Caine Black Knife

Calm Guy turned and spread empty hands. The ruffled cuffs of his doublet draped his wrists and half his palms. The drape along the insides of his forearms was just exactly the wrong shape.

“Those blades up your sleeves’ll get you pounded by a Knight.”

Another shrug, and a tilt of the head at the kettledrum backbeat of gunfire in the night streets beyond the lobby’s lamplight. “Knights are busy.”

“Yeah. That’s exactly the problem.” I took another step. “We can still get out of this with nobody dying.”

“Dying?” Pratt looked from me to Calm Guy in growing distress. “What exactly is going-?”

Whistler said, “Shut up. Don’t worry about it.”

Pratt relaxed. “Oh. Oh, sure. I forgot: you guys are all friends.”

“Yes,” Whistler said, spinning his gemstone. “Yes, we are friends.”

Calm Guy squinted up the stairs. “Still haven’t seen your hand.”

“Yeah. I appreciate the invitation, but-”

“You think this is an invitation?”

“If you were here to kill me, we wouldn’t be talking.”

“Killing you’s Plan B. Moving up toward Plan A-and-a-Half. You’re coming with us. Peacefully. Peacefully in our company or peacefully in a bag.”

“I like peacefully.” I can play nice, when I have to. “Peacefully works for me just fine.”

“Come on, then.”

I didn’t move. “Where we going?”

“Simon Faller has requested the pleasure of your company. Forcefully.”

“Faller?” I tried them in English. “Y’know, I’ve been wanting a word or two with Mr. Faller myself-”

He gave me a what the fuck? smirk, and spread it around to his friends. “You talk too much already,” he said. In English. He had a Brooklyn accent. “We’re not here to talk.” He chuckled and made a slight, ironic bow. “Just guys with a job to do, you get it? Deliverymen.”

I went back to Westerling. “I’ll make you a deal.”

He did too. “I don’t think so.” I guess he was used to Westerling enough that he didn’t really care.

I did, though.

“The Smoke Hunt’s outside,” I said. “We don’t want to be on the street anyway, right? We’ll wait here. All of us. Once the Knights take care of the Smoke Hunt, I’ll go with you to BlackStone and see Faller. Peacefully.”

And when those amped-on-God fuckers break in here and find, instead of some sleepy hostelers, an assload of heavily armed Actors, it’ll make me a shitty prophet, but a happy one.

Not to mention that it wouldn’t exactly break my heart to have Tyrkilld and Kierendal-and, say, Angvasse Khlaylock-know I’d been hauled at gunpoint off to see the Wizard. But nobody ever wants to do things the easy way.

Calm Guy shook his head. “We’re on a schedule. Once the Knights take care of the Smoke Hunt, it’ll be too late.”

“Too late? For what?”

“For you’ll find out, smart guy.”

“I made a good offer. Think it over.”

“Don’t have to.” I sighed. “Is your fucking schedule worth more than your life?”

“Maybe not.” Calm Guy grinned up at me. “But it’s worth more than their lives. Hawk-?”

“Hey.” A glossy white grin unfolded under the gunman’s glossy black hair. “Wanna see a trick?”

“Not really.”

Hawk’s right hand and arm became a blur that in less than an eyeblink resolved into a big black pistol leveled at arm’s length on Ytrrall Pratt’s pretty red head.

Kravmik growled wordlessly and tried to pull her closer.

“Go right on,” Hawk told him easily. “I’ll just shoot you first.”

I sagged. “That’s a pretty good trick.”

“Ain’t it just?”

“You’re fast, kid.”

“Fastest you’ll ever see.”

“Fastest I ever saw was Berne. Saint Berne, they call him now. Maybe you heard what happened to him.” I nodded toward Calm Guy: the ex-Cat. “Or you could ask him. He’ll know. He might even have been there.”

“Ancient history, old man. A whole different world ago.”

I looked down at this grinning killer who’d been in short pants then. Who had maybe just been born when Black Knives ruled here. But only maybe. Ancient history. “I guess it was.”

“Let’s see that hand,” Calm Guy said.

“Yeah, whatever.” I showed them the Automag. Nobody looked impressed.

“Put it on the stairs behind you and keep coming.” I didn’t move.

“You said you know things about me.” Half a shrug half lifted the Automag. Not enough to get anybody tense. “Most of what you know about me is wrong.”

“Let’s find out,” Calm Guy said. “Hawk: the grill. Leg first. Then the head. Then the girl.”

“The leg?” Hawk sighed. “I hate when they yowl.”

“Wait.” I scowled down at the blur of my reflection in the Automag’s chromed slide, tilting it like I wasn’t entirely sure what I was seeing. And I wasn’t. Not really.

I was trying to decide exactly who I was right then.

“Hawk.” I rolled the nickname around my mouth. “Hawk. Ever study at an abbey, Hawk?”

“Hey-” Calm Guy began.

“I’m talking to Hawk. I’ll talk to you again when I’m done with him.”

The words came out slower and slower, like my spring was winding down.

Slower and flatter and colder. “Ever do any Esoteric training?”

Those glossy white teeth showed up again. He had a lot of them in that soft red mouth. “What’s it to you?”

“I’m gonna ask you a riddle, Hawk. An Esoteric riddle.”

“Do I give a shit?”

“If you know the answer, Hawk,” I said, dead slow, dead flat, “I might let you live.”

A dead cold silence.

Calm Guy and Whistler exchanged a look like they were asking each other if either of them liked Hawk well enough to get in the way of whatever was about to happen without knowing what the fuck it was about to be. They each saw the same answer.

Hawk saw those answers too. His pale cheeks flamed. “Screw this-”

“What-” The riddle came out soft, gentle, quizzical, like I really wanted to know. “-is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Hawk’s eyes narrowed, then widened, and then his extended arm and hand and pistol became again a blur, now in a quarter arc toward the stairs, but even that blur had to cover a meter and a half while the muzzle of my Automag had to twitch only a couple inches.

Both pistols blasted flame. Hawk’s blasted once. Mine blasted three times: an autoburst, which is an accommodation for crappy shooters, which I am. The autoburst fired three of its caseless tristacks-a total of nine shatterslugs-in a brief sequence that kicked its muzzle through a short arc up and to the right. A couple of brief shrieks came from over by the dining hall door: Mrs. Pratt, maybe. Maybe Kravmik.

Splinters burst from the bannister in line with my navel: Hawk’s round. A great shot, that kid-ten times the shooter I’ll ever be. For all the good it did him.

Splinters also burst from the floorboards past Hawk’s right knee. As well as from his right thigh, right hip, spine, and the left side of his rib cage. A different kind of splinter.

Shatterslugs break into tumbling needles after impact: full kinetic transfer and a shitload of internal shredding. Hawk went down like a sack of hamburger. He didn’t bounce when he hit the floor. It was more of a splat.