Caine Black Knife

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  Then you know why I need you here, Caine. This is the task I have been given by our Emperor. By your Emperor. To defend the dil T’llan against your people—

  “Yeah, I get it.”

  They’re your enemies too.

  “Uh-huh. I say again: So? What’s your offer?”

  Silence.

  Hush of rain and the beat of my heart.

  “Come on, Kier. What do you want me to do about it?”

  Without hesitation: Kill the Champion. Kill Angvasse Khlaylock.

  I laughed at her. It wasn’t easy; she’s not exactly funny. But I could fake it.

  I can make it worth your while.

  “No, you can’t.”

  You don’t think you can do it?

  “For starters.”

  And the rest?

  “I don’t want to.”

  Silence.

  She said, Really.

  “Really.”

  Silence.

  Eventually: Why not?

  “Reasons are for peasants.”

  Silence.

  I’d settle for Purthin.

  “Oh, right. He knows me—”

  So did Ma’elKoth.

  My turn to fall silent. Eventually: “I thought you said you were fighting my war. Sounds like you want me to fight yours.”

  BlackStone is under Khryllian protection. Before I can touch the Artans, we have to—

  “Yeah, yeah, sure. Keep it up, Kier.”

  A hush like a breath of wind: a sigh, maybe. What does the Champion want you to do?

  “Is that your business?”

  If I say it is.

  “Leave the Artans to me. When I’m done, they won’t be a problem.”

  How does that get me what I want?

  “Didn’t say it would.” I let air leak out between my teeth. “Does Deliann know you don’t give a shit about this supposed mission of yours?”

  Our Sainted Emperor and I have an understanding.

  “He wants the dil T’llan protected. You want ogrilloi free in the Boedecken.”

  Like I said.

  “Because that’s what the Black Knives were in the first place. Part of Panchasell’s defense of the dil T’llan. I mean, ogrilloi were your dogs, right? Hunting dogs. Guard dogs. Isn’t that what you bred them for?”

  We did better with them than we did with you.

  “You are sentimental.”

  There is no way in which ogrilloi are not superior to humanity. Stronger. Faster. More loyal, more faithful. More honest and more courageous. True always to their own nature—

  “Yeah, so are horses. Except horses don’t eat people.”

  Nor do ogrilloi. Not anymore.

  “Tell that to the Smoke Hunt.”

  If only I had the chance.

  My teeth found that raw spot on the inside of my lip. “The Smoke Hunt isn’t yours?”

  Mine? How would you think it mine? Random slaughter is your style.

  I couldn’t argue. If shit were gonna be simple, God would’ve called somebody else.

  The Smoke Hunt is the worst thing that has happened to our operation. Pointless, useless, wasteful bloodshed. They accomplish only the spread of terror; they keep the Khryllians on the highest alert, and ensure the constant vigilance and militarization of the entire population. They are the enemy of the ogrilloi as much as they are of the Khryllians—the Smoke Hunt justifies the oppression of Hell. Not that they wouldn’t have their uses, if properly directed—

  That spot on the inside of my lip was getting way too goddamn sore. “Orbek.”

  Yes.

  “It wasn’t just about me—Smoke Hunters carry the Black Knife clan sign—”

  He was my best hope to get inside. After all, you trained him.

  “Since you sicced Orbek on the Smoke Hunt, are Hunts up or down?”

  Why?

  “Just answer.”

  Up.

  “Nine Knights down—how many were yours? Or sympathizers?”

  Four. Where are you going with this?

  It was my turn to laugh. It didn’t come out sounding real humorous. “They’re Black Knives, you dumb cunt. You were using him. You think he wasn’t using you? Like you said: I trained him.”

  We’re not going to get along until you start telling me what you know.

  “Sometimes shit isn’t complicated,” I said. “You just have to be willing to accept the absolute fucking corruption of everybody involved.”

  Silence.

  Eventually: So where does this leave us?

  I shrugged. “Let’s deal.”

  Deal how?

  “Play Cainist for a minute. Talk about what you want. Not what you told Deliann you’d do. What you really want.”

  Why would I do that?

  “You ever read Deliann’s book on me?”

  I’m not literary.

  “He has Ma’elKoth say that the only way to beat me is to keep me running in so many different directions I can’t focus. That to give me a clear view of my enemy is to hand me victory.”

  So why would I give you a clear view?

  “Because we’re not enemies.”

  It warms me to hear you say so.

  “Play straight with me and you maybe get something for it. Take the chance, Kier.”

  I have trusted you before.

  “And the truth of it is you came out pretty good. It’s not my fault shit went bad in the middle.” Which truth might have been stretched around a corner or two, but she let it go.

  Slowly, like it hurt her to say: I want the Knights of Khryl and the rest of your vile feral slavers broken like you broke the Black Knives.

  I nodded. “And you don’t care what happens to anybody else around here.”

  Do any of them care about Folk?

  “Some do. Some don’t. That’s not what we’re talking about.”

  What are we talking about?

  “I can help you. But you have to help me.”

  There are limits to what I am willing to do.

  “I’m not asking a lot.”

  I’m listening.

  “I know shit’s about to blow up here; what do we have, a week?”

  Less. A revolution is an avalanche. Once you crack the crust, you can only ride it out or let it roll you under.

  “Yeah. It’s more than just the grills and your local agents, right?”

  Caine, please. However much we may pretend to trust each other, you can’t expect me to give you anything you can take to the Champion.

  “Fair enough. But let me play clever little feral for a minute, huh? Your people have something going that’ll trigger a major crackdown on Hell—maybe even a minor massacre—which will make a really swell excuse for the full-scale invasion by, say, several divisions of the Ankhanan Army that Deliann has in concealed positions on the border, because he’s already been talking with the Lipkan Court about the Poor Oppressed Ogrilloi and the Nasty Oppressing Khryllians and how the Ankhanans Have No Territorial Ambitions, and after all Lipke’s still moderately cheesed with the Order for bailing on the Plains War, which means that Deliann can have this place fully invested on maybe two weeks’ notice.” I spread my hands. “How am I doing?”

  Two weeks? You forget we have rail now. And steamboats.

  “Yeah. I’m still not used to that. I bet the Khryllians aren’t, either.”

  We’re counting on it. What price your help?

  “Lay off the Smoke Hunt.”

  The Whisper ratcheted down tighter. Ask for something else.

  “That’s what I want.”

  Aren’t you the man who used to say you can’t make a revolution without breaking heads?

  “No,” I said. “I’m not. And I didn’t come here for your revolution.”

  I thought freedom was a kind of religion with you—

  “That’s the Cainists. Don’t confuse gospel with reality.”

  What is the reality?

  “A lot of people ask me that.”

  I want
you on my side, Caine. I have gone to considerable trouble—

  “My heart’s pumping pisswater for your fucking trouble.”

  Frustration twisted the Whisper into a hiss. Why is this so important to you?

  I shrugged. “Orbek’s my brother. The Black Knives are my clan.”

  Oh, please. Since when?

  “I was adopted.”

  You are the most preposterous, self-aggrandizing excuse for a—

  “I’m serious about this, Kier. Remember what happens to people who hurt my family.”

  A whole river of glass bells cascaded off that cliff. Your adopted ogrillo family!

  “Kier.”

  Glass kept tinkling. What?

  “Faith is adopted.”

  The river of bells flash-froze in midair.

  When she finally spoke, her Whisper was very soft, and very slow, and very, very flat, soothing, the way a cautious trainer might speak to an escaped bear. A big, hungry, angry bear.

  Let’s say I agree. Let’s say I change my plans, shift my resources, and take the risk. What do I get?

  I stood up. “Exactly what you asked for.”

  The discreetly fist-shaped brass knocker on the reinforced door produced no results, but a knuckle-size rock against the shutter of the lone lamplit window on the second floor produced a voice that was clearly female though in no way recognizably feminine. “Don’t do that again. You won’t like it if I have to come down.”

  “You’ll like it even less if I have to come up.”

  The shutter swung open. The silhouette of a squarish head on squarish shoulders appeared just long enough to deliver a nod and a hand-wave toward a black shoulder-breadth archway three steps down from street level. “I’ve been expecting you. Use the kitchen door.”

  The sunken walkway led between the townhouses to the garden alley behind. The garden gate was reinforced as well, but I heard the clack-chank of a heavy bolt being drawn. The gate swung open.

  Nobody there. Nobody visible, anyway.

  A head-high panel in the kitchen door stood open, spilling pale lamplight into the back garden’s clutter: random weeds dying among rocks, from pea gravel to fragments of boulders the size of chairs. I picked my way through the gloom, nodding thoughtfully at the unavoidable crunch of my footsteps.

  The kitchen door swung open. I said to the squarish silhouette, “I thought you quit.”

  “I resigned my Exoteric post, for which I was cast forth in disgrace into the outer darkness. Disgrace, as you well know, is often useful to the Esoteric Service.” The silhouette retreated from the doorway. “Come in. I have a chair for you by the stove.”

  The kitchen was modest, barely large enough to fit the small coal-fired stove, iron washbasin, and tiny breakfast table with its two leather-upholstered chairs. Another chair, of plain wood, stood near the stove, and it was to this one that she pointed her thick straight cane.

  “Sit there until you dry. My front room holds a variety of valuable documents, and I will not have them damaged. Take off your boots if you like.”

  Instead I stood just inside the doorway. “I’m surprised the Esoterics took you.”

  “Took me?” T’Passe of Narnen Hill, one-time vice-Ambassador to the Infinite Court, lately the self-appointed apostle of the gospel of Cainism and queen of that permanent hornet’s nest in my buttcrack, leaned heavily on her cane for the step or two it took her to reach the table. “It was not a matter of taking me. It was a matter of getting the best use from me.”

  “You were always—?”

  She pointed at a lamp. Its wick flared to life. “Chief of post for Ankhana. Oh, yes—Toa-Sytell’s men chose well when they arrested me.”

  I nodded, frowning, remembering. “I guess . . . you never were afraid. Not even in the Pit. Facing down Serpents. Facing down Orbek.”

  She shrugged. “Neither were you.”

  “That’s different. I was looking to die.”

  “Die in the manner of your own choosing. I, conversely, sought to live . . . in the manner of my own choosing. The results were identical because the fact of choice was identical; the commitment to absolute freedom. As we Cainists say: My Will, or I Won’t.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, don’t start, huh?”

  She chuckled and waved another lamp alight. “Our Abbey schools do a terrible thing when they teach us to think, eh?”

  Her hair had been shaved to a salted stubble over the rumple of scar that swept up and back from her cheekbone across the ruin of her right ear. She lowered herself into the breakfast chair with care that bespoke chronic pain, and sat with her right leg extended while she stripped a sheet of bleached paper from a stack on the table in front of her, then found a pen, an inkwell, and a small sand shaker.

  I said, “You’ve looked better.”

  She grunted. “You, of course, haven’t. Sit.”

  I shook my head, shrugged, and did as I was told. “That all from Assumption Day?”

  She gave me a sidelong look. “And I am so grateful for your concern—though one might be forgiven for wondering, given such concern, why you did not, say, visit me in the embassy’s infirmary.”

  “I did. Before you woke up. You’re a lot easier to take when I don’t have to listen to you yap.”

  “We have that in common, then.” She dipped the pen and began scratching on the paper. Her head down, not looking at me, she said softly, “The hip is Assumption Day. The ear . . . my most recently previous assignment was . . . difficult. Not everything is about you, my friend.”

  I made a face. “Since when are we friends?”

  “My last assignment was likely the reason Ambassador Raithe was amenable to my request to be transferred here: in the expectation that it would be a quiet posting, where I might recuperate in peace.”

  “You can give that shit up right now.”

  “I never held that illusion.” Her doughy face came up. I had forgotten how bright and hard her eyes could be. “I knew exactly what I was getting into.”

  “You’re a genius.”

  “What I am,” she said, “is the world’s leading authority on you.”

  I scowled at her. “You said you’ve been expecting me.”

  “Yes. Ever since I arrived. What name are you using?”

  “Huh?”

  “You had been going by Jonathan Fist, yes?” She shuffled through the pages in front of her, frowning, squinting at the rows of close-crabbed writing on them. “At least, that is the name I have for you when you went south, when you instigated that border war along with Orbek and the horse-witch—”

  “We didn’t instigate anything, we—and how do you know that?”

  “The name. Some reference to an Artan legend, isn’t it?”

  I shrugged. “He made a deal he couldn’t get out of.”

  “Ah.” She tapped the pen to the end of her nose, smiling. “I should very much like to meet the horse-witch. Did you bring her with you?”

  “Will you stop?”

  “No, of course you wouldn’t—primitive masculine-warrior complex—you’d never willingly bring her into danger. You rarely even fight women, let alone kill them—it’s clear you’ve always found it distasteful at best, if not outright intolerable . . . unless they’re a different species, of course, which doesn’t exactly count, does it? In fact, I believe of all your murders, women account for only—”

  “I might add one more if you don’t shut up a minute.”

  She turned a raised eyebrow toward me. “Oh, please. Now: What name are you using?”

  “I am very tired,” I said. “I am dripping fucking wet and the last meal I managed to eat got spewed all over a cell floor while a Khryllian Knight played handball with my head. You’ve got a serious problem in this town. All I want to do is dump it on you so I can go get a hot meal and some goddamn sleep, all right?”

  “And I am very interested in what you have to say. But we will do this in an organized fashion, or we will not do it at all. The name?”
/>   I sighed. “Dominic Shade.”

  “Ah.” She held the pen folded between her hands, but I could glimpse movement on the tabletop: letters scratching themselves into view upon the paper. “Both names by which you have been actually known—during your novitiate and in Kirisch-Nar. You don’t think that’s a risk?”

  I shrugged. “It seemed like less of a risk than lying to Knights of Khryl, magick or not.”

  “And you are using magickal nonrecognition?”

  “A variant on the Eternal Forgetting.”

  “That was the magick devised by Konnos the Artificer, yes? Used by your late wife in her Simon Jester identity?”

  I nodded. “It’s supposed to make people unable to connect separate facts about me. That’s why I figured to use real names. But I’m not sure it’s working very fucking well.” I waved a hand at her. “You’re evidence of that.”

  “As you should have expected; thaumaturgic magick is uncertain through out the Battleground, the more so in closer proximity to Hell. However—” She checked her papers again. “As I recall . . . yes, here it is. The Eternal Forgetting is vulnerable to those whose core image of the subject transcends operant identity.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “It’s not important. Let’s continue. Why did you abandon the Jonathan Fist identity?”

  I’m not going to belt her, I told myself. I’m not. “What are you, writing a fucking book?”

  “Why, yes.” She gave me a smile so warmly smug I almost changed my mind. “Yes, I am.”

  I dropped my face into my hands instead. “Oh, sweet shivering fuck. I hate you. Do you have any idea how much I hate you?”

  I heard her chuckle. “Stop. You’ll hurt my feelings.”

  “There’s already a goddamn book on me—”

  “I’ve read it. But it’s not really about you; to my reading, it’s more about the damage you inflict on the lives of those around you. My book is to be far more than his; no mere history, no simple-minded biography, but instead the definitive treatise on your phenomenon, rather than your life: you as more than merely you.”

  “Oh, god.”

  “The essence of what makes you you: the quintessential spirit of the Caine in us all. Which is, after all, my sole interest. Cainism will never be a pure philosophy, a truly useful and universal moral compass, until that essence can be carved free of your unfortunately messy reality.”