Caine Black Knife aoc-3

by Matthew Stover

  I don’t know how many bucks we expedition survivors had killed during the Retreat. It was a lot. I mean a lot. Over a hundred, anyway. Maybe one-fifty. In thirty-four days. So the Black Knives were not exactly pussies, y’know, because they just kept coming, no matter how many we took out. But they ran from the Khryllians.

  They had reason.

  By the time the grills broke and ran and the Khryllians finished riding down the stragglers that afternoon, the Black Knives had lost roughly seven hundred warriors. In a little over two hours. The Khryllian dead numbered, I seem to recall, a couple dozen. Armsmen.

  There were no casualties among the Knights.

  Khlaylock wanted to harry them on their retreat. I told him to save his horses. I knew where they were going.

  They were running home for Mommy.

  We caught up with them four days later. They were dug in on the far side of what is now called the Caineway, using that half of the vertical city as a defensive emplacement and the river as the world’s biggest moat. They still had thirteen hundred or fourteen hundred warriors over there, and almost all of them had bows, and even though the river was no more than chest deep now that it had spread across the badlands, wading through it into a storm of those five-foot-long thumb-thick arrows was nobody’s idea of fun.

  And even if Khlaylock had made the swing south and found a crossing a few miles downstream, what the hell were he and his armsman cavalry supposed to do against thirteen hundred Black Knife bucks and maybe eight hundred-odd bitches dug in among the streets and alleys and ruined buildings of the vertical city?

  On the other hand, the Black Knives weren’t in such a good position either, because if they set foot out of the city the Khryllians could cut them to shit on the plains, and they knew it. So Khlaylock decided to send a couple riders back toward North Rahndhing to alert the Order that he had the entire Black Knife Nation bottled up; then he could settle in to wait a few weeks for the six thousand or so heavy infantry it’d take to clean them out house to house. Nice and neat and safe.

  Nice and neat and safe, however, was emphatically not what I was getting paid for.

  Besides, I knew how Khryllians operate. Once the battle was over, they’d release the bitches and the cubs and just castrate any bucks who’d make submission.

  I considered this an unacceptable outcome.

  I was back in my cover, y’know, scout and resident ogrillo expert, so I didn’t have any authority or standing to argue with a Knight Captain of the Order of Khryl. All I had was a tip from Marade that her Khryllian truthsense had never worked on me at all.

  And, y’know, that eye for weakness.

  So early in the evening after he’d sent off the riders, I stopped by Khlaylock’s tent to commiserate.

  The Knight Attendant had just finished preparing Khaylock’s dinner, and the Great Man was relaxing on his camp stool in front of a small turd fire. I ambled over and squatted on my heels across from him without waiting for permission. “That was a fine thing you did today, Knight Khlaylock,” I told him. “I admire you for it. Not many Khryllian commanders would have the courage to put the lives of their men above their own honor.”

  He didn’t even blink. “Have a care, Caine Lackland. Think twice before suggesting dishonor to a Knight of Khryl.”

  This Lackland moniker was something he’d hung on me, believe it or not, as a sign of respect. Knights all have House names and carry the name of their lands, or the lands they are sworn to; Marade, for example, was formally Marade, Knight Tarthell of Kavlin’s Leap. In the Lipkan Empire, only serfs have a single name-like, say, Caine. So, in deference to my actions in freeing Marade and Tizarre and escaping the Black Knives, he did me the honor of nicknaming me Lackland, as though my not having lands and a surname was some kind of oversight.

  “Oh, shit no, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean it like that. No disrespect intended.” I shook my head like your average amiable dumbass. “I was talking about-what d’you Khryllians call it? Your Legend, right? The story Knights and armsmen and all the Soldiers of Khryl will tell each other about your life, for as long as the Order survives. Everything good or bad about who you are that might help another Khryllian face a tough situation, right?”

  He nodded at me over the top of a steel mug of wine. “It is in our Legends that Knights continue to serve Our Lord of Valor, even long after we fall in His Service.”

  “Well, yeah. That’s what I’m talking about. I mean, a few days ago you fought what will probably go down in your Legend as one of the greatest cavalry engagements in Khryllian history. Maybe in the history of the world. Now today, though. .”

  He squinted at me. “You find fault with my orders?”

  “No, no, no. Not at all. That’s my point. I think it’s great that you have so much compassion for your men. Rather than lose any more, you’re willing to be remembered as the Knight who let the Black Knives slip away.”

  He set his mug on the ground beside his boot, and sighed. “I am no fool, Caine Lackland, and a fool you must be not to have discovered so before now. The Order of Khryl does not exist to serve your private vengeance.”

  Tell me that again tomorrow, I thought, but I said, “All right, look, sure, I can’t play you. I get that. But now lend me half an ear, huh? The Black Knives are settled in over there, and they’re spoiling for a fight. On their terms, right? Because you made them fight on your terms four days ago, and they want some payback. But when they find out you’re not gonna attack-when they find out it’s a siege instead of a battle-things are gonna change. Especially when their food starts to run short. It’ll be more than a month before your infantry can get here. I know for a fact they don’t have supplies to last that long.”

  Khlaylock leaned into the firelight. “Then fight they must, and we can-”

  “No. Run they will, and you can’t.”

  He scowled at me.

  “They’ll leave just enough bucks behind to keep some fires lit and shit to make it look like they’re still there, while the rest of them slip away. Once they’re gone, they’ll scatter. And the Order will never catch them together again. Not in your lifetime, anyway.”

  He turned that scowl toward the darkness beyond the Khryllian camp. He was seeing the badlands inside his head, the way any good cavalry commander could: the way they had looked at sunset, the way they would look from any vantage points he could reach, from any scouting arcs he could order.

  The way they would look from the vertical city, once it was empty.

  He murmured, “You are saying there is another way out.”

  “Yeah. But better than that-better for you, and for that Legend of yours,” I told him. “I’m saying there’s another way in.”

  He brought his gaze back across the fire and spoke the two words that if I were a more demonstrative guy I might have kissed him on the mouth for. “Show me.”

  Which is how, a couple hours later, Khlaylock and I found ourselves in that tactical dispute I mentioned earlier.

  We were on the plateau overlooking the vertical city, next to the topside access tunnel. Getting up there wasn’t a problem; the cliffs were limestone, which made sedimentary layers that I could go up better than most men climb stairs. I towed a light cord attached to hemp rope that I pulled up and tied off to an outcropping, and Khlaylock, with Khryl’s Strength, just hand-over-handed himself straight up the rope without raising a sweat. The prairie grass on the plateau was waist-high by then and there was a night breeze from the west, which put us downwind from the access tunnel and covered our motion. Sound was not an issue, because my waterfall was roaring out from the escarpment only thirty-odd feet below the lip, which made it an easy sneak, even for Khlaylock, who was less than ideally stealthy, despite leaving his armor behind and carrying only a long knife and his morningstar.

  The Black Knives had posted a couple of sentries up there, but the sentries got lazy, as sentries do, and when one of them went back down the access tunnel for something, I got the other with my gar
rotte. He made enough noise-thrashing around, trying to get me off his back-to draw the attention of the other one, who poked his head up the access tunnel to see what was going on, which news was delivered to him by Khaylock’s morningstar at something like lightspeed.

  The medium, as they say, was the message.

  And sure, the lightspeed thing is hyperbole, but not as much as you think. That particular strike graphically demonstrated the distinction between a Knight Venturer, like Marade, and a Knight Captain; whereas a shot from Marade could lift a full-grown ogrillo from his feet and hurl his corpse a yard or two, when Khlaylock hit that buck in the face, the poor bastard’s head just fucking vaporized.

  Which almost made me reconsider. But only almost. Like somebody I used to know had liked to say: I died the day I passed my Boards.

  From the lip of the escarpment, the vertical city fanned out below us in a spray of pinprick campfires fogged by the waterfall’s spray. A gibbous moon hanging in the southeast whitened the peeled-back levels while I laid out my half-fake plan. I pointed out the downramp from the vault and explained how easy it’d be for Khlaylock to lead his Knights down the tunnel to take the Black Knives from the rear.

  Khlaylock, unsurprisingly, was having some difficulty seeing the tactical advantage in this. His scowl kept getting deeper the longer he looked down at the city. “In the best case, our surprise attack turns the Black Knife line long enough for my cavalry to ford the river. Which leaves my Knights and me inside the city with two thousand Black Knives and my cavalry-again at best-funnelled into narrow streetways as they strike inward to join us, forced to fight Black Knife warriors on the worst possible ground.”

  I shook my head. “You do this the way I tell you, you won’t have to fight them. They don’t want to fight you-”

  “Black Knives are the fiercest warriors of the Boedecken-”

  “That’s because what their-uh-priesthood does to cowards is far, far worse than dying in battle.” He turned that scowl on me.

  I nodded down into the scatter of spray-fogged campfires. “You know the Black Knives practice sorcery. What you don’t know is that it’s not just sorcery, it’s their religion. And this is their most holy place. It’s the seat of their god. I killed their. . high priest, I guess you’d say-” Because I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell Knight Captain Khryllians Do Not Make War On Et Cetera that I had murdered a female noncombatant. “-and I know where the rest of their priesthood will be. I can take you straight to them. Once you wipe them out, the warriors will crumble. Shit, they’ll be grateful.”

  Well, maybe. I had a feeling they wouldn’t be lining up for a chorus of “Ding Dong, the Bitches’re Dead,” though even if my conditioning would have let me tell him that, he wouldn’t have gotten the joke.

  His scowl vanished into a pale stone stare colder than the moonlight. “Knights of Khryl are warriors, not assassins.”

  “Oh, grow up, for shit’s sake. What’s more important to you: Playing fair? or winning?”

  “To act with Honor at all times is the absolute obligation of every Knight. Maintain the Honor of your Person, the Order, and Our Lord. Speak the Truth, though it mean your Death. Defend all those who cannot-”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it before.”

  He was already turning back toward the topside access stair. “And there is no need for attack, nor to fear escape of the Black Knives below. Two Knights alone-three perhaps at most, given resupply up the rope we have ourselves lately employed-might hold this shaftway ’gainst the Black Knife Nation entire.”

  He was right, of course, which was the problem. Well. . not exactly a problem. .

  The only reason I was arguing with him in the first place was that I kind of liked the guy. I had a soft spot for the true-blue Honor-and-Justice types. Still do, a little.

  When I was a kid, secondhanding pirated Adventures bootlegged off the Net, I was as big a Jhubbar fan as the next guy-even though I couldn’t admit it, exactly. Or even at all. Not in my neighborhood. In the Mission District, you pretty much had to worship Mkembe, though he was long dead; Jhubbar-Raymond Story-was too goody-goody, y’know, noble and courageous, defend the weak and Show the Power of Truth through Righteous Action and all that shit. I was a sucker for it. Though I couldn’t tell anybody-not even Dad-I even wanted to be him when I grew up. He was a Knight of Khryl.

  Sometimes I still want to be him.

  Sometimes I wonder how much of the stupid shit I’ve done was just to punish myself for not growing up to be Jhubbar Tekkanal. I wonder sometimes if that’s why I married my late wife: because, down deep, we both despised the man I really am. It was the only thing we had in common.

  I got over hating myself. Mostly. She didn’t. But let that go.

  The point is, I hadn’t brought Khlaylock up there to sell him the plan. My plan wasn’t my plan. My plan was to bring him up there and kill him so I could tell the rest of the Knights he’d been taken by the Black Knives, and then I could lead them in a “rescue” raid; basically, to con the Knights into killing the Black Knife priest-bitches before they found out Khlaylock was dead. Liking the guy was giving me a little trouble pulling the trigger, that’s all.

  And that wasn’t the only issue; I had my audience to consider.

  We were close enough to the lip of the escarpment that a grab of his arm and a drop to my back for a simple tomenage would have done the trick-and that’s exactly how I’d have handled it, later in my career. But this was early days, and I had no idea just how popular Retreat from the Boedecken had become.

  Kollberg was a genius at marketing; he was selling firsthander seats on a per-day basis, with discounts for multiple-day purchase and an option to re-up for extra days if the audience member processed the credit request before he or she left the building. He was also licensing the Adventure to other Studios across Earth, along with a cut-down secondhander cube of highlights starting when I spotted the Black Knives coming across the badlands, so new first-handers could get up to speed on the story arc. Every Studio in the world ended up splitting out some excess capacity; the Studio system hadn’t seen an extended Adventure with this level of nonstop slaughter since Mkembe and Mast in Westmarch Raiders.

  By the time I was standing on the escarpment next to Khlaylock, I was already an international star; I just didn’t know it yet. So I was still looking to turn the High Drama volume knob up to eleven.

  Which is why I said, “Wow. So Khryl loves cowards now?”

  There are lots of cliches for how he took it-pillar of salt, turned to stone, that kind of shit-but none of them capture his eerily explosive stillness; he was locked down like a vault around a bomb. Somebody took the millisecond pause between triggering the detonator and the blast and stretched it into a long, long silence empty of everything but the waterfall’s roar. It really kinda gave me a shiver.

  A hot black shiver, just above my balls.

  I took that shiver in both fists of my Control Disciplines and jammed it into my adrenals. The night went bright and sharp and loud. Electric jolts along my arms and legs whispered that if I needed to, I could fly. .

  When he finally spoke I could barely pick out his voice; it sounded like boulders grinding together in the river beneath our feet.

  “You are no Knight, Caine Lackland, and I am not in Khryl’s Battledress-”

  “I know a coward when I see one. Khryl does too.”

  The look he sent over his shoulder shot those hot black jolts all the way up to the top of my skull. “Were you Armed-”

  “Fuck Armed.” I pulled the knives out of my sleeves. A sharp flip of my wrists shot them both hilt-deep into the earth. “You have Khryl’s Strength. I have the truth. You think I’m wrong, prove it.”

  “A Challenge? With you?” He stared, morning star hanging slack as his mouth. “Are you mad?”

  “Yeah. Crazy too.” He finally turned toward me, slowly, considering, rolling it over in his head to get a good look at the angles. “You claim Khryl favors
your plan-?”

  “I claim,” I said, “you’re a gutless butt-weasel. You’re a Knight Captain, for shit’s sake. Even if you didn’t have Khryl’s Strength and Khryl’s Speed and Khryl’s Farts and who knows what else, you’re twice my fucking size. What are you afraid of?”

  “My reluctance,” he said slowly, “arises of the debt you are owed by the Order, in the rescue of Knight Tarthell, and your aid against the Black Knife Nation. Do you understand that should I choose to Challenge and you Answer, your health, limb, and life itself are at peril? That even should Khryl favor your cause, you may be injured beyond the capacity of His Love to repair?”

  I grinned. “Likewise.”

  He stared a moment longer. “Will you not retract? You cannot hope to stand against me, Caine Lackland, and I would not willingly do you harm.”

  “Sacrilege along with cowardice.” I wasn’t even talking anymore. It was the black jolt working my lips and tongue and throat. “Khryl decides who wins, doesn’t he? Unless you’re gonna pile on apostasy.”

  He lowered his head with a resigned sigh. “Very well. Make peace with whatever god favors you, little man; you will have no further chance. Challenge.”

  “Accepted,” I said. “I will Answer.”

  So there we stood, on the lip of the escarpment, in billows of mist curling back from the waterfall. My back to the brink. His to the access tunnel. The moon, almost full and almost overhead, bleached the ten feet of softly damp pairie grass between us pale as a charcoal sketch on sheepskin. He lifted his morningstar in both hands; with the sun down, he could aim the weapon’s head only at the sun’s reflected light-y’know, the moon-and he composed himself for the prayer that would sanctify the coming Combat.

  He drew himself up to his full height and lifted his head to Khryl’s light-the last time a Khryllian Knight ever kneels is when he takes his Orders, unless he’s defeated and Yields in Combat-and when he slipped into the Old High Lipkan Ammare Khryl Tyrhaalv’Dhalleig, the head of his morningstar took on that St. Elmo’s fire glow that began to creep down the haft toward his hands and I took one long skipping step for momentum and leaped.