Caine Black Knife

deliver you into the Champion’s presence.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Freeman?”

“Tell your Champion thanks for the sentiment, but I’ve got shit to do.”

“Freeman, you still misunderstand-”

“One of us does.”

“I am tasked to deliver you-”

“And I’m telling you I’m not going.” I let my friendly grin go less friendly. “Unless you’re also tasked to tie me up and drag me there.”

Markham went very still. Still like a lizard that feels the approach of a mouse. “Tie you up, freeman? Not at all. I am tasked only to deliver you; my duty unto the Champion, and to Khryl, requires that I fulfill all lawful tasks. The Champion did not specify that you be willing. Or conscious.”

His expression never flickered. “Or alive.”

“You’re a friendly sonofabitch, aren’t you?”

Markham’s lips were so far gone it was amazing he had a face at all. “This will be difficult only if you choose to make it so.”

I looked at him long enough to remember how old I am.

“What the fuck, huh? Let’s go.”

A stonefaced armsman brought me my trunk and stood by while I fished out a tunic, vest, and pants and shook traces of bug powder out the window. My boots were damp. Even through the bitter saddle soap, they still smelled of blood.

I wadded up the white linens and underhanded them at the armsman. “Give ’em to the beggars, along with my other stuff.”

The armsman let the linens bounce off his chest and didn’t even glance at where they fell on the floor. “There are no beggars in Purthin’s Ford.”

I shrugged. “Then stick ’em up your ass.”

Markham was waiting for me under the sally gate of the vigilry. Though my guts still spasmed and my noodle legs were still way overcooked, I dragged the travel trunk over the courtyard flags in my best imitation of brisk, and I bit down on my voice to make sure I didn’t wheeze when I joined the Lord Righteous at the wide stone archway. “You cocksu-uh, guys-still go everywhere on foot, right?”

“We bear the weight of Khryl’s Armor with our own strength, yes.”

“Your own strength, yeah. That’s what I meant. But for someone without Your Own Strength, this trunk isn’t exactly a feather pillow, you follow?”

“Of course, freeman.” Markham stepped into the street and pointed at a passing dogcart.

The cartboy-a sweaty grill pushing sixty, barefoot, in a homespun vest and shapeless pants ragged at the ankle, smelling of ass and cheap booze-dropped the dogcart’s draw shafts and threw himself into submission: knees on the street, hands behind ankles, forehead into the cobbles alongside the Khryllian’s instep. “Will dhe Lord do dhis poor ellie dhe honor’v acceptin’ service?”

“The freeman will ride, Eligible,” Markham said. “Load the case.”

The grill scrambled to his feet and lunged for the travel trunk with as much alacrity and enthusiasm as arthritis-knobbed joints allowed; I saw the cartboy’s grimace at the trunk’s weight and said, “Hey, let me do that-”

“No, no, kwatch-no, I goddid, sure.” The cartboy kept his head ducked, eyes fixed on the cobbles, forcing his spine into an awkward half crouch to hold his crown ridge below my chin. “You please go climb up, kwatch. Do my job, I godda, hey?”

I found my lips pulling back and I couldn’t unlock my teeth. “Don’t call me that.”

The cartboy ducked his head even lower and his shoulders hunched around his ears. “Hey, don’ mean nuddin’, kwatch-kwatch don’ mean nuddin’, bud, like-”

“I know what it means.” Sudden cords in my neck drew down my head.“I’m not your fucking kwatcharr.”

“Hey, I-hey, I don’. . I don’-”

“A man has spoken, Eligible.” Markham’s voice was soft and bland, entirely matter-of-fact, but it stopped the stammering like he’d cut the grill’s throat with a silken knife. “Freeman Shade? Will you ride?”

I didn’t answer. I was staring at scar-puckered stumps, dark and skin-cancer rippled, on the cartboy’s forearms. Stumps of his fighting claws.

Guards in the Ankhanan Donjon had lopped off Orbek’s fighting claws at that same joint. With bolt cutters.

click clack, he’d said. click fuck-me clack.

For trying to help Caine. That is: me.

Then.

you understand what they do to me? do you? they do to me what you do to black knives, all those years ago: cut off what makes me me. now I never get a bitch. never get pups. what good’s being safe? a good death is all i got left. a good death. honor on my clan.

I found myself trying to swallow around that familiar fist tangled in my guts.

“Eligible? What’s that mean, eligible?”

“Sure, kwatch-er, boss. Sure. Godda be ellie, hey?” The cartboy swung the travel trunk into the dogcart’s cargo cage. He displayed his maimed forearms proudly. “Betcha I am. Don’ wanna ged messing wid ’dacks, boss. Sdick to ellies. We dake care a you good.”

The cartboy shuffled back between the draw shafts and picked them up. “Good hey, climb up, hey? Where do I run you?”

I looked at Markham. “Eligible for what?”

The face of the Lord Righteous looked harder than the cobbles of the street. “Will you ride?”

I chewed on the inside of my lower lip for a second.

“Shit.”

I dug an Ankhanan silver noble out of my purse and flipped it to the astonished cartboy, then stepped to the back of the dogcart and reached for the trunk.

“I’d rather walk.”

The Spire gave me the creeps.

It reminded me of the Washington Monument. I posed at the monument once for promo shots, and it’s something you never forget: the psychic weight of that monstrously blank neo-stele looming behind your back. A giant white cock, fucking the sky.

Except the Spire was bigger. A lot bigger.

I kept my head down. *Never did things by halves, did you?*

God, as usual, did not reply.

It wasn’t just the illusion of looming threat-the way it leaned over me as though I were about to be crushed by God’s Own Hard-On-it was that the Spire really was, in a sense, God’s own hard- on.

Fucking Ma’elKoth.

A stalagmite of whitestone-faced granite piled on the lowest arc of the vertical city, studded with embrasure-pocked battlements, its bleached immensity commanded the whole of Purthin’s Ford and the face of Hell. Six arching sally bridges, staggered in a quarter-spiral, joined it to the tiers of the vertical city. Its uppermost reach overtopped the lip of the escarpment by nearly thirty meters; the five-spired cap caught the sun in a brilliant white-metal blaze that could be seen, on clear days, all the way to the Rymedge Mountains beyond.

And that wasn’t enough either. Impossibly huge and impenetrably strong just wouldn’t properly demonstrate the big bastard’s infinite genius-the goddamn name he chose for himself is a phrase in Paquli that translates as I Am Limitless-and I guess even in those days he felt the need to prove it with every move he made.

The Spire was also the spillway and control center for Home’s original hydropower dam.

I’d seen guesstimated specs on it in a Monastic Threat Estimate from about fifteen years ago. The river is the