Caine Black Knife aoc-3

by Matthew Stover

Ahh, there it is. There. Now I’m starting to hurt.

  Good. Good. I need to hurt. Because some things are starting to make sense to me.

  Because this Althing of theirs is more than an Althing-it’s some kind of mass combined baptism-confirmation-bar-and-bat-mitzvah-rite-of-fucking-passage. The walled bowl against the perimeter, where we paddocked the horses. . see how crowded it is?

  Those are cubs. Can you see them? Their children. Baby Black Knives. Hundreds of them. Some kind of creche: all in there together, from blood-wet infants to half-grown juvie bucks, walled away from the rest of the camp.

  Kiddie prison. Or something.

  And on the line of crosses below me, the ones hung with ogrilloi. . shit, there they go again: another handful of juvenile bitches-they look about the same age as the ones who have been looking after the cubs in the kiddie prison-come trailing out behind that big fat cunt in the glossy headdress like a mane of crow feathers, the one who acts like she owns the fucking planet. They spread themselves out obediently, turn their backs and bend over to present like baboons in heat, and Crowmane goes up to the crucified prisoners one at a time to jab her blood-crusted thumb-talon up their butts. .

  Yeah. Here’s one for you science geeks out there: ogrillo males carry their prostates the same place humans do.

  And as she manually collects each one, she lifts each handful to the night and howls something in the local babble before she jams it up the snatch of the next juvenile bitch, which is the exact point in the process of Black Knife ritual-exogamy-by-manual-insemination where this whole deal jumps the sword from revolting to downright fascinating.

  How fascinating? It’s holding my attention, and I’m dying on a fucking cross.

  Funny thing is, you probably can’t see it. Not even with my eyes.

  If I’d stayed in Battle Magick, I could show it to you: I’d have learned to turn visualization into vision, imagination into hallucination. But if I’d stayed in Battle Magick, I wouldn’t understand what it means.

  That’s the thing, here. I know what it means. That’s my edge. The difference between me and Mick Barand.

  A Monastic education.

  This is what you can’t see with my eyes:

  Crowmane raises her fistful of goblin jizz and hacks out her hairball invocation, and around her hand-around her head, her mane of glossy feathers, around her rows of nipples dangling like boneless thumbs, around her mounded rolls of asscheek-there gathers a significance, a realness, a vivid lucid-dream intensity that makes everything else in the screaming bloody night fade like it’s barely even here.

  I mean everything.

  The crucified ogrilloi. The juvie bitches. The Black Knife camp, and the shackled rows of captives waiting their turns. Even Kess, who’s still twitching and struggling where he hangs from meathooks through his jaw while ants and nightflies chew the coils of his guts that trail in the dirt around the scrabbling balls of his feet. .

  Even me. Even the new pain I’ve found.

  We don’t count right now.

  Right now, we’re only details. We don’t matter. All that matters is that Crowmane’s fistful of jizz is gonna grow up to be a Black Knife superhero. Fast. Strong. Physically flawless. Completely without fear. The perfect warrior.

  How do I know? I know the way you know things in your dreams. I just know. That’s the real that makes the rest of us into a dream. That’s what she’s paying for with our pain.

  It’s exactly like a dream. Because it is a dream. But it’s not my dream.

  That’s why I need to suffer. I need to get the attention of the dreamer.

  And I can. That’s the kicker. That’s the punchline. That’s what’d make me laugh if I could laugh. That’s why suffering is a luxury.

  Because their demon isn’t Bound. Not by them, anyway.

  Now, like an answer to my silent prayer, they bring out the next two.

  It’s Marade and Tizarre.

  Streaked and stained with filth and blood. They both are gagged with thick mouth-jamming knots of rope. Tizarre’s lips are smashed and her eyes swollen near to shut with bruise. Marade’s golden skin is flawless beneath the crust of clot and muck, for Khryl still loves her. She must have fought them even here, even after she awoke within their camp: she is shackled with chains that could bind a dragon, where Tizarre is tied only with rope, cruelly tight; her hands are as swollen as her eyes and shading toward the same necrotic black.

  The bitches kick their knees from under them and cast them to the stone before me.

  I have figured out what it is. Why they have put me where I am. Why they make me do what they make me do. Did I tell you? Did I say it inside my throat, or only in my mind? I can’t remember.

  It’s because I showed brave the way a grill stud might show brave. Because I went out against them alone. Because even now they cannot make me beg for death.

  It is possible they intend this as an honor.

  So I will be the last. I will watch the others. Their infinite pain. Their unimaginably ugly deaths. I could close my eyes, but I won’t.

  I will not.

  To be their witness is the only penance I can offer.

  This is how I pay for making myself the star of the Caine Show.

  And now it’s time to choose.

  The final refinement, one that some remotely clinical part of my mind can even appreciate: the bitches remove their gags. So I have to hear them beg.

  And because it’s them, because it’s Marade and Tizarre, because they are both heroes in a way I can barely imagine, each of them begs me to choose her, to spare her partner.

  To let her partner live one more day. One more hour.

  Their begging turns to shouts as they try to drown each other’s voice. Their shouts become desperate screams and finally wordless siren wails.

  And I will make the choice.

  It is what I do, now.

  I will send one of them to a deeper circle of Hell, and the screaming of the chosen and the curses of the spared will rain as fire upon my head.

  Should be grateful. Isn’t this what I wanted? Isn’t this what I asked for? Swallowed by dark. Blind beyond the memory of day.

  All the way down.

  AndI am grateful. This is what I wanted. This is what I asked for. Didn’t know it was possible to hurt this much.

  For this I thank You.

  Make of this suffering a sacrament: a covenant between us.

  Do this one thing, and there will be agony beyond Your imagination. Only grant my one small desire, and I promise You a universe of pain.

  Just get me off this cross.

  That’s all. Get me down from here. So I can hurt them.

  Get me down from here, and I will be Yours forever. We’ll make our own Caine Show. Together.

  A universe of pain. Everlasting. Forever and amen.

  Just get me down from here.

  PART TWO

  PRINCE OF LIES

  I sat on that bench outside the Cathedral for a long time.

  I sat while night took the city. I sat while Khryllian lamplighters tromped by, kindling the hurricane lanterns that hung from tall wrought-iron hook-poles to mark each street corner: faint candles in the vast Boedecken dark. I sat while the night clogged up with rain again and barely visible people hurried past me with lowered heads and shoulders hunched against the chill, carrying shuttered lanterns that leaked strips of flickering yellow light. I sat long enough that my ass either warmed the bench’s polished stone or went dead numb.

  Finally I got up. “Fuck this for a joke; I’m freezing my balls off. I’m leaving.”

  Don’t. I feel safer here.

  I spun and the Automag found my hand.

  Around me: rain and empty darkened streets, featureless looming bulk of the Cathedral and the face of Hell. I was entirely alone.

  No surprise: that whisper had been a Whisper. Not an actual voice at all, but a minor TK variant directly manipulating my eardrums. Makes the slithery breathy nondescript a
lmost-voice sound like it’s coming from everywhere at once.

  I safetied the Automag and put it away. “Come on out. If I meant you harm, I would’ve come looking.”

  You have been known to change your mind.

  I didn’t deny it. “At least tell me which direction I should face.”

  It matters not. I’m well out of range of your pistol, and I can hear what you say no matter where you say it.

  “Yeah?” I settled back onto the bench. It had been my ass going numb after all; the stone was cold as a bitch. “How long have you been watching?”

  Since you walked out of the Cathedral. Straight to the Eyes post; you’re so predictable.

  “Sure.” Doing my dark-adaption trick, I scanned the sightlines of ghostly windows in buildings around the little plaza, checking for ones that overlooked both my bench and the Cathedral steps. There were only two: one on the face of a third-floor gable, and the other a picture window at the front of a one-story shop. “And it tickles the fuck out of you to sit up there in your little garret room and watch me shiver.”

  Caine, please. You insult me. Nor am I in the bootmaker’s. Unlike you, I’m not that easy to locate.

  “Whatever.” It wasn’t worth pushing. “All right, I’m listening.”

  You were the one who wanted to see me.

  “That’d be nice.”

  Oh, ha. You see? I pretend to appreciate your wit. You pretend not to hate me. Can we do business now? This must be important-or, I imagine, poor dim Tyrkilld would be dead already.

  She’d been smack on about me changing my mind; right then I’d have cheerfully slapped the points off her ears for being a condescending elvish cunt. There’s only so much talking-down-to I can take, and I’ve had about five lives’ worth from Kierendal.

  “I guess he told you I took a job for the Champion.”

  I had hoped Tyrkilld’s welcome might leave you disinclined to help the Khryllians. You were supposed to come into this on our side.

  “Whose side is that?”

  Ours. The good guys. You know: truth, justice and the Ankhanan Way.

  I made a face. “Since when do truth and justice have anything to do with the Ankhanan Way?”

  She laughed at me: that elfin titter that sounds like somebody dropped a handful of glass bells off a cliff. Since Assumption Day, of course. You arranged it so yourself, didn’t you?

  “Sure, funny. Now let’s talk about side of what, and why you dragged Orbek into it.”

  Dragged? Me?

  “Orbek went to Ankhana to visit friends-friends who are half-made Faces, just like he used to be. Three months later he’s shooting Knights of Khryl and playing Black Knife kwatcharr.”

  Not playing, Caine. I could hear a shrug in her Whisper. A clever little feral like you shouldn’t have much difficulty figuring it out.

  “I just want to hear you say it.”

  Deliann doesn’t want you involved. Our Sainted Emperor feels you’ve done enough.

  “He’s sentimental that way.”

  Not sentimental, Caine. Squeamish. Our Sainted Emperor knows what happens when you get busy. Three years later we’re still rebuilding Ankhana.

  “I’ve heard. So Orbek was just bait after all. Because you knew I’d come.”

  I’m not squeamish.

  “I remember. Tyrkilld will too.”

  Oh?

  “Must have come as a bit of a surprise that he lived long enough to report in this afternoon.”

  It’s not the first time you’ve disappointed me.

  “You sure he’s outlived his usefulness? He’s smarter than he plays, and he’s got a good heart.”

  A fatal virtue, in this place and these times.

  A tilt of my head: not quite ready to agree. “You were willing enough to use his heart when it suited you.”

  So are you, I think.

  “I quit playing good guy a long time ago.”

  Her Whisper chipped sharp as an obsidian scalpel. Have you seen how you feral scum treat Folk here? They’re slavers, Caine.

  “Some of them.”

  No one ordered you here. No one even asked you. Especially not me. Let Deliann flash on me all year long. This is your choice. Nobody else’s.

  “That’s what people keep telling me.”

  How much do you know about what’s really going on?

  “It’s what you know that worries me. What you don’t.”

  This is your war I’m fighting, Caine. Don’t you understand that yet? Do you know what this place is?

  “Yeah.”

  We are the First Folk, Caine. I stood in this place when Panchasell Mithondionne carved it from the gutrock of this escarpment more than a thousand years ago. Do you know what your Artans have here? This is not just a dil-not just a gate to your hellworld-

  “I told you: I know.”

  Then you know why I need you here, Caine. This is the task I have been given by our Emperor. By your Emperor. To defend the dil T’llan against your people-

  “Yeah, I get it.”

  They’re your enemies too.

  “Uh-huh. I say again: So? What’s your offer?”

  Silence.

  Hush of rain and the beat of my heart.

  “Come on, Kier. What do you want me to do about it?”

  Without hesitation: Kill the Champion. Kill Angvasse Khlaylock.

  I laughed at her. It wasn’t easy; she’s not exactly funny. But I could fake it.

  I can make it worth your while.

  “No, you can’t.”

  You don’t think you can do it?

  “For starters.”

  And the rest?

  “I don’t want to.”

  Silence.

  She said, Really.

  “Really.”

  Silence.

  Eventually: Why not?

  “Reasons are for peasants.”

  Silence.

  I’d settle for Purthin.

  “Oh, right. He knows me-”

  So did Ma’elKoth.

  My turn to fall silent. Eventually: “I thought you said you were fighting my war. Sounds like you want me to fight yours.”

  BlackStone is under Khryllian protection. Before I can touch the Artans, we have to-

  “Yeah, yeah, sure. Keep it up, Kier.”

  A hush like a breath of wind: a sigh, maybe. What does the Champion want you to do?

  “Is that your business?”

  If I say it is.

  “Leave the Artans to me. When I’m done, they won’t be a problem.”

  How does that get me what I want?

  “Didn’t say it would.” I let air leak out between my teeth. “Does Deliann know you don’t give a shit about this supposed mission of yours?”

  Our Sainted Emperor and I have an understanding.

  “He wants the dil T’llan protected. You want ogrilloi free in the Boedecken.”

  Like I said.

  “Because that’s what the Black Knives were in the first place. Part of Panchasell’s defense of the dil T’llan. I mean, ogrilloi were your dogs, right? Hunting dogs. Guard dogs. Isn’t that what you bred them for?”

  We did better with them than we did with you.

  “You are sentimental.”

  There is no way in which ogrilloi are not superior to humanity. Stronger. Faster. More loyal, more faithful. More honest and more courageous. True always to their own nature-

  “Yeah, so are horses. Except horses don’t eat people.”

  Nor do ogrilloi. Not anymore.

  “Tell that to the Smoke Hunt.”

  If only I had the chance.

  My teeth found that raw spot on the inside of my lip. “The Smoke Hunt isn’t yours?”

  Mine? How would you think it mine? Random slaughter is your style.

  I couldn’t argue. If shit were gonna be simple, God would’ve called somebody else.

  The Smoke Hunt is the worst thing that has happened to our operation. Pointless, useless, wasteful bloodshed. They a
ccomplish only the spread of terror; they keep the Khryllians on the highest alert, and ensure the constant vigilance and militarization of the entire population. They are the enemy of the ogrilloi as much as they are of the Khryllians-the Smoke Hunt justifies the oppression of Hell. Not that they wouldn’t have their uses, if properly directed-That spot on the inside of my lip was getting way too goddamn sore. “Orbek.”

  Yes.

  “It wasn’t just about me-Smoke Hunters carry the Black Knife clan sign-”

  He was my best hope to get inside. After all, you trained him.

  “Since you sicced Orbek on the Smoke Hunt, are Hunts up or down?”

  Why?

  “Just answer.”

  Up.

  “Nine Knights down-how many were yours? Or sympathizers?”

  Four. Where are you going with this?

  It was my turn to laugh. It didn’t come out sounding real humorous. “They’re Black Knives, you dumb cunt. You were using him. You think he wasn’t using you? Like you said: I trained him.”

  We’re not going to get along until you start telling me what you know.

  “Sometimes shit isn’t complicated,” I said. “You just have to be willing to accept the absolute fucking corruption of everybody involved.”

  Silence.

  Eventually: So where does this leave us?

  I shrugged. “Let’s deal.”

  Deal how?

  “Play Cainist for a minute. Talk about what you want. Not what you told Deliann you’d do. What you really want.”

  Why would I do that?

  “You ever read Deliann’s book on me?”

  I’m not literary.

  “He has Ma’elKoth say that the only way to beat me is to keep me running in so many different directions I can’t focus. That to give me a clear view of my enemy is to hand me victory.”

  So why would I give you a clear view?

  “Because we’re not enemies.”

  It warms me to hear you say so.

  “Play straight with me and you maybe get something for it. Take the chance, Kier.”

  I have trusted you before.

  “And the truth of it is you came out pretty good. It’s not my fault shit went bad in the middle.” Which truth might have been stretched around a corner or two, but she let it go.

  Slowly, like it hurt her to say: I want the Knights of Khryl and the rest of your vile feral slavers broken like you broke the Black Knives.