Caine Black Knife

tongue and throat. “Khryl decides who wins, doesn’t he? Unless you’re gonna pile on apostasy.”

He lowered his head with a resigned sigh. “Very well. Make peace with whatever god favors you, little man; you will have no further chance. Challenge.”

“Accepted,” I said. “I will Answer.”

So there we stood, on the lip of the escarpment, in billows of mist curling back from the waterfall. My back to the brink. His to the access tunnel. The moon, almost full and almost overhead, bleached the ten feet of softly damp pairie grass between us pale as a charcoal sketch on sheepskin. He lifted his morningstar in both hands; with the sun down, he could aim the weapon’s head only at the sun’s reflected light-y’know, the moon-and he composed himself for the prayer that would sanctify the coming Combat.

He drew himself up to his full height and lifted his head to Khryl’s light-the last time a Khryllian Knight ever kneels is when he takes his Orders, unless he’s defeated and Yields in Combat-and when he slipped into the Old High Lipkan Ammare Khryl Tyrhaalv’Dhalleig, the head of his morningstar took on that St. Elmo’s fire glow that began to creep down the haft toward his hands and I took one long skipping step for momentum and leaped.

In those days-years before Berne put Kosall through my spine-I could leap really well.

My Control Disciplines had my legs so amped that I might as well have been on the moon; when the arc of my leap reached him, I was still as high as his head and descending and I had to shoot the side kick down at an angle to catch the haft of his morningstar just below its centerpoint.

Now, sure, in those days I maybe weighed all of seventy-five kilos dripping wet-Khlaylock would have gone around one-fifteen buck naked-and I would have needed both hands to even lift his morningstar without popping a ball, and I could forget swinging it effectively in a fight. But I wasn’t swinging it.

I was falling on it.

With my entire seventy-five kilos, plus all the kinetic energy I could cram into an exceedingly well-trained side kick, which made his two-handed grip into a fulcrum, the haft into a lever, and the seven-bladed head into Archimedes’ Earth.

It caught him full on the left temple. This would have killed any ordinary man. Khlaylock didn’t even fall down. The effect was pretty spectacular nonetheless.

A wet ripping crunch splintered his eye socket and cheekbone and fanned black blood spray into the mist; the impact turned his head and sent the morningstar on past, taking most of the side of his face with it. The weapon flipped out of his slackening hands and he staggered, trying to turn toward me as I landed, trying to get his hands up-even stunned into next year he was trying to fight back-but his left eye dangled out of its shattered socket by his optic nerve, flopping against black-smeared teeth left exposed because his upper lip was lying on the grass somewhere still hooked to the head of his morningstar, and that had to fuck with his targeting, because he was waving his head around like he couldn’t decide which eye he should be seeing with. Before he could figure it out, I threw my hip into a Thai roundhouse that slammed my right shin across his kidneys hard enough to capture his unsteady balance and send him stumbling toward the lip of the escarpment. I sprang after him, digging in my feet and jamming both hands into his spine to send him even faster, and y’know, if he’d been somebody else, somebody less the Legendary Warrior than Purthin Khlaylock, he still might have taken me, because another Knight would have fallen, and had a chance to get up again. Khlaylock, though, staggered to the very brink, caught his balance, and wheeled to face me.

Just in time to catch both feet of my old-fashioned flying dropkick in the middle of his chest.

He sailed out over the long, long drop with a curiously calm, flat look in his good eye, a look that bespoke absolute certainty that this is not yet over, little man.

The hundred-meter fall to the highest of the Black Knife campfires below disagreed with him.

I hit ground at the lip and just lay there for a while, letting the black jolts drain away into the wet and the grass.

The waterfall was too loud for me to hear him land.

After I stopped shaking, I dragged the two Black Knife sentries to the edge and shoved them over after him. I picked up my knives and stuck them back into their sleeve sheaths, then went over and shook the shreds of Khlaylock’s face off his morningstar.

I held it in both hands, staring down at it until my arms started to ache. Not just a weapon. A symbol. The Morning Star. Enlightenment. The Dawn of Truth and Justice that Destroys the Night of Ignorance and Sin. I remember wondering if Khlaylock had lived long enough to appreciate the irony; must have been like getting pimp- slapped by Khryl Himself.

Then I shrugged and threw it off the cliff too.

I’ve had twenty-five years to think about the business on the escarpment that night, and I’m still not sure which one of us it makes looks worse. Yeah: I was an asshole. Pushing his buttons to pump up some drama. To jazz my career. Not to mention the whole premeditated murder thing. But I wasn’t kidding anybody. Including myself.

And looking back on it, I can see the leading edge of a running theme of my career. I don’t remember making a conscious choice in tactics when I picked the fight with Khlaylock; it just felt right. I could just as easily-more easily-have made the Challenge about our tactical dispute; by Khryl’s Law, I could have Challenged Khlaylock to let Khryl decide between us. Strictly business. But I made it personal. Because it was personal. At the bone, it’d be him and me, no matter what we were pretending to be fighting about. To bring the other shit into it would have been. . well. .

Dishonest.

Which is a peculiar word from anyone who’s done what I’ve done and been who I’ve been, but there it is. There I am.

Here’s the truth of Purthin Khlaylock, under all his Truth and Honor and Devotion to Justice and Noble Reluctance to whatever: when you get to the bone, why exactly was he getting ready to kill me?

For calling him names.

Yes: I am a bad man. But I’ve never been that bad.

Purthin Khlaylock, the perfect Knight: one more blood-drunk thug.

And yeah, fine, Blood-Drunk Thug should be carved on my headstone. I don’t claim to be better than him. . but it does still chap my ass a little that everybody claims he’s better than me.

I have my own vanity. I don’t kill for it, that’s all.

The rest of my plan went pretty much the way most of my plans do: just fine, right up to the point where it spectacularly exploded.

That point was dawn-ish, a few seconds after a handful of Knights Venturer and I had fallen on the Black Knife priest-bitches like an old building. I was, in fact, in the middle of pinning Cornholes’ mouth shut with a knife through the soft tissue under her jaw when a roar went up from the Black Knives that was answered by the Khryllians across the river, and it got real fucking bright real fast, blue-white-star bright like Pretornio in the last stage of overload, and I looked down from the second level of Hell and thought, Fuck my ass like a chicken pot pie, because the blue-white star in question turned out to be a butt-naked Purthin Khlaylock, balls-deep in my river while he fought off the entire motherfucking Black Knife Nation. Single- handed.

They poured into the water after him like a black tide, a storm of locusts, a school of giant screaming piranhas, like a whatthefuckdoesitmatter because he wasn’t running away, he was holding his ground inside a ring of sunfire that was the arc of his morningstar.

If you’re ever in Seven Wells and you have a chance to stop by the Halls of Glory in the Great Holding of Dal’Kannith, you can see a really nice depiction by Rhathkinnan, the greatest living painter of Lipke: a fresco fifty feet high and three hundred feet long, Khlaylock’s Stand at the Ford. It’s got it all the first spray of dawn on the vast shadow-pocked face of the vertical city, swarms of uncountable thousands of Black Knives, Khlaylock doing a reasonable facsimile of Khryl Morning Goddamn Star Himself at the center of a rising hurricane of raggedly severed ogrillo body parts while on the opposite bank his cavalry shouts itself into battle order.

I do not, by the way, appear in that painting.

This is only partly because Rhathkhinnan-and the rest of the Order of Khryl-would kind of like to forget I was