“Well-” Tourann shifted his weight uncomfortably. “-this is strictly conjectural, based on an. . unreliable resource we have inside Freedom’s Face. This resource is, well, Folk-you know how they are; might be true, and it might just be a funny story-”
“Yeah, spare me. Give.”
“There’s supposed to be a dil to the Quiet Land here in the Battleground. In Hell, actually-somewhere back inside the bluff. The story is that BlackStone’s looking for it.”
My eyes drifted closed. One hand came up, fell again, reached for the edge of the desk, and missed. I lurched drunkenly.
“Caine? Caine, are you unwell?”
By the time I opened my eyes again, Tourann was half out of his chair. I waved him back into it. “I’m all right. I’m all right, I just-wow. Just-this has been a kinda rough day. Shit, I gotta sit down.”
I took a faltering step and half fell into the horseshoe chair in front of the fire.
“Caine-seriously, I don’t wield the full range of Ule-Tourann’s powers, but if you’re sick, Our Beloved Father does grant me-”
“Nothing that’ll help.”
I shoved myself forward and from somewhere found the strength to hold my head up and look the bishop in the eye. “That story’s not a story, that’s all. You need to get on your Artan Mirror tonight. Now. You need to tell Ankhana. There really is a dil, and BlackStone’s not just looking for it. They’ve found it.”
“Really? Well, that’s certainly interesting, if true, but it’s hardly urgent, is it? It’s not like they’ll ever be able to open it, after all.”
“They have. More than once.”
“Impossible. Even the power of Our Beloved Father-”
“You need to get a message to the Duke right now. The Emperor needs to know the dil T’llan has been breached again, probably from our side.”
“But it’s not possible-”
“Fuck not possible.”
“Please-you must understand-communications of this type are out of policy, and without a very good reason. . I mean, you didn’t even know about the dil until I brought it up-”
The headache chiseled gouges along the inside of my temple. My hand went to my eyes again. “Know about it?”
— darkness stinking of shit and fear and human breath, naked and hot and cold and slime-wet until shivers ripple like shockwaves from flesh to clinging flesh, rune-carved rose quartz shimmering in the blue nonlight of the bladewand—
My hand came away from my eyes and my mind leaped twentyfive years in a single bound. “Know about it?” I said again. “I’ve been there.”
“Caine-”
“Tell them I saw it in a fucking dream.”
“What?”
“Just do it, huh?”
“Really, Caine, consider: the Emperor is also the Mithondionne, after all. Adopted grandson of the bloody elf-king who magicked up the dil T’llan and closed them all however many centuries ago. If there were a dil in Purthin’s Ford, don’t you think he’d have mentioned it?”
“Unless he had good reason not to.”
I looked down at my hands. I spend a lot of time staring at my hands.
“You know why I was up here in the first place? I was covert for the Monasteries, working an exoteric identity as a Boedecken scout and ogrillo expert for a half-private expedition. They were after a magickal artifact-this giant fucking runecut blush diamond, big as my head. A Legendary artifact, ramping up on True Relic. If they found it, my job was to backdoor an Esoteric strike team. If it was what the partners thought it was, the Monasteries were fucking sure gonna swallow it at one bite no matter who got chewed up.”
“So?”
“So it was the Tear of Panchasell.”
“Panchasell-?”
I nodded. “That bloody elf-king you were talking about.”
“But-but-the Tear of Panchasell-that’s just a legend-”
“Or something.”
“It was never found-”
“It was never recovered.” My lips curled under. I couldn’t fit that many teeth into a smile.
“Well, I-still, I wouldn’t give it too much thought. Even if these Artans manage to find a dil, it’s not like they can open it; even the power of Our Beloved Father is barely-”
“Will you shut up about Our Beloved Fucking Father? What do you have on the BlackStone compound and operations?”
“Not much. Just what we’ve been able to bribe out of a couple ellie delivery grills.”
“No scry on them, either? You’ve never even had an Eye inside?”
“Caine, BlackStone’s a griffinstone producer. They don’t want us to know what’s going on in there, and they have power to burn.”
“Yeah, whatever. Write another fucking report, will you?” I lurched to my feet and dragged my sorry butt back over to the window.
Hell stared back at me. “Son of a fuck-my-ass bitch. They already know I’m here, too.”
“They do?” Tourann sounded more surprised than skeptical.
“Faller will have had somebody over in Riverdock, watching the steamers unload.”
“How do you figure?”
“It’s what I’d do. Not that he’s expecting me-though he might be, shit, I hadn’t even thought of that-but on general principle. He’ll want to know who’s coming and going.” I shook my head and tried to unclench my jaw. “Any Artan would recognize me. Any. I’m amazed the fucker didn’t buttonhole me for an autograph.”
I swung back around toward Tourann. “What do you have for resources on the ground here?”
“I don’t have authority to talk to you about that.” He shifted uncomfortably again. “I will tell you it’s not a lot.”
I waved a hand. “Never mind. I haven’t even been here a day and I know more than you mopes already.”
“More of what?”
“Don’t bother mirroring the Duke. It’s a waste of time.”
Tourann blinked. “I-what?”
“Forget about it. They already know. Deliann does, anyway. Son of a bitch.”
“He does?”
“Listen, this Khlaylock girl-three years is a long damn time to be Champion, isn’t it?”
“That’s part of why they call her Khrylget.”
“Three years, though. . She stand for Champion before the Assumption? Or after?”
Tourann coughed, frowning. “You mean the Assumption, right?”
“Yeah. The one your better half doesn’t like to talk about much. The one where I cut Our Beloved Fucking Father in half and jammed a foot of sword through His Beloved Fucking Brain.”
Tourann coughed hard enough that he had to wipe spit off his chin. “I don’t actually know-I could look it up for you, but I don’t have the records handy-”
“Make a note to check it out. Because if she never stepped up till after the Assumption, well. . it might be significant.”
“I don’t see it.”
“It has to do with the Covenant of Pirichanthe, and Ma’elKoth and Assumption Day, and it’s. . complicated.”
I found myself staring at the scars on my hands again. “Just find out.”
It was all I could say.
“There’s a cold-post board in Weaver’s Square. The date’ll be posted in numerics on a note that says, ‘Rod, here’s your box number.’ You have that?”
“Yeah. Rod here’s your box.” I rubbed my eyes. “Yeah, I got it. All right, last thing before I get out of your station. I need some eyeball with the Monastic agent-in-place.”
“I don’t have any official-”
“But you know who it is. You have to. Give.”
Tourann took a deep breath. “You know the Monasteries are decidedly unwelcome on the Battleground.”
“Yeah, I heard. And there’s no way in any given variety of Hell the Council of Brothers would let a whole nation of Khryllians go unmonitored.”
“Well, yes. So-” The bishop tilted his head with a sort of preparatory flinch. “-sometimes the best way to hide a really ill
egal activity is inside a mildly illegal activity, you follow?”
“Why do I get the feeling you’re warming me up for something I’m not gonna like?”
“Remember what I told you about the Cainists?”
“Oh.” I rubbed my eyes again; this couldn’t be good. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
“It gets worse.”
“Worse than that?”
“I’m afraid so.” Tourann nodded sympathetically. “You know her.”
I stopped rubbing my eyes; if I kept going, I just might jam my fingers into the sockets up to the second knuckle. “You have got to be motherfucking kidding me-”
“If only I were. I’ve had to deal with her myself once or twice.”
He wrote an address on a scrap of paper and passed it to me. I crumpled it in my fist. “Fuck me inside out.”
“I’m sorry. I truly am.”
“Not as sorry as I am.” I sighed and let my fist fall. Out the window, the fat bitch lolled in the firelight on the ledge. I took a deep breath, sighed it out, then turned back to Tourann and began, “The chalice with the palace-”
He held up a hand. “I’ll put myself away, if you don’t mind. I’m usually out only after midnight.” He made a half-apologetic wave toward the window. “It’s been a year since I could have a brandy and watch the evenfires.”
“What about the Bishop?”
“He’ll remember a perfectly ordinary Rite of Atonement.” He produced an earthenware jug and a pair of cordials. “Care to join me? It’s Tinnaran.”
“Another time.”
As I turned to go, Tourann said, “It must be a, erm, peculiar feeling. .”
I stopped. “Yeah?”
Tourann waved the jug in a little circle. “This. All this. Being here.”
“Peculiar is one word for it.”
“I mean, you did this. If not for you, none of this would be here.”
“It wasn’t just me.
Lots of people-”
“Lots of people, sure.” Tourann splashed a cordial full of brandy. “Any of them still alive?”
I took that without a blink. “Purthin Khlaylock.”
“Sure, sure. The city’s called Purthin’s Ford, but it’s the river that makes all this possible; it changed this whole corner of the continent into a garden. You know what they call the river, up here?”
I looked down at my hands while I tried to breathe past the brick in my guts. “The Caineway.”
“That’s right. The Caineway. I can’t imagine how that must feel.”
“Me neither,” I said, and left.
Night had swallowed the vertical city.
By the time I dragged my exhausted ass down the steps of the cathedral, the streets of Purthin’s Ford were buried already in the horizon’s shadow; the sinking sun had levered darkness upward to erase each tier of Hell in turn. The cliffs and the city reflected enough firelight that the street I walked shimmered with blood-colored gloom.
if not for you, none of this would be here
I sagged into a polished stone bench and let my head hang.
Slave culture. Intacts and eligibles.
turned this whole corner of the continent into a garden
I had to look sometime. I was fresh out of excuses to wait.
black knives don’t kneel
I lifted my head and opened the eye of my mind.
Twists of night knotted around me: vast braided cables of interstellar black frayed into strands that tied me to the river, to the Spire, to Hell above and every breath of the damned and their masters: a fractal arterial network pumping shadow from all this place had been to all I was, from all I had been to what it was.
The night smeared and writhed and wrapped itself around me, swallowing me, entering me, oozing like oil into eyes and mouth and nose and ears. I shook my head. A humorless chuckle rattled in my throat. This was what I’d been avoiding? This had had me running scared? It didn’t seem possible.
Since when am I afraid of the dark?
FOREVER AND A MEN
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.
Sffrins a lxry. Heerz manser.
Here.
Is my.
Answer.
Maxmum bad.
Snot nough.
Not.
Enough.
Hav topen meyes.
Have to.
Fuh kk kk k—
Fuck.
Me.
God.
Hrrr.
Air. Air is all.
Air’s everything but—
So. .
Tired. .
But.
Don’t need air to talk to you.
Technology is a wonderful fucking thing.
I just—
Need.
To hurt more.
It’s night.
Must be night. No sun on my skin.
I can open my eyes. I can. And I will. Pretty soon.
I will.
Keep . . breathing.
Motherfucker.
Wind. . ’s still shifting. Cookfire smoke. . mulch of rotten blood and gamy meat high and soft and blue. . funerary platforms west of camp. . staked out their dead for the buzzards and the crows. .
Just.
Breathe.
Out.
In’s no problem.
Breathe.
Out.
It took J-ahh, hrr. Hrrgh. . conditioning. .
Still can’tHere, then. Here. I can do this.
Control Disciplines.
I can.
I can.
I can do this.
I can.
Okay.
This is what I mean.
The son of that old-fashioned god back home, where you are, took all day to die. Not sure how long it’s been for me. Guess I’m in a little better shape. Or maybe it’s because I’m up here for my own sins. .
Or—
Grunting, alien words, the creak of rope and greased wood and yes, and yes, it’s me, they are, yes.
Yes.
My scaffold of timber reclines, rotating slow as the wheel of stars that must be somewhere above, angling backward on its horizontal axle like an easy chair until my over strained diaphragm spasms out of muscle failure and gasps and wheezes and pumps my starving lungs again: this is the real reason I’m outlasting the son of that old-fashioned god.
Because they won’t let me die. Not yet.
Oxygen whispers away the shadows in my head.
I open my eyes.
My hand-that’s my hand, above on the weather-greyed arm of the Y-shaped cross. Looks like I’ve got a cramp: fingers twisted into talons of somebody else’s agony. I can see the cramp. I can’t feel it. My hands and feet are gone: blocks of wood. Lumps of stone. Maybe my pain center’s finally burned out.
Maybe the rusty spikes through my wrists and ankles severed the nerves.
The blood that wells around the spike is dark in the orange light of the bonfires. It gathers brighter rose as it trickles thick and cooling down crusted channels to my shoulder.
Not hanging from the spikes. Grill-size cross: wrist shackles beyond my fingertips. Not worth a custom job. Tied me on. Spikes’re just to keep me from slipping the rope.
The Y to which I am nailed eventually rotates far enough back to take some of the pressure off the spikes they drove between my Achilles tendon and ankle joint. Now my struggle is to hold up my head. To look upon our torturers. Their half-assed let’s-pretend sorcerors.
Bitches.
Would have guessed it would be bitches. Would have known. Even if I never seconded the Barand. Would have known.
Dad showed me that story-was it horsemen out of the far eastern steppes? was it nomads I cannot name in a desert I cannot name? — how they took as an article of faith that a man’s
only proper role is war; that to inflict pain upon the helpless will ruin a warrior for battle. So when they had taken someone they despised so much that only infinite suffering could answer the ache in their blood-They’d give him to the women.
Bitches dance around me in their gloss-black feathers and blood-brown paint and swinging swollen dugs, and they pinch me and pull my hair and talon-flick my balls and tease my shrinking flesh with any petty insult they can imagine. And when they get bored, they offer me spit and urine in a wooden ladle, and the thirst that consumes me is stronger than my disgust.
And that’s exactly the problem. Suffering is a luxury. I don’t hurt enough. Haven’t hurt enough.
Not yet.
Far below us, a vast field of bonfires paints the badlands with pools of sunset. Down among them Black Knives pursue their Black Knife lives: cooking and washing and eating and drinking, telling jokes and dancing, lying and singing and wrestling and fucking and doing whatever else ogrilloi do when nothing special is going on.
Very few even give us a glance.
Fuckers.
They were not real to me before. Even the ones I fought hand-to-hand. They were abstract. Impersonal. A natural disaster. A flood, a fire, an avalanche. Something to deal with.
Things are different, now.
Now I see them. I smell them.
I know them.
And if I can just hurt enough. .
But that’s the problem. Suffering is a luxury.
This is different from the Barand. A whole different world. He and his boys were taken far out in the Waste; they were used, and used up, on the spot. That was just a clutch of them, long-range raiders. This is a whole different world.
This is some kind of fucking Althing.
More than that.
They didn’t need us for this party. It’s BYOV. The screams and whimpers that are their favorite dinner music come mostly from other ogrilloi. Criminals. Cowards. Captives from other clans. Who gives a shit? The point-the sharp end of the fuckstick—
This wasn’t something staged just for us. This was what they came here for.
This. Not us. It was never about us. It was about being here.
Shit, y’know-?
Shit.
We might’ve got away after all.
Caine Black Knife aoc-3 Page 21
