Half-numb fingers grope for the point of the sheath. .
There. There. Yeah.
All right.
Better use my left. Might cut a tendon.
I get a grip on the sheath and squeeze. The razor edge of the thrower slices through the sheath’s stitching almost without effort and goes through the leather of my tunic even easier. A line of ice bites into my fingers, but the tendons seem okay: I can pinch the sheath and work the exposed edge against the bindings on my wrists and it’s too much movement but he’s jogging along oblivious beneath me and I bounce on his shoulder limp as a corpse and now my hands are free.
Slowly. Slowly. Fingers working down the back of my collar find the thrower’s hilt-
I draw the knife.
So.
This is it. My chance. My last chance.
Won’t even have to take my hands from behind my neck. Point against my jugular. One hard shove into my carotid. Unconsciousness in seconds. Death in a minute or two. Quick. Painless.
Over.
It’s worth doing. Shit-if any of them saw me with the bladewand-the Black Knife Kiss-
It’s worth doing. It is. Right now, right here, I can opt out of an infinite festival of hurt. And maybe I will. Maybe I-
Huh.
Nahhh.
I really am a stone batshit sonofabitch. I must be. Or just a plain fucking idiot. It’s not like I don’t know what they’re going to do to me. Of all human beings within a hundred miles, a thousand, I’m the one who
It’s like I
I want to go all the way down.
Whoo.
It’s a goddamn shame you only learn the really interesting shit about yourself when it’s too late to be useful.
But-
If that’s what I really want, if that’s what’s really driving me, I can just lie here over his shoulder. Hellbound Express. No lines, no waiting.
But, y’know-
There’s this knife in my hand.
And my ankles are tied, and I’m bagged in this net and bleeding and wounded and shaking weak, and I don’t even know how many of them are here and I’m probably going to start retching again any second, and I know already I’m gonna be sorry for this. Of all the fucking idiotic things I have done in my fucking idiotic life-
And somehow anyway, it still seems like a really good idea.
So gently, delicately, I slide the point of the knife through a gap in the net, just to one side of the bony knobs of vertebral ridge between his kidneys, and angle it in toward his spinal cord and hold it tight as I can with my left while I make a fist with my right.
And pound the knife into his spine.
The blade scrapes on bone, and he makes one thin grunt-more puzzled dizziness than pain-and the point skids off the bone into the disk and I pound the knife again and it shears through cartilage into his spinal cord and he huffs a muffled interrogatory snort when his legs stop working.
He slams to his knees, and my weight over his shoulder shifts his balance and he topples backward. Onto me.
Pinned, face smashed into his sweaty goat-smelling skin, his impossible weight crushing breath from my chest-
No hope in hell of shifting however many hundred pounds of twitching, writhing ogrillo who now begins to howl his uncomprehending distress-
On the whole, this could be going better.
But through the sudden shouting of other ogrilloi, there rings another voice, a human voice, and into one of those fractional pauses where everybody seems to be drawing breath at the same time slides a familiar
I really, really love that girl.
His weight vanishes. I open my eyes.
Marade has him up over her head one-handed like he’s just a half-stuffed scarecrow.
His talons gouge black furrows in her skin as he scrabbles at her arm, but her other hand is full of morningstar and the blades whistle and his brains splash around me in a bloody rain.
She tosses his corpse aside and looks down at me, and she’s not even wearing her armor anymore. Her surcoat and leggings are ripped and plastered flat with blood, and even through the muck of gore and sand that paints her face, I can see disappointment so bitter it blows out her knees and drops her to the stone beside me. “Oh,” she says. “Oh. It’s you.”
I should probably make some kind of snappy comeback, but my mouth isn’t working and neither are my lungs. Her face, the moon, the city, the universe itself contracts to a single point of light.
And winks out.
››scanning fwd››
I know I’m awake because no dream hurts this much.
A lifetime’s practice holds me still, keeps my eyes closed and my breathing steady. Moving feels like a bad idea anyway; just breathing ignites enough fire from my guts that I’d stop if I could. Under my head: rounded, firm but softly yielding, structural, warm as flesh-
It
Somebody with no pants on.
Um. Yow.
“I know you’re awake.”
Marade’s voice, just above a whisper. A hand strong and hot and smelling of vomit and old sweat cups my cheek. “Caine? Khryl’s Love can Heal your remaining wounds, but you must be silent, do you understand? You must control yourself; I cannot do it for you.”
I summon a hoarse whisper. “Control?”
“You were screaming.”
“Uh. This isn’t-” My voice scrapes into a cough that blooms scarlet from my ribs through the top of my head. “Oh, crap. That really hurts.”
It hurts so bad I can only laugh. Laughing hurts worse.
“Softly, Caine. I cannot guess how near they may be.”
They who? “I was just gonna say: this isn’t exactly how I pictured waking up across your thighs.”
The hand moves up to stroke my hair, and her voice is soft and sad. “Do you never stop?”
I open my eyes and see only the same Mandelbrot blooms of color that I’d seen with them closed. “Um, I can’t see. I can’t see a damn thing.”
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Blind? So much for my fucking career-
“It’s all right, Caine. It’s all right. It’s dark, that’s all.”
“What happened? What’s going-wait. I remember-”
The vertical city. Black Knives in the badlands. The ambush. . ogrilloi screaming as they burned. . the fight at the gate, the fight on the third tier. .Rababal.
Stalton.
Breathe-breathe-find Control. It’s only pain.
Yeah, shit, huh-only pain, yeah, sure, fucking right. Hard to meditate with splinters of rib scraping around your lung.
“What
