Caine Black Knife

The river of bells flash-froze in midair.

When she finally spoke, her Whisper was very soft, and very slow, and very, very flat, soothing, the way a cautious trainer might speak to an escaped bear. A big, hungry, angry bear.

Let’s say I agree. Let’s say I change my plans, shift my resources, and take the risk. What do I get?

I stood up. “Exactly what you asked for.”

The discreetly fist-shaped brass knocker on the reinforced door produced no results, but a knuckle-size rock against the shutter of the lone lamplit window on the second floor produced a voice that was clearly female though in no way recognizably feminine. “Don’t do that again. You won’t like it if I have to come down.”

“You’ll like it even less if I have to come up.”

The shutter swung open. The silhouette of a squarish head on squarish shoulders appeared just long enough to deliver a nod and a hand-wave toward a black shoulder-breadth archway three steps down from street level. “I’ve been expecting you. Use the kitchen door.”

The sunken walkway led between the townhouses to the garden alley behind. The garden gate was reinforced as well, but I heard the clack-chank of a heavy bolt being drawn. The gate swung open.

Nobody there. Nobody visible, anyway.

A head-high panel in the kitchen door stood open, spilling pale lamplight into the back garden’s clutter: random weeds dying among rocks, from pea gravel to fragments of boulders the size of chairs. I picked my way through the gloom, nodding thoughtfully at the unavoidable crunch of my footsteps.

The kitchen door swung open. I said to the squarish silhouette, “I thought you quit.”

“I resigned my Exoteric post, for which I was cast forth in disgrace into the outer darkness. Disgrace, as you well know, is often useful to the Esoteric Service.” The silhouette retreated from the doorway. “Come in. I have a chair for you by the stove.”

The kitchen was modest, barely large enough to fit the small coal-fired stove, iron washbasin, and tiny breakfast table with its two leather-upholstered chairs. Another chair, of plain wood, stood near the stove, and it was to this one that she pointed her thick straight cane.

“Sit there until you dry. My front room holds a variety of valuable documents, and I will not have them damaged. Take off your boots if you like.”

Instead I stood just inside the doorway. “I’m surprised the Esoterics took you.”

“Took me?” T’Passe of Narnen Hill, one-time vice-Ambassador to the Infinite Court, lately the self-appointed apostle of the gospel of Cainism and queen of that permanent hornet’s nest in my buttcrack, leaned heavily on her cane for the step or two it took her to reach the table. “It was not a matter of taking me. It was a matter of getting the best use from me.”

“You were always-?”

She pointed at a lamp. Its wick flared to life. “Chief of post for Ankhana. Oh, yes-Toa-Sytell’s men chose well when they arrested me.”

I nodded, frowning, remembering. “I guess. . you never were afraid. Not even in the Pit. Facing down Serpents. Facing down Orbek.”

She shrugged. “Neither were you.”

“That’s different. I was looking to die.”

“Die in the manner of your own choosing. I, conversely, sought to live. . in the manner of my own choosing. The results were identical because the fact of choice was identical; the commitment to absolute freedom. As we Cainists say: My Will, or I Won’t.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, don’t start, huh?”

She chuckled and waved another lamp alight. “Our Abbey schools do a terrible thing when they teach us to think, eh?”

Her hair had been shaved to a salted stubble over the rumple of scar that swept up and back from her cheekbone across the ruin of her right ear. She lowered herself into the breakfast chair with care that bespoke chronic pain, and sat with her right leg extended while she stripped a sheet of bleached paper from a stack on the table in front of her, then found a pen, an inkwell, and a small sand shaker.

I said, “You’ve looked better.”

She grunted. “You, of course, haven’t. Sit.”

I shook my head, shrugged, and did as I was told. “That all from Assumption Day?”

She gave me a sidelong look. “And I am so grateful for your concern-though one might be forgiven for wondering, given such concern, why you did not, say, visit me in the embassy’s infirmary.”

“I did. Before you woke up. You’re a lot easier to take when I don’t have to listen to you yap.”

“We have that in common, then.” She dipped the pen and began scratching on the paper. Her head down, not looking at me, she said softly, “The hip is Assumption Day. The ear. . my most recently previous assignment was. . difficult. Not everything is about you, my friend.”

I made a face. “Since when are we friends?”

“My last assignment was likely the reason Ambassador Raithe was amenable to my request to be transferred here: in the expectation that it would be a quiet posting, where I might recuperate in peace.”

“You can give that shit up right now.”

“I never held that illusion.” Her doughy face came up. I had forgotten how bright and hard her eyes could be. “I knew exactly what I was getting into.”

“You’re a genius.”

“What I am,” she said, “is the world’s leading authority on you.”

I scowled at her. “You said you’ve been expecting me.”

“Yes. Ever since I arrived. What name are you using?”

“Huh?”

“You had been going by Jonathan Fist, yes?” She shuffled through the pages in front of her, frowning, squinting at the rows of close-crabbed writing on them. “At least, that is the name I have for you when you went south, when you instigated that border war along with Orbek and the horse-witch-”

“We didn’t instigate anything, we-and how do you know that?”

“The name. Some reference to an Artan legend, isn’t it?”

I shrugged. “He made a deal he couldn’t get out of.”

“Ah.” She tapped the pen to the end of her nose, smiling. “I should very much like to meet the horse-witch. Did you bring her with you?”

“Will you stop?”

“No, of course you wouldn’t-primitive masculine-warrior complex-you’d never willingly bring her into danger. You rarely even fight women, let alone kill them-it’s clear you’ve always found it distasteful at best, if not outright intolerable. . unless they’re a different species, of course, which doesn’t exactly count, does it? In fact, I believe of all your murders, women account for only-”

“I might add one more if you don’t shut up a minute.”

She turned a raised eyebrow toward me. “Oh, please. Now: What name are you using?”

“I am very tired,” I said. “I am dripping fucking wet and the last meal I managed to eat got spewed all over a cell floor while a Khryllian Knight played handball with my head. You’ve got a serious problem in this town. All I want to do is dump it on you so I can go get a hot meal and some goddamn sleep, all right?”

“And I am very interested in what you have to say. But we will do this in an organized fashion, or we will not do it at all. The name?”

I sighed. “Dominic Shade.”

“Ah.” She held the pen folded between her hands, but I could glimpse movement on the tabletop: letters scratching themselves into view upon the paper. “Both names by which you have been actually known-during your novitiate and in Kirisch-Nar. You don’t think that’s a risk?”

I shrugged. “It seemed like less of a risk than lying to Knights of Khryl, magick or not.”

“And you are using magickal nonrecognition?”

“A variant on the Eternal Forgetting.”

“That was the magick devised by Konnos the Artificer, yes? Used by your late wife in her Simon Jester