Caine Black Knife

Fucking Kierendal.”

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

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

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

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

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

Dammit.

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

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

Tyrkilld shook his head dolefully. “Ankhanans.”

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

“Friends in high places, has she?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shit.”

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

“The Smoke Hunt?”

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

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

Tyrkilld nodded an encouraging smile.

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

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

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

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

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

And missed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mine’s black.

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

I bit down on my breath.

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

Tyrkilld said, “Get him up.”

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

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

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

The armsman never even had a chance to scream.

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