This looks on the page a lot more impressive than it sounded drooling out of the smashed-up mouth of a middle-aged blood-and puke-smeared naked guy with stripcuffed wrists and ankles who was hanging from the grips of a pair of homicidal supercops in high-tech body armor, but it worked.
Markham stared like I’d invited him to bend over and lube his asshole. Rababal-Faller-dropped his face into one hand with an English “Ohhh, for Christ’s God damn sake.” The soapies tilted their mirrors at each other, then pointed them back at Khlaylock.
“Legality is moot,” one said. “Administrator Michaelson is our prisoner now.”
“No.” If the stone tablets on which God carved the Ten Commandents could talk, they would have sounded a lot like Khlaylock’s voice did then. “Khryl is Lord of Justice. If Our Lord affirms his charge, this man is free. It is the Law.”
He faced Markham. “Lord Tarkanen, will you Answer?”
Markham looked appalled. “My Lord, he is but grade six-hardly more than an armsman-and his injury. . I misdoubt he can so much as stand-”
“If the Lord refuses my Challenge, I’ll do more than stand.” I tried to sound like I believed it. “I’ll walk right the fuck out of here, and it’s your goddamn duty to make sure I-”
“Do not presume to instruct me on Khryl’s Law.” Khlaylock’s stare never wavered from Markham. Maybe he didn’t want to dirty his eyes with the image of my face. Deliberate as the planet’s turn, and as relentless, he said, “Will you Answer?”
Markham sighed. “My Lord, I will.”
Khlaylock lowered his head. “So let it be. I will Witness.”
“You were here-you’ll tell them, you have to tell them-” Rababal was babbling at the soapies, who were again pointing the mirror-masks of those helmets at each other. “He was alive when I delivered him to you-this is not my fault-”
“And he will be alive when we deliver him to Social Court,” Soapy One said.
“That remains to be seen.” Khlaylock paused at Markham’s side and set his gauntlet across the top curve of the Lord Righteous’s pauldron. “Markham-entertain no assumptions, and cherish no confidence of victory. He would not make such Challenge had he no stratagem to defeat you.”
This was true, but hardly sporting of him to bring up right then.
Markham’s bleak grey stare settled on my presumably short future. “My Lord, your words are heard.”
“Nor depend upon Our Lord, even with truth on your side. This man uses the Law only to serve his ends. He knows nothing of honor.”
This, on the other hand, was a damn lie; I know plenty about honor. It just happens to be a luxury I can’t fucking afford.
He had good enough reason to dislike and distrust me. Twentyfive years ago, when he was still the Knight Captain commanding the Khryllian garrison at North Rahndhing, just outside the southeastern fringe of the Boedecken, and I was nearing the end of the Adventure that was making me a star, we had a minor disagreement about the tactical approach we should take in dealing with the remnants of the Black Knife Nation. This disagreement became a dispute, which I settled in a less-than-strictly-honorable fashion-because in a straight fight he would have killed me before I could blink-and our working relationship ended with me leaving him for dead in the hands of the surviving Black Knives.
Regardless that it turned out pretty well for him in the end, I admit this was a rotten thing to do. I was a very bad man in those days. I’m not much of a good man now.
Which is not an excuse.
I’m not trying to rationalize anything, or even to explain anything. Actions justify themselves, or they don’t. Words can’t make them right or wrong. Dad used to say, “If you need to justify something, you shouldn’t have done it.” Like I said when I started this: it’s about what happened. Not why.
So this is what happened.
I met Purthin Khlaylock at the end of the actual retreat part of Retreat from the Boedecken. By my best count-because I don’t make a habit of reviewing my old Adventures, especially that one-it was thirty-four days, give or take, after I destroyed the Tear of Panchasell and unleashed the Caineway.
I still can’t remember how many people were in Rababal’s original expedition-thirty-nine or forty, something like that. Ten of us got out of Hell alive.
Not counting Rababal himself. But let that go.
The cook, Nollo, supposedly of Mallantrin; his lover, also supposedly of Mallantrin, Jashe, the guy everybody called the Otter; three “brothers” from Hrothnant, Tarpin, Matrin, and Karthran; a pair of surly “Jheledi” bondsmen, Kynndall and Wralltagg; and Marade and Tizarre.
And me.
By the time we made contact with the Khryllian outpost at North Rahndhing, there was Marade and Tizarre, and there was me.
It was the best month of my life.
In a straight ride-with water and spare horses-it was seven days from Hell to North Rahndhing. In friarpace-a semimagickal meditative form of running I’d trained in at Garthan Hold-I could have made it alone in five, if I’d been in top form. About as fast as a healthy ogrillo warrior, again assuming I could find water along the way.
But if we’d gone straight anywhere, they would have run us down and killed us ugly.
It’s hard to say how many Black Knives died when I unleashed the river, because nobody I’ve talked to really knows how many there were to start with. Some estimates say there were as few as seven thousand in the clan. Some put the number closer to fifteen thousand or even eighteen thousand. I can tell you this, though: those who survived that night were not the old, or the very young, or the weak, or the slow.
And there were about three thousand of them.
Three thousand of the toughest, meanest, fastest, strongest bitches and bucks of the Black Knife Nation pulled themselves out of the wreckage of their most sacred holy ground to find themselves standing among the broken corpses of their brothers and sisters. Their parents. Their children.
The remnants of the Black Knife Nation were, as one might imagine, immoderately pissed at me.
I was top of my entire novitiate in Smallgroup Tactics at Garthan Hold, but I barely even needed my training. Every one of the seven surviving “porters” had graduated from the Studio Conservatory’s Combat School, so even though none of them were superstar material-except maybe Jashe-they knew their business inside and out. And Tizarre, whose Cloaks could make us more or less invisible, and we had the bladewand, and a shitload of other stuff Kollberg had strategically placed for us. . not to mention Marade, who was a homicidal Wonder Woman and kinda immoderately pissed herself.
Screw tactics.
All I needed was to remember some of those books Dad used to make me read. Such as War and Peace.
According to Tolstoy, Kutuzov beat Napoleon on the French retreat from Moscow by refusing to do battle. He kept their armies in contact, so Napoleon could never relax-he had to keep his army in battle order at all times-but every time Napoleon would march out to fight, Kutuzov would retire. When Napoleon would go back to his camp, Kutuzov would advance: the military version of Push Hands.
I combined this principle with some basic concepts of guerrilla warfare I’d picked up from The Life of Geronimo. So when the Black Knives would come out in force, we’d circle behind and murder wounded in their camps. When they’d send out single-pack scouting parties, at least one entire pack, sometimes two or three if they weren’t too far apart, would vanish. . and be found later as skinned corpses, missing their scent glands. If they posted pickets, we killed the pickets. If they picketed whole packs, well. .
Ogrilloi bunch up when threatened. It’s instinctive. So when spooky noises would start coming from the darkness, they’d drift together-then one swipe of the bladewand. .
We’d drag the bodies around before we skinned them and piled them up, to make it look to the Black Knives like we’d been able to kill the pack because we’d caught them spread too far apart. Get it?
And, y’know, the corpses wouldn’t be only skinned,
either. They’d be partially eaten.
This was not just for effect.
I could pretend it was simple pragmatism. We had to be mobile. Our lives depended on it. So none of us carried supplies other than water skins. We lived on what we took off Black Knife corpses. And on the corpses themselves. Sure, blood’s thicker than water. But you get used to it.
Tastes good, too.
I’m not into pretending, though. Not anymore. The real reason everyone was eating Black Knife meat and drinking Black Knife blood is because I made them do it.
Partly it was my innate sense of justice.
Yes, justice, goddammit. If they want to kill and eat me, I will kill them, and I will eat them.
Period.
This was not the argument I made to the rest. I didn’t make an argument. Our first day out, I came back into our cold night camp with a skinned ogrillo leg over my shoulder and told Tizarre to take the bladewand and start carving off chops.
They weren’t real excited about this idea.
After all, the only differences between ogrilloi and humans are some details of phenotype; the two species are closely related enough to even be cross-fertile, to a limited extent, kind of like horses and donkeys. Eating ogrilloi was close enough to cannibalism to make everybody but me more than a little queasy.
I won’t go into the details of the scene, who said what and all, because that’s not what this story is about. Let’s just leave it at this: It started with me telling everybody that we’d be eating ogrilloi because it’d make us all smell more like ogrilloi-we’d be sweating their proteins and crapping their fats, y’know? — which was starting to work until somebody, Jashe, I think, pointed out that it wouldn’t make us smell like grills, it’d make us smell like humans who are eating grills, which was when things started to turn ugly.
I ended up explaining in a very calm, very quiet voice that we didn’t have enough supplies to survive, and we couldn’t carry people who weren’t pulling their weight, and anyone who wasn’t willing to go all the way with this should just trot on back and give themselves to the Black Knives right fucking now.
This was not the real reason I made everyone eat ogrilloi either. The reason was another of those books Dad made me read.
Heart of Darkness.
There was one thing I never understood about that book: why people think Kurtz went crazy out there. The way I saw it-the way I still see it-Marlow was the crazy one. When Kurtz was murmuring the horror, the horror, I always figured he was talking about having to go back to Europe.
I guess it’s because, y’know, I grew up in the jungle. My jungle had gutters and alleys and CID prowl cars circling just below the cloud deck, but it was a jungle just the same. That was why when the Black Knives showed up was when I started to get happy for the first time since I graduated from the Conservatory. Who says you can’t go home again?
And that’s what I had to do for the others. I had to bring them over to my yard: make them understand that they were in the jungle now. That everything they thought they knew about Who They Were and How Things Are Done and What the World Is All About had been fucked up the ass with a live grenade. That the trick to the jungle is to be top predator.
To eat everybody.
After what we’d been through, they didn’t need a lot of convincing. Oh, there were some token protests about holding the line between us and them and that kind of moral-high-ground bullshit, but the real lesson of Heart of Darkness is that the jungle is always there, inside even the most civilized of us. It whispers shadow love in the twilit corners of our minds, and no matter how deaf we pretend to be, we can’t help but listen.
Don’t believe me? Check the rental figures for my Adventures.
The only survivor with the moral authority to stand up to me would have been Marade, who not only had that parfit gentil Khryllian Knight of Renown thing going but also had been through so much worse at the hands-and otherwise-of the Black Knives than any of the rest of us that if she’d said no, I probably couldn’t have made anybody else say yes without holding knives to their throats. But Marade, for all her power, for all her certain knowledge of Khryl’s Love for her, was not to the manor born; underneath all that Armor of Proof and Morning Star in Her Hand and the rest of it was still just an Actress after all, and I. . wellI’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of.
Saying she was not to the manor born doesn’t say enough. She wasn’t really Marade, not the way I’m Caine. Marade was just a character she was playing. She was still really Olga Bergmann, third daughter of a failing Business family from the Swedish southland who had turned to Acting because her two older sisters’ marriages hadn’t managed to revive the family fortunes. Nothing in her privileged upbringing had remotely prepared her for the brutalization she suffered from the Black Knives; hell, I don’t think anything could prepare anyone to go through something like that. I doubt a Home-born Knight could have survived it any better. I know I wouldn’t have.
She put a good face on it; as long as we were running and fighting, the pressure we were under held her together. But once she was safely at North Rahndhing. .
Her breakdown isn’t really part of this story either. Let’s just say that when the Knights of Khryl came out to face the Khulan Horde at Ceraeno a year and change later, Marade wasn’t with them. She was undergoing drug therapy in the inpatient unit of the Vienna Institute for Social Wellness. She never did recover enough that she could enjoy sex; she’d do it-when it was in her contract-but she’d freeze up and start to shake, and it was always pretty ugly. Which, though nobody ever actually said so, was maybe mostly my fault.
I’ve always had an eye for weakness. It’s a little late to start apologizing for it now.
Then a while after that, down in Yalitrayya during Race for the Crown of Dal’kannith, I’m pretty sure it was at least partly her lingering issues with me that made her get stupid with Berne, which I know for damn sure made her and Tizarre both wish they’d died back with the Black Knives. I’ve secondhanded their final cubes. I owed it to them.
Remember what I said about Saving people is not among my gifts?
Anyway, here’s the thing—
As entertaining as it was to kill dozens, maybe hundreds, of Black Knife bucks, I never kidded myself that we were actually accomplishing anything. Except making me, Marade, and Tizarre into overnight superstars. We never forgot that we were there to entertain people; half the battle was coming up with ever-more-inventive ways to slaughter bucks, and the other half was to make sure we never actually escaped.
No fear of that, anyway.
The bucks weren’t our enemies, though, not really; probably starting with Spearboy all the way back outside the gate of Hell, they kept coming at us because they were more afraid of their bitches than they were of dying. For good reason.
So the goal wasn’t to kill bucks (except to amuse the folks back home-who, as it turned out, never got tired of it). And Marade seemed to enjoy herself, but y’know, she had different issues.
All I was trying to do was lead the surviving bucks as close as possible to North Rahndhing, because I had it on, ahem, reliable authority, that there were between five and ten Knights posted there, and one of the few creatures on Home that can outpace a friar or an ogrillo over the long haul is a Knight of Khryl. It’s why they don’t ride. Khryl doesn’t approve of it; Knights bear their arms and armor with their own strength-actually His Own Strength, but let that go. So they run in full armor, and they run like hell. With armsman cavalry to engage the bucks, I could lead Knights on foot to their rear and take out the bitches.
All of them.
I had gotten enough out of that weird-ass three-way I’d had with their god and their top bitch, one I’d nicknamed Crowmane, to understand who was really in charge. Only females entered their fucked-up priesthood of the Outside Power. So once the bitches were gone, we’d have not only wiped out the next generation of Black Knives, we’d also have cut them off from the thing that really made
them Black Knives in the first place. Simple, yes?
Simple no.
Try explaining this to Knight Captain Purthin Soldiers-of-the-Lord-of-Battles-Do-Not-Make-War-Upon-Women-andChildren Khlaylock.
So I didn’t bother. Explaining, that is.
His attitude was no mystery to me; it was the institutional attitude of the Order of Khryl, which-as the most militant cult of the Lipkan pantheon-was not exactly unknown to the Monasteries. They all felt that way, and I knew it going in, and timing, as they say, is everything.
Back in the day, it seems that the chance to take a chunk out of the Black Knives was the kind of thing that’d make any Knight Officer of Khryl cream his surcoat. Five hours after Marade had a chance to tell our story, Purthin Khlaylock strode forth from the white gates of North Rahndhing at the head of a column of seven Knights Venturer, a Knight Attendant, and three hundred mounted armsmen, which seemed like a ridiculously small number to head-on a couple thousand-odd Black Knife warriors. Until I saw them in action.
There was only a single engagement in the field, before the big one that ended it, back at Hell. It wasn’t much of a contest.
Khryllian armsmen are the finest soldiers on Home. Lacking the spiritual gifts that would qualify them as full-fledged Knights of Khryl, they compensate by obsessively developing their physical skills, and by their absolute devotion to a code of honor that does not permit even the thought of defeat.
One hundred brilliantly coordinated heavy cavalry with superior armor, razor-barbed lances, and the devastating seven-bladed morningstar, supported by two hundred disciplined, starkly courageous mounted arbalestiers who also carried short billhooks for close work, against a mass of lightly armed ogrilloi who, for all their advantages of size, strength, and speed, had a concept of warfare dependent upon the sort of personal heroics that went out of style at Troy. To handle any necessary personal heroics of our own, we had nine Knights of Khryl.
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