Caine Black Knife

by Matthew Stover

  This was not the real reason I made everyone eat ogrilloi either. The reason was another of those books Dad made me read.

  Heart of Darkness.

  There was one thing I never understood about that book: why people think Kurtz went crazy out there. The way I saw it—the way I still see it—Marlow was the crazy one. When Kurtz was murmuring the horror, the horror, I always figured he was talking about having to go back to Europe.

  I guess it’s because, y’know, I grew up in the jungle. My jungle had gutters and alleys and CID prowl cars circling just below the cloud deck, but it was a jungle just the same. That was why when the Black Knives showed up was when I started to get happy for the first time since I graduated from the Conservatory. Who says you can’t go home again?

  And that’s what I had to do for the others. I had to bring them over to my yard: make them understand that they were in the jungle now. That everything they thought they knew about Who They Were and How Things Are Done and What the World Is All About had been fucked up the ass with a live grenade. That the trick to the jungle is to be top predator.

  To eat everybody.

  After what we’d been through, they didn’t need a lot of convincing. Oh, there were some token protests about holding the line between us and them and that kind of moral-high-ground bullshit, but the real lesson of Heart of Darkness is that the jungle is always there, inside even the most civilized of us. It whispers shadow love in the twilit corners of our minds, and no matter how deaf we pretend to be, we can’t help but listen.

  Don’t believe me? Check the rental figures for my Adventures.

  The only survivor with the moral authority to stand up to me would have been Marade, who not only had that parfit gentil Khryllian Knight of Renown thing going but also had been through so much worse at the hands—and otherwise—of the Black Knives than any of the rest of us that if she’d said no, I probably couldn’t have made anybody else say yes without holding knives to their throats. But Marade, for all her power, for all her certain knowledge of Khryl’s Love for her, was not to the manor born; underneath all that Armor of Proof and Morning Star in Her Hand and the rest of it was still just an Actress after all, and I . . . well—

  I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of.

  Saying she was not to the manor born doesn’t say enough. She wasn’t really Marade, not the way I’m Caine. Marade was just a character she was playing. She was still really Olga Bergmann, third daughter of a failing Business family from the Swedish southland who had turned to Acting because her two older sisters’ marriages hadn’t managed to revive the family fortunes. Nothing in her privileged upbringing had remotely prepared her for the brutalization she suffered from the Black Knives; hell, I don’t think anything could prepare anyone to go through something like that. I doubt a Home-born Knight could have survived it any better. I know I wouldn’t have.

  She put a good face on it; as long as we were running and fighting, the pressure we were under held her together. But once she was safely at North Rahndhing . . .

  Her breakdown isn’t really part of this story either. Let’s just say that when the Knights of Khryl came out to face the Khulan Horde at Ceraeno a year and change later, Marade wasn’t with them. She was undergoing drug therapy in the inpatient unit of the Vienna Institute for Social Wellness. She never did recover enough that she could enjoy sex; she’d do it—when it was in her contract—but she’d freeze up and start to shake, and it was always pretty ugly. Which, though nobody ever actually said so, was maybe mostly my fault.

  I’ve always had an eye for weakness. It’s a little late to start apologizing for it now.

  Then a while after that, down in Yalitrayya during Race for the Crown of Dal’kannith, I’m pretty sure it was at least partly her lingering issues with me that made her get stupid with Berne, which I know for damn sure made her and Tizarre both wish they’d died back with the Black Knives. I’ve second-handed their final cubes. I owed it to them.

  Remember what I said about Saving people is not among my gifts?

  Anyway, here’s the thing—

  As entertaining as it was to kill dozens, maybe hundreds, of Black Knife bucks, I never kidded myself that we were actually accomplishing anything. Except making me, Marade, and Tizarre into overnight superstars. We never forgot that we were there to entertain people; half the battle was coming up with ever-more-inventive ways to slaughter bucks, and the other half was to make sure we never actually escaped.

  No fear of that, anyway.

  The bucks weren’t our enemies, though, not really; probably starting with Spearboy all the way back outside the gate of Hell, they kept coming at us because they were more afraid of their bitches than they were of dying. For good reason.

  So the goal wasn’t to kill bucks (except to amuse the folks back home—who, as it turned out, never got tired of it). And Marade seemed to enjoy herself, but y’know, she had different issues.

  All I was trying to do was lead the surviving bucks as close as possible to North Rahndhing, because I had it on, ahem, reliable authority, that there were between five and ten Knights posted there, and one of the few creatures on Home that can outpace a friar or an ogrillo over the long haul is a Knight of Khryl. It’s why they don’t ride. Khryl doesn’t approve of it; Knights bear their arms and armor with their own strength—actually His Own Strength, but let that go. So they run in full armor, and they run like hell. With armsman cavalry to engage the bucks, I could lead Knights on foot to their rear and take out the bitches.

  All of them.

  I had gotten enough out of that weird-ass three-way I’d had with their god and their top bitch, one I’d nicknamed Crowmane, to understand who was really in charge. Only females entered their fucked-up priesthood of the Outside Power. So once the bitches were gone, we’d have not only wiped out the next generation of Black Knives, we’d also have cut them off from the thing that really made them Black Knives in the first place. Simple, yes?

  Simple no.

  Try explaining this to Knight Captain Purthin Soldiers-of-the-Lord-of-Battles-Do-Not-Make-War-Upon-Women-and-Children Khlaylock.

  So I didn’t bother. Explaining, that is.

  His attitude was no mystery to me; it was the institutional attitude of the Order of Khryl, which—as the most militant cult of the Lipkan pantheon—was not exactly unknown to the Monasteries. They all felt that way, and I knew it going in, and timing, as they say, is everything.

  Back in the day, it seems that the chance to take a chunk out of the Black Knives was the kind of thing that’d make any Knight Officer of Khryl cream his surcoat. Five hours after Marade had a chance to tell our story, Purthin Khlaylock strode forth from the white gates of North Rahndhing at the head of a column of seven Knights Venturer, a Knight Attendant, and three hundred mounted armsmen, which seemed like a ridiculously small number to head-on a couple thousand-odd Black Knife warriors. Until I saw them in action.

  There was only a single engagement in the field, before the big one that ended it, back at Hell. It wasn’t much of a contest.

  Khryllian armsmen are the finest soldiers on Home. Lacking the spiritual gifts that would qualify them as full-fledged Knights of Khryl, they compensate by obsessively developing their physical skills, and by their absolute devotion to a code of honor that does not permit even the thought of defeat.

  One hundred brilliantly coordinated heavy cavalry with superior armor, razor-barbed lances, and the devastating seven-bladed morningstar, supported by two hundred disciplined, starkly courageous mounted arbalestiers who also carried short billhooks for close work, against a mass of lightly armed ogrilloi who, for all their advantages of size, strength, and speed, had a concept of warfare dependent upon the sort of personal heroics that went out of style at Troy. To handle any necessary personal heroics of our own, we had nine Knights of Khryl.

  I don’t know how many bucks we expedition survivors had killed during the Retreat. It was a lot. I mean a lot. Over a hundred, anyway. M
aybe one-fifty. In thirty-four days. So the Black Knives were not exactly pussies, y’know, because they just kept coming, no matter how many we took out. But they ran from the Khryllians.

  They had reason.

  By the time the grills broke and ran and the Khryllians finished riding down the stragglers that afternoon, the Black Knives had lost roughly seven hundred warriors. In a little over two hours. The Khryllian dead numbered, I seem to recall, a couple dozen. Armsmen.

  There were no casualties among the Knights.

  Khlaylock wanted to harry them on their retreat. I told him to save his horses. I knew where they were going.

  They were running home for Mommy.

  We caught up with them four days later. They were dug in on the far side of what is now called the Caineway, using that half of the vertical city as a defensive emplacement and the river as the world’s biggest moat. They still had thirteen hundred or fourteen hundred warriors over there, and almost all of them had bows, and even though the river was no more than chest deep now that it had spread across the badlands, wading through it into a storm of those five-foot-long thumb-thick arrows was nobody’s idea of fun.

  And even if Khlaylock had made the swing south and found a crossing a few miles downstream, what the hell were he and his armsman cavalry supposed to do against thirteen hundred Black Knife bucks and maybe eight hundred–odd bitches dug in among the streets and alleys and ruined buildings of the vertical city?

  On the other hand, the Black Knives weren’t in such a good position either, because if they set foot out of the city the Khryllians could cut them to shit on the plains, and they knew it. So Khlaylock decided to send a couple riders back toward North Rahndhing to alert the Order that he had the entire Black Knife Nation bottled up; then he could settle in to wait a few weeks for the six thousand or so heavy infantry it’d take to clean them out house to house. Nice and neat and safe.

  Nice and neat and safe, however, was emphatically not what I was getting paid for.

  Besides, I knew how Khryllians operate. Once the battle was over, they’d release the bitches and the cubs and just castrate any bucks who’d make submission.

  I considered this an unacceptable outcome.

  I was back in my cover, y’know, scout and resident ogrillo expert, so I didn’t have any authority or standing to argue with a Knight Captain of the Order of Khryl. All I had was a tip from Marade that her Khryllian truthsense had never worked on me at all.

  And, y’know, that eye for weakness.

  So early in the evening after he’d sent off the riders, I stopped by Khlaylock’s tent to commiserate.

  The Knight Attendant had just finished preparing Khaylock’s dinner, and the Great Man was relaxing on his camp stool in front of a small turd fire. I ambled over and squatted on my heels across from him without waiting for permission. “That was a fine thing you did today, Knight Khlaylock,” I told him. “I admire you for it. Not many Khryllian commanders would have the courage to put the lives of their men above their own honor.”

  He didn’t even blink. “Have a care, Caine Lackland. Think twice before suggesting dishonor to a Knight of Khryl.”

  This Lackland moniker was something he’d hung on me, believe it or not, as a sign of respect. Knights all have House names and carry the name of their lands, or the lands they are sworn to; Marade, for example, was formally Marade, Knight Tarthell of Kavlin’s Leap. In the Lipkan Empire, only serfs have a single name—like, say, Caine. So, in deference to my actions in freeing Marade and Tizarre and escaping the Black Knives, he did me the honor of nicknaming me Lackland, as though my not having lands and a surname was some kind of oversight.

  “Oh, shit no, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean it like that. No disrespect intended.” I shook my head like your average amiable dumbass. “I was talking about—what d’you Khryllians call it? Your Legend, right? The story Knights and arms-men and all the Soldiers of Khryl will tell each other about your life, for as long as the Order survives. Everything good or bad about who you are that might help another Khryllian face a tough situation, right?”

  He nodded at me over the top of a steel mug of wine. “It is in our Legends that Knights continue to serve Our Lord of Valor, even long after we fall in His Service.”

  “Well, yeah. That’s what I’m talking about. I mean, a few days ago you fought what will probably go down in your Legend as one of the greatest cavalry engagements in Khryllian history. Maybe in the history of the world. Now today, though . . .”

  He squinted at me. “You find fault with my orders?”

  “No, no, no. Not at all. That’s my point. I think it’s great that you have so much compassion for your men. Rather than lose any more, you’re willing to be remembered as the Knight who let the Black Knives slip away.”

  He set his mug on the ground beside his boot, and sighed. “I am no fool, Caine Lackland, and a fool you must be not to have discovered so before now. The Order of Khryl does not exist to serve your private vengeance.”

  Tell me that again tomorrow, I thought, but I said, “All right, look, sure, I can’t play you. I get that. But now lend me half an ear, huh? The Black Knives are settled in over there, and they’re spoiling for a fight. On their terms, right? Because you made them fight on your terms four days ago, and they want some payback. But when they find out you’re not gonna attack—when they find out it’s a siege instead of a battle—things are gonna change. Especially when their food starts to run short. It’ll be more than a month before your infantry can get here. I know for a fact they don’t have supplies to last that long.”

  Khlaylock leaned into the firelight. “Then fight they must, and we can—”

  “No. Run they will, and you can’t.”

  He scowled at me.

  “They’ll leave just enough bucks behind to keep some fires lit and shit to make it look like they’re still there, while the rest of them slip away. Once they’re gone, they’ll scatter. And the Order will never catch them together again. Not in your lifetime, anyway.”

  He turned that scowl toward the darkness beyond the Khryllian camp. He was seeing the badlands inside his head, the way any good cavalry commander could: the way they had looked at sunset, the way they would look from any vantage points he could reach, from any scouting arcs he could order.

  The way they would look from the vertical city, once it was empty.

  He murmured, “You are saying there is another way out.”

  “Yeah. But better than that—better for you, and for that Legend of yours,” I told him. “I’m saying there’s another way in.”

  He brought his gaze back across the fire and spoke the two words that if I were a more demonstrative guy I might have kissed him on the mouth for. “Show me.”

  Which is how, a couple hours later, Khlaylock and I found ourselves in that tactical dispute I mentioned earlier.

  We were on the plateau overlooking the vertical city, next to the topside access tunnel. Getting up there wasn’t a problem; the cliffs were limestone, which made sedimentary layers that I could go up better than most men climb stairs. I towed a light cord attached to hemp rope that I pulled up and tied off to an outcropping, and Khlaylock, with Khryl’s Strength, just hand-over-handed himself straight up the rope without raising a sweat. The prairie grass on the plateau was waist-high by then and there was a night breeze from the west, which put us downwind from the access tunnel and covered our motion. Sound was not an issue, because my waterfall was roaring out from the escarpment only thirty-odd feet below the lip, which made it an easy sneak, even for Khlaylock, who was less than ideally stealthy, despite leaving his armor behind and carrying only a long knife and his morningstar.

  The Black Knives had posted a couple of sentries up there, but the sentries got lazy, as sentries do, and when one of them went back down the access tunnel for something, I got the other with my garrotte. He made enough noise—thrashing around, trying to get me off his back—to draw the attention of the other one, who poked his head u
p the access tunnel to see what was going on, which news was delivered to him by Khaylock’s morningstar at something like lightspeed.

  The medium, as they say, was the message.

  And sure, the lightspeed thing is hyperbole, but not as much as you think. That particular strike graphically demonstrated the distinction between a Knight Venturer, like Marade, and a Knight Captain; whereas a shot from Marade could lift a full-grown ogrillo from his feet and hurl his corpse a yard or two, when Khlaylock hit that buck in the face, the poor bastard’s head just fucking vaporized.

  Which almost made me reconsider. But only almost. Like somebody I used to know had liked to say: I died the day I passed my Boards.

  From the lip of the escarpment, the vertical city fanned out below us in a spray of pinprick campfires fogged by the waterfall’s spray. A gibbous moon hanging in the southeast whitened the peeled-back levels while I laid out my half-fake plan. I pointed out the downramp from the vault and explained how easy it’d be for Khlaylock to lead his Knights down the tunnel to take the Black Knives from the rear.

  Khlaylock, unsurprisingly, was having some difficulty seeing the tactical advantage in this. His scowl kept getting deeper the longer he looked down at the city. “In the best case, our surprise attack turns the Black Knife line long enough for my cavalry to ford the river. Which leaves my Knights and me inside the city with two thousand Black Knives and my cavalry—again at best—funnelled into narrow streetways as they strike inward to join us, forced to fight Black Knife warriors on the worst possible ground.”

  I shook my head. “You do this the way I tell you, you won’t have to fight them. They don’t want to fight you—”

  “Black Knives are the fiercest warriors of the Boedecken—”

  “That’s because what their—uh—priesthood does to cowards is far, far worse than dying in battle.” He turned that scowl on me.

  I nodded down into the scatter of spray-fogged campfires. “You know the Black Knives practice sorcery. What you don’t know is that it’s not just sorcery, it’s their religion. And this is their most holy place. It’s the seat of their god. I killed their . . . high priest, I guess you’d say—” Because I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell Knight Captain Khryllians Do Not Make War On Et Cetera that I had murdered a female noncombatant. “—and I know where the rest of their priesthood will be. I can take you straight to them. Once you wipe them out, the warriors will crumble. Shit, they’ll be grateful.”