Caine Black Knife

by Matthew Stover

  She’s perfectly still. Must be holding out for something from Dal’kannith.

  Good fucking luck.

  Moon’s out, way over in the west. The top bitches are back up here. I catch Crowmane’s voice behind me, and Dugsacks leans on the retaining wall and chews wood-roasted meat off what looks a little like it could be half a giant chicken wing but is actually the forearm of somebody I know.

  Knew.

  Maybe somebody who died in the fight. Stalton. Rababàl. Maybe somebody who’s died since. Somebody I chose. Maybe Kess, or Nollo.

  Maybe Tizarre.

  Dugsacks sees me watching her eat and tosses the arm to Cornholes, who gives me a friendly snort that sounds like a lion’s cough because each of her nostrils is bigger around than my dick. Teasingly, mockingly, she lifts the arm up within reach of my teeth.

  So I take a bite.

  Why not? Better than a sop of vinegar. Tastes good too.

  The ridges of flesh that serve her for eyebrows pop wide. While I chew, she chuckles and says something to the other bitches and they hoot and when she turns back and lifts her head to laugh up at me, I figure my gut’s recovered some. I make an experiment: I spit the hunk of somebody-I-know in her eye.

  Dammit. Wanted it up her nose.

  She starts for me and Crowmane stops her with an authoritative bark. Dug-sacks says something that gets a laugh from the other bitches and Cornholes’ eyes bulge and she whaps Dugsacks a good one with the roasted arm and they go for each other and Crowmane has to wade in personally, and while they’re all still hooting and clawing and shrieking and struggling—

  This place is suddenly getting light . . .

  Shadows sharpen and stone glares and what exactly the hell is going on here? Not dawn. Can’t be. Dawn here is vermillion dust. This light’s yellow as a lamp and it’s coming from—

  It’s coming from—

  Hot staggering fuck. Pretornio’s on fire.

  A crown of flames fans the night from her skull, lightning-blue where it springs from naked bone, rising to a sunflower spray, and across the badland camp Black Knives turn and stand and stare, and the world goes quiet except for the night wind’s whisper and the harsh spit of flame. Flesh has burned off her spine, and the exposed bone spits a column of blue blaze up to join her crown, bright as an arc-welder. Bright as a star.

  Shit, she’s in overload.

  And she’s still chanting . . .

  Guess Dal’kannith’s coming through for her after all. With something Old fucking Testament.

  The bitches have forgotten about me now. They’ve forgotten about each other. They line the retaining wall, staring down in brain-dead stupefaction at their homemade fusion torchsicle.

  Crowmane recovers first. She roars something into the camp, where awed Black Knives have stopped eating and fucking and gambling and everything else to stand and stare with stupid looks scorching into their warthog faces. Crowmane roars again, and a couple of bucks grab a water barrel and run at Pretornio. This tickle in my guts might be the pre-echo of an oncoming laugh. They’re gonna be sorry.

  The bucks skid to a stop at the base of the impale-o-matic and heave the barrel. A gout of water splashes up onto her and power explodes through it like a fuel-air bomb. The shockwave blasts cook fires into showers of burning shit and shreds tents and sends ogrilloi tumbling. What’s left of the two bucks looks like Daffy Duck after the dynamite goes off in his beak.

  And Pretornio chants on.

  Another roar from Crowmane. Bucks scramble to string their bows, and four-foot arrows as big around as my thumb zip out of the night and smack into her unresisting flesh with a stutter of flat whaps like bored applause.

  Every one of them bursts aflame: instant torches fed with her melting body fat. And I finally manage that laugh.

  The laugh shakes me. It rocks me. It rips barb-wire chunks off my ass-boned-to-Neverland diaphragm. I don’t mind.

  It always did hurt.

  “Hey . . .” Dead crows wheeze better than that, if they’re fresh enough. Nobody even looks around. “Hey . . . dumb cunts . . .”

  Gahh. Throat’s worse’n my gut.

  Fuck it anyway.

  I suck a fold of lip between my teeth and bite down and thick salt-black metal syrup slides down into my throat before I give myself time to think about drowning in my own blood.

  “Hey, you stupid goddamn cows—”

  Dugsacks turns and gives me the fisheye. I gasp strength back into my lungs. “Tell your head shit-suck over there that you have maybe two minutes. Maybe three. Then it’s fucking over for you.”

  Next to Crowmane at the retaining wall, Cornholes snarls something savage over her shoulder at Dugsacks, who snarls something back and Cornholes raises a fist that’d stun a buffalo but Crowmane’s all over them again and one of her hands has gathered unto itself all the reality there is to be had here on the parapet, and I simply and purely dream-certain know that if they get seriously into it right now, she’ll make them seriously dead before either of them can seriously blink.

  They know it too. Cornholes shuts the hell up. Dugsacks mutters something, and Crowmane barks at her. Dugsacks flinches, and says whatever it was again, louder.

  Now Crowmane looks at me. The hyper-real shimmer around her hand swells toward my face, and when she growls something that sounds like nerroll pagganik torrin nezz, paggtakkuni, the eldritch dream-knowing tells me that she means What do you whimper, little rabbit?

  I lift my head enough to give her a look at my teeth. “I know what she’s doing. I can tell you about it. Maybe in time.”

  She swivels her swinging tits toward me and gives me a toss of the crowfeather headdress. Nershrannik pagannol. Pelshragikk laggan?

  Why do you tell me? Why do I listen?

  “Because I want off this fucking cross.” More panting brings enough strength to go on. “Because you know it.”

  One pace closer. The other bitches cluster instinctively at her shoulders. Those yellow eyes never flicker. Pagallo nezziokk. Burshraggikko ymik treyy, paggtakkuni. Ymik.

  Talk now. Later I take you down, little rabbit. Later.

  “I got your little rabbit for you right here, you stupid fucking cunt. You want to play games? Fine. I’ll die up here. Laughing.” I cough a wad of blood out of my throat and manage a spit that sprays it across her face. “Because I get to watch you die down there.”

  She doesn’t flinch at my blood. She doesn’t even blink. The flarelight from Pretornio’s overload has gone stark white, crowning Crowmane with a halo of starfire. Pagallo nezziokk.

  Talk now.

  Out of the west come the low skirling whispers of storm winds spinning up over gravel-scoured badlands, rising into the hush where I can still hear the hiss and snap of the lightning-blue corona of flame and the high, thin sound of Pretornio’s voice, still chanting, still screaming her invocation to her god while His power burns away her breasts and her fingers and her cheeks and eyebrows and her scream loses words and spirals upon itself into the simple shriek of superheated gases that opens into an end-of-the-world thunderclap.

  A whipcrack shock blasts out and over us and the camp and the vertical city and the badlands. Every bonfire and torch and hurricane lamp and even fucking candle flares into instant firestorms that claw for the stars—

  And go out.

  Darkness. Only a sliver of moon, and embers swirling toward the sky.

  And near-to-silence, while night-blind Black Knives pick themselves up and try to discover just how badly hurt they all might be.

  Shapes moving in the ink pool below my cross: Crowmane and her bitches. One of them murmurs, and a parapet stone casts sickly green light enough to let them find their feet.

  Out in the camp, all that’s left of Pretornio is a smoldering ember on the end of half the impale-o-matic.

  Three feet of vertical cigar.

  Crowmane’s a little singed, but by the time she’s on her feet she’s pulled herself together and is already shouting ord
ers down into the camp, getting torches relit, bonfires rekindled, burns tended.

  To the west, the storm winds whisper themselves up to moans.

  And I just hang here. And watch.

  I watch Crowmane and Dugsacks and Cornholes and Thumbnipples and Turdcrotch and all the rest of them look around and check themselves out and chuckle at each other and convince themselves that they were never really scared in the first place. That the stupid Lipkan bitch-on-a-stick just didn’t have the juice, when the balls hit the butthole. I watch them get their party going again with an extra kicker because they had a little thrill but it’s all over now.

  I watch Crowmane giving her orders, wielding her handful of Reality, striding back and forth on the parapet doing her Cinerama Tits-to-the-Wind Napoleon thing without even turning me one more glance.

  I only watch. I don’t say a word.

  Because I was just, y’know, making that shit up. About knowing what Pretornio was doing. It was just a story to get me off this cross long enough to get my teeth into Crowmane’s throat. That’s all it was. But that’s not all it is.

  Here’s a nifty thing about my Monastic education—

  It tells me, for one thing, that we have time right now for a history lesson, if I make it quick.

  The Monasteries were founded by Jantho of Tyrnall at the end of what people here call the Deomachy—the God War. When gods go to war, it’s an ugly thing—that whole Armageddon Rag, Ragnarok’n’Roll shit. It’s never really over till everybody’s dead. That’s what got Jantho Ironhand’s brother Jereth up in arms; he decided to make the God War as ugly for the gods as it was for the poor bastards who worshipped them, which brought the Deomachy to a relatively swift and bloody end. Bloody on all sides. Though Jereth didn’t survive the war, he is reputed, before his death, to have kicked substantial deific butt.

  His epithet is “the Godslaughterer.”

  The Deomachy is why Our Founder, Jantho Ironhand, was of the considered opinion that the greatest threat to humanity’s survival on Home was our unfortunate tendency to murder people for bowing down to the wrong gods, and the gods’ unfortunate tendency to take advantage of our unfortunate tendencies, to play power games just because they can.

  The whole murdering-people-because-we-like-their-land—and murdering them as an oh-well-what-the-hell side effect of making money and murdering them because, y’know, it’s the kind of fun you just can’t get anywhere else—those were all side issues for ol’ Jantho, so the Monasteries didn’t start worrying about any of that shit till later on. Of course, most religions get into those businesses eventually, too.

  So a lot of what the Monasteries do is keep an eye on the gods, and on their worshippers; a lot of what we in the Esoteric Service do is get ourselves bloody when some of these religions look to start running a little wild.

  So we have to know the gods. All of them. And their religions—which, of course, often don’t have a whole lot to do with their particular gods, but let that go. We’re encouraged to be consecrated to some god’s worship and rise in their service, even their priesthood. So Monastics know a lot of, well, esoteric shit, if you’ll pardon the expression, about every major religion. Including some of the splinter sects that follow Dal’kannith Wargod.

  This is why I’m sounding kind of fucking cheerful right now.

  When I said I knew what Pretornio was up to, yeah, I was lying . . . but, y’know, funny fucking thing. I was also telling the truth. Just took me a while to remember.

  Probably that dying-on-a-cross thing screwing with my concentration a little.

  And maybe it was because I was still thinking she was praying to Dal’Kannith . . .

  They were supposed to have died out or been suppressed—I can’t remember—something like two hundred years ago. That might be another reason. The trehv’Dhalleig Jzranapal, if my memory can be trusted, something like that anyway—the Silent Pure, more or less. Reluctant hostage-sacrifices from Chi’iannon to her son/husband/master Dal’Kannith, so the story runs—but really they were more like Home-grown Joans of Arc, strapping down their tits and stuffing fake codpieces and becoming, before the world, full Kannithan battle-priests. Often the most powerful Kannithan priests, in fact, so long as their secret was never exposed. And so long as they stayed virgins.

  Surrendering virginity surrendered power. But surrendering virginity’s one thing. Rape is something else.

  The Great Mother of the Lipkan pantheon rules the dead as well as the unborn—because, y’know, they’re the same, right?—and there is one tale in the Monastic Record, one fucking scary one, of an incident in Paquli’s Western Marches some three hundred and change years ago, in the Vale of the Dead, when one of the Silent Pure called upon Chi’iannon, instead of Dal’Kannith, while being murdered by sexual mutilation. Want to know why it’s called Vale of the Dead?

  Wait—

  Hear that?

  Those low swirling storm wind moans from the west? I know you can hear them. You’re using my ears. Hear them ramping up toward the howls of a full gale? The question is, how long before those storm winds catch the attention of Crowmane and her bitches?

  How long will it take them to notice that the wind they can feel is only a medium breeze? And it’s coming from the east. And then, sooner or later, eventually, maybe, one of them’s gonna remember that all there is west of the camp . . .

  Is the funerary platforms.

  Those winds you’re hearing with my ears—I bet you guessed it already. That’s not wind. It’s howls of mindless insatiate hunger.

  The voices of the dead.

  There’s a storm coming out of the west all right, but it ain’t fuckin’ weather.

  >>scanning fwd>>

  “—your ass till it comes out your ears. Had your chance.” I’d need the voice of a civil defense siren to be heard over the screams and howling from the horror show in the camp, but I’m pretty sure Crowmane catches my meaning anyway.

  I laugh down into her smoking yellow stare. “I’m comfortable right here.” My instructor in Applied Legendry at Garthan Hold—Brother Clement, his name was—I remember him bloviating about the Vale of the Dead story: How minor incidents become exaggerated to preposterous degrees over only a few years. . . . Clearly impossible for a single individual, no matter how complete her attunement, to channel power sufficient for yammana yammana yammana bullshit. Pompous old fuck.

  Wish he could be down in that camp right now.

  The rest of the top bitches have joined the final defense perimeter, a thick wall of wide-eyed, flared-nostril, clenched-jaw fight-to-the-death determination between the howling chaos of the camp and the corral area where they’ve got all their cubs and juvies. Their last line of defense, with all the power they’ve got left. Dunno how much it is. Down in the camp, Black Knife bucks have given up on arrows and spears to use whatever heavy cleaving shit they can lay hands on to hack desperately at the arms and legs of writhing howling shadows that are all teeth and claws and hunger.

  I think the bucks might be winning, might have a pretty good chance of containing the corpses and chopping them down. It’s hard to tell.

  Goddamn shame so many of ’em we killed went down sliced in half by my bladewand, or with spines or legs crushed by Marade’s morningstar or arms severed or legs hamstrung by Pretornio’s porters. If we’d left their dead in better shape, this would have been a shitload more entertaining. But, y’know . . .

  It’s still not bad.

  From the foot of my cross, Crowmane shows me her age-greyed tusks and sends a wave of dream-Real threat up to close over my head.

  You think it can’t be worse for you. I tell you it can.

  I show her my own teeth. Probably pretty fucking grey by this time, too. “Now you’re just flirting.”

  She snarls up at me and squeezes her ball of Reality—

  —and my days of death on the scaffold rewind within my head in a harlequin whirl of white-noon blaze and black-ice midnight until the dead cold carved-o
ak tree limbs that are nailed to the arms of the cross and connected still somehow to my shoulders and hips spasm and jerk—

  Hang on to your balls, kids. My arms and legs . . .

  She’s bringing them back.

  Ligaments twist barbwire through acid-etched joints. Muscle fibers ripped in handfuls like hair from my head, steelclamped around the spikes—

  I can feel the spikes again . . .

  Iron on naked bone scraping blossoms of screaming midnight off my arms—ankles—

  Gahh.

  Gahhhh.

  Fucking pain center . . . got that going again too . . . betcha . . . noticed, huh . . . ?

  huhh—

  the spasms and the twisting and the spurt of tears into the blood that trails from my lips—

  tellya . . . secret . . .

  secret to—

  —gahhhhh—

  The secret to great Acting.

  Huh.

  Huh fuck huh.

  Here’s the, the, the secret to great Acting—

  give the people what they want.

  So I finally let it out: the howling and the sobbing and shit, sure, she’s seen me cry already and she’s heard me moan and sob but here it is: I finally let it all hang out.

  All the the begging for mercy.

  All the pleading that she just fucking end it I don’t care anymore just make it stop—All the weak sad shit I’ve been sucking back and swallowing ever since I first saw that buck stand up in the badlands.

  I give it up. I give it all up.

  “I’ll tell you I swear I’ll tell you anything—it’s the Cauldron of Chi’iannon, all right? I know about it! I know! Please—just get me down—! Just make it stop . . .”

  Fading now: a broken whisper.

  Broken like me.

  “. . . just get me down. I’ll tell you everything . . . please . . .”

  And because she wields a piece of Reality in her right hand, she knows my pain is real. She knows my break is real.

  She knows I’m telling the truth.

  She goes to the big wheel-crank that controls the angle of my scaffold and turns it until my cross becomes a timber bed. A curl of contempt twists her lips around her tusks. She slashes the ropes that tie me to the cross with the filed-sharp fighting claw below her left hand. She leans across my face, and with the same hand she yanks on the spike through my right arm. The wood squeals as it comes free, and my arm comes with it and my shoulder’s silent roar is loud enough to grey out the universe.