Caine Black Knife

They are no serious threat.”

Oh, really? Well.

Well, well, well.

I said, “The rifles and checkpoints looked serious enough.”

“We have a problem of our own; they call themselves the Smoke Hunt.”

“I gathered that,” I said slowly. “What’s it got to do with Orbek?”

“This is where the matter becomes. .” She sighed. “. . complicated.”

I shrugged. “I call it Caine’s Law: Everything’s more complicated than you think it is.”

“Ah.”

“There’s a corollary,” I offered, going for an amiable keep on chatting, lady kind of tone. “Whenever somebody tells you shit’s simple, they’re trying to sell you something.”

Again she almost smiled. Almost. “Perhaps. Yet I tell you matters are complex, and I too am. . selling you something.”

“Yeah? What’re you selling?”

She fixed me with the infinite melancholy of her twilight eyes. “This Orbek-his claim of being a Black Knife-is this truth?”

“Far as I know.” I shrugged and found something to look at in the darkening sky. “That’s what his father told him, anyway-Orbek was born after the-after, uh, y’know-”

“And you truly claim him as brother? You, of all men living?”

“It’s-kind of a longer story than I really want to get into right now.”

She shook her head. “You are an interesting man.”

“He’s pretty interesting too.”

“I meet too many interesting people,” she said distantly. “Most of them I have to kill.”

“Probably just coincidence.”

Her voice went sad and cold: autumn winds dropping toward winter. “Not in this case.”

The evening damp turned to winter on my neck. “Maybe you want to tell me what you mean by that.”

She lifted her face to the heavens and murmured, “Ammare Khryl Tyrhaalv’Dhalleig, hrereteg yroshallai ti Hammantellentlei av uvranishai terishiin,” which I somehow knew, without being surprised at the knowledge, in the way you know things in a dream, was Old High Lipkan. Which wasn’t a shocker; I have heard Old High Lipkan before. The shocker was that I knew what it meant.

Beloved Khryl, Lord of Valor, I do this only for the honor of Your Name and the future of Your people.

This was a shocker because I don’t speak Old High Lipkan.

I found myself chewing the inside of my lip again while I waited for her to pull her nerves together. Eventually she lowered her head and took a deep breath. “How much do you know of your-brother’s-doings on the Battleground?”

“Uh-uh.” I folded my arms. “That’s not how this works.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“This is your party. You lay out the snacks.”

Infinite weariness in her nod. “I met him, this Orbek who styles himself kwatcharr of the Black Knives.”

“He does?”

She went on like I hadn’t spoken. “He was sought for questioning in an unrelated incident-a murder, in the fourth tier of Hell.”

“That wasn’t murder,” I said.

“Oh?” she said mildly, angling her head toward me.

I met her gaze squarely. She waited for me to elaborate. I waited for her to get tired of waiting.

She sighed. “The killing was done with a firearm-merely to bring such a weapon into Purthin’s Ford-”

“How d’you know he didn’t get it here?”

Again she waited for me to elaborate. Again I waited for her to get tired of waiting. Eventually she surrendered a nod. “He avoided armsmen and Knights together for some days; he was not taken until I myself joined the hunt. He defied me personally, in Khryl’s Battledress, which is an affront to God Himself.”

“Ankhanans are like that.”

“Yes. You are. While the Empire maintains a pretense of careful neutrality, it is known that some of the Battleground’s current difficulties are of Ankhanan origin, and your own relationship with the Empire, and the Emperor, is known to Khryl’s Order. This why you were mistreated; it was necessary to ascertain whether you might be associated with these elements. Knight Aeddhar felt he had no better way to prove your innocence. And for this I apologize, on my own behalf, as well as on behalf of Knight Aeddhar, the Order of Khryl, and the Civility of the Battleground. This apology is profound and sincere, as is my hope that you might accept it.”

“I’m not there yet. Get back with Orbek.”

“There are no gentle words for this, freeman.” Her voice hardened out of that wistful tone, but her eyes were still all melancholy twilight. “Your brother is in the Pens.”

“Pens.” An empty echo, no meaning behind it.

“Yes. At Shortshadow tomorrow, he will face Khryl’s Justice. By my hand.”

“Khryl’s Justice? Son of a bitch. He’s gonna fight you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not a fight, it’s an execution.”

She didn’t even blink. “It is at his own request: a request that I am, as Khryl’s Champion, obliged by custom and by Law to answer.”

For a long cold minute, I looked at her. Just looked. She let me. I wasn’t really seeing her anyway.

I was seeing Orbek in the Donjon’s Pit, walking like he lived only to fight and to fuck and didn’t much care which he did to who. I was hearing the trace of a Boedecken burr in his bleak Warrens growl-

— i am black knife. my dead father is black knife, from before. from when the land likes black knives-

I was feeling Orbek’s fist tangle in my filthy shirt, his hot carnivore breath down the side of my neck-

— but remember. you win this one? you remember I coulda hurtcha. maybe i be dead, but you be hurt, hey? i want some fuck-me consideration-

And I was remembering Orbek in the Shaft and Orbek in the Donjon riot and how Orbek had taken care of Faith and all the leagues we’d walked together in the years since Assumption Day, and after a while I turned back to her and my voice came out flat as roadkill. “That’s why you set your boy Markham to babysit me.”

She picked up the leather bundle and began to unroll it. “Were the Order of Khryl ever to forget the. . potential hazards. . presented by Esoterics,” she said softly, “my uncle’s face would serve as infallible reminder. As might the new scars borne by Knight Aeddhar.”

“Huh.”

“And you are no ordinary Esoteric. No one wants your hand raised against us.”

“I haven’t thought that far ahead.”

She paused, holding the bundle half closed across the altar-block. “Have you not?”

I scratched idly at the knurls of scar and callus that layer my knuckles. “I guess it depends on what he’s in for.”

It seemed like a useful lie.

“He was taken,” she said, “during a submission violation incident.”

“What the hell’s that?”

“All Khryl’s ogrilloi must make submission when addressed by any Knight. It has to do with how ogrilloi were originally bred; the elves selected for-”

“I know how they were bred. Orbek isn’t Khryl’s, he’s an Ankhanan freeman.”

“On the Battleground, all ogrilloi are Khryl’s. He refused submission.”

“I’ll bet he did.”

black knives don’t kneel

A quiet hiss whished on inside my head, like the ignition of an internal pilot light. “I’ll bet he did,” I