Caine Black Knife

there at all. It’s mostly because I spent that battle learning the value of intellectual flexibility and improvisation under pressure.

My Knights, naturally enough, were about half a second shy of breaking for the river; they’d come to rescue Khlaylock, not to slaughter priest-bitches. Slaughtering bitches was my thing. So in that half second while they were all looking down the face of the vertical city instead of chasing the bitches who were scampering off upslope, I shouted, “It’s working! Come on!”

Polished helmets swung my way.

“What do you think is keeping him alive down there? Pure thoughts?” I snarled at them. “If those bitches get away long enough to raise their god and their power, he’s dead and we are too, so get your armored butts moving!” Then I turned and went after the bitches without looking back. Hell, for all I knew I might even have been telling the truth. In a second or two I could hear them on my tail, and I let myself smile into the dawn.

We killed every one of them. All we could find, anyway. Cornholes and Dugsacks and Turdcrotch and Thumbnipples, and when I couldn’t remember if we’d missed any or not, we just went ahead and killed whatever other bitches we came across. It was fun, making them scream and bleed and beg. It was more than fun. Whoever said “Revenge is a dish best served cold” never tasted it hot.

It was so much fun, in fact, that I completely forgot to pack it in and slip away while I had the chance.

Pretty soon-too soon-it was all over. The surviving bucks and juvies had scattered to the Boedecken winds, and there weren’t even close to enough Khryllians to run them all down; some were taken into other clans, but ogrillo solidarity in general didn’t really extend as far as Black Knives. Most of them ended up ditching the Boedecken altogether for human cities, slipping into the Folk slums of towns all over Lipke and the Ankhanan Empire to try and live out their days pretending they’d never even heard of Black Knives.

Broken Knives, the other clans call them now. Limp Dicks.

All that came later, though; at the time, while the cavalry was still merrily slaughtering whatever fleeing bucks they could catch, I was getting a swift boot up the ass on my way out of the Khryllian camp.

Which is not the worst that could have happened. When a couple of the Knights Venturer caught my elbows in their gentle-but-firm too-bad-for-your-punk-ass way and and let me know they were hauling me off to where Knight Captain Khlaylock was waiting outside camp, all the Holy shit, I actually fucking pulled it off euphoria in my chest transubstantiated into a couple yards of ice-cold concrete because, y’know, in all the excitement I had just plain forgotten that Khlaylock was still alive. And that he might find himself inclined to be a little stern with me.

I kept seeing the cloud of bloody mist that had once been the head of a Black Knife after its close encounter with Khlaylock’s morningstar. This image became considerably more vivid when we reached Khlaylock and I saw the ruin of his face. Khryl’s Love had Healed it as it was, fusing bone and flesh into a rumpled crater of scar.

Imagine my surprise, then, when Khlaylock waved away the Venturers and led me down a nearby wadi, where I found a fully tacked saddle horse peacefully cropping scrub in the morning sun.

“Take him and go,” Khlaylock said. His voice sounded like somebody was scraping cinder blocks together in his throat. “Go and never return, Caine Lackland.”

I stood there blinking into the sun. “Excuse me?”

“He is a fine gelding,” Khlaylock grated. “He will bear you well.”

“I, ah-I don’t know what to say-”

“You have spoken overmuch already.”

“I just-well, I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but-I mean, this wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. .”

“Think of it as undeserved grace.”

“I guess I sort of thought you’d want another crack at your Challenge-”

To which, by the way, I was fully planning to Yield and fess up in front of the whole mob about how I’d clocked him with a Sunday punch and sort of throw myself on his, and Khryl’s, questionable mercies, but he just turned his remaining eye on me like his stare could nail me to the ground. “Go. Do not let another dawn find you within my sight. Ever.”

I went.

I was only an hour outside the camp when the Studio pulled me. Two days later-before I even got out of the hospital-I finally realized why Khlaylock didn’t re-Challenge. He’d Challenged me for calling him a coward. Get it?

He was afraid he’d lose. Again.

No wonder he was pissed. We can forgive any crime except the murder of our illusions.

Khlaylock lifted that gauntlet from Markham’s shoulder and waved it negligently in my direction. “Release him.”

“You don’t understand,” Soapy Two told him from my right. “Administrator Michaelson is in our custody-”

“The failure of understanding is yours.” A single gleaming stride had Mount Khlaylock louring over Soapy Two like an unquiet volcano. “I am the guardian of Khryl’s Law on His Battleground. Release this man.”

Soapies are not known for unsteady nerves. That mirror-mask gave back only a smear of Justiciar and a quietly flat “And we are the Social Police. This is, by treaty, Earth land. Please step aside, sir.”

This could have gotten interesting in an existentially satisfying way, but there was also the unfortunate possibility they might have come to some kind of civilized solution, and one of the problems with being a bad guy is that civilized solutions just never turn out well for you.

Besides, it would have been plain sloppy to let this opportunity slip away. Not likely I’d get another.

I squinted my one good eye up at Khlaylock’s. “Sucks to live in fear, doesn’t it?”

“What?” He knew better than to get into a conversation with me, but I guess he just couldn’t help himself.

“Were you not pledged to Combat, I would undertake to teach you the meaning of fear.”

Remember that eye for weakness?

I sneered into the pretty half of his face. “Yeah, teach me. Might as well learn from the master.” Lightning flickered behind his bright-gleaming eye. I had him by his metaphorically empty nutsack.

He went for contempt. “How a villain as low and vile as you can question my heart-”

“For fuck’s sake, Khlaylock, do we have to have this fight all over again? It doesn’t take guts to smash some poor bastard’s skull with a morningstar. If you had any stones at all you’d kill me right here, you punkass sack of shit. Or just let Soapy haul me off. I mean, they’re taking me straight to True Hell. That’s closer to justice than anything you’ll get from Khryl.”

He took a step so that he could tower over me even more than he had Soapy Two. “Is that what you’d prefer?”

“Some people really are upright and pure and the perfect Knight and all that shit. Marade was. More than you, anyway. I’m thinking Angvasse is. You?

You just play the part because you’re pissing your codpiece terrified that if you screw up, Khryl won’t love you anymore.”

He drew himself up and gathered dignity around himself like a mantle of righteousness; he had an answer to this one. “Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.”

I had an answer too. “Who said that? Some other nutless wonder?”

Markham shouldered forward. “The courage of the Justiciar is legendary-”

“Only compared with yours, ass-cob.” I shook some pity into my sneer. “It’s one thing to be a good guy because that’s who you are. It’s something else to be a good guy because you’re too much a fucking pussy to break the rules.”

Cords twisted across the undamaged half of Khlaylock’s forehead. “Were you not already pledged to Combat-”

“Yeah, yeah. Bored with this. Let’s fight.”

Khlaylock fixed his good eye on Soapy One, who had me by the left arm. “Release him.”

Soapy One might have been carved from the same rock as Mount Khlaylock. “I repeat: please step aside, sir. I won’t ask you again.”