Caine Black Knife

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  And here I am, a vicious little ghetto punk whose whole life wouldn’t be an eyeblink to the least of the First Folk, about to cut the fucking thing in half. Because somebody they never heard of pissed me off.

  That, my friends, is a deep lesson about how the world works.

  Which is when Tizarre finally does get my attention, not by calling my name but with an ear-shattering blast that sucks all the air in the chamber into a whirl that follows the sideways column of flame roaring from her hands out into the cavernway I just came from, and she’s got the black iron head of an ogrillo arrow sticking a span out from her left kidney and that is exactly the down payment on what we might both have to pay for me being too fucking sentimental to pull the trigger, because a flight of arrows they got off just in time comes bursting through the ass end of her Firebolt trailing flames of their own, and one’s coming straight for my face and I’m already falling into a shoulder roll and it just clips my forehead and I take the roll backward over something on the cavern floor that rams into my own kidney hard enough that I can’t even make it all the way back to my feet because my knees have gone to cloth—

  And the bladewand’s off.

  From the floor I point it at the Tear and call upon my will and all I get is a scorch on my palm from the eggbutt and that hiss of blue static discharge from the tip.

  “Caine—”

  Now her voice is a half-strangled gurgle. She’s got a sickly smile behind blood on her mouth, and both hands wrapped around the arrow shaft sticking out of her belly. She retches more blood. “Sorry—I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t be sorry. Just fucking stop them till I make this thing work, then we can get out of here—”

  “Stop them? There are thousands—you made sure they’ll never stop—”

  Goddamn right.

  I try for my feet, but again my knees buckle, and I catch myself with a hand on the knob of rock that jammed my kidney—

  Huh—huh—did you—

  Did you see that?

  Was that my eyes, or just in my head?

  When I touched the rock, there was—

  A severed hand—I was—she was—he and me and she—pinned through the spine—staring into the sky, taking the hand of a kneeling man, cut in half and the waterfall’s spray falling into my open, staring eyes, my own face above among the buildings and the blade driving toward my forehead and—

  And where my hand is on the rock, the rock isn’t rock. Not anymore. It’s the hilt of a sword.

  And where I touch, this hilt sings with the high humming whine of Power . . .

  I look up at Tizarre. She blinks at me. “What—what’s happening—?”

  “What always happens,” I say, because that is what I always say now.

  She nods, because she understands. “What happens next? Is there a next?”

  “You already know.”

  She nods again.

  I toss her the bladewand. It hangs eternally in the air. It is in her hand before it ever leaves mine. Before she catches it, she has turned away, though she still faces me and will forever.

  “Keep it,” I tell her. “It’s yours. I don’t need it anymore.” I stand, and the Sword cuts free of the rock. It shrieks in my hand.

  I hold it poised above the Tear of Panchasell.

  Long and straight and heavy, its blade is the color of mirror-polished tungsten. The runes deep-graven from forte to tip are graceful and smooth as brushtrokes, and they burn with fire so black that my eye cannot hold them; they shift and twist and shimmer and crawl along the blade, sucking light from the air . . .

  I have never seen anything like the Sword. I have known the Sword for lifetimes.

  When it destroys the Tear, it will break the Power’s hold upon the river. A river choked for a thousand years will shatter this place and burst free through these chambers. Will crash from the face of the vertical city upon the camp below.

  In my hand is the death of the Black Knives, and their rebirth.

  Their death is today.

  When the edge carves into the Tear, it screams like I’m murdering the world.

  And maybe I am.

  >>scanning fwd>>

  Dawn at my back ignites the rainbow.

  Beyond huge . . . solid as Bifrost in the billows of my waterfall’s spray . . .

  One foot stretches out from the face of what was the city’s fifth tier, high above; the other is grounded somewhere out in the vast mist-shrouded sea wrack that used to be the Black Knife camp.

  That’s my pot of gold. Right there. In the endless earth-shaking thunder of my waterfall, I can imagine the echoes of Black Knife screams.

  Somewhere to the south, a new river rolls down the Boedecken Waste, black with mud and shreds of tent, shattered wagons and broken bodies.

  I look upon the work of my hand, and it is good.

  Only one flaw in the plan so far: the rendezvous is far enough away from the waterfall’s thunder that I can still hear the idiots argue. About me.

  I lean against the wall outside the shattered gape of what used to be a window, where the nine survivors are dressing themselves in the clothing I brought for them, treating whatever wounds Marade can’t Heal with supplies I gave them, and eating and drinking food and water I provided for them, while they all talk about how they just can’t trust me.

  “—it doesn’t make sense.” Marade’s still standing up for me, at least. Sounds like she’s the only one. “If his sole need was revenge, why risk the rescue at all? He could as easily have left me—left me—”

  Even from out here, I can hear the choke. She can’t say it.

  “Where we were,” she finishes lamely. “He could have done what has been done without even your help, though unleashing the river would have cost his life—”

  That much is true.

  “You weren’t there,” Tizarre says. “None of you. You didn’t see him. You didn’t hear him.”

  “And the cubs—I mean, so what?” This from Jashe the Otter. “How many would have lived through the river thing, anyway?”

  “That’s my point,” Tizarre says. “Why . . . do that? Why the show?”

  “Diversion,” Marade says, but she doesn’t sound too sure of it.

  “That’s what he said. That’s what he told me it was about. To make sure they’d chase him up into the city. To thin them out on the ground and give you all a better chance to escape—but then he hit their children. So more of them stayed. To protect the children.”

  “Well, I don’t care,” somebody else says. “I’m just damn grateful to be alive.”

  “You say that now,” Tizarre insists darkly. “But he’s not done with us. That’s why the rescue. He still has a use for us. That’s the only reason. Just wait. You’ll see.”

  Another man might be offended. I probably would be, if she were wrong. But, y’know, some Black Knives can probably swim.

  I stare out at my waterfall. At my rainbow. The rainbow is a promise from God that there will never be another Flood.

  I don’t plan to need one.

  Fuck punishment. This is about extinction.

  KHRYL’S JUSTICE

  It wasn’t a good dream.

  I couldn’t make it make sense, even as a nightmare: it should have been a net over my face, not a burlap sack. Chunks of puke shouldn’t be flopping around my head. I was sure of that.

  The next time awareness knocked a hole in my skull, I started to worry that I was naked, when I should have been suited up in my black leathers. And this wad of cloth tied into my mouth with what felt like rope? Where the fuck had that come from?

  It did, however, explain why the chunks of puke were pretty much all small enough to have come out of my nose.

  Later, a dimly foggy realization chewed into my forehead that the shoulder I was facedown over should have been flesh instead of metal.

  The last worst part: it wasn’t rope on my wrists and ankles. Forget that I didn’t have the throwing knife that was supposed to be in the co
ncealed sheath behind the collar of my missing tunic; not only would that knife have been useless against the armor on this particular back but it wouldn’t have cut what was binding my wrists anyway, which I could recognize because I still had some feeling in my fingers, because he hadn’t put them on as tight as the Los Angeles Social Police had a few years back when they pinched me for Forcible Contact Upcaste.

  Stripcuffs.

  I puked into the sack again.

  Then I fell back down the black hole.

  I’ve been lucky enough to make it through my life so far with less than my share of major head trauma. Sure, I’ve been knocked around, bashed with sticks and stones, quarterstaves and iron-bound clubs, warhammers and friggin’ morningstars, even a brick or two; stabbed with stilettos, daggers, knives, and smallswords; taken a broadsword through the liver and an axe into the thigh; been variously shot with arrows, sling stones, bullets and motherfucking blowgun darts—not to mention being once or twice hurled from high places—but I’ve mostly managed to avoid being whacked on the head hard enough to produce more than a few seconds of unconsciousness.

  Now, even those few seconds are serious enough; that’s a concussion right there, and anybody who thinks an untreated concussion isn’t serious should go recheck the mortality figures. Still, though, it’s something you generally live through. You wake up with a bad headache and persistent dizziness and nausea, general weakness and shit, and you need some bed rest—or, say, a Khryllian Healing, like the one I got after Tyrkilld slapped me up—to get over it, but you do. Eventually.

  When those seconds stretch into minutes, you go from bad headache into the territory of, say, subdural hematoma, which is a fancy way of saying that your brain’s bleeding and starting to swell, which means that you’re not gonna just open your eyes and shake it off and go beat up the bad guys. It means it’s a roll of God’s dice whether you’re gonna open your eyes at all, and if you do it’ll probably be a lot like it was for me: a fucking nightmare.

  This is not just a metaphor.

  The bleeding-brain kind of unconsciousness is a fall across an event horizon of oblivion: an infinitely instant shredding of everything you are as psychic tidal forces smear you into an eternal scream. Waking up is no treat, either; it doesn’t happen all at once, but in little flickers and flashes that start out as needles and graduate to razors in the eye and the grip of God Himself upon your balls, and it involves a lot of vomit and choking and wishing you could go back to falling into that black hole, because the eternal scream is a helluva lot more fun.

  That’s how it is for me, anyway.

  Maybe it’s because it seems like every time it happens to me, I start that whole razors-in-the-eyes waking-up crap in a bag over somebody’s shoulder while the sonofabitch is out for a jog.

  The only way I can reconstruct roughly how long I must have been out before I started twilighting up from semiconsciousness is to guess how fast Markham could haul my twitching ass from the Pratt & Redhorn to the jitney ramp up Hell while making a wide circle around the Spire, because he wouldn’t exactly want to bump into any inquisitive Khryllians on the way.

  Did I not mention that part?

  Turns out I wasn’t wrong about Calm Guy’s backup. I wasn’t even wrong about the really, really good nerves. My only mistake was assuming that the backup in question would have reason to be afraid of the Smoke Hunt.

  Well, okay. That wasn’t my only mistake.

  There are ways in which I think really, really fast. Like how to kill people. There are ways in which I don’t think really, really fast. Like working out that the only way Faller’s gunmen could have known I was at the Pratt & Redhorn was if they found out from Kierendal & Tyrkilld & Co.—not fucking likely—or if they found out from, say, the all-too-conveniently lurking-in-an-alley-across-the-street Lipkan ass-cob who booked me the room in the first place.

  At the time I was playing sack of meat potatoes, I didn’t have any idea of any of this. There were some inexplicable images swimming around the brimstone swamp inside my head, of Boedecken badlands covered in grain and vineyards and a river dividing a city of neat whitewashed brick tangled up with headless ogrilloi burning with a red fire that cast no light. And that was about it.

  I don’t remember much of the early part of my visit to BlackStone. Somebody must have taken the sack off me, because I remember somebody saying good lord, clean him up, and sometime after that I was wet and there was a blinding-bright haze pumping in through my eyeballs that was overinflating my head until I could feel the bones of my skull grinding against each other along jagged fissures as they began to separate and a distantly familiar voice said from the top of the well I’d fallen down—

  lord tarkanen—you hit him too hard

  Then another distantly familiar voice, not Markham’s—like the voices of Actors from Adventures I’d cubed a few times when I was a kid, I always had a good ear for voices—

  or perhaps not hard enough—were you not once the practicing necromancer, simon faller? a shade will answer honestly where a man may not—

  Which I tried to laugh about, y’know, because of the pun, but I’m pretty sure I only managed a dull moan.

  no no no, he has to be alive—my orders—a healing—do a healing—

  Nay. This voice was Markham’s. I could even make out a strict grey cloud among the bright haze that filled my universe. This hurt was not taken in battle. Khryl’s Love will not avail.

  A round pale shadow in the bright haze began to resolve toward the blur of a face.

  Michaelson? Michaelson, can you understand me at all? Do you know where you are? Caine, talk to me.

  I remember, here, trying to answer.

  Dead . . . I was trying to say. Dead . . .

  Simon Faller, said that familiar voice which wasn’t Markham’s, he raves. Let him die. If he lives, we will all come to regret it. This I know from bitter experience.

  Here I would have laughed again, if I could laugh. Somehow thinking how many people could honestly say the same made me giggly.

  It’s not up to me, the blur of a face replied. And it’s not up to you, either. We’ll turn him over as is. Let them deal with him however they want; then if he dies, it’s their problem.

  Are Artan Healing magicks superior to Khryl’s?

  Just—ah, different, that’s all. Let them in.

  That face-blur leaned down closer, and more details came into focus: grey cream-plastered wisps of comb-over, a crisp salt-and-pepper beard giving shape to soft jowls . . .

  It was Rababàl.

  Michaelson—maybe you can’t hear me, but—I know you always say that everything’s personal, but this really is business. Really. I got over hating you a long time ago. This is just business.

  “Dead . . .” This time I did manage to get the word out past my teeth, instead of bouncing around inside my fractured skull. “You’re dead . . .”

  Even when he cannot move, can barely speak, still he threatens you—

  It’s not a threat. The dead man retreated to a blur, then to a cloud. As far as he knows, it’s simple fact.

  And before I could summon anything like sense to the surface of my scrambled brain, things got even weirder.

  In accordance with the treaty between our peoples, Markham was saying, I now deliver this fugitive into your custody and your care.

  Then a couple of new shadows loomed in my personal haze. When they leaned down to pick me up, both of them wore on their inhumanly rounded heads these sickeningly familiar funhouse-smeared leers that were still unmistakably me.

  My own face.

  I knew me. Them. I grew up in a San Francisco Labor slum. Anybody Labor would have to be six days dead to not recognize the Social Police.

  Administrator Hari Michaelson. The electronic digitizer in the soapy’s mirror-masked helmet didn’t work in Home physics; he just sounded like he was talking with one hand over his mouth. You are under arrest for the crime of capital Forcible Contact Upcaste, in the murder of Le
isureman Marcus Anthony Vilo.

  It’s funny, y’know—

  Life has a way of sticking a knife in my eye at just the right time.

  Being handed over to the Social Police was a dull knife. Rusty. Serrated too. I guess I’m lucky that way.

  It went in my left eye socket and sawed around inside my sinus cavity until the scrape of rusty serrated metaphoric steel on metaphoric bone cranked me up across my personal event horizon, and though I could not summon any ghost of a clue where this might be happening or why, through the pain and general mystery I was able to dimly recognize that this situation boded ill for my immediate future.

  So I thought, Fuck it. Let’s fight.

  This may seem like an unusual decision from a semiconscious middle-aged naked guy with a skull fracture who’s bound hand and foot in unbreakable high-tech police restraints, but I have this rule of thumb, one that I’ve practiced so long—ever since I was a kid running wild on Mission District streets—that it’s become hard-wired instinct. When bad guys try to take you somewhere by force, fight.

  Fight now.

  Because they’re taking you into their comfort zone. That’s why they’re not killing you where you are: because wherever you are, you still have a chance. For whatever reason. Witnesses. Police. Weapons. Escape routes. Something. That’s why they want to take you somewhere else. And once you get where they’re taking you, it’s over.

  Or it’s not over. Not for a long time.

  Fighting might get you killed. But it’s better than whatever’s waiting for you where they can take time to enjoy themselves.

  It happened to some of the street kids I knew back in the District. They’d disappear. And their bodies would turn up later. Sometimes you could tell they’d been kept alive for weeks. Or months. By how many of the wounds had scarred over. Even some of the amputations. And castrations and vaginal mutilations and you don’t want to know.

  So—

  Fuck it.

  Fight.

  But, as people who know me will have heard before, there is fighting and there is fighting.