Caine Black Knife

here is vermillion dust. This light’s yellow as a lamp and it’s coming from-

It’s coming from-

Hot staggering fuck. Pretornio’s on fire.

A crown of flames fans the night from her skull, lightning-blue where it springs from naked bone, rising to a sunflower spray, and across the badland camp Black Knives turn and stand and stare, and the world goes quiet except for the night wind’s whisper and the harsh spit of flame. Flesh has burned off her spine, and the exposed bone spits a column of blue blaze up to join her crown, bright as an arc-welder. Bright as a star.

Shit, she’s in overload.

And she’s still chanting. .

Guess Dal’kannith’s coming through for her after all. With something Old fucking Testament.

The bitches have forgotten about me now. They’ve forgotten about each other. They line the retaining wall, staring down in brain-dead stupefaction at their homemade fusion torchsicle.

Crowmane recovers first. She roars something into the camp, where awed Black Knives have stopped eating and fucking and gambling and everything else to stand and stare with stupid looks scorching into their warthog faces. Crowmane roars again, and a couple of bucks grab a water barrel and run at Pretornio. This tickle in my guts might be the pre-echo of an oncoming laugh. They’re gonna be sorry.

The bucks skid to a stop at the base of the impale-o-matic and heave the barrel. A gout of water splashes up onto her and power explodes through it like a fuel-air bomb. The shockwave blasts cook fires into showers of burning shit and shreds tents and sends ogrilloi tumbling. What’s left of the two bucks looks like Daffy Duck after the dynamite goes off in his beak.

And Pretornio chants on.

Another roar from Crowmane. Bucks scramble to string their bows, and four-foot arrows as big around as my thumb zip out of the night and smack into her unresisting flesh with a stutter of flat whaps like bored applause.

Every one of them bursts aflame: instant torches fed with her melting body fat. And I finally manage that laugh.

The laugh shakes me. It rocks me. It rips barb-wire chunks off my ass-boned-to-Neverland diaphragm. I don’t mind.

It always did hurt.

“Hey. .” Dead crows wheeze better than that, if they’re fresh enough. Nobody even looks around. “Hey. . dumb cunts. .”

Gahh. Throat’s worse’n my gut.

Fuck it anyway.

I suck a fold of lip between my teeth and bite down and thick salt-black metal syrup slides down into my throat before I give myself time to think about drowning in my own blood.

“Hey, you stupid goddamn cows-”

Dugsacks turns and gives me the fisheye. I gasp strength back into my lungs. “Tell your head shit-suck over there that you have maybe two minutes. Maybe three. Then it’s fucking over for you.”

Next to Crowmane at the retaining wall, Cornholes snarls something savage over her shoulder at Dugsacks, who snarls something back and Cornholes raises a fist that’d stun a buffalo but Crowmane’s all over them again and one of her hands has gathered unto itself all the reality there is to be had here on the parapet, and I simply and purely dream-certain know that if they get seriously into it right now, she’ll make them seriously dead before either of them can seriously blink.

They know it too. Cornholes shuts the hell up. Dugsacks mutters something, and Crowmane barks at her. Dugsacks flinches, and says whatever it was again, louder.

Now Crowmane looks at me. The hyper-real shimmer around her hand swells toward my face, and when she growls something that sounds like nerroll pagganik torrin nezz, paggtakkuni, the eldritch dream-knowing tells me that she means What do you whimper, little rabbit?

I lift my head enough to give her a look at my teeth. “I know what she’s doing. I can tell you about it. Maybe in time.”

She swivels her swinging tits toward me and gives me a toss of the crowfeather headdress. Nershrannik pagannol. Pelshragikk laggan?

Why do you tell me? Why do I listen?

“Because I want off this fucking cross.” More panting brings enough strength to go on. “Because you know it.”

One pace closer. The other bitches cluster instinctively at her shoulders. Those yellow eyes never flicker. Pagallo nezziokk. Burshraggikko ymik treyy, paggtakkuni. Ymik.

Talk now. Later I take you down, little rabbit. Later.

“I got your little rabbit for you right here, you stupid fucking cunt. You want to play games? Fine. I’ll die up here. Laughing.” I cough a wad of blood out of my throat and manage a spit that sprays it across her face. “Because I get to watch you die down there.”

She doesn’t flinch at my blood. She doesn’t even blink. The flarelight from Pretornio’s overload has gone stark white, crowning Crowmane with a halo of starfire. Pagallo nezziokk.

Talk now.

Out of the west come the low skirling whispers of storm winds spinning up over gravel-scoured badlands, rising into the hush where I can still hear the hiss and snap of the lightning-blue corona of flame and the high, thin sound of Pretornio’s voice, still chanting, still screaming her invocation to her god while His power burns away her breasts and her fingers and her cheeks and eyebrows and her scream loses words and spirals upon itself into the simple shriek of superheated gases that opens into an end-of-the-world thunderclap.

A whipcrack shock blasts out and over us and the camp and the vertical city and the badlands. Every bonfire and torch and hurricane lamp and even fucking candle flares into instant firestorms that claw for the stars-

And go out.

Darkness. Only a sliver of moon, and embers swirling toward the sky.

And near-to-silence, while night-blind Black Knives pick themselves up and try to discover just how badly hurt they all might be.

Shapes moving in the ink pool below my cross: Crowmane and her bitches. One of them murmurs, and a parapet stone casts sickly green light enough to let them find their feet.

Out in the camp, all that’s left of Pretornio is a smoldering ember on the end of half the impale-o-matic.

Three feet of vertical cigar.

Crowmane’s a little singed, but by the time she’s on her feet she’s pulled herself together and is already shouting orders down into the camp, getting torches relit, bonfires rekindled, burns tended.

To the west, the storm winds whisper themselves up to moans.

And I just hang here. And watch.

I watch Crowmane and Dugsacks and Cornholes and Thumbnipples and Turdcrotch and all the rest of them look around and check themselves out and chuckle at each other and convince themselves that they were never really scared in the first place. That the stupid Lipkan bitch-on-a-stick just didn’t have the juice, when the balls hit the butthole. I watch them get their party going again with an extra kicker because they had a little thrill but it’s all over now.

I watch Crowmane giving her orders, wielding her handful of Reality, striding back and forth on the parapet doing her Cinerama Tits-to-the-Wind Napoleon thing without even turning me one more glance.

I only watch. I don’t say a word.

Because I was just, y’know, making that shit up. About knowing what Pretornio was doing. It was just a story to get me off this cross long enough to get my teeth into Crowmane’s throat. That’s all it was. But that’s not all it is.

Here’s a nifty thing about my Monastic education-

It tells me, for one thing, that we have time right now for a history lesson, if I make it quick.

The Monasteries were founded by Jantho of Tyrnall at the end of what people here call the Deomachy-the