Caine Black Knife

wheeze a little as I lift the sword.

“Oh, for shit’s sake. Look at this.”

Right at the mess of brains and bone splinters, the blade takes a thirtydegree bend and almost a quarter fuck-my-bleeding-ass twist. “You spend like half your motherfucking life learning how to get a sword into somebody’s skull-how come nobody teaches you how to take it out?”

They’re not listening; Stalton’s trying to tighten the straps of his battered shield one-handed, and Marade’s looking down at the mess those warhammers made of her right thigh.

“Screw this piece of shit.” I drop it. Swords suck, anyway.

Wouldn’t happen with a knife.

I pick up the warhammer he hit me with, hefting it for weight and balance, and the bloom of pain below my short ribs spiders into a spreading numbness that buckles my knees.

Oh, damn.

I lean on the warhammer and palpate my liver through the cool slick chainmail and my padded surcoat. It doesn’t exactly hurt; the sensation is too vast, too oceanic. My gut’s bloating already, and pressing on it opens a black pit that sucks away my strength. Dunno how bad it really is, but the night darkens and goes liquid around me, and sounds stop making sense. Bad enough.

Shock, though, I am trained for. Breathe.

And.

Breathe.

And-Breathe, and-

And a few seconds’ focused concentration on my Control Disciplines pumps my blood pressure high enough to swim the world back into focus.

Breathe.

And breathe.

A shift of attention within the Disciplines amps my stress hormones; the pain fades and strength leaks back into my legs and arms, and my head clears.

Forget love and money, baby: adrenocortical steroids make the world go round.

After most of a minute I can stand up straight and finally get a decent look at this hammer. The haft’s longer than my arm and the iron head runs about three kilos, but two-handed, I can swing it well enough. My gut and Stalton’s wrist can both vouch for the impact the bone-shattering peen can deliver; the spike on the back side has the same shallow curve as an ogrillo fighting claw and can punch through steel plate-Marade’s right cuisse looks like the surface of the moon, and at least three of those craters are deep leaking punctures.

Should work well enough on ogrillo skulls.

Marade shakes her head distractedly, sprinkling her legs with blood from her nose. “Caine. I’ll need your help-”

A surge of motion behind her, and she interrupts herself with a shirring backhand of her morningstar that meets the clumsy lunge of the dying Black Knife and splatters the wall with his brains.

That girl can hit.

His corpse flips against the other Black Knife. The live one gives a snarl, but he’s got nothing left-the snarl’s mostly groan and he collapses beneath his dead clanmate’s body, still staring murder up at Marade as he strangles on the fluid filling his burnt lungs.

Y’know, if she and I could find some way to live through this-I mean, y’know, if she likes me at all. .

She staggers toward me, fumbling at the upper curve of her perforated cuisse. “Help me get this off, will you?”

I drop to one knee and slip my hands up under her tasset to feel for the top buckle, and I must truly be a sick fucking puppy, because the feel of her warm flesh through the sticky cloth of her breeches has my breath going even shorter than that body-shot from the hammer did.

“I, uh-” I have to cough my throat clear. “We don’t have much for bandages-I mean, my shirt, I guess-”

“No need,” she tells me. “Soft-tissue wounds aren’t serious for me. I just need this off. The ripped edges are cutting into muscle-I can’t walk and I can’t Heal. And I need to see what I can do for Stalton’s arm.”

My gut could use some attention too, but-

The way she’s talking. .

I stop and squint up at her. “Kinda lost that whole Ivanhoe cadence all of a sudden, haven’t you?”

“What?” She looks startled, and a guilty flash shifts her eyes. “I, uh-”

Caine. The ghost-hiss of Tizarre’s Whisper shushes from just behind my left shoulder. I raise my arm to signal I’ve heard her. Two more packs, and another’s linking up. About two bowshots south and closing.

I nod to myself and pull my right-hand boot knife. Marade scowls down as I start sawing through her cuisse’s retaining straps.

“Caine?”

“That was Tizarre. We have company.”

She bares her teeth and looks over her shoulder. “Stalton?”

“I’m mobile,” he says thinly. He doesn’t sound too sure of it. “Which way?”

“Fuck it.” The last strap parts and her cuisse comes off in my hand. “Just get out of sight. We’ll hit ’em right here.”

››scanning fwd››

The ogrillo hesitates for one frozen second when I point the bladewand at his eye. I summon the surge of intention that will slice off the top of his head but all I get is a bluish static discharge and enough heat from the bladewand’s eggbutt to scorch my palm and shit how long does this fucking thing take to repower anyway-

He grunts and spreads a huge wicked grin and lunges, swinging, and I duck inside the dark whirr of his warhammer and spike that wicked grin of his with the business end of the bladewand.

Its mithondion wood is dense as steel and it punctures skin and rips muscle and splinters bone; it grates into the hinge of his jaw and sticks fast and rips from my fingers as he rears back, bellowing the nerve-numbing shock of the bone-shot. His hands go loose on his hammer’s haft, while mine find it below the head. A hard twist of the haft and a sidekick to his gut don’t move him at all but shove me away and leave me on my feet in front of him with his hammer in my hands. And the bastard turns and bolts like a startled cat.

With my bladewand still sticking out of his motherfucking face-

“Cocksucker!” I spring after him but something tears in my belly and ogrilloi can do forty at a sprint and I couldn’t catch him on a motorcycle. “Shitlicking cunthole come back and fight!”

I throw the warhammer as hard as I can. It spins along the street and slams him across the kidneys and he staggers, but he keeps his feet and never even looks back.

He vanishes into the hot dry midnight, and all I can do is cuss and snarl and look around for somebody else to kill.

I find only smoking corpses and the clitclat of toeclaws moving away into the darkness and Marade in her battered armor springing onto the back of one huge buck who’s not quite fast or smart enough to have bolted with the others. She’s lost her morningstar somewhere, but it doesn’t matter; with one hand sliding around his bull neck to grip her opposite rerebrace, her other hand finds the back of his crest ridge, and with Khryl’s Strength, she doesn’t have to settle for the strangle. One grunting flex practically pops his head off.

He’s dead before they hit the ground.

She lies across him, panting. By the time I get there, she’s rolled onto her back, still gasping shallowly, and it’s easy to see why: her breastplate’s a mess. Must be like trying to breathe inside an iron maiden. The kind with spikes. “Here, let me help-”

“No-no, I can-” she wheezes, pulling off her gauntlets. Blood bubbles from her smashed mouth. “Where-?”