Caine Black Knife aoc-3

by Matthew Stover

  I know which they she’s talking about: the bosses. Our bosses. “They don’t do that. Not for us. Not ever.”

  “But they-sometimes, sometimes they do. Emergency transfer. You know they do. We’ve all heard-”

  “Only for stars. Big stars. Bigger than any of us will ever be.”

  “You don’t know that. They could-they might-”

  “Marade-” I hold her closer. Even through the dust and sweat, the scent of her hair—

  I better forget that shit before I turn into one of those kinda sick guys I was ripping on a minute ago. “Marade, listen. I didn’t tell you this before-or anyone-because, y’know, I didn’t know for sure that any of you were. . in our line of work. But those guys-those two guys the Black Knives were chasing? The ones who led them here? What did you think happened to them?”

  “I–I don’t know. I didn’t really think about it. I suppose I thought the Black Knives caught them.”

  “No. They were pulled. Transferred home.”

  She stiffens against my chest. “Pulled? They were-”

  “Yeah. They were-like us. In our line. Sort of.”

  “But-see? Don’t you see? That’s what I was talking about-”

  “No. It wasn’t an emergency transfer. I’m pretty sure it was planned.”

  “Planned-?” She’s gone breathless. I’m not having an easy time of it myself.

  “I’m pretty sure they were bird-dogging us. That they led the Black Knives here. On purpose. For the bosses. Because we were here.”

  “That’s-that’s not possible. They don’t do that kind of-they wouldn’t.”

  “You sure? Think about it: at least three, maybe four or five of us. Or more. Nobody major. Nobody even big enough that we’d ever heard of each other. It costs a lot of fucking money to train and transfer us. How can they-the bosses, our sponsors, whatever-how do they recover their investment, when none of us’ll ever be big enough to generate our own audience?”

  “You’re saying-you think-”

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “Oh, great Khryl-oh my fierce courageous God-”

  “Yeah. This Adventure . . our Adventure-” I shake my head, helpless to soften this much.

  Or at all.

  So I just say it. “It’s a snuffer.”

  “You can’t-you can’t know this-”

  “Know it? I can feel it. So can you.” And something about this strikes me funny, in a frostbite-on-the-balls sort of way. My laugh comes out bleak as our future.

  “There are people back home who’ll pay a lot to be us while we’re tortured to death. That’s what we are. All we are. Victims in a snuffer.”

  Now I get Stalton. Really get him. I understand about not going out like a punk.

  “Then-” She pulls away, just a little; her impossibly powerful hands still rest lightly upon my collarbone and my pectoral. From the shift in the soft timbre of her voice I can hear she’s turned her face from mine. “Then we shouldn’t give them the satisfaction. We should just. . die. Die here. Like Rababal. Right here in this room. In the darkness. My weapon is on the floor; your clothes and that last knife of yours are beside them. You are an assassin. I know you are. If I asked you, Caine-if I asked, would you-?”

  “No.”

  “Caine-”

  “No.”

  Through the palms of her hands I feel her tremors flickering back to life. “Must I-if I beg-”

  “Not a chance. Not you. Not ever.”

  And please God don’t let her ask what she could do to persuade me. I’m afraid I might tell her.

  So before she can get around to it, I pull her close. This isn’t my Comfort the Sobbing Chick hug.

  This is my Can You Feel My Heart Beating hug.

  Her breasts spread softness across my chest, and I put my cheek to hers and I whisper, “I have a better idea.”

  “Caine-I don’t-”

  “Remember what I said, back when this started?” I turn into her just enough that she can feel the motion of my lips against her skin. “I always have a better idea.”

  “But-”

  “No. Listen to me. If we die here, here in this room-shit, that’ll just prove they were right about us. Don’t you get it? Why should we do those fuckers the favor of confirming their shit-ass opinions?”

  Now her arms go around me and they tighten like a playful anaconda. A trace of awe colors her murmur. “Wait-I understand. That’s it-what you’ve been after. This whole night. Ever since you saw them in the badlands. Your insane boldness. The lunatic confidence, the screw-you attitude. The speeches. Walking out to face the Black Knives alone. .”

  “Goddamn right. That’s the best revenge we have, you get it? The only one we have. People used to say the best revenge is living well. Dying well is almost as good.”

  I put my lips to her neck just behind her ear and whisper, “We can make them sorry they did this to us. We can make them weep for all the money we would have earned them-”

  I slide my lips down her long smooth throat, and she lifts her chin to let me taste her to the collarbone. “And to do that we have to fight. We have to keep fighting. No matter what. Even when the Black Knives take us. Even when they torture us. We have to not quit. That’s our revenge: we’ll make those bean-counting shit-lickers mourn the stars we would have been.”

  “Yes.” Her arms squeeze some more, and she better let up before I pass out. “Yes-I see it. .”

  But now she goes gentle again and pulls away, and one of her hands goes back to my chest, her palm a wall of muscle and bone. “Caine. . do you really mean we?”

  A tiny whisper, young and lost but still thinking it might be found: “Do you really think. . I mean, we knew-you know, about you. Everyone expected you to be a star. But do you-do you think. .?”

  Her whisper trails away, but I know what she’s asking. “Yes. Absolutely. No doubt about it.”

  “Really?”

  The breath of hope in her voice is so faint it’s breaking my heart.

  “Don’t lie to me, Caine. Not now. You really think I could have. . have been a star? That we could? Tizarre and I?”

  “Marade-” If only she could know how much I mean this. “Marade, you are a star.”

  Her hand is trembling again, and my heart is going with it. Better not stop now. Dunno if I’ll have the guts to start again. “I can’t say about Tizarre. She’s-nervous, y’know? Selfconscious. But you-the first time I ever saw you, I knew. I didn’t know you’re in the business, but I can tell a natural on sight. You’re already a bigger star than I’ll ever be.”

  “Really?” Her voice is hushed. “You believe that?”

  Here, safe in the dark, I don’t mind saying it. “Sure. What am I? A ghetto throat-cutter with a shitty attitude. But you? You’re . . magnificent. An honest to-shit Knight in Shining Armor. You walk into a room and people forget what they were talking about. You are all presence. Confidence and power. Grace in motion. You make people want to get on their knees and hope you might notice them.”

  I take her hand from my chest and lift it to my face. Even blind, she might feel my conviction. “You’re a hero. A real hero. The best kind. Upright. Virtuous. Loyal. Defend-the-weak and your-strength-is-the-strength-of-ten-because-your-heart-is-pure, and everything that makes people love heroes in the first place. What makes people wish they could be heroes, too. The best in all of us, you know? Lancelot and Percival and Arthur all in one. And to top it all off-” I give her a come-on-laugh-with-me chuckle. “-you whip mountains of ass.”

  “Caine, that’s-if only I was really like that. .”

  “You are.”

  “But I don’t feel like-inside, I’m not. . not-it’s all an act, Caine. Don’t you see? It’s an act, that’s all.”

  “So what?” I shrug. “Why shouldn’t it be? That’s what we are.”

  Has this never occurred to her? “What we are is whatever we can make people think we are. That’s what we do. It’s our job. And what I said-everything I
said-that’s what I think of you. Which only means you’re really, really good at it. Not to mention that you. . you are-”

  Fucking sack-of-shit coward. Say it.

  Say it.

  “That you are, without question, the most stunningly beautiful woman it has ever been my privilege to meet.”

  Got it out. And I didn’t even sound like an idiot. I hope.

  “Do you really think so?” The hand at my face comes alive, warm, sliding behind my neck. Another hand finds my collarbone, then slowly traces my chest down to the ribs of muscle below my ribs of bone. It lingers briefly on the fresh young scar there. Then heads south.

  I guess sometimes I say the right thing after all.

  “You really think I’m beautiful?”

  And her lips are close enough to mine that her breath warms my beard. Her fingers find my pubic hair and my hard-on is back like a hurricane and I don’t think I can talk right now.

  Her hand closes around me like I’m the steel haft of her morningstar.

  “I understand now. I finally understand. You’re trying to save me.”

  All I have is a breathless stammer. “Marade-Marade, I can’t-I can’t-”

  “Stars. That’s the answer. We can be stars-we can make them believe in us. Believe we’ll be profitable. Believe we’ll be big. Then they’ll bring us home. All we have to do is convince them.”

  Never gonna happen. Not to us. I should tell her.

  I should.

  Instead I just find her lips with my own and let her tongue slide into my mouth and shut me right the fuck up. She shivers and pulls my hand to her, into the warm slick wet between her legs.

  Maybe false hope is her only hope. Maybe she needs to believe it. One of my dad’s favorite writers said, We must grant each other the illusions we need to live.

  Or maybe that’s grant ourselves.

  “ou are not what you pretend, Caine. I know it. I can feel it.” She lowers herself to the hard stone floor supine and draws me down along her, my spring-steel cock against her iron-within-velvet thigh. “There is a hero inside you. A star. We can live, Caine.”

  And I am shivering too hard to answer her, and she reaches around me and pulls me into her, and my shiver becomes a shudder. She locks her legs around my hips and gives a little cry, a tiny yip, and lifts me from the floor with a hungry surge of her hips-

  “We will live, Caine. That’s our promise. To live. To be the stars we know we can be.”

  “Yes,” I tell her. “Yes.”

  What else can I say? What else do I want to say?

  “And if they take me home-if they take me-”

  Her voice gathers power in the rhythm of her hips.

  “I will not leave you here. I will not leave you in their hands. I swear, I swear, I swear it. I will come for you.”

  “I know. .” Breathless. Gasping. “I nnnn-nnnn-”

  “And you will come for me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Say you will-”

  “Yes-”

  “Say it-”

  “Yes, Marade, yes. Yes, I will come for you-”

  “You will. You will come for me, Caine-you will-you will-”

  She spasms around me and her legs clench, and she could crush my spine to powder and I don’t care now. It doesn’t matter and it will never, can never matter, for there is only her flesh and mine and the vast wave we make together that stretches forever toward a crest in an infinite white glare that dissolves away all the dread and hurt and regret and anger and everything that could ever be wrong with the world.

  And-

  ››scanning fwd››

  We lie in each other’s arms, tremulous and gasping.

  After a time I pull out of her, and she gives a little moan, brief, fading, and she clutches me against her, and I hold her twice as hard.

  So we’re the ones going out with a bang.

  Yeah. Still not funny.

  I give her a final kiss, one last lingering meeting of intimate flesh, trying to say with my lips and my arms what I don’t think I can say with my voice: that this wasn’t a mistake. That it wasn’t hormones and extremity. That we weren’t just fucking.

  At least, I don’t think we were.

  And sometime later we part, and begin to search out the tatters of our clothing.

  Oddly shy now. .

  I should say something.

  I should say-“Marade. . Marade, I-”

  “Don’t.”

  “But-”

  “Just don’t.”

  So I don’t.

  It’s a long dark silence.

  My hand falls on my knife by instinct. A heavy metal-on-stone scrape tells me she’s found her morningstar.

  I come to my feet in the black. “Must be getting light.”

  Faint rustlings of cloth as she stands beside me. “Yes.”

  “Are you ready for this?”

  “Yes, Caine. Finally, yes.” Her voice is strong now. Solid and sure. “I am.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  Shoulder to shoulder, we walk from blind dark into rose-steel dawn.

  They’re waiting for us outside.

  EYES OF GOD

  I must say, Freeman Shade, I am, ha-ha, hrm, favorably impressed by your piety-”

  Ule-Tourann, the Family Bishop of Purthin’s Ford, moved up one of the sanctum’s ramped aisles in a loose-jointed shamble. From under the Bishop’s biretta straggled curls of oiled hair the same color as the grease spot on his surplice. He moved like a man who’d heard of exercise but had never actually seen it done. And he yapped. Ruthlessly. Yap yap yap yap: a stupefyingly endless river of content-free noise.

  “. . if only more Beloved Children would make Atonement their first order of business when they arrive in a new city. If only. Though the final boat came in, er, well, I would suppose-that is to say, usually the last of the steamers arrives no later than the end of fourth watch-”

  “I got held up in customs.”

  “Ah.” He blinked and nodded like he actually understood. “Well then, it’s as it may be, eh? If it is Willed, it Shall be So. Ma’elKoth is Supreme, yes?”

  “So they tell me.”

  The sanctum resembled that of the Cathedral of the Assumption in Ankhana: a bowl of benches surrounding a walled expanse of floor, like stadium seating around an arena. But here the sanctum was floored with rose-veined marble, and lovely runners of scarlet and gold led from each radial aisle to the broad altar in the center. Astride the altar stood a colossal bronze nude of God Himself, resembling the one that stood in the Great Hall of the Colhari Palace-double-sided, so that the face of Ma’elKoth looked out before and behind, and bearing stylized representations of both male and female genitals-though where the original stood with arms akimbo, this Ma’elKoth had arms outstretched above, forming pillars that supported a domed ceiling of colored glass. All the dazzling blues of a clear noonday sky at its apex, the dome shaded into cloud-swirls of sunset reds and golds near its base.

  The Bishop continued to chatter in an amiably mindless way as we threaded among the acolytes and underpriests who roamed the sanctum brushing carpets, polishing the altar, clambering up and down the cunning collapsible scaffold that let them burnish the bronze Ma’elKoth. The current of his yap-river carried us beyond the sanctum, through the administrative wing, and all the way to his office.

  The Bishop installed himself in an immense cowhide swivel chair that he spun away from a writing hutch the size of a meat locker. He added some wrist-size logs to the grate and waved them alight, then gestured toward a horseshoe chair upholstered in knobby green brocade. “Please, Freeman Shade, be comfortable, ha-ha-hrm, yes. Before we proceed to the, er, the Atonement cells, there was that small matter. . ? That is, I was informed that you, ha-ha, wish to make an offering, yes?”

  I barely heard him. The shutters were open. I drifted across the room to stand at the window, and I looked up into Hell.

  Watchfires on the battlements cast orange smears up t
he sides of the Spire, pocked with yellow crosses where lamplight shone through arbalestinas. The light on the face of Hell was redder, just enough to make out ghosts of structure; cookfires and lamps and window-leaked hearth glow scattered sparks across its face. There, off to the right, just above the third bridge-hung now with age-greyed blankets and stained tunics, a sloppy-fat ogrillo bitch dozing beside a fire can on the ledge, while a couple pups sat naked, giving each other the occasional listless punch on the arm, near a gap where the retaining wall had collapsed-that was it.

  That was the parapet. Right there. Where I had stood with the partners half my life ago, watching Black Knives run the badlands. Now it was ogrilloi in the vertical city and humanity below. I wondered if any of them had looked out over the river today. If any of them had watched the riverboat.

  If any of them had seen me coming.

  “Erm, ha-ha, Freeman Shade-? There was, erm, an amount discussed, yes? A hundred-?”

  Hell above me. Hell behind and Hell ahead.

  I turned aside from the window. “The vessel with the pestle,” I said in English, heavily, because this was Ma’elKoth’s sense of fucking humor and frankly it was just goddamn embarrassing, “has the brew that is true.”

  The bishop’s face went blank and slack, shapeless as a mask carved in pudding.

  I snapped my fingers. Bone structure developed within the bishop’s cheeks like a telescopic image being twisted into focus; his jaw firmed, and keen purpose drove the genial glaze from his eyes. He sat forward in the swivel chair and pushed his face sideways with one hand until a string of audible joint pops shot down his spine.

  “Knowing how to do that buys you ten seconds to explain why I shouldn’t have you killed.”

  I said, “You know me.”

  A wave of clarity passed over the bishop’s face.

  “Lord Caine.” He rose and extended a hand. “You’re expected. I have your equipment right here.”

  I took the offered hand. “Caine.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Just Caine. Freeman Caine, if you want. I’m not Lord anything. Better you just call me Dominic Shade.”

  The bishop shrugged. “I’d be honored if you’d call me Tourann.”