Caine Black Knife aoc-3

by Matthew Stover

  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 Fallerbal’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 twentyfive 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, Rababal. 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.

  EXTRODUCTION

  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 out of my dick, and a big diaper, and I didn’t have any selfconsciousness 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.

  I was born to be an intellectual. Before his illness and multiple breakdowns, my father was arguably the most famous anthropologist of the century; his book Tales of the First Folk is still the standard text on Primal oral culture. My mother, before her death, had been his brightest student. Even after the Social Police arrested him and busted us down to Labor, he was still trying to make me think like a Professional, teaching me out of books on the net. Even after my mother died. Even after the madness had him wholly in its grip; on his semilucid days, he would make me read and talk and read some more. But I did that only to keep him from beating me into bloody unconsciousness. Any real chance of growing up an intellectual was over for me by the time I was six. My real education was street school.

  I might have been born an intellectual, but I was raised a peasant.

  Which-along with what a number of people have described as lunatic self-confidence and a truly staggering degree of self-absorption-might explain why I wasn’t really worried.

  It was clear why they put me in the Buke. This was tactical. Because of all those years of visiting Dad here. They were expecting my presumed future to smother me in wet-wool layers of claustrophobia.

  Dickheads.

  I spent days hanging from a fucking cross. I spent fuck knows how long chained to the wall of the Shaft in Ankhana’s Donjon, dying of gangrene in a river of other people’s shit. Spending the rest of my life in a nice clean quiet cell is gonna scare me?

  Oh, yeah. Sure.

  One of the books that Dad made me read-one that I’ve read again a few times on my own, in fact-was The Art of War. Because, like a lot of those old-timey Chinese guys, Sun Tzu had a gift for metaphor. The book isn’t just about war, it’s about handling conflict. You could even say it’s about how to live well in a dangerous world.

  One of the things Master Sun wrote is that a general who knows his enemy and knows himself need not fear the outcomes of a thousand battles.

  I knew my enemy. That was my edge.

  When I finally got a visitor, he seemed a little surprised to find me smiling.

  His Professional’s suit and tie didn’t really fit-looked like it was cut for a guy with twenty extra pounds on him-and he scuffed the soles of his brown wingtips along the floor when he came through the door, but maybe it wasn’t the suit so much as it was my eyes.

  My eyes kept wanting to see his hair in a brown comb-over instead of grey strings waxed flat across bare scalp, and a dirt-colored stubble on thicker jowls instead of the stiff salty beard neatly trimmed. Age suited him, really: he’d lost weight and gained gravity.

  And he could walk straight in and just sit down and let me stare at him and get my mind around his existence, and he didn’t even have to do his goddamn coin tricks with nervous hands. He just kept them folded in his lap.

  I kept smiling. I didn’t have anyplace I had to be.

  Pretty soon he leaned forward. “You don’t seem to understand how much trouble you’re in.”

  My smile spread to an open grin. “And you’re looking good for a guy I last saw raining in pieces down the face of Hell.”

  He brushed that off with an irritable nod. “Ancient history.”

  “Feels like fucking yesterday”. He flushed, and his gaze flicked down toward his folded hands. His fingers twitched. “That was-” He shook his head and looked back at me. “That’s not what I’m here to talk about. I’m here to save your life.”

  I shrugged.

  “Capital Forcible Contact Upcaste, Michaelson. Were you awake enough to remember that part? You’re on full-sense log murdering a Leisureman-”

  I laughed at him.

  “You think this is funny?”

  “What am I supposed to call you? Rababal? Simon Faller? Gofer?” He flushed darker. “Michaelson-”

  “That’s not my name.”

  His fingers twitched again. Missing that platinum coin, I bet. “What kind of game do you think you’re playing?”

  “Same as usual,” I told him. “The kind I win.”

  He stared at me, then swung that stare to my wrists and my diaper and my dead legs, the featureless walls and the blank inside of the door, inviting me to stare with him, to take in the reality of my cell, of the Buke, of Earth. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “There is,” I admitted, not without a certain pride, “a history of insanity in my family.”

  “You have one hope of coming out of this alive, Michaelson. One. And that is cooperation-”

  “I told you that’s not my name.”

  He rolled his eyes. “What am I supposed to call you, then? Caine? Shade?Tell me.”

  “Last time I was on Earth,” I said, “the proper mode of address from a Professional to an Administrator was sir.”

  He stared.

  “Let’s give it a try, shall we?”

  His mouth had to work for a while before it could chew out some words.

  “You are insane.”

  “And you can kiss my upcaste ass, you lackey fuck.”

  His lips started flapping. “Do you-are-you don’t-”

  “I’m not the one in trouble, Faller. You are. If the Board of Governors wanted me dead, I’d be dead already. I’d have never woken up. Instead somebody invested serious coin in neurosurgery, and instead of being the star of a show trial for killing Vilo, I’m sequestered with political prisoners. And instead of Soapy interrogators, I’ve got good old Rababal here to have a chat with me about cooperation. Which means shit’s already going bad enough on Home that somebody thinks they need me to fix it. So start kissing my ass or kiss yours good-bye.” I batted my eyelids at him. “You pick.”

  His lips stopped flapping long enough to peel back off his teeth. “It’s not just you, Michaelson. We know about your daughter, and we know where she is-”

  “Simon, Simon, Simon.” I could peel lips too, and my teeth were bigger than his. “Do you really want to bring my family into this?”

  His lower lip snuck back up a little.

  I cocked
my head toward him. “Not that I’m worried about her; Faith’s defended in ways you can’t imagine. But if you want to do the we’ll-hurt-your-family thing just on principle, I’m into it. Maybe you never saw the cube of what happened to Vinson Garrette.”

  His brows drew together and those lips tried for a disbelieving smile. “Are you threatening me?”

  “Nah. I was just thinking how, y’know, with these bedrails for leverage-having the bed anchored to the floor makes it a great platform, real stable, just perfect-from here I can kick your head right the fuck off your shoulders. Right off. Like a tee ball. Rrrip. Bounce bounce bounce.”

  His right eyelid flickered. Color drained down his cheeks into his beard. “I read your chart-your legs. . your legs don’t-”

  “Yeah, Simon. That’s right. My legs don’t. You believe everything you read?”

  A sharp chuff-an aspiriated ki-ya-and a twist of my abdominals, which are real damn strong, snapped my diaper toward his face, and those nervous hands flew up like startled pigeons and he jerked away hard enough to slide sideways off the chair and dump himself ass-first on the floor, and he got up madder than a teargassed bear because of course neither of my dead legs even cleared the rail.

  “Just kidding.” I grinned at him. “And I was lying about your head coming off anyway. I’m an asshole like that.”

  He took a step toward me and one of those nervous hands made a fist that swung up by his shoulder. And paused. And hung there while rage-swollen veins writhed across his forehead.

  Which told me everything I’d been pretending to know had actually been true after all.

  My grin widened. “You can fuck off now, Faller. Don’t come back until the Bog’s ready to deal.”

  Those veins kept on writhing, but the fist opened, and the hand fell to his side.

  He lowered his head. “I don’t know what else I was expecting,” he muttered. “Why should it be different now?”