Caine Black Knife

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  “Happy men,” Tyrkilld said, leaning forward to lay a brick of a hand on my arm, “are only half alive.”

  I decided not to tell him my life could be read as a chain of evidence establishing exactly that. “I figure you’re a decent guy, Tyrkilld. As low-rent cock-sucking thugs go, y’know.”

  “Gracious as ever.”

  “I figure you wouldn’t really be in this if you had the faintest fucking clue what was really going on. Freeing enslaved ogrilloi doesn’t have shit to do with it. Freeing ogrilloi is only a means to an end.”

  Tyrkilld swayed a bit. “And—? You’ll have to help me, lad; I’m no master of the mental arts even when sober.”

  “Freedom’s Face is a cover for an Ankhanan insurgency. Because even now, nobody wants to fight the Knights of Khryl straight up. Not even the Empire.”

  The Knight’s eyes went round. “Fight us? Ankhana?”

  “If they have to.”

  “For what? What do we have that they could possibly want?”

  “This.” I waved a hand. “Everything. All of it.”

  “The Battleground?” He looked dazed. “The vast Ankhanan Empire covets our poor scrap of a corner of the Boedecken Waste—? What for? Hasn’t your bloody elven sorceror of an Emperor land enough already?”

  “It’s not about the land. It’s about what’s here. It’s about your Artan guests and BlackStone Mining. It’s—complicated.”

  “Are we so short of time?”

  “Maybe. And I’m not sure I could make you understand why they want it anyway. And you’re sure as hell short of brains right now. No offense.”

  “None taken; freely admitted, my lad. Freely admitted. And how do you come by this sudden trove of intelligence that Khryl Himself avowed you lacked only this morning?”

  “People tell me things. When I ask them nicely. You should give it a fucking try someday.”

  Tyrkilld’s wariness evaporated into a sudden chuckle. “Red Horn! A flagon! And one for the freeman!” He pounded the table with the flat of his hand. It cracked, and sagged in the middle.

  He blinked at it, then shrugged. “And so pray, Master Monassbite, if it would please your Imperial Lordliness to impart to a poor humble hedge Knight one last pittance of your Shining Verity . . . why bring’st you this news to my insufficiently sober self? I can barely hope to remember it, much less take action . . .”

  “Nobody told you to get pisseyed.”

  He leaned back again and favored me with a long, slow, alchoholically deliberate scrutiny. “If what you’ve told me is true, you understand that what you’ve just done is . . . well, for want of a kinder word, one can only call it treason.”

  I shrugged. “I’ve done worse.”

  Tyrkilld blinked, blinked again, and then unleashed a roar of laughter. “I’ll drink to that!” He peered around. “Or I would . . . Red Horn! Where’s my swill?”

  He slapped the cracked table. It split with a groan and collapsed. The kitchen doors banged open again and Kravmik lumbered in, another bucket-size flagon in one hand and a civilized cup in the other. “And here we go—grk. For love of—Tyrkilld, you break another my table!”

  “Bring on the swill,” said the Knight with a lordly wave. “Put the table on my account.”

  “Bet I will,” the ogrillo grumbled as he set the flagon and the cup on the edge of the nearest undamaged table. “Be more careful, you, hey?”

  “So you two know each other, huh?”

  Ogrillo and Knight looked at each other before looking at me with expressions of mildly inquisitive innocence.

  “No taking a knee. Not even a ‘the Knight thisandthat.’ Not to mention your own private barrel of whateverthefuck this is.”

  Tyrkilld yawned and smacked his lips. “I’m not in Khryl’s Battledress, and thus informality is no insult. As for the barrel—”

  “’S just grillswill,” Kravmik said. He hung his head a little. “The Knight Aeddhar’s gotten a taste for it, that’s all. So I keep a barrel topped up for him. And in exchange, he makes sure the parish armsmen don’t bust up my pot still.”

  “Pot still?” I sat up straighter. “Pot still as in distill?”

  “And a nasty vile fluid it dispenses, too,” Tyrkilld sighed, reaching for the flagon. “He boils the alchohol off his beer, capturing the spirit in a long coiled tube of—”

  “Wait. Stop. Both of you. Hot staggering fuck.” I lurched to my feet. “Grill-swill is distilled beer?”

  “Not so loud,” Kravmik muttered. “I know we’re alone here, but it’s not completely legal, you understand?”

  “Or even at all,” Tyrkilld said, taking a long draught. “And for good reason too.”

  “Give me that.” I snatched the cup off the table. Inside was a very pale, almost colorless liquid . . . with that dark, burnt-chocolate scent . . . but also some heather, and honey, and exotic spice . . .

  That was the smell. The taste that had brought tears to my eyes.

  I remembered now: Orbek recounting the boogeyman stories his father used to tell him. About marsh ghouls in the Boedecken, who’d lure you out into the bogs and suck out your eyeballs and pull you down . . . into the bogs.

  The bogs that were full of—

  “Peat.” Wonder kindled within me like summer dawn. “It’s sonofabitching peat.”

  Kravmik frowned at me. “It’s bogearth. We cut it for the cook fires—wood’s too expensive to burn here, coal ruins the food, and turds . . . well, humans get funny about turd smoke.”

  “You’re making beer out of malted barley. That you’re drying over peat fires,” I murmured reverently. “Bogearth, whatever. And you’re distilling the beer to make, uh, grillswill.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Oh, my sweet and generous gods.” I took a sip. It was liquid fire. Too young. Too harsh. Unfiltered. Yeast and fermentation esters.

  It was fucking magnificent.

  I said, “Kravmik Red Horn: Lazzevget, will you marry me?”

  “Come again?”

  “How much for my own barrel? Shit, how much for all the barrels? How much grillswill can you make without getting arrested?”

  Kravmik nodded at Tyrkilld. “Ask him.”

  Tyrkilld shrugged up at me.

  “You can stomach this disgusting brew?”

  “Oh, Tyrkilld—” I took another sip. It lit up my brain. “Oh, it’s pretty hairy, I’ll give you that—”

  “’S just grillswill,” Kravmik muttered. “What d’you expect?”

  “But that’s because you’re holding it in beer barrels for, what, a few days? Weeks? Listen, I can ship barrels of Tinnaran oak up here—new oak, and some already used to age their brandy—if you barrel it for years, instead of days—three years in the new oak, macerate some tannin into it, then finish it in the—”

  “He’s gone entirely mad,” Tyrkilld said in wonder. “Kravmik, take his cup. Two sips and the poor lad’s mind is gone.”

  “Reach for this cup and I’ll break your fucking arm.”

  I took another sip, a long one, and held it in my mouth until my tongue burned. Must have been a hundred forty proof or better. Amazing he could distill it without blowing the roof off the building.

  But after a moment I remembered where I was. And why.

  I swallowed the swill and set down the cup.

  “Son of a bitch.” Sweat had prickled out across my forehead. I swiped my sleeve upward over my face. “Talk about shit happening at the wrong time . . .”

  Tyrkilld and Kravmik were still staring at me. I shrugged at the huge ogrillo. “Thanks, Kravmik. I mean it. And thanks for sharing your barrel, Tyrkilld. You’ll never know how much it meant to me. But I have to go to bed now. Tomorrow’s gonna be a busy day.”

  Kravmik shook his head and turned away. “Ankhanans,” he muttered, lumbering back toward the kitchen. “Can never tell with those people . . .”

  Without a table to lean on, Tyrkilld had some difficulty regaining his feet. Once upright, he frowned down i
nto his flagon. “And amongst all this still rests concealed, Master Monassbite,” he murmured, “the truth of why you have brought your tale to me.”

  I cycled a dozen different lies; a couple almost made it into my mouth.

  But—

  “You’re the only one to bring this to, Tyrkilld. I’m putting this on you for the same reason that Kierendal decided she wanted you dead: because you’re the one who knows shit—you’ve been on the inside. You’re the one who can hurt her, when she starts to make her real moves, and . . . ah, fuck it anyway.” I reached for the cup again. “It’s because I don’t like you.”

  “You’ll have to favor the ignorance of a poor parish Knight; I’ve averred already that I’m no great mind, even sober. Which it might serve you well to remember I am currently not.”

  A one-shoulder shrug brought the cup to my lips; swillfire lit up the inside of my skull. “I figured you’d only half believe me. So instead of, say, going to Angvasse and mounting a full-scale sweep—which you can’t really do anyway, without telling her more than you can afford for her to know about your, y’know, compromised position—you’d go and snoop around a little, pick up some Faces, and pound ’em to check out my story.”

  Tyrkilld nodded somewhat more vigorously than entirely necessary. “As would any prudent Knight who’d had experience of your dishonest self.”

  “Sure. The punch line, though, is that I’m telling the truth.” I took another shot of the swill. “And Kierendal is no one to be fucked with. Which is also the truth. About the time that you found out it was all true, you’d be in the middle of being violently dead.”

  “Ah.”

  “Which would set off a full-scale round-up of Freedom’s Face—which is what I want—and would leave you in bloody chunks that even Khryl couldn’t put back together. Which was also what I wanted.”

  Tyrkilld rocked onto the balls of his feet and stuck his chin out as though that might help him keep his balance. “And yet now you have revealed this nefarious plan entire.”

  A swirl of the cup set the grillswill in motion enough to sharpen the air with the sizzle of raw alcohol.

  “Maybe I’m just not the hard-ass I used to be,” I said. “It’s one thing to figure out how to get a guy killed. It’s another to do it cold while you look him in the face.”

  I raised the cup.

  “And it’s something entirely else to do it to a man who’s just bought you—when you thought you’d never see another for the rest of your pathetic suffering life—a big damn mug of scotch.”

  Already on the edge of the bed, tunic hanging on the post, baton unstrapped and pistol unholstered, I was pulling off one of my boots when I sagged and let my foot fall back to the floor. “Goddammit.”

  I flopped backward onto the bed and threw my arm over my eyes. It didn’t help.

  Pretty soon I moved my arm. Stars stared at me through the skylight. A winding crack in the plaster spread crooked winter stain from the casement toward the door.

  Somehow it looked like the Caineway.

  “Son of a bitch.” I heaved myself upright and put my tunic back on.

  Downstairs, the dining hall was a shipwreck of post-party debris. A couple of listless eligibles drifted among the wreckage, righting tables and performing triage on the chairs and benches. Young Mistress Pratt had her hair bound up now, and a sheen of sweat to match the pretty flush on her cheeks as she shouldered a massive tray piled high with tankards and half-empty platters toward the kitchen doors, while a sullen teenage human boy swept spillage toward the alley door.

  Pratt was piling more trays with tankards and platters, but he stopped willingly enough when my wave from the doorway caught his eye.

  “Freeman Shade?” He wiped his hands on his apron as he came over. “Is there a problem? What’d you say to Knight Aeddhar? He came back and walked through the crowd, and the party just melted away . . . not that I’m complaining—flat-rate event, y’know; the less they drink, the better we do—but from the look on his face—”

  “Out here, Pratt, huh?”

  “Oh, sure, sure, freeman.” He chuckled tiredly as he slipped through the half door. “No harm in letting Yttrall do some of the work—not that she doesn’t pull her weight. D’you know how much it’s worth to this establishment just to let her sit on Knight Aeddhar’s knee and laugh at his jokes? Which is a job in and of—”

  “Pratt.”

  The hosteler met my eyes and seemed to see me for the first time. Sudden wariness pinched the fatigue-lines deeper down his thin cheeks. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?” His voice had gone quiet. “Really wrong.”

  “Pratt, you need to get your family out of town.”

  The hosteler’s feathery, almost invisible brows drew together. “What?”

  “I mean it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know. And I don’t think I can explain.”

  Pratt took a step back. The apron fell forgotten from his opening fingers. “Are—are you threatening me—?”

  “Listen to me. You have to go. All of you. Forget about cleaning up. You can do that later. If there is a later. Things are in motion here—I’ve started things in motion—”

  I shook my head, and my teeth found the sore spot on the inside of my lip. “It’s about to get bad here. I don’t know how bad. Maybe worse than it’s ever been. If you don’t go now . . .” I sighed. “You may not get the chance. You could be dead. You and your pretty wife. And your baby twins. Dead ugly.”

  “What—” Pratt’s mouth was slack, and what little color his cheeks had ever had was now somewhere south of his collar. “I don’t understand—what are you talking about?”

  “I’m trying to save your life.”

  Pratt was pleading now. “Why are you saying these things to me?”

  “That’s the funny part.” My laugh didn’t sound amused, even to me. “It’s because I like you.”

  Pratt only looked helpless.

  “I like your place. You do a good thing here at a fair price, and you treat people better than you have to. You’re the kind of guy the world needs more of.”

  “So you’re—so you’re scaring the crap out of me—?”

  “Take a fucking vacation, Pratt. Take your pretty wife and your new kids south on the first steamer tomorrow. Go someplace nice. Here will not be nice. Here could get you all dead.”

  “But I can’t—I can’t just—”

  “I’m not kidding, Pratt.”

  Pratt gave himself a little shake and managed an unsteady laugh. He swiped the thinning hair sideways across his scalp. “I . . . appreciate the—uh, the warning, Freeman Shade. I do. But really, the Battleground is the safest place on Home—”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Well.” He sighed. “It’s the middle of the night, and my place is a wreck. I can’t make any moves until tomorrow, can I? And meanwhile, there’s still work to do, so if you don’t mind excusing me, freeman—”

  I hung my head. I hate this part.

  “Freeman?”

  Hate it.

  “Er, Freeman Shade, if you don’t mind, I really do have—”

  My hand seized Pratt’s shirtfront faster than he could blink. The hosteler had just barely enough time to draw breath for a shout of alarm before my other hand flicked out to lay my palm gently along his cheek.

  “You know me.”

  Pratt’s shout of alarm died in his throat. His mouth worked. His eyes stared wildly for an instant, then squeezed shut, and he clapped his hands over his face and his legs buckled. He threw himself to his knees at my feet.

  “Forgive me—forgive me, Lord, I did not know thee—!”

  “Get up.”

  Shivering on the floor, face pressed into his knees, Pratt moaned. “Ma’elKoth is Lord of Gods and Master of Home, and Caine is His One True Hand. . . . Ma’elKoth is Lord of Gods and Master of Home, and Caine is His One True Hand . . .”

  “Get up. Don’t grovel. I hate groveling.”
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  Pratt lifted a face transfigured by terror and awe. “My Lord?”

  “And those bloody Psalms. They’re so depressing.” I pressed a hand to my head, blinking. How much of that damned grillswill had I drunk, anyway? “Just get up, huh?”

  “As the Prince of Chaos commands—”

  “And stop it with that shit.”

  “As the—”

  “Shut up.”

  Pratt stood in a half crouch, cringing away from me.

  “So take it as coming from Ma’elmotherfuckingKoth Himself, all right? Get thee fucking hence from this place, goddammit.”

  Pratt barely allowed himself to whisper, “As the Prince of Chaos commands . . .”

  I left Pratt shaking on the foyer rug and stomped up the stairs toward my room.

  Christ, I hate that shit.

  BAD GUY

  I linger upon this moment, as I have a thousand times, or a million, or only once forever; no number can signify, because times have no more meaning than does Time. All of you is present here: your painful birth and your blasted childhood, your criminal youth and murderous manhood, your sad slipping-down maturity and all your many deaths—

  And yet none of you is here now, too.

  In this moment, for this moment, you have erased yourself. No longer an Actor, a man, Hari Michaelson, Caine.

  You vanish into the legend you are still creating.

  The conference room is institutional green. The conference table is faux-granite grey. The conference chairs are mauve.

  Do they look comfortable to you?

  Do you somehow sense the quantum smear of futures in which you’ll someday sit in them—when you’ll have conversations too much like this one with other, younger Actors?

  This question will hang suspended without answer until I have voice to ask.

  For now, I focus on the hum of the motorbed under your ass, on the saline drip streaming drool into your strapped-down left arm, and on the salt I taste on the back of your tongue.