Caine Black Knife

I probably shouldn’t let her see my grin.

Tizarre can hear their pain too: I can see it on her face, in her pinching-down eyes and the white smears where her lips should be.

“What are you gonna do? Leave me out here? With them?”

“I should-”

I slide a hand around to the back of my belt, onto the butt of the blade-wand. “The only thing you should do is make up your fucking mind before they make it up for you.”

“What am I going to tell Marade?”

Oh, for shit’s sake. “Tell her? She’s watching it right now-don’t be such a fucking baby-”

“Don’t say that to me-you don’t get to say that to me-”

Yeah, fair enough, not the best image, I’ll apologize if I live through this but right now those howls are close enough that they’re raising hairs on the back of my neck, and I’m starting to hear feet on stone and screw this anyway.

I pull out the bladewand and jam its business end against her Shield and necessity triggers a surge of intention that sends shearing force out from the tip. The Shield collapses in a cascade of sparks and she staggers and I spring into the chamber and just barely stop myself from stabbing her in the eye for being a whining weak-ass cunt.

Instead I keep on going past her toward the Tear. “Get that fucking Shield back up!”

“Caine-”

“No time for your shit. Do it!”

The Tear of Panchasell shimmers at me from its pedestal of solid gold, a private sunset the size of my head. Runic cirrus-ripples curve and twist across its surface and sink beneath as well, sucking my gaze into its rose- diamond depths.

I lift my own slice of sky: the electric sizzle of the bladewand’s edge.

“Caine-”

A thousand years ago, if the stories are true: Panchasell Mithondionne, near-immortal High King of the First Folk, weeping as he labored over his masterwork, an aeon of Primal lore guiding the hand of the greatest adept in the history of the race-the history of the world-to create a Thing of Power that is also a thing of beauty, a song in crystal, a dream of peace made solid to defend his people and this world. .

And here I am, a vicious little ghetto punk whose whole life wouldn’t be an eyeblink to the least of the First Folk, about to cut the fucking thing in half. Because somebody they never heard of pissed me off.

That, my friends, is a deep lesson about how the world works.

Which is when Tizarre finally does get my attention, not by calling my name but with an ear-shattering blast that sucks all the air in the chamber into a whirl that follows the sideways column of flame roaring from her hands out into the cavernway I just came from, and she’s got the black iron head of an ogrillo arrow sticking a span out from her left kidney and that is exactly the down payment on what we might both have to pay for me being too fucking sentimental to pull the trigger, because a flight of arrows they got off just in time comes bursting through the ass end of her Firebolt trailing flames of their own, and one’s coming straight for my face and I’m already falling into a shoulder roll and it just clips my forehead and I take the roll backward over something on the cavern floor that rams into my own kidney hard enough that I can’t even make it all the way back to my feet because my knees have gone to cloth-

And the bladewand’s off.

From the floor I point it at the Tear and call upon my will and all I get is a scorch on my palm from the eggbutt and that hiss of blue static discharge from the tip.

“Caine-”

Now her voice is a half-strangled gurgle. She’s got a sickly smile behind blood on her mouth, and both hands wrapped around the arrow shaft sticking out of her belly. She retches more blood. “Sorry-I’m sorry-”

“Don’t be sorry. Just fucking stop them till I make this thing work, then we can get out of here-”

“Stop them? There are thousands-you made sure they’ll never stop-”

Goddamn right.

I try for my feet, but again my knees buckle, and I catch myself with a hand on the knob of rock that jammed my kidney-

Huh-huh-did you-

Did you see that?

Was that my eyes, or just in my head?

When I touched the rock, there was-

A severed hand-I was-she was-he and me and she-pinned through the spine-staring into the sky, taking the hand of a kneeling man, cut in half and the waterfall’s spray falling into my open, staring eyes, my own face above among the buildings and the blade driving toward my forehead and-

And where my hand is on the rock, the rock isn’t rock. Not anymore. It’s the hilt of a sword.

And where I touch, this hilt sings with the high humming whine of Power. .

I look up at Tizarre. She blinks at me. “What-what’s happening-?”

“What always happens,” I say, because that is what I always say now.

She nods, because she understands. “What happens next? Is there a next?”

“You already know.”

She nods again.

I toss her the bladewand. It hangs eternally in the air. It is in her hand before it ever leaves mine. Before she catches it, she has turned away, though she still faces me and will forever.

“Keep it,” I tell her. “It’s yours. I don’t need it anymore.” I stand, and the Sword cuts free of the rock. It shrieks in my hand.

I hold it poised above the Tear of Panchasell.

Long and straight and heavy, its blade is the color of mirror-polished tungsten. The runes deep-graven from forte to tip are graceful and smooth as brushtrokes, and they burn with fire so black that my eye cannot hold them; they shift and twist and shimmer and crawl along the blade, sucking light from the air. .

I have never seen anything like the Sword. I have known the Sword for lifetimes.

When it destroys the Tear, it will break the Power’s hold upon the river. A river choked for a thousand years will shatter this place and burst free through these chambers. Will crash from the face of the vertical city upon the camp below.

In my hand is the death of the Black Knives, and their rebirth.

Their death is today.

When the edge carves into the Tear, it screams like I’m murdering the world.

And maybe I am.

››scanning fwd››

Dawn at my back ignites the rainbow.

Beyond huge. . solid as Bifrost in the billows of my waterfall’s spray. .

One foot stretches out from the face of what was the city’s fifth tier, high above; the other is grounded somewhere out in the vast mist-shrouded sea wrack that used to be the Black Knife camp.

That’s my pot of gold. Right there. In the endless earth-shaking thunder of my waterfall, I can imagine the echoes of Black Knife screams.

Somewhere to the south, a new river rolls down the Boedecken Waste, black with mud and shreds of tent, shattered wagons and broken bodies.

I look upon the work of my hand, and it is good.

Only one flaw in the plan so far: the rendezvous is far enough away from the waterfall’s thunder that I can still hear the idiots argue. About me.

I lean against the wall outside the shattered gape of what used to be a window, where the nine survivors are