Caine Black Knife aoc-3

by Matthew Stover

  “I’ve got him.” Fast, smooth, professionally nerveless, Whistler reached into one of the pockets on his hunting vest. His other hand was busy keeping his gemstones spinning, and Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy had a knife in one hand and a pistol in the other and both eyes on the muzzle of the Automag and Lasser Pratt, without a word, a preparatory breath or so much as a flicker on his utterly serene expression, lifted the hurricane lamp and smashed it over Whistler’s head.

  Whistler’s face went blank. The shield went down.

  The lobby darkened.

  The Automag roared but only floorboards splintered because Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy was quicker than a cat and had already thrown himself sideways into a shoulder roll that brought him to his feet on the far side of Pratt and the lobby was brightening again now because Whistler had fallen to his knees and the lamp oil had wicked his vest and caught fire, and Whistler went down on his face, burning on the floor, and Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy smacked Pratt on the temple with the pommel of his knife and caught his sagging body under the arm with the same hand, so that he had a knife in front at the notch of Pratt’s collarbone and a pistol under Pratt’s jaw at the rear, and he snarled, “Drop it! Drop it now!”

  I walked down the stairs.

  “I’ll cut his fucking head off! Drop your weapon!”

  I said, “Why should I?”

  Blood trickled along Pratt’s cheekbone. “Fuck this guy. He told that cocksucker to kill my wife. Shoot him.”

  “Shut up!” Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy jabbed the muzzle up into Pratt’s jaw hard enough to make the hosteler grunt. “Didn’t you hear me?”

  “I thought,” I said, “you know who I am.”

  “After I kill him-” His eyes were bright and hard and slick: gemstones wet with spit. “-we’ll move on to the grill and the woman. And the kids.”

  “Why don’t we talk it over by the light of your burning spellbitch?”

  Pratt said through teeth forced shut by the pressure of the muzzle under his chin, “Shoot this fucker.”

  “Shut up!”

  “When you get back to Faller, tell him I said there’s more going on here than he knows. More than he can guess. Tell him I said it’s Caine’s Law, here. Ask him if he knows Rule Three.”

  “What the fuck are you talking-”

  “You let Pratt go.” I gestured at the flames on Whistler’s back. “We put out your spellbitch while he’s still breathing. Then you go out that door and I never change my mind about letting you two live.”

  “I don’t like this deal.”

  I lifted the Automag. “You think Pratt’s life means more to me than yours does to you?”

  Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy considered that. Not for very long.

  This is a perk of being me.

  He licked his lips. “Put him out first.”

  “Kravmik. The tablecloth.”

  The huge ogrillo reluctantly let go of Yttrall, pulled the tablecloth out from under the remaining lamp on the small lamp stand, and spread it over Whistler. The lobby darkened again.

  Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy started backing for the door, yanking Pratt along with him. “You can’t protect them, old man.”

  Old man. I felt every day of it. “Don’t forget to tell Faller what I said.”

  At the doorway, Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy shoved Pratt stumbling back into the lobby. “I’ll tell your mother,” he snarled from the shadows beyond. “I’ll tell her that you-”

  The Automag blasted another autoburst. From the nightshadowed street came another shredded-body splat.

  I watched a wisp of smoke curl back along the Automag’s muzzle. “Guess I’ll tell him myself.”

  I walked without hurry across the lobby. I thumbed the Automag again to single shot and put a tristack into the back of Whistler’s head as I passed. Whistler’s transition from man to corpse was marked by a single whiplash buck and a halo-splash of blood and bone splinters into the carpet.

  At the doorway I kept close beside the jamb, where the dim lamplight wouldn’t line me to the street outside. I looked down into the shadows off the boardwalk at the crumpled mess of Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy, who had now become Writhing and Struggling to Breathe as He Bleeds to Death Guy.

  “You-you said. .”

  “I said-” I lifted the hem of my tunic and reholstered the Automag. “-I wasn’t gonna change my mind.”

  “You. . you. . don’t let me just. . for the love of God. .”

  “Which god?”

  I stood there and watched him die. It didn’t take long.

  I raised my head and called out into the night. Not loud. They’d be close enough to hear me. “Hey. You seeing this? Hawk and Whistler are dead too.”

  The night answered with echoes of distant gunfire.

  “Think you can do better? Take your best fucking shot. I’ll be right out.”

  When I turned back from the doorway, pale faces were peering down from the second-floor landing: other hostelry guests, clutching half-closed clothing around themselves and rubbing sleep from fearful eyes.

  “Get everybody up and anybody Armed, get armed,” I said. “The Smoke Hunt’s outside, bandits and looters are everywhere, and the Knights can’t protect you because they’ve got bigger problems. Get every weapon you can lay your hands on and get ready to fight for your fucking lives.”

  The faces stared blankly down at me. I pointed at Hawk and Whistler. “You want to be dead like them? Go!”

  The faces disappeared.

  I went back across the lobby. Whistler smelled like bad barbeque. Hawk smelled like roadkill.

  Kravmik was trembling all over. “You-the Knights-have to go to the parish-”

  I picked up Hawk’s pistol. “Can you shoot?”

  Kravmik’s face twisted doubtfully. “Never have.”

  “Hold it tight and keep your wrist locked. The safety’s here. Aim it like a handbow. Can you manage?”

  The pistol nearly disappeared inside his vast fist. “It’s a weapon. I’m an ogrillo,” he said with a deep breath. “I’ll manage.”

  Pratt was half crumpled in his wife’s arms, shaking with adrenaline collapse. “Got ’em-we got ’em, didn’t we?”

  “You hurt?”

  “I, ah-I dunno, I-”

  Yttrall shook her head without looking up. She stroked his thin sweat-damp hair. “He’s well as can be hoped, my lord. No harm beyond the shaking, I think. Though I feared much for my brave Lasser lad-”

  “No need, no need-they had me right where we wanted ’em,” Pratt said with a shaky laugh.

  “Yeah. How’d you slip the Charm?”

  “You should know,” his wife said.

  “I should?”

  “Wouldn’t be real successful here if every ass-mandrake and his buttsister could Charm me out of their bill, would I?” Pratt fished inside his blouse and pulled out a coin-size medal on a chain. “Proof against all forms of magickal compulsion.”

  I reached for the medal and turned it over in my hand. It was damp with the touch of Pratt’s skin, and of a warm pale metal, maybe white gold. On one side was stamped a representation of a pair of hands, both holding daggers; the forearms crossed at the wrists and were pinned together by the blade of a sword that stuck up between the angled dagger blades to bisect the angle they made. The opposite side was plain except for a phrase inscribed in simple Westerling script.

  My Will, or I Won’t.

  “Son of a bitch.” I dropped it like it had burned me and jerked to my feet. “Didn’t I tell you to get out of town?”

  “We-well. .” He made a faint backhanded wave around the small lobby, which I only now registered was lined with baggage piled along the walls. “We can’t just go, not all at once, my lord-”

  “I’m not your lord.”

  “-I mean, please, you must understand, we have staff here, they’re family-and they have families of their own-”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  “And our guests. .”

>   “What about them?”

  Pratt cast a help me glance at Kravmik, who just shrugged and shambled over Whistler’s corpse toward the door, already holding Hawk’s pistol like he’d been born with it in his hand.

  Pratt gently disengaged himself from Ytrall’s arms. “It’s not that easy to explain.” “

  Nor so hard either,” his wife said. “A guest in our house has a claim on us, begging your lordship’s pardon. We’ll not be leaving while there’s danger they must face within our walls, or without. It’s a duty, your lordship. Not unlike your own.”

  I wasn’t going to debate my duty. Whatever the fuck it might be, which is something I’ve never been able to get entirely straight. “It’s worth more than your life?”

  Pratt shrugged helplessly. “It is our life.”

  “Then get them out of here too.”

  “That we shall,” Ytrall said. “When it may be done. Which is not this instant, begging your lordship’s pardon.”

  “Well-” I locked a snarl behind my teeth and stifled a sudden lust to slap the snot out of both of them. “-do it, that’s all. As soon as shit calms down enough that you can hit the street.”

  “Not this street. Not anytime soon.” Kravmik turned back from the door.

  His eyes were empty yellow saucers. “We got Hunters outside. I think they’re coming this way.”

  From the front of Kravmik’s massive shoulder, the street looked empty.

  “I don’t see them.”

  “Me neither.” With the muzzle of Hawk’s pistol, Kravmik tapped his snout alongside one age-greyed tusk. “But they’re out there. And not far.”

  “Any idea how many?”

  I felt him shrug. “Thirty years ago, maybe I coulda. No stalker, these days.”

  “Don’t smell Tyrkilld anywhere, do you?”

  “Not if I don’t have to.” But he couldn’t even force a smile.

  I leaned into the doorway. “Hey,” I said, louder. “Hey, fuckers. Still there?Talk to me.”

  Blank storefronts and boardwalk for fifty yards to the river. The other way, just a long straight gloom, half-lit orange by fireglow reflected from low clouds.

  Indigo shadows still and sharp as the gaps between stars.

  “We got a mutual problem that can have a mutual solution,” I called.

  “Come on, fuckers. You want to be out there with the Smoke Hunt?”

  Nothing. Maybe I was wrong about the backup. Or maybe their nerves were just really, really good. One way to find out.

  I stepped through the door and bent over Calm Guy’s corpse to pry the gun out of his dead hand. Nobody shot at me.

  The weapon was Earth-make, not stonebender: a Smith amp; Wesson select-fire, loading thirty hypervee steel-tail aluminum tumblers in a double-stack extended clip. Old-fashioned, but these rounds could pick a lock at a hundred meters and body armor doesn’t even slow them down. Not that Smoke Hunters would be wearing any.

  It fit my right hand just fine.

  From out on the boardwalk, the street looked even more deserted. Shuttered storefronts stared back at me. A puddle left from last night’s rain rippled burnt orange in the breeze. And the gunfire sounded to be moving the other way.

  How good was Kravmik’s nose anyway?

  I mean, that breeze was on the back of my neck. . the firefight was fading beyond the shadows down the street. . any Hunters that would be coming this way must have slipped the armsmen somehow, because the Khryllians sure as hell weren’t chasing them. . was Kravmik’s nose good enough to scent them from blocks off? Downwind?

  Which was when a tiny voice inside my head whispered, that’s right, dumbass, the breeze is on the back of your neck.

  I turned.

  Six were already in the river. Faint shimmering haloes of scarlet witchfire around their heads evoked corpse-lanterns on the Great Chambaygen-except they were coming at us across the current, and at a pretty good clip. Two more right behind, slipping silently down into the black water. One last on the far quay. Standing. Staring at me.

  Naked. Rippling with flames of power.

  He spread arms like the thighs of bulls, and drew air into a chest like a bargeload of boulders—

  And I, for roughly the duration of my entire lifetime in reverse, froze.

  Sort of.

  I didn’t so much freeze as I froze about freezing.

  I was hanging from a wire an arm’s length over my own head: a psychic Sword of Damocles. Because I really didn’t know how I was going to take this. I’ve been having this dream half my life.

  Back in the Boedecken. .

  The details are different every time, so it doesn’t matter who’s with me or how the place looks, how I’m armed, none of that, all that mattered was that I was back in the Boedecken but I was old and slow and tired with killing.

  And Black Knives were coming for me. Again.

  It felt like some kind of justice. This was where I really started-everything before was prologue-so this was where I ought to end. There was a bitter poetry to it: after all the spectacularly fraudulent mock heroics that had made me a legend, I freeze on a dark street in front of people who’d fallen for that legend so hard that they worship it. That might be the only way to pay for being me. To make my end not a storied, gloried song but the punch line to the bad joke I’ve always been. To go out like a punk.

  Stalton’s eyes. . opal stars of slivered moon—

  You don’t decide to freeze, or to break, or to crumple in a corner and crap yourself any more than you decide to black out when somebody cracks your head with a pipe. It’s something your brain does without your cooperation. When the demons asleep in the back of your skull wake up hungry.

  Crowmane’s smoking stump and Stalton’s eyes and Purthin Khlaylock, lifting his morningstar to pray—

  So I hung there over my own head, dangling from a golden thread of I think maybe but how am I supposed to know and when the fuck, exactly, does my wave function collapse and leave Whiskers’ corpse rotting in my skull?

  But in the same instant I was remembering-as my dead wife used to remind me, way too fucking often-not everything is about me.

  Kravmik and the Pratt family and a house full of ordinary damn people bobbing downstream toward the fecal falls were counting on me to be the closest thing they had to a canoe, and justice for me wasn’t gonna do them any goddamn good at all, so for a decade-long blink of an eye I saw myself starring in Beau Geste again, this time for real, making a stand here in the hostelry, trying to hold off the Smoke Hunt with a grand total of three guns, two balls, and no brains at all. Which wouldn’t end up doing Pratt amp; Co. an assload of good either. It’d just make me feel better about dying ugly.

  Which, because in my heart I’ll always be an Actor, made me think of Edmund Kean’s last words, Dying is easy-comedy is hard, and I found myself muttering, “You think so? Just watch how fucking funny this is gonna be.”

  And it had all started and finished in an Ox-Bow Incident half-second, because by the time that buck across the river unleashed the roar he’d been drawing breath for, I had already snapped back into my body and was turning to Kravmik in the doorway. “Forget what I said about fighting them. Get the Pratts and the staff and all the guests up to the roof and have them scatter over the alleys to the surrounding buildings. I mean scatter. Anybody who can’t make the jump? Throw ’em. And give me back that gun.”

  He scowled down at me. “But you say-”

  “Forget what I said. You’re not gonna fight them. Get people going and go with them. I’ll lead the Hunters off-slow ’em down till Tyrkilld and the Riverdock armsmen can get back here-”

  The big chef squinted toward the river. “Maybe I can talk to them-grills are grills. Smoke Hunt’s got no reason to hook red with-”

  “Kravmik.”

  He heard it in my voice. That doubtful scowl crawled back down his crown ridge. “What?”

  Kravmik had to be pushing my age-maybe from the wrong side-which meant he was old eno
ugh that this was one of those happy accidents where I could just tell the truth. “Those are Black Knives.”

  His eyes popped to about the size of my hands, and he made a noise like he’d swallowed his tongue. When he could finally get out a word, that word was a half whispered, “No. .”

  “Yes.”

  His mouth hung slack for a second or two, then his lower lip started to flap. “But-b-but-n-n-no clan sign-”

  “Not where you can see it. Don’t believe me? Go over there and ask Pratt who I am. But give me the gun first.” Because, y’know, ever since I made sure the Khulan Horde went down at Ceraeno, Black Knives aren’t the only grills who have reason to hold maybe a bit of a grudge, and I wasn’t in the mood to take a round or two in the back for being a fucking wise guy.

  “Who you are-?”

  “Just do it. Go on, move!” He frowned like he’d found a rat turd in his almondine, but he put the gun in my outstretched left and jogged heavily back around Whistler’s corpse toward the Pratts.

  A couple of the Smoke Hunters were already out of the river. One loped toward me along the street, slow and easy, trotting on all fours, and the other reared up and spread his arms and expanded a steamer-trunk chest to unleash a contrabasso blast of-“Dizhrati golzinn Ekk!”

  — which somehow, on its twisty cart ride through the funhouse I use for a brain, didn’t do anything like start a freeze; a toasty red glow kindled somewhere around my balls and spread up through my chest and down my legs and into my arms, and when it finally reached my head, what the buck had roared ended up translating Welcome back to the Boedecken, Skinwalker.

  And I felt a whole lot better.

  I nodded a smile back at him as I leaned my left forearm against the boardwalk post in front of me and wedged my right hand down hard on top of it with Calm Guy’s Smith amp; Wesson braced against the post on the side, because steadied like that with a gun like this, even a crappy shooter like myself can get medium-range accuracy on the order of a carbine, and so my reply to his welcome was a cheerfully warm Thanks; it’s good to be home, which was delivered in a three-round burst to the heart that slapped him down flat and wet and floppy.