Caine Black Knife aoc-3

by Matthew Stover

  “You are here,” she said, “because it is my wish that you see the Battleground as I see it.”

  She unclasped her hands and extended one to swing through a long, slow wave out at the darkening downland: the sprawl of city and the gentle swells of plantations and vineyards beyond. “Purthin’s Ford. The Knightly Estates of the Order of Khryl.”

  The gesture turned toward the escarpment, toward distant compounds lit with the glow of coal-gas mantles, and a nearer compound, vast rows upon rows of regimented shacks and cages surrounded by razor wire and guardhouses and greenish beams of roving searchlights. “The Upland Manufactories, and BlackStone Mining, and the Pens.”

  She returned her hand behind her back, and lowered her shrouded head toward the tiers of the vertical city below. “And of course, the face of Hell.”

  “Yeah. Pretty. So?”

  “Five hundred Knights of Khryl. Ten thousand armsmen. Thirty thousand sworn Soldiers, man, woman, and child. There was a time that the Order of Khryl was so respected-so feared-that the mere chance we might enter battle was enough to end a war. Whole empires bowed before us.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Now we are-” This time her shrug was big enough to hurt. “-jailers. Keepers of the Boedecken ogrilloi.”

  I nodded a shrug of my own at the platinum spires around us. “But you’ve got a really nice house.”

  “Bitter though it may be, this duty has fallen to us, and I shall see it done. For the sake of all that you see around you here. Do you understand this? It is not for mine own sake, nor for Khryl’s, nor for the Order’s alone-certainly it is not for glory, nor for any hope of the return of bygone days. It is for the lives and hopes and happiness of forty thousand Khryllians, near that many again of the Civility, and near to two hundred thousands of the ogrilloi themselves that I do this. They are each and all my responsibility. My duty. Thus do I fulfill it.”

  “Thus?” I frowned. “What, you mean by bringing me up here?”

  “Yes. By bringing you to the Purificapex of Khryl. By standing you at my side, in a place where only ordained Knights of Khryl have stood till now. By showing you what I see. For we must understand one another, you and I.”

  Wincing, the pounding in my head telling me I wasn’t going to like the answer, I asked, “We must? How come?”

  “Because,” she said, turning to me finally, pulling back her bloodstained cowl, “I know who you are.”

  For long enough that the platinum numbed my bare toes, I could only stare.

  She missed good-looking by a yard on the hard side: her face might have been shaped from chrome steel by a cutting torch. Her hair hung straight and limp, the color of maple leaves that have lain under snow cover all winter long. Her neck was corded with knife-etched muscle, and her jaw looked to have been modeled on a splitting maul.

  But her eyes—

  Those eyes. . damn. I knew that color.

  Lifetimes ago, I trained at the Studio Conservatory on Naxos, in Earth’s Aegean Sea. At twilight in late summer, as the last arc of the sun slips into the sea and the first stars kindle, the sky goes to indigo velvet: warm, and soft, and impossibly remote. That color.

  But in her eyes that remote melancholy was overlaid with cool unselfconscious speculation, a direct and level interest that examined my face, my shoulders. The shape of my hands. The drape of my robe.

  I offered another blank mental Damn. .

  I played dumb. I’ve had plenty of practice. “Have we met?”

  She spread her hands. “I am Angvasse, Lady Khlaylock, currently the Champion of Khryl.”

  “Khlaylock?” My stomach lurched. “Any relation?”

  “I have the honor to be that great man’s niece.”

  I said, “Uh.”

  Another Khlaylock was the last thing I needed in my life right now. Or, say, ever. I coughed. “Sorry. I’m supposed to take a fu-a knee or something, right?”

  “Formalities need not be observed; I am not in Khryl’s Battledress. Here in the Palm of God we are equals. You may stand. You may even call me Angvasse.” Faint creases appeared around those startling eyes as though she might be about to smile. “You should understand that these liberties are not taken elsewhere.”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “And you may speak freely here; Khryl is a warrior god. His Sanctum cannot be profaned by mere words, no matter how coarse.”

  I coughed again. “How do you-who do you think I am?”

  She waved a dismissive hand. “Please. An Ankhanan Esoteric enters the Battleground, speaking of Black Knives? I am not ignorant of our history. And now, meeting you in person-I passed my youth in my uncle’s house. His portrait of you hangs in his study.”

  I blinked. “It does?”

  “Of a much younger you, of course. Slimmer. Less scarred.” Her eyes creased again like she was thinking about smiling but decided against it. “And I thought you’d be taller.”

  “Everybody does.” I scowled at her. “Are you putting me on? A portrait?”

  “He is an accomplished painter. When he retires as Justiciar, I have no doubt he will become a noted artist.”

  I started to monologue, God save me from the fucking sensitive artistic types, until I remembered that the god to whom I was bitching is Himself one of those fucking sensitive artistic types. “But in his study? I mean, in his study doesn’t he want, I don’t know, a picture of his father? Or Khryl or something?”

  “Such paintings grace other rooms in his manor. You hang on the wall of his study, he has said, as a constant reminder-” Her melancholy took on a curious note of schadenfreude. “-of the price of vanity.”

  “He was never short on that.”

  “You would find him,” she said, “quite changed.”

  “I’d rather not find him at all.”

  She nodded. “He does not remember you fondly.”

  “But still-I mean, I’m supposed to be defended against-”

  “Not from God. The Lord of Valor directs my attention to threats against His Soldiers and His land.”

  “I’m a threat?”

  “Are you not?”

  “I wasn’t planning to be.” Another shrug. Why lie? “Getting beaten more-or-less to death might have changed my mind.”

  “And thus I offer my apology. The incident occurred at my command, and I sincerely regret the necessity.”

  I chewed on that. It tasted like the inside of my lip. “You ordered that bastard to kill me?”

  “Not to kill. Never.”

  “Did you explain that to him?”

  “We are a young land, freeman; I have not seen thirty years, yet I saw the birth of the Battleground-as you must know, you who had so much a hand in creating it. We are still building the customs and tradition-constructing a society entire-that will fulfill Our Lord’s Command to tame His Land and defend the innocents who seek to thrive here.”

  A wistful undertone hinted that she used to believe it.

  I did my best to sound encouraging. “Uh-huh.”

  “And our circumstance has become desperate. It was necessary to be certain of your intentions.”

  “What’s this got to do with Orbek?”

  “Certain. . elements. . have begun to interfere in Khryl’s society. Violently.”

  “Yeah, I gathered. So, what, he’s hooked in with this Freedom’s Face?”

  “Freedom’s Face is nothing.” She turned a hand as though releasing a fly from her fist. “Overprivileged and underexperienced scions of your Ankhanan burghers. Children with too much time on their hands, who have somehow come to believe that the romance of Liberty outweighs skill at arms. Who believe that casual vandalism, minor sabotage, and demonstrations of civil disobedience can bend the Will of God. We own Freedom’s Face; we can destroy it at a whim. We allow its survival only because we find it a useful beer pot in which to gather your juvenile wasps.”

  “Has anybody explained that to Tyrkilld?”

  “Explained it?” She looked
honestly puzzled. “He is Khryl’s leading Knight in the control of Freedom’s Face. They are no serious threat.”

  Oh, really? Well.

  Well, well, well.

  I said, “The rifles and checkpoints looked serious enough.”

  “We have a problem of our own; they call themselves the Smoke Hunt.”

  “I gathered that,” I said slowly. “What’s it got to do with Orbek?”

  “This is where the matter becomes. .” She sighed. “. . complicated.”

  I shrugged. “I call it Caine’s Law: Everything’s more complicated than you think it is.”

  “Ah.”

  “There’s a corollary,” I offered, going for an amiable keep on chatting, lady kind of tone. “Whenever somebody tells you shit’s simple, they’re trying to sell you something.”

  Again she almost smiled. Almost. “Perhaps. Yet I tell you matters are complex, and I too am. . selling you something.”

  “Yeah? What’re you selling?”

  She fixed me with the infinite melancholy of her twilight eyes. “This Orbek-his claim of being a Black Knife-is this truth?”

  “Far as I know.” I shrugged and found something to look at in the darkening sky. “That’s what his father told him, anyway-Orbek was born after the-after, uh, y’know-”

  “And you truly claim him as brother? You, of all men living?”

  “It’s-kind of a longer story than I really want to get into right now.”

  She shook her head. “You are an interesting man.”

  “He’s pretty interesting too.”

  “I meet too many interesting people,” she said distantly. “Most of them I have to kill.”

  “Probably just coincidence.”

  Her voice went sad and cold: autumn winds dropping toward winter. “Not in this case.”

  The evening damp turned to winter on my neck. “Maybe you want to tell me what you mean by that.”

  She lifted her face to the heavens and murmured, “Ammare Khryl Tyrhaalv’Dhalleig, hrereteg yroshallai ti Hammantellentlei av uvranishai terishiin,” which I somehow knew, without being surprised at the knowledge, in the way you know things in a dream, was Old High Lipkan. Which wasn’t a shocker; I have heard Old High Lipkan before. The shocker was that I knew what it meant.

  Beloved Khryl, Lord of Valor, I do this only for the honor of Your Name and the future of Your people.

  This was a shocker because I don’t speak Old High Lipkan.

  I found myself chewing the inside of my lip again while I waited for her to pull her nerves together. Eventually she lowered her head and took a deep breath. “How much do you know of your-brother’sdoings on the Battleground?”

  “Uh-uh.” I folded my arms. “That’s not how this works.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “This is your party. You lay out the snacks.”

  Infinite weariness in her nod. “I met him, this Orbek who styles himself kwatcharr of the Black Knives.”

  “He does?”

  She went on like I hadn’t spoken. “He was sought for questioning in an unrelated incidenta murder, in the fourth tier of Hell.”

  “That wasn’t murder,” I said.

  “Oh?” she said mildly, angling her head toward me.

  I met her gaze squarely. She waited for me to elaborate. I waited for her to get tired of waiting.

  She sighed. “The killing was done with a firearm-merely to bring such a weapon into Purthin’s Ford-”

  “How d’you know he didn’t get it here?”

  Again she waited for me to elaborate. Again I waited for her to get tired of waiting. Eventually she surrendered a nod. “He avoided armsmen and Knights together for some days; he was not taken until I myself joined the hunt. He defied me personally, in Khryl’s Battledress, which is an affront to God Himself.”

  “Ankhanans are like that.”

  “Yes. You are. While the Empire maintains a pretense of careful neutrality, it is known that some of the Battleground’s current difficulties are of Ankhanan origin, and your own relationship with the Empire, and the Emperor, is known to Khryl’s Order. This why you were mistreated; it was necessary to ascertain whether you might be associated with these elements. Knight Aeddhar felt he had no better way to prove your innocence. And for this I apologize, on my own behalf, as well as on behalf of Knight Aeddhar, the Order of Khryl, and the Civility of the Battleground. This apology is profound and sincere, as is my hope that you might accept it.”

  “I’m not there yet. Get back with Orbek.”

  “There are no gentle words for this, freeman.” Her voice hardened out of that wistful tone, but her eyes were still all melancholy twilight. “Your brother is in the Pens.”

  “Pens.” An empty echo, no meaning behind it.

  “Yes. At Shortshadow tomorrow, he will face Khryl’s Justice. By my hand.”

  “Khryl’s Justice? Son of a bitch. He’s gonna fight you?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s not a fight, it’s an execution.”

  She didn’t even blink. “It is at his own request: a request that I am, as Khryl’s Champion, obliged by custom and by Law to answer.”

  For a long cold minute, I looked at her. Just looked. She let me. I wasn’t really seeing her anyway.

  I was seeing Orbek in the Donjon’s Pit, walking like he lived only to fight and to fuck and didn’t much care which he did to who. I was hearing the trace of a Boedecken burr in his bleak Warrens growl-

  — i am black knife. my dead father is black knife, from before. from when the land likes black knives—

  I was feeling Orbek’s fist tangle in my filthy shirt, his hot carnivore breath down the side of my neck-

  — but remember. you win this one? you remember I coulda hurtcha. maybe i be dead, but you be hurt, hey? i want some fuck-me consideration—

  And I was remembering Orbek in the Shaft and Orbek in the Donjon riot and how Orbek had taken care of Faith and all the leagues we’d walked together in the years since Assumption Day, and after a while I turned back to her and my voice came out flat as roadkill. “That’s why you set your boy Markham to babysit me.”

  She picked up the leather bundle and began to unroll it. “Were the Order of Khryl ever to forget the. . potential hazards. . presented by Esoterics,” she said softly, “my uncle’s face would serve as infallible reminder. As might the new scars borne by Knight Aeddhar.”

  “Huh.”

  “And you are no ordinary Esoteric. No one wants your hand raised against us.”

  “I haven’t thought that far ahead.”

  She paused, holding the bundle half closed across the altar-block. “Have you not?”

  I scratched idly at the knurls of scar and callus that layer my knuckles. “I guess it depends on what he’s in for.”

  It seemed like a useful lie.

  “He was taken,” she said, “during a submission violation incident.”

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “All Khryl’s ogrilloi must make submission when addressed by any Knight. It has to do with how ogrilloi were originally bred; the elves selected for-”

  “I know how they were bred. Orbek isn’t Khryl’s, he’s an Ankhanan freeman.”

  “On the Battleground, all ogrilloi are Khryl’s. He refused submission.”

  “I’ll bet he did.”

  black knives don’t kneel

  A quiet hiss whished on inside my head, like the ignition of an internal pilot light. “I’ll bet he did,” I repeated.

  “Instead, he shouted out his name-as though it might be some sort of battle cry-”

  “Yeah.”

  “-and he attacked.” She opened the bundle. “With this.”

  Inside were Orbek’s two KA-BARs-the ones he liked to wear up his sleeves, some kind of half-ass emotional compensation shit for his amputated fighting claws-and a sleek black 10mm Automag.

  She picked up the pistol by the barrel and offered it to me.

  I went to take i
t. Slowly. I felt old and stiff. But each step toward her carved ten years off me. I took the pistol and weighed it in my hand. The grip was molded for a hand twice the size of mine-Orbek’s size. It felt heavy enough to be loaded. I thumbed the clip release and checked. It was loaded.

  I slapped the clip back in and racked the slide, then sighted it toward the gleaming floor. “And the Knight survived?”

  She said softly, “One of them did.”

  Her voice caught me. Her eyes held me.

  I said, “You?”

  In the uncertain light, I could just make out what could have been a pair of new scars like the ones I’d found over my liver: a long ragged smear of pink under her left ear, and a thumbnail-size rippled disk just above her sternal notch. It was a good bet she had an assload more like them under that robe.

  Orbek had always been a stellar shot.

  I looked down at the gun, then at her, then back at the gun. “Fuck me like a goat. .”

  She set the knives aside and spread her hands. “If your desire is for preemptive vengeance, you need seek no further.”

  I stepped back and leveled the pistol. “I know how Khryllian power works. I know how fast you must be.” I took another step back. “I can still put one through your eye before you can move.”

  “I am certain of it.”

  Moisture trickled down my spine. I licked my lips and found sweat there. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “I am waiting for you to decide.”

  I stared at her over the sights. “Even if I decide to shoot you.”

  “Yes.”

  I flicked a glance toward the stairs. If my hand twitched when I squeezed the trigger, I’d need all the head start I could get.

  Her stare remained steady. Calm. Empty.

  Waiting.

  It’d been a long time since I killed a woman.

  A shimmer of memory, a quarter-century old: her uncle’s broken face, left eye dangling from the optic nerve below its shattered socket, punctured and leaking vitreous humor down his nasolabial fold past the corner of his mouth. Christ, I thought, tangling in my life is pretty fucking hard on this family.

  I gave my head a quick irritated shake. This was the wrong time for that shit.

  Besides, tangling in my life is hard on everybody.

  “This has to be,” I ground out through my teeth, “just about the most fucked-in-the-ass stunt anybody’s ever pulled with me.”