Caine Black Knife

HALF ELIGIBLE

I don’t have a clear memory of the Rite of Investment, which is probably a good thing. Like nearly everything else Khryllian-once you get past the pretty armor and nice white buildings and the defend-the-innocent-and-be-kind-to-peasants crap-what I do recall is flat-out nasty.

It all took place under the Regard of Khryl, which makes it bleed together in my head, but there was some bare-fingered ripping of flesh involved, hers or mine or both, and a lot of precious bodily fluid likewise, and at one point I’m pretty sure I had my hand inside her rib cage.

With my fingers wrapped around her beating heart.

Get what I mean about flat-out nasty?

Or maybe it was her hand and my heart. Like I said, I’m not real clear on the details. Somebody’s hand was inside somebody’s chest. Khryllians are big on sticking their hands into people. Penetration of flesh and shit. It’s that goddamn Healing of His. Once you sand the corners off consequences, people start to get really fucking weird.

Some people say that’s what happened to me. But screw them anyway. None of them could have lived through my consequences.

Anyway, I came walking down out of there with my right fist full of metaphoric Holy Foreskin, and it was not the most comfortable thing I’ve ever held.

But I was fucking right going to get my handjob’s worth.

Rounding the last curve of stair down into the Lavidherrixium, rubbing worm-threads of dried blood from my skin and hoping these sick bastards at least had a goddamn shower I could use before I had to go out in public, I didn’t notice how the murmur of breeze above became the murmur of voices below until the voices took on actual words.

“. . and that, my Lord, is a matter to offer up unto the Regard of the Lord of Valor. Which is none other than my full intention here, and which you, my Lord, have a truly astonishing lack of authority to prevent.”

I could clearly hear the nailed-shut clamp of Markham’s Lipkan jaw. “I repeat: You may not ascend. You must depart immediately. That is an order.”

“The Love of Our Lord of Valor has cleared the clamor from my ears, my Lord; I kenned you well at first breath. And every time since. What I have not heard is by what authority you propose to stand between a Knight of Khryl and the Regard of God, nor yet, precisely, how you propose to enforce this preposterous tyranny upon my person.”

“I am Lord Righteous in service to the Champion of-”

“Oh, aye, there is that, and the trifle of authority you wield is held in fief from her, true enough. But even Herself can stand between a Knight and Our Lord only if the unfortunate Knight in question is proven Recreant, Craven, or Base. Is one or more of these a charge you’d care to offer a poor halfcrippled Knight the barest glimpse of a wink to Answer? For the dispute can be settled between us right now, my Lord Righteous in Et Cetera. Assuredly it can; we need only step out where we will not defile-”

“I repeat. You may not ascend. You must depart immediately.”

I could imagine the look on Markham’s face. It made me smile as I followed the curving walkway above the long pool. Despite recognizing the other voice.

“This unlawful, sacrilegious-one might even say blasphemous, were one of a more judgmental temper than my poor self-insistence of yours could, within the bounds of reasonable possibility, lead a Knight of suspicious nature to wonder if there might be something, above in the Purificapex, that you’d mislike him to encounter. And to speculate what this mysterious something might, in fact, turn out to be.”

“Yeah, Markham, tell the man.” I ducked under the last of the hanging lanterns above the walkway. “What is it you don’t want him to see?”

In the meat-smelling damp, Markham stood blankly still, pale as a Lipkan corpse. Trickles of condensation rolled down his armor.

One of the racks now held an impressively polished set of Khryllian plate that could have been made for a short bear. From one of the wall hooks, an arm’s length from where my clothes lay in a wadded pile, hung a padded surcoat and leggings, and bleached linen underclothes. From another hook hung a long white cloak.

Standing facing the armored Lord Righteous, buck naked as the day he was born but with a shitload more hair, arms akimbo, the white-shot thatch that covered his vast chest and asscheeks and tree-trunk legs not managing to conceal an impressive array of scarring that included an angry red knot on a scarlet rope around his right thigh, stood Tyrkilld, Knight Aeddharr.

This worthy’s jaw hung slack, and his face rapidly drained bright red into killing white.

“How’s the leg, shitheel?”

Tyrkilld’s mouth closed with a snap so loud he should have cracked a couple teeth. He took a breath, then another, and by the time he finally spoke, his voice was nearly human.

#8220;It gives considerable pain. But against finding your vile self in this holy place, it bears comparison to casting a taper upon a house afire.”

“Thanks.” I turned toward the pale steel outrage that was Markham’s face. “Angvasse wants you to take me to the Pens. To take me to see Orbek.”

His expression didn’t so much as flicker. “The way lies back along our path,” he said. “As soon as you dress-”

“Through that office?” I nodded judiciously. “Go wait for me there.”

He looked blank. I flicked a couple back-of-the-hand shoos at him.

Markham’s face had gone beyond red. It was the color now of the robes. “I am tasked only-”

“Shut up about your tasks.” Maybe I could give the bastard an aneurysm and drop him right here. “Take a fucking hike. I’m sick of having you stare at my ass.”

“I-” Markham’s mouth snapped shut, then swung open again. “I-”

“Go on, fuck off.”

“My duty is to the Champion-”

“I got your doody right here.” I lifted my handful of metaphoric Holy Foreskin. “Ch’syavallanaig Khryllan’tai.”

It got real bright in there.

I had to squint against the blaze that sprang from my upraised palm, even though I knew enough to point it away from my eyes; it lit up Markham like he’d stuck his face in an arc welder. Tyrkilld smothered what would have been, from anyone other than a Khryllian, a blasphemous obscenity, and shielded his eyes with one bull-shank arm.

It’s not for nothing that one of Khryl’s epithets is “the Brilliant.” Maybe it’s a sungod thing.

It also felt like the palm of my hand was being burned to ash and cinders while being continuously Healed, which is no coincidence, because that’s basically what was happening. Also a sungod thing.

I guess Khryl doesn’t want His Invested Agents throwing His Authority around casually. Like, for example, just to piss off Lipkan ass-cobs. But, y’know, that’s one of those Covenant of Pirichanthe things. The gods can only grant power or take it away; what you do with it is up to you.

Which is why I could stand there with a mouthful of grin, even while I was shaking steam off the new pink skin on my palm and patting out the line of smolder that was climbing the cuff of the blood-robe.

“You know what that means?” I waved the hand a little more. It still stung like a bastard. “It means you have to fuck off. Now.”

Markham’s only reply was a flickering glance of pure cold revulsion before he executed a crisp quarter-face and marched into the night-black corridor. Tyrkilld and I listened to his footsteps fade away.

We looked at each other.

“That,” Tyrkilld said slowly, “was entertainment near sufficing to counter the obscenity of your presence.”

I couldn’t help grinning at him. “Yeah, I can’t stand the sonofabitch either.”

He paced slowly toward the pool. “So Our Lady Champion’s . . apology. . took an unusual form.”

I went over to my clothes and peered around. “You guys have a shower or something?”

“I made no request for an apology to be made. Of any kind.”

“Shower,” I said. “Sh. Ow. Er. You have one? I itch like a whore in a haystack.”

“The sole apology I owe is the one I go to offer unto Khryl.”

“For trying to kill me?” I said to his back. “Or for failing?”

He glowered down at the bloody water. “We are at war. I did nothing wrong. Nothing.”

“Tell it to Khryl.”

“I intend to.”

To hell with the shower. I peeled off the robe and let it drop, then picked up my pants. “Is that what this is about? You want me to tell you all’s fair because you think you’re at war? Fuck you, shitheel.”

“Like that, is it?”

“And it always will be.” I shook out my pants. “I’m not much for forgiveness.”

“Has any been requested?”

“Not by you.” I lowered the pants to the floor. “You’re walking pretty good for somebody who had about two fingers’ worth of thighbone shot off.”

Tyrkilld looked down. His right hand made a fist. On its back was a disk of new scar, big around as a gold Ankhanan royal.

After a moment, he said softly, “The armsman-”

“Braehew. Yeah, I heard.”

Tyrkilld nodded distantly. “When a Soldier gives himself to Khryl, there are ways in which he might. . continue to serve.”

I stared, my pants forgotten. “What, a bone graft? You’re walking on a piece of that poor bastard’s leg?”

“I am. My hand shares several of his bones, as well-as does your side.”

I pressed my bright-pink palm to the quadrangle of new scars over my liver. “No fucking way.”

“Your ribs were shattered. Did no one tell you this?”

“No.” I felt suddenly ill. More ill. “Nobody bothered to explain.”

“I will be calling upon his widow and orphaned daughters later tonight. Perhaps you’d be gracious enough to accompany me.”

I shook my head in blank astonishment. “Every one of you bastards is completely bugnuts. Every single one.”

“He fell in honorable battle-”

“My ass.”

“-in service to the Lord of Valor. It is my duty to offer whatever consolation his widow may require.”

“Whatever consolation?” I shook my head again. “I don’t want to know.”

Tyrkilld’s voice was hoarse. And bleak. “Braehew died without sons.”

“Didn’t I just say I don’t want to know?” I waved him off like somebody else’s fart. “The more I find out about Khryllians, the less I like any of you.”

Tyrkilld spoke from under his lowered brows. His face could not be seen. “House Aeddharr has been the flower of Jheledi knighthood since before the grand Lipkan Empire was even a ring of dog’s piss. Since before Our Lord of Valor was more than a simpleminded goatherd with a gift for the sling. I have some knowledge of the obligations of nobility. Which knowledge a person of generous nature might forgive me for suspecting you lack.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Tyrkilld turned a sidelong eye upon me. “If it’s no forward remark from one who was lately engaged in damaging your health, you seem well.”

“I’m all right.”

“Which is a point of curiosity to me, as Khryl’s Healing extends only to hurts taken upon the field of battle.”

“So?”

“So it is a curious happenstance that the hurts Khryl’s Hand delivered unto your person through mine own seem Healed as well. Seeing as how they were delivered before the fighting began.”

I shrugged as I finally stepped into my pants. “There’s fighting and there’s fighting.”

“Ah?”

I pulled my pants up. “That fight started when your poor bastard Braehew pointed his shotgun at my balls.”

“Oh, did it now?” Tyrkilld frowned thoughtfully. “I would not have regarded it so.”

“That’s why you lost.”

“We lost,” Tyrkilld said, drawing himself up with an impressive display of dignity for a naked man, “because such was the Judgment of Our Lord of Valor.”

“Ever occur to you,” I said as I fastened the row of buttons up the side of the pants, “that maybe you just got beat?”

“Hnhn?”

“Don’t you wonder? Maybe I just kicked your ass. Maybe I got lucky.”

Tyrkilld’s eyes went dreamy and his voice gentled. “Might this be, to my unworthy ear, the music of a confession?”

I snorted. “It’s just that your Utterance of Valor shit is kind of, well. .”

“Primitive? Unreliable? Childish? Stupid?” Tyrkilld shrugged a couple yards of hairy shoulders. “Only to Incommunicants. To distinguish between simple defeat and the Judgment of God is not difficult in most cases, and in this one it’s clear as Trahammeth’s Glass. At the critical moment, Khryl withdrew from me His Love.”

“Oh, I get it.” I favored him with a bland smile. “You’re saying Khryl Himself affirmed what I said about your father.”

Muscle rippled along his wide jaw. “That’s not what we were fighting about.”

“The hell it wasn’t.”

Streaks of flush like claw marks surfaced across his chest, and the skin over the knuckles on those oak-knot hands went white. “You. . are a very, very bad man.”

“Do you know that when you get really angry, even your nuts blush?”

Tyrkilld spun and stomped toward the pool hard enough to shake the stone floor-but he stopped at the edge. “What you said. . about your father. .”

The view wasn’t any better from behind. “What about him?”

“You made him sound a fine man-a man of great courage and conviction,” Tyrkilld said quietly. “A far better man than your vile self.”

“Maybe we have that in common.”

“Possibly we do. May I express my regret that I can never make his acquaintance?”

“Don’t.” I picked up my tunic. It was inside out. “He would’ve spit in your fucking face.”

When I looked up, Tyrkilld had turned away and was silently wading into the blood-tainted water, and somehow, unaccountably, I felt like an asshole. More of an asshole.

“Don’t take it too hard.” I tried to swallow it, but the truth came up my throat like vomit. “He’d spit in my face, too.”

Tyrkilld stopped. “We are at war.”

“Sure you are.”

“You can have no faint idea-”

“You think you’re at war.”

“And what, if you’ll again indulge the curiosity of a poor ignorant parish Knight, is that intended to mean?”

“When you go upstairs to see Khryl,” I said, “stand there with your bloody cock and balls in hand and pray to Him that you never find out.”

Tyrkilld shook his head grimly. “There is not a gracious bone among your double hundred, is there? Not a one.”

“I had a gracious bone once. Some Khryllian ass-bandit beat it to paste.”

He was silent for a moment, staring into the slow thick ripple of the bloody water around his thighs.

“What you said this afternoon-about men like me ruling the world. .” Tyrkilld looked over one shoulder. “Men don’t rule the world, you might know. We scarcely rule the Battleground.”

“I wasn’t talking about this world.” I got my tunic straightened out and began to shrug my way into it, and so it was from the inside of my tunic, half-muffled and blindfolded, that I heard Tyrkilld’s reply.

“That I know well enough.”

I said, “Fuck me like a goat.”

“I’ll pass, if it means no particular offense.”

“Oh, for shit’s sake.” I managed to get my head out and pulled the tunic down. I got one of my boots and began trying to pull it on, snarling under my breath, “Should’ve just drove into town on a circus wagon with a motherfucking brass band playing ‘Send in the Clowns.’ ”

“Your pardon? My ears are less than-”

“How’d you know me?”

“Ah. Well, there’s little to it, at that. We’ve met before, is the sum of the tale. I was with Lord Khlaylock, back in the day. Back in the day in question, one might say.”

“I don’t remember you.”

“I was one among several, and you were. . well, you.”

“I still am. More or less. Maybe you noticed.” I stomped my boots the rest of the way on. “All right, I’m dressed. Markham’s gone. Let’s drop the fucking games.”

“Your pardon?”

“You’re going to do me a favor.”

He wheeled on me, slowly, head back, eyes half slitted, two-thirds of a disbelieving smile crawling across his lips. “And how does one arrive at this improbable conviction?”

“You owe me, Tyrkilld. You owe me your life twice over already today.”

Those oak-knot hands went to his vast hairy hips. “Indeed?”

“At the Riverdock customs sequestry, your life was forfeit by your own Laws of Engagement.”

“Not my Laws. Khryl’s. And my gratitude for your unexpected mercy is unbounded, never doubt. But a second time? When could this have occurred?”

“About fifteen minutes ago. Call it a tenth of a watch.”

“Ah? You spared my life when I was not even present to appreciate your mercy? How virtuous.”

“If you say so.”

“And how, precisely, did you perform this extraordinary act?”

“I didn’t tell Angvasse Khlaylock that you’re an Ankhanan agent.”

The smile vanished. His head rolled forward, and his hands came off his hips, and his weight shifted and he took the beginning of a breath, and I said, “Better not.”

He stopped at full poise.

“Think about it,” I said. “She’s right upstairs. She just Invested me with the Authority of Khryl. I don’t care what magick you’ve got to fuck with her truthsense. She’ll never believe you. Never.”

He subsided into a kind of relaxation-the kind you see on lions who are trying to decide whether they’re hungry-and forced another of those disbelieving smiles onto his face. “And here we’ve arrived at another improbable conviction. Preposterous, one might even-”

“Don’t.”

“I am a Knight ordained and-”

“Yeah. A Knight ordained and whatever who’s working for Kierendal. Let’s not argue, huh?”

“It’s so entirely ridiculous-”

“Shit, Tyrkilld, what do I care? But you’re gonna do this thing for me.

Nothing serious. Just deliver a message to her.”

“To your Ankhanan elf gangster-queen?”

“Tell her I know she’s in Purthin’s Ford, and I know why. Tell her we don’t have to be enemies. We have interests in common here. We should meet, and we should talk. I’ll even let the whole ordering-you-to-beat-me-to-death thing go. As a courtesy.”

He gave me a pretty credible snort. “Uncommonly magnanimous-or might it be your habit to extend amnesty for imaginary crimes?”

I gave him back a shrug. “Kierendal and I have an unusual relationship. She gets nothing but good from me, but every so often anyway she decides to have me killed. I guess I’m used to it.”

“Custom gives ease to many a queer fashion.”

“Something like that. Unless she didn’t tell you to do anything about me at all.”

“I’m sure I couldn’t say.”

“Because that’d mean she’s decided to have you killed.”

Tyrkilld looked suddenly thoughtful.

“She knows Orbek, and she knows me, and she knows I’d be here as soon as I got a hint Orbek might be in trouble. If she wanted you to live, she’d have warned you to expect me. And reminded you that I’ve killed men for a hell of a lot less than slapping my head into next fucking year.”

He shrugged. “Nor would any such warning have signified overmuch, even had your hypothetical elf-queen managed to impress upon me quite how entirely skilled you are at it.”

“Have it your way. But tell her what I said, huh? I don’t want to piss in her soup. And she won’t want to piss in mine.”

“And so, perchance-” Tyrkilld squinted past me, like he was looking for something in the darkness of the passageway down which Markham had vanished. “-were a man to unexpectedly find himself in a position to do such a service for your estimable self, whence cometh recompense, and in what manner?”

“I’ll tell you how I knew. What gave you away.”

“Oh?”

“Think about it, Tyrkilld. Khryllians aren’t as easygoing as I am. Knowing where you fucked up could save your life. Could save lots of lives. Like, say, the lives of everyone in Freedom’s Face, y’know?”

He looked down into the slow roil of bloody water around his thighs.

“I suppose. .” Even in the dead silence of the Lavidherrixium, I could barely hear him. “I suppose there would be value in that. To learn how you could be so certain.”

Dumbass. “I wasn’t. Not certain.”

His head snapped up. His mouth dropped open.

“Fucking amateur,” I said, and turned for the darkness.

From the outside, the Pens was Mid-Period Gulag: barbed wire and bright lights and guard towers posted with sharpshooters. I automatically noted shadows, fields of fire, available hard and soft cover, and shook my head silently. Somebody knew what they were doing.

Somebody Artan: the wire fencing looked galvanized, and the searchlights had a moon-greenish glow I recognized. The limelights at the Railhead in Transdeia are exactly that color.

This Faller character. . Back in the day, I used to run Earthside transit operations for the Overworld Company out of the San Francisco Studio; I knew most of the techs and OC operatives by sight, and all of them by name. How could Faller have come out of Transdeia and I didn’t know him?

Maybe tomorrow I’d pay a visit, and ask.

Tonight I had to save Orbek’s life.

Getting in to see Orbek wasn’t a problem. I didn’t even need to whip out the Holy Foreskin. With Markham to hold my hand, we walked right through the gates and nobody looked like they were even thinking about stopping us.

From the inside, the Pens looked less like a prison camp than a kennel. Banks of eight-by-five strap-iron cages sat on legs a meter off the scraped-bare stone of the escarpment. No plumbing, just eligible trusties with rakes and buckets and wheelbarrows and a vast manure pile at the cliffside fence.

The dusk clogged up with misting drizzle again. I was starting to hate the weather in this town.

Some stretches of cages stood open and empty, waiting for convicts who stood in chains of eight in the mustering pen. Some stretches of cages were full of indistinct shapes, huddled against the damp. Trusties fanned out among the rows, tossing tarpaulins over cage tops to keep out the rain. Chill white flames burned steady in some cage-irons’ lattice gaps: cold greenishyellow gaslight erasing color in cold greenish-yellow eyes.

The drizzle thickened toward rain. Head down, arms crossed over my chest, I walked behind the Lord Righteous. An icy trickle traced my spine from my plastered-flat hair to the crack of my ass. Shivers started below my ribs and rippled out into my legs and up to my neck.

At least it was rinsing off the old blood. That was some consolation.

Sure it was.

Markham walked with a long swinging confident stride. He didn’t seem to notice the rain running inside his collarpiece. Maybe the armor had drains in its heels.

I might start to hate the bastard.

I stared up under dripping eyebrows at his back, cataloguing every joint in that rain-beaded armor where a fighting knife’s spearpoint might drive through into flesh. Not from any ill intent. Just on general principle.

Mostly.

He led me past the kennels toward a broad, flat field that steamed gently in the rain. Closer, I could see that the field was checkered with square panels of iron grillework though which the vapor leaked. At the edge, the grilles were set into stone over the mouths of ten-by-ten pits cut fifteen feet deep into the escarpment’s bedrock. The vapor-

Breath and body heat.

“Um,” I said, “you got some kind of ladder or something? Or do I just jump?”

“No need.” Markham waved a gauntlet ahead. “Your ogrillo has a visitor already.”

Out in the middle of the iron and stone field stood a pair of hulking trusties, immense shoulders hunched to their ears, and an uncomfortable-looking Knight Attendant. One of the trusties held what looked like a short siege ladder: a metal pole that sprouted rows of pegs a couple of spans apart along opposite sides.

Markham stopped at the edge of the field. “I leave you here, Freeman. Put yourself in the care of yonder Knight Attendant.”

“What, you’re not gonna walk me home?”

“Your possessions will be delivered to the Pratt amp; Redhorn hostelry. Any page can direct you. Good evening.” He executed a crisp about-face and marched off into the rain.

I shrugged and set out across the field.

Some of the grilles had tarps draped across them. Most did not.

Orbek’s didn’t.

The trusties and the other Knight Attendant were staring down into Orbek’s pit. The rain half-muffled growls and grunts and low-throated snarling howls. Helm tucked under his right arm, the Knight watched with the grimly blank look of a man refusing to flinch from a distasteful obligation. The trusties both had trifurcate lips drawn back from filed-blunt tusks: grins or sneers, I couldn’t tell. Yellow eyes slitted, steam curling from snouts, one massaged the stump of a fighting claw with his opposite hand. The other rubbed his own crotch through his burlap pants, unself-conscious as a dog licking its balls.

The howls rose into yelping. Sounded like pain. Didn’t sound like Orbek. “What, you make him kill his own dinner?”

“Not exactly, Freeman.” The Knight stepped to one side to let me pass.

“Then what’s that fucking noise?”

A faint crinkle twitched at the corners of the Knight’s eyes. “Exactly.”

It wasn’t until I got to the edge of the pit that I suspected a Lipkan Knight of Khryl could actually have a sense of humor.

“Oh, for shit’s sake.” I rubbed my eyes. Headache thundered in my skull. “I didn’t need to see this.”

What I didn’t need to see was Orbek and his other visitor.

Fucking.

A middle-aged ogrillo bitch, naked but for a pair of battered boots, stood braced wide-legged, facing the near corner like a boxer leaning on the ropes between rounds, while Orbek pounded her from behind.

Orbek was on another planet: eyes squeezed shut, spasms in his massive neck jerking his tusks ripping at the rain. The bitch’s dugs swung and bounced like wattles on a spastic turkey. Another spasm of yelping brought her head up and she met the eyes above and she howled even louder: performing, exaggerating, a sardonic lip-curling mockery of passion, thick purple tongue lolling between her tusks, green-yellow eyes wide, fierce, challenging-

Like she was daring us all to jump in and have a whack at her too.

I looked over my shoulder at the Knight Attendant, whose expressionlessly polite stare somehow managed to look like a smirk. “Let me guess. You asked what he wanted for his last meal. He said, ‘Cooze.’ ”

The Knight snuffled something close to a laugh without cracking his deadpan. “The Pens is a jail, not a brothel. This is a conjugal visit.” He nodded down at them and offered an apologetic rattle of a shrug. “Likely their last.”

“Conju-that’s his wife?”

“I take it you and your-mmm. . brother-aren’t close?”

“Son of a bitch.” I shot the Knight a baffled look. “Since when do ogrilloi get married?”

“I’m sure I cannot say. Some new Ankhanan silliness, I’d wager.” The Knight inclined his head in a sketch of a bow. “With apologies in advance for any offense, it’s well known that Ankhanans are mad.”

“Yeah.” I waved at the trusties. “All right. Open the lid. I’m going in.”

The Knight inclined his head an inch farther. “Now?”

“Unless you’re enjoying the show.”

“Erm. Please, Freeman. As you will.”

“Yeah, me neither.” I leaned over the grille. “Orbek!”

Ogrillo eyes popped open, met mine, and bugged wide. “You.”

“Me. Get off her. And for shit’s sake put your pants on.”

A long stare, fading from angry to mournful, eventually turned into a shrug. The young ogrillo’s beer-barrel chest swelled and sank: a resigned sigh. “Might as well. One big fuck-me bucket of icewater, you are.”

“I’d say I was sorry if I, y’know, was.”

“Yeah.” He grinned back his lips to expose the ivory curve of his tusks. “Shoulda figured you’d show up, little brother.”

“Yeah. You shoulda.”

The Knight murmured, “He doesn’t seem entirely happy to see you.” I shrugged. “I’m used to it.”

Going down the ladder made my head hurt worse. The gaslight from outside reached only halfway down, and the gloom below had a reddish tinge. The stone walls of the pit were gray-green with old damp. The drizzle had slackened again, but the iron grille condensed moisture from the thick foggy air; every second or two I’d get a plash from fat rusty raindrops.

The cover of the shit bucket standing in the corner didn’t quite fit, but that stink drowned in the acid reek of unwashed ogrillo: a chewy funk of sweat and pheromones and animal sex. By the time the trusties had withdrawn the siege ladder and clanged the grille back into place over his head, I was half blind with pain. I sagged against a slimy wall and tried to sort through the thousands of things I probably shouldn’t say.

Orbek was still lacing up the side of his breeches. He’d let his bristly spine ruff grow: he now had a reddish Trojan-helmet brush sticking straight up from his crest ridge. He’d gained weight, too: massive curves of new muscle rippled under the grey skin of his bare chest and shoulders, though he had still another five years or so before he’d hit full mature size.

Not much chance of that now.

When we’d met, in the Ankhanan Donjon, Orbek had been only seventeen. Three years? Was that all? Christ, we’d been through a lot since then.

I had to say something. I thought about seeing Orbek off at the Palatine station three months ago. On his way home, he’d said. Back to the Warrens for a while. Look up old friends. Take a vacation.

Visit family.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in Ankhana?”

The young ogrillo pulled his side laces tight and tied them off. “Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”

“I’d have a wiseass answer for that if my head didn’t hurt so bad.” I gazed up into the green-glowing drizzle through the grille. “I have this dream, y’know?More like a fantasy. That once, just once, somebody I care about is in trouble, and when I show up to help, they’re actually happy to see me.”

“That why you’re here?” Orbek’s voice was dark as coffee. “To help?”

Drizzle condensed to rain and dropped from the grille into the silence between us. The fist in my head thumped the inside of my skull once. And again.

I sighed. “Yeah, well, it’s a dream I have. That’s all.”

Orbek spat into his hands and slickened his spine ruff; it sprang back to vertical, wet and gleaming. “Pull up a floor, hey? Don’t look so good, little brother. Better sit before you fall.”

In those yellow eyes was a wariness that could instantly trip hostile; this somehow made everything easier. I can always fall back on being an asshole.

I squinted at the ogrillo bitch. “Kinda old for you, isn’t she?”

The bitch had slagged her way over to a bundle of soggy blankets that seemed to be the pit’s closest thing to a bed, and she lay on them now, watching incuriously, one big-knuckled hand rubbing idly between her legs. “Call her Kaiggez,” Orbek said softly. “I’d introduce you, but I dunno who you are today.”

I could feel the Knight Attendant watching through the dripping grille above. I nodded to the bitch. “Dominic Shade. Don’t get up. I don’t like hugs and there’s no fucking way I’m gonna shake that hand.” Her expression was unreadable. “Korloggil nas paggarnik, paggtakkunni? ” she said softly. “Perrlag Nazutakkaarik rint diz Etk Perrog’k?”The wet trickle down my spine got colder. I do know a few words of Etk Dag, nowadays. One of them is Nazutakkaarik. It’s a nickname. A title. The Black Knives had called me that. A few of them. Toward the end. When only a few were left.

I shifted my weight, sliding my back along the wall toward the corner. “He told you who I am.”

Orbek smirked around his tusks. “She don’t talk Westerling, little brother. Says she’s happy to meet her brother-in-law.”

“Brother-in-law my ass.” A creeping flush of anger drove off some of the chill. I squeezed my voice down to a blurred snarl, mindful of ears above. “What did she really say? ‘Tell the Skinwalker he’s welcome in the Boedecken’?”

“Hnh.” Orbek’s smirk never flickered. “We don’t call it Boedecken. We call it Our Place.”

“You got a hell of an attitude for somebody who’s gonna die tomorrow.”

“Maybe I should snivel like a human, hey? That make you happy? Because you being happy, that’s what I live for.”

“I didn’t come all this way to be fucked with, big dog.”

“Rather fuck with her, little brother.” The young ogrillo spread hands the size of frying pans. “Wanna watch some more?”

“Oh, sure. Like that horse cock of yours won’t give me nightmares already.” I shook my head. “You got nothing better to talk about than the old days? About the-what do you call it? The Horror?”

“Talk? Haven’t been talking.” White flame glowed in the back of his eyes: nighthunter retinas catching and concentrating the dim gaslight that reflected down off the rain-shined walls. “Been listening.”

“Uh.” Like any sucker punch, it didn’t really hurt. But it rocked me. It knocked me to pieces and stirred up the chunks.

Orbek lowered himself to the blankets beside her, his back against the wall, one huge arm curling protectively around her shoulders. She snuggled down into his lap and kissed the inside of his forearm.

He twitched his tusks. “Back then, she’s terkullik. Creche-maid. First bred and nursing. See this?” With his free hand, he stroked a rumpled sheet of black scar that spread up her left thigh to her flank. Where her left hind dug should have been was only a dark knot. “Know where she gets it?”

“I can guess.”

“Don’t have to. She gets it carrying pups out of the fire, little brother. You know which fire. Dead pups.”

The light in the back of his eyes shimmered like moonlit ice. “Her dead pups.”

She reached up and caressed his arm, drawing it around her face. Her thick purple tongue oozed out and licked fog-beads from the stump of his fighting claw. Her gaze held no anger. No hostility. Only a fiercely concentrated watchfulness: one predator staring down another.

Over the body of our prey.

Those stirred-up chunks suddenly clicked together into a new shape. “Oh,” I said. “I get it now.”

“Do you?”

“Sure. Got yourself a Black Knife bitch.” I lowered myself into a somewhat hip-creaking version of an ogrillo squat. “She’s up the pipe, huh?”

His tusk-display went fierce. “I’m only half eligible.”

“How many? You know yet?”

“Four. We go to a norulaggik for a sniffie before I get bagged. She says three bucks and a bitch.”

I let myself smile, really smile, for the first time since I boarded the steamboat below Thorncleft. “Orbek. Stud-daddy Black Knife.”

The hairless meat of the ogrillo’s brows drew together. “How come you go happy all the sudden?”

“You fucking knucklehead. Ever stop to think I might have something to say about Black Knives coming back to the Boedecken? Think about who I am, for shit’s sake. What’d you think I was gonna do when I found out? Throw you a party?”

The young ogrillo seemed to draw in upon himself: a smaller target. “Guess what? Don’t think about you.”

I inclined my head toward the steady stare of his bitch. “She does.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, “she’s got reason.”

“Shit, Orbek, I came all this way worrying I might have to kill you.”

The wary cold distance started to drain out of Orbek’s eyes, and he half-relaxed with a friendly snort. “No worry there. Champion’s got the killing part handled, hey?”

“Easy enough to fix.”

“You think so?”

“Sure. Walk into that arena and kiss her feet.”

Orbek’s head lowered like a boar’s. “Can’t do that.”

“Sure you can.”

Tusks swung side to side. “Black Knives don’t kneel.”

“My ass. That’s what knees are for.”

His head ratcheted lower. “Can’t.”

“What are you afraid of? The shit with Kopav? It’s handled, Orbek. I’ve squared it already.”

Orbek’s head jerked back up, and that wary light flicked back into his eyes. “You know about Kopav?”

“Everything I need to.” I cast a significant glance up toward the fog and the night. “I have a highly placed source.”

“Him?” Orbek’s nod was slow, understanding. His gaze still teetered on the edge of hostile. “Huh. What’s He want with me?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t give a shit. We’ll worry about Him after you live through this, huh?”

“I take a shot at Him once. You know that? Well, almost. On Assumption Day. Maybe He holds a grudge.”

“Maybe He thinks He’s doing you a favor.”

“And maybe khoshoi fly out of my butt. Needs to mind His own business, hey?” The young ogrillo’s arm tightened around the bitch’s meaty shoulders. “So do you.”

“You are my business, knucklehead. Give the cocksuckers what they want, then take your wife home and live happily ever goddamn after, will you?”

“Terlukk pagganik rez haggallo, paggtakunni,” the bitch murmured with an air of lazy malice. “Utoppik negge tesslent jeroppik Black Knife? Pok ler Limp Dick?”

“Black Knife ekk,” Orbek growled under his breath. “Paggano rez hagallo Black Knife. Keptarrol Black Knife.”

“What’s that about?”

He muttered, “She asks what she should tell my boys when they’re born. Is their clan Black Knife? Or Limp Dick?”

I scowled. “Doesn’t speak Westerling, huh?”

“Don’t ain’t same as can’t, little brother.”

“I get that. So what’s with Lady Macbitch? Why’s she busting what’s left of your balls?”

“She wants Black Knives to live free. So do I.”

“Free. Right.” I jabbed a finger at Orbek’s huge chest. “I know you, big dog.”

“You know shit.”

“Come on, kid, you’ve been talking about how you’ll never have pups since the day you adopted me. It was the reason you adopted me. Remember?”

“I remember lots of things.”

“What did she tell you? No fight, no fuck? Shit, Orbek. You don’t think this is a little extreme?”

He snorted. “Are you the right guy to jab somebody on going too far-” Lips curled back from long hooked tusks. “-for his wife?”

I had to look away. A second or two passed before I could squeeze the bloom of pain in my chest down into its usual fist-size ball of barbed wire. When I could talk again, I said, “You think she loves you? She doesn’t give a damn for you, Orbek. She’s playing some game of her own.”

“Love? She loves what I love. She dreams what I dream. That’s her game. Mine too, hey? That’s why we marry. She loves Black Knives. She dreams being free. Together, we dream Black Knife freedom. Together we make our dreams true. Forever.”

My headache came dripping back with each splash from the grille. “Maybe you’d better explain this to me. Small words, okay?”

Orbek disentangled himself from the bitch and rose. Suddenly the pit felt a lot smaller. “My fight with the Champion ain’t cause I don’t submit. It’s cause I don’t have to. We fight over whether Black Knives have to submit. To Khryl. To His Law. Get it? To say Kopav was self-defense, I gotta get down and kneel. Give my life to Khryl. Gotta say I live or die by your law.”

He shook his head, lips curling in a snarl of revulsion. “Kopav’s submission makes me Black Knife kwatcharr. If I submit, so does my clan. We belong to Khryl, then.”

“That’s idiotic.”

“You think so? When the Khulan Horde falls at Ceraeno, what happens to Boedecken ogrilloi? They got my same choice: submit or fight. They submit. And now here they are, hey? You see much of how Khryl’s ogrilloi live? It’s no fuck-me joke, little brother.”

“I haven’t been laughing.”

“But I am Black Knife. Now kwatcharr. Black Knives never make submission. Not then. Not ever.”

“Only because there weren’t any-”

“Yeah.” Orbek leaned toward me, lowering his voice. “Yeah. You do that for us, little brother. After the Horror we scatter to cities. Submit to other clans. By the time the Khulan Horde loses at Ceraeno, Black Knives aren’t Black Knives anymore. Kopav Crookback ain’t Black Knife back then; his sire gives him to Dust Mirrors. Kopav’s sire and his bitches’ other get die without submission. So my clan is free. Of all the Boedecken ogrilloi, only Black Knives are free. And they will be always, unless I hang chains on them myself.”

“What, you’re gonna die over a fucking legal technicality?”

“No technifuckinganything. The Champion is the Fist of Khryl. Stand against her, and I stand against the god. So I fight her, and I die. But I die fighting. I die free. Honor on me. Honor on my clan. Next year in Ankhana, there is my oldest boy, Orbek Black Knife: Kaiggezget, to be Black Knife kwatcharr. Black Knives live free forever.”

I shook my head. “Ever think it might be better for these pups of yours to grow up knowing you? Being with you?”

“Better than being free? Who am I talking to here?”

Somehow that’s always the question with me. I brought a hand to my eyes, trying again to massage the headache away. It didn’t work any better than it had before.

“My father runs to the city,” he said. “This is his shame: that he runs from the Boedecken. Those days, my father’s younger than me when you and me meet in the Pit. My mother dies in Alientown. Killed by a drunk headpounder. My father fever-chokes in the Warrens. My brothers die in the Caverns War. None ever sees the Boedecken. Until me. All we ever know of Our Place-all we know of Black Knives-is what my father remembers, from cub-time. Before the Horror. Before you. When Black Knives rule Our Place. When other ogrilloi circle from our track. When their bitches use magick to scuff out their scent because they nose ours. When men run from just our name.”

“People run from some of my names too, kid. It’s not something to be proud of.”

“You say. Easy for you. You walk like a king. More than a king-kings hide when you come to town. When you talk, God listens.”

“It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

“Now God listens to me!” One ham-size fist struck his barrel chest. “Our god. Black Knife god. She hears my prayer: bring Black Knives back to Our Place. Bring back men’s fear.”

I could feel a black knife of my own twisting in my guts. “You don’t know what you were asking for.”

“I do. Our god is no Ma’elKoth, little brother. She makes her bargains up front. She tells me my life is Hers now, and She spends it how She chooses.”

“She chooses my ass.” I jerked my chin toward the bitch in the corner. “They choose, Orbek. That’s what your father never told you. Black Knives were never kings. They were always slaves. Slaves to the bitches.” He just grinned at me. “I stand with God, little brother. You know nothing.”

“I was there-”

“And I am here.”

“Terggol pettikaar homunn horrillterazz,” the bitch murmured. “Rummattagarr yas burratt net?”

I looked at Orbek. He showed me more tusk. “She says she knows humans are born half-eligible, but she wonders where you lost your balls.”

“Tell her-” I stopped and shook my head, disgusted. “Forget it. I got nothing to say to you, you fucking slag.”

“Hey.” Orbek’s grin dissolved. He pushed himself to his feet. He practically filled the pit. “Watch your mouth with my wife.”

I looked up into my brother’s cold yellow eyes. “She wants you dead, dick-head. I’m on your side.”

“My side is the Black Knife side.”

“I’m trying to save your life.”

“Nobody asked you.”

“All you have to do is tell that guy up there that you’ll submit.” I waved a hand at the gaslit face of the Knight Attendant peering down through the grille. “That’s him. Right up there. Just say it, and I’ll get you out of this.”

Orbek wouldn’t even look up. “Don’t need your help. Don’t want your help.” He took a single step that brought him looming over me. “Nobody asks you to come here. I’m asking you to go.”

I went perfectly still. For a long time I stared up at the red-streaked silhouette of this ogrillo I called brother. I remembered that if not for Orbek, I’d be dead now. I remembered meeting Orbek in the Ankhanan Donjon; I remembered our fight, and the birth of our friendship. I remembered how Orbek had single-handedly won the Donjon riot that had freed us all. I remembered thinking, back when we’d met in the Donjon’s reeking Pit, that Orbek was a lot like I’d been at that age. Now I could only wonder at how wrong I’d been. Had I ever been this young?

No, of course not.

Neither had Orbek.

Slowly, I hoisted himself back to my feet. “Gonna tell me what’s really going on?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Good story, Orbek. Real good. I almost bought it.” I waved at the Knight Attendant above. “Let’s have that ladder, huh?”

I took Orbek’s massive wrist in an ogrillo handclasp and pulled myself close, my mouth a handspan from his ear. “Want to tell me the truth?” I murmured, barely above a whisper. “Dying won’t help your friends in the Smoke Hunt.”

“Don’t touch me!” Orbek yanked out of my grip, and a huge hand slammed the middle of my chest so hard I bounced into the wall. “Never touch me. Never again.”

My head rang. I leaned on the wall, breathing strength back into my legs. “Like that, is it?”

There was sudden anger in his eyes, and revulsion, and naked loathing. Those ham-size fists twitched up by his face. “You think I want to get out of this, little fucker? You think I want to live?”

“Orbek-”

A fist rose, but it didn’t fall on me. It fell on him. On the side of his head. Next to the black-streaked track that led down from his eye.

Ogrilloi cry tears of blood.

“After what I do? Think I want to live? After being bitch to you?”

He hit himself again.

Oh, I thought, blank as cut stone. Oh, I get it. Oh, Christ.

I could still look him in the eye, though. I’m tough enough for that. “You knew who I was. You knew what I did.”

His chin lifted until he was looking at me between his tusks. “Knowing’s one thing. But being with her-being with someone who’s there, who lives through it. .”

He lost the words in a throat-deep snarl. I’ve heard that snarl before. Here in the Boedecken. I heard it from bucks tripping on tangles of their own intestines. I heard it from bitches cradling corpses of their cubs. “Orbek, listen-”

Cables in his neck wrenched his head around. “You never understand my dishonor. You never understand my shame.”

“Orbek-” My eyes burned. My chest felt like I was trying to breathe under a pile of Black Knife dead. “In the Shaft, you told me that now I share the dishonor I put on the Black Knives. That now what honor I win, I share that too.”

His yellow stare was raw with pain and loathing. For me or for himself, I couldn’t tell. “I’m younger then. Younger and stupider. Stupid enough to think you know something about honor.”

And in the end, I’m never quite as tough as I want to be. I found myself looking down at my hands. As usual. “Everybody does shit when they’re young and stupid, Orbek. You just have to fucking live with it.”

“I don’t.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Is for me. You should go home.”

“Or what?”

Lips peeled back around his tusks. “Something could happen to you.”

“It usually does.”

He flicked a glance at Kaiggez. “Ain’t you got a family now?”

“Yeah. And you’re part of it.”

The trusties pried up the grille, and the siege ladder slid down into the pit. I put a hand on a spoke-rung, and a much larger hand fell on my shoulder and turned me around with irresistable strength. “What you think you’re gonna do?”

I answered with a smile that was as friendly and relaxed as I could manage. “Whatever I think I should.”

“Not asking now. Telling. Stay out of this.”

“You might want to take that hand off me, big dog.”

“Listen, little fucker-”

“Last time you jumped me I was crippled.” I showed some teeth to those fierce yellow eyes. “Think it’s gonna work out better for you today?”

“You better-”

“You better do what you’re fucking told.”

He froze.

“You hear me? When Angvasse Khlaylock comes around for her Challenge, you get down on your knees. You’ve been told. Do it.”

“You tell me nothing. I am Black Knife kwatcharr-”

“You’re not shit.”

That powerful hand switched from my shoulder to my chest and pinned me to the wall. Orbek bent over me, tusks inches from my jaw. Behind him, Kaiggez sat up, her eyes catching witchfire highlights. Orbek’s breath smelled like roadkill. “Want to try me, little fucker?”

“You got it backward.” I went completely boneless, letting him support my whole weight; if this went bad, I’d need both legs to kick. “I took your submission in the Donjon, shithead. You’re mine.”

His hairless brows drew together in a rumple of meat.

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s right.”

I leaned around him so I could get a good look at the cold calculation growing in Kaiggez’s eyes. I blurred my voice low to keep this from Khryllian ears above. “You getting this, Lady Macbitch? Orbek’s nobody special. He’s sure as fuck not Black Knife kwatcharr.”

I grinned right into his blankly wounded face. “I am.”

His face went from wounded to dead. I hadn’t just hurt him this time. Something was dying inside him. Dying right in front of me. “You-you can’t just-”

“I didn’t. You did. Now take your fucking hand off me before I kill you myself.”

I’d worry about his goddamn feelings after I didn’t have to worry about his life.

His hand only tightened, and I’d had enough of this shit. I popped the nerve cluster on the inside of his bicep; he grunted and his hand spasmed open. I stepped up close and gave him a couple seconds to decide if he had a move to make.

He leaned down close enough that a twitch of his head would hook a tusk into my eye. “Don’t want you in my business, little fucker. Don’t want your teeth in my kill. Fucking human-”

Just talk. I turned my back on him and started up the ladder.

“Everything you do makes trouble,” he snarled after me. “Everything you touch fucks up. You come around and everybody dies.”

“Should have thought of that before you adopted me,” I said, and slipped over the rim of the pit into the night and the rain.