Caine Black Knife

They had reason.

By the time the grills broke and ran and the Khryllians finished riding down the stragglers that afternoon, the Black Knives had lost roughly seven hundred warriors. In a little over two hours. The Khryllian dead numbered, I seem to recall, a couple dozen. Armsmen.

There were no casualties among the Knights.

Khlaylock wanted to harry them on their retreat. I told him to save his horses. I knew where they were going.

They were running home for Mommy.

We caught up with them four days later. They were dug in on the far side of what is now called the Caineway, using that half of the vertical city as a defensive emplacement and the river as the world’s biggest moat. They still had thirteen hundred or fourteen hundred warriors over there, and almost all of them had bows, and even though the river was no more than chest deep now that it had spread across the badlands, wading through it into a storm of those five-foot-long thumb-thick arrows was nobody’s idea of fun.

And even if Khlaylock had made the swing south and found a crossing a few miles downstream, what the hell were he and his armsman cavalry supposed to do against thirteen hundred Black Knife bucks and maybe eight hundred-odd bitches dug in among the streets and alleys and ruined buildings of the vertical city?

On the other hand, the Black Knives weren’t in such a good position either, because if they set foot out of the city the Khryllians could cut them to shit on the plains, and they knew it. So Khlaylock decided to send a couple riders back toward North Rahndhing to alert the Order that he had the entire Black Knife Nation bottled up; then he could settle in to wait a few weeks for the six thousand or so heavy infantry it’d take to clean them out house to house. Nice and neat and safe.

Nice and neat and safe, however, was emphatically not what I was getting paid for.

Besides, I knew how Khryllians operate. Once the battle was over, they’d release the bitches and the cubs and just castrate any bucks who’d make submission.

I considered this an unacceptable outcome.

I was back in my cover, y’know, scout and resident ogrillo expert, so I didn’t have any authority or standing to argue with a Knight Captain of the Order of Khryl. All I had was a tip from Marade that her Khryllian truthsense had never worked on me at all.

And, y’know, that eye for weakness.

So early in the evening after he’d sent off the riders, I stopped by Khlaylock’s tent to commiserate.

The Knight Attendant had just finished preparing Khaylock’s dinner, and the Great Man was relaxing on his camp stool in front of a small turd fire. I ambled over and squatted on my heels across from him without waiting for permission. “That was a fine thing you did today, Knight Khlaylock,” I told him. “I admire you for it. Not many Khryllian commanders would have the courage to put the lives of their men above their own honor.”

He didn’t even blink. “Have a care, Caine Lackland. Think twice before suggesting dishonor to a Knight of Khryl.”

This Lackland moniker was something he’d hung on me, believe it or not, as a sign of respect. Knights all have House names and carry the name of their lands, or the lands they are sworn to; Marade, for example, was formally Marade, Knight Tarthell of Kavlin’s Leap. In the Lipkan Empire, only serfs have a single name-like, say, Caine. So, in deference to my actions in freeing Marade and Tizarre and escaping the Black Knives, he did me the honor of nicknaming me Lackland, as though my not having lands and a surname was some kind of oversight.

“Oh, shit no, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean it like that. No disrespect intended.” I shook my head like your average amiable dumbass. “I was talking about-what d’you Khryllians call it? Your Legend, right? The story Knights and arms-men and all the Soldiers of Khryl will tell each other about your life, for as long as the Order survives. Everything good or bad about who you are that might help another Khryllian face a tough situation, right?”

He nodded at me over the top of a steel mug of wine. “It is in our Legends that Knights continue to serve Our Lord of Valor, even long after we fall in His Service.”

“Well, yeah. That’s what I’m talking about. I mean, a few days ago you fought what will probably go down in your Legend as one of the greatest cavalry engagements in Khryllian history. Maybe in the history of the world. Now today, though. .”

He squinted at me. “You find fault with my orders?”

“No, no, no. Not at all. That’s my point. I think it’s great that you have so much compassion for your men. Rather than lose any more, you’re willing to be remembered as the Knight who let the Black Knives slip away.”

He set his mug on the ground beside his boot, and sighed. “I am no fool, Caine Lackland, and a fool you must be not to have discovered so before now. The Order of Khryl does not exist to serve your private vengeance.”

Tell me that again tomorrow, I thought, but I said, “All right, look, sure, I can’t play you. I get that. But now lend me half an ear, huh? The Black Knives are settled in over there, and they’re spoiling for a fight. On their terms, right? Because you made them fight on your terms four days ago, and they want some payback. But when they find out you’re not gonna attack-when they find out it’s a siege instead of a battle-things are gonna change. Especially when their food starts to run short. It’ll be more than a month before your infantry can get here. I know for a fact they don’t have supplies to last that long.”

Khlaylock leaned into the firelight. “Then fight they must, and we can-”

“No. Run they will, and you can’t.”

He scowled at me.

“They’ll leave just enough bucks behind to keep some fires lit and shit to make it look like they’re still there, while the rest of them slip away. Once they’re gone, they’ll scatter. And the Order will never catch them together again. Not in your lifetime, anyway.”

He turned that scowl toward the darkness beyond the Khryllian camp. He was seeing the badlands inside his head, the way any good cavalry commander could: the way they had looked at sunset, the way they would look from any vantage points he could reach, from any scouting arcs he could order.

The way they would look from the vertical city, once it was empty.

He murmured, “You are saying there is another way out.”

“Yeah. But better than that-better for you, and for that Legend of yours,” I told him. “I’m saying there’s another way in.”

He brought his gaze back across the fire and spoke the two words that if I were a more demonstrative guy I might have kissed him on the mouth for. “Show me.”

Which is how, a couple hours later, Khlaylock and I found ourselves in that tactical dispute I mentioned earlier.

We were on the plateau overlooking the vertical city, next to the topside access tunnel. Getting up there wasn’t a problem; the cliffs were limestone, which made sedimentary layers that I could go up better than most men climb stairs. I towed a light cord attached to hemp rope that I pulled up and tied off to an outcropping, and Khlaylock, with Khryl’s Strength, just hand-over-handed himself straight up the rope without raising a sweat. The prairie grass on the plateau was waist-high by then and there was a night breeze from the west, which put us downwind from the access tunnel and covered our motion. Sound was not an issue, because my waterfall was roaring out from the escarpment only thirty-odd feet below the lip, which made it an easy sneak, even for Khlaylock, who was less than ideally stealthy, despite leaving his armor behind and carrying only a long knife and his morningstar.

The Black Knives had posted a couple of sentries up there, but the sentries got lazy, as sentries do, and when one of them went back down the access tunnel for something, I got the other with my garrotte. He made enough noise-thrashing around, trying to get me off his back-to draw the attention of the other one, who poked his head up the access tunnel to see what was going on, which news was delivered to him by Khaylock’s morningstar at something like lightspeed.

The medium, as they say, was the message.

And sure, the lightspeed thing is hyperbole, but not as much as you think. That particular strike graphically demonstrated the distinction between a Knight Venturer, like Marade, and a Knight Captain; whereas a shot from Marade could lift a full-grown ogrillo from his feet and hurl his corpse a yard or two, when Khlaylock hit that buck in