Caine Black Knife

We don’t count right now.

Right now, we’re only details. We don’t matter. All that matters is that Crowmane’s fistful of jizz is gonna grow up to be a Black Knife superhero. Fast. Strong. Physically flawless. Completely without fear. The perfect warrior.

How do I know? I know the way you know things in your dreams. I just know. That’s the real that makes the rest of us into a dream. That’s what she’s paying for with our pain.

It’s exactly like a dream. Because it is a dream. But it’s not my dream.

That’s why I need to suffer. I need to get the attention of the dreamer.

And I can. That’s the kicker. That’s the punchline. That’s what’d make me laugh if I could laugh. That’s why suffering is a luxury.

Because their demon isn’t Bound. Not by them, anyway.

Now, like an answer to my silent prayer, they bring out the next two.

It’s Marade and Tizarre.

Streaked and stained with filth and blood. They both are gagged with thick mouth-jamming knots of rope. Tizarre’s lips are smashed and her eyes swollen near to shut with bruise. Marade’s golden skin is flawless beneath the crust of clot and muck, for Khryl still loves her. She must have fought them even here, even after she awoke within their camp: she is shackled with chains that could bind a dragon, where Tizarre is tied only with rope, cruelly tight; her hands are as swollen as her eyes and shading toward the same necrotic black.

The bitches kick their knees from under them and cast them to the stone before me.

I have figured out what it is. Why they have put me where I am. Why they make me do what they make me do. Did I tell you? Did I say it inside my throat, or only in my mind? I can’t remember.

It’s because I showed brave the way a grill stud might show brave. Because I went out against them alone. Because even now they cannot make me beg for death.

It is possible they intend this as an honor.

So I will be the last. I will watch the others. Their infinite pain. Their unimaginably ugly deaths. I could close my eyes, but I won’t.

I will not.

To be their witness is the only penance I can offer.

This is how I pay for making myself the star of the Caine Show.

And now it’s time to choose.

The final refinement, one that some remotely clinical part of my mind can even appreciate: the bitches remove their gags. So I have to hear them beg.

And because it’s them, because it’s Marade and Tizarre, because they are both heroes in a way I can barely imagine, each of them begs me to choose her, to spare her partner.

To let her partner live one more day. One more hour.

Their begging turns to shouts as they try to drown each other’s voice. Their shouts become desperate screams and finally wordless siren wails.

And I will make the choice.

It is what I do, now.

I will send one of them to a deeper circle of Hell, and the screaming of the chosen and the curses of the spared will rain as fire upon my head.

Should be grateful. Isn’t this what I wanted? Isn’t this what I asked for? Swallowed by dark. Blind beyond the memory of day.

All the way down.

And-

I am grateful. This is what I wanted. This is what I asked for. Didn’t know it was possible to hurt this much.

For this I thank You.

Make of this suffering a sacrament: a covenant between us.

Do this one thing, and there will be agony beyond Your imagination. Only grant my one small desire, and I promise You a universe of pain.

Just get me off this cross.

That’s all. Get me down from here. So I can hurt them.

Get me down from here, and I will be Yours forever. We’ll make our own Caine Show. Together.

A universe of pain. Everlasting. Forever and amen.

Just get me down from here.

PART TWO PRINCE OF LIES

I sat on that bench outside the Cathedral for a long time.

I sat while night took the city. I sat while Khryllian lamplighters tromped by, kindling the hurricane lanterns that hung from tall wrought-iron hook-poles to mark each street corner: faint candles in the vast Boedecken dark. I sat while the night clogged up with rain again and barely visible people hurried past me with lowered heads and shoulders hunched against the chill, carrying shuttered lanterns that leaked strips of flickering yellow light. I sat long enough that my ass either warmed the bench’s polished stone or went dead numb.

Finally I got up. “Fuck this for a joke; I’m freezing my balls off. I’m leaving.”

Don’t. I feel safer here.

I spun and the Automag found my hand.

Around me: rain and empty darkened streets, featureless looming bulk of the Cathedral and the face of Hell. I was entirely alone.

No surprise: that whisper had been a Whisper. Not an actual voice at all, but a minor TK variant directly manipulating my eardrums. Makes the slithery breathy nondescript almost-voice sound like it’s coming from everywhere at once.

I safetied the Automag and put it away. “Come on out. If I meant you harm, I would’ve come looking.”

You have been known to change your mind.

I didn’t deny it. “At least tell me which direction I should face.”

It matters not. I’m well out of range of your pistol, and I can hear what you say no matter where you say it.

“Yeah?” I settled back onto the bench. It had been my ass going numb after all; the stone was cold as a bitch. “How long have you been watching?”

Since you walked out of the Cathedral. Straight to the Eyes post; you’re so predictable.

“Sure.” Doing my dark-adaption trick, I scanned the sightlines of ghostly windows in buildings around the little plaza, checking for ones that overlooked both my bench and the Cathedral steps. There were only two: one on the face of a third-floor gable, and the other a picture window at the front of a one-story shop. “And it tickles the fuck out of you to sit up there in your little garret room and watch me shiver.”

Caine, please. You insult me. Nor am I in the bootmaker’s. Unlike you, I’m not that easy to locate.

“Whatever.” It wasn’t worth pushing. “All right, I’m listening.”

You were the one who wanted to see me.

“That’d be nice.”

Oh, ha. You see? I pretend to appreciate your wit. You pretend not to hate me. Can we do