Slowly. Slowly. Fingers working down the back of my collar find the thrower’s hilt—
I draw the knife.
So.
This is it. My chance. My last chance.
Won’t even have to take my hands from behind my neck. Point against my jugular. One hard shove into my carotid. Unconsciousness in seconds. Death in a minute or two. Quick. Painless.
Over.
It’s worth doing. Shit—if any of them saw me with the bladewand—the Black Knife Kiss—
It’s worth doing. It is. Right now, right here, I can opt out of an infinite festival of hurt. And maybe I will. Maybe I—
Huh.
Nahhh.
I really am a stone batshit sonofabitch. I must be. Or just a plain fucking idiot. It’s not like I don’t know what they’re going to do to me. Of all human beings within a hundred miles, a thousand, I’m the one who does know. Who really knows. It’s like—
It’s like I want it.
I want to go all the way down.
Whoo.
It’s a goddamn shame you only learn the really interesting shit about yourself when it’s too late to be useful.
But—
If that’s what I really want, if that’s what’s really driving me, I can just lie here over his shoulder. Hellbound Express. No lines, no waiting.
But, y’know—
There’s this knife in my hand.
And my ankles are tied, and I’m bagged in this net and bleeding and wounded and shaking weak, and I don’t even know how many of them are here and I’m probably going to start retching again any second, and I know already I’m gonna be sorry for this. Of all the fucking idiotic things I have done in my fucking idiotic life—
And somehow anyway, it still seems like a really good idea.
So gently, delicately, I slide the point of the knife through a gap in the net, just to one side of the bony knobs of vertebral ridge between his kidneys, and angle it in toward his spinal cord and hold it tight as I can with my left while I make a fist with my right.
And pound the knife into his spine.
The blade scrapes on bone, and he makes one thin grunt—more puzzled dizziness than pain—and the point skids off the bone into the disk and I pound the knife again and it shears through cartilage into his spinal cord and he huffs a muffled interrogatory snort when his legs stop working.
He slams to his knees, and my weight over his shoulder shifts his balance and he topples backward. Onto me.
Pinned, face smashed into his sweaty goat-smelling skin, his impossible weight crushing breath from my chest—
No hope in hell of shifting however many hundred pounds of twitching, writhing ogrillo who now begins to howl his uncomprehending distress—
On the whole, this could be going better.
But through the sudden shouting of other ogrilloi, there rings another voice, a human voice, and into one of those fractional pauses where everybody seems to be drawing breath at the same time slides a familiar shrrr-splat and the meaty flr-thmp of a falling body—
I really, really love that girl.
His weight vanishes. I open my eyes.
Marade has him up over her head one-handed like he’s just a half-stuffed scarecrow.
His talons gouge black furrows in her skin as he scrabbles at her arm, but her other hand is full of morningstar and the blades whistle and his brains splash around me in a bloody rain.
She tosses his corpse aside and looks down at me, and she’s not even wearing her armor anymore. Her surcoat and leggings are ripped and plastered flat with blood, and even through the muck of gore and sand that paints her face, I can see disappointment so bitter it blows out her knees and drops her to the stone beside me. “Oh,” she says. “Oh. It’s you.”
I should probably make some kind of snappy comeback, but my mouth isn’t working and neither are my lungs. Her face, the moon, the city, the universe itself contracts to a single point of light.
And winks out.
>>scanning fwd>>
I know I’m awake because no dream hurts this much.
A lifetime’s practice holds me still, keeps my eyes closed and my breathing steady. Moving feels like a bad idea anyway; just breathing ignites enough fire from my guts that I’d stop if I could. Under my head: rounded, firm but softly yielding, structural, warm as flesh—
It is flesh. I’m naked on somebody’s lap.
Somebody with no pants on.
Um. Yow.
“I know you’re awake.”
Marade’s voice, just above a whisper. A hand strong and hot and smelling of vomit and old sweat cups my cheek. “Caine? Khryl’s Love can Heal your remaining wounds, but you must be silent, do you understand? You must control yourself; I cannot do it for you.”
I summon a hoarse whisper. “Control?”
“You were screaming.”
“Uh. This isn’t—” My voice scrapes into a cough that blooms scarlet from my ribs through the top of my head. “Oh, crap. That really hurts.”
It hurts so bad I can only laugh. Laughing hurts worse.
“Softly, Caine. I cannot guess how near they may be.”
They who? “I was just gonna say: this isn’t exactly how I pictured waking up across your thighs.”
The hand moves up to stroke my hair, and her voice is soft and sad. “Do you never stop?”
I open my eyes and see only the same Mandelbrot blooms of color that I’d seen with them closed. “Um, I can’t see. I can’t see a damn thing.”
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Blind? So much for my fucking career—
“It’s all right, Caine. It’s all right. It’s dark, that’s all.”
“What happened? What’s going—wait. I remember—”
The vertical city. Black Knives in the badlands. The ambush . . . ogrilloi screaming as they burned . . . the fight at the gate, the fight on the third tier . . .Rababàl.
Stalton.
Breathe—breathe—find Control. It’s only pain.
Yeah, shit, huh—only pain, yeah, sure, fucking right. Hard to meditate with splinters of rib scraping around your lung.
“What—hrrr—what happened to your armor?”
“So dented and rent that I can no longer wear it. And . . . I’d rather do without. From what can it now protect me?”
Slowly, incrementally, I push the pain outside myself. “Our clothes?”
“Khryl’s Love is swift; in the dark, wounds may close with cloth inside—”
“Okay, I get it.”
How much does my life suck? Finally naked with Marade, and I’m too busted up to do anything about it.
Huh. Not entirely naked—my exploring hands find wet sticky cloth tied around my belly, and more around my right thigh. Sticky and crusty with the texture of burnt-on coffee grounds where it isn’t wet.
Clotting blood. A lot of it. I can’t find any dry cloth. Under the sticky cloth around my thigh, something hard and raggedly sharp like splintered bone sticking up—oh yeah—
I remember snapping off the head and flights but leaving the shaft in. No way to tell if it nicked my femoral artery; if it did, pulling the shaft could bleed me out in minutes.
I seem to be severely fucking broken, here. Which somehow doesn’t really bother me. Not really at all.
Huh.
If I didn’t hurt so goddamn much, that’d be kind of interesting.
“So these bandages have to come off, huh?”
“Yes. Khryl’s Love has Healed your skull fracture, but He will need both my hands for your belly and your leg, if you are not to bleed to death.”
Breathe.
And . . . breathe . . .
“I must ask you, Caine, and you must tell me truly: do you wish to be Healed?”
“Are you kidding?” Right now I’d trade my balls for a fucking aspirin. “Yeah,” I tell her. “Yeah, I want it.”
“Because you must know what we face. I can remove the shaft from your leg, and . . . you understand. Bleeding out is a
gentle way to die.”
I’ve already made that choice. “And leave you here alone? What kind of guy do you think I am?”
“I have discovered, tonight, that I do not know. And so I ask.”
Uh. I’m not ready for this. “Where are we?”
“Still in the vertical city. Deep in one of the chambers. A storm cellar, perhaps; there is only one door.”
“How many of us? Who’s here?”
“Just us. You and me.”
“Yeah, okay. Okay.”
Another few seconds of measured breath. I find that I have to ask. I have to know. It doesn’t matter that I don’t like them, or that they don’t like me. Like doesn’t matter anymore. If it ever did.
“Pretornio?”
“The porters’ formations were—not mobile. Seven dead. The rest—”
She doesn’t want to say taken.
“eah, okay.”
“Stalton?”
I know what she really wants to ask. She doesn’t want to know: she needs to know. She can’t stop herself. “Did you . . . did you find him?”
Maybe she needs to work her way up. To talk around the question.
“He’s—”
Maybe she’s not the only one. Why is this so hard to say? “He’s dead.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah. Real sure.”
She waits for me to elaborate.
Finally: “What about Rababàl—Rababàl and, and . . . Did you—I, ah, I saw a flash . . . ?”
“Yeah.”
The pain’s leaking back in through my wall of Control. I shift, trying to find a position where the cold burn in my guts doesn’t make my head swim. There isn’t one. “The last explosion—? The big one?”
“Yes.”
I shrug against her thighs. “That was Rababàl. That’s why it was the last.”
Silence. I feel her breathe.
“Did he—?”
“He had three or four arrows in him. Couldn’t even stand up.”
Don’t think I’ll tell her how he cursed me as he lay bleeding into the dead weeds. “He decided to go clean.”
“Clean.” Her echo is tiny: comprehending. “The explosion was . . . bits and pieces of bodies—a waterfall of fire—they rained all over the lower levels. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
I’d tell her he went out with a bang, but she wouldn’t think it’s funny. “Some of those pieces were his.”
“Yes.” Her warm soft flesh rises and ebbs under me in a long sigh. “We may live to regret that we haven’t joined him.”
“Pretty likely.” Pain surges like vomit climbing my throat—
—oh, crap—shouldn’t have thought vomit—
“Marade?” My voice has gone thick. “Better move. Think I’m gonna puke.”
“You already have. Several times.”
Must be true: a spasm of retching that rips unnamable things inside my belly spills only thin acidic drool from my lips.
“Caine—” she says as I go quiet again. Her voice is thin, tight, hesitant, like she’s working herself up to ask something she doesn’t want to know the answer to. “Caine, I couldn’t find . . . what about—what about—”
Yeah. Wish I had a better answer. “It’s not good news.”
Her breathing hitches. “They have her. That’s what you think. They have her, and, and—”
A bare whisper, half a breath from silence. “—and she’s alive . . .”
“I don’t know. Probably.” I shrug helplessness against her thighs. “I was going after her when they took me.”
“Caine—what you said—what they do to thaumaturges—”
Her voice fails, and the hitch in her breath becomes faint gasping, and her arms tighten around me: begging me with her body to tell her I was exaggerating, that I just made that shit up, that it isn’t true and it’s not going to happen to Tizarre.
But I wasn’t exaggerating, and it is true.
“They might not know. She was armed. If she fought them blade and shield—if she didn’t use any magick—they might think she was there only to cover Rababàl’s back.”
Best I can do.
A couple wet sniffles. “I was—I wasn’t—” I can hear her swallow. “You weren’t who I was looking for.”
Her voice goes solid again. Soft and flat and brutal. “I was looking for her. Finding you was an accident.”
“It’s all right, Marade. I know. It’s all right.”
“She and I—she’s my partner, Caine. You wouldn’t understand. You don’t . . . you don’t need anybody—”
That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway.
“We’ve been partners—forever. Even in school. Marade and Tizarre. We’re a team. Halves of a greater hero. That’s how we pitched it. To the bosses. We were going to be like, you know, like the female Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.”
She’s not giving away anything I haven’t figured already. But still, she should know better. “Marade, don’t—”
“Fuck it,” she says, harsh, freighted with loathing: the stinging emphasis you get from someone who never uses obscenity. “Fuck it and fuck them. What does it matter now? If they have a problem, they can edit this out.”
“Yeah. I guess they can.” I close my eyes against the darkness, open them again. “Anyone else? Do you know?”
“I’m not sure. Tizarre and I . . . we used to talk about it, late at night. Trying to guess. Kess, maybe. And I think Stalton . . . was. I think. Probably.”
Wow.
A sawtooth knife scrapes inside my ribs: everyone who ever rents Stalton’s last cube will watch that hammer come down at their own eyes. Be able to feel it. If I weren’t going to die here, I could do it myself.
Wow.
“And you, of course,” she says. “Finding you working for Rababàl is what made us realize we weren’t the only ones.”
“Why me of course?”
“Because we recognized you. From, uh, you know—from school.”
Holy crap. “For real?”
“Oh yes. We knew all about you. We came in the quarter before you graduated. We were—I guess you could call us fans. Your first fans.”
Huh. So far, my only.
“I don’t—” Why do I feel like I should apologize? “I don’t remember you.”
“A couple of first-quarter girls? Why should you? You were the campus stars—you and your friend. You know, the elf—?”
Yeah. Conditioning won’t allow us to speak his name, but we don’t have to. And, y’know, thinking about school gives me a weird warm feeling. Even the pain in my gut fades a little. Much as I hated the place, I like remembering it.
Talking there and then beats the shit out of living here and now.
“We always—we kind of thought you must be dead, or something.”
“Or something?”
I can feel her shrug in the shift of her breasts. “Everyone thought you’d be a big star. I mean, it’s been, what, six years? Seven? We thought we would have heard of you by now.”
“Yeah, well, my life hasn’t been going exactly to plan. Maybe you’ve noticed.”
Her sigh is silent, but I can feel it. “And—that friend of yours. He was so gifted. Best in the school. Whatever happened to him?”
I shrug against her thighs. “Nobody knows. Dead, probably. He never came back from—” Can’t say the word. “Never came back from, y’know, his, uh, training. You know.”
“Being the best . . . it doesn’t really count for much, does it?”
“Not unless best means luckiest.” It comes out pretty well, but the cold twist above my wounded guts reminds me how much I still miss him. Not that it matters now. If you believe the religious types, I might see him soon enough.
“Tizarre . . .” Her voice has gone to hush. A drop of moisture splashes on my chest.
“Tizarre had such a crush on him . . .”
Another drop. I resist the urge to taste it.
“She used to write about
him. Poetry. Sometimes to him. In her diary.”
“Yeah?” I have had as much as I can take of this maudlin crap. “She’d have been disappointed. He was queer.”
“He . . . what? He was?”
“Most likely. We never talked about it. But I’m pretty sure. Only way she would have gotten anywhere with him is if she suddenly grew a dick.”
“Caine, you—” I can feel her shift in the darkness. Maybe shaking her head. “Why do you have to be such a . . . an asshole all the time?”
Oh, for shit’s sake. Here we go. “I wonder that myself.”
“You’re so . . . hostile. So angry. Are you always like this?”
“Sometimes I’m worse.”
“That’s what I mean. You say it like a joke, but it’s not. Not really. You always have something rotten to say about everything. Even yourself.”
“Hey, I’ve got an idea for a good time—why don’t I bleed to death on your lap while you outline my defects of character?”
“Hnh. And to think I—I thought—”
“What? You thought what?” It comes out harsh: a lot colder than I meant to sound. Because I really want to know.
Because she and Tizarre—Tizarre and her crush on my friend . . . I mean, what about Marade? Did she ever have a crush of her own?
From balls to brain I ache with hope that she’s always had a thing for bad boys . . .
Because my body doesn’t care where we are. My body doesn’t care how broken I am. How much I hurt. My body doesn’t care about anything except the smooth warmth of her skin. The soft full arc of breast against my arm. Because right now all I can think about is that one mind-bending kiss.
But all she has for me is a resigned sigh as she shifts her grip so that she can cradle me in her arms like a baby. “Are you ready now?”
Ahhh, shit. “Yeah. I guess I am.”
Without apparent effort, she lifts me off the floor and stands.
“Khryl’s Healing is a power of Love.” Her voice has recovered that Ivanhoe swing: she’s got her Knight on now. “It is His Love for those wounded in the service of Valor that knits flesh and bone. But because my flesh is Its channel, His Love can only follow my own.”
Caine Black Knife Page 18
