Caine Black Knife

THE CAINE WAY

RETREAT FROM THE BOEDECKEN (partial)

You are CAINE (featured Actor: Pfnl. Hari Michaelson)

MASTER: NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.

© 2187 Adventures Unlimited Inc. All rights reserved.

“ Tizarre-!” I hiss as loud as I dare. “Tizarre, goddammit. .”

The next flare of summer lightning shows only the back of her neck and the strings of her mouse-brown hair. She hasn’t moved. Not even a twitch from her limp-fingered hands, corpse-pale above the knotted rope that holds her arms and head and shoulders above the half-liquid muck of rotting flesh and marrow-sucked bones, scraps of unidentifiable vegetables, old puke and softening turds.“

While the rumble of thunder rolls past the camp, I scratch up a fistful of sand and gravel. No point in calling anymore; any louder and it might not matter how good my improvised ghillie suit is. Some alert Black Knife buck might start to wonder why a pile of scrub and rock near the edge of the slop pit is suddenly stage-whispering in a human voice.

Pretty soon somebody’s gonna notice there’s one too many piles anyway.

I push my fist out from under the ghillie’s rope fringe and drop some gravel into the the slop pit’s darkness. Onto my best guess at the back of her neck. “Tizarre-!”

The night gives me a long, cold wait for the next flash of lightning. If she’s dead, I’m completely fucked. I can’t do this without her. Maybe I can still run. Maybe. Maybe if I hadn’t taken out so many pickets and gotten the fuckers thousand-amped about their perimeter, I would have had a shot.

God damn you worthless weak fucking whiny sack of shit whore, you better not be-

When the lightning finally comes, it shows my fondest hope: a flicker of white above the slop pit’s muck: one of Tizarre’s eyes, turned up toward the ragged rim of night sky.

“Who. . z’there?” Her voice is as dead as her hands. “How d’you know m’name?”

“Keep it down, for fuck’s sake,” I hiss at her. “It’s Caine. We need to-”

“Caine?” Blank and dull. Not even a spark. “How-?”

“Never mind that. We need to get you out of there.”

Silence.

“Tizarre?”

“I-don’t, Caine. I can’t. Don’t make me. Just let me die.”

Not fucking likely. “Don’t quit on me now, Tizarre. Not now. I need you.Marade needs you.”

A whisper from the darkness: “I can’t. . feel my legs, Caine. I can’t feel anything. They. . they cut me before they hung me in here. . Storm’s coming. I can end it. I can drown. .”

Huh. If she wanted to drown in other people’s shit, she could’ve just stayed home.

“I can help you. I found stuff, Tizarre-”

Fuck it anyway. “Stuff from home, Tizarre.”

Another flash of summer lightning.

Both her eyes are open now. “Home?”

“Yeah. I’ve been home. You get it?”

“Marade-before they took her, she said-she said you promised-if they took you home-”

“Yeah, I promised.”

I let the thunder roll past before I go on.

People who have moral qualms with bald fucking lies don’t become Eso-terics in the first place. What I am about to say won’t give me the slightest twinge.

“And here I am. I came back for her. I came back for you. Because she’ll never leave you behind.”

Another flash-and her eyes are wide now, and they seem to hold the light. Her voice is still a whisper, but its hush is no longer lifeless. “You-you came back here-to save us. .”

“I can’t do it alone, Tizarre. I need you. We can save Marade.”

Thunder rolls by. Louder.

Some god sounds angry.

“We can save everybody.”

The next flash of lightning gives me the answer on her filth-crusted face, and that answer gives me a brief sick twist just below my heart.

Maybe I was lying about that not the slightest twinge part, too.

››scanning fwd››

The thunder crashes before the flare of lightning fades, and the cloudburst roar almost covers her half-strangled snarls as her hands twitch and shudder and spasm themselves back to life.

“. . nahh . . shit-” The rain erases any tears before they reach her cheeks. The cords bulging from her jaw to her collarbone pick up faerie-fire highlights from the faint blue glow of the gluey mud that packs the bandages on her legs. “Never thought I’d be happy to hurt this bad. .”

I shrug at her from the doorway. “Pain’s just God’s way of reminding you you’re alive.”

“Then. . gahhh. . maybe I need a kinder god. .”

“We all do.” I come out of my squat. “That’s enough. Get too clean, you’ll smell human again.”

“All right.” She nods and wipes a smear of snot from her nose onto the back of one shaky forearm. “All right, help me in.”

I pull her back into the dry and settle her against a wall while I smear her bare feet with one of the last of the glands.

“What are you doing?”

“They can still track us if they try hard enough, but this way we at least won’t draw their noses unless they already know we’re here.”

“Those are-”

“Scent glands. Grills carry them under their jaws, in the palms of their hands and the soles of their feet. A subtler way of marking territory than just pissing around.”

“You-cut them out? Out of their-”

“What do you think keeps me ahead of these fuckers? Good looks and charm? Come on.” I pick her up, sling her arm over my shoulder, and half carry her into the winding dark.

“Where are we going?”

The one safe place in the entire fucking Boedecken. “Somewhere you can’t get to until you’ve already been there.”

Deep into the black. I count steps, listening for rainfall ahead, landmarks where the ceilings have caved in. Up and up, and up some more, and she’s gasping against my shoulder. “How do you-don’t they search?”

“Not on foot. Not anymore.” Her weight turns my chuckle into a grunt. “I guess they decided that’s a bad idea.”

“But-magick? They have magick-”

“It’s not-” Shit, she’s getting heavier. “-thaumaturgy. It’s theurgy. They have to petition their god for power.”

“So?”

“So I killed their high fucking priestess. The big bitch with the headdress of black feathers.”

“You-how could you possibly-?”

“Easier than you think. You could say it was luck, but I don’t think so.”

Now I do manage a low laugh. A real one, dark as the storm outside. “I’m pretty sure their god’s on my side.”

››scanning fwd››

She huddles against the dust-dry rock, arms crossed over her breasts, dripping dirty rain into the sand. The rose-pale glow from the Tear puts a blush on her bare skin that could make her look healthy, if not for the shivering, if not for the pain and bleak horror in her eyes.

“It was really here,” she keeps murmuring while I dig through the pile of old bones and armor and weapons and shit for a tunic and pants and boots. “It was really here, all this time. .”

“Yeah.”

“And we never would have found it.”

“Yeah. That’s the magick on it. If I’d been looking for it, I couldn’t have found it either.”

Her eyes are wide. I wish it could be wonder. “This is. . all this gear. . it’s from home?”

“Nah.” I give her an apologetic shake of the head. “That was. . well, this is mostly shit I found here. We’re not the first people in the last thousand years to come hunting the Tear. Some of them died here for reasons other than Black Knives.”

“But-”

“And some of it’s our shit. Some of it’s stuff I took off Black Knives this past day. They were carrying useful things besides their scent-mark glands.”

Awe wipes the pain-twist from her face. “You’re the skinwalker.”

“The what?”

“A monster-a shapeshifter-kind of the ogrillo boogeyman.” She smears wet hair back from her eyes. “I heard them talking about it-about you-”

“You understand them? You speak their language?”

“No, nothing like that-it’s magick, kind of a limited telepathy-just something I’d do when they’d be close enough to hear-to, to take my mind off-”

“Yeah.”

“They said you’d gotten off the scaffold, but-they said you were dead. You had to be. Some of the bucks were saying a skinwalker’s stalking the camp-it can walk through walls, turn invisible, read minds, and it can look like anyone it kills-it takes their skins and wears them, and it becomes them on the outside, but inside it’s a monster. .”

“A skinwalker.” Huh. I like it. Must be why they stopped stalking me-a little superstitious terror goes a long way. And there I was, skinning the bastards only because it makes the bodies look like hell on a stick.

Just lucky, I guess.

“Yeah.” I flex my hands. I like the way they feel. “Yeah, that was me.”

“But you-you have been home, though? You’re going to take us home-you said. . you said you’d take us. .”

“I said what I had to say to get you out of that fucking pit.”

Air squeezes from her chest. “You. .”

“I need you alive and fighting, Tizarre. I’ve got shit here that can clean out your infections and give you back some strength. I’ve got food and weapons and some armor and some magick stuff that I’m not even sure what it is. But none of it would’ve done you any good down there. None of it’ll do you any good up here if you’re not game to use it.”

“I. .” She wraps her arms over her tiny breasts and can’t look at me. “Down. . down in that hole. .”

“Yeah.” I squat next to her and lay the tunic over her chest. “I’m not gonna pretend to know what it was like for you down there. But I went through some shit these last few days myself, y’know?”

Her fingers are working well enough to grasp the tunic and draw it around her like a blanket. “Yes. Yes, I know. But you-you were always strong. .”

“Nah. Just dirt mean.”

Now she can look at me again. Now I can see the tears.

“This is what I figure,” I tell her. “I’ve been through some shit before this, too. Nothing this bad. Nothing as bad as what they did to you. Nothing as bad as what they’re doing to Marade right now.”

“Marade. .” she echoes, hollow and distant and sad. “What are they doing to her?”

“It’s. . bad. Worse than what they did to me. Worse than what they did to you.”

“Oh. . oh, gods.” Fresh tears now. “Oh, gods, I can’t stand it. .”

“She can.”

Mouse-brown brows draw together.

“That’s the thing about Khryllians. That’s the gift of Khryl. It’s a rough fucking gift, but it’s there. She can survive anything except giving up.”

“She won’t. She’ll never give up-”

“She will when she finds out you’re dead.”

“Oh. .” Her eyes widen again, and her mouth goes slack. “But, but I’m-”

“That’s why you have to pull your shit together. Now. When this storm stops and they look into that slop pit and all they see above the surface is that pair of dead arms I hung in that rope-”

Her shaking’s getting worse.

“I can’t do it for you, Tizarre. It’s your power. You’re the thaumaturge. You can do Cloak. You can walk right into the middle of that fucking camp.”

“You-you want me to-go back in there-?”

“You have to.”

“I-can’t. Caine, I can’t-”

“You can. That’s the thing. That’s what I’m trying to get through to you. You’re stronger than you think you are. I’ve seen other people go through shit. Some of it worse than this. I know something about how people survive. How people live with it. It’s not complicated. It’s just hard, that’s all.”

“Hard.” She laughs now, and there’s a bright brittle edge to it. “Hard?”

“Yeah. You just keep fighting. No matter what. You just have to not quit.”

“Caine-”

“It’s the same for regular people as it is for Khryllians. We can survive anything except giving up. Sure, for them it works for their bodies too-but screw that anyway. As long as you don’t quit, all these fuckers can do is kill you.”

Maim you, blind you, cripple you, leave you brain-damaged and drooling, whatever. . but a good lie trumps a bad truth every time. I put a hand on her arm. “Dying’s not the worst that can happen.”

That’s true enough, anyway.

“You don’t understand.” Her shivering’s getting worse, despite the tunic. Guess it doesn’t have anything to do with cold. “I did quit. I gave up. I was screaming. . begging. .”

“Yeah, me too.”

Once again, white appears around the rims of her irises.

I shrug at her. “They broke me like a rotten fucking stick. So what? They break everybody. It’s what they do.”

“But-but-”

“But that was then.” I stand up. “Fuck then. Then is over. Fight now.”

“I–I don’t know if I-”

“They have Marade chained facedown over a pile of rocks. Naked. In the middle of the camp. So the whole clan can watch while the bucks take turns on her.”

“Caine-Caine, don’t-”

“You know why she’s still alive? It’s not just because she’s Khryllian, Tizarre. Yeah, her god Heals her, because she fights. Every time. She fights every time. But you know why she fights every time?”

I shift my squat in front of her and take her arms, so she can’t look away from me. “It’s because I’m not on that cross anymore.”

“Caine-”

“It’s because you might still need her.”

“I-”

“Are you gonna leave her there?” I give her a shake. “Are you?”

“How can you-how can you put this on me?”

“Because it is on you. It’s on both of us. Because there’s nobody else.”

I show her some teeth.

“Because I have a plan.”

››scanning fwd››

The rush of rain becomes a sizzle. Then a hush. Fading thunder rolls away to the east.

Time to go.

I lean into the rope harness hard enough to scrape bloody hemp-burns up my chest and over my shoulders. The sledge lurches into motion, and I drag it out toward the night.

My night.

It’s a good night to die, fuckers.

The Black Knife camp spreads rain-smoking watch fires across the badlands, three hundred feet below.

Out along the parapet. .

There’s still enough hush in the misting drizzle to cover the grind of the sledge through sand and over wet stone, and I am taking no chances because night and hard stone can play tricks with sound. The weight of the sledge counterbalances me only a couple hand spans off the rock. One of the skids catches on a corner of crumbled wall, and a couple of the barrels tip loose of my half-assed lashings and tumble off. I scramble out of the harness and dive for them before they can roll out a gap in the retaining wall.

Not yet. Not here.

My hands shiver and jerk while I struggle to get the barrels secured back onto the sledge. For sure this time.

Details. It’s always the little fucking details that kill you.

Come on, goddammit. My fingers just won’t for shit’s sake cooperate, and the stress floods out my Control-enhanced nightsight until I’m fumbling blind and I am not going to bitch this up. I’m not. Not this time.

When the barrels are finally back in place, I check the lashing on the chest that holds the bottles, and the rags that wrap and wick them. If I lose those. .Solid. Solid. All right. Keep breathing. It’s all right.

Back in the harness. A few breaths brings the parapet back to a ghostly grey-blush shimmer in my peripheral vision. Good enough. Let’s go.

And I go.

But-

Fuck.

Taking too long. Too much scraping. And I just don’t have the strength. Without the pain to remind me, I keep forgetting how fucked up I still am.

Should’ve dry-run this thing. But how could I? Too late now anyway.

Just push.

I lean deeper into the harness. Rope grinds through skin and muscle and burns into bone okay not really but still it feels like hot staggering fuck-

Fucking push.

It’s too loud the rain’s stopped they can’t hear me but they can, I know they can hear me and I can’t go any faster but I just can’t get there push goddammit push-

I make the point just as my knees give out. I slip the harness and throw myself into the point’s muddy sand and let the blood from my chest and shoulders mix with the puddles while I try to figure out how I’m ever gonna get my breath.

“Caine-”

I jerk and spasm onto my back and roll to my feet by reflex with knives in my hands before I register that it was Tizarre’s voice. I fade from the lip of the point and get my back to a wall.

“Shit,” I mutter through my teeth as I put away the knives. “Might as well, y’know, slap my balls or something. Be nicer.”

A hand I cannot see attached to an arm I cannot see lands lightly on my shoulder, and a shuddering wave of dream-wakening twists through my mind because I can see her, and now that I can, I know I always could. . but only with my eyes. Not with my brain.

Until she decided to let me.

Thaumaturges creep the shit out of me, and Cloak is one of the reasons why.

“Everyone’s as ready as I can make them.” She has the bladewand, and she offers it to me butt-first. “Any fucker close to Marade when the show starts is in for a hell of a surprise.”

I take the bladewand. “I’ll bet.”

“You have no idea.” Her face is still bleak, but now a grim fire glimmers deep in her eyes. “Instead of the shackles on her wrists, she had me half cut the staples that fix the chains to the stone.”

“Um.”

The image is vivid: Marade rising naked from that pile of rubble while from each hand three feet of chain as thick as my wrist screams into a lethal iron blur-

Hell of a surprise is one way to put it, I guess.

Makes me wish I could be there to watch.

I stick the bladewand in the top of my boot and extend my hands. “Dawn’s coming. Set me up.”

She takes my left hand in one of hers. I get a faint half-orange image of her licking her lips, frowning. “It should really be, y’know, copper or silver paint-”

“Blood’ll be fine. Do it.”

“You do it.”

I pull a dagger and gash the base of my thumb; she catches my blood in the cup of her palm. “Have you ever done this before? Used a Shout?”

“I know how it works.”

She nods. “Don’t forget to cover your ears.”

“Yeah.”

“This’ll take a little bit. Go ahead with the oil barrels now. After I do your hands, you can’t use them for anything else.”

I put the dagger away and draw the bladewand out of my boot. “Get on it.”

She stares down at the pool of blood in her palm and starts taking the deep, slow, regular breaths that will drop her into mindview. The blood begins to shimmer with a faint alcohol-flame glow that casts no light.

A twist of intention sends a blue plane of force flickering out from the tip of the bladewand; the lashings on the barrels fall away, and the tops of the barrels themselves slip sideways on glass-smooth cuts. I slap the top off the first one and just tip it over. Oil floods out onto the point, oozing and rolling and twisting over the water-soaked sand, flowing thick and sluggish down toward the apex, where the wall has fallen away. I kick the second one off the other side of the sledge and let it spill there, then lift the third and the fourth carefully to the gap in the retaining wall and set them there as the spilled oil begins to roll over the lip and drain along branching channels below.

“Caine-” Her voice has that spooky emptiness; she’s still in mindview. “Now.”

I scrub oil and grit from my palms onto my breeches, then give her my hands. She dips a forefinger into my blue-shimmering blood.

Humming under her breath, she paints sigils in blood on my palms. Pretty soon she lets my hands drop and brings her finger to my face, painting around my mouth and up onto my cheeks. After a few seconds of this, she sighs, and full consciousness swims back up to the surface of her eyes.

“All right.” She gives herself a little shake. “Whenever you’re ready.”

My breath goes short, whistling faintly through my clamped-tight throat. “Get in position.”

“Caine-” She squints against a half-strangled cough. “We won’t live through this, will we?”

“Hard to say.” I shrug to cover the shakes that are starting to ripple along my arms. “A couple days ago, I would have said no way. But my luck’s been running good lately.”

“When I-” Another cough, choked, with maybe a little bit of sob behind it. “When I was telling Marade the plan, Whispering to her-y’know, the diversion, the rendezvous, everything-she started to cry. It’s the-I’ve never seen her cry, Caine. I don’t think. . what they did to her. . But she started to cry when I told her the plan, and I asked her-well, she just said she was grateful, that’s all. She kept saying thanks. But not for the, y’know, the escape. The rescue.”

She swallows. “For the chance to hit back.”

My eyes burn. Not with tears. “Yeah.”

“That’s what I want to say too. Thanks. For the chance to hit back.”

“It’s more than a chance,” I tell her. “You remember what I said the night they took us, how the Black Knives would remember us for a thousand years?”

“But that was just-”

“Yeah, it was. Then.”

Storm clouds part. Stars wink into being.

“You and I, Tizarre, right here, right now-”

Can she see my teeth?

“-we just might make it true.”

››scanning fwd››

Even the wind goes still. Rich fruity fumes steam up from the oil on the point.

From the apex, the Black Knife camp is a clutter of cinders and ash and smolder like a kicked-out campfire. The cinders are the hide tents, the ashes are knots of bachelor males sleeping out under the stars and the rain, and the smolder is the remains of watch fires burning down now with the approach of dawn.

I’m in place. Go.

I don’t bother to signal her that I heard.

She’ll figure it out.

Vengeance is mine saith the Lord but this morning He’s gonna fucking well have to share.

I press my painted palms to my painted cheeks. I draw as deep a breath as I can and open my mouth as far as it’ll go, then clap my hands once, crisp and sharp, in front of my open mouth.

It makes a sound like most of the Boedecken just exploded.

The magick of the Shout directs the sound away from me, but still the blast is physical, staggering me, buckling my knees and smacking stars into my eyes.

Cover my fucking ears too fucking right-!

Like I have any hearing left to lose.

I can’t even imagine what it must have sounded like to the Black Knives, but that sleepy kicked-through campfire just became a kicked-over anthill as ogrilloi jump up and rush out of their tents and spin around and fumble for weapons and probably shout and howl and squeal, if I could hear them, and I’m not even started yet.

Now I do cover my ears, and I Shout:

YOU

WERE

WARNED

The sound is too vast to be called speech: it is as though the escarpment itself roars at them. The anthill of Black Knives slows, and stops. Dim smears of ogrillo faces turn toward the sky.

THIS PLACE

IS MINE

With a foot, I tip one of the remaining oil barrels carefully, so that it pours over the lip of the point into the branching stone channels that drain down the face of the vertical city.

I SAID

I WOULD FEED YOU

YOUR FUTURE

On cue, the spill of oil running down the channels catches fire.

Good girl.

Rivers of flame cascade across the face of the vertical city, spreading through a delta of absolute darkness. And fire licks back up the channels as well, climbing, converging into a giant burning arrow.

Pointing exactly at where I stand.

BUT I AM

A MERCIFUL GOD

I tip over the final barrel of oil and skip back away from the point as the flames claw through the gap and the whole point becomes a pillar of fire fifty feet tall.

I WON’T MAKE YOU

EAT IT

RAW

I’m still chuckling as I get the first of the bottles out of the chest and ignite the wicks at the burning trickle where I tipped the first oil barrel. Even there it’s hot enough that I have to shield my face with my arm and I can smell my hair starting to crisp, but I don’t care, I’m chuckling anyway. It sounds like God playing dice with planets.

Didn’t think that was funny? Watch this.

I heave a burning bottle high out off the parapet and follow it with another, little specks of whippy flame snapping through long arcs down into the fading night, and turn back to the chest for a couple more before those two hit the ground. I don’t need to watch them land. I know where they’re going to hit.

I may be a crappy shot, but I throw really, really well.

At the retaining wall with two more lit in my hands, I wind up-

Caine-what are you doing?

Not really a Whisper. Is there a spell called Snarl?

I launch the bottle anyway before I look down at her red-lit form a level below.

WHY THE FUCK

ARE YOU STILL THERE?

The Shout makes my head ring. She flinches and covers her ears, but a second later she’s back at the wall down there waving an arm down at the Black Knife camp. Down at the flames spreading from where my oil bombs landed. Down at the crowded creche. Crowded with screaming cubs.

Screaming burning cubs. Burning juvie bucks. Burning juvie bitches.

The pregnant ones.

That’s not the plan! Those are-those are children-!

GET MOVING

GODDAMMIT

But they’re only children-babies-they never did anything-

I fling the other bottle. It shatters against stone ten feet from where she’s standing.

She has to skip back along her parapet to avoid the splash of flame, and in the brighter light down there now, I can see the horror and loathing on her face, and I don’t give half a squirt of runny fucking shit.

MOVE

OR YOU GET THE NEXT ONE

IN THE FACE

With one last look of pure outraged betrayal, she turns and runs.

Down below, somebody’s already unbarring the gate of the creche, and the whole camp is alive. Arrows clatter around me. Everybody who’s not scrambling to save the cubs is either shooting at me or sprinting up into the vertical city.

Works for me.

I turn back to the chest of bottles. If I really want to roast the little shits, I better get busy.

››scanning fwd››

“Tizarre, goddammit-!” How many times have I said that today?

I whip into a spin-kick that slams my right heel into the Shield hard enough to rattle my own damn teeth, but beyond the shimmering curve, the rose-pale glow of the Tear shows nothing but a tightening in the white pinch around her eyes. This is a hell of a time for her to discover she’s got real power.

Not to mention a conscience.

Standing among the shreds of bone and armor beyond the Tear of Panchasell, arms wrapped around her narrow chest to squeeze down her shivers, she looks like she’s ready to just stand there and watch. “You never said anything about killing their cubs.”

She has completely bone-my-ass cracked. “I’m sorry, all right? I promise I’ll fucking suffer for it the rest of my life if you’ll just fucking let me in-”

“Those were children, Caine-you never said you were-”

“If I had,” I snarl at her, “would you have helped?”

“Of course not!”

“There’s your fucking answer, then.”

Here they come on my trail now. Hear those howls echoing along the empty cavernways? Hear that blind ravening rage? Hear that pain? Sounds to me like they want to rip open their own guts with their bare hands and claw the pain out so they can stuff it down my throat till I strangle.

I probably shouldn’t let her see my grin.

Tizarre can hear their pain too: I can see it on her face, in her pinching-down eyes and the white smears where her lips should be.

“What are you gonna do? Leave me out here? With them?”

“I should-”

I slide a hand around to the back of my belt, onto the butt of the blade-wand. “The only thing you should do is make up your fucking mind before they make it up for you.”

“What am I going to tell Marade?”

Oh, for shit’s sake. “Tell her? She’s watching it right now-don’t be such a fucking baby-”

“Don’t say that to me-you don’t get to say that to me-”

Yeah, fair enough, not the best image, I’ll apologize if I live through this but right now those howls are close enough that they’re raising hairs on the back of my neck, and I’m starting to hear feet on stone and screw this anyway.

I pull out the bladewand and jam its business end against her Shield and necessity triggers a surge of intention that sends shearing force out from the tip. The Shield collapses in a cascade of sparks and she staggers and I spring into the chamber and just barely stop myself from stabbing her in the eye for being a whining weak-ass cunt.

Instead I keep on going past her toward the Tear. “Get that fucking Shield back up!”

“Caine-”

“No time for your shit. Do it!”

The Tear of Panchasell shimmers at me from its pedestal of solid gold, a private sunset the size of my head. Runic cirrus-ripples curve and twist across its surface and sink beneath as well, sucking my gaze into its rose-diamond depths.

I lift my own slice of sky: the electric sizzle of the bladewand’s edge.

“Caine-”

A thousand years ago, if the stories are true: Panchasell Mithondionne, near-immortal High King of the First Folk, weeping as he labored over his masterwork, an aeon of Primal lore guiding the hand of the greatest adept in the history of the race-the history of the world-to create a Thing of Power that is also a thing of beauty, a song in crystal, a dream of peace made solid to defend his people and this world. .

And here I am, a vicious little ghetto punk whose whole life wouldn’t be an eyeblink to the least of the First Folk, about to cut the fucking thing in half. Because somebody they never heard of pissed me off.

That, my friends, is a deep lesson about how the world works.

Which is when Tizarre finally does get my attention, not by calling my name but with an ear-shattering blast that sucks all the air in the chamber into a whirl that follows the sideways column of flame roaring from her hands out into the cavernway I just came from, and she’s got the black iron head of an ogrillo arrow sticking a span out from her left kidney and that is exactly the down payment on what we might both have to pay for me being too fucking sentimental to pull the trigger, because a flight of arrows they got off just in time comes bursting through the ass end of her Firebolt trailing flames of their own, and one’s coming straight for my face and I’m already falling into a shoulder roll and it just clips my forehead and I take the roll backward over something on the cavern floor that rams into my own kidney hard enough that I can’t even make it all the way back to my feet because my knees have gone to cloth-

And the bladewand’s off.

From the floor I point it at the Tear and call upon my will and all I get is a scorch on my palm from the eggbutt and that hiss of blue static discharge from the tip.

“Caine-”

Now her voice is a half-strangled gurgle. She’s got a sickly smile behind blood on her mouth, and both hands wrapped around the arrow shaft sticking out of her belly. She retches more blood. “Sorry-I’m sorry-”

“Don’t be sorry. Just fucking stop them till I make this thing work, then we can get out of here-”

“Stop them? There are thousands-you made sure they’ll never stop-”

Goddamn right.

I try for my feet, but again my knees buckle, and I catch myself with a hand on the knob of rock that jammed my kidney-

Huh-huh-did you-

Did you see that?

Was that my eyes, or just in my head?

When I touched the rock, there was-

A severed hand-I was-she was-he and me and she-pinned through the spine-staring into the sky, taking the hand of a kneeling man, cut in half and the waterfall’s spray falling into my open, staring eyes, my own face above among the buildings and the blade driving toward my forehead and-

And where my hand is on the rock, the rock isn’t rock. Not anymore. It’s the hilt of a sword.

And where I touch, this hilt sings with the high humming whine of Power. .

I look up at Tizarre. She blinks at me. “What-what’s happening-?”

“What always happens,” I say, because that is what I always say now.

She nods, because she understands. “What happens next? Is there a next?”

“You already know.”

She nods again.

I toss her the bladewand. It hangs eternally in the air. It is in her hand before it ever leaves mine. Before she catches it, she has turned away, though she still faces me and will forever.

“Keep it,” I tell her. “It’s yours. I don’t need it anymore.” I stand, and the Sword cuts free of the rock. It shrieks in my hand.

I hold it poised above the Tear of Panchasell.

Long and straight and heavy, its blade is the color of mirror-polished tungsten. The runes deep-graven from forte to tip are graceful and smooth as brushtrokes, and they burn with fire so black that my eye cannot hold them; they shift and twist and shimmer and crawl along the blade, sucking light from the air. .

I have never seen anything like the Sword. I have known the Sword for lifetimes.

When it destroys the Tear, it will break the Power’s hold upon the river. A river choked for a thousand years will shatter this place and burst free through these chambers. Will crash from the face of the vertical city upon the camp below.

In my hand is the death of the Black Knives, and their rebirth.

Their death is today.

When the edge carves into the Tear, it screams like I’m murdering the world.

And maybe I am.

››scanning fwd››

Dawn at my back ignites the rainbow.

Beyond huge. . solid as Bifrost in the billows of my waterfall’s spray. .

One foot stretches out from the face of what was the city’s fifth tier, high above; the other is grounded somewhere out in the vast mist-shrouded sea wrack that used to be the Black Knife camp.

That’s my pot of gold. Right there. In the endless earth-shaking thunder of my waterfall, I can imagine the echoes of Black Knife screams.

Somewhere to the south, a new river rolls down the Boedecken Waste, black with mud and shreds of tent, shattered wagons and broken bodies.

I look upon the work of my hand, and it is good.

Only one flaw in the plan so far: the rendezvous is far enough away from the waterfall’s thunder that I can still hear the idiots argue. About me.

I lean against the wall outside the shattered gape of what used to be a window, where the nine survivors are dressing themselves in the clothing I brought for them, treating whatever wounds Marade can’t Heal with supplies I gave them, and eating and drinking food and water I provided for them, while they all talk about how they just can’t trust me.

“-it doesn’t make sense.” Marade’s still standing up for me, at least. Sounds like she’s the only one. “If his sole need was revenge, why risk the rescue at all? He could as easily have left me-left me-”

Even from out here, I can hear the choke. She can’t say it.

“Where we were,” she finishes lamely. “He could have done what has been done without even your help, though unleashing the river would have cost his life-”

That much is true.

“You weren’t there,” Tizarre says. “None of you. You didn’t see him. You didn’t hear him.”

“And the cubs-I mean, so what?” This from Jashe the Otter. “How many would have lived through the river thing, anyway?”

“That’s my point,” Tizarre says. “Why . . do that? Why the show?”

“Diversion,” Marade says, but she doesn’t sound too sure of it.

“That’s what he said. That’s what he told me it was about. To make sure they’d chase him up into the city. To thin them out on the ground and give you all a better chance to escape-but then he hit their children. So more of them stayed. To protect the children.”

“Well, I don’t care,” somebody else says. “I’m just damn grateful to be alive.”

“You say that now,” Tizarre insists darkly. “But he’s not done with us. That’s why the rescue. He still has a use for us. That’s the only reason. Just wait. You’ll see.”

Another man might be offended. I probably would be, if she were wrong. But, y’know, some Black Knives can probably swim.

I stare out at my waterfall. At my rainbow. The rainbow is a promise from God that there will never be another Flood.

I don’t plan to need one.

Fuck punishment. This is about extinction.