Caine Black Knife

We lie in each other’s arms, tremulous and gasping.

After a time I pull out of her, and she gives a little moan, brief, fading, and she clutches me against her, and I hold her twice as hard.

So we’re the ones going out with a bang.

Yeah. Still not funny.

I give her a final kiss, one last lingering meeting of intimate flesh, trying to say with my lips and my arms what I don’t think I can say with my voice: that this wasn’t a mistake. That it wasn’t hormones and extremity. That we weren’t just fucking.

At least, I don’t think we were.

And sometime later we part, and begin to search out the tatters of our clothing.

Oddly shy now. .

I should say something.

I should say-“Marade. . Marade, I-”

“Don’t.”

“But-”

“Just don’t.”

So I don’t.

It’s a long dark silence.

My hand falls on my knife by instinct. A heavy metal-on-stone scrape tells me she’s found her morningstar.

I come to my feet in the black. “Must be getting light.”

Faint rustlings of cloth as she stands beside me. “Yes.”

“Are you ready for this?”

“Yes, Caine. Finally, yes.” Her voice is strong now. Solid and sure. “I am.”

“Then let’s go.”

Shoulder to shoulder, we walk from blind dark into rose-steel dawn.

They’re waiting for us outside.

EYES OF GOD

I must say, Freeman Shade, I am, ha-ha, hrm, favorably impressed by your piety-”

Ule-Tourann, the Family Bishop of Purthin’s Ford, moved up one of the sanctum’s ramped aisles in a loose- jointed shamble. From under the Bishop’s biretta straggled curls of oiled hair the same color as the grease spot on his surplice. He moved like a man who’d heard of exercise but had never actually seen it done. And he yapped. Ruthlessly. Yap yap yap yap: a stupefyingly endless river of content-free noise.

“. . if only more Beloved Children would make Atonement their first order of business when they arrive in a new city. If only. Though the final boat came in, er, well, I would suppose-that is to say, usually the last of the steamers arrives no later than the end of fourth watch-”

“I got held up in customs.”

“Ah.” He blinked and nodded like he actually understood. “Well then, it’s as it may be, eh? If it is Willed, it Shall be So. Ma’elKoth is Supreme, yes?”

“So they tell me.”

The sanctum resembled that of the Cathedral of the Assumption in Ankhana: a bowl of benches surrounding a walled expanse of floor, like stadium seating around an arena. But here the sanctum was floored with rose-veined marble, and lovely runners of scarlet and gold led from each radial aisle to the broad altar in the center. Astride the altar stood a colossal bronze nude of God Himself, resembling the one that stood in the Great Hall of the Colhari Palace-double-sided, so that the face of Ma’elKoth looked out before and behind, and bearing stylized representations of both male and female genitals-though where the original stood with arms akimbo, this Ma’elKoth had arms outstretched above, forming pillars that supported a domed ceiling of colored glass. All the dazzling blues of a clear noonday sky at its apex, the dome shaded into cloud-swirls of sunset reds and golds near its base.

The Bishop continued to chatter in an amiably mindless way as we threaded among the acolytes and underpriests who roamed the sanctum brushing carpets, polishing the altar, clambering up and down the cunning collapsible scaffold that let them burnish the bronze Ma’elKoth. The current of his yap-river carried us beyond the sanctum, through the administrative wing, and all the way to his office.

The Bishop installed himself in an immense cowhide swivel chair that he spun away from a writing hutch the size of a meat locker. He added some wrist-size logs to the grate and waved them alight, then gestured toward a horseshoe chair upholstered in knobby green brocade. “Please, Freeman Shade, be comfortable, ha-ha-hrm, yes. Before we proceed to the, er, the Atonement cells, there was that small matter. . ? That is, I was informed that you, ha-ha, wish to make an offering, yes?”

I barely heard him. The shutters were open. I drifted across the room to stand at the window, and I looked up into Hell.

Watchfires on the battlements cast orange smears up the sides of the Spire, pocked with yellow crosses where lamplight shone through arbalestinas. The light on the face of Hell was redder, just enough to make out ghosts of structure; cookfires and lamps and window-leaked hearth glow scattered sparks across its face. There, off to the right, just above the third bridge-hung now with age-greyed blankets and stained tunics, a sloppy-fat ogrillo bitch dozing beside a fire can on the ledge, while a couple pups sat naked, giving each other the occasional listless punch on the arm, near a gap where the retaining wall had collapsed-that was it.

That was the parapet. Right there. Where I had stood with the partners half my life ago, watching Black Knives run the badlands. Now it was ogrilloi in the vertical city and humanity below. I wondered if any of them had looked out over the river today. If any of them had watched the riverboat.

If any of them had seen me coming.

“Erm, ha-ha, Freeman Shade-? There was, erm, an amount discussed, yes? A hundred-?”

Hell above me. Hell behind and Hell ahead.

I turned aside from the window. “The vessel with the pestle,” I said in English, heavily, because this was Ma’elKoth’s sense of fucking humor and frankly it was just goddamn embarrassing, “has the brew that is true.”

The bishop’s face went blank and slack, shapeless as a mask carved in pudding.

I snapped my fingers. Bone structure developed within the bishop’s cheeks like a telescopic image being twisted into focus; his jaw firmed, and keen purpose drove the genial glaze from his eyes. He sat forward in the swivel chair and pushed his face sideways with one hand until a string of audible joint pops shot down his spine.

“Knowing how to do that buys you ten seconds to explain why I shouldn’t have you killed.”

I said, “You know me.”

A wave of clarity passed over the bishop’s face.

“Lord Caine.” He rose and extended a hand. “You’re expected. I have your equipment right here.”

I took the offered hand. “Caine.”

“Pardon?”

“Just Caine. Freeman Caine, if you want. I’m not Lord anything. Better you just call me Dominic Shade.”

The bishop shrugged. “I’d be honored if you’d call me Tourann.”

He dug a ring of keys out of his robe and unlocked one of the cupboards on his writing hutch, then muttered briefly under his breath and made a series of circular gestures with his left hand while with his right he reached in farther than the hutch was deep, and began briskly pulling out more objects than could have fit within it. “Sorry I can’t show you the rest of the station. Security. You understand.”

“Yeah, whatever. Are you the secondary or the primary?”

His eyebrows lifted. “You mean: Which came first, the bishop or the spy?”