Caine Black Knife

by Matthew Woodring Stover

She half-turns away and sneaks a glance at Tizarre. Then she looks down at her gauntlets. Muscle bulges along her jaw, and she’s got nothing to say.

  Me, I’m not so squeamish. I hook thumbs behind my belt and lean back to rest elbows on the parapet. “They call it the Black Knife Kiss: they lock lips onto your eye sockets and suck your eyeballs out. One at a time. Bite through your optic nerve. They figure if you can’t see, you can’t do magick.”

  Rababàl’s mouth works like he wants to say something but can’t remember any words.

  “And then there’s your hands.” I look at his; he palms that platinum disk like I caught him scratching his dick. “They twist wire around your wrists tight enough to cut your circulation. Pretty soon your hands turn black. And die. Sometimes they let their khoshoi nibble on them, or strap your arms out wide to attract crows. Sometimes they just leave ’em. Dead. Rotting on your wrists.”

  “Caine—” His voice quavers, and he swallows. “Still, I—”

  “And if you somehow manage to try a spell anyway, they pound these long spikes into your skull. Big steel needles about as long as your forearm, big around as a horseshoe nail. Doesn’t kill you. Doesn’t even really hurt. But then they take a torch and hold it to the outside end of the spikes. One at a time. The spikes conduct heat pretty well. Still doesn’t hurt much; brain’s got no pain nerves. But it gives you a hell of a fever, y’know? Worst fucking fever anyone will ever have. Delusions. Hallucinations. A nightmare where you never wake up. You go to Hell while you’re still alive. And even through the fever, you can feel chunks of yourself dying. Slowly. Your brain cooks. One piece at a time.”

  Rababàl’s face has gone grey. Guess he’s got a vivid imagination.

  Vivid enough to keep him from asking me how the hell I know all this, which is a really good thing because I don’t have a really good answer.

  “But it’s not always that bad.” I offer a reassuring grin. “Sometimes they get enthusiastic with the torches and your brain boils instead.” I shrug. “At least it’s quick.”

  I push myself off the wall and take one step, right into the middle of them. They shift unconsciously, spreading to give me space. That’s one good sign. They stand and wait to hear what I’m gonna say next. That’s another. “Know how ogrilloi wish each other luck? They say, Die fighting. You get it? That’s luck for us, too. The only luck we have left.”

  I give them all a good long slow look at as many of my teeth as I can fit into a smile, and hold out my fist. “Die fighting.”

  Marade’s eyes are the first to clear, and cold determination sharpens the elegant planes of her face. She squeezes a gauntlet into a jointed ball of steel, and extends it to touch my knuckles.

  “Yes,” she says. “Yes. Die fighting.”

  Figured I could count on her: Khryllians are suckers for that heroic laststand shit. And she is so beautiful right now that I better just keep my mouth right the fuck shut.

  Stalton squints at me. “You look like you’re enjoying this.”

  “Most fun you can have with your clothes on.”

  Did I really just say that? Heat rises in my cheeks. Better not look at her either.

  He shakes his head. “You’re completely insane.”

  “That a problem for you?”

  “Shit, no. I admire it.” He suddenly grins and adds his fist to ours. “Die fighting.”

  Then Tizarre adds hers, and Pretornio, and finally even Rababàl curls his stubby fingers and nods.

  Howzafuckinbout that? Forget Marade. This is better.

  I can feel it. I can smell it. I can roll it around in my mouth and you can fuck my left ear if I don’t like the taste. The partners all stand there. Looking. Waiting. Looking at me.Waiting for me to tell them what to do. Who knew it’d be this easy . . . ?

  I don’t have to say it out loud. It sounds better in my head than it would from my mouth. No more bit-player suckassitude. Now, you yappy fucks, you gutless upcaste bean-counting ass-pirates—

  Now, you’re the bit players.

  I just made this into The Caine Show.

  >>scanning fwd>>

  Black Knives resolve out of heatshimmer and dust. They top a fold of the badlands a couple hundred yards away and stop. They can see me now.

  I’ll never know what the Black Knives were expecting to find outside the gate of the vertical city, but I guarantee it didn’t resemble one lone skinny-ass human in black leather, standing on a little rise. Waiting for them.

  From where they are, the perimeter wall of the vertical city will frame me in the red-smeared light of the setting sun, leathers stark against the bleached rubble of the ruined gate thirty yards to my rear. My stance contraposto. Relaxed. Careless. My hands open. Loose. Empty. Vivid as a dream.

  My dream, anyway.

  All they know about humans is hunting us, hurting us, and eating us. They must be thinking, what’s that skinny little sonofabitch doing just standing there?

  Is my face in shadow? I hope not. I hope they can see me smile.

  They eye me with predatory wariness. I can almost smell what they want to do: circle me, check me out, get a good sniff, a nice leisurely hyena lookaround before they mob me for the kill. But like I told the partners: sure, they’re predators, but they’re not animals—and they’re too goddamn smart to get within easy bowshot of the perimeter wall until they have some idea what’s going on.

  Which is good. Every second they hesitate is another second for Pretornio to work his wargod juju on the porters. Which is the point of this charade, after all. Well . . .

  That’s what I told the others, anyway.

  Is it so wrong to want one jack-racking balls-to-the-wall setpiece before I die?

  That’s all I’m after. One good fucking scene.

  This better be it. Don’t think I’ll get another.

  Hot. Cold. Numb. Tingling. My heart stutters. My right kneecap jumps like a rat trapped inside my leg. There’s a roaring in my ears that makes no sound at all: I can hear my breath going short and smoky, hear the ghost whisper of the bone-dry breeze, hear some kind of prairie chicken scratching at the scrub twenty yards away. My nose feels like it’s packed full of sand, but I can still smell sunbaked dust and my own sweat. This could be fear. I can’t tell. Can you be so scared that it makes you happy?

  And not just happy: I’ve got a hard-on like I could break boards with my dick.

  Now one Black Knife starts forward from the vanguard. He struts a little, easy, loose-jointed with exaggerated arrogance. Dominance display: I can almost smell the testosterone. Some of the tension uncoils in my guts. The swagger’s overdone.

  This’ll be an up-and-comer. A bachelor out to rack up style points in front of the big dogs. I’ve seen better. Shit, I’ve done better.

  Y’know, given laboralls and cosmetic surgery, this puppy’d be right at home in my old neighborhood. That must be why I’m turning comfortable out here: the Boedecken badlands aren’t all that different from the streets I grew up on. I’ve spent most of my life surviving pack-hunters more dangerous than these.

  Watching him swagger toward me, I know exactly what the rules are.

  He stops a little more than halfway here, squints my way, then shrugs and turns his back to me. It’s an ogrillo dare, part of his dominance display: dismissing me as a threat.

  I keep smiling. My cheeks hurt.

  All four of them.

  Still giving me his back, he ostentatiously strings his recurved compound bow. A theatrical flourish extracts an arrow; he holds the bow high over his head as he nocks the arrow and draws the string, making sure I get a great view. Then in one smooth motion he turns and fires and I just stand here grinning like somebody stapled my lips to my teeth.

  The arrowhead chips sparks off a stone an arm’s length in front of my left foot.

  Like I said: I know the rules.

  His squint turns appreciative, and his trifurcate upper lip draws back from his tusks. Hoots that might be approval come faintly from the pack of
Black Knives back at the fold. He paces toward me, nocking another arrow. From seventy yards or so, he lets fly. The arrow hisses past my right ear.

  This fucker can shoot.

  I open my hands invitingly, beckoning for him to try again. Closer.

  Those hoots from the Black Knives are louder now. They’re starting to sound derisive. The bowstud’s face darkens, and he calls to me: “Paggnakkid razlim nezz, paggtakkunni.”

  Y’know, it never occurred to me that these cocksmokes might not speak Westerling.

  He paces in another twenty yards, and there’s nothing theatrical about him now. He draws and fires without aiming and I let breath hiss from my lips and my legs go slack and my arms flop loose and I look at his eyes beyond the arrow’s sizzling rush as my right hand flicks up from thigh to face and closes on the arrowshaft, which burns skin as it skids to a stop along my palm. Its steel point stares at me, an inch from my eye.

  No speakee? No problem. This is what you call nonverbal communication.

  I spin the arrow through my fingers like a baton. Should pretty well conceal the electric shiver jolting out of my adrenals. At Garthan Hold, training arrows have sandbag heads.

  Hoo.

  Live points are . . . a whole different world.

  Hoo.

  All right, then.

  Now. More nonverbiage—

  I balance the arrow, head down, on the tip of my left forefinger, and have an agonizing half second’s vision of just how stupid I’m gonna look if I don’t pull this off before I shrug a silent Fuck it anyway and let fly: leaving the arrow to hang in a blink-long Wile E. Coyote pause in midair, I throw myself into a backspin that whips my right heel through a horizontal arc to strike the middle of the arrowshaft. The shaft snaps around my heel.

  The halves tumble away from each other to clatter into the rocks. The prairie chicken thing takes flight with an indignant skrill.

  Ogrillo eyes track the pieces’ skitter, and when they skip back to me I spread my empty hands—

  And take a deep curtain-call bow.

  Hot staggering fuck. How good did that feel?

  My grin isn’t fake anymore. I’ve got the flavor now. The scent’s in my nose and it’s setting my head on fire. This is what it’s all about. This right here.

  This is Being a Star.

  Is anything better?

  Huh.

  Except—

  Where’s my goddamn applause?

  Maybe my applause is the deliberate caution—just short of open reluctance—with which the ogrillo puts down his bow and slips his quiver off his belt. The way he pulls his spear before he starts toward me, like he needs the weight of its shaft in his hands to keep his pecker up. Maybe it’s the thick dry slide of his plum-colored tongue around his tusks, and the way he never takes his eyes off me as he approaches.

  Applause enough, I guess.

  The Black Knives behind him edge closer, working their way down the fold. They spread into a wide arc like an infantry skirmish line, flanks curving toward the city.

  If Spearboy here doesn’t start the party pretty damn soon, the Black Knife line will envelop the little rise where I stand. Which is gonna suck for me, star or not. Maybe I should have let Marade handle this part after all.

  A last stand on a hilltop surrounded by ogrilloi is probably her idea of sex.

  As Spearboy stalks up the face of my rise, that whole “should have let Marade” idea starts sounding better and better.

  He’s huge.

  Secondhanding a couple Hammets and the Barand have not remotely prepared me for this fucker’s sheer immensity. Up close, in the flesh, it’s like turning a corner and bumping into something that ought to be extinct.

  Seven feet tall. Four feet wide. Wrinkled grey-green hide that covers biceps bigger than my head. Those sun-yellowed tusks. His goddamn fingernails . . .

  Fighting claws like shortswords. Filed sharp.

  Painted black.

  That spear of his, more like—what do you call it?—a bill or something: eight or nine feet long, and at least three feet of it is blade as wide as my hand, with a rear-pointed barb on each side, to unhorse riders. Or yank a victim within reach of his fighting claws.

  I shouldn’t have left my sword with Stalton. And I should have put on my fucking armor.

  And I should have remembered that despite secondhand memories of being Hammet and Barand from those Adventure cubes, I’ve never fought an ogrillo before. I should’ve been thinking more about living through this than about how cool I was gonna look standing out here with nothing but a fucking knife up my sleeve . . .

  And—most of all—

  I really, really should have stopped on the way out here to take a piss.

  Wetting my pants’ll blow that whole Being a Star trip, I’m guessing.

  When Spearboy gets about ten feet away, his chest expands and his neck bulges and he unleashes a godawful howl that makes every single hair on my body stand on end. He shakes the spear toward my belly and starts pumping his hips and grunting low in his throat, and I get it.

  He’s telling me that he’s gonna open my guts and fuck me in the wound.

  Huh. How about that? I feel better now.

  Because if he really thought he could do it, he’d be wet-humping my belly already instead of poncing around like a demented mime.

  I feel more than better. I feel incredible. Every problem I have ever had has just . . . evaporated. My career. Torture. Death. Dad. All of it.

  Everything. Anything. Don’t have one single problem in the world except living through the next twenty seconds. And that’s not a problem. It’s nothing at all.

  Live, die, who gives a shit? So I’ve never fought an ogrillo. So what?

  No ogrillo has ever fought me.

  I fake a lunge and he flinches, and I laugh out loud.

  “Let’s go, Fido.” I beckon with both empty hands. “Strike up the fucking band.”

  He makes a tentative thrust. I skip back. He slices at my head and I duck to the side. His eyes are round as plates and piss-yellow, and I bet my left nut that if his whole rumphumping clan weren’t watching, he’d be running right now and splashing brown with every step.

  His gorilla chest heaves like he can’t quite get a breath—

  Then he gives his tusks a shake and his head settles into his shoulders. Muscle bunches around the spinal ridge that crowns his skull. He growls something that I don’t register as words.

  He’s found his nerve again.

  He starts to circle: three hundred-plus pounds of sentient predator, stalking me. His blade slides through slow, lazy loops, tracing infinity.

  Idiots pretending they know something about fighting sometimes say shit like Other things being equal, advantage lies with the longer weapon or Other things being equal, the fighter who strikes first wins. My favorite is Other things being equal, a big man beats a small man.

  Know what makes them idiots? Wait. I’ll show you.

  He finally commits: with a grunt like a rhino’s cough he launches a full lunge, jamming that spear straight for my spine by way of my navel. I slap the spear aside with a clank, and his eyes go wide at the sparks the knife up my left sleeve strikes off his blade.

  Before he has the faintest fucking chance to figure out what just happened, I’m spinning toward him along the spear shaft, left hand grabbing his nearside tusk while my right clears the knife past my left cuff, and when his reflexive sideways yank rips his tusk out of my grip, that same yank shows me the back of his skull. So that’s where I put the knife.

  The blade’s only seven inches. The point doesn’t quite come out his mouth.

  Get it?

  “Other things” are never equal.

  His body convulses: a single giant spasm that rips the knife from my hand and flattens him like he’s been hit by lightning. One more wrench slams his head backward into the dirt. His jaws gape around an extra tongue of bloodsmeared steel.

  His yellow eyes fix on mine with a mournful
doggy puzzlement, as though we’d had a deal, as though we’d gone into business together with the mutual understanding that he’d live and I’d die and now he can’t quite comprehend how I could double-cross him like this. His eyes cup that canine dismay till the dust he’s kicked up settles across them and dulls even the illusion of life.

  Wow.

  I mean: wow.

  Fuck me if I don’t really, really have to pee.

  I look up. Black Knives everywhere. Standing. Staring. Silent as trees.

  Which is as raw butt-naked sexual as the kill itself.

  Yeah.

  I mean: yeah.

  Now for the curtain call.

  “You see that, you fuckers?” Ten years of kiai have given me a voice that can dent plate armor. “Did anybody NOT see what just happened here? Does anybody need it EXPLAINED?”

  They stand. They stare. Whispers rustle into growls that roll into low thunder.

  “This”—I sweep a hand behind me toward the vertical city—“is MINE. Go wherever the fuck you want, but you can’t come HERE.”

  Minor shifts of weight, a general sway like a forest before a storm. I can’t tell if I’m getting through.

  “For you, this place is HELL. You HEAR me? You UNDERSTAND? For you, here is PAIN. Here is DEATH.”

  I turn my hand toward the corpse of Spearboy. “He died EASY. You will die HARD. You will die SCREAMING. Your bitches will HOWL. Your pups will STARVE.

  “I will FEED YOU YOUR FUTURE.”

  Still they only sway. Their thunder-grumble starts ramping up in rhythm: swell and slack and swell again, like the surf ahead of a typhoon at high tide.

  Do they have any fucking clue what I just said?

  I look down at the dust in the dead eyes at my feet, and think about predatory carnivores and pack-hunters—

  And I start to chuckle. I mean: this is about marking territory, right?

  So before I turn my back on the massed warriors of the Black Knife clan, before I begin to walk the infinite thirty yards to lead them into the ambush back at the ruined gate, before I even have time to worry about how much extra shitstorm I might’ve spun up for myself and all of us, I unlace my breeches, open the front, and pull out my dick.

  And pee on Spearboy’s corpse.