Caine Black Knife

by Matthew Stover

  Imagine my surprise, then, when Khlaylock waved away the Venturers and led me down a nearby wadi, where I found a fully tacked saddle horse peacefully cropping scrub in the morning sun.

  “Take him and go,” Khlaylock said. His voice sounded like somebody was scraping cinder blocks together in his throat. “Go and never return, Caine Lackland.”

  I stood there blinking into the sun. “Excuse me?”

  “He is a fine gelding,” Khlaylock grated. “He will bear you well.”

  “I, ah—I don’t know what to say—”

  “You have spoken overmuch already.”

  “I just—well, I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but—I mean, this wasn’t exactly what I was expecting . . .”

  “Think of it as undeserved grace.”

  “I guess I sort of thought you’d want another crack at your Challenge—”

  To which, by the way, I was fully planning to Yield and fess up in front of the whole mob about how I’d clocked him with a Sunday punch and sort of throw myself on his, and Khryl’s, questionable mercies, but he just turned his remaining eye on me like his stare could nail me to the ground. “Go. Do not let another dawn find you within my sight. Ever.”

  I went.

  I was only an hour outside the camp when the Studio pulled me. Two days later—before I even got out of the hospital—I finally realized why Khlaylock didn’t re-Challenge. He’d Challenged me for calling him a coward. Get it?

  He was afraid he’d lose. Again.

  No wonder he was pissed. We can forgive any crime except the murder of our illusions.

  Khlaylock lifted that gauntlet from Markham’s shoulder and waved it negligently in my direction. “Release him.”

  “You don’t understand,” Soapy Two told him from my right. “Administrator Michaelson is in our custody—”

  “The failure of understanding is yours.” A single gleaming stride had Mount Khlaylock louring over Soapy Two like an unquiet volcano. “I am the guardian of Khryl’s Law on His Battleground. Release this man.”

  Soapies are not known for unsteady nerves. That mirror-mask gave back only a smear of Justiciar and a quietly flat “And we are the Social Police. This is, by treaty, Earth land. Please step aside, sir.”

  This could have gotten interesting in an existentially satisfying way, but there was also the unfortunate possibility they might have come to some kind of civilized solution, and one of the problems with being a bad guy is that civilized solutions just never turn out well for you.

  Besides, it would have been plain sloppy to let this opportunity slip away. Not likely I’d get another.

  I squinted my one good eye up at Khlaylock’s. “Sucks to live in fear, doesn’t it?”

  “What?” He knew better than to get into a conversation with me, but I guess he just couldn’t help himself.

  “Were you not pledged to Combat, I would undertake to teach you the meaning of fear.”

  Remember that eye for weakness?

  I sneered into the pretty half of his face. “Yeah, teach me. Might as well learn from the master.” Lightning flickered behind his bright-gleaming eye. I had him by his metaphorically empty nutsack.

  He went for contempt. “How a villain as low and vile as you can question my heart—”

  “For fuck’s sake, Khlaylock, do we have to have this fight all over again? It doesn’t take guts to smash some poor bastard’s skull with a morningstar. If you had any stones at all you’d kill me right here, you punkass sack of shit. Or just let Soapy haul me off. I mean, they’re taking me straight to True Hell. That’s closer to justice than anything you’ll get from Khryl.”

  He took a step so that he could tower over me even more than he had Soapy Two. “Is that what you’d prefer?”

  “Some people really are upright and pure and the perfect Knight and all that shit. Marade was. More than you, anyway. I’m thinking Angvasse is. You?

  You just play the part because you’re pissing your codpiece terrified that if you screw up, Khryl won’t love you anymore.”

  He drew himself up and gathered dignity around himself like a mantle of righteousness; he had an answer to this one. “Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.”

  I had an answer too. “Who said that? Some other nutless wonder?”

  Markham shouldered forward. “The courage of the Justiciar is legendary—”

  “Only compared with yours, ass-cob.” I shook some pity into my sneer. “It’s one thing to be a good guy because that’s who you are. It’s something else to be a good guy because you’re too much a fucking pussy to break the rules.”

  Cords twisted across the undamaged half of Khlaylock’s forehead. “Were you not already pledged to Combat—”

  “Yeah, yeah. Bored with this. Let’s fight.”

  Khlaylock fixed his good eye on Soapy One, who had me by the left arm. “Release him.”

  Soapy One might have been carved from the same rock as Mount Khlaylock. “I repeat: please step aside, sir. I won’t ask you again.”

  “Do you threaten me?” Incredulity ratcheted Khlaylock’s head another inch or two to his right, which was more or less what I’d been waiting for. “Here, I’ll settle it. Ch’syavallanaig Khryllan’tai.”

  Social Police stripcuffs are designed with a shear-strength high enough to lift a passenger car, and will withstand not only knives but also bolt-cutters and cold chisels, blowtorches, and maybe even arc welders. Basically anything that doesn’t send out the coded electronic pulse that triggers the doohicky to rearrange the cuffs’ long-chain molecules is pretty much useless. They are not, however, designed to bind the wrists of a guy whose right hand can suddenly become roughly as hot as the surface of the sun.

  I admit that that’s more hyperbole—which anyone reading this might guess by the general lack of setting the atmosphere on fire and wiping out all life on the planet—but the point is that the Holy Foreskin was a couple orders of magnitude beyond the heat tolerance of the stripcuffs, so in addition to burning the staggering fuck out of my left wrist and freeing my hands, I shocked a quart of living crap out of Soapy Two, good nerves or not, when his peripheral vision registered a handful of sunfire swinging upside his head.

  Nothing wrong with his reflexes: he let go of my arm and twisted toward me with a smoothly professional bob-and-weave that cleared his helmet under my swing, which was okay because I wasn’t aiming for him anyway.

  Markham jerked back out of my reach with his gauntlets coming up like a boxer’s guard and some Old High Lipkan trigger word burst from his mouth to drape his entire body in electric blue witchfire—also top-rate reflexes—which was also okay because I wasn’t aiming for him either.

  Purthin, Lord Khlaylock, Justiciar Et Cetera, Radiant Mantle of Whothefuckcaresanyway, had just barely time to blink his eye and begin to draw breath for his own Old High Lipkan trigger word when my handful of Holy Foreskin came up his blind side and caught him below his left ear.

  There’s an esoteric variant of the Southern Cobra style of chi tao chu’an called Python; it’s based on wrist and open-palm strikes that lead into joint locks and strangles. It was in that Python spirit that my slap didn’t follow through after impact; instead my open palm hooked around the back of his neck so that his reflexive jerk away drove the base of his skull hard against the Holy Foreskin, which was—though less hot than the surface of the sun—plenty hot enough to blast the water content of his skin and muscle into a burst of superheated steam. A shotgun fired beneath the surface of a bathtub filled with blood would make pretty much the same sound.

  And nearly as much mess.

  Being a minor expert on destruction of the human body, I could go through the technical details, such as how the blast vaporized his upper trapezius and most of his capitor group, crushing his cervical vertebrae into chunks that blew out through his levator scapulae, and so on and so forth—not to mention coming way too damn close to blowing my own damn hand off—but the actual significance of all this was the sum total e
ffect: by the time the Holy Foreskin faded from my palm, Khlaylock’s half-severed head had flopped onto his breastplate and dragged his balance forward over locked knees so that he toppled like a felled tree.

  Soapy One, still holding my left arm, took a reflexive step away from the arterial blood spurting out the ragged remnants of Khlaylock’s carotids, which is the only reason a hundred-forty-some-odd kilos of armored meat didn’t actually land on me.

  Holy Foreskin–dazzle slowly faded from my eyes, and color slowly leached back into the lamplit room, and from the way Faller and Markham were blinking, they couldn’t see any better than I could. We all stood there for a stretching second or two, staring down at Khlaylock’s corpse while the only sounds were the soft plopping as scorched shreds of his flesh peeled off the walls and dripped to the floor, the sizzle of the steam coming off my newborn-pink palm, and Fallerbàl’s low psychotic-fugue moan of oh god oh fuck me fuck me fuck me god . . .

  Looking back on it, I feel like I should have had some kind of flash then, a life-passing-before-my-eyes vision of all the things Purthin Khlaylock has meant to me in the last twenty-five years. Who he was and what I did to him are so intimately intertwined with everything I am that without having kicked his armored ass off the escarpment above Hell, I can’t imagine ever becoming me.

  Instead I just sighed. “Well. That’s done.”

  Maybe I’m not so sentimental after all.

  Markham stood in a half-jittering immobility, like the blue witchfire crawling over his armor was a few thousand volts AC. I nodded to him. “Hey, you win. Congratulations. Here’s your prize: you get to explain all this to Angvasse Khlaylock. She’ll probably be here in a minute or two; I’m surprised she’s not here already.”

  Markham and Faller favored me with identical owl-eyed blinks. “What?”

  “Did I not mention that part? Hey, sorry.” Guess I didn’t look sorry either. “Think about it, Markham—you took me out of an alley that’s in the middle of the Riverdock parish. In full view of Tyrkilld Aeddhar’s favorite bar. Where one of his best friends happens to be an ogrillo. You think those shadows were dark to him? What do you think’s gonna happen when he tells Tyrkilld that you slapped me into a skull fracture and hauled me off? In the middle of a Smoke Hunt. With Smoke Hunters standing right in fucking front of you. You don’t think Tyrkilld’s gonna be kinda curious? You don’t think Angvasse’s gonna be, say, a little interested in what happened to her Invested Agent of Motherfucking Khryl?”

  “I—I was—” Markham had to cough his throat clear before he could go on. “I was acting on the direct order of the Justiciar—”

  “Sure, all right. Did you waste those Hunters? Or do they have some way to recognize you? So they don’t, y’know, kill one of the guys who’s on their side.”

  Markham’s mouth snapped shut with an audible clack.

  “What are you gonna tell Angvasse about why you’re even here tonight? You gonna tell her you were never in her service at all? Gonna tell her you’re a lying bastard whose main job is to babysit her so that she never finds out what’s really going with the Smoke Hunt?”

  “An order of the Justiciar,” Markham said though locked teeth, “which still stands.”

  “Sure. Good luck with that, huh?” I swung my ton-and-a-half of head toward Faller. “Shit, man, you’ll have to tell her yourself.”

  Faller just gave back the empty stare of a jacklighted deer.

  I pointed my chin at Khlaylock’s corpse. “That pile of meat was the local head of state, who just got himself murdered by an Earthman on Earth territory. And you’re about to whisk his killer out of reach of Khryl’s Justice. You get it? You’re maybe five minutes away from war with the Order of Khryl. And because he’s also the Lipkan viceroy, you can likely toss in war with Lipke on top.”

  “I—I—I can’t—I mean, the Social Police—I—” Faller’s eyes bugged out and his stammer dissolved into choking.

  “Listen to me, Rababàl. I’m showing you the way out, get it? All you have to do is tell the truth.”

  “What? What truth?”

  “Tell her I killed him. Tell her I said I was doing my job. My Invested Agent of Khryl gig. Remind her she knew going in that hiring me doesn’t always work out how my bosses hope it will.”

  “Hiring—? Your job?”

  I nodded. “She hired me to stop the Smoke Hunt.”

  “To—what makes you think—?”

  “That was the tricky part of this job. It’s usually easy enough to figure out who’s in charge of shit—all you have to do is find out who’s getting the most out of it, you follow? Who’s gonna win if it goes all the way. But the Smoke Hunt? Everybody gets theirs. It’s a stable system. Nobody wants it to change. The Smoke God gets an endless banquet of dread, fury, and terror. The Hunt’s leadership gets political power—they’ve unified the Boedecken clans in a way this world hasn’t seen since the Khulan Horde. The Khryllians get a permanent enemy that keeps the whole population militarized and obedient. Black Stone gets an open dil, an exploding business in export griffinstones, not to mention a stable slave-labor supply because the toughest, most committed troublemakers get chopped piecemeal into each new round of Smoke Hunters. The Board of Governors gets new access to Home. Hell, even Khryl wins; as an Ideational Power, His Power is a function of the devotion of his worshippers. When shit goes bad, what do people do? They fucking well pray. Khryl’s never been happier. That’s how I knew. It wasn’t one of you, or two or three. It’s too neat. There’s too much to go around. That’s how I knew you’d made a deal. It’s all of you. All you fuckers. Everybody wins.”

  My mouth was full of blood and acid bile. “Everybody except the ordinary grills, living in slave ghettoes, trading their balls for a chance at a better life.

  Everybody except the regular fucking folk getting ripped limb from fucking limb by the fucking Smoke Hunt. Christ, I hate you people. If you only knew how I hate you.”

  I spat the blood on the floor. I was panting. My breath felt hot enough to ignite the room. “And now I’ve fucked you, because there actually are a couple decent fucking people in this artesian shitspring of a town, and they’re on their way here, and there’s no way you’re gonna talk your way out of this. Hell, you can’t even want to. The truth’s your only fucking hope.”

  “Perhaps,” Markham murmured. “And perhaps not. Do you believe Khryl’s Champion is likely to defy the expressed Will of the Lord of Battles?”

  “Just bet my life on it, didn’t I?”

  Soapy One snorted. “What life?” he said, and his shock baton came up on my own blind side and blasted starshells across my brain.

  On Home, the physics are wrong for the capacitors in the shock baton. So he had to hit me a couple more times. I remember saying, as I went down, “Tell her—tell her she owes me. Tell her I want to get paid . . .”

  Then the event horizon surged out from inside my head and swallowed me whole.

  A DEAL WITH GOD

  Once I woke up, it didn’t take long to figure out where I was. I’d been there before.

  Too many times.

  The plain cream-colored walls, blank, windowless, featureless except for the touchpad beside the door. The flat cream-colored door itself, also without window. Or handle. The simple desk and chair, injection-molded of a single piece with the floor. Nothing on them. No books. No screen and stylus, and certainly no pen or paper. The lo-flo crapper in the corner. The bed, with the padded wire-and-plastic straps to secure my arms to the cold round rails of brushed stainless steel. No straps for my legs, because they didn’t need any, and they knew it.

  This was Earth.

  The computerized spinal bypass that let my legs work in this universe hadn’t been reinitialized since I left three years ago; the mental trick that lets me walk on Home is magick. From the waist down I was just dead fucking meat. Like—as Deliann once wrote—having a couple dead dogs strapped to my ass. Except I can’t eat ’em.

  I had a tube coming ou
t of my dick, and a big diaper, and I didn’t have any self-consciousness about crapping all over myself. If they didn’t feel like cleaning up my shit, they could fucking well unstrap an arm so I could use the bedpan—the one success of my literally half-assed spinal regeneration therapy had been bowel and bladder control. But nobody minded cleaning up my shit. They weren’t capable of minding.

  If I’d had any doubt about where I was being held, it would have vanished the first time my attendants came in to empty my urine bag, replace my IVs, and change my diaper. I could see the lobotomized vacancy in their eyes before I saw the neural yokes on their necks.

  Workers.

  I didn’t bother to try to talk to them. With their higher cognitive function overridden by the yokes, Workers can’t do anything beyond give simple answers to direct questions. These couldn’t even do that. They were deaf. Stone fucking deaf.

  Surgically deafened.

  To make sure that an inmate here had no one to communicate with. That the inmate has absolutely no unapproved contact whatsoever with anyone beyond his cell. Which I knew because for about ten years, I used to regularly bribe my way into this place, to talk to my father.

  I was in the Buke.

  The Buchanan Social Camp is one of the places Geneva puts people who need to have their antisocial attitudes rectified, or at least interdicted from healthy society. Usually permanently.

  It’s hard to say how long I was there; time has little meaning in the Buke. Workers came and went. My relief bag and diaper got changed, as did my sheets and my IV. My headaches went away. I got stronger.

  I had time to think.

  Thinking—real thinking—is not something I do often, nor particularly well. I was never trained for it, and I sure as hell don’t have any natural inclination.

  Thinking gets in my way. In a fight it’s fatal.

  In the real world, instinct and experience are superior to thought; Tolstoy wrote that in a contest of cunning, the peasant consistently defeats the intellectual, and he was right. Not because the peasant is smarter but because he doesn’t have the self-doubt and the second thoughts and all the other mind tricks that make the intellectual out-think himself.