Caine Black Knife

“I intend to.”

To hell with the shower. I peeled off the robe and let it drop, then picked up my pants. “Is that what this is about? You want me to tell you all’s fair because you think you’re at war? Fuck you, shitheel.”

“Like that, is it?”

“And it always will be.” I shook out my pants. “I’m not much for forgiveness.”

“Has any been requested?”

“Not by you.” I lowered the pants to the floor. “You’re walking pretty good for somebody who had about two fingers’ worth of thighbone shot off.”

Tyrkilld looked down. His right hand made a fist. On its back was a disk of new scar, big around as a gold Ankhanan royal.

After a moment, he said softly, “The armsman-”

“Braehew. Yeah, I heard.”

Tyrkilld nodded distantly. “When a Soldier gives himself to Khryl, there are ways in which he might. . continue to serve.”

I stared, my pants forgotten. “What, a bone graft? You’re walking on a piece of that poor bastard’s leg?”

“I am. My hand shares several of his bones, as well-as does your side.”

I pressed my bright-pink palm to the quadrangle of new scars over my liver. “No fucking way.”

“Your ribs were shattered. Did no one tell you this?”

“No.” I felt suddenly ill. More ill. “Nobody bothered to explain.”

“I will be calling upon his widow and orphaned daughters later tonight. Perhaps you’d be gracious enough to accompany me.”

I shook my head in blank astonishment. “Every one of you bastards is completely bugnuts. Every single one.”

“He fell in honorable battle-”

“My ass.”

“-in service to the Lord of Valor. It is my duty to offer whatever consolation his widow may require.”

“Whatever consolation?” I shook my head again. “I don’t want to know.”

Tyrkilld’s voice was hoarse. And bleak. “Braehew died without sons.”

“Didn’t I just say I don’t want to know?” I waved him off like somebody else’s fart. “The more I find out about Khryllians, the less I like any of you.”

Tyrkilld spoke from under his lowered brows. His face could not be seen. “House Aeddharr has been the flower of Jheledi knighthood since before the grand Lipkan Empire was even a ring of dog’s piss. Since before Our Lord of Valor was more than a simpleminded goatherd with a gift for the sling. I have some knowledge of the obligations of nobility. Which knowledge a person of generous nature might forgive me for suspecting you lack.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Tyrkilld turned a sidelong eye upon me. “If it’s no forward remark from one who was lately engaged in damaging your health, you seem well.”

“I’m all right.”

“Which is a point of curiosity to me, as Khryl’s Healing extends only to hurts taken upon the field of battle.”

“So?”

“So it is a curious happenstance that the hurts Khryl’s Hand delivered unto your person through mine own seem Healed as well. Seeing as how they were delivered before the fighting began.”

I shrugged as I finally stepped into my pants. “There’s fighting and there’s fighting.”

“Ah?”

I pulled my pants up. “That fight started when your poor bastard Braehew pointed his shotgun at my balls.”

“Oh, did it now?” Tyrkilld frowned thoughtfully. “I would not have regarded it so.”

“That’s why you lost.”

“We lost,” Tyrkilld said, drawing himself up with an impressive display of dignity for a naked man, “because such was the Judgment of Our Lord of Valor.”

“Ever occur to you,” I said as I fastened the row of buttons up the side of the pants, “that maybe you just got beat?”

“Hnhn?”

“Don’t you wonder? Maybe I just kicked your ass. Maybe I got lucky.”

Tyrkilld’s eyes went dreamy and his voice gentled. “Might this be, to my unworthy ear, the music of a confession?”

I snorted. “It’s just that your Utterance of Valor shit is kind of, well. .”

“Primitive? Unreliable? Childish? Stupid?” Tyrkilld shrugged a couple yards of hairy shoulders. “Only to Incommunicants. To distinguish between simple defeat and the Judgment of God is not difficult in most cases, and in this one it’s clear as Trahammeth’s Glass. At the critical moment, Khryl withdrew from me His Love.”

“Oh, I get it.” I favored him with a bland smile. “You’re saying Khryl Himself affirmed what I said about your father.”

Muscle rippled along his wide jaw. “That’s not what we were fighting about.”

“The hell it wasn’t.”

Streaks of flush like claw marks surfaced across his chest, and the skin over the knuckles on those oak-knot hands went white. “You. . are a very, very bad man.”

“Do you know that when you get really angry, even your nuts blush?”

Tyrkilld spun and stomped toward the pool hard enough to shake the stone floor-but he stopped at the edge. “What you said. . about your father. .”

The view wasn’t any better from behind. “What about him?”

“You made him sound a fine man-a man of great courage and conviction,” Tyrkilld said quietly. “A far better man than your vile self.”

“Maybe we have that in common.”

“Possibly we do. May I express my regret that I can never make his acquaintance?”

“Don’t.” I picked up my tunic. It was inside out. “He would’ve spit in your fucking face.”

When I looked up, Tyrkilld had turned away and was silently wading into the blood-tainted water, and somehow, unaccountably, I felt like an asshole. More of an asshole.

“Don’t take it too hard.” I tried to swallow it, but the truth came up my throat like vomit. “He’d spit in my face, too.”

Tyrkilld stopped. “We are at war.”

“Sure you are.”

“You can have no faint idea-”

“You think you’re at war.”

“And what, if you’ll again indulge the curiosity of a poor ignorant parish Knight, is that intended to mean?”

“When you go upstairs to see Khryl,” I said, “stand there with your bloody cock and balls in hand and pray to Him that you never find out.”

Tyrkilld shook his head grimly. “There is not a gracious bone among your double hundred, is there? Not a one.”

“I had a gracious bone once. Some Khryllian ass-bandit beat it to paste.”

He was silent for a moment, staring into the slow thick ripple of the bloody water around his thighs.

“What you said this afternoon-about men like me ruling the world. .” Tyrkilld looked over one shoulder. “Men don’t rule the world, you might know. We scarcely rule the Battleground.”

“I wasn’t talking about this world.” I got my tunic straightened out and began to shrug my way into it, and so it was from the inside of my tunic, half-muffled and blindfolded, that I heard Tyrkilld’s reply.

“That I know well enough.”