Caine Black Knife

When the demons asleep in the back of your skull wake up hungry.

Crowmane’s smoking stump and Stalton’s eyes and Purthin Khlaylock, lifting his morningstar to pray-

So I hung there over my own head, dangling from a golden thread of I think maybe but how am I supposed to know and when the fuck, exactly, does my wave function collapse and leave Whiskers’ corpse rotting in my skull?

But in the same instant I was remembering-as my dead wife used to remind me, way too fucking often-not everything is about me.

Kravmik and the Pratt family and a house full of ordinary damn people bobbing downstream toward the fecal falls were counting on me to be the closest thing they had to a canoe, and justice for me wasn’t gonna do them any goddamn good at all, so for a decade-long blink of an eye I saw myself starring in Beau Geste again, this time for real, making a stand here in the hostelry, trying to hold off the Smoke Hunt with a grand total of three guns, two balls, and no brains at all. Which wouldn’t end up doing Pratt amp; Co. an assload of good either. It’d just make me feel better about dying ugly.

Which, because in my heart I’ll always be an Actor, made me think of Edmund Kean’s last words, Dying is easy-comedy is hard, and I found myself muttering, “You think so? Just watch how fucking funny this is gonna be.”

And it had all started and finished in an Ox-Bow Incident half-second, because by the time that buck across the river unleashed the roar he’d been drawing breath for, I had already snapped back into my body and was turning to Kravmik in the doorway. “Forget what I said about fighting them. Get the Pratts and the staff and all the guests up to the roof and have them scatter over the alleys to the surrounding buildings. I mean scatter. Anybody who can’t make the jump? Throw ’em. And give me back that gun.”

He scowled down at me. “But you say-”

“Forget what I said. You’re not gonna fight them. Get people going and go with them. I’ll lead the Hunters off-slow ’em down till Tyrkilld and the Riverdock armsmen can get back here-”

The big chef squinted toward the river. “Maybe I can talk to them-grills are grills. Smoke Hunt’s got no reason to hook red with-”

“Kravmik.”

He heard it in my voice. That doubtful scowl crawled back down his crown ridge. “What?”

Kravmik had to be pushing my age-maybe from the wrong side-which meant he was old enough that this was one of those happy accidents where I could just tell the truth. “Those are Black Knives.”

His eyes popped to about the size of my hands, and he made a noise like he’d swallowed his tongue. When he could finally get out a word, that word was a half whispered, “No. .”

“Yes.”

His mouth hung slack for a second or two, then his lower lip started to flap. “But-b-but-n-n-no clan sign-”

“Not where you can see it. Don’t believe me? Go over there and ask Pratt who I am. But give me the gun first.” Because, y’know, ever since I made sure the Khulan Horde went down at Ceraeno, Black Knives aren’t the only grills who have reason to hold maybe a bit of a grudge, and I wasn’t in the mood to take a round or two in the back for being a fucking wise guy.

“Who you are-?”

“Just do it. Go on, move!” He frowned like he’d found a rat turd in his almondine, but he put the gun in my outstretched left and jogged heavily back around Whistler’s corpse toward the Pratts.

A couple of the Smoke Hunters were already out of the river. One loped toward me along the street, slow and easy, trotting on all fours, and the other reared up and spread his arms and expanded a steamer-trunk chest to unleash a contrabasso blast of-“Dizhrati golzinn Ekk!”

— which somehow, on its twisty cart ride through the funhouse I use for a brain, didn’t do anything like start a freeze; a toasty red glow kindled somewhere around my balls and spread up through my chest and down my legs and into my arms, and when it finally reached my head, what the buck had roared ended up translating Welcome back to the Boedecken, Skinwalker.

And I felt a whole lot better.

I nodded a smile back at him as I leaned my left forearm against the boardwalk post in front of me and wedged my right hand down hard on top of it with Calm Guy’s Smith amp; Wesson braced against the post on the side, because steadied like that with a gun like this, even a crappy shooter like myself can get medium-range accuracy on the order of a carbine, and so my reply to his welcome was a cheerfully warm Thanks; it’s good to be home, which was delivered in a three-round burst to the heart that slapped him down flat and wet and floppy.

I swung the sights onto the one trotting toward me-who hadn’t even broken stride-and let him have his own burst into the upper lip. His head exploded like a meat grenade.

Four more were up out of the water and the other three were behind them and I was coolly taking aim, y’know, two down, seven to go; hey, honey, watch me turn Rover into Spot, and generally feeling pretty snappy about myself until the first one got up.

So I shot him again. More than shot him. I hosed him down-at least ten rounds. Big wet chunks of Smoke Hunter ripped loose and plopped onto the puddled street. Including his right arm.

Which was when he bent down, picked up his own severed goddamn arm by his own severed goddamn wrist, and swung it around his head.

“DIZHRATI GOLZINN EKK!”

He wasn’t even bleeding.

And I wasn’t feeling all that snappy anymore.

I remember blinking stupidly until I could finally make my mouth work.

“Fuck this for a joke-”

It got even less funny when the one with only a gooey mess of raw sausage where his head should be rolled to his feet and loped over to join the others.

The dream-vision-prophecy. . that Meld thing. . how I had spread my mind though different bodies. . seeing through each other’s eyes. . plus a sick twist on the Ghost Dancer bullets-cannot-harm-us thing. .

Somebody had learned a new trick. No. An old one.

— the Black Knife camp below my cross alive in the night with shadows leaping, howling, teeth and claws and hunger-Somebody learned Pretornio’s trick.

No wonder the Hunt could ring up Khryllians wholesale. I’d watched reanimated corpses of Pretornio’s porters rip Black Knives limb from limb-reanimated ogrilloi would be proportionally stronger-

From the dream: that fantasy of power, stone walls shattering under a blow of my grey-leather fist. .

. . a fantasy of being stronger than a Knight of Khryl.

Now there’s a new kind of suicide bomber. . I monologued to my audience of one.

Now they were all down to all fours, coming at that ground-eating lope, not in any hurry so I had maybe all of three seconds, and across the street an alley mouth yawned darkness, and I remembered another alley up around the corner, and in that two-seconds-left I decided to bet my life that they were connected.

I ran out into the street, holding down the Smith amp; Wesson’s trigger, not aiming, spraying low to empty the clip and hope for a boneshot to a leg or two to slow a couple down. The slide racked open before I hit the opposite boardwalk and I dropped it and stopped at the alley mouth to empty Hawk’s pistol at them too before I fell back into the shadows and that’s when shit went really weird.

Because one of Smoke Hunters said, “Hey, check it out-did you guys see that? I think that was Caine!”

And another said “No fucking way,” and a third said, “No, man, I think he’s right- ”

They were speaking English.

“Do we kill him?”

“Kill him? Before I get his autograph?”

So there, in the alley, back against the cold wet brick wall, two-handing the Automag up by my cheek, I did