Caine Black Knife

by Matthew Stover

  I just—

  Need.

  To hurt more.

  It’s night.

  Must be night. No sun on my skin.

  I can open my eyes. I can. And I will. Pretty soon.

  I will.

  Keep . . . breathing.

  Motherfucker.

  Wind . . . ’s still shifting. Cookfire smoke . . . mulch of rotten blood and gamy meat high and soft and blue . . . funerary platforms west of camp . . . staked out their dead for the buzzards and the crows . . .

  Just.

  Breathe.

  Out.

  In’s no problem.

  Breathe.

  Out.

  It took J—ahh, hrr. Hrrgh . . . conditioning . . .

  Still can’t—

  Here, then. Here. I can do this.

  Control Disciplines.

  I can.

  I can.

  I can do this.

  I can.

  Okay.

  This is what I mean.

  The son of that old-fashioned god back home, where you are, took all day to die. Not sure how long it’s been for me. Guess I’m in a little better shape. Or maybe it’s because I’m up here for my own sins . . .

  Or—

  Grunting, alien words, the creak of rope and greased wood and yes, and yes, it’s me, they are, yes.

  Yes.

  My scaffold of timber reclines, rotating slow as the wheel of stars that must be somewhere above, angling backward on its horizontal axle like an easy chair until my over strained diaphragm spasms out of muscle failure and gasps and wheezes and pumps my starving lungs again: this is the real reason I’m outlasting the son of that old-fashioned god.

  Because they won’t let me die. Not yet.

  Oxygen whispers away the shadows in my head.

  I open my eyes.

  My hand—that’s my hand, above on the weather-greyed arm of the Y-shaped cross. Looks like I’ve got a cramp: fingers twisted into talons of somebody else’s agony. I can see the cramp. I can’t feel it. My hands and feet are gone: blocks of wood. Lumps of stone. Maybe my pain center’s finally burned out.

  Maybe the rusty spikes through my wrists and ankles severed the nerves.

  The blood that wells around the spike is dark in the orange light of the bonfires. It gathers brighter rose as it trickles thick and cooling down crusted channels to my shoulder.

  Not hanging from the spikes. Grill-size cross: wrist shackles beyond my fingertips. Not worth a custom job. Tied me on. Spikes’re just to keep me from slipping the rope.

  The Y to which I am nailed eventually rotates far enough back to take some of the pressure off the spikes they drove between my Achilles tendon and ankle joint. Now my struggle is to hold up my head. To look upon our torturers. Their half-assed let’s-pretend sorcerors.

  Bitches.

  Would have guessed it would be bitches. Would have known. Even if I never seconded the Barand. Would have known.

  Dad showed me that story—was it horsemen out of the far eastern steppes? was it nomads I cannot name in a desert I cannot name?—how they took as an article of faith that a man’s only proper role is war; that to inflict pain upon the helpless will ruin a warrior for battle. So when they had taken someone they despised so much that only infinite suffering could answer the ache in their blood—

  They’d give him to the women.

  Bitches dance around me in their gloss-black feathers and blood-brown paint and swinging swollen dugs, and they pinch me and pull my hair and talon-flick my balls and tease my shrinking flesh with any petty insult they can imagine. And when they get bored, they offer me spit and urine in a wooden ladle, and the thirst that consumes me is stronger than my disgust.

  And that’s exactly the problem. Suffering is a luxury. I don’t hurt enough. Haven’t hurt enough.

  Not yet.

  Far below us, a vast field of bonfires paints the badlands with pools of sunset. Down among them Black Knives pursue their Black Knife lives: cooking and washing and eating and drinking, telling jokes and dancing, lying and singing and wrestling and fucking and doing whatever else ogrilloi do when nothing special is going on.

  Very few even give us a glance.

  Fuckers.

  They were not real to me before. Even the ones I fought hand-to-hand. They were abstract. Impersonal. A natural disaster. A flood, a fire, an avalanche. Something to deal with.

  Things are different, now.

  Now I see them. I smell them.

  I know them.

  And if I can just hurt enough . . .

  But that’s the problem. Suffering is a luxury.

  This is different from the Barand. A whole different world. He and his boys were taken far out in the Waste; they were used, and used up, on the spot. That was just a clutch of them, long-range raiders. This is a whole different world.

  This is some kind of fucking Althing.

  More than that.

  They didn’t need us for this party. It’s BYOV. The screams and whimpers that are their favorite dinner music come mostly from other ogrilloi. Criminals. Cowards. Captives from other clans. Who gives a shit? The point—the sharp end of the fuckstick—

  This wasn’t something staged just for us. This was what they came here for.

  This. Not us. It was never about us. It was about being here.

  Shit, y’know—?

  Shit.

  We might’ve got away after all.

  Ahh, there it is. There. Now I’m starting to hurt.

  Good. Good. I need to hurt. Because some things are starting to make sense to me.

  Because this Althing of theirs is more than an Althing—it’s some kind of mass combined baptism-confirmation-bar-and-bat-mitzvah-rite-of-fucking-passage. The walled bowl against the perimeter, where we paddocked the horses . . . see how crowded it is?

  Those are cubs. Can you see them? Their children. Baby Black Knives. Hundreds of them. Some kind of crèche: all in there together, from blood-wet infants to half-grown juvie bucks, walled away from the rest of the camp.

  Kiddie prison. Or something.

  And on the line of crosses below me, the ones hung with ogrilloi . . . shit, there they go again: another handful of juvenile bitches—they look about the same age as the ones who have been looking after the cubs in the kiddie prison—come trailing out behind that big fat cunt in the glossy headdress like a mane of crow feathers, the one who acts like she owns the fucking planet. They spread themselves out obediently, turn their backs and bend over to present like baboons in heat, and Crowmane goes up to the crucified prisoners one at a time to jab her blood-crusted thumb-talon up their butts . . .

  Yeah. Here’s one for you science geeks out there: ogrillo males carry their prostates the same place humans do.

  And as she manually collects each one, she lifts each handful to the night and howls something in the local babble before she jams it up the snatch of the next juvenile bitch, which is the exact point in the process of Black Knife ritual-exogamy-by-manual-insemination where this whole deal jumps the sword from revolting to downright fascinating.

  How fascinating? It’s holding my attention, and I’m dying on a fucking cross.

  Funny thing is, you probably can’t see it. Not even with my eyes.

  If I’d stayed in Battle Magick, I could show it to you: I’d have learned to turn visualization into vision, imagination into hallucination. But if I’d stayed in Battle Magick, I wouldn’t understand what it means.

  That’s the thing, here. I know what it means. That’s my edge. The difference between me and Mick Barand.

  A Monastic education.

  This is what you can’t see with my eyes:

  Crowmane raises her fistful of goblin jizz and hacks out her hairball invocation, and around her hand—around her head, her mane of glossy feathers, around her rows of nipples dangling like boneless thumbs, around her mounded rolls of asscheek—there gathers a significance, a realness, a vivid lucid-dream intensity that makes everythi
ng else in the screaming bloody night fade like it’s barely even here.

  I mean everything.

  The crucified ogrilloi. The juvie bitches. The Black Knife camp, and the shackled rows of captives waiting their turns. Even Kess, who’s still twitching and struggling where he hangs from meathooks through his jaw while ants and nightflies chew the coils of his guts that trail in the dirt around the scrabbling balls of his feet . . .

  Even me. Even the new pain I’ve found.

  We don’t count right now.

  Right now, we’re only details. We don’t matter. All that matters is that Crowmane’s fistful of jizz is gonna grow up to be a Black Knife superhero. Fast. Strong. Physically flawless. Completely without fear. The perfect warrior.

  How do I know? I know the way you know things in your dreams. I just know. That’s the real that makes the rest of us into a dream. That’s what she’s paying for with our pain.

  It’s exactly like a dream. Because it is a dream. But it’s not my dream.

  That’s why I need to suffer. I need to get the attention of the dreamer.

  And I can. That’s the kicker. That’s the punchline. That’s what’d make me laugh if I could laugh. That’s why suffering is a luxury.

  Because their demon isn’t Bound. Not by them, anyway.

  Now, like an answer to my silent prayer, they bring out the next two.

  It’s Marade and Tizarre.

  Streaked and stained with filth and blood. They both are gagged with thick mouth-jamming knots of rope. Tizarre’s lips are smashed and her eyes swollen near to shut with bruise. Marade’s golden skin is flawless beneath the crust of clot and muck, for Khryl still loves her. She must have fought them even here, even after she awoke within their camp: she is shackled with chains that could bind a dragon, where Tizarre is tied only with rope, cruelly tight; her hands are as swollen as her eyes and shading toward the same necrotic black.

  The bitches kick their knees from under them and cast them to the stone before me.

  I have figured out what it is. Why they have put me where I am. Why they make me do what they make me do. Did I tell you? Did I say it inside my throat, or only in my mind? I can’t remember.

  It’s because I showed brave the way a grill stud might show brave. Because I went out against them alone. Because even now they cannot make me beg for death.

  It is possible they intend this as an honor.

  So I will be the last. I will watch the others. Their infinite pain. Their unimaginably ugly deaths. I could close my eyes, but I won’t.

  I will not.

  To be their witness is the only penance I can offer.

  This is how I pay for making myself the star of the Caine Show.

  And now it’s time to choose.

  The final refinement, one that some remotely clinical part of my mind can even appreciate: the bitches remove their gags. So I have to hear them beg.

  And because it’s them, because it’s Marade and Tizarre, because they are both heroes in a way I can barely imagine, each of them begs me to choose her, to spare her partner.

  To let her partner live one more day. One more hour.

  Their begging turns to shouts as they try to drown each other’s voice. Their shouts become desperate screams and finally wordless siren wails.

  And I will make the choice.

  It is what I do, now.

  I will send one of them to a deeper circle of Hell, and the screaming of the chosen and the curses of the spared will rain as fire upon my head.

  Should be grateful. Isn’t this what I wanted? Isn’t this what I asked for? Swallowed by dark. Blind beyond the memory of day.

  All the way down.

  And—

  I am grateful. This is what I wanted. This is what I asked for. Didn’t know it was possible to hurt this much.

  For this I thank You.

  Make of this suffering a sacrament: a covenant between us.

  Do this one thing, and there will be agony beyond Your imagination. Only grant my one small desire, and I promise You a universe of pain.

  Just get me off this cross.

  That’s all. Get me down from here. So I can hurt them.

  Get me down from here, and I will be Yours forever. We’ll make our own Caine Show. Together.

  A universe of pain. Everlasting. Forever and amen.

  Just get me down from here.

  PRINCE OF LIES

  I sat on that bench outside the Cathedral for a long time.

  I sat while night took the city. I sat while Khryllian lamplighters tromped by, kindling the hurricane lanterns that hung from tall wrought-iron hook-poles to mark each street corner: faint candles in the vast Boedecken dark. I sat while the night clogged up with rain again and barely visible people hurried past me with lowered heads and shoulders hunched against the chill, carrying shuttered lanterns that leaked strips of flickering yellow light. I sat long enough that my ass either warmed the bench’s polished stone or went dead numb.

  Finally I got up. “Fuck this for a joke; I’m freezing my balls off. I’m leaving.”

  Don’t. I feel safer here.

  I spun and the Automag found my hand.

  Around me: rain and empty darkened streets, featureless looming bulk of the Cathedral and the face of Hell. I was entirely alone.

  No surprise: that whisper had been a Whisper. Not an actual voice at all, but a minor TK variant directly manipulating my eardrums. Makes the slithery breathy nondescript almost-voice sound like it’s coming from everywhere at once.

  I safetied the Automag and put it away. “Come on out. If I meant you harm, I would’ve come looking.”

  You have been known to change your mind.

  I didn’t deny it. “At least tell me which direction I should face.”

  It matters not. I’m well out of range of your pistol, and I can hear what you say no matter where you say it.

  “Yeah?” I settled back onto the bench. It had been my ass going numb after all; the stone was cold as a bitch. “How long have you been watching?”

  Since you walked out of the Cathedral. Straight to the Eyes post; you’re so predictable.

  “Sure.” Doing my dark-adaption trick, I scanned the sightlines of ghostly windows in buildings around the little plaza, checking for ones that overlooked both my bench and the Cathedral steps. There were only two: one on the face of a third-floor gable, and the other a picture window at the front of a one-story shop. “And it tickles the fuck out of you to sit up there in your little garret room and watch me shiver.”

  Caine, please. You insult me. Nor am I in the bootmaker’s. Unlike you, I’m not that easy to locate.

  “Whatever.” It wasn’t worth pushing. “All right, I’m listening.”

  You were the one who wanted to see me.

  “That’d be nice.”

  Oh, ha. You see? I pretend to appreciate your wit. You pretend not to hate me. Can we do business now? This must be important—or, I imagine, poor dim Tyrkilld would be dead already.

  She’d been smack on about me changing my mind; right then I’d have cheerfully slapped the points off her ears for being a condescending elvish cunt. There’s only so much talking-down-to I can take, and I’ve had about five lives’ worth from Kierendal.

  “I guess he told you I took a job for the Champion.”

  I had hoped Tyrkilld’s welcome might leave you disinclined to help the Khryllians. You were supposed to come into this on our side.

  “Whose side is that?”

  Ours. The good guys. You know: truth, justice and the Ankhanan Way.

  I made a face. “Since when do truth and justice have anything to do with the Ankhanan Way?”

  She laughed at me: that elfin titter that sounds like somebody dropped a handful of glass bells off a cliff. Since Assumption Day, of course. You arranged it so yourself, didn’t you?

  “Sure, funny. Now let’s talk about side of what, and why you dragged Orbek into it.”

  Dragged? Me?

&n
bsp; “Orbek went to Ankhana to visit friends—friends who are half-made Faces, just like he used to be. Three months later he’s shooting Knights of Khryl and playing Black Knife kwatcharr.”

  Not playing, Caine. I could hear a shrug in her Whisper. A clever little feral like you shouldn’t have much difficulty figuring it out.

  “I just want to hear you say it.”

  Deliann doesn’t want you involved. Our Sainted Emperor feels you’ve done enough.

  “He’s sentimental that way.”

  Not sentimental, Caine. Squeamish. Our Sainted Emperor knows what happens when you get busy. Three years later we’re still rebuilding Ankhana.

  “I’ve heard. So Orbek was just bait after all. Because you knew I’d come.”

  I’m not squeamish.

  “I remember. Tyrkilld will too.”

  Oh?

  “Must have come as a bit of a surprise that he lived long enough to report in this afternoon.”

  It’s not the first time you’ve disappointed me.

  “You sure he’s outlived his usefulness? He’s smarter than he plays, and he’s got a good heart.”

  A fatal virtue, in this place and these times.

  A tilt of my head: not quite ready to agree. “You were willing enough to use his heart when it suited you.”

  So are you, I think.

  “I quit playing good guy a long time ago.”

  Her Whisper chipped sharp as an obsidian scalpel. Have you seen how you feral scum treat Folk here? They’re slavers, Caine.

  “Some of them.”

  No one ordered you here. No one even asked you. Especially not me. Let Deliann flash on me all year long. This is your choice. Nobody else’s.

  “That’s what people keep telling me.”

  How much do you know about what’s really going on?

  “It’s what you know that worries me. What you don’t.”

  This is your war I’m fighting, Caine. Don’t you understand that yet? Do you know what this place is?

  “Yeah.”

  We are the First Folk, Caine. I stood in this place when Panchasell Mithondionne carved it from the gutrock of this escarpment more than a thousand years ago. Do you know what your Artans have here? This is not just a dil—not just a gate to your hellworld—

  “I told you: I know.”