Caine Black Knife aoc-3

by Matthew Stover

  I went perfectly still. For a long time I stared up at the red-streaked silhouette of this ogrillo I called brother. I remembered that if not for Orbek, I’d be dead now. I remembered meeting Orbek in the Ankhanan Donjon; I remembered our fight, and the birth of our friendship. I remembered how Orbek had single-handedly won the Donjon riot that had freed us all. I remembered thinking, back when we’d met in the Donjon’s reeking Pit, that Orbek was a lot like I’d been at that age. Now I could only wonder at how wrong I’d been. Had I ever been this young?

  No, of course not.

  Neither had Orbek.

  Slowly, I hoisted himself back to my feet. “Gonna tell me what’s really going on?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Good story, Orbek. Real good. I almost bought it.” I waved at the Knight Attendant above. “Let’s have that ladder, huh?”

  I took Orbek’s massive wrist in an ogrillo handclasp and pulled myself close, my mouth a handspan from his ear. “Want to tell me the truth?” I murmured, barely above a whisper. “Dying won’t help your friends in the Smoke Hunt.”

  “Don’t touch me!” Orbek yanked out of my grip, and a huge hand slammed the middle of my chest so hard I bounced into the wall. “Never touch me. Never again.”

  My head rang. I leaned on the wall, breathing strength back into my legs. “Like that, is it?”

  There was sudden anger in his eyes, and revulsion, and naked loathing. Those ham-size fists twitched up by his face. “You think I want to get out of this, little fucker? You think I want to live?”

  “Orbek-”

  A fist rose, but it didn’t fall on me. It fell on him. On the side of his head. Next to the black-streaked track that led down from his eye.

  Ogrilloi cry tears of blood.

  “After what I do? Think I want to live? After being bitch to you?”

  He hit himself again.

  Oh, I thought, blank as cut stone. Oh, I get it. Oh, Christ.

  I could still look him in the eye, though. I’m tough enough for that. “You knew who I was. You knew what I did.”

  His chin lifted until he was looking at me between his tusks. “Knowing’s one thing. But being with her-being with someone who’s there, who lives through it. .”

  He lost the words in a throat-deep snarl. I’ve heard that snarl before. Here in the Boedecken. I heard it from bucks tripping on tangles of their own intestines. I heard it from bitches cradling corpses of their cubs. “Orbek, listen-”

  Cables in his neck wrenched his head around. “You never understand my dishonor. You never understand my shame.”

  “Orbek-” My eyes burned. My chest felt like I was trying to breathe under a pile of Black Knife dead. “In the Shaft, you told me that now I share the dishonor I put on the Black Knives. That now what honor I win, I share that too.”

  His yellow stare was raw with pain and loathing. For me or for himself, I couldn’t tell. “I’m younger then. Younger and stupider. Stupid enough to think you know something about honor.”

  And in the end, I’m never quite as tough as I want to be. I found myself looking down at my hands. As usual. “Everybody does shit when they’re young and stupid, Orbek. You just have to fucking live with it.”

  “I don’t.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “Is for me. You should go home.”

  “Or what?”

  Lips peeled back around his tusks. “Something could happen to you.”

  “It usually does.”

  He flicked a glance at Kaiggez. “Ain’t you got a family now?”

  “Yeah. And you’re part of it.”

  The trusties pried up the grille, and the siege ladder slid down into the pit. I put a hand on a spoke-rung, and a much larger hand fell on my shoulder and turned me around with irresistable strength. “What you think you’re gonna do?”

  I answered with a smile that was as friendly and relaxed as I could manage. “Whatever I think I should.”

  “Not asking now. Telling. Stay out of this.”

  “You might want to take that hand off me, big dog.”

  “Listen, little fucker-”

  “Last time you jumped me I was crippled.” I showed some teeth to those fierce yellow eyes. “Think it’s gonna work out better for you today?”

  “You better-”

  “You better do what you’re fucking told.”

  He froze.

  “You hear me? When Angvasse Khlaylock comes around for her Challenge, you get down on your knees. You’ve been told. Do it.”

  “You tell me nothing. I am Black Knife kwatcharr-”

  “You’re not shit.”

  That powerful hand switched from my shoulder to my chest and pinned me to the wall. Orbek bent over me, tusks inches from my jaw. Behind him, Kaiggez sat up, her eyes catching witchfire highlights. Orbek’s breath smelled like roadkill. “Want to try me, little fucker?”

  “You got it backward.” I went completely boneless, letting him support my whole weight; if this went bad, I’d need both legs to kick. “I took your submission in the Donjon, shithead. You’re mine.”

  His hairless brows drew together in a rumple of meat.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s right.”

  I leaned around him so I could get a good look at the cold calculation growing in Kaiggez’s eyes. I blurred my voice low to keep this from Khryllian ears above. “You getting this, Lady Macbitch? Orbek’s nobody special. He’s sure as fuck not Black Knife kwatcharr.”

  I grinned right into his blankly wounded face. “I am.”

  His face went from wounded to dead. I hadn’t just hurt him this time. Something was dying inside him. Dying right in front of me. “You-you can’t just-”

  “I didn’t. You did. Now take your fucking hand off me before I kill you myself.”

  I’d worry about his goddamn feelings after I didn’t have to worry about his life.

  His hand only tightened, and I’d had enough of this shit. I popped the nerve cluster on the inside of his bicep; he grunted and his hand spasmed open. I stepped up close and gave him a couple seconds to decide if he had a move to make.

  He leaned down close enough that a twitch of his head would hook a tusk into my eye. “Don’t want you in my business, little fucker. Don’t want your teeth in my kill. Fucking human-”

  Just talk. I turned my back on him and started up the ladder.

  “Everything you do makes trouble,” he snarled after me. “Everything you touch fucks up. You come around and everybody dies.”

  “Should have thought of that before you adopted me,” I said, and slipped over the rim of the pit into the night and the rain.

  THE MEMORY OF DAY

  RETREAT FROM THE BOEDECKEN (partial)

  you are CAINE (featured Actor: Pfnl. Hari Michaelson)

  MASTER: NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.

  © 2187 Adventures Unlimited Inc. All rights reserved.

  The middle distance hums with echoes of roars and bellowing: somebody’s still fighting, a tier or two below, close enough that I can hear them over the rising wind. But it’s not them I have to find. As long as they’re fighting, they don’t need me.

  Hello? Goddammit. Hey! Over here!

  Come on, come on—

  Nothing.

  Standing in open moonlight waving at shadows on the parapet is only making me feel like an idiot. Tizarre must be busy with the others. Or she’s just not there. Or—

  Flame explodes in a brilliant surging tidal bore along the face of the vertical city. Above flat black stone, ragged billows of sunfire claw against the wind.

  Shit.

  That’s not the or I was hoping for.

  ››scanning fwd››

  His Minor Shield is warm as flesh, a curve of softly shimmering almost-glass that gives a little under my hand. I’d lean on it while I get my breath but if he passes out it’ll dump me on my face, so I settle against the age-rounded stone of the narrow alleyway instead. But
even leaning is too much: my eyelids go heavy and my knees go to cloth and fuck me stand up fuck my ass stand up-Balancing precariously on someone else’s legs, I try again. “Come on, goddammit,talk to me. Which way did they take her?”

  On the Shield’s far side, Rababal’s still fumbling inside the bloody tangle of his cape. The arrow shaft sticking out from his shattered collarbone twitches in a different rhythm from the hitching pulse of the one through his lung.“

  Bastard . . stay there, you . . bastard,” he gasps. He tries to push himself up the wall of the little cul-de-sac, but his legs are worse than mine and he sags back down onto the sand drift in the corner.

  “Just stay there. . They’ll be back, be back any second now. Just-I just. . fucker. You fucker.”

  He says it like it’s the worst word he knows.

  “Before-before I do it. . all I want-I want is-I want to watch them kill you. I hope they. . uh. Uh. I hope it hurts.”

  So he’s the kind who needs to blame somebody. Maybe he’s got reason.

  “Look, forget me, huh? Think about Tizarre. You want to leave her with them?”

  “I don’t. . don’t care,” he wheezes. “Ahhh. . hkk. There it is.” One of his hands comes out of his cape holding a buckeye. “My last. . I’ve been saving. .”

  “Listen, goddammit!” I give his Shield a solid whack with the toe of my boot, and the impact feeds back enough through his Flow-link to make him grunt. “You sack of yellow shit-sure, you get to go clean. What about Tizarre ?”

  “Fucker.” Bloody froth trails black from his mouth in the moonlight, and he finally meets my eye, and I have never seen such naked loathing on a human face. “This was mine, you fucker. It was mine. My shot. All these years. . working-waiting. . you fucker.”

  What the hell’s he talking about? “Come on, Rababal-this is your last chance to not be a pissy bitch-”

  “It was mine!” His shriek sprays black froth into the sand between us. “My idea. My plan. Mine, you fucker! And then you . . you. . now it’s all about you. .”

  His voice breaks down into harsh hollow gasps, andIs he crying?

  “Who are you anyway? Huh? Who the fuck are you? You’re fucking nobody! What gives you the right to. . the right. .”

  The alley mouth behind me begins to whisper with the clicking of toeclaws on stone. Lots of them. Not too far away and getting closer.

  He’s sobbing openly now. The buckeye lies forgotten on his limp, nerveless palm. “What gives you the right. . ?”

  “Right’s got nothing to do with it. Maybe you haven’t noticed.”

  His sobs hiccup to a sudden stop. He blinks once. And again.

  He says quietly, “East.”

  He leans to one side and gathers the last two canteens into the curve of his working arm. “Away from the central ramps.”

  “All right.” The clicking’s getting louder. “Rababal-”

  “You should go.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Caine.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t forgive you.”

  I look back. His stare is colder than the moon.

  “Do you hear me? You are not forgiven.”

  I give him a nod. “I hear you.”

  It seems to mean something to him.

  “Go.”

  I find handholds on the wall and search for the first foothold with the toe of my boot and find it and up I go. I make the top of the wall a second or two before the alley fills with Black Knives. They move cautiously toward the curve of force that seals the cul-de-sac. From beyond the curve, one tiny motion: Rababal’s fist closing around that buckeye-And I decide to get the hell out.

  Around the black-gapped wells of collapsed rooftops, the walls are thick enough to run on. Black Knives shout behind me and arrows hiss into the night, but they can’t pursue without climbing the wall or breaking the Shield, and I’m already fifty yards away when the night roars flame behind me.

  I don’t look back. At least I didn’t have to kill him myself.

  I keep running.

  East.

  ››scanning fwd››

  The ground he’s carrying me over-what I can see of it past his huge gorilla ass-is still the city’s sand-dusted stone, bleached by moonlight. Must have been unconscious no more than a minute or two.

  He swings along at a leisurely walk. Sure. Why hurry?

  Twisting enough to get a look behind us scrapes the throw net across my face. The rough prickly hemp is wet with blood. Probably mine. Head wound, I bet. Which explains why I can’t remember how he caught me.

  No way to tell how bad I’m hurt. The strings of puke on the hemp are probably mine too. This fucker’s shoulder is broad as a saddle, but playing sack-of-potatoes over it isn’t doing my guts any favors.

  But it was worth taking the look; we seem to be Ass-End Charlie in this little parade.

  All right. All right because he’s no expert at the frisk. There’s one he missed.

  Pressure of the steel: hard against the curve of my spine between my shoulder blades—

  All right. I can do this.

  Slowly. Slowly. I rotate my wrists, turning my hands within the-ropes? strips of leather? — that bind them behind my kidneys.

  Slowly. If he tumbles I’m awake, I’m fucked.

  Uh: more fucked.

  Half-numb fingers grope for the point of the sheath. .

  There. There. Yeah.

  All right.

  Better use my left. Might cut a tendon.

  I get a grip on the sheath and squeeze. The razor edge of the thrower slices through the sheath’s stitching almost without effort and goes through the leather of my tunic even easier. A line of ice bites into my fingers, but the tendons seem okay: I can pinch the sheath and work the exposed edge against the bindings on my wrists and it’s too much movement but he’s jogging along oblivious beneath me and I bounce on his shoulder limp as a corpse and now my hands are free.

  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.