Caine Black Knife

HERO

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.

Screams of burning ogrilloi echo off the stone. Eight or nine of them-a swell bonfire down there.

The light they cast gleams on steel teeth of two kratrioi closing in on them from either end of the alley, and from up here it looks clean, precise, even elegant: close-order drill on a parade ground.

Y’know, for a weaselly little twitch, that Pretornio swings serious dick.

Caine.

I look up and give a wave toward the impenetrable night-shadow that shrouds the distant parapet where Tizarre and Rababal stand.

Two packs converging on your position. Get ready.

Yeah: they’ve heard the screams. Running to get a look. And they’re gonna die for it.

I turn toward the featureless shadow-shapes of Marade and Stalton. “Here they come. Fade.”

They’re right on top of you-

I wave a second acknowledgment and swing through the window gap in the crumbling wall, get low, and squeeze some heat into the butt of the blade-wand. The thumping of bare feet and clicking of toeclaws on stone has my balls sucking themselves up to my rib cage. Huge blacker shadows hurtle into the shadows in front of me and I stick the bladewand through the window and a pulse of blue energy licks from its end, casting enough light that I can see three or four of them begin to just come apart.

They grunt and gasp as they fall and one starts to howl and I duck below the sill and press against the night-chilled stone as the canteen full of oil that Rababal has Reached down to just above their heads ignites with a metallic whang.

When I look back out the little window, everything’s on fire.

Including about fifteen Black Knives.

››scanning fwd››

Fucking stuck-goddamn crest ridge’s like a bench vise-

Good thing the fight’s over. This could’ve been terminally embarrassing.

I step on his face-my boot heel squelches in his open eye-and stick the bladewand back behind my belt so I can use both hands.

Ghost-blue flickers from oil flames guttering in the cracks of the flagstones. The last two Black Knives wheeze and gurgle against the wall, sagging. Marade rips the smashed visor off her helm with a squeal of tortured metal, then limps painfully over their smoldering throw nets, slaps aside the hammer one raises in feeble defense, and lifts her morningstar.

“Leave them,” I pant at her. “Inhaled flame. . dead already.”

She turns a blood-smeared face toward me: the smashed visor must’ve crumpled in enough to break her nose. “We can’t just let them suffer-”

Stalton sags against the crumbled wall, cradling the pudding that used to be his left wrist. “Sure we can.”

He nudges one of the throw nets with his foot. “It was a pretty good speech, Caine,” he says with a shaky, shocky laugh. “But that don’t-let-’em-take-you-alive thing is starting to look like a problem.”

With the dead ogrillo’s head braced between my boot and the oil-scorched flags, a twisting wrench yanks my sword free of his skull. The effort unfolds a scarlet bloom under my short ribs where his hammer caught me, and I wheeze a little as I lift the sword.

“Oh, for shit’s sake. Look at this.”

Right at the mess of brains and bone splinters, the blade takes a thirtydegree bend and almost a quarter fuck-my-bleeding-ass twist. “You spend like half your motherfucking life learning how to get a sword into somebody’s skull-how come nobody teaches you how to take it out?”

They’re not listening; Stalton’s trying to tighten the straps of his battered shield one-handed, and Marade’s looking down at the mess those warhammers made of her right thigh.

“Screw this piece of shit.” I drop it. Swords suck, anyway.

Wouldn’t happen with a knife.

I pick up the warhammer he hit me with, hefting it for weight and balance, and the bloom of pain below my short ribs spiders into a spreading numbness that buckles my knees.

Oh, damn.

I lean on the warhammer and palpate my liver through the cool slick chainmail and my padded surcoat. It doesn’t exactly hurt; the sensation is too vast, too oceanic. My gut’s bloating already, and pressing on it opens a black pit that sucks away my strength. Dunno how bad it really is, but the night darkens and goes liquid around me, and sounds stop making sense. Bad enough.

Shock, though, I am trained for. Breathe.

And.

Breathe.

And-Breathe, and-

And a few seconds’ focused concentration on my Control Disciplines pumps my blood pressure high enough to swim the world back into focus.

Breathe.

And breathe.

A shift of attention within the Disciplines amps my stress hormones; the pain fades and strength leaks back into my legs and arms, and my head clears.

Forget love and money, baby: adrenocortical steroids make the world go round.

After most of a minute I can stand up straight and finally get a decent look at this hammer. The haft’s longer than my arm and the iron head runs about three kilos, but two-handed, I can swing it well enough. My gut and Stalton’s wrist can both vouch for the impact the bone-shattering peen can deliver; the spike on the back side has the same shallow curve as an ogrillo fighting claw and can punch through steel plate-Marade’s right cuisse looks like the surface of the moon, and at least three of those craters are deep leaking punctures.

Should work well enough on ogrillo skulls.

Marade shakes her head distractedly, sprinkling her legs with blood from her nose. “Caine. I’ll need your help-”

A surge of motion behind her, and she interrupts herself with a shirring backhand of her morningstar that meets the clumsy lunge of the dying Black Knife and splatters the wall with his brains.

That girl can hit.

His corpse flips against the other Black Knife. The live one gives a snarl, but he’s got nothing left-the snarl’s mostly groan and he collapses beneath his dead clanmate’s body, still staring murder up at Marade as he strangles on the fluid filling his burnt lungs.

Y’know, if she and I could find some way to live through this-I mean, y’know, if she likes me at all. .

She staggers toward me, fumbling at the upper curve of her perforated cuisse. “Help me get this off, will you?”

I drop to one knee and slip my hands up under her tasset to feel for the top buckle, and I must truly be a sick fucking puppy, because the feel of her warm flesh through the sticky cloth of her breeches has my breath going even shorter than that body-shot from the hammer did.

“I, uh-” I have to cough my throat clear. “We don’t have much for bandages-I mean, my shirt, I guess-”

“No need,” she tells me. “Soft-tissue wounds aren’t serious for me. I just need this off. The ripped edges are cutting into muscle-I can’t walk and I can’t Heal. And I need to see what I can do for Stalton’s arm.”

My gut could use some attention too, but-

The way she’s talking. .

I stop and squint up at her. “Kinda lost that whole Ivanhoe cadence all of a sudden, haven’t you?”

“What?” She looks startled, and a guilty flash shifts her eyes. “I, uh-”

Caine. The ghost-hiss of Tizarre’s Whisper shushes from just behind my left shoulder. I raise my arm to signal I’ve heard her. Two more packs, and another’s linking up. About two bowshots south and closing.

I nod to myself and pull my right-hand boot knife. Marade scowls down as I start sawing through her cuisse’s retaining straps.

“Caine?”

“That was Tizarre. We have company.”

She bares her teeth and looks over her shoulder. “Stalton?”

“I’m mobile,” he says thinly. He doesn’t sound too sure of it. “Which way?”

“Fuck it.” The last strap parts and her cuisse comes off in my hand. “Just get out of sight. We’ll hit ’em right here.”

››scanning fwd››

The ogrillo hesitates for one frozen second when I point the bladewand at his eye. I summon the surge of intention that will slice off the top of his head but all I get is a bluish static discharge and enough heat from the bladewand’s eggbutt to scorch my palm and shit how long does this fucking thing take to repower anyway-

He grunts and spreads a huge wicked grin and lunges, swinging, and I duck inside the dark whirr of his warhammer and spike that wicked grin of his with the business end of the bladewand.

Its mithondion wood is dense as steel and it punctures skin and rips muscle and splinters bone; it grates into the hinge of his jaw and sticks fast and rips from my fingers as he rears back, bellowing the nerve-numbing shock of the bone-shot. His hands go loose on his hammer’s haft, while mine find it below the head. A hard twist of the haft and a sidekick to his gut don’t move him at all but shove me away and leave me on my feet in front of him with his hammer in my hands. And the bastard turns and bolts like a startled cat.

With my bladewand still sticking out of his motherfucking face-

“Cocksucker!” I spring after him but something tears in my belly and ogrilloi can do forty at a sprint and I couldn’t catch him on a motorcycle. “Shitlicking cunthole come back and fight!”

I throw the warhammer as hard as I can. It spins along the street and slams him across the kidneys and he staggers, but he keeps his feet and never even looks back.

He vanishes into the hot dry midnight, and all I can do is cuss and snarl and look around for somebody else to kill.

I find only smoking corpses and the clitclat of toeclaws moving away into the darkness and Marade in her battered armor springing onto the back of one huge buck who’s not quite fast or smart enough to have bolted with the others. She’s lost her morningstar somewhere, but it doesn’t matter; with one hand sliding around his bull neck to grip her opposite rerebrace, her other hand finds the back of his crest ridge, and with Khryl’s Strength, she doesn’t have to settle for the strangle. One grunting flex practically pops his head off.

He’s dead before they hit the ground.

She lies across him, panting. By the time I get there, she’s rolled onto her back, still gasping shallowly, and it’s easy to see why: her breastplate’s a mess. Must be like trying to breathe inside an iron maiden. The kind with spikes. “Here, let me help-”

“No-no, I can-” she wheezes, pulling off her gauntlets. Blood bubbles from her smashed mouth. “Where-?”

I shake my head. “Fuckers ran off. Not that I blame them. And I–I-”

“What?”

I can barely make myself say it. “I lost the bladewand.”

She nods exhaustedly. Her eyes drift briefly closed. “All right. All right. We can-we still can-”

“Still can what? Die ugly?”

She fumbles under her gorget for the cuirass buckles. “Khryl loves me-once I can breathe, I can pray. He’ll Heal me. Us. Fight on.”

“Yeah, okay.” I reach down and smooth blood-soaked hair out of her eyes. “That was a real pretty neckbreak, Marade. Since when do Khryllians teach the sleeper?”

Her fingers slip on the buckles, and that guilty flash crosses her face again.“Caine, I–I mean-”

“Forget it.” A few of the downed Black Knives are still twitching. One drags himself painfully toward the shadows. The flames of oil clinging to the crumbling walls and across the sand-packed street gutter and fade; we’re about to lose the light. Much as I’d enjoy watching Marade remove her breastplate, I better get with business.

Her last kill had dropped his warhammer; I pick it up. “If you’re okay with getting that plate off, I’ll go smoke the wounded.”

She gets the straps unbuckled and slips the cuirass enough that she can sit up, then freezes, her head cocked.

“What?”

“Tizarre.” She lifts one arm in the I hear you wave at the night-black parapet far above. Her face goes blank, then grim. “Pretornio’s in trouble.”

“Worse than us?”

She yanks at her breastplate. It comes off with a squeal of ripping metal.“Yes. The porters broke. They’ve been overrun. Some of them have already been taken.”

“Taken? Taken alive?”

A single nod. “We have to-have to get to them-” She heaves herself to her feet, swaying. Her surcoat gleams red-black, soaked through with gore. She takes an unsteady step, and another, and stumbles against a wall. She leans there, retching blood.

“You’re in no shape to go anywhere. You shouldn’t even be upright.”

“Have to,” she says. She pulls the collar of her surcoat up to mop her mouth and chin. “We stand to pray. By the time we all get down to Pretornio, I’ll be able-”

She stops and looks around, blinking stupidly. “Where’s Stalton?”

I ape her, feeling stupider than she looks. “Fuck me. He was right over-”

Right over where there is now only fading flames and Black Knives in various states of disrepair.

“Stalton! Hey, Stalton!”

“Caine-!” she hisses, making shushing motions with her hand.

I ignore her; anybody who can hear me already knows where we are. “Stalton! Come on, man, link up! We gotta move!”

I stand for a while in the quiet wind, listening to the whuff of dying flames.

A stir in the sand looks like it might be tracks.

“Stay here and pray,” I tell her. “I’ll find him.”

Blood streaks and scuffled sand lead me beyond the firelight. Another dip into the Control Disciplines fully dilates my irises and floods my retinal rods with rhodopsin. It’s not quite Nightsight, but I am trained to see things clearly without looking straight at them; in the starlight, the fringes of my meditation-enhanced peripheral vision are sufficient to find a spot in a right-of-way between two crumbled dwellings where Stalton’s boot tracks disappear into the prints of bare ogrillo feet.

My hauberk suddenly gains a couple hundred pounds and I really, really need to sit down. Better not. Don’t know if I’ll get up again.

This glorious death thing could be going a hell of a lot better.

“Caine? Where are you?” Her voice is stronger already. “What happened to the lantern?”

“I don’t know. Lost.”

“Stalton?”

“Him too.”

She comes stumbling toward me, blundering through what is to her impenetrable darkness. “What do you mean? Is he dead?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. His tracks stop here. Theirs go on. There’s no body.”

“How can you-” She stops herself, and the night goes silent around her. “You can see.”

“Sort of.” Why bother to lie? “A little.”

For what feels like a long time, she stands perfectly still. I can hear her breathe.

“What are you?” Her voice is quiet. Slow. Fatal. “Monastic?”

In the distance: fading human screams.

“What difference does it make now?”

“Some kind of Esoteric. You must be. Why did you not tell anyone?”

“We all have secrets,” I remind her.

“An assassin,” she murmurs, a bleak dropping half-whisper, as though discovering what I am has broken something precious inside her. An inexplicable hint of tears. “Who is your target? Is it me?”

Given the history between the Monasteries and the Order of Khryl, there is some justification for paranoia. “It’s not like that.”

“What, then? All of us? This is what you’ve been pushing for, is it not? We all die. A brilliant strategem-”

“Marade, cut it out. Pull yourself together.” I need to do the same. “We’re not done yet.”

Her silhouette gives a silent nod. A sniffle in the darkness. “Yes. Yes. Pretornio, his men. Stalton. They need us.”

“That’s right.” I unbuckle my belt and let it drop, then shuck my hauberk and surcoat off over my head. Finally. Just the leather tunic and pants. I can move again. “You go for the priest and the porters. Do what you can.”

“And you?”

“I’ll find Stalton.” One way or another.

“If he is dead-”

“Then no problem. Tizarre can link us up.” I breathe adrenalized strength back into my legs. Some, anyway; there’s a limit to the Disciplines, and I’m not far from it.

I’m as ready to go as I’ll ever be.

“Caine, I-this is-” The outline of one hand, reaching. “We’ll not see each other alive again, I think.”

“I guess probably not.”

That shadowed hand gropes in the darkness. I let it find me, and she gathers me into a bearhug, lifting me effortlessly from the ground with steel-sleeved arms that could crush my spine with a shrug, but through her sodden surcoat her breasts are soft and round and instead of crushing death I get her bloody lips on mine in one copper-salted kiss.

Before I can even clearly think What the fuck? she sets me on my feet again.

“Die fighting, Caine,” she says, and stumbles off toward the guttering flames beyond.

I watch her go for a second, and two, and three and four, and I am such a useless sack of shit coward that I can’t say a word. Not a word even now.

And she’s gone.

Shit.

My good-byes go only to the night and to the dead.

The last of the flames flutter out. All that’s left is to breathe back my night-vision, find a warhammer, and trot off on the Black Knives’ trail.

››scanning fwd››

So these two decided on a snack. Easier than lugging his body all the way back to their camp, I guess. Just goes to show: your average Black Knife can be every bit as selfish, undisciplined, and lazy as your average human.

Somehow that should be more comforting than it is.

I should blow. Leave them to their dinner and go see if I can find Marade, because there’s really fuck-all anyone can do for him now, and I would go, I would, but the moon’s finally coming up and in that strengthening silver-bleached glow, there’s something weird about how they’re kneeling over his belly.

One keeps a hand on the bunched hauberk where it’s pulled up over Stalton’s face, and the other is half turned on all fours so that his legs pin Stalton’s to the sand, and while the meaning of this is still seeping through my mental wall of no fucking way his body twists and bucks and the tangled mess of guts twitches and-

And fuck me fuck me fuck me God he’s still alive-

With all their grunting and slurping they can’t hear me as I slip over the sill of what must have been, a thousand years ago, somebody’s bay window, hammer over my shoulder, and with a big slow backswing, I step up and golf the head-end one right in front of the ear.

The impact straightens him upright on his knees, eyes blank and staring over his shattered cheekbone, and the one kneeling on Stalton’s legs manages to lift his head in time to catch my downstroke between his eyes like a steer in a slaughterhouse. The peen leaves a fist-size dent in his skull and his eyeballs splatter and he topples sideways and before his corpse can even hit the ground I spin and let the first one have the back-spike through the nape of his neck. It punches though bone and I use it like a gaff to drag the bastard backward off Stalton’s chest and out of the mess of guts and black soggy sand.

The two Black Knives flop and twitch and kick and grunt as their autonomic nervous systems refuse to believe they’re actually dead, but after a while their hukk-hukk-huhhkkkkk becomes fading hisses of escaping breath, and the only sound in the broken chamber is thick hitching gasps that could be sobs, and I can’t tell if it’s Stalton or if it’s me.

The chainmail over his face twists side to side. His hands are still bound under his back. I drop to my knees beside him, just where that ogrillo had been, and gently pull the hauberk down to his shoulders.

His eyes are squeezed shut like he’s afraid they’ll burst, and his mouth and chin and cheeks are thick with tear-streaked blood. He’s sobbing like a heartbroken teenager. I slide one hand under his head and stroke his hair with the other and say some stupid meaningless shit about how he can quiet down now because everything’s okay, it’s all over and it’s okay, and somehow that stupid meaningless shit must not sound stupid to him, because his breathing starts to even out, and pretty soon he lets himself open his eyes. “Who-?”

“It’s Caine, Stalton.”

“C–Caine? Caine, I. . hurt. It hurts, Caine.”

“Yeah, I know.” Fuck. Better if he dies now. Better if he died twenty minutes ago. Fuck. “Shh. Hush now. Let it go.”

“It’s not. . I’ve had worse. . it’s not too bad. The pain.” His voice is blurred. Shaky. “Like a little-little food . . food poisoning. . that’s all. Caine?”

I’d tell him to save his strength, but, y’know, for what? “Yeah.”

“Got. . water? Thirsty. Mmm, really thirsty.”

Me too. I don’t remind him what we did with our canteens. “Yeah. Yeah, sure. I’ll get you some water. In a minute.”

“Wasn’t supposed to be like this. .”

Tears roll out from the corners of his eyes and trail down his temples. “Just a j-j-job, that’s all. Little. . bodyguarding. Lead to something better, you know? Nobody said it’d be like this. It’s not-it’s not supposed to end here. .”

“Yeah.” I lower his head back down to the sand-packed floor. The moon glows in over my shoulder. “I’d make it different if I could.”

“I, uh-I. . ahhh, fuck.” His back arches. “Can’t-can’t even sit up. .”

Not with his abdominals chewed away. “I know. Don’t try.”

“Can you-? Can you help me see-?”

“You don’t want to.”

“It’s really bad. .? I can’t see. It is. It’s really bad.”

“Trust me.”

I get to my feet and pick up the warhammer. It’s gained a ton or so; I have to rest it on my shoulder, and the weight still buckles my knees. I’ve killed men before. But I’ve never killed a man who’s real to me. Who’s a person. A guy I like.

A man I wish could have been my friend.

“Yeah. Yeah, okay. Caine, don’t-don’t-”

“It’s better like this. Quick.”

“No. No, not that. It’s okay. Just don’t-” Fresher tears roll along the streaks down his face. “-don’t tell anybody, okay?”

“Tell-?”

His raw streaming stare begs me to promise. “Don’t tell them I went out like a. . like a punk. Tell them I. . died fighting. Tell them. Okay?”

Like there’s anybody I can tell who’d care. But I guess that’s not the point.

“Yeah.” I shift my grip on the hammer. My arms tremble. My hands prickle sweat inside my gloves. “Ready?”

“Does it have to be-is there. . is there any way-? Marade or Pretornio or-”

“No. It’s just me. And I don’t know anything about Healing.” I show him the hammer. “This is what I know.”

His eyes fix on mine. “Don’t tell them I went out like a punk.”

“You won’t.”

The hammer goes up over my head and I bring it down like it’s an axe and his skull’s a log, and there is a crunch and a splatter and y’know in the end, I told him the truth. He didn’t go out like a punk at all.

Didn’t even close his eyes.

Tougher than me. .

What I just did bitches my candy ass before I get back out the window.

Reaction buckles my knees and throws me retching against the sill. I crumple just beyond the mess of corpses and skid myself into a corner. And all I can do is sit and shake.

Because I’m looking at my future. What’s left of it.

It’s here. It’s this.

Fighting them is pointless. I don’t really give a rat’s butthole about that glorious-last-stand crap I sold everybody on. Sounded good coming out of my mouth, but it was dogshit and I can taste it now.

This is a hell of a time to find out I’m no hero.

Only one thing I can still do for them. One thing. For these people I conned into dying ugly. I hope the next one is easier. No, I don’t.

Shit, I don’t know. Can it get easy to kill your friends?

What if it does? What does that make me?

Huh.

Guess I’ll be finding out.