Caine Black Knife

with-

What?

I had a sick feeling that I knew.

The textbook answer was a higher power. But this hadn’t felt like transcen-dance. Not like emptying myself into the infinite. Just the opposite.

It had felt like summoning.

I am the Smoke Hunt.

I still had that nagging presque vu. This should remind me of something. The Wild Hunt, maybe. I’ve always had warm shorts for the mythology of the Wild Hunt: a storm of chaos sweeping across the land, destroying all in its path. What’s not to like?

Reminds me of my Acting career.

But the Wild Hunt wasn’t it. At least not all of it. This was a different kind of hunt.

The dream or vision or whatever hadn’t stopped with the drumming and the dancing but had flowered into an effortless lope through moonlit streets filled with scents of piss and rainwater, spilled wine and human sweat-A sense of connection. . like the Meld the primals do, a sense of being more than one person. . or being one person spread through different bodies, all the bodies, so that in my pack I could look at myself through different eyes at the same time, and see myselves wreathed in flickering scarlet flames that cast no light, and the flame was the connection, and the connection throbbed thick and hot with shared werewolf lust.

Hitting a building. A door ripped from its hinges. Lamps shattering, flames licking wide: real flames here, crackling and scorching flesh. A casual punch splintering through a wall. Burying my jaws in soft screaming pink- fleshed humans tangled in bedsheets that leaked bright sweet blood into shredded mattress ticking.

More flames, and more terror, and more sweet copper blood.

Grey-fleshed fists crushing meat and bone with the same wet ripping crunch as the seven-bladed morningstars in the hands of men in chainmail that bore the sunburst of Khryl, the thunder of their long guns, the shirr of buckshot and the shree of rifle slugs, the clatter of steel-shod hooves on cobbled streets and no fear, no pain, just impact: blows given, blows received.

And draped over a crumple of ruined wall, shreds of corpse so battered it could have been ogrillo or human or pieces of both, freshly dead, sharp-slanting moonlight catching wisps of steam curling up from open gleaming meat-

Steam from the wounds. .

My dad, maybe forty years ago, had told me an anthropologist’s theory about the origin of the myth of the human soul: that water vapor rising from deep wounds might have been mistaken by ancient humans for the soul escaping from the body. Probably the origin of ghosts, too. The word spirit comes from a root meaning breath; in most traditions, ghosts resemble the curling fog you see from your own mouth on a chilly day. All the crap about the afterlife, about Heaven being in the sky. . all from nothing more than wisps of condensing vapor, coiling upward like smoke-

Like smoke.

I said, “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.”

Sure. That was it. Had to be. Had to be. Drummming. Dancing. Mind-altering substances. Ecstatic union with a higher power. . no fear, no pain-

Even bullets can’t hurt you. They can only kill you.

Take a pacifist Earth-human millennial religious movement, filter it through the consciousness of sentient pack-hunting carnivores, and what do you get?

The Smoke Hunt.

“They’re Ghost Dancers, for shit’s sake. Fucking ogrillo Ghost Dancers.

Crazy fuck my ass Horse and Jesus stinking bloody Christ on a stick.”

I ground my face harder into my hands. “Orbek-what the fuck have you gotten your stupid dog ass into?”

It was a rhetorical question. Because there had been more to the dream.

There had been her.

Armor like a mannequin of convex mirrors. Out from the shadows of a street’s mouth across the plaza, a massive two-handed morningstar propped casually over one shoulder. Reflected firelight dancing on facades. Three of me sprinting across the flagstones to meet her, smeared with the blood of the finest soldiers of Home. Casually removing her helm, shaking loose her hair. On her face, no fear. No anger. Only a reserved, remote sadness.

Her scent: human, female, thick with death. Red-smeared mirror-curves of armor rumpled with fist-shaped dents and pocked with bullet holes. Hair caked black with clotted blood. A morningstar rising with mechanical precision, falling in steel thunderbolts. Shreds of meat plastering cheekbones and forehead into unhuman texture around her vivid eyes.

Vasse Khrylget, they called her. I had a pretty good idea why.

“Yeah, okay,” I muttered. “What d’you want me to do about it?” Not that I really expected an answer. Or needed one.

I scowled at the pulse of orange dawnglow on the frame of the skylight. Too early for coffee for sure. Maybe I could snag some beans from the kitchen, chew them like aspirin. . which was another goddamn thing this world could use-the pounding in my head was turning out to be less drums than migraine again. .

Still only half awake, I had already pulled on my boots and was looking around for my tunic when it finally occurred to me that dawnglow doesn’t pulse. “Oh,” I said. “Oh, crap.”

And what was that noise? Voices?

I stood on the bed and shoved the lower edge of the skylight until it squealed loose from the rust on its rim.

Yeah: voices. Faint, empty with distance, but clear-

Dizhrati golzinn Ekk!

Okay: not a dream. Not a vision.

Prophecy.

I sagged, hanging from the skylight’s lower rim. “Son of a bitch.”

Did I have to deal with this before I even got coffee? “Son of a bitch.” I rubbed my stinging eyes. “Yeah, okay. Whatever.”

Fixing the prop to hold the skylight open, I turned around and grabbed the rim underhand; with a groan of middle-aged morning, I heaved my legs up through the opening and back over the lip. As I slid through the skylight belly-down, I collected a soot-greased scrape on the stomach from a sharp slate and a bang on the skull from the lead-framed pane, so when I pushed myself up to my knees I was already pissed as hell, rubbing the back of my head and looking around for somebody to take it out on.

A distant surf of ogrilloid roaring half-drowned shrieks of terror and agony and rage. Human shrieks. Probably.

There: three or four blocks over, toward the voices; that was the glow I’d thought was dawn.

Buildings on fire.

My breath smoked. Splashes of the water I’d wiped from my face trickled goosebumps across my bare chest. I glanced longingly back down through the skylight at my warm rumpled bed-but the false dawn caught my eye again. Looked warm enough over there.

I was already backing up to get a running start for the leap across the alley to the rooftop beyond when I finally thought, What in the name of sweet shivering fuck am I doing?

I was fifty years old, for shit’s sake. Fifty years old and about to run the rooftops toward some kind of goddamn free-for-all massacre. For no reason. Just because it was there.

Without even a shirt on.

I shook my head and lifted a hand as though telling some pushy asshole to back the hell off. “Not my business.”

I didn’t sound convinced, or convincing.

“Not my business.” That was better. Good enough.

Now the shouts and screams picked up a soggy kettledrum backbeat. Gunfire. Full-throated: heavy-caliber stuff. The Khryllians had arrived.