Caine Black Knife

.

This isn’t happening.

This isn’t happening. .

But no denial can keep the stars in the sky.

No denial can stop the freefall sideways-inside-out

yank

that puts a ceiling of acoustic tile and recessed fluorescent tubing over my staring eyes-

— that replaces the rubble under my back with a Winston Transfer platform-

— and the crumbling millennial walls of the abandoned city with the white latex gloves and surgical masks and blue antimicrobial cap-and-gowns of Studio EMTs-

— who heave me onto a crash cart in a bone-wrenching hurricane of stat this and amp of epi and no narco, no narco, adrenocorts only and thunder me out into some corridor of anonymously sterile tile, and there’s only one guy among them with a real face, and I reach over to him and grab his arm with my right hand.

“Am I-is this for real-? I’ve been having this dream-on the cross, I don’t know how many times-this dream where you pull me-”

The guy with the face-a mid-thirtyish flabby pale kind of guy, with colorless eyes and too-fleshy lips, already losing his hair-can barely keep up with the EMTs pushing my crash cart while he stares down at the bloody spike through my wrist with a creepy revolted fascination, like it sickens him and gives him a hard-on at the same time. “Oh, oh, no, Entertainer Michaelson,” he says, “oh, this is entirely, ah, for real, I assure you. Really.”

“I’m home. .?” The new tears that find the crusted trails down my cheeks are hot enough to burn me. “You brought me, brought me home. .”

“I’ve been in touch with your, er, Patron, that is, mm, Businessman Vilo,” he says, jogging alongside the cart, already going breathless. “He underwrote your emergency transfer, and he has, mmm, authorized me to, ah, renegotiate your contract-once you’ve been stabilized, of course. .”

“I don’t care,” I tell him, “I don’t care. Just. . thank you, that’s all. . thank you. Oh, god. Oh, god, thank you. I don’t even know your name. .”

“Oh, I am. . ah.” He surrenders trying to keep up and stops with a little wave.

“Kollberg,” he calls after me. “Administrator Arturo Kollberg, Entertainer. Get yourself patched up. We have a, ah, great deal to talk about. .”

He waves again. “A great deal.”

PRATT AND REDHORN

The Pratt and Redhorn was a small but well-appointed hostelry of three floors and maybe twenty-odd rooms that occupied a lively corner of the River-dock parish not far from the vigilry. I paid off the cartboy and tracked rain through the foyer.

A sign on the table in the tiny lobby advised me in three languages to ring the bell for service, so I did. Tobacco and meat smoke and considerable noise-voices raised in drunken song, accompanied by the planking of tuneless metallic percussion-billowed through a half-doored archway, which was blocked by a sign that advised, with apologies in the same three languages, that the dining hall was reserved for a private function. My sigh was more than half growl when I rang the bell again, louder.

I was in no mood. For anything.

I don’t know what reaction I’d been expecting out of t’Passe. It sure as hell wasn’t a gleam in her hard bright eyes and a nod and a brisk I’ve been wondering how it might turn out.

I didn’t make a hassle over it at first; after all, she’d been still unconscious in the Monastic Embassy infirmary on the day I’d driven Kosall into the stone at the upstream tip of Old Town and let Ma’elKoth’s flame flow through my hands to destroy that fucking blade forever. But when I reminded the World’s Greatest Living Expert On Me of this detail of trivia, she just shrugged. “Destroyed? Not while you live, I suspect.”

She was making my stomach hurt. “You better explain what you mean by that.”

“It is so intimately linked with your legend that the two of you are inextricable. Think: this is the blade that killed you, Caine, on Assumption Day, and thus plowed the field for your rebirth into-”

“Except I wasn’t exactly dead.”

She shrugged again. “Seven years in what our hosts name the True Hell? Argue semantics if you like. This is also the weapon that slaughtered the goddess Pallas Ril-”

“Except she’s not exactly dead either.”

“We speak of legend. Of what is known. It is known that you used this same blade to bring her back from beyond even Hell, and on the Day of the True Assumption you-again with the sword-unbound the Ascendant Ma’elKoth to make Him Master of Home. Kosall and you are virtually one and the same. Even its name-I’ve done a bit of research on that-”

“Of course you have.”

“Do you want to hear it?”

“Would it matter if I don’t?”

“ ‘Kosall,’ ” she’d said with a slightly malicious smile, “turns out to be a Westerlicized corruption of the Lipkan Kh’Hohtsanjanell, which means, in their usual straightforward fashion, Blade That Cuts Everything.”

I’m not ashamed to say that I actually flinched. “Deliann-Deliann once called me that-”

“I know.” The malice in that smile had faded back behind the smug. “I was there.”

“But-that’s just a name-those are just stories-”

“You,” she said severely, “are fighting the hook. Are you-you of all men-trying to claim that names do not signify? That there is such a thing as just a story?”

I had plenty of wriggle left in me. “Are you claiming that stories count for more than what actually happened?”

“What ‘actually happened’ depends on whom one asks, doesn’t it?” She grinned at me. “And once you explain what ‘actually happened,’ aren’t you merely replacing their story with yours?”

“Fuck that.” I was getting angry all over again. “No story is gonna make something unhappen. No story is gonna turn a fucking pile of slag at the tip of Old Town back into a magick sword and drop it five hundred years in the past-”

“Unless,” she said, all seriousness now, shading into grim, “a god is telling it.”

I didn’t answer. She poked her goddamn cane at my chest. “You know it’s true. That’s what’s really been on your mind. That’s what has you at a rolling boil.”

“This is exactly the kind of shit Jereth and Jantho started killing gods over,” I said.

She nodded. “Using, if your intuition is correct, a sword that had already been and would someday be used to slay three gods anew.”

“Three-?”

“Pallas Ril, Ma’elKoth, and-”

I interrupted her with a maybe unnecessarily forceful “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Still. .” She got up and limped toward a stack of books on the floor by the inner doorway. “Are you certain it was Kosall? Could it not have been the black runeblade?”

“The what?”

“The one you found in the chamber. .” She opened one of the volumes and started leafing through it. “It was in your report. . I have notes on it, let’s see-”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

She looked up from the book. “The one you used to unleash the river.”