Caine Black Knife

dressing themselves in the clothing I brought for them, treating whatever wounds Marade can’t Heal with supplies I gave them, and eating and drinking food and water I provided for them, while they all talk about how they just can’t trust me.

“-it doesn’t make sense.” Marade’s still standing up for me, at least. Sounds like she’s the only one. “If his sole need was revenge, why risk the rescue at all? He could as easily have left me-left me-”

Even from out here, I can hear the choke. She can’t say it.

“Where we were,” she finishes lamely. “He could have done what has been done without even your help, though unleashing the river would have cost his life-”

That much is true.

“You weren’t there,” Tizarre says. “None of you. You didn’t see him. You didn’t hear him.”

“And the cubs-I mean, so what?” This from Jashe the Otter. “How many would have lived through the river thing, anyway?”

“That’s my point,” Tizarre says. “Why . . do that? Why the show?”

“Diversion,” Marade says, but she doesn’t sound too sure of it.

“That’s what he said. That’s what he told me it was about. To make sure they’d chase him up into the city. To thin them out on the ground and give you all a better chance to escape-but then he hit their children. So more of them stayed. To protect the children.”

“Well, I don’t care,” somebody else says. “I’m just damn grateful to be alive.”

“You say that now,” Tizarre insists darkly. “But he’s not done with us. That’s why the rescue. He still has a use for us. That’s the only reason. Just wait. You’ll see.”

Another man might be offended. I probably would be, if she were wrong. But, y’know, some Black Knives can probably swim.

I stare out at my waterfall. At my rainbow. The rainbow is a promise from God that there will never be another Flood.

I don’t plan to need one.

Fuck punishment. This is about extinction.

KHRYL’S JUSTICE

It wasn’t a good dream.

I couldn’t make it make sense, even as a nightmare: it should have been a net over my face, not a burlap sack. Chunks of puke shouldn’t be flopping around my head. I was sure of that.

The next time awareness knocked a hole in my skull, I started to worry that I was naked, when I should have been suited up in my black leathers. And this wad of cloth tied into my mouth with what felt like rope? Where the fuck had that come from?

It did, however, explain why the chunks of puke were pretty much all small enough to have come out of my nose.

Later, a dimly foggy realization chewed into my forehead that the shoulder I was facedown over should have been flesh instead of metal.

The last worst part: it wasn’t rope on my wrists and ankles. Forget that I didn’t have the throwing knife that was supposed to be in the concealed sheath behind the collar of my missing tunic; not only would that knife have been useless against the armor on this particular back but it wouldn’t have cut what was binding my wrists anyway, which I could recognize because I still had some feeling in my fingers, because he hadn’t put them on as tight as the Los Angeles Social Police had a few years back when they pinched me for Forcible Contact Upcaste.

Stripcuffs.

I puked into the sack again.

Then I fell back down the black hole.

I’ve been lucky enough to make it through my life so far with less than my share of major head trauma. Sure, I’ve been knocked around, bashed with sticks and stones, quarterstaves and iron-bound clubs, warhammers and friggin’ morningstars, even a brick or two; stabbed with stilettos, daggers, knives, and smallswords; taken a broadsword through the liver and an axe into the thigh; been variously shot with arrows, sling stones, bullets and motherfucking blowgun darts-not to mention being once or twice hurled from high places-but I’ve mostly managed to avoid being whacked on the head hard enough to produce more than a few seconds of unconsciousness.

Now, even those few seconds are serious enough; that’s a concussion right there, and anybody who thinks an untreated concussion isn’t serious should go recheck the mortality figures. Still, though, it’s something you generally live through. You wake up with a bad headache and persistent dizziness and nausea, general weakness and shit, and you need some bed rest-or, say, a Khryllian Healing, like the one I got after Tyrkilld slapped me up-to get over it, but you do. Eventually.

When those seconds stretch into minutes, you go from bad headache into the territory of, say, subdural hematoma, which is a fancy way of saying that your brain’s bleeding and starting to swell, which means that you’re not gonna just open your eyes and shake it off and go beat up the bad guys. It means it’s a roll of God’s dice whether you’re gonna open your eyes at all, and if you do it’ll probably be a lot like it was for me: a fucking nightmare.

This is not just a metaphor.

The bleeding-brain kind of unconsciousness is a fall across an event horizon of oblivion: an infinitely instant shredding of everything you are as psychic tidal forces smear you into an eternal scream. Waking up is no treat, either; it doesn’t happen all at once, but in little flickers and flashes that start out as needles and graduate to razors in the eye and the grip of God Himself upon your balls, and it involves a lot of vomit and choking and wishing you could go back to falling into that black hole, because the eternal scream is a helluva lot more fun.

That’s how it is for me, anyway.

Maybe it’s because it seems like every time it happens to me, I start that whole razors-in-the-eyes waking-up crap in a bag over somebody’s shoulder while the sonofabitch is out for a jog.

The only way I can reconstruct roughly how long I must have been out before I started twilighting up from semiconsciousness is to guess how fast Markham could haul my twitching ass from the Pratt amp; Redhorn to the jitney ramp up Hell while making a wide circle around the Spire, because he wouldn’t exactly want to bump into any inquisitive Khryllians on the way.

Did I not mention that part?

Turns out I wasn’t wrong about Calm Guy’s backup. I wasn’t even wrong about the really, really good nerves. My only mistake was assuming that the backup in question would have reason to be afraid of the Smoke Hunt.

Well, okay. That wasn’t my only mistake.

There are ways in which I think really, really fast. Like how to kill people. There are ways in which I don’t think really, really fast. Like working out that the only way Faller’s gunmen could have known I was at the Pratt amp; Redhorn was if they found out from Kierendal amp; Tyrkilld amp; Co.-not fucking likely-or if they found out from, say, the all-too-conveniently lurking-in-an-alley-across-the-street Lipkan ass-cob who booked me the room in the first place.

At the time I was playing sack of meat potatoes, I didn’t have any idea of any of this. There were some inexplicable images swimming around the brimstone swamp inside my head, of Boedecken badlands covered in grain and vineyards and a river dividing a city of neat whitewashed brick tangled up with headless ogrilloi burning with a red fire that cast no light. And that was about it.

I don’t remember much of the early part of my visit to BlackStone. Somebody must have taken the sack off me, because I remember somebody saying good lord, clean him up, and sometime after that I was wet and there was a blinding-bright haze pumping in through my eyeballs that was overinflating my head until I could feel the bones of my skull grinding against each other along jagged fissures as they began to separate