Caine Black Knife

“Oh, for shit’s sake.” My head pounded. I rubbed my eyes. “I remember this from Abbey school-that fucking Khryllian Sanctified by the Blood of Heroes crap. . it’s supposed to be just a metaphor- ”

“Freeman, the Champion awaits.”

I looked at the water for a long moment. I tried to imagine so much as dipping in a toe. My stomach churned.

I turned for the door. “Tell the Champion I appreciate the sentiment and thanks very much for the Healing and the three-peasant tour, but this is a little bit way too motherfucking much, and I am out of here like a-”

I came to a sudden stop. The doorway was full of Khryllian. The Khryllian said, “No.”

“Markham, get out of my way.”

“You may make the attempt to move me.”

“I’m telling you I’m not doing this-”

“And I am telling you, Freeman Shade, that you are.”

The Lord Righteous’s stare was full of cold possibility.

“You pull this swim-in-the-blood shit on everybody who comes up here, or is this something special just for me?”

Something flickered through Markham’s eyes then, something I hadn’t seen before: something cold and hot together. Something angry, and frightened. Wounded.

Dangerous.

“Fuck me.” I suddenly had a little trouble getting my breath. “There is no ‘everybody who comes up here,’ is there? That’s the going up Hell instead of inside the Spire, the secret passage, the no introductions, all of it. It’s so nobody starts running around yelling there’s a non-Khryllian desecrating Our Holy Pukinsuckmydick or whateverthefuck you call it. You’ve never done this before-”

“I am tasked to deliver you to the Champion.” Markham’s voice had gone as dangerous as his eyes.

“You don’t know what’s going on either.” I jabbed a finger at the Khryllian’s petrifying face. “You don’t have a fucking clue.”

Markham’s jaw worked like he was chewing rocks. “It is not my duty to know.”

“And it’s killing you. It’s eating you alive.”

The progress of his self-control could be traced by the slow drain of flush from his cheeks down into his neck. He wrapped himself in supercilious Lipkan disdain. “It is not my duty to know.”

So I turned away and stripped off my tunic. I threw it to the floor under the clothes hooks with a short dark laugh. “Gonna be here on my way out?”

“Perhaps,” Markham said warily to my back. “Why?”

“Maybe I’ll fill you in,” I said as I kicked off my boots and unbuckled my belt, “or maybe-”

I dropped my pants. “Maybe I’ll just give you one more chance to kiss my ass.”

LEGEND

RETREAT FROM THE BOEDECKEN (partial)

you are CAINE (featured Actor: Pfnl. Hari Michaelson)

MASTER: NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.

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They roar toward my back like a tornado on crank.

To hell with the jinking, the juking and the fuck-my-ass serpentine: I take the last ten meters at a dead sprint. A clattering rain of barbed arrows rattles onto the gateway’s stone. One of them clips my butt as I dodge around the upright and stumble into the linked shield-wall of a dozen porters. The guy I slammed into doesn’t blink. None of them do.

Twelve identical thousand-yard stares: they don’t even see me.

Guess I bought Pretornio enough time after all.

Three faces peer over the wall-top. Fuckers. Wish I had something to throw at them. “What happened to my Cloak?”

Tizarre grimaces a baffled apology that I’d like to pound into her face with a rock. Stalton hisses, “Come on, they’re-right-behind-you come on-!”

The hand I grabbed my ass with comes back red. “Fucking right.”

A few centuries’ neglect have chewed back mortar a span deep between the huge dressed-stone blocks of the gateway; I jump, grab on, and scramble up the rest of the eight meters as fast as most guys can climb stairs.

Black Knives boil into the gateway. Shouting. Roaring. Bellows of bloodlust and rage below my feet. I flick a glance down behind me-

Ogrilloi surge and snarl around the twin formations of the porters. The porters stand braced in kratrio to either side of the crumbled gate arch: locked shield to shield, the rear rank’s shields held flat overhead like a steel-tiled roof, leaving just enough of a slit for their long-bladed stabbing spears to lick outward at any Black Knife stupid enough to stumble into reach.

As I’m clawing over the lip onto the top of the wall, Pretornio lifts his arms as though delivering a benediction. The kratrii begin to move.

Leaning into their shields, the porters force their way into the boil of Black Knives in perfect lockstep. Vertical cracks open in their shield wall to pass the short thick hacking-blades each man carries in his right hand. Where they strike, Black Knives bleed.

No wonder Lipke could bitch-hump this whole continent. Half an hour with a priest of Dal’Kannith, and twenty-five surly, untrained, lazy goddamn packbearers are suddenly a Roman fucking legion.

They grind toward each other, pinching off the inflow of Black Knives like a sphincter with razor-blade teeth. On the wall, Stalton leans around the broad curve of the panel shield he’s covering Rababal with. A stack of sword- bladed spears lean in the crenel next to him, and he’s got my hauberk in his free hand. “You are one stone batshit son of a bitch.”

I flash him a grin and keep moving. He hefts my armor. “Suit up, kid. They’ll be climbing-” but I’m already past the shield and in Rababal’s face.

“Now, goddammit! Now!”

Rababal’s got a thousand-yard stare of his own: mindview. He reaches out, and the charged buckeyes he scattered in the rocks outside the wall blast flame. The air shirrs with stone-shard shrapnel. Burning, bleeding Black Knives howl and claw at each other, trailing meat-scented smoke.

Huh: smells like burnt duck.

Rababal’s expression stays blankly remote and he starts mumbling under his breath. A couple Black Knives leap for the farside wall. Rababal snaps a smoking buckeye at them like he’s flicking a booger, and it erupts into flame that blasts them back to the ground, on fire and howling.

Stalton drops my hauberk and grabs a spear with a very stylish one-handed flourish that slashes a hand off the first Black Knife up our wall. The ogrillo roars as it tumbles toward the jagged masonry below. “Caine, your armor-”

“Leave it. Pass me one of those spears.”

“The arrows-”

“Have you seen those arrows?” I may not be the most educated cockknocker in this city today, but I know the story of Agincourt.

For answer, he hands me his spear and reaches for another. Bright bloody steel jabbing and slicing at their hands and faces convinces the Black Knives to take their chances on the ground.

Good fucking luck. They’re about to learn how it feels to be iron.

The porters re-form into a single rectangle that corks the gate mouth, front two ranks facing the smoldering