Caine Black Knife

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  The cell was immaculate.

  Two doors, both of iron, scoured and freshly oiled; a wide barred window that let in the noonday quiet and a hint of autumn air; walls of whitewashed brick that smelled of clean chalk; comfortable cushions on the built-out brick benches along the walls; a gleaming brass chamberpot in one corner, and in the other, a small table with a pair of fired-clay beakers, an earthenware jug of cool water, a dish of dried fruit, shelled nuts, and a small plate with three different kinds of hard cheese.

  Just about the nicest place I’d ever been locked up.

  I’d said good-bye to Orbek . . . what was it, four months ago? Had to be. It had been late spring when we made it back to Thorncleft after we settled the thing on the Korish border. Orbek got on the Ankhana train at the Railhead, going home to visit his old friends in the Warrens, he’d said.

  To look up some family.

  Now with the leaves turning to gold and red we were both on the Battleground, and somehow Orbek had made enough trouble that just mentioning his name bought a quiet afternoon in jail.

  I didn’t waste time in worry, or energy in pacing. They’d let me out, or they wouldn’t.

  After a while, I ate.

  The sun fell fully on the outer wall of the cell. The brick got pleasantly warm. I stretched out on those comfortable cushions, laced fingers behind my head, and let the headache sew my eyes shut. And for a time I was twenty-five again, young and stupid and vicious, playing Beau Geste with the Black Knives in the vertical city . . .

  Despite what you’ve heard, I’m not stupid. I knew already what had been eating me up: that twenty-five-year-old kid. I don’t like remembering him. I don’t like sharing my life with him. I don’t like being reminded I haven’t changed all that much.

  What’s really creepy is that I don’t like being reminded how much I have changed.

  Because, y’know, those black screaming nightmares of blood and terror—

  Those aren’t nightmares. Not for me. When the scrape of iron on iron wiped away blood and screams and sucked night back inside my head, I was sorry to wake up.

  That’s the permanent carnival of me.

  I rolled onto my side. Slanting sunlight through the barred window loaded my shoulders with an extra quarter century.

  The outer door swung open. The first armsman through went left, the next went right, and the third came up the middle: pro style. Each of them had one of those fancy riot guns at slant arms to go along with the morningstars that swung from their belts. Each of them had a forefinger resting lightly on the guard alongside the trigger. Each of them had creases on windburned faces and the lizard eyes of veteran killers.

  They wore full-length byrnies and studded steel caps that the afternoon heat must have made resemble walking around with their heads in frying pans. The one in the middle stopped in front of the bench and let the riot gun’s business end sag. The muzzle didn’t quite cover me. Not quite. “On your feet.”

  This day was slipping from crummy toward downright fucking grim. “I just woke up.”

  The armsman stepped back and racked the slide on his riot gun. The muzzle shifted, and the finger slipped through the guard, and I felt a decidedly cold twinge in my testicles. Which was where the muzzle now pointed. “On your feet, friar.”

  “Or what? You’ll shoot my nuts off?”

  “Or you will insult my office.” A new voice, from outside the still-open door: mellow and friendly, traces of a Jheledi lilt making it as deceptively light as the top notes of a pipe organ. “Freeman Shade. Please rise.”

  A reluctant sigh swung my legs over the edge of the bench. I was too old for this big-dick horseshit anyway. Still, I couldn’t help deadpanning the armsman when I stood up. “A boy likes to be asked, dumbass.”

  Must be something in the Boedecken air. Or something.

  Through the door ambled an exceedingly ordinary-looking Knight, below average height—a full hand shorter than me, and I’m not a tall man—well into middle age, thinning hair above a round, kindly face. The Sunburst of Khryl on his cuirass looked shrunken compared with the volume of the chest it didn’t manage to cover. A cloak thrown back over his pauldrons was shimmering white only as far as his waist; below, it was splashed the same muddy reddish brown as his greaves and sabatons. A greathelm he carried in one hand was casually passed in the direction of the nearest armsman as he came in. The armsman blanched as he desperately shifted his grip on his riot gun and nearly dropped them both. The Knight didn’t appear to notice.

  His eyes were warm and brown, and sparkled with some secret amusement as he flicked a finger at the other armsman and waited for him to close the outer door.

  The cell felt a good deal smaller.

  “Freeman Shade,” he said, “I am Tyrkilld, Knight Aeddharr. I would be the Knight Householder for the Riverdock Parish.”

  “Would you? It’s damned swell of you to come personally to welcome me to town. I’m sure you’re a busy man.”

  “Oh, that I am indeed.” The Knight chuckled. He blinked as though surprised to find himself standing there. “And to deliver a welcome is exactly why I have come.”

  “In your Khrylsday-go-to-Tourney armor too.”

  “Well, that’s but to impress the worthy.” He crossed his wrists and unfixed the jointed fasteners that clipped his gauntlets to his vambraces. “No one expects to find your name numbered upon that gloried roll, freeman.”

  Knight Aeddharr passed the gauntlets to another of the armsmen. His hands were large and square. The fingers on those hands were short and thick and looked about as nimble as wagon spokes. And about as soft.

  This was going to suck.

  “So.” I let my knees bend a couple degrees, quadriceps and femoral biceps taking the weight that shifted slightly forward, onto the balls of my feet. A breath or two of Control Discipline goosed my adrenals. Everything went bright and slow. “This is where the gloves come off. As it were.”

  “Of a certainty.” Tyrkilld opened those large square hands and spread them in a man-to-man shrug of regretful necessity. “A mailed hand may well slay before you reveal the truth that God and the Justiciar require.”

  “You can just ask—”

  “Oh, that I intend. Pynhall.”

  I saw it coming: the Control Disciplines had my reflexes hyped enough for that. I saw it clearly. Not that it mattered.

  Just a slap. Open-handed. A wide flat palm that crawled with eldritch blue witchfire came up from hip level to the corner of my jaw like it had been shot from a rifle. I didn’t even manage to blink before the room whited out and thunder crashed into the tolling of the vast carillons that call the Beloved Children to Assumption Day worship at the White Cathedral and I bounced off something hard and fell on something harder and when the world darkened back into existence and the bells began to fade to distant chimes I was on hands and knees on a stone floor, staring at a blurred and doubling pair of jointed steel sabatons caked with brownish-red mud, and Christ my head hurt and I gave it a shake that made it hurt worse and I said—

  “Wow.”

  “Do we understand each other, now?”

  I didn’t risk another shake of my head. It might fall off.

  “You have a gift for expressing yourself.”

  “You’re not the first to notice, freeman.” The Knight took a respectful step back. “You may wish to rise. It’s best to be on your feet, and a fair distance from the nearest wall. I’ve good control with Khryl’s Hand, but there’s little help for you on the secondary impact.”

  I made it to one knee and looked up into the Knight’s kindly round faces: all three of them. I closed my eyes, opened them, squinted, and there were only two. “Am I gonna live through this?”

  “That remains to be seen. Up you go, then.”

  My legs’d never make it. “I’m good right here, thanks. How do I get this to stop?”

  “Tell me what I want to know.”

  “And if I can’t?”

  “I’m certain you
can.”

  “Then we have a problem.”

  Armor creaked with Tyrkilld’s shrug. “You do.”

  I looked around for something to lean on. The movement threatened to split my skull. “And if I Challenge?”

  “We’ll take that as understood, shall we? What are you, grade six?” Tyrkilld chuckled indulgently. “Strike at your own inclination.”

  “Oh, sure. Thanks.” Leaning with both hands on my bent knee, I let a few more breaths siphon clarity back inside my head. “This is about Orbek?”

  “Was that a mystery? The Order of Khryl and the Civility of the Battleground have an interest in the dealings of this ogrillo of yours.”

  “He’s not my ogrillo.” A hand to my temple helped squeeze the silent thunderstorm back down inside my skull. “He’s my brother.”

  “So you told Knight Khershaw. And Our Lord of Valor still hears no lie.” Tyrkilld shook his head amiably. “With you a Monastic, too. An Esoteric. Likely an assassin.”

  “I’m retired.”

  “Not so long ago, you would have been mortal enemies.”

  “We were. We got over it.”

  “How this came about must be an interesting tale—”

  “A long one, anyway.” Too fucking long. “It tells better than it lived.”

  “—but it concerns me not at all. My first interest lies in what you will tell me about Freedom’s Face.”

  “I’m sure I’d have a snappy comeback if my head didn’t hurt so damn much. What the hell is Freedom’s Face?”

  Tyrkilld sounded honestly regretful. “Pynhall’t.”

  I saw it coming again. Didn’t matter this time either. It was the other hand. Which also didn’t matter.

  I was on my back when my eyes twitched open. The muscles on the right side of my neck were being chewed away by rabid squirrels. I couldn’t see them. Or hear them, or touch them when I pawed weakly at the pain. But they were enthusiastic little fuckers. Industrious.

  A beige smear that was probably Tyrkilld’s face hovered in the middle distance overhead.

  “Bodes fair to be a Minor Penance in this for me.” His voice had a vaguely oceanic quality, like distant surf. “Freeman Shade, I must tell you that by happenstance—by sad coincidence, for you—my dear father, a Knight of much greater valor and reknown than my poor self, was foully murdered. By a Monastic assassin. Are we becoming still more clear?”

  Stone bled into flesh and back out again and my arms and legs spasmed at random; I couldn’t even roll over. “Fuck . . . me . . .”

  “Though I know well it’s a dark sin to condemn a man for his brother’s crime, I discover I can’t help enjoying myself. Just a bit. Hence cometh my expectation of the Minor Penance I lately mentioned; I find myself hoping, in a shadowed corner of my tarnished soul, that you’ll play games and be evasive and insist upon this immoral defiance of yours, so that I might deliver Khryl’s Hand unto your sinning head, here, until out from your eye sockets leak the shreds of your vile Monastic brains.”

  Use leaked back into my body. I made it onto my side and curled around the medicine ball of barbed wire that swelled under my ribs.

  “I’d feel bad for you . . . about your dad and your tarnished soul and all—” A trail of blood from my mouth made a tiny fading spiral on the stone floor. “—if you weren’t beating the crap out of me right now.”

  “Can you stand, then?”

  “Do I have to?”

  “You won’t like it if I use the boot.”

  “I’m no fan of the hand, either.” I put out one of my own. “All right, wait. I’m getting up. Give a guy a couple seconds, can you?”

  Tyrkilld opened arms to either side of an indulgent smile.

  I found one of the built-out brick benches and pushed myself up. The room spun around me and the walls pulsed and my stomach heaved and I staggered past an armsman and made it to the brass chamberpot in the corner in time to decisively lose the cheese and nuts and dried fruit I’d snacked on an hour or two ago.

  On my knees again, leaning on the chamberpot, I spat bloody vomit. “Does it matter I’m telling the truth?”

  “Each true word scrubs one stain from your filthy heart,” Tyrkilld said agreeably.

  “I never heard of this Freedom’s Face shit until you said the words just now.”

  “Go to, freeman. Try not my patience.”

  I got my feet under me and swayed upright. “You’re the one with truth-sense, shithead. Am I lying?”

  Tyrkilld sighed. “Freeman Shade, are you the man to convince me that Our Lord of Valor’s ear for truth cannot be misled by the dark magicks of the elves?”

  The vomit-knotted fist in my stomach clenched tighter. “Elves?”

  “Next you’ll try to tell me that it’s pure coincidence that an Ankhanan Esoteric has come to visit this Ankhanan Orbek Black Knife just now.”

  “Ankhanan . . . ? Oh, fuck.” I put a hand to my eyes. “Fuck me like a virgin goat. Freedom’s Face. Fucking Kierendal.”

  “Ah, there. There, y’see? Perhaps there is some truth you can share after all.

  A shy truth, it must be, requiring a bit of encouraging to poke its wee nose out into the light of day.” He spread those oak-knot hands invitingly. “Speak to me of this Kierendal.”

  “Shit, ask me anything. I hate that fucking slag.” I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. “So what is it, some kind of Free-the-Poor-Oppressed-Motherfucking-Ogrilloi thing?”

  “And behold.” Tyrkilld beamed. “Come then; coax your shy truth out from its cranny—” He flexed his right hand meaningfully. “—unless you’d prefer I extend the invitation myself.”

  “I’m just guessing . . .” I panted harshly, wondering if I might spew again. Probably not.

  Dammit.

  If I hadn’t been so woozy I would’ve thought to puke down the bastard’s breastplate.

  “Just . . . guessing. Three years ago the Folk were granted freedom of the Empire. Maybe you heard. They’re full citizens now. Full human rights.”

  Tyrkilld shook his head dolefully. “Ankhanans.”

  “Don’t start. Kierendal is . . . shit, I don’t even know what to call her, these days. Call her the Duchess; that’s as good a name as any. She’s a primal—what you call an elf—who runs some very successful businesses in the capital. Reason they’re successful—she also runs a criminal syndicate, a big one . . . grew out of an old-time Warrengang, from a part of the city called the Face. So they were the Faces. Get it? So if someone’s running some kind of underground Free-the-Grills shit here out of Ankhana, it’s a good bet she’s in it somehow. Which is a serious problem for you. Because she is very rich and very powerful, really goddamn smart and completely ruthless. Not to mention connected. Which are the other reasons she’s so successful.”

  “Friends in high places, has she?”

  “She used to bone the Emperor. Does that count?”

  Tyrkilld accepted this news with a ruefully genial smile and nod. The armsmen didn’t even blink.

  “Oh, for shit’s sake.” I shook my aching head and coughed up another wad of sick. “When I get to anything you don’t already know, wave a fucking flag or something, huh?”

  “Oh, well, yes indeed, there is that. We have a way of uncovering the truth, as you’ve seen.”

  “Is this where you start bouncing me off the walls again?”

  “Very likely. Now that we’ve seen you can find it in yourself to be honest with me, when the effort you make—” His hands flexed again. “—is sufficiently sincere.”

  “Shit.”

  “Men often do, at certain points in these long afternoons. Let’s move on to your, ah . . . brother . . . and his friends in the Smoke Hunt.”

  “The Smoke Hunt?”

  “Oh, yes, freeman. You knew we’d come round to this, did you not?”

  I took a deep breath, sighed it out. I lifted my head. It weighed a couple tons. “I guess I might have a shy truth about whatever the fuck that is, too.”

  T
yrkilld nodded an encouraging smile.

  I nodded one back. “I think it’s hiding up my vile Monastic ass,” I said. “See if you can suck it out my butthole.”

  Tyrkilld’s mouth pursed for the labial consonant and this time I didn’t see it coming.

  The hand took me below the arch of the sternum and shock blasted up and down my spine and out my liver and kidneys and though the top of my head and soles of my feet, then there was only air around me and I tumbled upward and crashed into the joining of wall and ceiling and bounced off the bench on the way down, and hitting the brick edge from ten feet wasn’t half the blow I just took; I barely felt it. I lay curled around my spasming gut and blood bubbled from my lips while I tried to remember how to breathe.

  “Freeman, freeman.” Tyrkilld sounded honestly regretful. “You know how the memory of my poor murdered father tasks me.”

  My diaphragm spasmed and air whooped into my lungs, and I coughed and spat bloody mucus up toward the Sunburst on Tyrkilld’s chest.

  And missed.

  So all I had left was words. I took them slow. Slow and clear and flat. No sense letting him think I was just pissed. “Your father. Was a low-rent. Thug. Piece of shit. Coward.” I gagged more bloody phlegm. “Just like you.”

  I got my breath and steadied it. “He died on his knees.”

  Tyrkilld’s face froze over. “You know nothing of my—”

  “I know he died—” Slow and clear and flat. “—with a friar’s dick in his mouth.”

  There was stillness then, and silence: only labored breath from both of us, half strangled and harsh, shared now, bound together. Finally our understanding had started to flow both ways.

  Into the silence, a winter whisper. “Get him up.”

  The nearest armsman, florid and glistening and greased with heat, shifted grips on his riot gun uncertainly. “Does the Knight—?”

  Tyrkilld’s white stare swore murder, and it didn’t look picky. “Get him up.”

  The armsman licked pale sweat from his upper lip and swung his riot gun to hang in a bore-down safari-carry over his shoulder. “As the Knight commands.”

  From the floor I showed the armsman teeth that tasted like blood. “Touch me—you’ll wish I’d killed you . . .”