Caine Black Knife

Of course, now I pretty much know.

By the time I stepped off the jitney at the fifth tier vault, I was whipped. Wrung out. The beating was barely half of it. This was worse. This was more. I’ve been beaten before. This was being beaten down. Beaten down by age, and by memory.

Everything looked too different. Nothing looked different enough.

The switchbacked thoroughfare still threaded high-arched tunnels to end at the vast almost-Gothic vault carved from the escarpment’s heartrock, but now, twenty-five years later, there were none of the shadows and dry must and sand, none of the lichen and gnawed-clean bones of small animals. The mica-flecked stone of the vault was scrubbed and spotless and polished to a mirror finish that threw back the light of dozens of lamps. Dual gates of filigreed iron closed both the lower entrance and the arch of the broad ramping tunnel that led to the surface of the escarpment above. The whole place had the air of a busy railhead, full of armsmen, clerks and porters, wagons, and chain gangs.

The last time I’d been in this vault-

I didn’t let myself think about it.

“From here you walk,” Markham said. “You may safely leave the trunk anywhere you like. I will have it sent on to your hostelry.”

“Shit. You could’ve done that back at the vigilry-”

“Yes,” Markham said. “I could have.”

The jitney bitch had her team backing the cart down the thoroughfare almost before my feet hit the rock. An attentive page was instantly on hand to take charge of the trunk. Markham directed me toward a new tunnel, broad as the thoroughfares, that had been cut the dozen meters or so through to the face.

It opened onto a cargo aerie: a broad oval cliff of cut-smooth rock, twilight sky, and the creak of oiled hemp as three massive cranes lifted whole wagons and their loads over the lip of the plateau above, swinging them wide over the half-kilometer drop. On my left the escarpment fell away down the levels of Hell to the twilit map of Purthin’s Ford and the flat indigo snake of the river, and ahead-

Ahead the Spire jabbed another hundred and thirty feet of swollen whitestone god-cock into the darkening sky.

To my right the world was eclipsed by the buttress wall that supported the final sally bridge. From the city below, those sally bridges looked delicate as rainbows; up close, its arching buttress was a cliff of rain-slick whitestone too vast for comprehension.

The whole thing was just way too fucking big.

I tried to remind myself that I’m not exactly educated-that really, I know a grand total of dick about materials science. I tried to remind myself that for all I knew, maybe granite and whitestone really could support the stress of a fortress fifteen hundred feet tall. Maybe it could hold up open spans of bridge a couple hundred yards long. Not to mention however ungodly many bazillion gallons of water under whatever hellish pressure must be inside. Maybe Ma’elKoth just knew a lot more about engineering than anyone else. Anywhere. Ever.

Maybe it was magick.

Maybe that magick wasn’t going to unexpectedly decay while I was way too fucking close to that fucking thing.

Markham led me along the cliff face toward a stone command house that had been built out from the base of the buttress. Like all official Khryllian structures, it was immaculate, all clean white lines and perfect white angles, and looked like it could double as a bunker. The outer room held regimented copying tables staffed by regimented Khryllian clerks making regimented lines of notes on the regimented contents of every wagon going up or down above the aerie; the back office held a pair of standard-issue back office types, distinguished only by their Soldier of Khryl crewcuts and the sunburst blazons on their blouses.

“I require this office,” Markham said, and the back-office types gathered their papers and their charcoals and vanished without a word. Without so much as a glance. At either of us. Or each other.

“They don’t ask why? Who I am? They don’t even ask how long?”

“It is not their duty to know.”

The door closed behind them. He moved to the rear wall of the office, which was tiled with the same brilliant whitestone that made the whole Spire shine-probably was the buttress wall itself. He ran the flat of his hand over the stone in a long smooth curve that could almost have been a caress.

He said, “Phy’nyll tin Pinesh,” and the sunset around his hand took on a faint wash of blue that flowed from his outstretched fingers. A rectangular section of wall swung backward into darkness. From within came a subterranean thunder, almost subsonic: a slow permanent earthquake in the absolute black: my river rumbling past.

Oh, for shit’s sake. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“Please follow me.” Walking through, Markham was instantly swallowed by night.

I squinted into the darkness. “What am I, a fucking bat? How about a lamp?”

“The way is straight and smooth, with hazard to neither head nor foot.” Markham’s voice echoed with the patience of the stone around us. “If you like, I will carry you.”

The way my head felt, I was tempted to take the bastard up on it. Instead I only sighed. “Anybody ever tell you you’re a funny guy?”

“No.”

“There’s a reason for that,” I said, and followed into the night-shrouded passage. As soon as I entered, the panel swung shut behind me and the way was dark as a cave.

Even this took me back. Walking along smooth flat stone in absolute black, left hand brushing polished wall cold and dripping with what I hoped was just rock sweat, I was twenty-five again with Marade at my side, walking out cold iron calm from midnight into screaming bloody dawn. .

I could still feel the spring steel of muscle under the velvet skin of her thigh. I could still smell my blood on her hand, feel her tongue between my lips. .

Sometime later another panel opened onto lamplight. Markham stepped aside to let me pass first through the doorway.

It was the first place in Purthin’s Ford that didn’t smell clean. It was also the first Khryllian place that wasn’t white. Some kind of Roman-style bath, tiled in brown terra-cotta-a long curving pool of rusty-looking water lay flat and still below a shallow flight of steps. The steps continued into depths invisible in the rusty murk. The room smelled stale and old-far too old for a place built less than twenty years ago-thick with must and decay, lampblack and a meaty butcher-shop funk.

Three steps led up to a narrow walkway that hugged the inner curve of the wall above the pool. The light in the room came from lamps hung on chains above this walkway; there were no windows. The wall near the steps was hung with clothes hooks, the first three holding towels and the rest empty. An array of armor racks stood nearby, all empty save one, and that one was hung not with chain or plate but with ordinary clothing, a tunic and pants that might have been of raw silk.

Markham had stopped in the passageway. “This is the Lavidherrixium. From here,” he said from the half light, “you will continue alone.”

I shrugged and turned for the walkway stairs.

“No,” Markham said from behind me. “You approach the Purificapex of the Lord of Valor.”

I looked over my shoulder. The Lord Righteous pointed at the pool.

“Oh, come on.”

“You may disrobe here, and hang your clothing. You will find a robe on the far side.”

“What am I supposed to do, swim? In that?”

“Yes.”

“You are batshit insane.”

“The taints of Cowardice and Compromise must be washed from you before you may approach.” Upper-case emphasis was clear in his tone. “You must be made Clean.”

“That’s gonna make me clean? Are you pulling my dick? It smells like-” I squinted along the curve of the wall and saw the robes hanging on the far side, and the robes weren’t white either; they were terra-cotta brown. The same brown as the tiles. The same brown as the rusty tinge of the water.

The butcher-shop funk finally got through to me.