Caine Black Knife

the carnage and ruin of Old Town, perched on a blast-folded curve of assault-car hull with Kosall’s cold steel across my lap. The rumpled and torn titanium wreckage permanently ticks and pings as it eternally cools under my ass. A few hundred yards to my left, there has always been a smoldering gap where the Courthouse once stood, surrounded by a toothed meteor-crater slag of melted buildings; even the millenial Cyclopean stone of the Old Town wall sags and bows outward over the river, a thermal catenary like the softened rim of a wax block- candle.

I face the god in the infinite now. .

I said again forever, “It’s an echo of my past. Or something. Let the fucking thing go, will you?”

She released it, and time leaked back into the universe.

I stared. “So that’s what’s left of the Godslaughterer’s sword? For real?”

“Do you not know it so?”

I nodded thoughtfully, scratching at my beard. Threads of dried blood wormed across my fingertips. “The Peaceful Hand?”

“The hand He extended in friendship to Jereth of Tyrnall, when Our Lord-Father Dal’Kannith sent Him to offer truce in the Deomachy. The hand that Jereth treacherously struck from his wrist. With this very blade.”

“Huh. That’s not the version we learn in the Monasteries.”

Her forefinger tapped the plain age-eaten knob that once must have been the pommel; even this was enough to claw my brain with deja vu.

— I squeeze its hilt until its hum matches my memory: it buzzes in my teeth-

“Shit, don’t do that, huh?”

She took her hand away and turned her palm upward. “And do you have reason to believe your version of the tale true and ours false?”

I shrugged, opening my own hand toward her. “History depends on who’s telling the story.”

“The power of Justice that runs in the very Blood of Our Lord destroyed the Accursed Blade,” she said, “but His Peaceful Hand was severed, and Our Lord maimed, by treachery; so it was that Dal’Kannith decreed on that black day the birth of the Knights, that we should become the Hands of Our Lord. As Champion, I am His Living Fist. In His service, what I do is His Will. Whatever I do. That is how I can bring you-even you-to this holy place.”

My smile of understanding wasn’t a smile. “All your sins are forgiven in advance.”

“I am righteous by definition. Until He proclaims by Terranhidhal zhan Dhalleig that I am no longer his chosen Champion, I am incapable of sin.”

“Not exactly peaceful hands.”

“No. The Hand of Peace was struck from him. We are Hands of War. The Hand of Peace is-” She gave a negligent flip of the head that spun blood-damp hair around her eyes. “-where we stand.”

I looked around. Those spires resembled fingers for a reason. . *You and your candy-ass artistic metaphors,* I monologued.

God did not reply.

“So what’s the point of all this?”

“You must understand,” she said, “that I treat with you only because you are a lesser evil than the darkness we face. You must understand-though we stand upon the holiest sanctum of our Order, though we are on Khryl’s Own Palm of the Peaceful Hand itself, despite the lineage of the Accursed Blade, its sanctity so vast that a lesser being might be struck dead for merely daring to gaze upon it-you must understand that if I ever even suspect you might be a more immediate threat-”

She wheeled on me. Her lips had peeled off her teeth and her eyelids had vanished, and there was nothing human in her chrome-steel face. She seized the naked hilt of the Accursed Blade and banished time and sense from the universe. She said forever, “Here under the Eyes of God Himself, I swear upon Mine Own Legend of Honor that I will pull this hilt from its resting place and fuck you to death with it.”

She let her echo die at the end of all things.

When, after several cosmic ages, she finally let go and the world started to turn again, I said, “I take it that’s a yes.”

HERO

RETREAT FROM THE BOEDECKEN (partial)

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

MASTER: NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.

© 2187 Adventures Unlimited Inc. All rights reserved.

Screams of burning ogrilloi echo off the stone. Eight or nine of them-a swell bonfire down there.

The light they cast gleams on steel teeth of two kratrioi closing in on them from either end of the alley, and from up here it looks clean, precise, even elegant: close-order drill on a parade ground.

Y’know, for a weaselly little twitch, that Pretornio swings serious dick.

Caine.

I look up and give a wave toward the impenetrable night-shadow that shrouds the distant parapet where Tizarre and Rababal stand.

Two packs converging on your position. Get ready.

Yeah: they’ve heard the screams. Running to get a look. And they’re gonna die for it.

I turn toward the featureless shadow-shapes of Marade and Stalton. “Here they come. Fade.”

They’re right on top of you-

I wave a second acknowledgment and swing through the window gap in the crumbling wall, get low, and squeeze some heat into the butt of the blade-wand. The thumping of bare feet and clicking of toeclaws on stone has my balls sucking themselves up to my rib cage. Huge blacker shadows hurtle into the shadows in front of me and I stick the bladewand through the window and a pulse of blue energy licks from its end, casting enough light that I can see three or four of them begin to just come apart.

They grunt and gasp as they fall and one starts to howl and I duck below the sill and press against the night-chilled stone as the canteen full of oil that Rababal has Reached down to just above their heads ignites with a metallic whang.

When I look back out the little window, everything’s on fire.

Including about fifteen Black Knives.

››scanning fwd››

Fucking stuck-goddamn crest ridge’s like a bench vise-

Good thing the fight’s over. This could’ve been terminally embarrassing.

I step on his face-my boot heel squelches in his open eye-and stick the bladewand back behind my belt so I can use both hands.

Ghost-blue flickers from oil flames guttering in the cracks of the flagstones. The last two Black Knives wheeze and gurgle against the wall, sagging. Marade rips the smashed visor off her helm with a squeal of tortured metal, then limps painfully over their smoldering throw nets, slaps aside the hammer one raises in feeble defense, and lifts her morningstar.

“Leave them,” I pant at her. “Inhaled flame. . dead already.”

She turns a blood-smeared face toward me: the smashed visor must’ve crumpled in enough to break her nose. “We can’t just let them suffer-”

Stalton sags against the crumbled wall, cradling the pudding that used to be his left wrist. “Sure we can.”

He nudges one of the throw nets with his foot. “It was a pretty good speech, Caine,” he says with a shaky, shocky laugh. “But that don’t-let-’em-take-you-alive thing is starting to look like a problem.”

With the dead ogrillo’s head braced between my boot and the oil-scorched flags, a twisting wrench yanks my sword free of his skull. The effort unfolds a scarlet bloom under my short ribs where his hammer caught me, and I