Caine Black Knife

The slow heartbeat of the riverboat’s steam-driven pistons pulsed in my bones. The waterfall hush from the sidewheel’s rising flukes shuffled the chatter and bustle of passengers and crew into white noise. I preferred it that way.

I’ve never been exactly social.

I had barely spoken since Thorncleft. I traveled alone. I couldn’t have made myself bring companions.

Not to the Boedecken. Not on this river. My river.

Fucking astonishing: how many people I knew who died up here. I couldn’t remember all the names. Rababal, Stalton, that Lipkan supposed-to-be priest of Dal’kannith. . Pretornio. Hadn’t really thought of them, any of them, in maybe twenty years. Lyrrie. Kess Raman. Jashe the Otter. Others. Dozens of others. Thirty-five? Thirty-six?

I couldn’t pin down how many. I wasn’t sure it was important, but somehow I thought it ought to be.

Back on Earth, it’d have only taken a minute or two to dig the cube out of my library and start to live the whole thing again. I didn’t think I would have.

Didn’t think I could have.

After I retired-in the bad days, that seven years when my legs never quite worked and the background music of my life was a mental track of the nearest bathroom because I could never tell when I was about to shit myself-I sometimes cubed my old Adventures. Caine’s old Adventures. Just on the really bad days. In the bad nights, when the shitswamp I’d made of my life sucked me down and drowned me. But I never cubed this one.

Not that I had to. All I had to do was stop holding it all down.

I still held it all down. Still hold it all down. I didn’t even know why. They’re fucking dead. Every one of them. Dead in the Boedecken Waste. Nameless corpses in the badlands’ dust. Left to the buzzards, the crows and the khoshoi.

Left to the Black Knives.

And if somebody let any of them out of Hell long enough to take a new look at this fucking place, the shock’d probably kill them all over again.

The gravel-scoured folds of the badlands had softened into rolling fields of maize and beans, well-ordered woodlots and neat rows of birch and alder windbreaks. Where the land was too rugged for food crops, the hills were terraced with vineyards: long trellised racks of twisting bark-shagged vines hung with purple and red and green clusters that I could smell even down here on the river. The river was itself new: shallow with youth and careful engineering, its broad slow curves fed the vast network of irrigation ditches and ponds and reservoirs that had brought the Waste to life. And somehow I couldn’t make myself believe this was a good thing.

These waves of living green looked like less to me.

The old Boedecken had been exactly that: old. Carved by time into its true shape. Harsh, jagged, scarred by existence, grim grey jaws locked onto the ass end of life.

I’d kind of liked it that way.

The river was the only change up here that hadn’t surprised me. Whenever I let myself, I could make the river’s birth happen inside my head vivid as a lucid dream. Like lots of births, the river’s had been ugly. A sea-wrack of pain and terror. A hurricane of blood.

The kind of fun I hadn’t had in a long, long time.

I kept my head down while the riverboat churned through the outer sprawl of Purthin’s Ford. I wasn’t ready to look up at Hell.

I knew it was there. When the light was good and the air was clear, I’d been able to see the Spire for two days.

But I didn’t look up now, while neat rows of white brick houses and red tile roofs around well-ordered plazas commanded by greystone Khryllian vigilries drifted south behind the docks and warehouses to either side, while chill black shadows of high-curved bridges wiped the ship from bow to wheel to stern, and the tiled arches were tight enough around the deck that I could smell the soap somebody had used to scrub the stonework clean.

I made a face that cracked the dust on my cheeks. When I licked my lips, they tasted like an open grave.

What was I, superstitious? Didn’t feel like fear. Didn’t feel like what people used to call post-traumatic stress disorder. Sure, if I let it, every second of Retreat from the Boedecken would come alive in my brain just like it was happening all over again. But that shouldn’t scare me. Just the opposite.

This place made me. I came here a nobody on my way to never-was. I left here the legend I always wanted to be.

Everything I’ve ever done pursues me. Like a doppleganger, a fetch, my past creeps up behind and strangles me in my sleep. When hunted by a monster in your dreams, you save yourself by facing the monster and demanding its name. In learning the monster’s name, you rob it of the power to haunt you. But I was awake. And anyway I already knew my monster’s name.

It was Caine.

My father used to tell me that you can’t control the consequences of your actions. You can’t even predict them. So all you can do is your best, and all that matters is to make sure what you do will let you look in the mirror and like what you see.

I can’t remember the last time I liked what I see in the mirror.

There was a writer from Earth’s twentieth century who wrote that “sin is what you feel bad after.” Of all the things I’ve done, what I did up here-

Maybe that was the feeling that made my mouth an open grave. That hung a brick around my neck to hold down my head. Maybe it was shame.

Maybe that was why I couldn’t put a name to it.

I’ve never pretended to be a good man. I have done very, very bad things in my life. Anybody who believes in Hell believes that Hell exists for men like me.

Fair enough. I was on my way.

On my way back.

After a while, I pushed myself off the rail and went into my cabin to organize my shit for debarking.

I still hadn’t looked up at Hell.

Just so we’re clear: I didn’t come to the Boedecken to save Orbek. I didn’t come to save anybody. Saving people is not among my gifts.

Shit needs to be settled eventually. One way or another. That’s the only way I can explain it.

Or even think about it.

There was a novelist on Earth, back around the beginning of the twentyfirst century, a guy my dad admired quite a bit. He wrote some books where the basic idea was that since you can’t control the consequences of what you do, the only thing that really counts is why you do it. You get it? The measure of right action is righteous intention. This writer was a religious type-a Mormon, don’t ask-and I guess he figured that if your heart’s right, God takes care of the rest.

Well, y’know. .

I know some gods. Better than I want to. Not one of them gives a shit about your heart.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine wrote a book that was supposed to be the story of his lives. Or stories of his life, you pick. Anyway: he wrote that what your life means depends on how you tell the story.

If it makes you feel better to pretend I had some noble purpose, knock yourself out. If you’d rather pretend I was driven by guilt, or by personal obligation, or that I just finally grew up enough to want to clean up my own fucking mess, that’s fine too.

This is the story of what happened when I came to the Boedecken. What happened. Not why. The only why is that I made up my mind. I decided, and I went. That’s it. Anybody who needs to know more about why should go ahead and fuck off.

Reasons are for peasants.

My dead wife-the one who decided she’d rather go play goddess than be married-she used to like to say that not everything is about me.

Screw that.

Who’s telling this story, anyway?

I dragged the travel trunk bouncing down over the ribs of the gangplank. At the foot of the plank I took a