Caine Black Knife aoc-3

by Matthew Stover

  In those days-years before Berne put Kosall through my spine-I could leap really well.

  My Control Disciplines had my legs so amped that I might as well have been on the moon; when the arc of my leap reached him, I was still as high as his head and descending and I had to shoot the side kick down at an angle to catch the haft of his morningstar just below its centerpoint.

  Now, sure, in those days I maybe weighed all of seventy-five kilos dripping wet-Khlaylock would have gone around one-fifteen buck naked-and I would have needed both hands to even lift his morningstar without popping a ball, and I could forget swinging it effectively in a fight. But I wasn’t swinging it.

  I was falling on it.

  With my entire seventy-five kilos, plus all the kinetic energy I could cram into an exceedingly well-trained side kick, which made his two-handed grip into a fulcrum, the haft into a lever, and the seven-bladed head into Archimedes’ Earth.

  It caught him full on the left temple. This would have killed any ordinary man. Khlaylock didn’t even fall down. The effect was pretty spectacular nonetheless.

  A wet ripping crunch splintered his eye socket and cheekbone and fanned black blood spray into the mist; the impact turned his head and sent the morningstar on past, taking most of the side of his face with it. The weapon flipped out of his slackening hands and he staggered, trying to turn toward me as I landed, trying to get his hands up-even stunned into next year he was trying to fight back-but his left eye dangled out of its shattered socket by his optic nerve, flopping against black-smeared teeth left exposed because his upper lip was lying on the grass somewhere still hooked to the head of his morningstar, and that had to fuck with his targeting, because he was waving his head around like he couldn’t decide which eye he should be seeing with. Before he could figure it out, I threw my hip into a Thai roundhouse that slammed my right shin across his kidneys hard enough to capture his unsteady balance and send him stumbling toward the lip of the escarpment. I sprang after him, digging in my feet and jamming both hands into his spine to send him even faster, and y’know, if he’d been somebody else, somebody less the Legendary Warrior than Purthin Khlaylock, he still might have taken me, because another Knight would have fallen, and had a chance to get up again. Khlaylock, though, staggered to the very brink, caught his balance, and wheeled to face me.

  Just in time to catch both feet of my old-fashioned flying dropkick in the middle of his chest.

  He sailed out over the long, long drop with a curiously calm, flat look in his good eye, a look that bespoke absolute certainty that this is not yet over, little man.

  The hundred-meter fall to the highest of the Black Knife campfires below disagreed with him.

  I hit ground at the lip and just lay there for a while, letting the black jolts drain away into the wet and the grass.

  The waterfall was too loud for me to hear him land.

  After I stopped shaking, I dragged the two Black Knife sentries to the edge and shoved them over after him. I picked up my knives and stuck them back into their sleeve sheaths, then went over and shook the shreds of Khlaylock’s face off his morningstar.

  I held it in both hands, staring down at it until my arms started to ache. Not just a weapon. A symbol. The Morning Star. Enlightenment. The Dawn of Truth and Justice that Destroys the Night of Ignorance and Sin. I remember wondering if Khlaylock had lived long enough to appreciate the irony; must have been like getting pimp-slapped by Khryl Himself.

  Then I shrugged and threw it off the cliff too.

  I’ve had twentyfive years to think about the business on the escarpment that night, and I’m still not sure which one of us it makes looks worse. Yeah: I was an asshole. Pushing his buttons to pump up some drama. To jazz my career. Not to mention the whole premeditated murder thing. But I wasn’t kidding anybody. Including myself.

  And looking back on it, I can see the leading edge of a running theme of my career. I don’t remember making a conscious choice in tactics when I picked the fight with Khlaylock; it just felt right. I could just as easily-more easily-have made the Challenge about our tactical dispute; by Khryl’s Law, I could have Challenged Khlaylock to let Khryl decide between us. Strictly business. But I made it personal. Because it was personal. At the bone, it’d be him and me, no matter what we were pretending to be fighting about. To bring the other shit into it would have been. . well. .

  Dishonest.

  Which is a peculiar word from anyone who’s done what I’ve done and been who I’ve been, but there it is. There I am.

  Here’s the truth of Purthin Khlaylock, under all his Truth and Honor and Devotion to Justice and Noble Reluctance to whatever: when you get to the bone, why exactly was he getting ready to kill me?

  For calling him names.

  Yes: I am a bad man. But I’ve never been that bad.

  Purthin Khlaylock, the perfect Knight: one more blood-drunk thug.

  And yeah, fine, Blood-Drunk Thug should be carved on my headstone. I don’t claim to be better than him. . but it does still chap my ass a little that everybody claims he’s better than me.

  I have my own vanity. I don’t kill for it, that’s all.

  The rest of my plan went pretty much the way most of my plans do: just fine, right up to the point where it spectacularly exploded.

  That point was dawn-ish, a few seconds after a handful of Knights Venturer and I had fallen on the Black Knife priest-bitches like an old building. I was, in fact, in the middle of pinning Cornholes’ mouth shut with a knife through the soft tissue under her jaw when a roar went up from the Black Knives that was answered by the Khryllians across the river, and it got real fucking bright real fast, blue-white-star bright like Pretornio in the last stage of overload, and I looked down from the second level of Hell and thought, Fuck my ass like a chicken pot pie, because the blue-white star in question turned out to be a butt-naked Purthin Khlaylock, balls-deep in my river while he fought off the entire motherfucking Black Knife Nation. Single-handed.

  They poured into the water after him like a black tide, a storm of locusts, a school of giant screaming piranhas, like a whatthefuckdoesitmatter because he wasn’t running away, he was holding his ground inside a ring of sunfire that was the arc of his morningstar.

  If you’re ever in Seven Wells and you have a chance to stop by the Halls of Glory in the Great Holding of Dal’Kannith, you can see a really nice depiction by Rhathkinnan, the greatest living painter of Lipke: a fresco fifty feet high and three hundred feet long, Khlaylock’s Stand at the Ford. It’s got it all the first spray of dawn on the vast shadow-pocked face of the vertical city, swarms of uncountable thousands of Black Knives, Khlaylock doing a reasonable facsimile of Khryl Morning Goddamn Star Himself at the center of a rising hurricane of raggedly severed ogrillo body parts while on the opposite bank his cavalry shouts itself into battle order.

  I do not, by the way, appear in that painting.

  This is only partly because Rhathkhinnan-and the rest of the Order of Khryl-would kind of like to forget I was there at all. It’s mostly because I spent that battle learning the value of intellectual flexibility and improvisation under pressure.

  My Knights, naturally enough, were about half a second shy of breaking for the river; they’d come to rescue Khlaylock, not to slaughter priest-bitches. Slaughtering bitches was my thing. So in that half second while they were all looking down the face of the vertical city instead of chasing the bitches who were scampering off upslope, I shouted, “It’s working! Come on!”

  Polished helmets swung my way.

  “What do you think is keeping him alive down there? Pure thoughts?” I snarled at them. “If those bitches get away long enough to raise their god and their power, he’s dead and we are too, so get your armored butts moving!” Then I turned and went after the bitches without looking back. Hell, for all I knew I might even have been telling the truth. In a second or two I could hear them on my tail, and I let myself smile into the dawn.

  We killed every one of them. Al
l we could find, anyway. Cornholes and Dugsacks and Turdcrotch and Thumbnipples, and when I couldn’t remember if we’d missed any or not, we just went ahead and killed whatever other bitches we came across. It was fun, making them scream and bleed and beg. It was more than fun. Whoever said “Revenge is a dish best served cold” never tasted it hot.

  It was so much fun, in fact, that I completely forgot to pack it in and slip away while I had the chance.

  Pretty soon-too soon-it was all over. The surviving bucks and juvies had scattered to the Boedecken winds, and there weren’t even close to enough Khryllians to run them all down; some were taken into other clans, but ogrillo solidarity in general didn’t really extend as far as Black Knives. Most of them ended up ditching the Boedecken altogether for human cities, slipping into the Folk slums of towns all over Lipke and the Ankhanan Empire to try and live out their days pretending they’d never even heard of Black Knives.

  Broken Knives, the other clans call them now. Limp Dicks.

  All that came later, though; at the time, while the cavalry was still merrily slaughtering whatever fleeing bucks they could catch, I was getting a swift boot up the ass on my way out of the Khryllian camp.

  Which is not the worst that could have happened. When a couple of the Knights Venturer caught my elbows in their gentle-but-firm too-bad-for-your-punkass way and and let me know they were hauling me off to where Knight Captain Khlaylock was waiting outside camp, all the Holy shit, I actually fucking pulled it off euphoria in my chest transubstantiated into a couple yards of ice-cold concrete because, y’know, in all the excitement I had just plain forgotten that Khlaylock was still alive. And that he might find himself inclined to be a little stern with me.

  I kept seeing the cloud of bloody mist that had once been the head of a Black Knife after its close encounter with Khlaylock’s morningstar. This image became considerably more vivid when we reached Khlaylock and I saw the ruin of his face. Khryl’s Love had Healed it as it was, fusing bone and flesh into a rumpled crater of scar.

  Imagine my surprise, then, when Khlaylock waved away the Venturers and led me down a nearby wadi, where I found a fully tacked saddle horse peacefully cropping scrub in the morning sun.

  “Take him and go,” Khlaylock said. His voice sounded like somebody was scraping cinder blocks together in his throat. “Go and never return, Caine Lackland.”

  I stood there blinking into the sun. “Excuse me?”

  “He is a fine gelding,” Khlaylock grated. “He will bear you well.”

  “I, ah-I don’t know what to say-”

  “You have spoken overmuch already.”

  “I just-well, I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but-I mean, this wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. .”

  “Think of it as undeserved grace.”

  “I guess I sort of thought you’d want another crack at your Challenge-”

  To which, by the way, I was fully planning to Yield and fess up in front of the whole mob about how I’d clocked him with a Sunday punch and sort of throw myself on his, and Khryl’s, questionable mercies, but he just turned his remaining eye on me like his stare could nail me to the ground. “Go. Do not let another dawn find you within my sight. Ever.”

  I went.

  I was only an hour outside the camp when the Studio pulled me. Two days later-before I even got out of the hospital-I finally realized why Khlaylock didn’t re-Challenge. He’d Challenged me for calling him a coward. Get it?

  He was afraid he’d lose. Again.

  No wonder he was pissed. We can forgive any crime except the murder of our illusions.

  Khlaylock lifted that gauntlet from Markham’s shoulder and waved it negligently in my direction. “Release him.”

  “You don’t understand,” Soapy Two told him from my right. “Administrator Michaelson is in our custody-”

  “The failure of understanding is yours.” A single gleaming stride had Mount Khlaylock louring over Soapy Two like an unquiet volcano. “I am the guardian of Khryl’s Law on His Battleground. Release this man.”

  Soapies are not known for unsteady nerves. That mirror-mask gave back only a smear of Justiciar and a quietly flat “And we are the Social Police. This is, by treaty, Earth land. Please step aside, sir.”

  This could have gotten interesting in an existentially satisfying way, but there was also the unfortunate possibility they might have come to some kind of civilized solution, and one of the problems with being a bad guy is that civilized solutions just never turn out well for you.

  Besides, it would have been plain sloppy to let this opportunity slip away. Not likely I’d get another.

  I squinted my one good eye up at Khlaylock’s. “Sucks to live in fear, doesn’t it?”

  “What?” He knew better than to get into a conversation with me, but I guess he just couldn’t help himself.

  “Were you not pledged to Combat, I would undertake to teach you the meaning of fear.”

  Remember that eye for weakness?

  I sneered into the pretty half of his face. “Yeah, teach me. Might as well learn from the master.” Lightning flickered behind his bright-gleaming eye. I had him by his metaphorically empty nutsack.

  He went for contempt. “How a villain as low and vile as you can question my heart-”

  “For fuck’s sake, Khlaylock, do we have to have this fight all over again? It doesn’t take guts to smash some poor bastard’s skull with a morningstar. If you had any stones at all you’d kill me right here, you punkass sack of shit. Or just let Soapy haul me off. I mean, they’re taking me straight to True Hell. That’s closer to justice than anything you’ll get from Khryl.”

  He took a step so that he could tower over me even more than he had Soapy Two. “Is that what you’d prefer?”

  “Some people really are upright and pure and the perfect Knight and all that shit. Marade was. More than you, anyway. I’m thinking Angvasse is. You?

  You just play the part because you’re pissing your codpiece terrified that if you screw up, Khryl won’t love you anymore.”

  He drew himself up and gathered dignity around himself like a mantle of righteousness; he had an answer to this one. “Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.”

  I had an answer too. “Who said that? Some other nutless wonder?”

  Markham shouldered forward. “The courage of the Justiciar is legendary-”

  “Only compared with yours, ass-cob.” I shook some pity into my sneer. “It’s one thing to be a good guy because that’s who you are. It’s something else to be a good guy because you’re too much a fucking pussy to break the rules.”

  Cords twisted across the undamaged half of Khlaylock’s forehead. “Were you not already pledged to Combat-”

  “Yeah, yeah. Bored with this. Let’s fight.”

  Khlaylock fixed his good eye on Soapy One, who had me by the left arm. “Release him.”

  Soapy One might have been carved from the same rock as Mount Khlaylock. “I repeat: please step aside, sir. I won’t ask you again.”

  “Do you threaten me?” Incredulity ratcheted Khlaylock’s head another inch or two to his right, which was more or less what I’d been waiting for. “Here, I’ll settle it. Ch’syavallanaig Khryllan’tai.”

  Social Police stripcuffs are designed with a shear-strength high enough to lift a passenger car, and will withstand not only knives but also bolt-cutters and cold chisels, blowtorches, and maybe even arc welders. Basically anything that doesn’t send out the coded electronic pulse that triggers the doohicky to rearrange the cuffs’ long-chain molecules is pretty much useless. They are not, however, designed to bind the wrists of a guy whose right hand can suddenly become roughly as hot as the surface of the sun.

  I admit that that’s more hyperbole-which anyone reading this might guess by the general lack of setting the atmosphere on fire and wiping out all life on the planet-but the point is that the Holy Foreskin was a couple orders of magnitude beyond the heat tolerance of the stripcuffs, so in addition to burning
the staggering fuck out of my left wrist and freeing my hands, I shocked a quart of living crap out of Soapy Two, good nerves or not, when his peripheral vision registered a handful of sunfire swinging upside his head.

  Nothing wrong with his reflexes: he let go of my arm and twisted toward me with a smoothly professional bob-and-weave that cleared his helmet under my swing, which was okay because I wasn’t aiming for him anyway.

  Markham jerked back out of my reach with his gauntlets coming up like a boxer’s guard and some Old High Lipkan trigger word burst from his mouth to drape his entire body in electric blue witchfire-also top-rate reflexes-which was also okay because I wasn’t aiming for him either.

  Purthin, Lord Khlaylock, Justiciar Et Cetera, Radiant Mantle of Whothefuckcaresanyway, had just barely time to blink his eye and begin to draw breath for his own Old High Lipkan trigger word when my handful of Holy Foreskin came up his blind side and caught him below his left ear.

  There’s an esoteric variant of the Southern Cobra style of chi tao chu’an called Python; it’s based on wrist and open-palm strikes that lead into joint locks and strangles. It was in that Python spirit that my slap didn’t follow through after impact; instead my open palm hooked around the back of his neck so that his reflexive jerk away drove the base of his skull hard against the Holy Foreskin, which was-though less hot than the surface of the sun-plenty hot enough to blast the water content of his skin and muscle into a burst of superheated steam. A shotgun fired beneath the surface of a bathtub filled with blood would make pretty much the same sound.

  And nearly as much mess.

  Being a minor expert on destruction of the human body, I could go through the technical details, such as how the blast vaporized his upper trapezius and most of his capitor group, crushing his cervical vertebrae into chunks that blew out through his levator scapulae, and so on and so forth-not to mention coming way too damn close to blowing my own damn hand off-but the actual significance of all this was the sum total effect: by the time the Holy Foreskin faded from my palm, Khlaylock’s half-severed head had flopped onto his breastplate and dragged his balance forward over locked knees so that he toppled like a felled tree.