Caine Black Knife

guardhouses and greenish beams of roving searchlights. “The Upland Manufactories, and BlackStone Mining, and the Pens.”

She returned her hand behind her back, and lowered her shrouded head toward the tiers of the vertical city below. “And of course, the face of Hell.”

“Yeah. Pretty. So?”

“Five hundred Knights of Khryl. Ten thousand armsmen. Thirty thousand sworn Soldiers, man, woman, and child. There was a time that the Order of Khryl was so respected-so feared-that the mere chance we might enter battle was enough to end a war. Whole empires bowed before us.”

“What’s your point?”

“Now we are-” This time her shrug was big enough to hurt. “-jailers. Keepers of the Boedecken ogrilloi.”

I nodded a shrug of my own at the platinum spires around us. “But you’ve got a really nice house.”

“Bitter though it may be, this duty has fallen to us, and I shall see it done. For the sake of all that you see around you here. Do you understand this? It is not for mine own sake, nor for Khryl’s, nor for the Order’s alone- certainly it is not for glory, nor for any hope of the return of bygone days. It is for the lives and hopes and happiness of forty thousand Khryllians, near that many again of the Civility, and near to two hundred thousands of the ogrilloi themselves that I do this. They are each and all my responsibility. My duty. Thus do I fulfill it.”

“Thus?” I frowned. “What, you mean by bringing me up here?”

“Yes. By bringing you to the Purificapex of Khryl. By standing you at my side, in a place where only ordained Knights of Khryl have stood till now. By showing you what I see. For we must understand one another, you and I.”

Wincing, the pounding in my head telling me I wasn’t going to like the answer, I asked, “We must? How come?”

“Because,” she said, turning to me finally, pulling back her blood-stained cowl, “I know who you are.”

For long enough that the platinum numbed my bare toes, I could only stare.

She missed good-looking by a yard on the hard side: her face might have been shaped from chrome steel by a cutting torch. Her hair hung straight and limp, the color of maple leaves that have lain under snow cover all winter long. Her neck was corded with knife-etched muscle, and her jaw looked to have been modeled on a splitting maul.

But her eyes-

Those eyes. . damn. I knew that color.

Lifetimes ago, I trained at the Studio Conservatory on Naxos, in Earth’s Aegean Sea. At twilight in late summer, as the last arc of the sun slips into the sea and the first stars kindle, the sky goes to indigo velvet: warm, and soft, and impossibly remote. That color.

But in her eyes that remote melancholy was overlaid with cool unselfconscious speculation, a direct and level interest that examined my face, my shoulders. The shape of my hands. The drape of my robe.

I offered another blank mental Damn. .

I played dumb. I’ve had plenty of practice. “Have we met?”

She spread her hands. “I am Angvasse, Lady Khlaylock, currently the Champion of Khryl.”

“Khlaylock?” My stomach lurched. “Any relation?”

“I have the honor to be that great man’s niece.”

I said, “Uh.”

Another Khlaylock was the last thing I needed in my life right now. Or, say, ever. I coughed. “Sorry. I’m supposed to take a fu-a knee or something, right?”

“Formalities need not be observed; I am not in Khryl’s Battledress. Here in the Palm of God we are equals. You may stand. You may even call me Angvasse.” Faint creases appeared around those startling eyes as though she might be about to smile. “You should understand that these liberties are not taken elsewhere.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“And you may speak freely here; Khryl is a warrior god. His Sanctum cannot be profaned by mere words, no matter how coarse.”

I coughed again. “How do you-who do you think I am?”

She waved a dismissive hand. “Please. An Ankhanan Esoteric enters the Battleground, speaking of Black Knives? I am not ignorant of our history. And now, meeting you in person-I passed my youth in my uncle’s house. His portrait of you hangs in his study.”

I blinked. “It does?”

“Of a much younger you, of course. Slimmer. Less scarred.” Her eyes creased again like she was thinking about smiling but decided against it. “And I thought you’d be taller.”

“Everybody does.” I scowled at her. “Are you putting me on? A portrait?”

“He is an accomplished painter. When he retires as Justiciar, I have no doubt he will become a noted artist.”

I started to monologue, *God save me from the fucking sensitive artistic types,* until I remembered that the god to whom I was bitching is Himself one of those fucking sensitive artistic types. “But in his study? I mean, in his study doesn’t he want, I don’t know, a picture of his father? Or Khryl or something?”

“Such paintings grace other rooms in his manor. You hang on the wall of his study, he has said, as a constant reminder-” Her melancholy took on a curious note of schadenfreude. “-of the price of vanity.”

“He was never short on that.”

“You would find him,” she said, “quite changed.”

“I’d rather not find him at all.”

She nodded. “He does not remember you fondly.”

“But still-I mean, I’m supposed to be defended against-”

“Not from God. The Lord of Valor directs my attention to threats against His Soldiers and His land.”

“I’m a threat?”

“Are you not?”

“I wasn’t planning to be.” Another shrug. Why lie? “Getting beaten more-or-less to death might have changed my mind.”

“And thus I offer my apology. The incident occurred at my command, and I sincerely regret the necessity.”

I chewed on that. It tasted like the inside of my lip. “You ordered that bastard to kill me?”

“Not to kill. Never.”

“Did you explain that to him?”

“We are a young land, freeman; I have not seen thirty years, yet I saw the birth of the Battleground-as you must know, you who had so much a hand in creating it. We are still building the customs and tradition-constructing a society entire-that will fulfill Our Lord’s Command to tame His Land and defend the innocents who seek to thrive here.”

A wistful undertone hinted that she used to believe it.

I did my best to sound encouraging. “Uh-huh.”

“And our circumstance has become desperate. It was necessary to be certain of your intentions.”

“What’s this got to do with Orbek?”

“Certain. . elements. . have begun to interfere in Khryl’s society. Violently.”

“Yeah, I gathered. So, what, he’s hooked in with this Freedom’s Face?”

“Freedom’s Face is nothing.” She turned a hand as though releasing a fly from her fist. “Overprivileged and underexperienced scions of your Ankhanan burghers. Children with too much time on their hands, who have somehow come to believe that the romance of Liberty outweighs skill at arms. Who believe that casual vandalism, minor sabotage, and demonstrations of civil disobedience can bend the Will of God. We own Freedom’s Face; we can destroy it at a whim. We allow its survival only because we find it a useful beer pot in which to gather your juvenile wasps.”

“Has anybody explained that to Tyrkilld?”

“Explained it?” She looked honestly puzzled. “He is Khryl’s leading Knight in the control of Freedom’s Face.