Caine Black Knife

Yttrall shook her head without looking up. She stroked his thin sweat-damp hair. “He’s well as can be hoped, my lord. No harm beyond the shaking, I think. Though I feared much for my brave Lasser lad-”

“No need, no need-they had me right where we wanted ’em,” Pratt said with a shaky laugh.

“Yeah. How’d you slip the Charm?”

“You should know,” his wife said.

“I should?”

“Wouldn’t be real successful here if every ass-mandrake and his buttsister could Charm me out of their bill, would I?” Pratt fished inside his blouse and pulled out a coin-size medal on a chain. “Proof against all forms of magickal compulsion.”

I reached for the medal and turned it over in my hand. It was damp with the touch of Pratt’s skin, and of a warm pale metal, maybe white gold. On one side was stamped a representation of a pair of hands, both holding daggers; the forearms crossed at the wrists and were pinned together by the blade of a sword that stuck up between the angled dagger blades to bisect the angle they made. The opposite side was plain except for a phrase inscribed in simple Westerling script.

My Will, or I Won’t.

“Son of a bitch.” I dropped it like it had burned me and jerked to my feet. “Didn’t I tell you to get out of town?”

“We-well. .” He made a faint backhanded wave around the small lobby, which I only now registered was lined with baggage piled along the walls. “We can’t just go, not all at once, my lord-”

“I’m not your lord.”

“-I mean, please, you must understand, we have staff here, they’re family-and they have families of their own-”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“And our guests. .”

“What about them?”

Pratt cast a help me glance at Kravmik, who just shrugged and shambled over Whistler’s corpse toward the door, already holding Hawk’s pistol like he’d been born with it in his hand.

Pratt gently disengaged himself from Ytrall’s arms. “It’s not that easy to explain.” “

Nor so hard either,” his wife said. “A guest in our house has a claim on us, begging your lordship’s pardon. We’ll not be leaving while there’s danger they must face within our walls, or without. It’s a duty, your lordship. Not unlike your own.”

I wasn’t going to debate my duty. Whatever the fuck it might be, which is something I’ve never been able to get entirely straight. “It’s worth more than your life?”

Pratt shrugged helplessly. “It is our life.”

“Then get them out of here too.”

“That we shall,” Ytrall said. “When it may be done. Which is not this instant, begging your lordship’s pardon.”

“Well-” I locked a snarl behind my teeth and stifled a sudden lust to slap the snot out of both of them. “-do it, that’s all. As soon as shit calms down enough that you can hit the street.”

“Not this street. Not anytime soon.” Kravmik turned back from the door.

His eyes were empty yellow saucers. “We got Hunters outside. I think they’re coming this way.”

From the front of Kravmik’s massive shoulder, the street looked empty.

“I don’t see them.”

“Me neither.” With the muzzle of Hawk’s pistol, Kravmik tapped his snout alongside one age-greyed tusk. “But they’re out there. And not far.”

“Any idea how many?”

I felt him shrug. “Thirty years ago, maybe I coulda. No stalker, these days.”

“Don’t smell Tyrkilld anywhere, do you?”

“Not if I don’t have to.” But he couldn’t even force a smile.

I leaned into the doorway. “Hey,” I said, louder. “Hey, fuckers. Still there?Talk to me.”

Blank storefronts and boardwalk for fifty yards to the river. The other way, just a long straight gloom, half-lit orange by fireglow reflected from low clouds.

Indigo shadows still and sharp as the gaps between stars.

“We got a mutual problem that can have a mutual solution,” I called.

“Come on, fuckers. You want to be out there with the Smoke Hunt?”

Nothing. Maybe I was wrong about the backup. Or maybe their nerves were just really, really good. One way to find out.

I stepped through the door and bent over Calm Guy’s corpse to pry the gun out of his dead hand. Nobody shot at me.

The weapon was Earth-make, not stonebender: a Smith amp; Wesson select-fire, loading thirty hypervee steel-tail aluminum tumblers in a double-stack extended clip. Old-fashioned, but these rounds could pick a lock at a hundred meters and body armor doesn’t even slow them down. Not that Smoke Hunters would be wearing any.

It fit my right hand just fine.

From out on the boardwalk, the street looked even more deserted. Shuttered storefronts stared back at me. A puddle left from last night’s rain rippled burnt orange in the breeze. And the gunfire sounded to be moving the other way.

How good was Kravmik’s nose anyway?

I mean, that breeze was on the back of my neck. . the firefight was fading beyond the shadows down the street. . any Hunters that would be coming this way must have slipped the armsmen somehow, because the Khryllians sure as hell weren’t chasing them. . was Kravmik’s nose good enough to scent them from blocks off? Downwind?

Which was when a tiny voice inside my head whispered, that’s right, dumb-ass, the breeze is on the back of your neck.

I turned.

Six were already in the river. Faint shimmering haloes of scarlet witchfire around their heads evoked corpse- lanterns on the Great Chambaygen-except they were coming at us across the current, and at a pretty good clip. Two more right behind, slipping silently down into the black water. One last on the far quay. Standing. Staring at me.

Naked. Rippling with flames of power.

He spread arms like the thighs of bulls, and drew air into a chest like a bargeload of boulders-

And I, for roughly the duration of my entire lifetime in reverse, froze.

Sort of.

I didn’t so much freeze as I froze about freezing.

I was hanging from a wire an arm’s length over my own head: a psychic Sword of Damocles. Because I really didn’t know how I was going to take this. I’ve been having this dream half my life.

Back in the Boedecken. .

The details are different every time, so it doesn’t matter who’s with me or how the place looks, how I’m armed, none of that, all that mattered was that I was back in the Boedecken but I was old and slow and tired with killing.

And Black Knives were coming for me. Again.

It felt like some kind of justice. This was where I really started-everything before was prologue-so this was where I ought to end. There was a bitter poetry to it: after all the spectacularly fraudulent mock heroics that had made me a legend, I freeze on a dark street in front of people who’d fallen for that legend so hard that they worship it. That might be the only way to pay for being me. To make my end not a storied, gloried song but the punch line to the bad joke I’ve always been. To go out like a punk.

Stalton’s eyes. . opal stars of slivered moon-

You don’t decide to freeze, or to break, or to crumple in a corner and crap yourself any more than you decide to black out when somebody cracks your head with a pipe. It’s something your brain does without your cooperation.