, doesn’t he? Unless you’re gonna pile on apostasy.”
He lowered his head with a resigned sigh. “Very well. Make peace with whatever god favors you, little man; you will have no further chance. Challenge.”
“Accepted,” I said. “I will Answer.”
So there we stood, on the lip of the escarpment, in billows of mist curling back from the waterfall. My back to the brink. His to the access tunnel. The moon, almost full and almost overhead, bleached the ten feet of softly damp pairie grass between us pale as a charcoal sketch on sheepskin. He lifted his morningstar in both hands; with the sun down, he could aim the weapon’s head only at the sun’s reflected light—y’know, the moon—and he composed himself for the prayer that would sanctify the coming Combat.
He drew himself up to his full height and lifted his head to Khryl’s light—the last time a Khryllian Knight ever kneels is when he takes his Orders, unless he’s defeated and Yields in Combat—and when he slipped into the Old High Lipkan Ammare Khryl Tyrhaalv’Dhalleig, the head of his morningstar took on that St. Elmo’s fire glow that began to creep down the haft toward his hands and I took one long skipping step for momentum and leaped.
In those days—years before Berne put Kosall through my spine—I could leap really well.
My Control Disciplines had my legs so amped that I might as well have been on the moon; when the arc of my leap reached him, I was still as high as his head and descending and I had to shoot the side kick down at an angle to catch the haft of his morningstar just below its centerpoint.
&
nbsp; Now, sure, in those days I maybe weighed all of seventy-five kilos dripping wet—Khlaylock would have gone around one-fifteen buck naked—and I would have needed both hands to even lift his morningstar without popping a ball, and I could forget swinging it effectively in a fight. But I wasn’t swinging it.
I was falling on it.
With my entire seventy-five kilos, plus all the kinetic energy I could cram into an exceedingly well-trained side kick, which made his two-handed grip into a fulcrum, the haft into a lever, and the seven-bladed head into Archimedes’ Earth.
It caught him full on the left temple. This would have killed any ordinary man. Khlaylock didn’t even fall down. The effect was pretty spectacular nonetheless.
A wet ripping crunch splintered his eye socket and cheekbone and fanned black blood spray into the mist; the impact turned his head and sent the morningstar on past, taking most of the side of his face with it. The weapon flipped out of his slackening hands and he staggered, trying to turn toward me as I landed, trying to get his hands up—even stunned into next year he was trying to fight back—but his left eye dangled out of its shattered socket by his optic nerve, flopping against black-smeared teeth left exposed because his upper lip was lying on the grass somewhere still hooked to the head of his morningstar, and that had to fuck with his targeting, because he was waving his head around like he couldn’t decide which eye he should be seeing with. Before he could figure it out, I threw my hip into a Thai roundhouse that slammed my right shin across his kidneys hard enough to capture his unsteady balance and send him stumbling toward the lip of the escarpment. I sprang after him, digging in my feet and jamming both hands into his spine to send him even faster, and y’know, if he’d been somebody else, somebody less the Legendary Warrior than Purthin Khlaylock, he still might have taken me, because another Knight would have fallen, and had a chance to get up again. Khlaylock, though, staggered to the very brink, caught his balance, and wheeled to face me.
Just in time to catch both feet of my old-fashioned flying dropkick in the middle of his chest.
He sailed out over the long, long drop with a curiously calm, flat look in his good eye, a look that bespoke absolute certainty that this is not yet over, little man.
The hundred-meter fall to the highest of the Black Knife campfires below disagreed with him.
I hit ground at the lip and just lay there for a while, letting the black jolts drain away into the wet and the grass.
The waterfall was too loud for me to hear him land.
After I stopped shaking, I dragged the two Black Knife sentries to the edge and shoved them over after him. I picked up my knives and stuck them back into their sleeve sheaths, then went over and shook the shreds of Khlaylock’s face off his morningstar.
I held it in both hands, staring down at it until my arms started to ache. Not just a weapon. A symbol. The Morning Star. Enlightenment. The Dawn of Truth and Justice that Destroys the Night of Ignorance and Sin. I remember wondering if Khlaylock had lived long enough to appreciate the irony; must have been like getting pimp-slapped by Khryl Himself.
Then I shrugged and threw it off the cliff too.
I’ve had twenty-five years to think about the business on the escarpment that night, and I’m still not sure which one of us it makes looks worse. Yeah: I was an asshole. Pushing his buttons to pump up some drama. To jazz my career. Not to mention the whole premeditated murder thing. But I wasn’t kidding anybody. Including myself.
And looking back on it, I can see the leading edge of a running theme of my career. I don’t remember making a conscious choice in tactics when I picked the fight with Khlaylock; it just felt right. I could just as easily—more easily—have made the Challenge about our tactical dispute; by Khryl’s Law, I could have Challenged Khlaylock to let Khryl decide between us. Strictly business. But I made it personal. Because it was personal. At the bone, it’d be him and me, no matter what we were pretending to be fighting about. To bring the other shit into it would have been . . . well . . .
Dishonest.
Which is a peculiar word from anyone who’s done what I’ve done and been who I’ve been, but there it is. There I am.
Here’s the truth of Purthin Khlaylock, under all his Truth and Honor and Devotion to Justice and Noble Reluctance to whatever: when you get to the bone, why exactly was he getting ready to kill me?
For calling him names.
Yes: I am a bad man. But I’ve never been that bad.
Purthin Khlaylock, the perfect Knight: one more blood-drunk thug.
And yeah, fine, Blood-Drunk Thug should be carved on my headstone. I don’t claim to be better than him . . . but it does still chap my ass a little that everybody claims he’s better than me.
I have my own vanity. I don’t kill for it, that’s all.
The rest of my plan went pretty much the way most of my plans do: just fine, right up to the point where it spectacularly exploded.
That point was dawn-ish, a few seconds after a handful of Knights Venturer and I had fallen on the Black Knife priest-bitches like an old building. I was, in fact, in the middle of pinning Cornholes’ mouth shut with a knife through the soft tissue under her jaw when a roar went up from the Black Knives that was answered by the Khryllians across the river, and it got real fucking bright real fast, blue-white-star bright like Pretornio in the last stage of overload, and I looked down from the second level of Hell and thought, Fuck my ass like a chicken pot pie, because the blue-white star in question turned out to be a butt-naked Purthin Khlaylock, balls-deep in my river while he fought off the entire motherfucking Black Knife Nation. Single-handed.
They poured into the water after him like a black tide, a storm of locusts, a school of giant screaming piranhas, like a whatthefuckdoesitmatter because he wasn’t running away, he was holding his ground inside a ring of sunfire that was the arc of his morningstar.
If you’re ever in Seven Wells and you have a chance to stop by the Halls of Glory in the Great Holding of Dal’Kannith, you can see a really nice depiction by Rhathkinnan, the greatest living painter of Lipke: a fresco fifty feet high and three hundred feet long, Khlaylock’s Stand at the Ford. It’s got it all the first spray of dawn on the vast shadow-pocked face of the vertical city, swarms of uncountable thousands of Black Knives, Khlaylock doing a reasonable facsimile of Khryl Morning Goddamn Star Himself at the center of a rising hurricane of raggedly severed ogrillo body parts while on the opposite bank his cavalry shouts itself into battle order.
I do not, by the way, appear in that painting.
This is only partly because Rhathkhinnan—and the rest of the Order of Khryl—would kind of like to forget I was there at all. It’s mostly because I spent that battle learning the value of intellectual flexibility and improvisation under pressure.
My Knights, naturally enough, were about half a second shy of breaking for the river; they’d come to rescue Khlaylock, not to slaughter priest-bitches. Slaughtering bitches was my thing. So in that half second while they were all looking down the face of the vertical city instead of chasing the bitches who were scampering off upslope, I shouted, “It’s working! Come on!”
Polished helmets swung my way.
“What do you think is keeping him alive down there? Pure thoughts?” I snarled at them. “If those bitches get away long enough to raise their god and their power, he’s dead and we are too, so get your armored butts moving!” Then I turned and went after the bitches without looking back. Hell, for all I knew I might even have been telling the truth. In a second or two I could hear them on my tail, and I let myself smile into the dawn.
We killed every one of them. All we could find, anyway. Cornholes and Dugsacks and Turdcrotch and Thumbnipples, and when I couldn’t remember if we’d missed any or not, we just went ahead and killed whatever other bitches we came across. It was fun, making them scream and bleed and beg. It was more than fun. Whoever said “Revenge is a dish best served cold” never tasted it hot.
It was so much fun, in f
act, that I completely forgot to pack it in and slip away while I had the chance.
Pretty soon—too soon—it was all over. The surviving bucks and juvies had scattered to the Boedecken winds, and there weren’t even close to enough Khryllians to run them all down; some were taken into other clans, but ogrillo solidarity in general didn’t really extend as far as Black Knives. Most of them ended up ditching the Boedecken altogether for human cities, slipping into the Folk slums of towns all over Lipke and the Ankhanan Empire to try and live out their days pretending they’d never even heard of Black Knives.
Broken Knives, the other clans call them now. Limp Dicks.
All that came later, though; at the time, while the cavalry was still merrily slaughtering whatever fleeing bucks they could catch, I was getting a swift boot up the ass on my way out of the Khryllian camp.
Which is not the worst that could have happened. When a couple of the Knights Venturer caught my elbows in their gentle-but-firm too-bad-for-your-punk-ass way and and let me know they were hauling me off to where Knight Captain Khlaylock was waiting outside camp, all the Holy shit, I actually fucking pulled it off euphoria in my chest transubstantiated into a couple yards of ice-cold concrete because, y’know, in all the excitement I had just plain forgotten that Khlaylock was still alive. And that he might find himself inclined to be a little stern with me.
I kept seeing the cloud of bloody mist that had once been the head of a Black Knife after its close encounter with Khlaylock’s morningstar. This image became considerably more vivid when we reached Khlaylock and I saw the ruin of his face. Khryl’s Love had Healed it as it was, fusing bone and flesh into a rumpled crater of scar.
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