by Steve Perry
“He’s a man who can sell every knife he builds for thousands of stads—and who has people lined up on a waiting list that’s ten years out. Last time I checked, anyway.”
“No way.”
“Come on. I think you’ll enjoy meeting Kiley. He’s an . . . unusual character.”
If the outside of the shop was bare, the inside was more so. The room was empty, save for a small workbench, some tools, and an extremely old man sitting on a three-legged, saddle-shaped stool at the bench. He didn’t look up as Mourn and Sola entered.
Mourn held a hand in front of her. Sotto voce, he said, “Wait a second. We don’t want to break his concentration.”
“We could be here a while, Mourn,” she whispered back, “before he ever notices us.”
“He knows we’re here. And he knows who we are—at least he knows me—otherwise, we’d never have gotten through the door.”
She looked at him.
“Frowning like that will give you premature lines in your face,” he said. “You’ll see why you don’t want that in a minute.”
She looked at the old man. He was white-haired, what there was left of it, and his skin was very dark, almost bluish. He wore a ragged coverall and moccasins, and a leather apron. He held a partially finished blade on the bench and applied a file to it in long, slow, even strokes. She could hardly see his face from this angle, but his hands were knobby and scarred.
A minute or so passed. He put the knife down and turned, the saddle seat pivoting, so that he faced them.
God, he looked to be about five hundred years old—had enough wrinkles on his face to make a busload of teeners look aged.
“Mourn.”
“Maestro. This is Cayne Sola. Cayne, Akeem Kiley. Best knifemaker in the galaxy.”
The old man smiled, and the wrinkles deepened. Seamed, lined, creased, as if his face was pliable leather folded into a grin a million times, so many times that any other expression would seem not quite right.
What a strikingly handsome man he must have been in his youth, she thought.
“Careful, the old fart will try and seduce you, and if you buy that smile, he’s halfway there already.”
She looked at Mourn.
“He’s right,” Kiley said. “What does a woman with your beauty and obvious charm see in a wastrel like Mourn? He doesn’t deserve you.” The gigawatt smile flared again. Great teeth for a man his age.
She grinned back. Kiley had to be eighty, ninety years old, and he exuded a smoldering, smoky pheromone so thick you could almost touch it. At his prime, she expected he would have had her out of her pants by now—all he’d have had to do was ask and she’d have shucked them as fast as she could.
She’d felt that energy a couple times in her life. Once, it was when she’d interviewed a famous pornoproj entcom star, a man noted for several things, not the least of which were his physical endowments. Another time, that flare of primal do-it-now sex had come from a woman about whom she was doing a story, an athlete who was a champion sprinter. Both times, it had been all she could do to keep herself from leaping upon them in pure lust. Neither time had it gone any farther than the unspoken and unacted-upon desire she’d felt. How would it feel, to have that kind of effect on people? You’d have to know it was there, and you’d have to think about using it . . .
“What are you carrying?” Kiley asked.
Mourn pulled the curlnose case from his belt and handed it to the old man.
Before Kiley opened it, he inspected the outside of the leather case. “Nice work. Joseph Tandy?”
“Chas Clements, Earth.”
Kiley nodded. He opened the case and removed the little pair of curved, ring-ended knives. Mourn had showed them to her, and told her what they were—she had it in her recordings—but the name escaped her.
Kiley put the case down and examined the little knives, turning them individually, putting them together, slipping his forefinger through the rings, spinning them around the digit in unison.
He put one in each hand, gripped them lightly, and closed his eyes. A small smile played. “Shiva Ki,” he said. “Cable pattern weld kerambits. Ki puts good combat into his stuff. First-rate.”
Mourn said, “Yep. Knowing I got the case on Earth gave it away. You did miss the case’s maker, though.”
“Leather isn’t my area of expertise, Mourn.”
“Just pointing it out.”
“I heard you were on Earth a while back, studying silat. Fine knives in that art.”
He wiped the blades with some kind of oiled cloth that gave off a musky, pleasant scent. Sola reached for the memory: sandalwood? Kiley put the knives into the case, shut it, handed it back to Mourn. “I made a keris once, as an experiment. Not a very good weapon for real-time work, though you can do some nice patternwork for the magicks. Did a little pisau once, too. Never tried kerambits, nobody ever asked.”
“What are you working on?” Mourn asked.
“Drop-point hunter for a guy wants to stalk great cats,” he said. “Probably wind up on the floor of a bamboo thicket somewhere.”
Mourn chuckled.
Sola said, “I’m missing the joke.”
Mourn said, “The Maestro doesn’t think that hunting great cats with a knife is a survival characteristic.”
“So you think your handmade expensive knife is going to be found next to the remains of the guy who bought it?”
“Great cats don’t leave many remains, as I understand it,” Kiley said, “and it might never be found, but, generally, yeah.”
“Isn’t that a . . . waste?”
Mourn laughed and shook his head.
“What?”
“Start the old bastard down that road? He’ll talk your ears off.”
“Pay no attention to Mourn, he can barely crow his fly shut after he pees without pinching his willie. You being a bright and beautiful woman, I’ll tell you my secret: I make knives for people who will use them. Fighters—like Mourn used to be—hunters, soldiers, cools, field medics, emergency workers. I expect my blades to be pulled and used frequently, and if you plan on mounting one on a wall in a trophy case and pointing at it when company comes? I won’t make it for you.”
“How can you tell?”
Again, the dazzling grin. “That’s the right question, fem. Not ‘Why?’ but how I can tell.
“How it works is, you come and see me and we talk. I believe you are right for the blade, I’ll make it for you. Well, at least that’s how it used to go. Now, I’m slowing down, I have to finish the orders I have, so I’m not taking any new ones.”
“But even so, if you know the man who buys your knife is likely to die?”
“That’s his choice. He wants to go against a cat half again as big as he is, using only a knife? He deserves the best tool he can get for the job.”
“And that’s your knife.”
“Yes. If he fails, it won’t be because his blade couldn’t do the job. So it’s the try that counts. Win, lose, draw, doesn’t matter what happens after, only that he was willing to try. Those are the people who deserve my work.”
“Do you mind if I include this in my documentary on the Flex?”
“We can talk about it,” he said. “Over dinner, maybe?”
“Will you stop hitting on my woman?”
Kiley kept looking at Sola, as if willing her to himself. Even as old as he was, she could feel the pull. What really struck her, though, was what Mourn said: my woman? She almost grinned at how much she liked the sound of that, despite the possessive nature of it. She wasn’t a slave, she didn’t belong to anybody. Still, she understood what he was saying. And liked it. A lot.
Kiley said, “From what I hear, you might not be around much longer. Shame for the gorgeous fem here to be all alone after you’re gone. She needs somebody who’ll appreciate her.”
“Somebody who has the capability to appreciate her, which would let you out,” Mourn said. He looked at Sola. “He has three wives he can’t keep happy.
”
“Four, now,” Kiley corrected. “Ask them if they have any complaints.” Again the fat-cat-happy grin.
Mourn shook head. “I take it that you’ve heard the story of my match with Primero?” Mourn said. His voice was dry.
“One version of it.” Now he turned from his come-hither look at Sola and looked at Mourn. “You don’t even know about the Gathering, do you? Crap, Mourn, you’re getting careless in your old age.”
Mourn said, “A Gathering? Here?”
“What is a Gathering?” Sola asked.
“When a bunch of high-ranked Flex players wind up in the same place at the same time,” Mourn said. “Could be accidental, but usually, it’s intentional. Lot of fights generally ensue.”
“Numbah One Hisself is coming to our world, and where the shark swims, so swim the remora.”
“Weems can’t know I’m here.”
“Primero has access to a lot of information,” Kiley said. “And it could be just a coincidence, though I have to say, given what I’ve heard about your last meeting, I doubt it.” He looked at Sola. “You were there. Did you get it recorded? I’d love to see it.”
“We’ll leave,” Sola said. “Be long gone when he gets here.”
“Ah. That’s how it is.”
“What?” she said.
He just gave her a tiny version of his magic smile. “Some lines even I won’t cross.”
“No,” Mourn said. “I’m almost ready. Maybe four, five more steps.”
Kiley lifted his eyebrows. “Steps?”
“I’ve been working on a system,” he said. “Something new. It’s positional.”
“Good enough to take Primero?”
“In theory. Won’t know until we get there.”
“Well, if my information is correct, you have a little over a week to get ready. Assuming he can knock over a few folks who might get in his way, which he can certainly do.” He looked at Sola. “You be sure and record it, luv, and you can show it to me after we hold Mourn’s wake.”
The idea of Mourn being dead did not go down well at all.
“We don’t have to stay,” she said to Mourn.
Kiley laughed. “You survive, you want to hang on to this one. Damned if she doesn’t care about you. Count your blessings. While you can.”
29
Mourn’s first fight was only a day after he and Kiley had talked. He could have avoided it, but having decided he was going to stick around for Weems’s arrival, he thought Fuck it and put his real name into the local com directory. Anybody wanted to talk to him, all they had to do was call.
He was in the kitchen in the rented cottage, preparing lunch, Cayne behind him at the table, staring through the window.
She didn’t say anything out loud, but he felt it from her.
“You don’t want me to do this, do you?”
“I’m not the person to tell you what you can or can’t do, Mourn.”
“You are afraid for me.”
“Is that so awful?”
“No, I appreciate it. But you know the story about the viper?”
“Refresh my memory.”
“A viper got caught in a snowstorm. Being cold-blooded, this was a death sentence. A man passing by saw the snake. The viper said, ‘Please, sir, pick me up and warm me against your body, else I’ll freeze to death.’
“The man said, ‘No fool I! You’ll bite me and I will die!’
“‘No, I promise I won’t! Please!’
“So the man collected the snake and put him in his pocket. After a while, the viper warmed, and then he bit the man through his shirt.
“‘Viper! You have poisoned me! You lied!’
“And the snake said—”
“‘You knew what I was when you picked me up,’” Sola finished.
Mourn smiled. “Are you planning on coming along and recording the fight?”
“Yes.”
“And if I start to lose, will you stop recording?”
“I take your point, Mourn. We are what we are. You fight. I record. Those are our roles.”
“For now, yes.” He shrugged. “Who knows what later will bring?”
The fight was against Wim Diversela, an HG mue who was one of the best heavyweights in the game. He was ranked Ninth. Even though Mourn was one rank higher at Tenth, Diversela challenged—and let it be known he was doing it for a warm-up—he wasn’t interested in cutting Mourn to pieces with his bowie-knife variant, a Texas toothpick, so he’d appreciate it, even though Mourn was the challenged party, if they could do it bare. Diversela expected that he would beat Mourn and that the match would help ready him for lower numbers—maybe not Weems himself, but somebody in the Top Five. You wanted to keep your edge, you had to work it against skilled players as much as possible.
Mourn understood this and was happy to oblige.
They met behind Mourn’s cottage.
The match took four seconds—Diversela charged, Mourn moved and tripped him, and caught him with a kick on the back of the head on his way to the ground. It was the fastest match he’d ever had in all his years in the Flex.
“Jesu, Mourn,” Cayne said, “I hardly had time to turn my cam on!” But she was relieved, he could see that.
Truth was, he was a bit relieved himself. Beating Cluster, that could have been luck. Winning a second fight made what he had seem more real.
Cayne, on the other hand, was definitely turning into more baggage than he would have guessed. Still, it didn’t feel all that heavy. Just not something he was used to having.
Mourn didn’t figure the match would do much for his ranking, and he was right. He and Diversela swapped places, that was it.
Still, Ninth was the highest he had ever been.
Three days later, Ali Muhammed Mather, ranked Fifth, arrived on-planet. What the hell, Mourn figured, in for a demi-, in for a stad. He called Mather. Mather was hoping for Weems, but Weems wasn’t there yet, and if he declined, he might lose a place or two, and while it didn’t really matter in the Ten vis-à-vis who you could challenge, his ego didn’t want the knock. Mather agreed. He also chose bare.
That match took, by Cayne’s count, nineteen seconds, and that only because Mather had a pain threshold high enough to keep hobbling around with a broken ankle. It took a second sweep-and-stomp that broke the other ankle to keep him down.
At that level, you generally took the place of the man you beat, so Mourn moved to Fifth.
By now, word had gotten around. Orleans Plinck had retired at Third, and Besimi Besimi, a Vishnuan, of all things, had moved into that spot. He came to see what Mourn had.
This fight, also bare, took longer. Besimi, a light heavy, was cautious, and he kept trying to bait Mourn into an attack, so he could counter. Mourn wasn’t going to give the man anything to work with, so they spent four or five minutes circling and feinting, nobody offering any real threats.
Besimi’s patience was shorter than Mourn’s. He finally thought he had an open head shot, and he took it. It was a trap. The forty-seventh step worked perfectly, and Besimi hit the ground hard enough to knock out both his air and his consciousness.
Just like that, Mourn had risen and defeated three of the Top Players, without working up a sweat on any of them.
It was awfully hard not to be overconfident. He knew better, but even so, either he’d encountered three top fighters when they were all having really bad days, or he had come up with something worth having.
Once the art he was working on got out, once people saw it and began to understand it, there would be countermeasures devised against it. That was inevitable. But for somebody who had never seen it before, somebody who expected Mourn to fight as his old recordings might indicate, the surprise had, thus far anyway, proven to be overwhelming. Such things had happened before, many times in many places. Two foreign cultures came together, they didn’t know what arts the other had devised, and some nasty and painful surprises came out of the meetings. Eventually, once you understood what your enem
y had, you could figure out a way around it; but “eventually” was the key term. Eventually, everybody died, and eventually, the universe would spin down; it was what you did until your time came that mattered.
Mourn and Cayne lay in bed after making love, and she said, “So, how does it feel to be Third, Mourn? Two men away from the top? You excited?”
He considered it for a moment before he spoke. “Not really,” he said. “How weird is that?” And that was the truth of it. He wasn’t excited. He was more interested in testing what he had built than in the ranking he had achieved. Doing it right, win or lose.
“Goals change, Mourn. You grow, and things don’t seem as important as they once were.”
Out of the mouths of babes. Yeah. He was beginning to see that.
He wasn’t sure that he liked it. You get to the top of the mountain you’ve been climbing most of your life and once there, you decide you don’t like the view?
How crappy was that?
He wasn’t at the top yet, and he still might not get there, but he was close enough that it didn’t seem like such a long haul. And the view? Better than at the base, but . . . not really all that special . . .
“Who the fuck is Lazlo Mourn?” Shaw was irritated, and the question was rhetorical—he was alone when he said it.
This guy, had to be five or six years older than Shaw, came out of nowhere after having bounced around in the low Twenties and high Teens forever. A solid fighter, better than a lot, but nothing to make the Top Ten lose any sleep until lately, when he started to tear through them like a needler punching holes in tissue paper! How?
Could it be that Mourn had some kind of chemical aid, too?
Could it be? And if so, was it better than the one Shaw had?
No, that was not possible. Shaw knew his field. He was at the cutting edge and everybody else was far behind. Nobody could have come up with Reflex on his own without leaving a wide trail, and he had people looking all the time. It was something else. Some new trick, and it had to be pretty good for Mourn to have beaten the players he’d defeated.
It would be nice to know what the trick was.
A rumor had it, somebody had recorded Mourn’s recent fights—a documentarian, from what Shaw’s agents could determine, but nobody seemed able to find her to make an offer for her footage. Nobody had a name or location for her, only that she had been there and caught the fights.
