Caine Black Knife

“They’re leading them straight here!”

I spread my hands silently: quod erat demonstrandum.

Everybody goes quiet, and their gazes all turn inward while they calculate what that might mean. I flash my teeth at Pretornio. “You want to pray? Pray the grills catch those guys.”

He stiffens, and color flares high on his cheekbones. “I will not! We should be trying to find a way to help them-”

“I’d help them, if I could. I’d help them to a couple arrows through their skulls.” I get the monocular back from Rababal and squint through it again. “But my bow doesn’t have the range. And anyhow I’m a crappy shot.”

Thunder gathers on Marade’s face, and her eyes go colder than her Ice Queen cheekbones. “Caine-” She leans toward me. “I shall decide that was a joke.”

The chill in her eyes reminds me that for all her bluff good-natured piety, you don’t get ordained a Knight of Khryl unless you really kinda enjoy killing people.

“Decide whatever you want.” I can do that I like to kill look too. “If those guys make it here, the grills’ll come after them. Here. Looking around. Searching. Sniffing. Hunting humans.”

I let them roll this around their mouths for a second or two. They seem to find the flavor bitter.

“There’s two of those guys. There’s thirty-eight of us. There’s a couple hundred ogrilloi. At least. Do the fucking math.”

They turn on each other and everybody starts to talk at once. I shouldn’t have mentioned math: they’re arguing about their sonofabitching money again.

Ever wonder what the gods think of money? Just look at the people they give it to.

I bring up the monocular. One horse is down, struggling, vomiting bloody foam. The other rider has turned back, whipping his horse to reach his partner, but his own horse is stumbling already, barely even carrying itself-it’ll never manage a gallop with them riding double-then the horse stumbles again and pitches into a face-first roll, the rider sprawling from the cliff shadow into the bloody sunset, and he comes up limping but still humping ass for his partner who’s pinned under his dying horse, and maybe they might get him free before the ogrilloi get there, but even if they do they’re on foot now and they don’t have a chance of reaching even the scrub-covered fold of dirt that was once the city’s ringwall. They don’t have anything like a chance, and I have this sinking knot at the bottom of my throat and a cold twist in my guts and I-

I lower the spyglass and stare at it in the palm of my hand: an abstract shape of brushed steel that no longer makes sense to my eye. I looked into the distance and got a twenty-power view of myself. What a sick, sick sonofabitch I am.

I hate that those guys are on foot now. .

Not that I was rooting for them. No. Not even that I don’t really want to see what the ogrilloi will do to them. If I don’t want to see it, all I have to do is put away the Zeiss.

No.

I’m disappointed. .

What the fuck is wrong with me?

In some shit-rotten depth of my cesspit heart, I want the ogrilloi to trap us here.

I want them to hunt us through the ruins. To catch and kill and eat these men and women with whom I have eaten and drunk and joked and slept. To catch and kill and eat even me.

In this stark mirror, I finally recognize my face.

Things just aren’t ugly enough yet.

I want this to get all the way worse. To go so dark it erases the memory of day.

It’s got nothing to do with balancing on the bubble between Hot Prospect and Never-Was. Nothing to do with slipping backward into the second half of my twenties, trailing three years of hit-challenged Adventures. Those are only surface images. Reflections on a black pool.

A deep one.

I put the monocular to my eye again, unable to believe I actually want to see what I want to see-but I do. I do. God help me.

I want maximum bad.

The guy’s out from under his dying horse. He’s got a rotten leg, limping raggedly, leaning on his partner, shin pouring blood: compound fracture. Poor bastard doesn’t have a chance. Now it’s just a question of whether the grills’ll take them before they can kill themselves.

That sick greasy slime is back in the bottom of my throat, though I am relieved. I really am. I know too well what’ll happen to us if we’re taken by ogrilloi.

But at the same time, y’know. .

“It’s over,” I say, glass still to my eye. “This has all become academic.”

The discussion behind me breaks off and Rababal’s breath starts to warm the back of my right ear. “They’re caught? Let me see.”

I don’t move. “You really want to?”

I can’t help thinking of Dad: he used to tell me praying is only talking to yourself. A useful form of meditation, nothing more. But that was back home. Things are different, here.

So if my prayer is to be granted, I should probably figure out what the hell I’m asking for.

Tyshalle? You listening?

The humans crest a spine in the badlands and go skidding down the slope into a wadi. They sprawl on the sand-dusted rocks; the uninjured one manages to sit by pulling himself up a scrub joshua hand-over-hand. He leans on it for a second or two, watching his friend’s blood soak into the thirsty earth. He says something, and his partner casts his arm across his eyes, lies there like he’s not going to answer-and a strange light kindles between them, an insubstantial liquid iridescence scattering prismatic splinters that spreads to touch them both, crawling their bodies in a halo of rainbow-

And they are gone.

In the dusty creekbed, only scuffs in the dirt and a black splotch of drying blood shows they were ever there.

Well.

I hear my own voice, dry as that empty creek. “How about that.”

“What? What’s happening?” Now they all cluster around me, demanding answers that my conditioning won’t let me give. Those guys were in my line of work.

They got pulled home.

Funny. I should tell Pretornio: the trick to getting your prayers granted is to ask for something that’s gonna happen anyway.

Okay. Not funny.

The ogrilloi are still coming at a gallop, following a trail they’re going to lose. . on a straight line with the ruined city where we’re standing right now, which kindles a strange hot black anticipation down somewhere around my balls.

They’re coming. Here. They really are.

Hunting humans. Humans they’ll never find. Humans who no longer exist in this universe.

They’ll have to settle for us.

I raise the lens to take another look at their approach.

On they come: part bear, part gorilla, all predatory leather-skinned dinosaur with warthog tusks and fighting claws as long as the knives in my rib sheaths. They run with spear and shield and bow strapped across their hogshead-size backs, their long gnarled arms becoming front legs for that ground-eating lope. It’s almost enough to raise a smile.

For a second or two.

Then one big bastard pauses for a second to rear up on his haunches for a better view of the land ahead, and I get a good look at the blazon, the clan sign, painted on his chest, and all at once that anticipation in my balls goes ice cold and my scrotum’s clenching hard enough to squeeze tears from my eyes. Because the blazon’s a single