Caine Black Knife

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  “Yeah, me too.”

  Once again, white appears around the rims of her irises.

  I shrug at her. “They broke me like a rotten fucking stick. So what? They break everybody. It’s what they do.”

  “But—but—”

  “But that was then.” I stand up. “Fuck then. Then is over. Fight now.”

  “I—I don’t know if I—”

  “They have Marade chained facedown over a pile of rocks. Naked. In the middle of the camp. So the whole clan can watch while the bucks take turns on her.”

  “Caine—Caine, don’t—”

  “You know why she’s still alive? It’s not just because she’s Khryllian, Tizarre. Yeah, her god Heals her, because she fights. Every time. She fights every time. But you know why she fights every time?”

  I shift my squat in front of her and take her arms, so she can’t look away from me. “It’s because I’m not on that cross anymore.”

  “Caine—”

  “It’s because you might still need her.”

  “I—”

  “Are you gonna leave her there?” I give her a shake. “Are you?”

  “How can you—how can you put this on me?”

  “Because it is on you. It’s on both of us. Because there’s nobody else.”

  I show her some teeth.

  “Because I have a plan.”

  >>scanning fwd>>

  The rush of rain becomes a sizzle. Then a hush. Fading thunder rolls away to the east.

  Time to go.

  I lean into the rope harness hard enough to scrape bloody hemp-burns up my chest and over my shoulders. The sledge lurches into motion, and I drag it out toward the night.

  My night.

  It’s a good night to die, fuckers.

  The Black Knife camp spreads rain-smoking watch fires across the badlands, three hundred feet below.

  Out along the parapet . . .

  There’s still enough hush in the misting drizzle to cover the grind of the sledge through sand and over wet stone, and I am taking no chances because night and hard stone can play tricks with sound. The weight of the sledge counterbalances me only a couple hand spans off the rock. One of the skids catches on a corner of crumbled wall, and a couple of the barrels tip loose of my half-assed lashings and tumble off. I scramble out of the harness and dive for them before they can roll out a gap in the retaining wall.

  Not yet. Not here.

  My hands shiver and jerk while I struggle to get the barrels secured back onto the sledge. For sure this time.

  Details. It’s always the little fucking details that kill you.

  Come on, goddammit. My fingers just won’t for shit’s sake cooperate, and the stress floods out my Control-enhanced nightsight until I’m fumbling blind and I am not going to bitch this up. I’m not. Not this time.

  When the barrels are finally back in place, I check the lashing on the chest that holds the bottles, and the rags that wrap and wick them. If I lose those . . .Solid. Solid. All right. Keep breathing. It’s all right.

  Back in the harness. A few breaths brings the parapet back to a ghostly grey-blush shimmer in my peripheral vision. Good enough. Let’s go.

  And I go.

  But—

  Fuck.

  Taking too long. Too much scraping. And I just don’t have the strength. Without the pain to remind me, I keep forgetting how fucked up I still am.

  Should’ve dry-run this thing. But how could I? Too late now anyway.

  Just push.

  I lean deeper into the harness. Rope grinds through skin and muscle and burns into bone okay not really but still it feels like hot staggering fuck—

  Fucking push.

  It’s too loud the rain’s stopped they can’t hear me but they can, I know they can hear me and I can’t go any faster but I just can’t get there push goddammit push—

  I make the point just as my knees give out. I slip the harness and throw myself into the point’s muddy sand and let the blood from my chest and shoulders mix with the puddles while I try to figure out how I’m ever gonna get my breath.

  “Caine—”

  I jerk and spasm onto my back and roll to my feet by reflex with knives in my hands before I register that it was Tizarre’s voice. I fade from the lip of the point and get my back to a wall.

  “Shit,” I mutter through my teeth as I put away the knives. “Might as well, y’know, slap my balls or something. Be nicer.”

  A hand I cannot see attached to an arm I cannot see lands lightly on my shoulder, and a shuddering wave of dream-wakening twists through my mind because I can see her, and now that I can, I know I always could . . . but only with my eyes. Not with my brain.

  Until she decided to let me.

  Thaumaturges creep the shit out of me, and Cloak is one of the reasons why.

  “Everyone’s as ready as I can make them.” She has the bladewand, and she offers it to me butt-first. “Any fucker close to Marade when the show starts is in for a hell of a surprise.”

  I take the bladewand. “I’ll bet.”

  “You have no idea.” Her face is still bleak, but now a grim fire glimmers deep in her eyes. “Instead of the shackles on her wrists, she had me half cut the staples that fix the chains to the stone.”

  “Um.”

  The image is vivid: Marade rising naked from that pile of rubble while from each hand three feet of chain as thick as my wrist screams into a lethal iron blur—

  Hell of a surprise is one way to put it, I guess.

  Makes me wish I could be there to watch.

  I stick the bladewand in the top of my boot and extend my hands. “Dawn’s coming. Set me up.”

  She takes my left hand in one of hers. I get a faint half-orange image of her licking her lips, frowning. “It should really be, y’know, copper or silver paint—”

  “Blood’ll be fine. Do it.”

  “You do it.”

  I pull a dagger and gash the base of my thumb; she catches my blood in the cup of her palm. “Have you ever done this before? Used a Shout?”

  “I know how it works.”

  She nods. “Don’t forget to cover your ears.”

  “Yeah.”

  “This’ll take a little bit. Go ahead with the oil barrels now. After I do your hands, you can’t use them for anything else.”

  I put the dagger away and draw the bladewand out of my boot. “Get on it.”

  She stares down at the pool of blood in her palm and starts taking the deep, slow, regular breaths that will drop her into mindview. The blood begins to shimmer with a faint alcohol-flame glow that casts no light.

  A twist of intention sends a blue plane of force flickering out from the tip of the bladewand; the lashings on the barrels fall away, and the tops of the barrels themselves slip sideways on glass-smooth cuts. I slap the top off the first one and just tip it over. Oil floods out onto the point, oozing and rolling and twisting over the water-soaked sand, flowing thick and sluggish down toward the apex, where the wall has fallen away. I kick the second one off the other side of the sledge and let it spill there, then lift the third and the fourth carefully to the gap in the retaining wall and set them there as the spilled oil begins to roll over the lip and drain along branching channels below.

  “Caine—” Her voice has that spooky emptiness; she’s still in mindview. “Now.”

  I scrub oil and grit from my palms onto my breeches, then give her my hands. She dips a forefinger into my blue-shimmering blood.

  Humming under her breath, she paints sigils in blood on my palms. Pretty soon she lets my hands drop and brings her finger to my face, painting around my mouth and up onto my cheeks. After a few seconds of this, she sighs, and full consciousness swims back up to the surface of her eyes.

  “All right.” She gives herself a little shake. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  My breath goes short, whistling faintly through my clamped-tight throat. “Get in position.”

  “Caine—” She squints against
a half-strangled cough. “We won’t live through this, will we?”

  “Hard to say.” I shrug to cover the shakes that are starting to ripple along my arms. “A couple days ago, I would have said no way. But my luck’s been running good lately.”

  “When I—” Another cough, choked, with maybe a little bit of sob behind it. “When I was telling Marade the plan, Whispering to her—y’know, the diversion, the rendezvous, everything—she started to cry. It’s the—I’ve never seen her cry, Caine. I don’t think . . . what they did to her . . . But she started to cry when I told her the plan, and I asked her—well, she just said she was grateful, that’s all. She kept saying thanks. But not for the, y’know, the escape. The rescue.”

  She swallows. “For the chance to hit back.”

  My eyes burn. Not with tears. “Yeah.”

  “That’s what I want to say too. Thanks. For the chance to hit back.”

  “It’s more than a chance,” I tell her. “You remember what I said the night they took us, how the Black Knives would remember us for a thousand years?”

  “But that was just—”

  “Yeah, it was. Then.”

  Storm clouds part. Stars wink into being.

  “You and I, Tizarre, right here, right now—”

  Can she see my teeth?

  “—we just might make it true.”

  >>scanning fwd>>

  Even the wind goes still. Rich fruity fumes steam up from the oil on the point.

  From the apex, the Black Knife camp is a clutter of cinders and ash and smolder like a kicked-out campfire. The cinders are the hide tents, the ashes are knots of bachelor males sleeping out under the stars and the rain, and the smolder is the remains of watch fires burning down now with the approach of dawn.

  I’m in place. Go.

  I don’t bother to signal her that I heard.

  She’ll figure it out.

  Vengeance is mine saith the Lord but this morning He’s gonna fucking well have to share.

  I press my painted palms to my painted cheeks. I draw as deep a breath as I can and open my mouth as far as it’ll go, then clap my hands once, crisp and sharp, in front of my open mouth.

  It makes a sound like most of the Boedecken just exploded.

  The magick of the Shout directs the sound away from me, but still the blast is physical, staggering me, buckling my knees and smacking stars into my eyes.

  Cover my fucking ears too fucking right—!

  Like I have any hearing left to lose.

  I can’t even imagine what it must have sounded like to the Black Knives, but that sleepy kicked-through campfire just became a kicked-over anthill as ogrilloi jump up and rush out of their tents and spin around and fumble for weapons and probably shout and howl and squeal, if I could hear them, and I’m not even started yet.

  Now I do cover my ears, and I Shout:

  YOU

  WERE

  WARNED

  The sound is too vast to be called speech: it is as though the escarpment itself roars at them. The anthill of Black Knives slows, and stops. Dim smears of ogrillo faces turn toward the sky.

  THIS PLACE

  IS MINE

  With a foot, I tip one of the remaining oil barrels carefully, so that it pours over the lip of the point into the branching stone channels that drain down the face of the vertical city.

  I SAID

  I WOULD FEED YOU

  YOUR FUTURE

  On cue, the spill of oil running down the channels catches fire.

  Good girl.

  Rivers of flame cascade across the face of the vertical city, spreading through a delta of absolute darkness. And fire licks back up the channels as well, climbing, converging into a giant burning arrow.

  Pointing exactly at where I stand.

  BUT I AM

  A MERCIFUL GOD

  I tip over the final barrel of oil and skip back away from the point as the flames claw through the gap and the whole point becomes a pillar of fire fifty feet tall.

  I WON’T MAKE YOU

  EAT IT

  RAW

  I’m still chuckling as I get the first of the bottles out of the chest and ignite the wicks at the burning trickle where I tipped the first oil barrel. Even there it’s hot enough that I have to shield my face with my arm and I can smell my hair starting to crisp, but I don’t care, I’m chuckling anyway. It sounds like God playing dice with planets.

  Didn’t think that was funny? Watch this.

  I heave a burning bottle high out off the parapet and follow it with another, little specks of whippy flame snapping through long arcs down into the fading night, and turn back to the chest for a couple more before those two hit the ground. I don’t need to watch them land. I know where they’re going to hit.

  I may be a crappy shot, but I throw really, really well.

  At the retaining wall with two more lit in my hands, I wind up—

  Caine—what are you doing?

  Not really a Whisper. Is there a spell called Snarl?

  I launch the bottle anyway before I look down at her red-lit form a level below.

  WHY THE FUCK

  ARE YOU STILL THERE?

  The Shout makes my head ring. She flinches and covers her ears, but a second later she’s back at the wall down there waving an arm down at the Black Knife camp. Down at the flames spreading from where my oil bombs landed. Down at the crowded crèche. Crowded with screaming cubs.

  Screaming burning cubs. Burning juvie bucks. Burning juvie bitches.

  The pregnant ones.

  That’s not the plan! Those are—those are children—!

  GET MOVING

  GODDAMMIT

  But they’re only children—babies—they never did anything—

  I fling the other bottle. It shatters against stone ten feet from where she’s standing.

  She has to skip back along her parapet to avoid the splash of flame, and in the brighter light down there now, I can see the horror and loathing on her face, and I don’t give half a squirt of runny fucking shit.

  MOVE

  OR YOU GET THE NEXT ONE

  IN THE FACE

  With one last look of pure outraged betrayal, she turns and runs.

  Down below, somebody’s already unbarring the gate of the crèche, and the whole camp is alive. Arrows clatter around me. Everybody who’s not scrambling to save the cubs is either shooting at me or sprinting up into the vertical city.

  Works for me.

  I turn back to the chest of bottles. If I really want to roast the little shits, I better get busy.

  >>scanning fwd>>

  “Tizarre, goddammit—!” How many times have I said that today?

  I whip into a spin-kick that slams my right heel into the Shield hard enough to rattle my own damn teeth, but beyond the shimmering curve, the rose-pale glow of the Tear shows nothing but a tightening in the white pinch around her eyes. This is a hell of a time for her to discover she’s got real power.

  Not to mention a conscience.

  Standing among the shreds of bone and armor beyond the Tear of Panchasell, arms wrapped around her narrow chest to squeeze down her shivers, she looks like she’s ready to just stand there and watch. “You never said anything about killing their cubs.”

  She has completely bone-my-ass cracked. “I’m sorry, all right? I promise I’ll fucking suffer for it the rest of my life if you’ll just fucking let me in—”

  “Those were children, Caine—you never said you were—”

  “If I had,” I snarl at her, “would you have helped?”

  “Of course not!”

  “There’s your fucking answer, then.”

  Here they come on my trail now. Hear those howls echoing along the empty cavernways? Hear that blind ravening rage? Hear that pain? Sounds to me like they want to rip open their own guts with their bare hands and claw the pain out so they can stuff it down my throat till I strangle.

  I probably shouldn’t let her see my grin.

  Ti
zarre can hear their pain too: I can see it on her face, in her pinching-down eyes and the white smears where her lips should be.

  “What are you gonna do? Leave me out here? With them?”

  “I should—”

  I slide a hand around to the back of my belt, onto the butt of the blade-wand. “The only thing you should do is make up your fucking mind before they make it up for you.”

  “What am I going to tell Marade?”

  Oh, for shit’s sake. “Tell her? She’s watching it right now—don’t be such a fucking baby—”

  “Don’t say that to me—you don’t get to say that to me—”

  Yeah, fair enough, not the best image, I’ll apologize if I live through this but right now those howls are close enough that they’re raising hairs on the back of my neck, and I’m starting to hear feet on stone and screw this anyway.

  I pull out the bladewand and jam its business end against her Shield and necessity triggers a surge of intention that sends shearing force out from the tip. The Shield collapses in a cascade of sparks and she staggers and I spring into the chamber and just barely stop myself from stabbing her in the eye for being a whining weak-ass cunt.

  Instead I keep on going past her toward the Tear. “Get that fucking Shield back up!”

  “Caine—”

  “No time for your shit. Do it!”

  The Tear of Panchasell shimmers at me from its pedestal of solid gold, a private sunset the size of my head. Runic cirrus-ripples curve and twist across its surface and sink beneath as well, sucking my gaze into its rose-diamond depths.

  I lift my own slice of sky: the electric sizzle of the bladewand’s edge.

  “Caine—”

  A thousand years ago, if the stories are true: Panchasell Mithondionne, near-immortal High King of the First Folk, weeping as he labored over his masterwork, an aeon of Primal lore guiding the hand of the greatest adept in the history of the race—the history of the world—to create a Thing of Power that is also a thing of beauty, a song in crystal, a dream of peace made solid to defend his people and this world . . .