Caine Black Knife

Grunting, alien words, the creak of rope and greased wood and yes, and yes, it’s me, they are, yes.

Yes.

My scaffold of timber reclines, rotating slow as the wheel of stars that must be somewhere above, angling backward on its horizontal axle like an easy chair until my over strained diaphragm spasms out of muscle failure and gasps and wheezes and pumps my starving lungs again: this is the real reason I’m outlasting the son of that old- fashioned god.

Because they won’t let me die. Not yet.

Oxygen whispers away the shadows in my head.

I open my eyes.

My hand-that’s my hand, above on the weather-greyed arm of the Y-shaped cross. Looks like I’ve got a cramp: fingers twisted into talons of somebody else’s agony. I can see the cramp. I can’t feel it. My hands and feet are gone: blocks of wood. Lumps of stone. Maybe my pain center’s finally burned out.

Maybe the rusty spikes through my wrists and ankles severed the nerves.

The blood that wells around the spike is dark in the orange light of the bonfires. It gathers brighter rose as it trickles thick and cooling down crusted channels to my shoulder.

Not hanging from the spikes. Grill-size cross: wrist shackles beyond my fingertips. Not worth a custom job. Tied me on. Spikes’re just to keep me from slipping the rope.

The Y to which I am nailed eventually rotates far enough back to take some of the pressure off the spikes they drove between my Achilles tendon and ankle joint. Now my struggle is to hold up my head. To look upon our torturers. Their half-assed let’s-pretend sorcerors.

Bitches.

Would have guessed it would be bitches. Would have known. Even if I never seconded the Barand. Would have known.

Dad showed me that story-was it horsemen out of the far eastern steppes? was it nomads I cannot name in a desert I cannot name? — how they took as an article of faith that a man’s only proper role is war; that to inflict pain upon the helpless will ruin a warrior for battle. So when they had taken someone they despised so much that only infinite suffering could answer the ache in their blood-

They’d give him to the women.

Bitches dance around me in their gloss-black feathers and blood-brown paint and swinging swollen dugs, and they pinch me and pull my hair and talon-flick my balls and tease my shrinking flesh with any petty insult they can imagine. And when they get bored, they offer me spit and urine in a wooden ladle, and the thirst that consumes me is stronger than my disgust.

And that’s exactly the problem. Suffering is a luxury. I don’t hurt enough. Haven’t hurt enough.

Not yet.

Far below us, a vast field of bonfires paints the badlands with pools of sunset. Down among them Black Knives pursue their Black Knife lives: cooking and washing and eating and drinking, telling jokes and dancing, lying and singing and wrestling and fucking and doing whatever else ogrilloi do when nothing special is going on.

Very few even give us a glance.

Fuckers.

They were not real to me before. Even the ones I fought hand-to-hand. They were abstract. Impersonal. A natural disaster. A flood, a fire, an avalanche. Something to deal with.

Things are different, now.

Now I see them. I smell them.

I know them.

And if I can just hurt enough. .

But that’s the problem. Suffering is a luxury.

This is different from the Barand. A whole different world. He and his boys were taken far out in the Waste; they were used, and used up, on the spot. That was just a clutch of them, long-range raiders. This is a whole different world.

This is some kind of fucking Althing.

More than that.

They didn’t need us for this party. It’s BYOV. The screams and whimpers that are their favorite dinner music come mostly from other ogrilloi. Criminals. Cowards. Captives from other clans. Who gives a shit? The point-the sharp end of the fuckstick-

This wasn’t something staged just for us. This was what they came here for.

This. Not us. It was never about us. It was about being here.

Shit, y’know-?

Shit.

We might’ve got away after all.

Ahh, there it is. There. Now I’m starting to hurt.

Good. Good. I need to hurt. Because some things are starting to make sense to me.

Because this Althing of theirs is more than an Althing-it’s some kind of mass combined baptism- confirmation-bar-and-bat-mitzvah-rite-of-fucking-passage. The walled bowl against the perimeter, where we paddocked the horses. . see how crowded it is?

Those are cubs. Can you see them? Their children. Baby Black Knives. Hundreds of them. Some kind of creche: all in there together, from blood-wet infants to half-grown juvie bucks, walled away from the rest of the camp.

Kiddie prison. Or something.

And on the line of crosses below me, the ones hung with ogrilloi. . shit, there they go again: another handful of juvenile bitches-they look about the same age as the ones who have been looking after the cubs in the kiddie prison-come trailing out behind that big fat cunt in the glossy headdress like a mane of crow feathers, the one who acts like she owns the fucking planet. They spread themselves out obediently, turn their backs and bend over to present like baboons in heat, and Crowmane goes up to the crucified prisoners one at a time to jab her blood- crusted thumb-talon up their butts. .

Yeah. Here’s one for you science geeks out there: ogrillo males carry their prostates the same place humans do.

And as she manually collects each one, she lifts each handful to the night and howls something in the local babble before she jams it up the snatch of the next juvenile bitch, which is the exact point in the process of Black Knife ritual-exogamy-by-manual-insemination where this whole deal jumps the sword from revolting to downright fascinating.

How fascinating? It’s holding my attention, and I’m dying on a fucking cross.

Funny thing is, you probably can’t see it. Not even with my eyes.

If I’d stayed in Battle Magick, I could show it to you: I’d have learned to turn visualization into vision, imagination into hallucination. But if I’d stayed in Battle Magick, I wouldn’t understand what it means.

That’s the thing, here. I know what it means. That’s my edge. The difference between me and Mick Barand.

A Monastic education.

This is what you can’t see with my eyes:

Crowmane raises her fistful of goblin jizz and hacks out her hairball invocation, and around her hand-around her head, her mane of glossy feathers, around her rows of nipples dangling like boneless thumbs, around her mounded rolls of asscheek-there gathers a significance, a realness, a vivid lucid-dream intensity that makes everything else in the screaming bloody night fade like it’s barely even here.

I mean everything.

The crucified ogrilloi. The juvie bitches. The Black Knife camp, and the shackled rows of captives waiting their turns. Even Kess, who’s still twitching and struggling where he hangs from meathooks through his jaw while ants and nightflies chew the coils of his guts that trail in the dirt around the scrabbling balls of his feet. .

Even me. Even the new pain I’ve found.