Caine Black Knife

LEGEND

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.

They roar toward my back like a tornado on crank.

To hell with the jinking, the juking and the fuck-my-ass serpentine: I take the last ten meters at a dead sprint. A clattering rain of barbed arrows rattles onto the gateway’s stone. One of them clips my butt as I dodge around the upright and stumble into the linked shield-wall of a dozen porters. The guy I slammed into doesn’t blink. None of them do.

Twelve identical thousand-yard stares: they don’t even see me.

Guess I bought Pretornio enough time after all.

Three faces peer over the wall-top. Fuckers. Wish I had something to throw at them. “What happened to my Cloak?”

Tizarre grimaces a baffled apology that I’d like to pound into her face with a rock. Stalton hisses, “Come on, they’re-right-behind-you come on-!”

The hand I grabbed my ass with comes back red. “Fucking right.”

A few centuries’ neglect have chewed back mortar a span deep between the huge dressed-stone blocks of the gateway; I jump, grab on, and scramble up the rest of the eight meters as fast as most guys can climb stairs.

Black Knives boil into the gateway. Shouting. Roaring. Bellows of bloodlust and rage below my feet. I flick a glance down behind me-

Ogrilloi surge and snarl around the twin formations of the porters. The porters stand braced in kratrio to either side of the crumbled gate arch: locked shield to shield, the rear rank’s shields held flat overhead like a steel-tiled roof, leaving just enough of a slit for their long-bladed stabbing spears to lick outward at any Black Knife stupid enough to stumble into reach.

As I’m clawing over the lip onto the top of the wall, Pretornio lifts his arms as though delivering a benediction. The kratrii begin to move.

Leaning into their shields, the porters force their way into the boil of Black Knives in perfect lockstep. Vertical cracks open in their shield wall to pass the short thick hacking-blades each man carries in his right hand. Where they strike, Black Knives bleed.

No wonder Lipke could bitch-hump this whole continent. Half an hour with a priest of Dal’Kannith, and twenty-five surly, untrained, lazy goddamn packbearers are suddenly a Roman fucking legion.

They grind toward each other, pinching off the inflow of Black Knives like a sphincter with razor-blade teeth. On the wall, Stalton leans around the broad curve of the panel shield he’s covering Rababal with. A stack of sword-bladed spears lean in the crenel next to him, and he’s got my hauberk in his free hand. “You are one stone batshit son of a bitch.”

I flash him a grin and keep moving. He hefts my armor. “Suit up, kid. They’ll be climbing-” but I’m already past the shield and in Rababal’s face.

“Now, goddammit! Now!”

Rababal’s got a thousand-yard stare of his own: mindview. He reaches out, and the charged buckeyes he scattered in the rocks outside the wall blast flame. The air shirrs with stone-shard shrapnel. Burning, bleeding Black Knives howl and claw at each other, trailing meat-scented smoke.

Huh: smells like burnt duck.

Rababal’s expression stays blankly remote and he starts mumbling under his breath. A couple Black Knives leap for the farside wall. Rababal snaps a smoking buckeye at them like he’s flicking a booger, and it erupts into flame that blasts them back to the ground, on fire and howling.

Stalton drops my hauberk and grabs a spear with a very stylish one-handed flourish that slashes a hand off the first Black Knife up our wall. The ogrillo roars as it tumbles toward the jagged masonry below. “Caine, your armor-”

“Leave it. Pass me one of those spears.”

“The arrows-”

“Have you seen those arrows?” I may not be the most educated cockknocker in this city today, but I know the story of Agincourt.

For answer, he hands me his spear and reaches for another. Bright bloody steel jabbing and slicing at their hands and faces convinces the Black Knives to take their chances on the ground.

Good fucking luck. They’re about to learn how it feels to be iron.

The porters re-form into a single rectangle that corks the gate mouth, front two ranks facing the smoldering ogrilloi out in the badlands, rear rank facing the broad corridor of the gateway. That’s the anvil.

The Black Knives trapped inside-a dozen, maybe fifteen-surge and snarl and roar.

Through the deep-shadowed arch at the inner end of the gateway, jauntily spinning a four-kilo morningstar as lightly as a majorette’s baton, strides the unstoppable human battle tank that is Marade.

Already got the hammer part figured, huh?

There is a cheerful abandon in the way she goes to work on the mass of panicked flailing screaming Black Knives, and y’know what?

I think I’m in love.

››scanning fwd››

They stand in little clusters out in the badlands, well beyond bowshot. Watching.

Down below, Marade tosses another dead Black Knife onto the growing pile outside the gate mouth.

That’s it, you fuckers. Watch. Not one ogrillo will come back out that gate alive.

Watch, you bastards. You cocksmoking asswhores. Watch.

And think it over.

Tizarre’s still babbling about her Cloak. “I don’t understand-it doesn’t make any sense. . the more power I threw into it, the weaker it got-”

“Yeah, I know. Shut up about it, will you?” She makes a little noise like half a whimper, and I wave a dismissing hand. “Look, forget it. Didn’t get hurt, did I?”

Except for the crease on my buttcheek that stings like a bastard every time I take a step, but forget that too. “Go help Marade, huh?”

“Help her do what?”

“I don’t give a shit. Just go.” Do I have time for her wounded fucking feelings?

I turn away and screw the spyglass back into my eye. Wish I knew enough about ogrilloi to read the expressions on their faces. What bugs me: none of the Black Knives carry packs. Only a few even carry water skins. And there’s no koshoi, and there’s none of the little sorta-almost-burros Boedecken ogrilloi use to carry supplies and loot. I don’t think this is a raiding party. I don’t think it ever was. I’ve got a sinking feeling that it might be a short-range reconnaissance-in-force.

Or worse: like a, y’know, like a posse. .

Now one of them squats. Just drops, right where he is, bouncing down in that Asian peasant-in-the-paddy crouch, balancing comfortably between his knees. And another one. A few more-

And there they go. All of them, dropping in a weirdly beautiful not-quite-random ripple like a crowd settling in after a standing ovation.

Settling in to wait.

No: not all. Three of them peel off and lope away, off into the badlands. Along their backtrail.

Time to go.

My eye socket aches. I need to lay off the Zeiss before I pop an eyeball right the hell out of my face. “Rababal. We need to get people together. Is Pretornio still dicking around?”

“I wouldn’t call it-”

“How long does it take to bury a couple bodies?” Yeah, yeah, respect for the dead, sure. Petro and Lagget were good guys, greater love hath no man, whatever. They’re dead, we’re not, and I want to keep it that way. “Rababal?”

No answer. He’s staring out at the mass of Black Knives, flicking that fucking coin through his fingers again. “What are they doing? Just sitting there. Staring at us. Did it work? Will they leave, now?”

“If they were leaving, they’d be gone already.”

“Your brilliant plan,” he mutters. “What are they waiting for?”

I shrug. “Dark.”

He squints at me.

“Ogrilloi are-what’s the word? You know: twilight hunters.”

“Crepuscular.”

“Yeah. So they’re gonna wait till dark, because their night vision’s a lot better than ours. Not to mention their sense of smell. And they won’t come in a rush this time. It’ll be scouting parties. Little ones, and maybe a lot of them: ogrilloi like to hunt in packs of seven to ten. They’ll come in quiet. Infiltrating, if they can. Find out where we are and what we have.”

“And how do you expect to stop them?”

“I don’t. I expect to be gone.”

“Now we run?”

“If this had just been about chasing those two guys in the badlands, they’d have left already. There’s something here they want.”

“Other than us?

I shrug again and poke my chin at the pile of Black Knife dead. “Something worth getting another chunk of their collective dick chopped off. I don’t think we qualify.”

“I pray you’re right.”

“You do that.”

He makes a face at me. “And now?”

I bite down on a sigh; it comes out a flat hiss between my teeth. “Tell Stalton to have Kess and the grooms start tacking up the horses.”

››scanning fwd››

Oh.

Well.

That’s it, then.

I take the Zeiss from my eye and hold it balanced on my grimy blood-caked palm. It’s a goddamn nifty little thing. Seamlessly linked ovoids of brushed stainless steel. Kidskin-padded eye cup. Laser-ground polarized optics. A little crust of dried blood mars its softly gleaming surface, and I absently rub it clean with my thumb.

Man, I have seen a lot of shit with it today.

Somebody in my line of work must have brought it from back home. Had to be a long time ago. On freemod. One of the old-timers, maybe even one of the guys I grew up watching. The bosses those days were a lot looser about high-tech contraband. This nifty little piece of quality craftsmanship has probably been knocking around this world longer than I’ve been alive. Getting lost, getting stolen. Traded. Pawned.

Looted.

I remember how startled I was when I first saw it, when Hoppy Spinner pulled it out of his kit bag that afternoon in the God’s Teeth. I remember wondering if Hoppy might be another like me: a struggling second-rater nobody ever heard of. I figured he must be in my line of work. I remember how I found out he wasn’t.

There were ogrilloi there too.

I remember finding what was left of his body after they let their khoshoi strip his bones. How the shreds and tatters left behind lay quietly decomposing.

I found this monocular in a pool of khoshoi vomit between his fang-scored pelvis and splintered ribs. Khoshoi are as conservative as wolves; whichever one yarked up this hunk of indigestible metal had gone ahead and eaten whatever else had come up with it. All that was left was the Zeiss and a handful of clotted bile.

This little fucking thing is all I still have of old Hoppy. Wonder where he got it.

From the anxious crowd of partners and porters half crouching within the shadowed mouth of the crest passage, Rababal says hoarsely, “What is it? What do you see?”

I drift away from the passage mouth, through the scrub toward the brink of this vast escarpment. My boots crunch through sand and loose gravel. Below, the vertical city spreads in descending rings like a peeled-open map of the Inferno.

Huh. When I called it Hell, I was just, y’know, riffing. But now I see it with different eyes.

“Come on out if you want,” I call. Quiet has outlived its usefulness. “You can see for yourself.”

I heft the monocular. “Won’t need this.”

A long, smooth windup and I pitch the fucking thing high and hard, out over the half-klick drop to the badlands. The sunset picks it up at the top of its arc and makes it shine like a falling star.

It drops out of the light, swallowed by the shadows below. A lifetime passes while I wait for the stillness to give up a faint clatter of metal on stone.

A presence at my shoulder: Stalton. “What’d you do that for?”

“I got it off a dead man,” I tell him without moving. “I don’t want it to pass on the same way.”

“Shit, Caine, you didn’t want it, you coulda just gave it to me-”

I turn just enough for him to see the look in my eyes. “Maybe you don’t understand what I just said.”

I leave him there to think about it and go back to the other partners.

Far out in the badlands, the vast dust cloud swells wide, one thin arc of its uppermost reach glowing in the last of the sunset. Marade’s staring at that cloud like she can read her future in it. And she can.

So can I.

Rababal and Tizarre stand like they froze solid in the middle of an involuntary flinch. They’re staring at a hundred-odd ogrilloi trotting toward us along the escarpment, not more than a mile away. Even as we watch, their gorilla-bear lope fades to a walk, then they start dropping into that wait-until-dark squat.

“How did they get up here?” Rababal fumbles with his platinum disk, drops it, and lets it chinng into the rocks at his feet. He doesn’t even look down. “How did they get here ahead of us?”

“They didn’t.” I nod back toward the city. “They’re still down there. These are new.”

“But-but-what are they doing up here?”

Marade murmurs the textbook answer. “When marching a large body of troops parallel to a major geographic feature-a mountain range, say, or this rift-cliff-you need a screen of skirmishers on the far side, in case-”

“Marching troops?”

Chrome steel creaks as she slowly shakes her head. “Or whatever.”

He follows her gaze out to the vast dust cloud now disappearing into the horizon’s shadow. “Um. Oh. Um, I see.” His nervy voice, finally, has gone calm and quiet. For the first time, he sounds like a grown-up. “I understand. That cloud-that’s not a storm.”

She nods, still staring at her future. She doesn’t seem to like the looks of it.

Yeah, well, me neither.

Tizarre’s got that wild look around her eyes again. “Where the hell are the horses? Where’s Kess and the grooms?”

I wave toward another trail of rising dust, upland toward the sinking sun.

“Bastard,” she breathes. “That ratsucking bastard-”

“Leave the language to me,” I mutter. “You don’t have the touch.”

That wild look of hers takes on a dangerous calculation. Even money says she’s running through all the magicks she knows that can hit them from here. “They haven’t gotten very far-”

“They’re plenty far. But they won’t get a lot farther; that dust isn’t theirs. It’s from Black Knives on their trail.”

Stalton’s at my shoulder again. “More Black Knives?” he breathes, blinking. Yeah: weak eyes. “Are you pulling my dick? How many?”

A sign that can’t unclench the fist in my gut. A shrug that can’t shift the weight on my shoulders. That’s all the answer he should need.

“Come on, Caine. You had the glass. How many are out there?”

So I tell him. “All of them.”

››scanning fwd››

I stick out a hand to stop the two thaumaturges in the stair shaft to the escarpment’s top. “What d’you got left for Fireballs?”

Tizarre looks at Rababal. He makes a face. “A, well, a dozen. Or so.”

“A dozen. Fuck my ass.”

“Had I known how splendidly your master plan would work,” he says through his teeth, “I would have been more conservative-”

“Yeah, whatever.” Don’t panic. Do not panic.

Panic-

Huh. Funny.

What panic?

Y’know, all I’m really getting right now is that hot dark tingle just above my balls. Maybe I really am one stone batshit son of a bitch.

I’m looking forward to this. .

“Okay. Okay, look, can you Reach from mindview?”

“Telekinesis?” He frowns. “Well, yes, a little. I’m not strong.”

“Won’t have to be. Collect canteens from the porters. Dump the water and fill ’em half full of lamp oil. Drop a buckeye in each, you follow?”

His frown turns appreciative. “I believe I do.”

“Tizarre: you can Nightsee, can’t you? Can you Whisper?”

She starts to nod, stops. Her feathery brows draw together. “I should be able to. Should. Something’s weird in the Flow here. No promises.”

“No excuses either. Make it work.”

She looks dubious. “The moon’s barely past first quarter, and it won’t rise till after midnight. Even if I can tell you where they are, you can’t fight in the dark.”

I nod toward Rababal. “You’ll be with him.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The oil canteens,” Rababal murmurs.

“Yup.” She’s recon. He’s artillery. “We’ll fight by the light of burning ogrilloi.”

The stubby necromancer stares at me like he’s never seen me before. Like I’m some kind of weird-ass animal and he’s trying to calculate how dangerous I might be.

He has no fucking idea. “What else you got?”

“For combat?”

“No, shithead. For a bad attack of drizzledick.”

“I, uh-Minor Shields. Some. Er, five. Just-y’know. For protection.”

“And?”

He glances away. Rising color warms the bottom folds of his jowls. “And, well, I suppose. .” he says diffidently. Offhand, as if it only just occurred to him. “I mean, y’know, there’s my bladewand. .”

“A bladewand?” I ratchet my dropped jaw back into place and lean so close that when he licks his lips I can smell his spit. “You have a bladewand? And you let me walk out that gate with nothing but a motherfucking knife up my sleeve?”

“Well, I, ah-it’s magick, you see-”

“You don’t want to know what I see.” I open a hand. “Give it.”

“But-but-”

“Give it, or my hand to fucking God I will take it off your body.”

Behind me, Stalton takes a step back up the crest passage. “Caine, you can’t just push him around like-”

I stop him with a look over my shoulder. “Ever see a move like the one I pulled on that fucker outside?”

His answer is a measuring squint.

“You’re about to bet your life I don’t have another.”

Color rises in his face. “That’s not-”

I shove my open hand at Rababal. “Now.”

He fumbles the bladewand out from inside his vest. It’s all I can do not to snatch it. I’ve never seen one in person. Not even secondhand, not in maybe fifteen years. . not since I was a kid, playing bootleg cubes of the Light-weaver. . then he holds it out to me, and I take it.

And I’m holding it. In my very own hand. I really am.

It’s heavy, and warm with the damp heat of his sweat. Almost as long as my forearm, its wine-colored wood is dense as steel, inlaid with an impossibly intricate lattice of fine platinum wire. The butt end swells to an ovoid the size of a hen’s egg, rounded and smooth, and it nestles into the hollow of my palm like it grew there. The balance point is a bare fingerbreadth from the butt; the griffinstone inside must be a monster.

A bladewand. I can’t fucking believe it.

A breath is all it takes to summon the limpid passionless clarity of the Control Disciplines. They’re not so different from mindview. My palm tingles with energy.

Hmm. The Lightweaver used to do it kinda like-

I point the wand at the passage gap and reach into myself, summoning pure concentration, feeling for the trigger point with my mind. Nothing happens.

Shit.

Rababal’s still sputtering. “But-but-but it’s magickal, don’t you understand?”

I do understand. I did a year of Battle Magick at the Conservatory-but if I’d been worth a wet fart at it, I wouldn’t be here now. .

“You’re no thaumaturge, Caine. How can you expect to-”

“Shut up.”

“Maybe I should take it,” Tizarre says uncertainly. “I mean, I’m good with a blade, and-”

“Shut up.”

Less effort. Just an intention. A feel. .

A surge inside my right arm: not a tingle, not the electric sizzle that Telukhai always felt, but an actual surge like a tide of hot oil pulsing from my spine to my fingertips-

“Really, Caine, you’re only embarrassing yourself. Years of training-”

Translucently shimmering blue-white energy licks along the platinum lattice and stretches out from the wand’s tip: a plane as wide as my hand and about three meters long that enters the millennial stone of the crest passage wall without resistance. It lasts for only one heart-thumping second, but that’s plenty of time for me to give the wand a twitch and carve off a hunk of rock bigger than my head.

Ohhh, yeah.

The hunk slides sideways and crashes down the ramp. The cut is smooth as glass. The bladewand’s butt is hot in my hand.

Now Tizarre and Stalton both have that what-the-fuck-kind-of-animal-is-this look on their faces too. Rababal breathes: “Who are you?”

I hold up the wand to catch the last rays of sunset. Platinum traceries shine like smears of blood.

I am really looking forward to this.

››scanning fwd››

“You know what we’re up against now.”

They stare at me from their huddles and clusters in the deep vaulted shadows of the immense passage hall, faces pinched and green with dread. Moonrise drips ghost-milk down the crest passage behind me.

“There’s no way out. There’s no way back. There is no parley. No appeal. They’re gonna come, and we’re gonna die. All of us. We can’t even slow them down. All we’ve got is a choice. Die tonight, or die from now till next month. Screaming.”

Not exactly St. Crispin’s Day, but at least I have their attention.

“I am going to die tonight. So is Marade, and Pretornio. Stalton and Rababal and Tizarre.” I nod at the cook, and his lover next to him. “So are you, Nollo. And you, Jashe. And every single one of you. Anybody who doesn’t will wish he had. Say it with me: I am going to die tonight.”

They look at me like I asked them to do the chicken dance.

“Come on. Say it. I am going to die tonight.”

Slowly, with a kind of reluctant surly stubbornness, they mumble their way through it.

“Where I come from, there used to be this, like, nation of warriors. When they were going into battle, they’d tell each other, Today is a good day to die. And they’d believe it.” I nod toward the sunset behind me. “Well, for us it’s night. This night. And I don’t know how good it is, but it’s the only one we’ve got.”

I make a fist and hold it out. “Tonight is a good night to die.”

They look at each other, at the niter-scaled walls, at the shadowed vault above. Anywhere but at me.

Christians like to say the truth will make you free. Guess I’ve got the wrong truth.

“Listen-” I let my fist go slack and rub my forehead. “Listen: I’ve got my share of problems, y’know? You all know it. I’m an asshole. Nobody likes me. Sometimes I don’t like me much either.”

I give them a second to disagree. Nobody jumps in. Big goddamn surprise. “

Shit weighs down on me, y’know? Like it does on everybody, I guess. I worry what the fuck I’m doing with my life. I’ve got a sick dad, and I can’t take care of him, and this girl I’m hot for thinks I’m a jerk, and shit, y’know, she’s right, but somehow I just can’t help my-” I manage to avoid looking at her. “Ahh, forget all that, it’s not important.

“Here’s the point: that’s all future stuff, y’know? Everything you worry about. Everything that keeps you awake at night. All the shitty things the world has waiting for all of us. You know: Failure. Old age. Loneliness. Heartbreak. Cancer. Whatever.

“All that is gone, now. You get it? That’s all shit to worry about tomorrow-but we won’t have to. Not ever again.

“For us, there is no tomorrow.

“Think about it. We have nothing left to worry about. Nothing. Shit, those Black Knives out there tonight? They’re giving us a gift. Because all that bad stuff, all the rotten fucking shit that could possibly happen for the rest of our lives. . won’t. Because the only rest of our lives we have left is a few minutes to decide how we’re gonna die.”

“What difference does that make?” somebody says. “Dead is dead.”

“Don’t care how you die? You don’t even have to leave this room. Just step over here.” I open my arms, offering. “You won’t feel a thing.”

No takers. No surprise.

“I’ll tell you how I’m gonna die.”

A long, slow look, eye to eye to eye. I let that spark in my balls heat up my voice. “I’m gonna drown in their smoking fucking blood.”

A muffled snort from the shadows: sounds like Stalton.

Thought he’d like that one.

“I will choke to death on their raw fucking brains. You follow? The cocksmoke that finally kills me will carry the marks of my teeth into his fucking grave-and when somebody digs him up a thousand years from now, they’ll point to the scar on his throat and they’ll say, ‘You see that? That was from Caine.’ ”

The passage hall goes quiet, and some of the eyes on me go cold now: the open-behind stare of surrendered hope. Good for them.

Good for me.

“I can’t say what happens in the next life. Or if there is a next life. You want that shit, talk to Pretornio, or Marade. I will tell you this, though. There’s one afterlife we know we can have: we can make the kind of fight here that will become a fucking legend.”

I come to my feet. “To hell with the next world. Let’s be immortal in this one. We’re gonna die anyway. Let’s do it right.”

“Yeah?” Sounds like the same guy, there in the darkness. “But who’s gonna know? We’ll all be dead. Nobody will even know this ever happened-”

“We will be remembered.” God’s own truth: this could be Adventure of the Year. I’ll be famous. Hell, they’ll be famous too. Dying in front of an audience of millions.

Wish I could be there to enjoy it.

“Believe it.” I give them a stare like the truth is a nail I can hammer into their heads with my eyes. “Our story will be known.”

“Yeah? Who’s gonna tell it? Who’s gonna remember us?”

My conditioning would choke me if I tried tell him, but I have another truth. A better truth. A truth that just might make us free.

“I thought that was obvious.” I raise a hand and wave at the black stone of the passage chamber walls, through the stone, out into the infinite night beyond.

Out at the Black Knives.

“They will.”