Caine Black Knife aoc-3

by Matthew Stover

  Humming under her breath, she paints sigils in blood on my palms. Pretty soon she lets my hands drop and brings her finger to my face, painting around my mouth and up onto my cheeks. After a few seconds of this, she sighs, and full consciousness swims back up to the surface of her eyes.

  “All right.” She gives herself a little shake. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  My breath goes short, whistling faintly through my clamped-tight throat. “Get in position.”

  “Caine-” She squints against a half-strangled cough. “We won’t live through this, will we?”

  “Hard to say.” I shrug to cover the shakes that are starting to ripple along my arms. “A couple days ago, I would have said no way. But my luck’s been running good lately.”

  “When I-” Another cough, choked, with maybe a little bit of sob behind it. “When I was telling Marade the plan, Whispering to her-y’know, the diversion, the rendezvous, everything-she started to cry. It’s the-I’ve never seen her cry, Caine. I don’t think. . what they did to her. . But she started to cry when I told her the plan, and I asked her-well, she just said she was grateful, that’s all. She kept saying thanks. But not for the, y’know, the escape. The rescue.”

  She swallows. “For the chance to hit back.”

  My eyes burn. Not with tears. “Yeah.”

  “That’s what I want to say too. Thanks. For the chance to hit back.”

  “It’s more than a chance,” I tell her. “You remember what I said the night they took us, how the Black Knives would remember us for a thousand years?”

  “But that was just-”

  “Yeah, it was. Then.”

  Storm clouds part. Stars wink into being.

  “You and I, Tizarre, right here, right now-”

  Can she see my teeth?

  “-we just might make it true.”

  ››scanning fwd››

  Even the wind goes still. Rich fruity fumes steam up from the oil on the point.

  From the apex, the Black Knife camp is a clutter of cinders and ash and smolder like a kicked-out campfire. The cinders are the hide tents, the ashes are knots of bachelor males sleeping out under the stars and the rain, and the smolder is the remains of watch fires burning down now with the approach of dawn.

  I’m in place. Go.

  I don’t bother to signal her that I heard.

  She’ll figure it out.

  Vengeance is mine saith the Lord but this morning He’s gonna fucking well have to share.

  I press my painted palms to my painted cheeks. I draw as deep a breath as I can and open my mouth as far as it’ll go, then clap my hands once, crisp and sharp, in front of my open mouth.

  It makes a sound like most of the Boedecken just exploded.

  The magick of the Shout directs the sound away from me, but still the blast is physical, staggering me, buckling my knees and smacking stars into my eyes.

  Cover my fucking ears too fucking right-!

  Like I have any hearing left to lose.

  I can’t even imagine what it must have sounded like to the Black Knives, but that sleepy kicked-through campfire just became a kicked-over anthill as ogrilloi jump up and rush out of their tents and spin around and fumble for weapons and probably shout and howl and squeal, if I could hear them, and I’m not even started yet.

  Now I do cover my ears, and I Shout:

  YOU

  WERE

  WARNED

  The sound is too vast to be called speech: it is as though the escarpment itself roars at them. The anthill of Black Knives slows, and stops. Dim smears of ogrillo faces turn toward the sky.

  THIS PLACE

  IS MINE

  With a foot, I tip one of the remaining oil barrels carefully, so that it pours over the lip of the point into the branching stone channels that drain down the face of the vertical city.

  I SAID

  I WOULD FEED YOU

  YOUR FUTURE

  On cue, the spill of oil running down the channels catches fire.

  Good girl.

  Rivers of flame cascade across the face of the vertical city, spreading through a delta of absolute darkness. And fire licks back up the channels as well, climbing, converging into a giant burning arrow.

  Pointing exactly at where I stand.

  BUT I AM

  A MERCIFUL GOD

  I tip over the final barrel of oil and skip back away from the point as the flames claw through the gap and the whole point becomes a pillar of fire fifty feet tall.

  I WON’T MAKE YOU

  EAT IT

  RAW

  I’m still chuckling as I get the first of the bottles out of the chest and ignite the wicks at the burning trickle where I tipped the first oil barrel. Even there it’s hot enough that I have to shield my face with my arm and I can smell my hair starting to crisp, but I don’t care, I’m chuckling anyway. It sounds like God playing dice with planets.

  Didn’t think that was funny? Watch this.

  I heave a burning bottle high out off the parapet and follow it with another, little specks of whippy flame snapping through long arcs down into the fading night, and turn back to the chest for a couple more before those two hit the ground. I don’t need to watch them land. I know where they’re going to hit.

  I may be a crappy shot, but I throw really, really well.

  At the retaining wall with two more lit in my hands, I wind up—

  Caine-what are you doing?

  Not really a Whisper. Is there a spell called Snarl?

  I launch the bottle anyway before I look down at her red-lit form a level below.

  WHY THE FUCK

  ARE YOU STILL THERE?

  The Shout makes my head ring. She flinches and covers her ears, but a second later she’s back at the wall down there waving an arm down at the Black Knife camp. Down at the flames spreading from where my oil bombs landed. Down at the crowded creche. Crowded with screaming cubs.

  Screaming burning cubs. Burning juvie bucks. Burning juvie bitches.

  The pregnant ones.

  That’s not the plan! Those are-those are children-!

  GET MOVING

  GODDAMMIT

  But they’re only children-babies-they never did anything—

  I fling the other bottle. It shatters against stone ten feet from where she’s standing.

  She has to skip back along her parapet to avoid the splash of flame, and in the brighter light down there now, I can see the horror and loathing on her face, and I don’t give half a squirt of runny fucking shit.

  MOVE

  OR YOU GET THE NEXT ONE

  IN THE FACE

  With one last look of pure outraged betrayal, she turns and runs.

  Down below, somebody’s already unbarring the gate of the creche, and the whole camp is alive. Arrows clatter around me. Everybody who’s not scrambling to save the cubs is either shooting at me or sprinting up into the vertical city.

  Works for me.

  I turn back to the chest of bottles. If I really want to roast the little shits, I better get busy.

  ››scanning fwd››

  “Tizarre, goddammit-!” How many times have I said that today?

  I whip into a spin-kick that slams my right heel into the Shield hard enough to rattle my own damn teeth, but beyond the shimmering curve, the rose-pale glow of the Tear shows nothing but a tightening in the white pinch around her eyes. This is a hell of a time for her to discover she’s got real power.

  Not to mention a conscience.

  Standing among the shreds of bone and armor beyond the Tear of Panchasell, arms wrapped around her narrow chest to squeeze down her shivers, she looks like she’s ready to just stand there and watch. “You never said anything about killing their cubs.”

  She has completely bone-my-ass cracked. “I’m sorry, all right? I promise I’ll fucking suffer for it the rest of my life if you’ll just fucking let me in-”

  “Those were children, Caine-you never said you were-”

  �
�If I had,” I snarl at her, “would you have helped?”

  “Of course not!”

  “There’s your fucking answer, then.”

  Here they come on my trail now. Hear those howls echoing along the empty cavernways? Hear that blind ravening rage? Hear that pain? Sounds to me like they want to rip open their own guts with their bare hands and claw the pain out so they can stuff it down my throat till I strangle.

  I probably shouldn’t let her see my grin.

  Tizarre can hear their pain too: I can see it on her face, in her pinching-down eyes and the white smears where her lips should be.

  “What are you gonna do? Leave me out here? With them?”

  “I should-”

  I slide a hand around to the back of my belt, onto the butt of the bladewand. “The only thing you should do is make up your fucking mind before they make it up for you.”

  “What am I going to tell Marade?”

  Oh, for shit’s sake. “Tell her? She’s watching it right now-don’t be such a fucking baby-”

  “Don’t say that to me-you don’t get to say that to me-”

  Yeah, fair enough, not the best image, I’ll apologize if I live through this but right now those howls are close enough that they’re raising hairs on the back of my neck, and I’m starting to hear feet on stone and screw this anyway.

  I pull out the bladewand and jam its business end against her Shield and necessity triggers a surge of intention that sends shearing force out from the tip. The Shield collapses in a cascade of sparks and she staggers and I spring into the chamber and just barely stop myself from stabbing her in the eye for being a whining weak-ass cunt.

  Instead I keep on going past her toward the Tear. “Get that fucking Shield back up!”

  “Caine-”

  “No time for your shit. Do it!”

  The Tear of Panchasell shimmers at me from its pedestal of solid gold, a private sunset the size of my head. Runic cirrus-ripples curve and twist across its surface and sink beneath as well, sucking my gaze into its rose-diamond depths.

  I lift my own slice of sky: the electric sizzle of the bladewand’s edge.

  “Caine-”

  A thousand years ago, if the stories are true: Panchasell Mithondionne, near-immortal High King of the First Folk, weeping as he labored over his masterwork, an aeon of Primal lore guiding the hand of the greatest adept in the history of the race-the history of the world-to create a Thing of Power that is also a thing of beauty, a song in crystal, a dream of peace made solid to defend his people and this world. .

  And here I am, a vicious little ghetto punk whose whole life wouldn’t be an eyeblink to the least of the First Folk, about to cut the fucking thing in half. Because somebody they never heard of pissed me off.

  That, my friends, is a deep lesson about how the world works.

  Which is when Tizarre finally does get my attention, not by calling my name but with an ear-shattering blast that sucks all the air in the chamber into a whirl that follows the sideways column of flame roaring from her hands out into the cavernway I just came from, and she’s got the black iron head of an ogrillo arrow sticking a span out from her left kidney and that is exactly the down payment on what we might both have to pay for me being too fucking sentimental to pull the trigger, because a flight of arrows they got off just in time comes bursting through the ass end of her Firebolt trailing flames of their own, and one’s coming straight for my face and I’m already falling into a shoulder roll and it just clips my forehead and I take the roll backward over something on the cavern floor that rams into my own kidney hard enough that I can’t even make it all the way back to my feet because my knees have gone to cloth-And the bladewand’s off.

  From the floor I point it at the Tear and call upon my will and all I get is a scorch on my palm from the eggbutt and that hiss of blue static discharge from the tip.

  “Caine-”

  Now her voice is a half-strangled gurgle. She’s got a sickly smile behind blood on her mouth, and both hands wrapped around the arrow shaft sticking out of her belly. She retches more blood. “Sorry-I’m sorry-”

  “Don’t be sorry. Just fucking stop them till I make this thing work, then we can get out of here-”

  “Stop them? There are thousands-you made sure they’ll never stop-”

  Goddamn right.

  I try for my feet, but again my knees buckle, and I catch myself with a hand on the knob of rock that jammed my kidney—

  Huh-huh-did you—

  Did you see that?

  Was that my eyes, or just in my head?

  When I touched the rock, there was—

  A severed hand-I was-she was-he and me and she-pinned through the spine-staring into the sky, taking the hand of a kneeling man, cut in half and the waterfall’s spray falling into my open, staring eyes, my own face above among the buildings and the blade driving toward my forehead and-And where my hand is on the rock, the rock isn’t rock. Not anymore. It’s the hilt of a sword.

  And where I touch, this hilt sings with the high humming whine of Power. .

  I look up at Tizarre. She blinks at me. “What-what’s happening-?”

  “What always happens,” I say, because that is what I always say now.

  She nods, because she understands. “What happens next? Is there a next?”

  “You already know.”

  She nods again.

  I toss her the bladewand. It hangs eternally in the air. It is in her hand before it ever leaves mine. Before she catches it, she has turned away, though she still faces me and will forever.

  “Keep it,” I tell her. “It’s yours. I don’t need it anymore.” I stand, and the Sword cuts free of the rock. It shrieks in my hand.

  I hold it poised above the Tear of Panchasell.

  Long and straight and heavy, its blade is the color of mirror-polished tungsten. The runes deep-graven from forte to tip are graceful and smooth as brushtrokes, and they burn with fire so black that my eye cannot hold them; they shift and twist and shimmer and crawl along the blade, sucking light from the air. .

  I have never seen anything like the Sword. I have known the Sword for lifetimes.

  When it destroys the Tear, it will break the Power’s hold upon the river. A river choked for a thousand years will shatter this place and burst free through these chambers. Will crash from the face of the vertical city upon the camp below.

  In my hand is the death of the Black Knives, and their rebirth.

  Their death is today.

  When the edge carves into the Tear, it screams like I’m murdering the world.

  And maybe I am.

  ››scanning fwd››

  Dawn at my back ignites the rainbow.

  Beyond huge. . solid as Bifrost in the billows of my waterfall’s spray. .

  One foot stretches out from the face of what was the city’s fifth tier, high above; the other is grounded somewhere out in the vast mist-shrouded sea wrack that used to be the Black Knife camp.

  That’s my pot of gold. Right there. In the endless earth-shaking thunder of my waterfall, I can imagine the echoes of Black Knife screams.

  Somewhere to the south, a new river rolls down the Boedecken Waste, black with mud and shreds of tent, shattered wagons and broken bodies.

  I look upon the work of my hand, and it is good.

  Only one flaw in the plan so far: the rendezvous is far enough away from the waterfall’s thunder that I can still hear the idiots argue. About me.

  I lean against the wall outside the shattered gape of what used to be a window, where the nine survivors are dressing themselves in the clothing I brought for them, treating whatever wounds Marade can’t Heal with supplies I gave them, and eating and drinking food and water I provided for them, while they all talk about how they just can’t trust me.

  “-it doesn’t make sense.” Marade’s still standing up for me, at least. Sounds like she’s the only one. “If his sole need was revenge, why risk the rescue at all? He could as easily
have left me-left me-”

  Even from out here, I can hear the choke. She can’t say it.

  “Where we were,” she finishes lamely. “He could have done what has been done without even your help, though unleashing the river would have cost his life-”

  That much is true.

  “You weren’t there,” Tizarre says. “None of you. You didn’t see him. You didn’t hear him.”

  “And the cubs-I mean, so what?” This from Jashe the Otter. “How many would have lived through the river thing, anyway?”

  “That’s my point,” Tizarre says. “Why . . do that? Why the show?”

  “Diversion,” Marade says, but she doesn’t sound too sure of it.

  “That’s what he said. That’s what he told me it was about. To make sure they’d chase him up into the city. To thin them out on the ground and give you all a better chance to escape-but then he hit their children. So more of them stayed. To protect the children.”

  “Well, I don’t care,” somebody else says. “I’m just damn grateful to be alive.”

  “You say that now,” Tizarre insists darkly. “But he’s not done with us. That’s why the rescue. He still has a use for us. That’s the only reason. Just wait. You’ll see.”

  Another man might be offended. I probably would be, if she were wrong. But, y’know, some Black Knives can probably swim.

  I stare out at my waterfall. At my rainbow. The rainbow is a promise from God that there will never be another Flood.

  I don’t plan to need one.

  Fuck punishment. This is about extinction.

  KHRYL’S JUSTICE

  It wasn’t a good dream.

  I couldn’t make it make sense, even as a nightmare: it should have been a net over my face, not a burlap sack. Chunks of puke shouldn’t be flopping around my head. I was sure of that.

  The next time awareness knocked a hole in my skull, I started to worry that I was naked, when I should have been suited up in my black leathers. And this wad of cloth tied into my mouth with what felt like rope? Where the fuck had that come from?