Caine Black Knife

FIREARMS

A handful of customs inspectors worked their way among the crates and nets and cargo pallets. They wore circlets of what I guessed might be electrum strapped around their skulls; from those circlets depended an array of individually jointed mechanical arms, each of which supported a lens. The lenses varied in size and color, and the inspectors would squint through each in turn while examining a suspect container. They looked bored, as did the inspector who stood beside the passenger queue, similarly scrutinizing hand luggage.

I smiled bland-friendly as the inspector examined me and my trunk through a succession of six different lenses. All I had with me were clothes, toiletries and gold. The inspector frowned. “You show positive for weapons.”

“Can’t help that.”

“Extend your hands.”

I did, palms up. Open. Empty.

The inspector switched lenses, then nodded to himself, muttering as he jotted notes on his clipboard. “Crimson, grade six-arms, legs. . hmp. And head.” He looked up. “Monastic?”

“Used to be.”

He nodded. “Very well. Pass along. Be advised that Khryl does not recognize Monastic sovereignty. On the Battleground, you are fully subject to the Laws of Engagement.”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“Be sure to examine the Laws in your visitor’s guide. Monastic training beyond grade four designates you an Armed Combatant at all times. Unarmed Exemption never applies.”

“Grade four?”

“Combat grades are detailed in your copy of the Laws. Grades beyond four involve the use of magick. Or, in your case, Esoteric Control Disciplines.”

“You seem to know more than most about Monastics.”

“I am a Soldier of Khryl. We know more than most about fighting.”

“Huh. Fair enough.” I leaned a little closer and lowered my voice. “You get a lot of trouble with that stuff?” I nodded toward the poster. “Firearms and explosives?”

“More every day. Ever see what a gun can do to a man?”

“Once or twice.”

The inspector shrugged down at the paper on his clipboard. “Bombs are worse.”

“I’d rather get blown up than a couple other things I could name.”

“Yes.” The inspector squinted up. “Know anything about the Smoke Hunt?”

The back of my neck tingled. Smoke Hunt. Like an echo of something I almost heard. . Finally I shrugged. “Fuck all.”

“May Khryl grant you keep it that way. Pass along.”

I shuffled forward. This trip was turning interesting already. Not in a good way. But I hadn’t expected good.

The stamp clerk at the head of the line didn’t bother to look up. “Name and nation.”

“Dominic Shade.” I fished documents out of a worn leather purse that hung from my belt. “Freeman of Ankhana.”

The clerk took the documents from his hand and opened them, but instead of reading them he glanced to one side, where a mountain of blond human in glittering plate armor stood at parade rest, visored greathelm under his left arm. The mountain scowled faintly, staring.

I gave the mountain back the ghost of a smile. I learned twenty-five years ago that I can’t be read by the truthsense of even the most powerful Khryllian Lord. And nobody better than Knight Attendant-barely out of novitiate-gets stuck with shit duty like checkpoint verification.

Not that it mattered; I was telling the truth. I mostly do.

Dominic’s the name I’d gone by when I first came to Home, playing a promising novice at the Abbey of Garthan Hold. In the depths of the gambling hells of Kirisch-Nar, where men fight beasts barehanded in the star-shaped arenas called catpits, I am still remembered as Shade. I was granted the freedom of the Ankhanan Empire some three years ago-not long after I murdered the Empire’s god.

But let that part go.

The Knight’s lips tightened. The clerk nodded absently. “Welcome to Purthin’s Ford, Freeman Shade. I see here you are Armed grade six-impressive for an Incommunicant. Monastic?”

“Retired.”

“Ah. Very well.” He made a note. “Current occupation?”

“Business traveler.”

“Really?” The clerk sniffed and looked up through his brows. “We don’t often see Armed Combatants making careers in sales. What’s your line?”

“Wholesale weights and measures.”

“Indeed.”

I tipped a bland wink toward the Knight Attendant. “Prepare, lest ye be weighed and found wanting, know what I mean?”

The Knight Attendant’s left eyebrow twitched. Fractionally.

“Yes.” The clerk sounded less impressed than the Knight looked. “Duration and purpose of your visit?”

“A few days. Maybe a week or two.”

“And you’re here on business?”

Maybe it was worth telling the truth here, too. “I’m here to see my brother.”

“His name?”

“Orbek.”

“Orbek Shade?”

“No.” I deadpanned the scowling Knight. “Black Knife. Orbek Black Knife. Sept Taykar.”

The Knight’s scowl evaporated into blank astonishment. The clerk dropped his pencil, fumbled for it. Charcoal crumbled in his fingers. “Oh, very funny.” He brushed at charcoal crumbs, smearing black across his table.

“If you say so.”

“What’s his name?”

I nodded at the Knight. “Ask him.”

The clerk turned, mouth opening. The Knight’s astonishment had now given way to naked suspicion. “Our Lord hears no lie.”

The clerk pointed his gape back my way. “Your brother’s an ogrillo?”

“Is that a problem?” I turned a palm upward. “Other than for my mother?”

“I, ah, I ah, I-don’t know. I suppose not, er-”

The Knight’s eyes narrowed over a mouth gone hard. “You claim this socalled Black Knife as brother?”

“How many times do you want me to say it?”

“There are no Black Knives in Purthin’s Ford.” The Knight turned away, lifting a finger clad in jointed steel. A liveried page scampered toward him, and the Knight spoke in tones too low to be heard through the general bustle.

Couldn’t read his lips, either. Call it a wash.

The page headed for the cityside door at a walk with an eager tilt of the torso that hinted it wanted to be a run.

Call it a wash with dirty water.

I pushed a sigh through my teeth. “So all right, let’s go, huh?”

The clerk looked blank. “I’m sorry?”

“Is there a law against family visits? Is there some goddamn tax to pay? Do I need a dispensation from the friggin’ Justiciar?”

“I, ah, well-no, I don’t-”

“Then stamp my fucking papers, huh? It stinks in here.”

“Freeman Shade.” That mountain of Khryllian steel and meat loomed at my shoulder. “Soldiers of Khryl are treated with courtesy. And deference.”

“Yeah?” I showed teeth to eyes as blue and empty as a winter sky while I channeled the ghost of me at twenty-five. “Hey, sorry.”

I turned back to the clerk. “Please stamp my fucking papers.”

There came the metallic rustle that is the only sound well-tended armor makes when its wearer shifts his weight; it didn’t quite bury the strangled growl the Knight failed to lock inside his throat. “Soldiers of Khryl are not spoken to in this manner-”

“No? Then I guess just now we all must’ve, what, nodded off and had the same dream?” I showed more teeth. “Does this mean we’re in love?”

Cunningly jointed gauntlets creaked with the clench of fists. “Freeman Shade, you are Armed as you stand, and your manner constitutes Lawful Challenge. Must I Answer?”

The second half of my life leaked back into me with a long, slow sigh of old-enough-to-know-better. I jammed the monster back in its vault, but I still had to lower my head before I could speak. Even at fifty, I can’t make myself back down while looking a man in the eye.

“No,” I said. “I apologize. To both of you.”

The Knight glowered into my peripheral vision, waiting for an explanation, an excuse, a Fatigue from my long journey or an I was only joking.

But I just stared at the floor.

“You apologize.”

“Yeah.” What do you want, flowers and a fucking box of candy? my young ghost snarled, but I fixed my gaze resolutely below the Knight’s chin and bit down till my jaw ached.

The Knight took a long, slow breath.

Then another.

“Accepted.”

“May I go now? Sir?”

The Knight lifted another finger, and another page scampered up. “Take the freeman’s trunk to the lucannixheril.”

“Hey-”

“Freeman Shade.” The Knight turned an open hand toward a nearby door of iron. It stood open. Down the hall beyond were more iron doors. They were closed. Each iron door had a head-high judas gate. “Wait in there. The page will direct you.”

“My papers-”

“You will not need them.”

“I said I was sorry-”

“And your apology was accepted. Wait in there.”

“Am I under arrest?”

The Knight inclined his very young, very blond head. “If you like.”

“For what?”

“Because it is my prerogative to declare you so, freeman.” His face could have been one of the walls. “As an Armed Combatant grade six, it is your right under the Laws of Engagement to Challenge my authority.” He nodded fractionally toward a sunlit opening on the far wall of the customs barn without shifting his expressionless gaze. “Should you wish to make such a Challenge, a sanctified Arena awaits through yonder archway.”

“Are you f-? Uh. You’re not.”

“The matter can also be settled here. You need only strike.”

“Strike.” I squinted at the Knight. The rules had changed since the last time I was in the Boedecken. Maybe because of the last time I was in the Boedecken.

The young Knight offered a bland smile that never rose past the temperate zone south of his arctic eyes. “If I have overstepped, Khryl will favor your cause; Our Lord of Valor is also lord of justice.”

“It’s a swell theory.” I lifted a hand to my face; a headache had begun to chew the backs of my eyes. “Have that page go easy on my trunk, will you? It’s new.”

The cell was immaculate.

Two doors, both of iron, scoured and freshly oiled; a wide barred window that let in the noonday quiet and a hint of autumn air; walls of whitewashed brick that smelled of clean chalk; comfortable cushions on the built-out brick benches along the walls; a gleaming brass chamberpot in one corner, and in the other, a small table with a pair of fired-clay beakers, an earthenware jug of cool water, a dish of dried fruit, shelled nuts, and a small plate with three different kinds of hard cheese.

Just about the nicest place I’d ever been locked up.

I’d said good-bye to Orbek. . what was it, four months ago? Had to be. It had been late spring when we made it back to Thorncleft after we settled the thing on the Korish border. Orbek got on the Ankhana train at the Railhead, going home to visit his old friends in the Warrens, he’d said.

To look up some family.

Now with the leaves turning to gold and red we were both on the Battleground, and somehow Orbek had made enough trouble that just mentioning his name bought a quiet afternoon in jail.

I didn’t waste time in worry, or energy in pacing. They’d let me out, or they wouldn’t.

After a while, I ate.

The sun fell fully on the outer wall of the cell. The brick got pleasantly warm. I stretched out on those comfortable cushions, laced fingers behind my head, and let the headache sew my eyes shut. And for a time I was twenty-five again, young and stupid and vicious, playing Beau Geste with the Black Knives in the vertical city. .

Despite what you’ve heard, I’m not stupid. I knew already what had been eating me up: that twenty-five-year-old kid. I don’t like remembering him. I don’t like sharing my life with him. I don’t like being reminded I haven’t changed all that much.

What’s really creepy is that I don’t like being reminded how much I have changed.

Because, y’know, those black screaming nightmares of blood and terror-

Those aren’t nightmares. Not for me. When the scrape of iron on iron wiped away blood and screams and sucked night back inside my head, I was sorry to wake up.

That’s the permanent carnival of me.

I rolled onto my side. Slanting sunlight through the barred window loaded my shoulders with an extra quarter century.

The outer door swung open. The first armsman through went left, the next went right, and the third came up the middle: pro style. Each of them had one of those fancy riot guns at slant arms to go along with the morningstars that swung from their belts. Each of them had a forefinger resting lightly on the guard alongside the trigger. Each of them had creases on windburned faces and the lizard eyes of veteran killers.

They wore full-length byrnies and studded steel caps that the afternoon heat must have made resemble walking around with their heads in frying pans. The one in the middle stopped in front of the bench and let the riot gun’s business end sag. The muzzle didn’t quite cover me. Not quite. “On your feet.”

This day was slipping from crummy toward downright fucking grim. “I just woke up.”

The armsman stepped back and racked the slide on his riot gun. The muzzle shifted, and the finger slipped through the guard, and I felt a decidedly cold twinge in my testicles. Which was where the muzzle now pointed. “On your feet, friar.”

“Or what? You’ll shoot my nuts off?”

“Or you will insult my office.” A new voice, from outside the still-open door: mellow and friendly, traces of a Jheledi lilt making it as deceptively light as the top notes of a pipe organ. “Freeman Shade. Please rise.”

A reluctant sigh swung my legs over the edge of the bench. I was too old for this big-dick horseshit anyway. Still, I couldn’t help deadpanning the armsman when I stood up. “A boy likes to be asked, dumbass.”

Must be something in the Boedecken air. Or something.

Through the door ambled an exceedingly ordinary-looking Knight, below average height-a full hand shorter than me, and I’m not a tall man-well into middle age, thinning hair above a round, kindly face. The Sunburst of Khryl on his cuirass looked shrunken compared with the volume of the chest it didn’t manage to cover. A cloak thrown back over his pauldrons was shimmering white only as far as his waist; below, it was splashed the same muddy reddish brown as his greaves and sabatons. A greathelm he carried in one hand was casually passed in the direction of the nearest armsman as he came in. The armsman blanched as he desperately shifted his grip on his riot gun and nearly dropped them both. The Knight didn’t appear to notice.

His eyes were warm and brown, and sparkled with some secret amusement as he flicked a finger at the other armsman and waited for him to close the outer door.

The cell felt a good deal smaller.

“Freeman Shade,” he said, “I am Tyrkilld, Knight Aeddharr. I would be the Knight Householder for the Riverdock Parish.”

“Would you? It’s damned swell of you to come personally to welcome me to town. I’m sure you’re a busy man.”

“Oh, that I am indeed.” The Knight chuckled. He blinked as though surprised to find himself standing there. “And to deliver a welcome is exactly why I have come.”

“In your Khrylsday-go-to-Tourney armor too.”

“Well, that’s but to impress the worthy.” He crossed his wrists and unfixed the jointed fasteners that clipped his gauntlets to his vambraces. “No one expects to find your name numbered upon that gloried roll, freeman.”

Knight Aeddharr passed the gauntlets to another of the armsmen. His hands were large and square. The fingers on those hands were short and thick and looked about as nimble as wagon spokes. And about as soft.

This was going to suck.

“So.” I let my knees bend a couple degrees, quadriceps and femoral biceps taking the weight that shifted slightly forward, onto the balls of my feet. A breath or two of Control Discipline goosed my adrenals. Everything went bright and slow. “This is where the gloves come off. As it were.”

“Of a certainty.” Tyrkilld opened those large square hands and spread them in a man-to-man shrug of regretful necessity. “A mailed hand may well slay before you reveal the truth that God and the Justiciar require.”

“You can just ask-”

“Oh, that I intend. Pynhall.”

I saw it coming: the Control Disciplines had my reflexes hyped enough for that. I saw it clearly. Not that it mattered.

Just a slap. Open-handed. A wide flat palm that crawled with eldritch blue witchfire came up from hip level to the corner of my jaw like it had been shot from a rifle. I didn’t even manage to blink before the room whited out and thunder crashed into the tolling of the vast carillons that call the Beloved Children to Assumption Day worship at the White Cathedral and I bounced off something hard and fell on something harder and when the world darkened back into existence and the bells began to fade to distant chimes I was on hands and knees on a stone floor, staring at a blurred and doubling pair of jointed steel sabatons caked with brownish-red mud, and Christ my head hurt and I gave it a shake that made it hurt worse and I said-

“Wow.”

“Do we understand each other, now?”

I didn’t risk another shake of my head. It might fall off.

“You have a gift for expressing yourself.”

“You’re not the first to notice, freeman.” The Knight took a respectful step back. “You may wish to rise. It’s best to be on your feet, and a fair distance from the nearest wall. I’ve good control with Khryl’s Hand, but there’s little help for you on the secondary impact.”

I made it to one knee and looked up into the Knight’s kindly round faces: all three of them. I closed my eyes, opened them, squinted, and there were only two. “Am I gonna live through this?”

“That remains to be seen. Up you go, then.”

My legs’d never make it. “I’m good right here, thanks. How do I get this to stop?”

“Tell me what I want to know.”

“And if I can’t?”

“I’m certain you can.”

“Then we have a problem.”

Armor creaked with Tyrkilld’s shrug. “You do.”

I looked around for something to lean on. The movement threatened to split my skull. “And if I Challenge?”

“We’ll take that as understood, shall we? What are you, grade six?” Tyrkilld chuckled indulgently. “Strike at your own inclination.”

“Oh, sure. Thanks.” Leaning with both hands on my bent knee, I let a few more breaths siphon clarity back inside my head. “This is about Orbek?”

“Was that a mystery? The Order of Khryl and the Civility of the Battleground have an interest in the dealings of this ogrillo of yours.”

“He’s not my ogrillo.” A hand to my temple helped squeeze the silent thunderstorm back down inside my skull. “He’s my brother.”

“So you told Knight Khershaw. And Our Lord of Valor still hears no lie.” Tyrkilld shook his head amiably. “With you a Monastic, too. An Esoteric. Likely an assassin.”

“I’m retired.”

“Not so long ago, you would have been mortal enemies.”

“We were. We got over it.”

“How this came about must be an interesting tale-”

“A long one, anyway.” Too fucking long. “It tells better than it lived.”

“-but it concerns me not at all. My first interest lies in what you will tell me about Freedom’s Face.”

“I’m sure I’d have a snappy comeback if my head didn’t hurt so damn much. What the hell is Freedom’s Face?”

Tyrkilld sounded honestly regretful. “Pynhall’t.”

I saw it coming again. Didn’t matter this time either. It was the other hand. Which also didn’t matter.

I was on my back when my eyes twitched open. The muscles on the right side of my neck were being chewed away by rabid squirrels. I couldn’t see them. Or hear them, or touch them when I pawed weakly at the pain. But they were enthusiastic little fuckers. Industrious.

A beige smear that was probably Tyrkilld’s face hovered in the middle distance overhead.

“Bodes fair to be a Minor Penance in this for me.” His voice had a vaguely oceanic quality, like distant surf. “Freeman Shade, I must tell you that by happenstance-by sad coincidence, for you-my dear father, a Knight of much greater valor and reknown than my poor self, was foully murdered. By a Monastic assassin. Are we becoming still more clear?”

Stone bled into flesh and back out again and my arms and legs spasmed at random; I couldn’t even roll over. “Fuck . . me. .”

“Though I know well it’s a dark sin to condemn a man for his brother’s crime, I discover I can’t help enjoying myself. Just a bit. Hence cometh my expectation of the Minor Penance I lately mentioned; I find myself hoping, in a shadowed corner of my tarnished soul, that you’ll play games and be evasive and insist upon this immoral defiance of yours, so that I might deliver Khryl’s Hand unto your sinning head, here, until out from your eye sockets leak the shreds of your vile Monastic brains.”

Use leaked back into my body. I made it onto my side and curled around the medicine ball of barbed wire that swelled under my ribs.

“I’d feel bad for you. . about your dad and your tarnished soul and all-” A trail of blood from my mouth made a tiny fading spiral on the stone floor. “-if you weren’t beating the crap out of me right now.”

“Can you stand, then?”

“Do I have to?”

“You won’t like it if I use the boot.”

“I’m no fan of the hand, either.” I put out one of my own. “All right, wait. I’m getting up. Give a guy a couple seconds, can you?”

Tyrkilld opened arms to either side of an indulgent smile.

I found one of the built-out brick benches and pushed myself up. The room spun around me and the walls pulsed and my stomach heaved and I staggered past an armsman and made it to the brass chamberpot in the corner in time to decisively lose the cheese and nuts and dried fruit I’d snacked on an hour or two ago.

On my knees again, leaning on the chamberpot, I spat bloody vomit. “Does it matter I’m telling the truth?”

“Each true word scrubs one stain from your filthy heart,” Tyrkilld said agreeably.

“I never heard of this Freedom’s Face shit until you said the words just now.”

“Go to, freeman. Try not my patience.”

I got my feet under me and swayed upright. “You’re the one with truth-sense, shithead. Am I lying?”

Tyrkilld sighed. “Freeman Shade, are you the man to convince me that Our Lord of Valor’s ear for truth cannot be misled by the dark magicks of the elves?”

The vomit-knotted fist in my stomach clenched tighter. “Elves?”

“Next you’ll try to tell me that it’s pure coincidence that an Ankhanan Esoteric has come to visit this Ankhanan Orbek Black Knife just now.”

“Ankhanan. .? Oh, fuck.” I put a hand to my eyes. “Fuck me like a virgin goat. Freedom’s Face. Fucking Kierendal.”

“Ah, there. There, y’see? Perhaps there is some truth you can share after all.

A shy truth, it must be, requiring a bit of encouraging to poke its wee nose out into the light of day.” He spread those oak-knot hands invitingly. “Speak to me of this Kierendal.”

“Shit, ask me anything. I hate that fucking slag.” I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. “So what is it, some kind of Free-the-Poor-Oppressed-Motherfucking-Ogrilloi thing?”

“And behold.” Tyrkilld beamed. “Come then; coax your shy truth out from its cranny-” He flexed his right hand meaningfully. “-unless you’d prefer I extend the invitation myself.”

“I’m just guessing. .” I panted harshly, wondering if I might spew again. Probably not.

Dammit.

If I hadn’t been so woozy I would’ve thought to puke down the bastard’s breastplate.

“Just. . guessing. Three years ago the Folk were granted freedom of the Empire. Maybe you heard. They’re full citizens now. Full human rights.”

Tyrkilld shook his head dolefully. “Ankhanans.”

“Don’t start. Kierendal is. . shit, I don’t even know what to call her, these days. Call her the Duchess; that’s as good a name as any. She’s a primal-what you call an elf-who runs some very successful businesses in the capital. Reason they’re successful-she also runs a criminal syndicate, a big one. . grew out of an old-time Warrengang, from a part of the city called the Face. So they were the Faces. Get it? So if someone’s running some kind of underground Free-the-Grills shit here out of Ankhana, it’s a good bet she’s in it somehow. Which is a serious problem for you. Because she is very rich and very powerful, really goddamn smart and completely ruthless. Not to mention connected. Which are the other reasons she’s so successful.”

“Friends in high places, has she?”

“She used to bone the Emperor. Does that count?”

Tyrkilld accepted this news with a ruefully genial smile and nod. The armsmen didn’t even blink.

“Oh, for shit’s sake.” I shook my aching head and coughed up another wad of sick. “When I get to anything you don’t already know, wave a fucking flag or something, huh?”

“Oh, well, yes indeed, there is that. We have a way of uncovering the truth, as you’ve seen.”

“Is this where you start bouncing me off the walls again?”

“Very likely. Now that we’ve seen you can find it in yourself to be honest with me, when the effort you make-” His hands flexed again. “-is sufficiently sincere.”

“Shit.”

“Men often do, at certain points in these long afternoons. Let’s move on to your, ah . . brother. . and his friends in the Smoke Hunt.”

“The Smoke Hunt?”

“Oh, yes, freeman. You knew we’d come round to this, did you not?”

I took a deep breath, sighed it out. I lifted my head. It weighed a couple tons. “I guess I might have a shy truth about whatever the fuck that is, too.”

Tyrkilld nodded an encouraging smile.

I nodded one back. “I think it’s hiding up my vile Monastic ass,” I said. “See if you can suck it out my butthole.”

Tyrkilld’s mouth pursed for the labial consonant and this time I didn’t see it coming.

The hand took me below the arch of the sternum and shock blasted up and down my spine and out my liver and kidneys and though the top of my head and soles of my feet, then there was only air around me and I tumbled upward and crashed into the joining of wall and ceiling and bounced off the bench on the way down, and hitting the brick edge from ten feet wasn’t half the blow I just took; I barely felt it. I lay curled around my spasming gut and blood bubbled from my lips while I tried to remember how to breathe.

“Freeman, freeman.” Tyrkilld sounded honestly regretful. “You know how the memory of my poor murdered father tasks me.”

My diaphragm spasmed and air whooped into my lungs, and I coughed and spat bloody mucus up toward the Sunburst on Tyrkilld’s chest.

And missed.

So all I had left was words. I took them slow. Slow and clear and flat. No sense letting him think I was just pissed. “Your father. Was a low-rent. Thug. Piece of shit. Coward.” I gagged more bloody phlegm. “Just like you.”

I got my breath and steadied it. “He died on his knees.”

Tyrkilld’s face froze over. “You know nothing of my-”

“I know he died-” Slow and clear and flat. “-with a friar’s dick in his mouth.”

There was stillness then, and silence: only labored breath from both of us, half strangled and harsh, shared now, bound together. Finally our understanding had started to flow both ways.

Into the silence, a winter whisper. “Get him up.”

The nearest armsman, florid and glistening and greased with heat, shifted grips on his riot gun uncertainly. “Does the Knight-?”

Tyrkilld’s white stare swore murder, and it didn’t look picky. “Get him up.”

The armsman licked pale sweat from his upper lip and swung his riot gun to hang in a bore-down safari-carry over his shoulder. “As the Knight commands.”

From the floor I showed the armsman teeth that tasted like blood. “Touch me-you’ll wish I’d killed you. .”

The armsman’s face wiped itself blank, and the armsman’s foot paused in midstep.

I rolled myself over and let the cool stone flags draw heat and twitching out of my face. “You and your fucking father. .” I spat into the floor. “Let me tell you about my father.”

I got arms and legs under me and heaved up to hands and knees. My head hung between my shoulders. I didn’t have the strength to lift it. “My father,” I said, “lived every fucking day of his life with a steel boot on his neck.”

There it was, the strength I needed, trickling up my spine from my wounded guts. I could lift my head now. I met Tyrkilld’s stare with my own. His was white.

Mine’s black.

“My father. . didn’t have armor of proof and the morning fucking star in his hand. . didn’t have a god to heal him, didn’t have speed of lightning and power of thunder and the rest of your shit. Only a man. That’s all. That’s enough. My father died a little every fucking day just to-”

I bit down on my breath.

“-just to keep cocksuckers like you from getting comfortable with ruling the world.”

Tyrkilld said, “Get him up.”

The armsman crouched and reached down with his left arm, turning to keep his riot gun slung on the opposite side of his body. For all the good it did him.

I reached up with my right to take the armsman’s left bicep in a grip that has been compared favorably to a bulldog’s jaws; my thumb dug into the nerve that ran up the inside of his arm along the radial artery. The armsman gasped and twisted instinctively to wrench his arm away from the unexpected pain, which pulled me off the floor and freed my left hand to stab a thumb into his right eye socket while my fingers crushed the armsman’s parotid gland in the process of hooking behind the angle of his jaw.

Where the head goes the body will follow, and so when Tyrkilld roared, “Tashhonall,” and catapulted himself across the cell in a blurring blue-flamed shoulder-rush, instead of meeting my chest and crushing the life from me in a shower of splintering ribs and shredded lung and spray of blood from a burst heart, he met instead the armored spine of the armsman that I had wrenched between us to absorb the impact.

The armsman never even had a chance to scream.

Tyrkilld hit us like a bullet train on meth and crushed us both against the wall, and though I took it hard-my head blurred into fireworks and something gave in my guts-the poor bastard armsman from kidneys to asshole was just blood fucking pudding.

I couldn’t breathe and couldn’t stand and could barely focus my eyes, but none of that mattered because while I was sliding half-crushed down the wall in a dogpile with Tyrkilld and the dying armsman, all I had to do was shift my grip from the armsman’s face to the trigger guard of the riot gun that was still slung bore-down over his shoulder, because Tyrkilld was yanking the armsman off me and winding up for a killing blow with a fist that smoked arcwelder flame, and because the muzzle of the riot gun was against Tyrkilld’s cuisse. It made a sound like bwank.

The full charge of buckshot blasted through the armor into Tyrkilld’s quadriceps just above his knee.

A spray of blood and meat and bone blew a fist-size hole out of the steel covering the Knight Householder’s hamstring and spun him and before he could hit the ground I had my other arm around the dying armsman’s chest, hugging him close while we fell together toward the floor; I managed to rack the riot gun’s slide and got off another round at one of the armsmen who was jumping to the side for a clear shot.

A couple thumb-size holes burst open on opposite sides of the second armsman’s pelvis and sprayed jets of blood as he spun and slammed back against the wall and a ricochet screamed through the cell-slug round. The third armsman’s weapon roared and a buckshot charge slammed the dying first armsman against my chest and punched my right side but I had bigger problems right then because blowing most of his fucking leg off just wasn’t enough to slow down Tyrkilld, Knight Aeddharr.

The bastard had ahold of the armsman again and even with one hand reaching into the mess of his leg to pinch off his femoral artery the other would be enough to pull the armsman clear one way or another which would be goodnightfuckingirene because killing fire still blazed around that fist. So I let Tyrkilld have the next round in the face. Or tried to.

While I was still pulling the trigger, an impossibly powerful grip latched onto the end of the bore, and Tyrkilld took the whole charge right in the palm of his witchfire hand. Which did not explode in a shower of blood and bone. The blast did no more than knock his hand away. Spent buckshot clattered on stone.

With the twitch of a what the hell shrug, I racked the slide and fired again.

Tyrkilld got that undamaged hand of his back in the way. . but its witchfire was gone. A hole appeared in its palm. And in Tyrkilld’s pauldron, beside his neck. And in the hip plate on the opposite side of his chest below his cuirass.

Another slug shrieked around the cell for what seemed like a long time before it stopped in someone’s body with a wet-sounding smack. Tyrkilld’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. Only a wheeze that bubbled with blood. He looked entirely astonished.

I racked the slide again and leveled the bore on Tyrkilld’s left eye. “Drop your weapons.”

I went on, louder, when I realized that I didn’t seem to be hearing anything except a long continuous clang. “By my count the next round’s buckshot again so fucking drop them or go home wearing his brains.”

Maybe one of the armsmen-the one standing with weapon shouldered or the ashen-faced one who was sliding down the wall, riot gun rib-ready in hands that were starting to shake-maybe one of them could read lips. They put down their guns.

“Kick them over here. Over by me. Now.”

They looked at Tyrkilld, but his eyes had rolled up in his head. Then they could only look at each other. After a second, they complied.

Carefully I shoved the spine-shattered armsman clear. Carefully I stood. My legs seemed to work. Hot syrup rolled down the back of my neck: scalp wound. I kept my elbow against the warm wet that spread down my right side, creeping toward my knee; no way to tell yet how bad I might be hurt.

Right then I felt no pain.

“Combat grades. Yeah, sure.” I hooked a toe under Tyrkilld’s shoulder and rolled him faceup. I lowered the riot gun’s bore to the Knight’s forehead. “School’s out till your next life, cocksucker.”

But instead of pulling the trigger, I stood motionless, head cocked, and listened to the singing silence. A second ticked over. And another.

“All right.” I tried a deep breath. It caught against a stab from my side. “You can come in now.”

I nodded at the uninjured armsman. “You. Get the door.”

The armsman looked blank. “Get the door for. .?”

“For whoever’s out there listening.” Wires of pain ratcheted my ribs tighter over my barbwire guts. “Whoever’s not letting a shitload of armsmen bust in here and kill me right now. Fucking let him in, will you? If I pass out, I’ll fall on this sonofabitch’s corpse, you get me?”

Light shifted in the cell, and a creak of metal on metal and the rise of dockside noise: the outer cell door had opened.

“Freeman Shade.”

This was a new voice: deeper, darker, low, and controlled, oiled and polished as ceremonial armor. “I am Markham, Lord-”

“I don’t give a shit. You heard?”

“I heard.”

“I made my point?”

“Yes.”

“They’re your fucking Laws of Engagement, and He’s your fucking god, and if I remember your stupid fucking rules, this means Khryl’s Own Motherfucking Self has just declared you cocksuckers had no business starting this shit up with me in the first place-”

“Freeman Shade-”

“And-and-” The cell darkened, and my tongue thickened, and I gritted my teeth and snarled, “And for shit’s sake, do something for that poor bastard armsman. .”

“We will.”

“Fucking right. . cocksuckers. .” I said, and night rose up within my head and swallowed me whole.

THE CAINE SHOW

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.

“But shit, I mean-here we have priests of Lipke’s god of war and, and, uh, god of personal combat-” Sweat from Stalton’s plastered-flat hair trickles past the corner of his mouth, and his tongue unconsciously catches it. “Can’t we expect. . y’know, a miracle or something? I mean, your gods don’t just let you guys die, do they?”

I look back out at the gathering storm of Black Knives. If I weren’t so goddamn gutsick, I’d screw my cover and give the partners the benefit of my Monastic education: the Covenant of Pirichanthe and all the metaphysical Abbey school shit about the Will is a Function of the Body. . but I just don’t have the strength.

“The aid of the Lord of Valor is already here.” Marade stares into the badlands, and her mouth has gone hard. “I am His miracle.”

He rolls his eyes.

“I feel better already.”

Pretornio chimes in like he memorized this in seminary. “One Skill of Dal’Kannith is to bind men together so that many fight as one; another Skill can give us all the strength to endure the harshest battle: the courage to face suffering squarely, and to stare unblinking into death’s eye.”

“Hear what they’re really saying?” My chuckle’s like a stir of rocks in a rusty can. “Same as me. We’re on our own.”

“But if we can get a rider to the Khryllian outpost at North Rahndhing-” Marade begins, and I have to stop myself from smacking her one.

“Don’t play dumb blonde, for shit’s sake.”

“Caine.” Her voice goes severe. “The Order of Khryl has fought ogrilloi for generations. Protocols of prisoner exchange are well established-”

“Fuck your protocols. The Order’s got nothing to offer these bastards, and you know it.”

“Except their lives.”

I make a face. “Good luck with that, huh?”

Her voice rises. “No Soldier of Khryl is left in enemy hands. Ever. It is our Law.”

“Your Law. My ass.”

“Caine.” The severity becomes cold threat, and a hand that can crush bone to pudding seizes my shoulder. “The Law is sacred. I will not warn you again.”

I shrug out of her grip. “I don’t much like being touched that way.”

Her brow darkens but before she can open her mouth I plow on. “Tell them, Marade. You know this shit. You have to. Tell them what happens to captives of Black Knives. Tell them how many have escaped. How many have been ransomed. Ever. Come on. How many?”

Her face goes bleak. She says nothing. Which is an honest answer.

I turn to the others. “Boedecken bitches tell their cubs that if they don’t behave, Black Knives’ll get ’em. You follow? Black Knives are the grills that give other grills nightmares.”

Wish I could tell them about Mick Barand. About the bootleg cube of his last Adventure that I smuggled home when I was twelve. Wish I could tell them what the Black Knives did to him.

Wish I could tell them how Barand took it.

One of the toughest bastards in Studio history. How they broke him. How they made him sob and scream and beg. How at the end, he could only shiver. How it took him a week to die.

How he was dead two days, dead inside, before they finally killed him.

“People talk about fates worse than death. Nobody talks about a fate worse than getting caught by Black Knives. Because there fucking isn’t any.”

Do they get it? Can they get it?

Marade finally gets up dick enough to step in. “There is truth in what he says,” she admits. “Black Knives are feared among all the clans of the Boedecken. Feared and hated. They have abandoned even the debased gods worshipped in the Waste. Our best understanding, based on testimony of the few Black Knives the Order has ever taken-and based on the. . the. . the remains. . of their own prisoners that have been recovered-is that Black Knife society centers on sorcery of a. . primitive. . and grievously savage kind. Their aim of warfare is capture. Prisoners are. . ritually tormented, that their anguish might attract demons; their pain-their lives-are exchanged for certain dark powers. The torments of the Black Knives are known to be. . inventive.”

Which pretty well sums it up, but that dry-ass clinical shit won’t move anybody. “Are you hearing her?” I ask generally. “Let me translate. We could rape their wives, kill their grandmothers, eat their babies-we could assbone their goddamn lapdogs-and nothing they’d do to us would be any worse than it’s gonna be anyway. Understand? This shit’s lip-deep and the tide’s coming in.”

They look at each other, and they look at me, and after one long shared second of My, what a colorful turn of phrase he has, they go back to yapping among themselves like I never even opened my mouth, and I can’t make myself listen anymore.

I stare down at the coarse-flecked grain of the parapet’s granite and wish I could snarl and howl and bite off a chunk. I’m past the scared. I’m past the depressed. Now I’m pissed.

It’s not the dying. It’s not the torture. It’s that these cockknockers don’t give a shit what I say.

No.

It’s that there’s no goddamn reason they should give a shit. It’s that I haven’t done more. That I haven’t been more. That I have come all this way to get clipped as a fuck-my-bleeding-ass bit player.

I deserve better than this. I have earned better than this.

I should have been a star.

Rababal’s eyes shift and his lips twitch. “But-if some of us can escape, we can send help-even a full rescue; North Rahndhing is not so far away. It might be their best hope-”

“What, they have to work for a living, so they don’t even deserve a warning?” I lean close enough to bite a hunk out of his jowls. A whisper: “You want to run, you better start right now, you fat fuck. Before I kill you myself.”

I bet he tastes like pork.

Stalton shoulders in between us. “That’s too close, Caine. Back off. Now.”

I look up into his watery shit-colored eyes. “What if I don’t want to?”

Marade’s gauntlet falls on my shoulder like a steel brick. “Caine, now is not the time-”

“Now is the time. Now is the only time.” I smack her hand away and bare my teeth at the sudden heat this sparks in her eyes. “You pack of fucking pinheads-have any of you heard a word I’ve said? These are not animals. You can’t buy them off with some hunks of live goddamn bait. When they hit the camp, it won’t be some kind of mindless goddamn feeding frenzy. The first thing they’ll do with anybody they take is hurt them till they give you up. How long d’you think the porters will stand mute? Shit, why should they? After you’ve ditched them to be tortured to death?”

“Then what do you suggest? This is the only way any of us has a chance!” Rababal’s venomous glare would be more intimidating without the quiver in his jowls. “Unless you have a better idea?”

And-

Son of a bitch.

It starts way down below my chest, below my stomach, down behind my navel. Somebody just now struck a match under my balls and set my guts on fire.

“Yeah, funny thing.” The burn creeps north and ignites a smile. “I do have a better idea.”

I look from one to the next: Rababal pale and sweating, Marade glowering glamorously, Stalton going narrow-eyed, Tizarre swiping hair across her brow with a trembling hand, Pretornio twisting his prayer chain between his fingers, and I wonder: Can they see it?

Can they see the flame in my head?

Because all that lumpy grey mush-all the dying here before I ever have a real career, the sinking dread and black despair and the whiny why-me-god-why-me-is melting, hissing, and just downright smoking the fuck away. Screw these shit-swallowing bit parts. I never expected to live this long anyway.

But I am for motherfucking sure gonna make a star-quality exit.

“Simple. .” I talk slowly, carefully, so even Pretornio can understand. “Simple: we can’t outrun them. We can’t hide from them. We can’t buy them off. There’s only one way any of us will live through this.”

Their empty stares wait for me to fill them with hope. Losers.

Fuck hope.

“One way: We have to convince them that hunting us is a bad idea.”

Marade’s eyes are the first to spark. “You’re saying-”

“I’m saying.” I let the flame kindle my voice. “I’m saying we have to hurt them.”

And it’s working. I can see them warm it up, imagining-not in detail, not yet, just tasting the concept-and I can see heat swell inside them to melt that ice-numb dread. I turn from them and lean on the parapet, willing them to follow my gaze out into the badlands. Out at the dust and the Black Knives. Willing them to think with me: Why not? Let’s fuck ’em up.

“You think-” Tizarre swallows the quaver in her voice and starts over. “You think we can do it?”

A good lie trumps a bad truth. “I know we can.”

“And this-” Rababal’s platinum disk flickers faster and faster through his fingers. “This is our best chance?”

“It’s our only chance. We have to step up and unleash severe fucking carnage. And we have to do it right.”

“What do you mean by right?”

I mean bend them in half and assbone them till their eyes bleed, but if I say so Marade’ll belt me and Pretornio will probably faint. “My way. No arguments. No committee. No goddamn debate.”

“Why your way? Marade’s order has been fighting ogrilloi for centuries. Pretornio’s an experienced infantry commander-”

“Hey, Marade-your people ever teach you what Black Knives do to thaumaturges?”

She half-turns away and sneaks a glance at Tizarre. Then she looks down at her gauntlets. Muscle bulges along her jaw, and she’s got nothing to say.

Me, I’m not so squeamish. I hook thumbs behind my belt and lean back to rest elbows on the parapet. “They call it the Black Knife Kiss: they lock lips onto your eye sockets and suck your eyeballs out. One at a time. Bite through your optic nerve. They figure if you can’t see, you can’t do magick.”

Rababal’s mouth works like he wants to say something but can’t remember any words.

“And then there’s your hands.” I look at his; he palms that platinum disk like I caught him scratching his dick. “They twist wire around your wrists tight enough to cut your circulation. Pretty soon your hands turn black. And die. Sometimes they let their khoshoi nibble on them, or strap your arms out wide to attract crows. Sometimes they just leave ’em. Dead. Rotting on your wrists.”

“Caine-” His voice quavers, and he swallows. “Still, I-”

“And if you somehow manage to try a spell anyway, they pound these long spikes into your skull. Big steel needles about as long as your forearm, big around as a horseshoe nail. Doesn’t kill you. Doesn’t even really hurt. But then they take a torch and hold it to the outside end of the spikes. One at a time. The spikes conduct heat pretty well. Still doesn’t hurt much; brain’s got no pain nerves. But it gives you a hell of a fever, y’know? Worst fucking fever anyone will ever have. Delusions. Hallucinations. A nightmare where you never wake up. You go to Hell while you’re still alive. And even through the fever, you can feel chunks of yourself dying. Slowly. Your brain cooks. One piece at a time.”

Rababal’s face has gone grey. Guess he’s got a vivid imagination.

Vivid enough to keep him from asking me how the hell I know all this, which is a really good thing because I don’t have a really good answer.

“But it’s not always that bad.” I offer a reassuring grin. “Sometimes they get enthusiastic with the torches and your brain boils instead.” I shrug. “At least it’s quick.”

I push myself off the wall and take one step, right into the middle of them. They shift unconsciously, spreading to give me space. That’s one good sign. They stand and wait to hear what I’m gonna say next. That’s another. “Know how ogrilloi wish each other luck? They say, Die fighting. You get it? That’s luck for us, too. The only luck we have left.”

I give them all a good long slow look at as many of my teeth as I can fit into a smile, and hold out my fist. “Die fighting.”

Marade’s eyes are the first to clear, and cold determination sharpens the elegant planes of her face. She squeezes a gauntlet into a jointed ball of steel, and extends it to touch my knuckles.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes. Die fighting.”

Figured I could count on her: Khryllians are suckers for that heroic laststand shit. And she is so beautiful right now that I better just keep my mouth right the fuck shut.

Stalton squints at me. “You look like you’re enjoying this.”

“Most fun you can have with your clothes on.”

Did I really just say that? Heat rises in my cheeks. Better not look at her either.

He shakes his head. “You’re completely insane.”

“That a problem for you?”

“Shit, no. I admire it.” He suddenly grins and adds his fist to ours. “Die fighting.”

Then Tizarre adds hers, and Pretornio, and finally even Rababal curls his stubby fingers and nods.

Howzafuckinbout that? Forget Marade. This is better.

I can feel it. I can smell it. I can roll it around in my mouth and you can fuck my left ear if I don’t like the taste. The partners all stand there. Looking. Waiting. Looking at me.Waiting for me to tell them what to do. Who knew it’d be this easy. .?

I don’t have to say it out loud. It sounds better in my head than it would from my mouth. No more bit-player suckassitude. Now, you yappy fucks, you gutless upcaste bean-counting ass-pirates-

Now, you’re the bit players.

I just made this into The Caine Show.

››scanning fwd››

Black Knives resolve out of heatshimmer and dust. They top a fold of the badlands a couple hundred yards away and stop. They can see me now.

I’ll never know what the Black Knives were expecting to find outside the gate of the vertical city, but I guarantee it didn’t resemble one lone skinny-ass human in black leather, standing on a little rise. Waiting for them.

From where they are, the perimeter wall of the vertical city will frame me in the red-smeared light of the setting sun, leathers stark against the bleached rubble of the ruined gate thirty yards to my rear. My stance contraposto. Relaxed. Careless. My hands open. Loose. Empty. Vivid as a dream.

My dream, anyway.

All they know about humans is hunting us, hurting us, and eating us. They must be thinking, what’s that skinny little sonofabitch doing just standing there?

Is my face in shadow? I hope not. I hope they can see me smile.

They eye me with predatory wariness. I can almost smell what they want to do: circle me, check me out, get a good sniff, a nice leisurely hyena lookaround before they mob me for the kill. But like I told the partners: sure, they’re predators, but they’re not animals-and they’re too goddamn smart to get within easy bowshot of the perimeter wall until they have some idea what’s going on.

Which is good. Every second they hesitate is another second for Pretornio to work his wargod juju on the porters. Which is the point of this charade, after all. Well. .

That’s what I told the others, anyway.

Is it so wrong to want one jack-racking balls-to-the-wall setpiece before I die?

That’s all I’m after. One good fucking scene.

This better be it. Don’t think I’ll get another.

Hot. Cold. Numb. Tingling. My heart stutters. My right kneecap jumps like a rat trapped inside my leg. There’s a roaring in my ears that makes no sound at all: I can hear my breath going short and smoky, hear the ghost whisper of the bone-dry breeze, hear some kind of prairie chicken scratching at the scrub twenty yards away. My nose feels like it’s packed full of sand, but I can still smell sunbaked dust and my own sweat. This could be fear. I can’t tell. Can you be so scared that it makes you happy?

And not just happy: I’ve got a hard-on like I could break boards with my dick.

Now one Black Knife starts forward from the vanguard. He struts a little, easy, loose-jointed with exaggerated arrogance. Dominance display: I can almost smell the testosterone. Some of the tension uncoils in my guts. The swagger’s overdone.

This’ll be an up-and-comer. A bachelor out to rack up style points in front of the big dogs. I’ve seen better. Shit, I’ve done better.

Y’know, given laboralls and cosmetic surgery, this puppy’d be right at home in my old neighborhood. That must be why I’m turning comfortable out here: the Boedecken badlands aren’t all that different from the streets I grew up on. I’ve spent most of my life surviving pack-hunters more dangerous than these.

Watching him swagger toward me, I know exactly what the rules are.

He stops a little more than halfway here, squints my way, then shrugs and turns his back to me. It’s an ogrillo dare, part of his dominance display: dismissing me as a threat.

I keep smiling. My cheeks hurt.

All four of them.

Still giving me his back, he ostentatiously strings his recurved compound bow. A theatrical flourish extracts an arrow; he holds the bow high over his head as he nocks the arrow and draws the string, making sure I get a great view. Then in one smooth motion he turns and fires and I just stand here grinning like somebody stapled my lips to my teeth.

The arrowhead chips sparks off a stone an arm’s length in front of my left foot.

Like I said: I know the rules.

His squint turns appreciative, and his trifurcate upper lip draws back from his tusks. Hoots that might be approval come faintly from the pack of Black Knives back at the fold. He paces toward me, nocking another arrow. From seventy yards or so, he lets fly. The arrow hisses past my right ear.

This fucker can shoot.

I open my hands invitingly, beckoning for him to try again. Closer.

Those hoots from the Black Knives are louder now. They’re starting to sound derisive. The bowstud’s face darkens, and he calls to me: “Paggnakkid razlim nezz, paggtakkunni.”

Y’know, it never occurred to me that these cocksmokes might not speak Westerling.

He paces in another twenty yards, and there’s nothing theatrical about him now. He draws and fires without aiming and I let breath hiss from my lips and my legs go slack and my arms flop loose and I look at his eyes beyond the arrow’s sizzling rush as my right hand flicks up from thigh to face and closes on the arrowshaft, which burns skin as it skids to a stop along my palm. Its steel point stares at me, an inch from my eye.

No speakee? No problem. This is what you call nonverbal communication.

I spin the arrow through my fingers like a baton. Should pretty well conceal the electric shiver jolting out of my adrenals. At Garthan Hold, training arrows have sandbag heads.

Hoo.

Live points are. . a whole different world.

Hoo.

All right, then.

Now. More nonverbiage-

I balance the arrow, head down, on the tip of my left forefinger, and have an agonizing half second’s vision of just how stupid I’m gonna look if I don’t pull this off before I shrug a silent Fuck it anyway and let fly: leaving the arrow to hang in a blink-long Wile E. Coyote pause in midair, I throw myself into a backspin that whips my right heel through a horizontal arc to strike the middle of the arrowshaft. The shaft snaps around my heel.

The halves tumble away from each other to clatter into the rocks. The prairie chicken thing takes flight with an indignant skrill.

Ogrillo eyes track the pieces’ skitter, and when they skip back to me I spread my empty hands-

And take a deep curtain-call bow.

Hot staggering fuck. How good did that feel?

My grin isn’t fake anymore. I’ve got the flavor now. The scent’s in my nose and it’s setting my head on fire. This is what it’s all about. This right here.

This is Being a Star.

Is anything better?

Huh.

Except-

Where’s my goddamn applause?

Maybe my applause is the deliberate caution-just short of open reluctance-with which the ogrillo puts down his bow and slips his quiver off his belt. The way he pulls his spear before he starts toward me, like he needs the weight of its shaft in his hands to keep his pecker up. Maybe it’s the thick dry slide of his plum-colored tongue around his tusks, and the way he never takes his eyes off me as he approaches.

Applause enough, I guess.

The Black Knives behind him edge closer, working their way down the fold. They spread into a wide arc like an infantry skirmish line, flanks curving toward the city.

If Spearboy here doesn’t start the party pretty damn soon, the Black Knife line will envelop the little rise where I stand. Which is gonna suck for me, star or not. Maybe I should have let Marade handle this part after all.

A last stand on a hilltop surrounded by ogrilloi is probably her idea of sex.

As Spearboy stalks up the face of my rise, that whole “should have let Marade” idea starts sounding better and better.

He’s huge.

Secondhanding a couple Hammets and the Barand have not remotely prepared me for this fucker’s sheer immensity. Up close, in the flesh, it’s like turning a corner and bumping into something that ought to be extinct.

Seven feet tall. Four feet wide. Wrinkled grey-green hide that covers biceps bigger than my head. Those sun-yellowed tusks. His goddamn fingernails. .

Fighting claws like shortswords. Filed sharp.

Painted black.

That spear of his, more like-what do you call it? — a bill or something: eight or nine feet long, and at least three feet of it is blade as wide as my hand, with a rear-pointed barb on each side, to unhorse riders. Or yank a victim within reach of his fighting claws.

I shouldn’t have left my sword with Stalton. And I should have put on my fucking armor.

And I should have remembered that despite secondhand memories of being Hammet and Barand from those Adventure cubes, I’ve never fought an ogrillo before. I should’ve been thinking more about living through this than about how cool I was gonna look standing out here with nothing but a fucking knife up my sleeve. .

And-most of all-

I really, really should have stopped on the way out here to take a piss.

Wetting my pants’ll blow that whole Being a Star trip, I’m guessing.

When Spearboy gets about ten feet away, his chest expands and his neck bulges and he unleashes a godawful howl that makes every single hair on my body stand on end. He shakes the spear toward my belly and starts pumping his hips and grunting low in his throat, and I get it.

He’s telling me that he’s gonna open my guts and fuck me in the wound.

Huh. How about that? I feel better now.

Because if he really thought he could do it, he’d be wet-humping my belly already instead of poncing around like a demented mime.

I feel more than better. I feel incredible. Every problem I have ever had has just. . evaporated. My career. Torture. Death. Dad. All of it.

Everything. Anything. Don’t have one single problem in the world except living through the next twenty seconds. And that’s not a problem. It’s nothing at all.

Live, die, who gives a shit? So I’ve never fought an ogrillo. So what?

No ogrillo has ever fought me.

I fake a lunge and he flinches, and I laugh out loud.

“Let’s go, Fido.” I beckon with both empty hands. “Strike up the fucking band.”

He makes a tentative thrust. I skip back. He slices at my head and I duck to the side. His eyes are round as plates and piss-yellow, and I bet my left nut that if his whole rumphumping clan weren’t watching, he’d be running right now and splashing brown with every step.

His gorilla chest heaves like he can’t quite get a breath-

Then he gives his tusks a shake and his head settles into his shoulders. Muscle bunches around the spinal ridge that crowns his skull. He growls something that I don’t register as words.

He’s found his nerve again.

He starts to circle: three hundred-plus pounds of sentient predator, stalking me. His blade slides through slow, lazy loops, tracing infinity.

Idiots pretending they know something about fighting sometimes say shit like Other things being equal, advantage lies with the longer weapon or Other things being equal, the fighter who strikes first wins. My favorite is Other things being equal, a big man beats a small man.

Know what makes them idiots? Wait. I’ll show you.

He finally commits: with a grunt like a rhino’s cough he launches a full lunge, jamming that spear straight for my spine by way of my navel. I slap the spear aside with a clank, and his eyes go wide at the sparks the knife up my left sleeve strikes off his blade.

Before he has the faintest fucking chance to figure out what just happened, I’m spinning toward him along the spear shaft, left hand grabbing his nearside tusk while my right clears the knife past my left cuff, and when his reflexive sideways yank rips his tusk out of my grip, that same yank shows me the back of his skull. So that’s where I put the knife.

The blade’s only seven inches. The point doesn’t quite come out his mouth.

Get it?

“Other things” are never equal.

His body convulses: a single giant spasm that rips the knife from my hand and flattens him like he’s been hit by lightning. One more wrench slams his head backward into the dirt. His jaws gape around an extra tongue of bloodsmeared steel.

His yellow eyes fix on mine with a mournful doggy puzzlement, as though we’d had a deal, as though we’d gone into business together with the mutual understanding that he’d live and I’d die and now he can’t quite comprehend how I could double-cross him like this. His eyes cup that canine dismay till the dust he’s kicked up settles across them and dulls even the illusion of life.

Wow.

I mean: wow.

Fuck me if I don’t really, really have to pee.

I look up. Black Knives everywhere. Standing. Staring. Silent as trees.

Which is as raw butt-naked sexual as the kill itself.

Yeah.

I mean: yeah.

Now for the curtain call.

“You see that, you fuckers?” Ten years of kiai have given me a voice that can dent plate armor. “Did anybody NOT see what just happened here? Does anybody need it EXPLAINED?”

They stand. They stare. Whispers rustle into growls that roll into low thunder.

“This”-I sweep a hand behind me toward the vertical city-“is MINE. Go wherever the fuck you want, but you can’t come HERE.”

Minor shifts of weight, a general sway like a forest before a storm. I can’t tell if I’m getting through.

“For you, this place is HELL. You HEAR me? You UNDERSTAND? For you, here is PAIN. Here is DEATH.”

I turn my hand toward the corpse of Spearboy. “He died EASY. You will die HARD. You will die SCREAMING. Your bitches will HOWL. Your pups will STARVE.

“I will FEED YOU YOUR FUTURE.”

Still they only sway. Their thunder-grumble starts ramping up in rhythm: swell and slack and swell again, like the surf ahead of a typhoon at high tide.

Do they have any fucking clue what I just said?

I look down at the dust in the dead eyes at my feet, and think about predatory carnivores and pack-hunters-

And I start to chuckle. I mean: this is about marking territory, right?

So before I turn my back on the massed warriors of the Black Knife clan, before I begin to walk the infinite thirty yards to lead them into the ambush back at the ruined gate, before I even have time to worry about how much extra shitstorm I might’ve spun up for myself and all of us, I unlace my breeches, open the front, and pull out my dick.

And pee on Spearboy’s corpse.

Ahhh, shit. Son of a bitch.

Should have picked up my goddamn knife, first.