This enough knife for you?
Hey now. He doesn’t move: not as stupid as he looks. Hey now.
The hunchback rises, slow, hands up and open, the human gesture of surrender. His fighting claws fold along his forearms. No need to hook red, hey? Easy now. Just say what you want, hey?
I want some eyeball with Kopav Dust Mirror.
You might like to tell me what for, he offers, sidling closer.
You might like your fuckbitch’s head where it is. You add a little pressure to the knife. Blood spoor pumps your salivary glands. Keep your teeth off my kill.
Hey-hey, fuck! The big one looks puzzled. Offended. Not frightened. Not hurt. Hey, I’m cut! He cuts me. Hey—
The hunchback considers this. Here’s the call, citybred. Come back two league-walks after sundown—
Your eyes flick toward the window, instinctively, to check the light and gauge the hour, just a flick, less than an eyeblink, but they knew you’d do it and the big one jerks his head back from your blade and one fighting claw jams for your groin while his other slashes for the forearm tendons of your knife hand. You twist sharp enough to knock the groin stab aside, but you feel the tug below your navel and a sudden flood scalds your crotch and thickens the air with sweet hot blood. You flick the KA-BAR in a short arc and the blade sticks in bone; the big one howls and wrenches his arm away into the table and it collapses and he goes with it. The little one lunges fast as a pro but your other hand comes out full of Automag and a single squeeze of burstfire unlaces his belly and blows him spinning backward to crash into the shack wall.
The parchment window rips. Sunlight stabs a curl of gunsmoke.
A continuous clang sings in your ears.
The big one cowers, kneeling, tears painting crimson streaks along his snout. The hunchback sits crumpled against the wall, cursing in a low, steady monotone while he tries to hold his guts in place with both hands. Fuckbitch. You got a gun. A fucking gun. You never say you got a gun, you fuckbitch.
You step over to him, Automag leveled on the big one. Kopav Dust Mirror, you remind him.
Fuck my bitch. I never be shot before. Fucking guns. This kills me, hey?
Likely.
You fuckbitch.
Want to go easy? I track that. You squat beside him and show him the knife.Want to go hard, I can track that too.
He stares through you.
You shrug. Or lie in your shit and hope a Knight comes. Maybe Khryl grants a Healing after you tell him how you try to gut me for my boots, hey?
His eyes drift shut.
What you want?
It’s you, hey? You’re Kopav?
Yah.
You’re Kopav ’Jurginget? Kopav Black Knife once?
His eyes open again. They’re the same color as yours. Once, he says. In puptime. Before the land hates Black Knives. Long gone now. I’m Dust Mirror since the Horror. No more Black Knives.
Your upper lip curls under and your lower peels down, baring your tusks to the roots. Except for me.
His gaze fixes on you, and there’s a hint of a spark there before a spasm of pain smudges his face blank. What you want?
You stand, knife in one hand, Automag in the other. Submission.
Huh. His face goes old now, tired and sad. Just that?
Yeah.
Fuck my bitch. Dint have to shoot me.
You cock your head half an inch. Dint have to rush me.
So-submission. His jaw works. And?
And you go easy.
He stares at you for a long time. From outside come grunts and distant shouts and shuffle and scuffle, drawn by the shots. Inside there is only blood and bowels and the whimper of the bigger one clutching the spurting gash in his forearm. You can see pain picking up steam by the waves of emptiness that roll through the hunchback’s eyes.
Finally he hisses resignation. Dint have to shoot me.
You wait.
He rolls himself forward off the wall, kneeling, and lowers his face until his forehead rests on your insteps. You thumb the Automag over to single shot.
He says, I give myself to you—
You center the muzzle on the crown of his spinal ridge.
— fuckbitch.
The slug splinters a fist-size hole through the floor planks. A wet one. You track the hunchback’s brains over to the other.
Ignik? Ignik Dust Mirror: Tchundiget?
Uh. He lifts eyes like bloody eggs. Kill me too, you gonna?
You twitch the Automag and point it between your boots.
Down.
Whimpering, he presses his forehead into his sire’s gore. I, I, I give-he’s snuffling so hard he can barely get the words out-I give myself to you.
You drop to one knee and tuck the Automag back into its holster by your kidney. Ignik gasps when you grab his wounded arm-bone scrapes together in there: splintered ulna, maybe. You press the gash your knife left on his forearm to the shallow rip his fighting claw gouged in your belly.
This is my battle wound. This is your battle wound. Our wounds are one. Our blood is one.
His jaw hangs open like he’s trying to draw flies to the rot on his teeth. I uh I uh I uh-who are you?
Use your fucking feet. Black Knives don’t kneel.
Bu bu bu hrk? He smears crimson tears off his face with a greasy hand. Black Knives?
You palm the KA-BAR and roughly square his shoulders. You’re filthy, little brother. And soft: too long in Hell. Your tusks are grey. Your neck bends easy.
He slobbers. And you-you-and you-I am Black Knife. You flip the KA-BAR pommel-first and hand it to him. Now, so are you.
My Gift has now been given, and I release you: you open your all-too-human eyes, stare at the mold-eaten plaster ceiling above your bed, and mutter, “Son of a bitch.”
And I imagine that it is the weight of years you shed to rise in that grey dawn. The deep ache in your joints may be the memory of dread: darkness and terror, the cotton-rip of flesh tearing under blunt claws, the icy inevitability of agony and death—
And yet it may be only the scars of half a century at war.
I cannot know. Though I feel the grinding of hip and shoulder and the scrape of hangover-dried eyelid, taste the fewmets of last night’s brandy and smell the old sweat that stains your tunic with salt rings-though I can count the pulse in your temples and calculate to a nicety the uneasy pressure in your bladder-I can never know what you’re thinking. Perhaps this is why you have fascinated me so. It is as good a reason as any.
Which is to say it means nothing at all.
You limp, stiff with morning, to the dirty bubbled window and rest your forehead against the autumn-cool glass. I fancy you wonder how you came to be so inexplicably old; I fancy you recall yourself facing Black Knives at twentyfive and marvel that as many years have passed from then to now.
You turn aside to the water stand and mop your face with a dripping towel that smells of rot. When you regard your reflection in the silvered glass above the basin, you scowl at the scrapes of white at your temples, at the salt in your once-black beard. You scowl and you shake your head and you scowl some more, and you sigh like a tired old man. . but we both know it’s a pose.
Shall we say: an act?
The dark flame in your eye is as plain to you as it is to me.
Your scowl turns thoughtful, and I know: you’re thinking that I could be lying to you.
What My Gift has shown you-is it history? is it news? is it prophecy?
Is it horseshit?
And I watch your scowl settle, and harden, and finally crack toward a grim smile, and I know: you have discovered that you don’t care.
I have Called. You will answer.
Have you found in your heart yet a story you can tell your daughter, that sweet half-godling child who dreams of you in her castle bed so many leagues away from this mountain town? Will you share with her guardian a reason? An excuse?
Or when they call for you, will only echoes answer?
Will you
say to Lady Faith, ten-year-old Marchioness of Harrakha: “Your Uncle Orbek’s getting himself into some trouble. I owe him. He went into the Shaft for me.”
Will you say to Lady Avery, the formidable Countess of Lyrissan: “I have to go north for a while; there’s news of Black Knives in the Boedecken. You don’t want that kind of trouble to your north.”
Or will you tell them the truth?
Will you reveal the fresh trip of your pulse? The high sweet song adrenaline hums in your veins, the youth My Gift breathes into your old, tired legs?
Will you tell them that you feel alive again?
This is My Gift to you, My Devil. Come out from your place and walk once more to and fro upon the world and go up and down in it. I give you back your joy. I give you back your passion. Come forth, My Caine. My love.
Come forth and serve Me.
Come out and play.
PART ONE
BELOW HELL
I leaned on the deck rail and silently numbered my dead.
The slow heartbeat of the riverboat’s steam-driven pistons pulsed in my bones. The waterfall hush from the sidewheel’s rising flukes shuffled the chatter and bustle of passengers and crew into white noise. I preferred it that way.
I’ve never been exactly social.
I had barely spoken since Thorncleft. I traveled alone. I couldn’t have made myself bring companions.
Not to the Boedecken. Not on this river. My river.
Fucking astonishing: how many people I knew who died up here. I couldn’t remember all the names. Rababal, Stalton, that Lipkan supposed-to-be priest of Dal’kannith. . Pretornio. Hadn’t really thought of them, any of them, in maybe twenty years. Lyrrie. Kess Raman. Jashe the Otter. Others. Dozens of others. Thirty-five? Thirty-six?
I couldn’t pin down how many. I wasn’t sure it was important, but somehow I thought it ought to be.
Back on Earth, it’d have only taken a minute or two to dig the cube out of my library and start to live the whole thing again. I didn’t think I would have.
Didn’t think I could have.
After I retired-in the bad days, that seven years when my legs never quite worked and the background music of my life was a mental track of the nearest bathroom because I could never tell when I was about to shit myself-I sometimes cubed my old Adventures. Caine’s old Adventures. Just on the really bad days. In the bad nights, when the shitswamp I’d made of my life sucked me down and drowned me. But I never cubed this one.
Not that I had to. All I had to do was stop holding it all down.
I still held it all down. Still hold it all down. I didn’t even know why. They’re fucking dead. Every one of them. Dead in the Boedecken Waste. Nameless corpses in the badlands’ dust. Left to the buzzards, the crows and the khoshoi.
Left to the Black Knives.
And if somebody let any of them out of Hell long enough to take a new look at this fucking place, the shock’d probably kill them all over again.
The gravel-scoured folds of the badlands had softened into rolling fields of maize and beans, well-ordered woodlots and neat rows of birch and alder windbreaks. Where the land was too rugged for food crops, the hills were terraced with vineyards: long trellised racks of twisting bark-shagged vines hung with purple and red and green clusters that I could smell even down here on the river. The river was itself new: shallow with youth and careful engineering, its broad slow curves fed the vast network of irrigation ditches and ponds and reservoirs that had brought the Waste to life. And somehow I couldn’t make myself believe this was a good thing.
These waves of living green looked like less to me.
The old Boedecken had been exactly that: old. Carved by time into its true shape. Harsh, jagged, scarred by existence, grim grey jaws locked onto the ass end of life.
I’d kind of liked it that way.
The river was the only change up here that hadn’t surprised me. Whenever I let myself, I could make the river’s birth happen inside my head vivid as a lucid dream. Like lots of births, the river’s had been ugly. A sea-wrack of pain and terror. A hurricane of blood.
The kind of fun I hadn’t had in a long, long time.
I kept my head down while the riverboat churned through the outer sprawl of Purthin’s Ford. I wasn’t ready to look up at Hell.
I knew it was there. When the light was good and the air was clear, I’d been able to see the Spire for two days.
But I didn’t look up now, while neat rows of white brick houses and red tile roofs around well-ordered plazas commanded by greystone Khryllian vigilries drifted south behind the docks and warehouses to either side, while chill black shadows of high-curved bridges wiped the ship from bow to wheel to stern, and the tiled arches were tight enough around the deck that I could smell the soap somebody had used to scrub the stonework clean.
I made a face that cracked the dust on my cheeks. When I licked my lips, they tasted like an open grave.
What was I, superstitious? Didn’t feel like fear. Didn’t feel like what people used to call post-traumatic stress disorder. Sure, if I let it, every second of Retreat from the Boedecken would come alive in my brain just like it was happening all over again. But that shouldn’t scare me. Just the opposite.
This place made me. I came here a nobody on my way to never-was. I left here the legend I always wanted to be.
Everything I’ve ever done pursues me. Like a doppleganger, a fetch, my past creeps up behind and strangles me in my sleep. When hunted by a monster in your dreams, you save yourself by facing the monster and demanding its name. In learning the monster’s name, you rob it of the power to haunt you. But I was awake. And anyway I already knew my monster’s name.
It was Caine.
My father used to tell me that you can’t control the consequences of your actions. You can’t even predict them. So all you can do is your best, and all that matters is to make sure what you do will let you look in the mirror and like what you see.
I can’t remember the last time I liked what I see in the mirror.
There was a writer from Earth’s twentieth century who wrote that “sin is what you feel bad after.” Of all the things I’ve done, what I did up here—
Maybe that was the feeling that made my mouth an open grave. That hung a brick around my neck to hold down my head. Maybe it was shame.
Maybe that was why I couldn’t put a name to it.
I’ve never pretended to be a good man. I have done very, very bad things in my life. Anybody who believes in Hell believes that Hell exists for men like me.
Fair enough. I was on my way.
On my way back.
After a while, I pushed myself off the rail and went into my cabin to organize my shit for debarking.
I still hadn’t looked up at Hell.
Just so we’re clear: I didn’t come to the Boedecken to save Orbek. I didn’t come to save anybody. Saving people is not among my gifts.
Shit needs to be settled eventually. One way or another. That’s the only way I can explain it.
Or even think about it.
There was a novelist on Earth, back around the beginning of the twentyfirst century, a guy my dad admired quite a bit. He wrote some books where the basic idea was that since you can’t control the consequences of what you do, the only thing that really counts is why you do it. You get it? The measure of right action is righteous intention. This writer was a religious type-a Mormon, don’t ask-and I guess he figured that if your heart’s right, God takes care of the rest.
Well, y’know. .
I know some gods. Better than I want to. Not one of them gives a shit about your heart.
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine wrote a book that was supposed to be the story of his lives. Or stories of his life, you pick. Anyway: he wrote that what your life means depends on how you tell the story.
If it makes you feel better to pretend I had some noble purpose, knock yourself out. If you’d rather pretend I was driven by guilt, or by personal obligation, or
that I just finally grew up enough to want to clean up my own fucking mess, that’s fine too.
This is the story of what happened when I came to the Boedecken. What happened. Not why. The only why is that I made up my mind. I decided, and I went. That’s it. Anybody who needs to know more about why should go ahead and fuck off.
Reasons are for peasants.
My dead wife-the one who decided she’d rather go play goddess than be married-she used to like to say that not everything is about me.
Screw that.
Who’s telling this story, anyway?
I dragged the travel trunk bouncing down over the ribs of the gangplank. At the foot of the plank I took a couple steps to the side to clear the way for the passengers behind. I stood the trunk on end and sat on it.
All right, you bastard. I’m here.
I’ve been doing the Actor’s Soliloquy for so many years it’s mostly reflex: whenever my attention starts to wander, I find myself narrating my life in subvocal twitches of lips and tongue and glottis. I used to make a good living at it; back in the day, such subvocal twitches had been registered by a tiny device inside my skull behind my left ear and transmitted a universe away to Earth, where a sophisticated computer algorithm had translated them into a quasithoughtlike internal monologue for the amusement of tens of thousands of narcotized fans who’d paid obscene amounts of money for the illusion of being me.
My life always played better than it lived.
Those days are long gone, but I still monologue. Now I play for an audience of one.
Dammit, I’m here. How about a hint? A clue? A pillar of cloud? A burning sonofabitching bush?
I waited, but there was only dockside chatter and the rustling thump of cargo nets, whistles of distant birdsong and the ripple-slap from the river.
God doesn’t talk to me anymore.
“Fine,” I muttered. “Fuck you anyway.”
Maybe He’d decided to hold a grudge for that sword-through-the-brain thing. Which suits me fine, most of the time; I have a grudge or two of my own.
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