Caine Black Knife

“You were here-you’ll tell them, you have to tell them-” Rababal was babbling at the soapies, who were again pointing the mirror-masks of those helmets at each other. “He was alive when I delivered him to you-this is not my fault-”

“And he will be alive when we deliver him to Social Court,” Soapy One said.

“That remains to be seen.” Khlaylock paused at Markham’s side and set his gauntlet across the top curve of the Lord Righteous’s pauldron. “Markham-entertain no assumptions, and cherish no confidence of victory. He would not make such Challenge had he no stratagem to defeat you.”

This was true, but hardly sporting of him to bring up right then.

Markham’s bleak grey stare settled on my presumably short future. “My Lord, your words are heard.”

“Nor depend upon Our Lord, even with truth on your side. This man uses the Law only to serve his ends. He knows nothing of honor.”

This, on the other hand, was a damn lie; I know plenty about honor. It just happens to be a luxury I can’t fucking afford.

He had good enough reason to dislike and distrust me. Twenty-five years ago, when he was still the Knight Captain commanding the Khryllian garrison at North Rahndhing, just outside the southeastern fringe of the Boedecken, and I was nearing the end of the Adventure that was making me a star, we had a minor disagreement about the tactical approach we should take in dealing with the remnants of the Black Knife Nation. This disagreement became a dispute, which I settled in a less-than-strictly-honorable fashion-because in a straight fight he would have killed me before I could blink-and our working relationship ended with me leaving him for dead in the hands of the surviving Black Knives.

Regardless that it turned out pretty well for him in the end, I admit this was a rotten thing to do. I was a very bad man in those days. I’m not much of a good man now.

Which is not an excuse.

I’m not trying to rationalize anything, or even to explain anything. Actions justify themselves, or they don’t. Words can’t make them right or wrong. Dad used to say, “If you need to justify something, you shouldn’t have done it.” Like I said when I started this: it’s about what happened. Not why.

So this is what happened.

I met Purthin Khlaylock at the end of the actual retreat part of Retreat from the Boedecken. By my best count-because I don’t make a habit of reviewing my old Adventures, especially that one-it was thirty-four days, give or take, after I destroyed the Tear of Panchasell and unleashed the Caineway.

I still can’t remember how many people were in Rababal’s original expedition-thirty-nine or forty, something like that. Ten of us got out of Hell alive.

Not counting Rababal himself. But let that go.

The cook, Nollo, supposedly of Mallantrin; his lover, also supposedly of Mallantrin, Jashe, the guy everybody called the Otter; three “brothers” from Hrothnant, Tarpin, Matrin, and Karthran; a pair of surly “Jheledi” bondsmen, Kynndall and Wralltagg; and Marade and Tizarre.

And me.

By the time we made contact with the Khryllian outpost at North Rahndhing, there was Marade and Tizarre, and there was me.

It was the best month of my life.

In a straight ride-with water and spare horses-it was seven days from Hell to North Rahndhing. In friarpace-a semimagickal meditative form of running I’d trained in at Garthan Hold-I could have made it alone in five, if I’d been in top form. About as fast as a healthy ogrillo warrior, again assuming I could find water along the way.

But if we’d gone straight anywhere, they would have run us down and killed us ugly.

It’s hard to say how many Black Knives died when I unleashed the river, because nobody I’ve talked to really knows how many there were to start with. Some estimates say there were as few as seven thousand in the clan. Some put the number closer to fifteen thousand or even eighteen thousand. I can tell you this, though: those who survived that night were not the old, or the very young, or the weak, or the slow.

And there were about three thousand of them.

Three thousand of the toughest, meanest, fastest, strongest bitches and bucks of the Black Knife Nation pulled themselves out of the wreckage of their most sacred holy ground to find themselves standing among the broken corpses of their brothers and sisters. Their parents. Their children.

The remnants of the Black Knife Nation were, as one might imagine, immoderately pissed at me.

I was top of my entire novitiate in Smallgroup Tactics at Garthan Hold, but I barely even needed my training. Every one of the seven surviving “porters” had graduated from the Studio Conservatory’s Combat School, so even though none of them were superstar material-except maybe Jashe-they knew their business inside and out. And Tizarre, whose Cloaks could make us more or less invisible, and we had the bladewand, and a shitload of other stuff Kollberg had strategically placed for us. . not to mention Marade, who was a homicidal Wonder Woman and kinda immoderately pissed herself.

Screw tactics.

All I needed was to remember some of those books Dad used to make me read. Such as War and Peace.

According to Tolstoy, Kutuzov beat Napoleon on the French retreat from Moscow by refusing to do battle. He kept their armies in contact, so Napoleon could never relax-he had to keep his army in battle order at all times-but every time Napoleon would march out to fight, Kutuzov would retire. When Napoleon would go back to his camp, Kutuzov would advance: the military version of Push Hands.

I combined this principle with some basic concepts of guerrilla warfare I’d picked up from The Life of Geronimo. So when the Black Knives would come out in force, we’d circle behind and murder wounded in their camps. When they’d send out single-pack scouting parties, at least one entire pack, sometimes two or three if they weren’t too far apart, would vanish. . and be found later as skinned corpses, missing their scent glands. If they posted pickets, we killed the pickets. If they picketed whole packs, well. .

Ogrilloi bunch up when threatened. It’s instinctive. So when spooky noises would start coming from the darkness, they’d drift together-then one swipe of the bladewand. .

We’d drag the bodies around before we skinned them and piled them up, to make it look to the Black Knives like we’d been able to kill the pack because we’d caught them spread too far apart. Get it?

And, y’know, the corpses wouldn’t be only skinned, either. They’d be partially eaten.

This was not just for effect.

I could pretend it was simple pragmatism. We had to be mobile. Our lives depended on it. So none of us carried supplies other than water skins. We lived on what we took off Black Knife corpses. And on the corpses themselves. Sure, blood’s thicker than water. But you get used to it.

Tastes good, too.

I’m not into pretending, though. Not anymore. The real reason everyone was eating Black Knife meat and drinking Black Knife blood is because I made them do it.

Partly it was my innate sense of justice.

Yes, justice, goddammit. If they want to kill and eat me, I will kill them, and I will eat them.

Period.

This was not the argument I made to the rest. I didn’t make an argument. Our first day out, I came back into our cold night camp with a skinned ogrillo leg over my shoulder and told Tizarre to take the bladewand and start carving off chops.

They weren’t real excited about this idea.

After all, the only differences between ogrilloi and humans are some details of phenotype; the two species are closely related enough to even be cross-fertile, to a limited extent, kind of like horses and donkeys. Eating ogrilloi was close enough to cannibalism to make everybody but me more than a little queasy.

I won’t go into the details of the scene, who said what and all, because that’s not what this story is about. Let’s just leave it at this: It started with me telling everybody that we’d be eating ogrilloi because it’d make us all smell more like ogrilloi-we’d be sweating their proteins and crapping their fats, y’know? — which was starting to work until somebody, Jashe, I think, pointed out that it wouldn’t make us smell like grills, it’d make us smell like humans who are eating grills, which was when things started to turn ugly.