Caine Black Knife

“Yeah? Who’s gonna tell it? Who’s gonna remember us?”

My conditioning would choke me if I tried tell him, but I have another truth. A better truth. A truth that just might make us free.

“I thought that was obvious.” I raise a hand and wave at the black stone of the passage chamber walls, through the stone, out into the infinite night beyond.

Out at the Black Knives.

“They will.”

HAND OF PEACE

The robe itched. It smelled like meat.

I padded barefoot up an endless spiral of stairs built out from an inner cylinder of granite; the outer drum curved a good six feet clear of the stairs’ empty edge, leaving a long, long drop to the lamplit arc of the Lavidherrixium below.

My hair was drying stiff, and my face felt tight and sticky, and my skin crawled, and I couldn’t stop half a grimace that was at least part smile. So many people would be shocked, shocked, to find me suddenly fastidious about bathing in blood. .

Funny thing: most of them were dead. Really funny thing: I killed a lot of them myself.

I’m not known for my sparkling sense of humor.

Eventually the smell of blood and lampblack gave way to clean after-rain and a sunset breeze, and the steps became damp, and I rounded the curve of the cylinder and found myself outside. Way outside.

An intricate scale model of Purthin’s Ford speckled with pinpricks of firelight stretched away below, and the sudden shift in perspective from six lamplit feet to six moonlit miles kicked me behind the knees and nearly pitched me headlong over the edge.

I lurched away from the rim, slipping, pressing my back against the white-stone curve of the Spire, bare feet scrabbling for purchase on the damp stair, and I held himself there for a year or two until my vertigo began to pass.

Eventually I could breathe again.

“Holy crap.” A faded wheeze: that was all I had. “They couldn’t post a fucking sign? Maybe put up a railing? Holy crap.”

The final curve of the stairs looped up to the topmost reach of the Spire. I went up it with my right shoulder brushing the wall and my eyes on the stairs in front of me; even the top of the escarpment, only a hundred feet below, pulled at my balance, dragging my head toward the brink.

I had a feeling that even Khryllians didn’t come up here lightly.

The five spires around the top of the Eternal Vaunt curved upward like tenmeter fingers of an upraised hand, plated in lustrous white metal; between them the cap was a steep slant of the same metal, polished and still slick after the rain. The stairs ended where the metal began; the slope of metal curved upward in a convex arc so that its apex was out of view.

I reached down and laid my palm on the metal: smooth and slick and colder than the rain.

Hmm.

I knew enough about the physics of magick to understand that the curve of the finger-spires above would focus Flow on that apex-the cup of the stylized palm-so this metal would be conductive. . not silver, though. From this height, a slash of sun still burned the horizon, visible through a rent in the slow clouds; in its light the metal showed no hint of tarnish, and I couldn’t imagine a legion of Khryllians making the climb up here for a daily polish. Not to mention Ma’elKoth and his friggin’ artistic sensibilities. . which meant this had to be something like, well-

Platinum.

And not leaf, either; though I couldn’t guess the thickness, this was clearly designed to be walked on. I frowned up at the vast finger-spires and the plated convex slopes between-could there be this much in the entire world? — but then I shrugged. If your basic Joe Alchemist can turn lead into gold, Ma’elKoth could probably make platinum out of his own turds.

*Figures,* I monologued. *Silver just isn’t quite white enough, is it?*

“Please join me. The view is better from up here.”

My jolt at the unexpected voice didn’t quite send me slipping down the platinum slope, tumbling off the rim of the thousand-foot tower and screaming down through misting drizzle to shatter some random embrasure far below in a cannonball of meat and bone. Not quite. But it came close enough that I saw the whole thing happen inside my head.

“Yeah?” Panting, I crouched and leaned on the platinum. It felt even colder now, smoother, satin ice. “Then it’ll be nice if I live long enough to see it, huh?”

“If Khryl had willed your death for this day, you would have died in the Riverdock customs sequestry. Join me.”

The voice was feminine, educated, with the air of effortless Lipkan aristocracy that Ankhanan society types so desperately try to emulate; at the same time, it had a full-throated chest resonance belonging more to fields than to drawing rooms. A rasping edge hinted that the woman who belonged to that voice spent a fair amount of her time on those fields shouting orders above the clash of weapons and the drum of steel-shod hooves.

I thought blankly, a chick?

I clicked over some decades-old Monastic research on the Order. This’d be the first female Champion of Khryl since, what, Pintelle? Call it eighty-odd years, give or take.

Wow.

Bare feet gave me just enough purchase on the platinum, despite the damp, that if I trusted my weight and didn’t lean too far into my balance I could make my way up the slope.

She stood at the focus of the Purificapex, her back to me, hands folded behind her. She wore a robe identical to mine, stained with old blood, raised hood shrouding her head. Her feet were bare, her ankles pale and thick, her calves trim, chiseled white marble; her folded hands were long and hard on thick corded wrists.

Beside her stood a waist-high extrusion of metal sloping up out of the general flooring, smooth on top, gently sloped, maybe ten inches wide and a couple of feet long. On top of it rested a leather bundle, rolled and tied with a thong like a chef’s knife wrap.

Good size for an altar, maybe. Or an anvil. Or a chopping block.

On the far side of the altar-block there was some kind of a long handle-like the hilt of a bastard sword wrapped in wire-sticking up at an angle. That handle was the only part of the furnishings that wasn’t platinum; it looked old, rusted, eaten by age and exposure.

I padded up behind her. “Think your boy Markham believes this apology crap?”

She didn’t move. “It does not matter what he believes.”

“Then why the story?”

“It is the truth.”

“Oh, come on.”

One shoulder lifted a millimeter. “It is part of the truth. The apology is not on behalf of Knight Aeddharr, but on my own.”

“Shit, lady, you could’ve just sent a card.”

“You are here,” she said, “because it is my wish that you see the Battleground as I see it.”

She unclasped her hands and extended one to swing through a long, slow wave out at the darkening downland: the sprawl of city and the gentle swells of plantations and vineyards beyond. “Purthin’s Ford. The Knightly Estates of the Order of Khryl.”

The gesture turned toward the escarpment, toward distant compounds lit with the glow of coal-gas mantles, and a nearer compound, vast rows upon rows of regimented shacks and cages surrounded by razor wire and