Caine Black Knife

“If you said anything like that to me,” the Lord Righteous replied in a tone that could freeze beer, “you would be a liar.”

“Ooh, good one.” I rolled my eyes. “So this is because I haven’t sucked enough butt? Shit, why didn’t you tell me? Hey, nice armor, Markham. You make that yourself? And I really like your fucking hair. .”

I was talking to his retreating back.

“Y’know,” I muttered as I dragged the travel trunk clattering after, “maybe there is something in the goddamn air.”

If there was, it was getting into my head: the headache was ramping up again. A hot swollen mass of hurt gathered behind my eyes, thumping in time with my heart. I winced with its pulse as the Lord Righteous turned away from the berm-baffled gatewalk toward the face of Hell. “What, we’re not going in?”

“The Champion awaits on the Purificapex atop the Eternal Vaunt. You will require transport.”

The hot throb inside my head when I tried to lift my gaze up the thousand feet of whitestone behind wouldn’t let me argue. I shut the hell up and followed the Lord Righteous across the whitewashed flagstones toward the jitney landing.

A thin misting drizzle had ridden into town on the dusk. Watch flames hissed and spat atop single-foot braziers. Lanterns swinging from half a dozen jitneys’ overhead lighthooks splashed shadows across the landing. Near the first tier’s face stood bulky freight carts, ogrilloi wrestling crates and casks up onto their beds. Heavy- linked chain served the carts for traces, hooked through yokes of eight. Ogrilloi chained in the traces sat quietly, heads down, breath smoking in the evening chill.

The twin thoroughfares that laddered either side of the face of Hell in vast switchbacked zags had been widened and repaved since my time: four lanes of ogrillo-drawn traffic could grind up or down the ten-percent grade without locking wheels. The thoroughfares’ long folded slant emptied onto a broad plaza crowded with bundle-laden ogrilloi, returning from jobs or shopping in the city below, waiting to load their burdens onto the jitneys, silent and patient in the rain.

Mounted armsmen made sure they stayed that way.

One of the water wranglers saw us coming. The grill dropped his cask on the flagstones and fell to his knees. “Knight!”

Then another, and another. Water cart drovers jumped down from their seats and cracked urgent whips at the heads of the dray-gangs. Bundles and sacks fell unheeded to the wet stones. Water casks rolled as the wranglers threw themselves down.

And for some reason, this had me thinking about Marade whittling the splinters off a broken shinbone.

I saw her in my mind as if she were doing it right now: planing the shinbone down with a little knife to make a kind of flat toothpick about two fingers wide, then using it to scrape the joints of her sabatons free of black mashed-potato muck. Sticky black mashed-potato muck that smelled like meat-

Rock dust and sand and clotted blood.

I stopped and shook my head, looking up and around to ask the wet twilight what the fuck had reminded me of that right now, and the shape of Hell above and the angle of the lamp-sparked cliff face snatched memory-

And I stopped breathing too. All I could do was blink.

Here. Right here. The Khryllians had built the jitney landing over it. The gateway.

The ambush.

Fire and spears and arrows and screams and the schannk of short swords licking along steel rims of linked shields and Marade’s morningstar showering shredded flesh-

Whatever the earth remembered of that clotted mush of sand and blood was under these whitestone flags. Right here. Right now. Where these hundreds of ogrilloi knelt in submission to a single Khryllian Lord.

The last of my breath hissed out in a shuddering Holy crap, and when I breathed in again, I inhaled more headache.

“Freeman Shade? Are you unwell?” Markham sounded like he hoped so.

“I, uh-no. No. I just-I forgot something, that’s all.”

“Is there some emergency?”

“What?”

“This matter you recall-does it require attention?”

“I, uh-”

I looked down. My boots shone in the rain, the whitestone flags beneath them grey with damp. In an open joint, a tiny anthill: mounded crumbs of the black earth beneath.

“Yeah. Yeah, it probably does.” I scuffed the anthill into a smear of mud. “But it’s too fucking late to do anything about it now,” I said, and walked on.

My headache got worse when we reached the jitney queue. As near as I could guess, I was standing right on top of where Pretornio had buried the porters. The two who died springing my trap on the Black Knives. I wondered if anyone had ever found the bodies.

I didn’t think so. Somehow I didn’t think so. Somehow I could feel them down there: tangles of worm-scoured bone an arm’s length beneath my soles. Perry? Pivo? Something like that. One of them had started with P. I was sure of that much.

Pretty sure.

The other-?

The deepening throb in my head drove off any hope of recall. My eyes drifted closed and I put the heel of a hand to my temple, rubbing in small circular motions that didn’t touch the pain, but also didn’t make it any worse. I kept doing it. It was something to do.

“Freeman Shade?”

Christ, my head hurt. “What?”

“Please embark, freeman. You are delaying the queue.”

I opened my eyes. The five grills in the jitney team knelt against their yokes, traces taut, their breath coming harsh and slow, arms slack and trembling: primly fascist autoerotic asphyxiation. They weren’t locked in: not convicts. This was a job. Four grills yoked in tandem, with a bitch single-yoked in the lead. Maybe watching her ass helped keep them trotting. The lead bitch had her forehead pressed to the insteps of Markham’s sabatons.

The Lord Righteous didn’t seem to notice. “Freeman Shade?”

i give myself to you.

I watched drizzle trickle like spit across the back of her grey-leathered skull.

fuckbitch

I shook my head and had to look away before I could speak. “Y’know what? I think I’d rather-”

But ogrilloi knelt everywhere, beside and before and behind, and the only direction I could look away was up. . and up was the third tier, and I followed with my eyes a walkway I had once followed afoot toward wet strangled moans and porcine grunting in a black bloody midnight, and from down here I could see the angle just above the shattered chamber where I found Black Knives rooting into Stalton’s belly. . bagged in his own armor, hauberk over his face like a rape victim’s skirt. .

“Fuck it anyway.” I waved a hand. “Make sure the bitch takes it easy with my trunk.”

I rode. Markham walked-well, jogged-alongside, one hand on the cart’s bed rail like he belonged in a Social Police LeSec detail. The jitney team trotted around the steep switchbacks of the thoroughfare fast enough that just watching them made me tired. We weaved up the slope, overtaking other weather-splintered grill carts with their sullenly dead-eyed dray teams and ignoring the grills on foot; they’d scatter at the rattle of Markham’s sabatons on the stone, dropping their bundles into the drizzle-churned muck to take to their knees and lower their heads.

Off the thoroughfare the levels of Hell slipped down around us, each shabbier and more crowded and more throat-choking with the overpowering stench of grill shit than the one below, as if the ogrilloi had organized themselves into instinctive castes. Down at the first level, they at least had clothes and lanterns and roofs over the ancient walls. Higher, the open gutters were packed with gnawed-down bones and rotten greens and sick yellow turds that melted slowly away in the rain; the only general improvement I could see that the Khryllians had made was to carve drains that emptied the gutters into sluices channeling the solid waste away from the river.

Even all those years ago, I remember being puzzled why the First Folk would have built a city without sewers.