Caine Black Knife aoc-3

by Matthew Stover

  It did, however, explain why the chunks of puke were pretty much all small enough to have come out of my nose.

  Later, a dimly foggy realization chewed into my forehead that the shoulder I was facedown over should have been flesh instead of metal.

  The last worst part: it wasn’t rope on my wrists and ankles. Forget that I didn’t have the throwing knife that was supposed to be in the concealed sheath behind the collar of my missing tunic; not only would that knife have been useless against the armor on this particular back but it wouldn’t have cut what was binding my wrists anyway, which I could recognize because I still had some feeling in my fingers, because he hadn’t put them on as tight as the Los Angeles Social Police had a few years back when they pinched me for Forcible Contact Upcaste.

  Stripcuffs.

  I puked into the sack again.

  Then I fell back down the black hole.

  I’ve been lucky enough to make it through my life so far with less than my share of major head trauma. Sure, I’ve been knocked around, bashed with sticks and stones, quarterstaves and iron-bound clubs, warhammers and friggin’ morningstars, even a brick or two; stabbed with stilettos, daggers, knives, and smallswords; taken a broadsword through the liver and an axe into the thigh; been variously shot with arrows, sling stones, bullets and motherfucking blowgun darts-not to mention being once or twice hurled from high places-but I’ve mostly managed to avoid being whacked on the head hard enough to produce more than a few seconds of unconsciousness.

  Now, even those few seconds are serious enough; that’s a concussion right there, and anybody who thinks an untreated concussion isn’t serious should go recheck the mortality figures. Still, though, it’s something you generally live through. You wake up with a bad headache and persistent dizziness and nausea, general weakness and shit, and you need some bed rest-or, say, a Khryllian Healing, like the one I got after Tyrkilld slapped me up-to get over it, but you do. Eventually.

  When those seconds stretch into minutes, you go from bad headache into the territory of, say, subdural hematoma, which is a fancy way of saying that your brain’s bleeding and starting to swell, which means that you’re not gonna just open your eyes and shake it off and go beat up the bad guys. It means it’s a roll of God’s dice whether you’re gonna open your eyes at all, and if you do it’ll probably be a lot like it was for me: a fucking nightmare.

  This is not just a metaphor.

  The bleeding-brain kind of unconsciousness is a fall across an event horizon of oblivion: an infinitely instant shredding of everything you are as psychic tidal forces smear you into an eternal scream. Waking up is no treat, either; it doesn’t happen all at once, but in little flickers and flashes that start out as needles and graduate to razors in the eye and the grip of God Himself upon your balls, and it involves a lot of vomit and choking and wishing you could go back to falling into that black hole, because the eternal scream is a helluva lot more fun.

  That’s how it is for me, anyway.

  Maybe it’s because it seems like every time it happens to me, I start that whole razors-in-the-eyes waking-up crap in a bag over somebody’s shoulder while the sonofabitch is out for a jog.

  The only way I can reconstruct roughly how long I must have been out before I started twilighting up from semiconsciousness is to guess how fast Markham could haul my twitching ass from the Pratt amp; Redhorn to the jitney ramp up Hell while making a wide circle around the Spire, because he wouldn’t exactly want to bump into any inquisitive Khryllians on the way.

  Did I not mention that part?

  Turns out I wasn’t wrong about Calm Guy’s backup. I wasn’t even wrong about the really, really good nerves. My only mistake was assuming that the backup in question would have reason to be afraid of the Smoke Hunt.

  Well, okay. That wasn’t my only mistake.

  There are ways in which I think really, really fast. Like how to kill people. There are ways in which I don’t think really, really fast. Like working out that the only way Faller’s gunmen could have known I was at the Pratt amp; Redhorn was if they found out from Kierendal amp; Tyrkilld amp; Co.-not fucking likely-or if they found out from, say, the all-too-conveniently lurking-in-an-alley-across-the-street Lipkan ass-cob who booked me the room in the first place.

  At the time I was playing sack of meat potatoes, I didn’t have any idea of any of this. There were some inexplicable images swimming around the brimstone swamp inside my head, of Boedecken badlands covered in grain and vineyards and a river dividing a city of neat whitewashed brick tangled up with headless ogrilloi burning with a red fire that cast no light. And that was about it.

  I don’t remember much of the early part of my visit to BlackStone. Somebody must have taken the sack off me, because I remember somebody saying good lord, clean him up, and sometime after that I was wet and there was a blinding-bright haze pumping in through my eyeballs that was overinflating my head until I could feel the bones of my skull grinding against each other along jagged fissures as they began to separate and a distantly familiar voice said from the top of the well I’d fallen down-lord tarkanen-you hit him too hard

  Then another distantly familiar voice, not Markham’s-like the voices of Actors from Adventures I’d cubed a few times when I was a kid, I always had a good ear for voices—

  or perhaps not hard enough-were you not once the practicing necromancer, simon faller? a shade will answer honestly where a man may not—

  Which I tried to laugh about, y’know, because of the pun, but I’m pretty sure I only managed a dull moan.

  no no no, he has to be alive-my orders-a healing-do a healing—

  Nay. This voice was Markham’s. I could even make out a strict grey cloud among the bright haze that filled my universe. This hurt was not taken in battle. Khryl’s Love will not avail.

  A round pale shadow in the bright haze began to resolve toward the blur of a face.

  Michaelson? Michaelson, can you understand me at all? Do you know where you are? Caine, talk to me.

  I remember, here, trying to answer.

  Dead. . I was trying to say. Dead. .

  Simon Faller, said that familiar voice which wasn’t Markham’s, he raves. Let him die. If he lives, we will all come to regret it. This I know from bitter experience.

  Here I would have laughed again, if I could laugh. Somehow thinking how many people could honestly say the same made me giggly.

  It’s not up to me, the blur of a face replied. And it’s not up to you, either. We’ll turn him over as is. Let them deal with him however they want; then if he dies, it’s their problem.

  Are Artan Healing magicks superior to Khryl’s?

  Just-ah, different, that’s all. Let them in.

  That face-blur leaned down closer, and more details came into focus: grey cream-plastered wisps of comb-over, a crisp salt-and-pepper beard giving shape to soft jowls. .

  It was Rababal.

  Michaelson-maybe you can’t hear me, but-I know you always say that everything’s personal, but this really is business. Really. I got over hating you a long time ago. This is just business.

  “Dead. .” This time I did manage to get the word out past my teeth, instead of bouncing around inside my fractured skull. “You’re dead. .”

  Even when he cannot move, can barely speak, still he threatens you—

  It’s not a threat. The dead man retreated to a blur, then to a cloud. As far as he knows, it’s simple fact.

  And before I could summon anything like sense to the surface of my scrambled brain, things got even weirder.

  In accordance with the treaty between our peoples, Markham was saying, I now deliver this fugitive into your custody and your care.

  Then a couple of new shadows loomed in my personal haze. When they leaned down to pick me up, both of them wore on their inhumanly rounded heads these sickeningly familiar funhouse-smeared leers that were still unmistakably me.

  My own face.

  I knew me. Them. I grew up in a San Francisco La
bor slum. Anybody Labor would have to be six days dead to not recognize the Social Police.

  Administrator Hari Michaelson. The electronic digitizer in the soapy’s mirror-masked helmet didn’t work in Home physics; he just sounded like he was talking with one hand over his mouth. You are under arrest for the crime of capital Forcible Contact Upcaste, in the murder of Leisureman Marcus Anthony Vilo.

  It’s funny, y’know—

  Life has a way of sticking a knife in my eye at just the right time.

  Being handed over to the Social Police was a dull knife. Rusty. Serrated too. I guess I’m lucky that way.

  It went in my left eye socket and sawed around inside my sinus cavity until the scrape of rusty serrated metaphoric steel on metaphoric bone cranked me up across my personal event horizon, and though I could not summon any ghost of a clue where this might be happening or why, through the pain and general mystery I was able to dimly recognize that this situation boded ill for my immediate future.

  So I thought, Fuck it. Let’s fight.

  This may seem like an unusual decision from a semiconscious middle-aged naked guy with a skull fracture who’s bound hand and foot in unbreakable high-tech police restraints, but I have this rule of thumb, one that I’ve practiced so long-ever since I was a kid running wild on Mission District streets-that it’s become hard-wired instinct. When bad guys try to take you somewhere by force, fight.

  Fight now.

  Because they’re taking you into their comfort zone. That’s why they’re not killing you where you are: because wherever you are, you still have a chance. For whatever reason. Witnesses. Police. Weapons. Escape routes. Something. That’s why they want to take you somewhere else. And once you get where they’re taking you, it’s over.

  Or it’s not over. Not for a long time.

  Fighting might get you killed. But it’s better than whatever’s waiting for you where they can take time to enjoy themselves.

  It happened to some of the street kids I knew back in the District. They’d disappear. And their bodies would turn up later. Sometimes you could tell they’d been kept alive for weeks. Or months. By how many of the wounds had scarred over. Even some of the amputations. And castrations and vaginal mutilations and you don’t want to know.

  So—

  Fuck it.

  Fight.

  But, as people who know me will have heard before, there is fighting and there is fighting.

  “Rababal. .” I managed to say, or thought I did, blinking toward the dead man. “Rababal, you needme. .”

  The dead man leaned back into the fog. Rababal died twentyfive years ago. You didn’t help him, and I need no help from you.

  “You can’t. .” The words seemed to be sticking in the haze inside my head. I worked harder to push them out into the air. “Turn me over. . this place. . gone. . a few days, that’s all. . war-war with Ankhana-”

  That made some kind of impression; the grey-fringed face recoiled into a deeper blur. Is he-could that be true-?

  The almost-familiar voice answered, I learned long ago that from this man’s mouth, not even Khryl can hear truth.

  Ah. .

  So that’s who Almost Familiar was.

  Even to my splintered consciousness, finding him here made everything make sense. I’m just fucking intuitive that way.

  Khryl’s friends within the Infinite Court assure me that his position in Church and Empire is purely symbolic. If war is to come, it will not come on his behalf.

  I tried to shake some use into my brain, and my mouth. “Not. . about me, dumbass. . make a deal-we need to deal-”

  Michaelson, I’m sorry. The grey-fringed blur didn’t sound sorry. It’s done.

  “No-no you can’t-can’t send me back. . can’t give me to them. . please-”

  I already have. Officers? Time is short. If you’ll bring him this way, please.“

  Stop, goddammit. . stop-”

  Hanging from the wire-laced gloves of the Social Police, hands stripcuffed behind me, ankles bound together with the same wire-reinforced plastic, naked, retching, unable to stand, unable to see, I still somehow snarled myself an internal sword of sunfire to cut through the fog inside my head and burn it away. No matter how broken I am, somehow I can always get pissed enough to kill somebody.

  Because, y’know, I’ve never been the type to go gentle into that et cetera.

  The room snapped into focus. It looked like the hideout of a half-successful caravan raider. Expensive furniture that didn’t match, delicately carved where it wasn’t notched and starting to splinter, upholstered in beautiful leathers and crushed velvets and brocades that couldn’t hide the stains and wear of careless overuse. The rug that filled the whole room had once been fine as anything I’d put in the Abbey, my San Francisco mansion back when I was a star, but now it bore a grey-brown smear of ground-in wear track between the door and the overlarge, overcarved big-dick I’m The Boss desk in overstained cherry. And there were wall hangings and shit that framed silver hookstands holding blackened glass lamps, but the silver was tarnished and the tapestries smudged with lampblack and the walls they hung on were cheap whitewashed plaster tracked with blue-grey mildew. The whole place looked impermanent, half-abandoned already, like this Faller guy had boosted the best of Duke Kithin’s furnishings before he’d left Thorncleft, then had just stashed the shit in some shack so he could piss on it like a bear before leaving it behind.

  In that raider’s cave of a room-besides me and the Social Police and Markham Lord Situational Fucking Ethics and the middle sixties-looking guy who was Rababal’s ghost or twin brother or identical goddamn cousin or whateverthefuck that I didn’t care about right then because he was a problem for another time-stood a magnificent man in magnificent armor, the kind of Radiant Mantle of Kingship sonofabitch that doesn’t really exist outside of stories and songs; you know, Arthur, Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, Richard Cour de Lion, all those blood-drunk thugs with good enough press agents to somehow end up heroes to way too many gullible losers.

  Not unlike me, I guess. But let that go.

  The armor was chrome steel, curves and angles of mirror that gleamed like dawn’s own rhodos goddamn dactylos in the lamplight. The guy inside was your basic snow-topped mountain of Biblical Patriarch, but in the blossom of mature strength-y’know, like that white brow and beard salted his face only to give the calm certainty in his eye a translucent shimmer of Revealed Truth.

  When I say eye, by the way, that’s literal.

  Half his face had that carved-from-God’s-Own-Granite agelessly rugged beauty that well befits said legendary king. The other half, well. .

  His left eye socket was a crumpled ruin of empty scar above a deep ragged dent that once had been nobly jutting cheekbone; it looked a lot like some vicious ghetto punk had, about twentyfive years ago, say, sneak-punched him with his own morningstar.

  This appearance was not, as smart people might have guessed already, coincidental.

  With all the mental and physical clarity my internal sunblade could bring me, I managed to gasp, “I was never his prisoner. .”

  “All that matters,” the soapy on my left said in very credible Westerling, “is that you’re our prisoner now,” and he and his partner kept on hauling me toward where Rababal’s ghost twin cousin was holding the door for us until six foot nine of chrome steel and Biblical Patriarch moved into our way with the reluctantly majestic unstoppability of an entire glacier cracking free of a mountainside to slide into an arctic sea.

  The Social Police, wisely, stopped. So did I, perforce.

  Purthin, Lord Khlaylock, Justiciar Impeccable of the Order of the Knights of Khryl, turned that Revealed Truth glare on Markham, Lord Tarkanen, Lord Righteous in service to the Champion of Khryl. “Is this truth?”

  Markham didn’t so much as blink, let alone flush. “I was tasked by My Lord Justiciar to deliver this man without fail,” he said simply. “I did not fail.”

  “Ambushed me. .” I slurred. “Abducted
. . while I w’s tryin’ t’ save people. .”

  Now Markham did have the grace to flush, just a little bit. So I twisted the knife. It’s what I do. “While I was doing his duty. . defending the Civility of the Battleground. .”

  It was more than moderately gratifying to watch color rise through the face of that supercilious Lipkan asscob all the way to the roots of his crewcut.

  “A direct order-my duty is to the-”

  “Everybody’s got. . a fucking excuse. .” Adrenaline sang in my ears. I didn’t know the words but I could sure as hell hum the goddamn tune. “You abandoned your people to danger. . you swore an oath to Khryl H’mself. . the word’s recreant, yeah? You ambushed me. . without warning or Challenge-makes you, ah-craven-”

  The red in Markham’s face had gone white around the eyes. He wheeled on Khlaylock. “My Lord Justiciar-this abuse, my Lord-”

  His niece’s jaw had looked like it could split logs; his could crack rocks. “You need not suffer it.”

  “He seeks only to cheat the carnifex.”

  “It is never wise,” Purthin Khlaylock murmured mordantly around that rock-breaker jaw, “to assume that one knows this man’s intention.”

  He didn’t actually lift a gauntlet to the ruin of his empty eye socket, but I’ll bet my nuts he was thinking about it.

  Markham aimed that Lipkan nose toward my face like a blade at garde, then waved a mailed hand as he turned away. “I see no reason to allow a personal affair of honor to interfere with the course of justice.”

  “Personal. .?” I forced out. “I’m an Armed Motherfucking Combatant. .”

  Markham went still. So did Khlaylock.

  “ ’S your fucking Law. .”

  “It is Khryl’s Law,” Mount Khlaylock rumbled above me, “and you would do well to mind your-”

  “Yeah. . sure. Whatever.” My shrug made my head hurt worse, which helped me grin and kept the haze at bay for a few seconds so my mouth could work. “I did not Yield, and I was not defeated in Combat. Markham, Lord Tarkanen, is no true Knight, but is a whatthefuck-a recreant craven ambusher and common criminal, yeah-and I call upon Khryl and His Justiciar to Witness the truth of my charge. I swear by your God and His Law, I am by right a free man.”