Caine Black Knife aoc-3

by Matthew Stover

  “Like that, is it?”

  “And it always will be.” I shook out my pants. “I’m not much for forgiveness.”

  “Has any been requested?”

  “Not by you.” I lowered the pants to the floor. “You’re walking pretty good for somebody who had about two fingers’ worth of thighbone shot off.”

  Tyrkilld looked down. His right hand made a fist. On its back was a disk of new scar, big around as a gold Ankhanan royal.

  After a moment, he said softly, “The armsman-”

  “Braehew. Yeah, I heard.”

  Tyrkilld nodded distantly. “When a Soldier gives himself to Khryl, there are ways in which he might. . continue to serve.”

  I stared, my pants forgotten. “What, a bone graft? You’re walking on a piece of that poor bastard’s leg?”

  “I am. My hand shares several of his bones, as well-as does your side.”

  I pressed my bright-pink palm to the quadrangle of new scars over my liver. “No fucking way.”

  “Your ribs were shattered. Did no one tell you this?”

  “No.” I felt suddenly ill. More ill. “Nobody bothered to explain.”

  “I will be calling upon his widow and orphaned daughters later tonight. Perhaps you’d be gracious enough to accompany me.”

  I shook my head in blank astonishment. “Every one of you bastards is completely bugnuts. Every single one.”

  “He fell in honorable battle-”

  “My ass.”

  “-in service to the Lord of Valor. It is my duty to offer whatever consolation his widow may require.”

  “Whatever consolation?” I shook my head again. “I don’t want to know.”

  Tyrkilld’s voice was hoarse. And bleak. “Braehew died without sons.”

  “Didn’t I just say I don’t want to know?” I waved him off like somebody else’s fart. “The more I find out about Khryllians, the less I like any of you.”

  Tyrkilld spoke from under his lowered brows. His face could not be seen. “House Aeddharr has been the flower of Jheledi knighthood since before the grand Lipkan Empire was even a ring of dog’s piss. Since before Our Lord of Valor was more than a simpleminded goatherd with a gift for the sling. I have some knowledge of the obligations of nobility. Which knowledge a person of generous nature might forgive me for suspecting you lack.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Tyrkilld turned a sidelong eye upon me. “If it’s no forward remark from one who was lately engaged in damaging your health, you seem well.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Which is a point of curiosity to me, as Khryl’s Healing extends only to hurts taken upon the field of battle.”

  “So?”

  “So it is a curious happenstance that the hurts Khryl’s Hand delivered unto your person through mine own seem Healed as well. Seeing as how they were delivered before the fighting began.”

  I shrugged as I finally stepped into my pants. “There’s fighting and there’s fighting.”

  “Ah?”

  I pulled my pants up. “That fight started when your poor bastard Braehew pointed his shotgun at my balls.”

  “Oh, did it now?” Tyrkilld frowned thoughtfully. “I would not have regarded it so.”

  “That’s why you lost.”

  “We lost,” Tyrkilld said, drawing himself up with an impressive display of dignity for a naked man, “because such was the Judgment of Our Lord of Valor.”

  “Ever occur to you,” I said as I fastened the row of buttons up the side of the pants, “that maybe you just got beat?”

  “Hnhn?”

  “Don’t you wonder? Maybe I just kicked your ass. Maybe I got lucky.”

  Tyrkilld’s eyes went dreamy and his voice gentled. “Might this be, to my unworthy ear, the music of a confession?”

  I snorted. “It’s just that your Utterance of Valor shit is kind of, well. .”

  “Primitive? Unreliable? Childish? Stupid?” Tyrkilld shrugged a couple yards of hairy shoulders. “Only to Incommunicants. To distinguish between simple defeat and the Judgment of God is not difficult in most cases, and in this one it’s clear as Trahammeth’s Glass. At the critical moment, Khryl withdrew from me His Love.”

  “Oh, I get it.” I favored him with a bland smile. “You’re saying Khryl Himself affirmed what I said about your father.”

  Muscle rippled along his wide jaw. “That’s not what we were fighting about.”

  “The hell it wasn’t.”

  Streaks of flush like claw marks surfaced across his chest, and the skin over the knuckles on those oak-knot hands went white. “You. . are a very, very bad man.”

  “Do you know that when you get really angry, even your nuts blush?”

  Tyrkilld spun and stomped toward the pool hard enough to shake the stone floor-but he stopped at the edge. “What you said. . about your father. .”

  The view wasn’t any better from behind. “What about him?”

  “You made him sound a fine man-a man of great courage and conviction,” Tyrkilld said quietly. “A far better man than your vile self.”

  “Maybe we have that in common.”

  “Possibly we do. May I express my regret that I can never make his acquaintance?”

  “Don’t.” I picked up my tunic. It was inside out. “He would’ve spit in your fucking face.”

  When I looked up, Tyrkilld had turned away and was silently wading into the blood-tainted water, and somehow, unaccountably, I felt like an asshole. More of an asshole.

  “Don’t take it too hard.” I tried to swallow it, but the truth came up my throat like vomit. “He’d spit in my face, too.”

  Tyrkilld stopped. “We are at war.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “You can have no faint idea-”

  “You think you’re at war.”

  “And what, if you’ll again indulge the curiosity of a poor ignorant parish Knight, is that intended to mean?”

  “When you go upstairs to see Khryl,” I said, “stand there with your bloody cock and balls in hand and pray to Him that you never find out.”

  Tyrkilld shook his head grimly. “There is not a gracious bone among your double hundred, is there? Not a one.”

  “I had a gracious bone once. Some Khryllian ass-bandit beat it to paste.”

  He was silent for a moment, staring into the slow thick ripple of the bloody water around his thighs.

  “What you said this afternoon-about men like me ruling the world. .” Tyrkilld looked over one shoulder. “Men don’t rule the world, you might know. We scarcely rule the Battleground.”

  “I wasn’t talking about this world.” I got my tunic straightened out and began to shrug my way into it, and so it was from the inside of my tunic, half-muffled and blindfolded, that I heard Tyrkilld’s reply.

  “That I know well enough.”

  I said, “Fuck me like a goat.”

  “I’ll pass, if it means no particular offense.”

  “Oh, for shit’s sake.” I managed to get my head out and pulled the tunic down. I got one of my boots and began trying to pull it on, snarling under my breath, “Should’ve just drove into town on a circus wagon with a motherfucking brass band playing ‘Send in the Clowns.’ ”

  “Your pardon? My ears are less than-”

  “How’d you know me?”

  “Ah. Well, there’s little to it, at that. We’ve met before, is the sum of the tale. I was with Lord Khlaylock, back in the day. Back in the day in question, one might say.”

  “I don’t remember you.”

  “I was one among several, and you were. . well, you.”

  “I still am. More or less. Maybe you noticed.” I stomped my boots the rest of the way on. “All right, I’m dressed. Markham’s gone. Let’s drop the fucking games.”

  “Your pardon?”

  “You’re going to do me a favor.”

  He wheeled on me, slowly, head back, eyes half slitted, two-thirds of a disbelieving smile crawling
across his lips. “And how does one arrive at this improbable conviction?”

  “You owe me, Tyrkilld. You owe me your life twice over already today.”

  Those oak-knot hands went to his vast hairy hips. “Indeed?”

  “At the Riverdock customs sequestry, your life was forfeit by your own Laws of Engagement.”

  “Not my Laws. Khryl’s. And my gratitude for your unexpected mercy is unbounded, never doubt. But a second time? When could this have occurred?”

  “About fifteen minutes ago. Call it a tenth of a watch.”

  “Ah? You spared my life when I was not even present to appreciate your mercy? How virtuous.”

  “If you say so.”

  “And how, precisely, did you perform this extraordinary act?”

  “I didn’t tell Angvasse Khlaylock that you’re an Ankhanan agent.”

  The smile vanished. His head rolled forward, and his hands came off his hips, and his weight shifted and he took the beginning of a breath, and I said, “Better not.”

  He stopped at full poise.

  “Think about it,” I said. “She’s right upstairs. She just Invested me with the Authority of Khryl. I don’t care what magick you’ve got to fuck with her truthsense. She’ll never believe you. Never.”

  He subsided into a kind of relaxation-the kind you see on lions who are trying to decide whether they’re hungry-and forced another of those disbelieving smiles onto his face. “And here we’ve arrived at another improbable conviction. Preposterous, one might even-”

  “Don’t.”

  “I am a Knight ordained and-”

  “Yeah. A Knight ordained and whatever who’s working for Kierendal. Let’s not argue, huh?”

  “It’s so entirely ridiculous-”

  “Shit, Tyrkilld, what do I care? But you’re gonna do this thing for me.

  Nothing serious. Just deliver a message to her.”

  “To your Ankhanan elf gangster-queen?”

  “Tell her I know she’s in Purthin’s Ford, and I know why. Tell her we don’t have to be enemies. We have interests in common here. We should meet, and we should talk. I’ll even let the whole ordering-you-to-beat-me-to-death thing go. As a courtesy.”

  He gave me a pretty credible snort. “Uncommonly magnanimous-or might it be your habit to extend amnesty for imaginary crimes?”

  I gave him back a shrug. “Kierendal and I have an unusual relationship. She gets nothing but good from me, but every so often anyway she decides to have me killed. I guess I’m used to it.”

  “Custom gives ease to many a queer fashion.”

  “Something like that. Unless she didn’t tell you to do anything about me at all.”

  “I’m sure I couldn’t say.”

  “Because that’d mean she’s decided to have you killed.”

  Tyrkilld looked suddenly thoughtful.

  “She knows Orbek, and she knows me, and she knows I’d be here as soon as I got a hint Orbek might be in trouble. If she wanted you to live, she’d have warned you to expect me. And reminded you that I’ve killed men for a hell of a lot less than slapping my head into next fucking year.”

  He shrugged. “Nor would any such warning have signified overmuch, even had your hypothetical elf-queen managed to impress upon me quite how entirely skilled you are at it.”

  “Have it your way. But tell her what I said, huh? I don’t want to piss in her soup. And she won’t want to piss in mine.”

  “And so, perchance-” Tyrkilld squinted past me, like he was looking for something in the darkness of the passageway down which Markham had vanished. “-were a man to unexpectedly find himself in a position to do such a service for your estimable self, whence cometh recompense, and in what manner?”

  “I’ll tell you how I knew. What gave you away.”

  “Oh?”

  “Think about it, Tyrkilld. Khryllians aren’t as easygoing as I am. Knowing where you fucked up could save your life. Could save lots of lives. Like, say, the lives of everyone in Freedom’s Face, y’know?”

  He looked down into the slow roil of bloody water around his thighs.

  “I suppose. .” Even in the dead silence of the Lavidherrixium, I could barely hear him. “I suppose there would be value in that. To learn how you could be so certain.”

  Dumbass. “I wasn’t. Not certain.”

  His head snapped up. His mouth dropped open.

  “Fucking amateur,” I said, and turned for the darkness.

  From the outside, the Pens was Mid-Period Gulag: barbed wire and bright lights and guard towers posted with sharpshooters. I automatically noted shadows, fields of fire, available hard and soft cover, and shook my head silently. Somebody knew what they were doing.

  Somebody Artan: the wire fencing looked galvanized, and the searchlights had a moon-greenish glow I recognized. The limelights at the Railhead in Transdeia are exactly that color.

  This Faller character. . Back in the day, I used to run Earthside transit operations for the Overworld Company out of the San Francisco Studio; I knew most of the techs and OC operatives by sight, and all of them by name. How could Faller have come out of Transdeia and I didn’t know him?

  Maybe tomorrow I’d pay a visit, and ask.

  Tonight I had to save Orbek’s life.

  Getting in to see Orbek wasn’t a problem. I didn’t even need to whip out the Holy Foreskin. With Markham to hold my hand, we walked right through the gates and nobody looked like they were even thinking about stopping us.

  From the inside, the Pens looked less like a prison camp than a kennel. Banks of eight-by-five strap-iron cages sat on legs a meter off the scraped-bare stone of the escarpment. No plumbing, just eligible trusties with rakes and buckets and wheelbarrows and a vast manure pile at the cliffside fence.

  The dusk clogged up with misting drizzle again. I was starting to hate the weather in this town.

  Some stretches of cages stood open and empty, waiting for convicts who stood in chains of eight in the mustering pen. Some stretches of cages were full of indistinct shapes, huddled against the damp. Trusties fanned out among the rows, tossing tarpaulins over cage tops to keep out the rain. Chill white flames burned steady in some cage-irons’ lattice gaps: cold greenishyellow gaslight erasing color in cold greenishyellow eyes.

  The drizzle thickened toward rain. Head down, arms crossed over my chest, I walked behind the Lord Righteous. An icy trickle traced my spine from my plastered-flat hair to the crack of my ass. Shivers started below my ribs and rippled out into my legs and up to my neck.

  At least it was rinsing off the old blood. That was some consolation.

  Sure it was.

  Markham walked with a long swinging confident stride. He didn’t seem to notice the rain running inside his collarpiece. Maybe the armor had drains in its heels.

  I might start to hate the bastard.

  I stared up under dripping eyebrows at his back, cataloguing every joint in that rain-beaded armor where a fighting knife’s spearpoint might drive through into flesh. Not from any ill intent. Just on general principle.

  Mostly.

  He led me past the kennels toward a broad, flat field that steamed gently in the rain. Closer, I could see that the field was checkered with square panels of iron grillework though which the vapor leaked. At the edge, the grilles were set into stone over the mouths of ten-by-ten pits cut fifteen feet deep into the escarpment’s bedrock. The vapor-Breath and body heat.

  “Um,” I said, “you got some kind of ladder or something? Or do I just jump?”

  “No need.” Markham waved a gauntlet ahead. “Your ogrillo has a visitor already.”

  Out in the middle of the iron and stone field stood a pair of hulking trusties, immense shoulders hunched to their ears, and an uncomfortable-looking Knight Attendant. One of the trusties held what looked like a short siege ladder: a metal pole that sprouted rows of pegs a couple of spans apart along opposite sides.

  Markham stopped at the edge of the field. “I leave you here, Free
man. Put yourself in the care of yonder Knight Attendant.”

  “What, you’re not gonna walk me home?”

  “Your possessions will be delivered to the Pratt amp; Redhorn hostelry. Any page can direct you. Good evening.” He executed a crisp about-face and marched off into the rain.

  I shrugged and set out across the field.

  Some of the grilles had tarps draped across them. Most did not.

  Orbek’s didn’t.

  The trusties and the other Knight Attendant were staring down into Orbek’s pit. The rain half-muffled growls and grunts and low-throated snarling howls. Helm tucked under his right arm, the Knight watched with the grimly blank look of a man refusing to flinch from a distasteful obligation. The trusties both had trifurcate lips drawn back from filed-blunt tusks: grins or sneers, I couldn’t tell. Yellow eyes slitted, steam curling from snouts, one massaged the stump of a fighting claw with his opposite hand. The other rubbed his own crotch through his burlap pants, unselfconscious as a dog licking its balls.

  The howls rose into yelping. Sounded like pain. Didn’t sound like Orbek. “What, you make him kill his own dinner?”

  “Not exactly, Freeman.” The Knight stepped to one side to let me pass.

  “Then what’s that fucking noise?”

  A faint crinkle twitched at the corners of the Knight’s eyes. “Exactly.”

  It wasn’t until I got to the edge of the pit that I suspected a Lipkan Knight of Khryl could actually have a sense of humor.

  “Oh, for shit’s sake.” I rubbed my eyes. Headache thundered in my skull. “I didn’t need to see this.”

  What I didn’t need to see was Orbek and his other visitor.

  Fucking.

  A middle-aged ogrillo bitch, naked but for a pair of battered boots, stood braced wide-legged, facing the near corner like a boxer leaning on the ropes between rounds, while Orbek pounded her from behind.

  Orbek was on another planet: eyes squeezed shut, spasms in his massive neck jerking his tusks ripping at the rain. The bitch’s dugs swung and bounced like wattles on a spastic turkey. Another spasm of yelping brought her head up and she met the eyes above and she howled even louder: performing, exaggerating, a sardonic lip-curling mockery of passion, thick purple tongue lolling between her tusks, green-yellow eyes wide, fierce, challenging-Like she was daring us all to jump in and have a whack at her too.