Caine Black Knife

and a distantly familiar voice said from the top of the well I’d fallen down-

lord tarkanen-you hit him too hard

Then another distantly familiar voice, not Markham’s-like the voices of Actors from Adventures I’d cubed a few times when I was a kid, I always had a good ear for voices-

or perhaps not hard enough-were you not once the practicing necromancer, simon faller? a shade will answer honestly where a man may not-

Which I tried to laugh about, y’know, because of the pun, but I’m pretty sure I only managed a dull moan.

no no no, he has to be alive-my orders-a healing-do a healing-

Nay. This voice was Markham’s. I could even make out a strict grey cloud among the bright haze that filled my universe. This hurt was not taken in battle. Khryl’s Love will not avail.

A round pale shadow in the bright haze began to resolve toward the blur of a face.

Michaelson? Michaelson, can you understand me at all? Do you know where you are? Caine, talk to me.

I remember, here, trying to answer.

Dead. . I was trying to say. Dead. .

Simon Faller, said that familiar voice which wasn’t Markham’s, he raves. Let him die. If he lives, we will all come to regret it. This I know from bitter experience.

Here I would have laughed again, if I could laugh. Somehow thinking how many people could honestly say the same made me giggly.

It’s not up to me, the blur of a face replied. And it’s not up to you, either. We’ll turn him over as is. Let them deal with him however they want; then if he dies, it’s their problem.

Are Artan Healing magicks superior to Khryl’s?

Just-ah, different, that’s all. Let them in.

That face-blur leaned down closer, and more details came into focus: grey cream-plastered wisps of comb- over, a crisp salt-and-pepper beard giving shape to soft jowls. .

It was Rababal.

Michaelson-maybe you can’t hear me, but-I know you always say that everything’s personal, but this really is business. Really. I got over hating you a long time ago. This is just business.

“Dead. .” This time I did manage to get the word out past my teeth, instead of bouncing around inside my fractured skull. “You’re dead. .”

Even when he cannot move, can barely speak, still he threatens you-

It’s not a threat. The dead man retreated to a blur, then to a cloud. As far as he knows, it’s simple fact.

And before I could summon anything like sense to the surface of my scrambled brain, things got even weirder.

In accordance with the treaty between our peoples, Markham was saying, I now deliver this fugitive into your custody and your care.

Then a couple of new shadows loomed in my personal haze. When they leaned down to pick me up, both of them wore on their inhumanly rounded heads these sickeningly familiar funhouse-smeared leers that were still unmistakably me.

My own face.

I knew me. Them. I grew up in a San Francisco Labor slum. Anybody Labor would have to be six days dead to not recognize the Social Police.

Administrator Hari Michaelson. The electronic digitizer in the soapy’s mirror- masked helmet didn’t work in Home physics; he just sounded like he was talking with one hand over his mouth. You are under arrest for the crime of capital Forcible Contact Upcaste, in the murder of Leisureman Marcus Anthony Vilo.

It’s funny, y’know-

Life has a way of sticking a knife in my eye at just the right time.

Being handed over to the Social Police was a dull knife. Rusty. Serrated too. I guess I’m lucky that way.

It went in my left eye socket and sawed around inside my sinus cavity until the scrape of rusty serrated metaphoric steel on metaphoric bone cranked me up across my personal event horizon, and though I could not summon any ghost of a clue where this might be happening or why, through the pain and general mystery I was able to dimly recognize that this situation boded ill for my immediate future.

So I thought, Fuck it. Let’s fight.

This may seem like an unusual decision from a semiconscious middle-aged naked guy with a skull fracture who’s bound hand and foot in unbreakable high-tech police restraints, but I have this rule of thumb, one that I’ve practiced so long-ever since I was a kid running wild on Mission District streets-that it’s become hard-wired instinct. When bad guys try to take you somewhere by force, fight.

Fight now.

Because they’re taking you into their comfort zone. That’s why they’re not killing you where you are: because wherever you are, you still have a chance. For whatever reason. Witnesses. Police. Weapons. Escape routes. Something. That’s why they want to take you somewhere else. And once you get where they’re taking you, it’s over.

Or it’s not over. Not for a long time.

Fighting might get you killed. But it’s better than whatever’s waiting for you where they can take time to enjoy themselves.

It happened to some of the street kids I knew back in the District. They’d disappear. And their bodies would turn up later. Sometimes you could tell they’d been kept alive for weeks. Or months. By how many of the wounds had scarred over. Even some of the amputations. And castrations and vaginal mutilations and you don’t want to know.

So-

Fuck it.

Fight.

But, as people who know me will have heard before, there is fighting and there is fighting.

“Rababal. .” I managed to say, or thought I did, blinking toward the dead man. “Rababal, you needme. .”

The dead man leaned back into the fog. Rababal died twenty-five years ago. You didn’t help him, and I need no help from you.

“You can’t. .” The words seemed to be sticking in the haze inside my head. I worked harder to push them out into the air. “Turn me over. . this place. . gone. . a few days, that’s all. . war-war with Ankhana- ”

That made some kind of impression; the grey-fringed face recoiled into a deeper blur. Is he-could that be true-?

The almost-familiar voice answered, I learned long ago that from this man’s mouth, not even Khryl can hear truth.

Ah. .

So that’s who Almost Familiar was.

Even to my splintered consciousness, finding him here made everything make sense. I’m just fucking intuitive that way.

Khryl’s friends within the Infinite Court assure me that his position in Church and Empire is purely symbolic. If war is to come, it will not come on his behalf.

I tried to shake some use into my brain, and my mouth. “Not. . about me, dumbass. . make a deal-we need to deal-”

Michaelson, I’m sorry. The grey-fringed blur didn’t sound sorry. It’s done.