Caine Black Knife

KHRYL’S JUSTICE

It wasn’t a good dream.

I couldn’t make it make sense, even as a nightmare: it should have been a net over my face, not a burlap sack. Chunks of puke shouldn’t be flopping around my head. I was sure of that.

The next time awareness knocked a hole in my skull, I started to worry that I was naked, when I should have been suited up in my black leathers. And this wad of cloth tied into my mouth with what felt like rope? Where the fuck had that come from?

It did, however, explain why the chunks of puke were pretty much all small enough to have come out of my nose.

Later, a dimly foggy realization chewed into my forehead that the shoulder I was facedown over should have been flesh instead of metal.

The last worst part: it wasn’t rope on my wrists and ankles. Forget that I didn’t have the throwing knife that was supposed to be in the concealed sheath behind the collar of my missing tunic; not only would that knife have been useless against the armor on this particular back but it wouldn’t have cut what was binding my wrists anyway, which I could recognize because I still had some feeling in my fingers, because he hadn’t put them on as tight as the Los Angeles Social Police had a few years back when they pinched me for Forcible Contact Upcaste.

Stripcuffs.

I puked into the sack again.

Then I fell back down the black hole.

I’ve been lucky enough to make it through my life so far with less than my share of major head trauma. Sure, I’ve been knocked around, bashed with sticks and stones, quarterstaves and iron-bound clubs, warhammers and friggin’ morningstars, even a brick or two; stabbed with stilettos, daggers, knives, and smallswords; taken a broadsword through the liver and an axe into the thigh; been variously shot with arrows, sling stones, bullets and motherfucking blowgun darts-not to mention being once or twice hurled from high places-but I’ve mostly managed to avoid being whacked on the head hard enough to produce more than a few seconds of unconsciousness.

Now, even those few seconds are serious enough; that’s a concussion right there, and anybody who thinks an untreated concussion isn’t serious should go recheck the mortality figures. Still, though, it’s something you generally live through. You wake up with a bad headache and persistent dizziness and nausea, general weakness and shit, and you need some bed rest-or, say, a Khryllian Healing, like the one I got after Tyrkilld slapped me up-to get over it, but you do. Eventually.

When those seconds stretch into minutes, you go from bad headache into the territory of, say, subdural hematoma, which is a fancy way of saying that your brain’s bleeding and starting to swell, which means that you’re not gonna just open your eyes and shake it off and go beat up the bad guys. It means it’s a roll of God’s dice whether you’re gonna open your eyes at all, and if you do it’ll probably be a lot like it was for me: a fucking nightmare.

This is not just a metaphor.

The bleeding-brain kind of unconsciousness is a fall across an event horizon of oblivion: an infinitely instant shredding of everything you are as psychic tidal forces smear you into an eternal scream. Waking up is no treat, either; it doesn’t happen all at once, but in little flickers and flashes that start out as needles and graduate to razors in the eye and the grip of God Himself upon your balls, and it involves a lot of vomit and choking and wishing you could go back to falling into that black hole, because the eternal scream is a helluva lot more fun.

That’s how it is for me, anyway.

Maybe it’s because it seems like every time it happens to me, I start that whole razors-in-the-eyes waking-up crap in a bag over somebody’s shoulder while the sonofabitch is out for a jog.

The only way I can reconstruct roughly how long I must have been out before I started twilighting up from semiconsciousness is to guess how fast Markham could haul my twitching ass from the Pratt amp; Redhorn to the jitney ramp up Hell while making a wide circle around the Spire, because he wouldn’t exactly want to bump into any inquisitive Khryllians on the way.

Did I not mention that part?

Turns out I wasn’t wrong about Calm Guy’s backup. I wasn’t even wrong about the really, really good nerves. My only mistake was assuming that the backup in question would have reason to be afraid of the Smoke Hunt.

Well, okay. That wasn’t my only mistake.

There are ways in which I think really, really fast. Like how to kill people. There are ways in which I don’t think really, really fast. Like working out that the only way Faller’s gunmen could have known I was at the Pratt amp; Redhorn was if they found out from Kierendal amp; Tyrkilld amp; Co.-not fucking likely-or if they found out from, say, the all-too-conveniently lurking-in-an-alley-across-the-street Lipkan ass-cob who booked me the room in the first place.

At the time I was playing sack of meat potatoes, I didn’t have any idea of any of this. There were some inexplicable images swimming around the brimstone swamp inside my head, of Boedecken badlands covered in grain and vineyards and a river dividing a city of neat whitewashed brick tangled up with headless ogrilloi burning with a red fire that cast no light. And that was about it.

I don’t remember much of the early part of my visit to BlackStone. Somebody must have taken the sack off me, because I remember somebody saying good lord, clean him up, and sometime after that I was wet and there was a blinding-bright haze pumping in through my eyeballs that was overinflating my head until I could feel the bones of my skull grinding against each other along jagged fissures as they began to separate 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.

“No-no you can’t-can’t send me back. . can’t give me to them. . please-”

I already have. Officers? Time is short. If you’ll bring him this way, please.“

Stop, goddammit. . stop-”

Hanging from the wire-laced gloves of the Social Police, hands stripcuffed behind me, ankles bound together with the same wire-reinforced plastic, naked, retching, unable to stand, unable to see, I still somehow snarled myself an internal sword of sunfire to cut through the fog inside my head and burn it away. No matter how broken I am, somehow I can always get pissed enough to kill somebody.

Because, y’know, I’ve never been the type to go gentle into that et cetera.

The room snapped into focus. It looked like the hideout of a half-successful caravan raider. Expensive furniture that didn’t match, delicately carved where it wasn’t notched and starting to splinter, upholstered in beautiful leathers and crushed velvets and brocades that couldn’t hide the stains and wear of careless overuse. The rug that filled the whole room had once been fine as anything I’d put in the Abbey, my San Francisco mansion back when I was a star, but now it bore a grey-brown smear of ground-in wear track between the door and the overlarge, overcarved big-dick I’m The Boss desk in overstained cherry. And there were wall hangings and shit that framed silver hookstands holding blackened glass lamps, but the silver was tarnished and the tapestries smudged with lampblack and the walls they hung on were cheap whitewashed plaster tracked with blue-grey mildew. The whole place looked impermanent, half-abandoned already, like this Faller guy had boosted the best of Duke Kithin’s furnishings before he’d left Thorncleft, then had just stashed the shit in some shack so he could piss on it like a bear before leaving it behind.

In that raider’s cave of a room-besides me and the Social Police and Markham Lord Situational Fucking Ethics and the middle sixties-looking guy who was Rababal’s ghost or twin brother or identical goddamn cousin or whateverthefuck that I didn’t care about right then because he was a problem for another time-stood a magnificent man in magnificent armor, the kind of Radiant Mantle of Kingship sonofabitch that doesn’t really exist outside of stories and songs; you know, Arthur, Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, Richard Cour de Lion, all those blood-drunk thugs with good enough press agents to somehow end up heroes to way too many gullible losers.

Not unlike me, I guess. But let that go.

The armor was chrome steel, curves and angles of mirror that gleamed like dawn’s own rhodos goddamn dactylos in the lamplight. The guy inside was your basic snow-topped mountain of Biblical Patriarch, but in the blossom of mature strength-y’know, like that white brow and beard salted his face only to give the calm certainty in his eye a translucent shimmer of Revealed Truth.

When I say eye, by the way, that’s literal.

Half his face had that carved-from-God’s-Own-Granite agelessly rugged beauty that well befits said legendary king. The other half, well. .

His left eye socket was a crumpled ruin of empty scar above a deep ragged dent that once had been nobly jutting cheekbone; it looked a lot like some vicious ghetto punk had, about twenty-five years ago, say, sneak-punched him with his own morningstar.

This appearance was not, as smart people might have guessed already, coincidental.

With all the mental and physical clarity my internal sunblade could bring me, I managed to gasp, “I was never his prisoner. .”

“All that matters,” the soapy on my left said in very credible Westerling, “is that you’re our prisoner now,” and he and his partner kept on hauling me toward where Rababal’s ghost twin cousin was holding the door for us until six foot nine of chrome steel and Biblical Patriarch moved into our way with the reluctantly majestic unstoppability of an entire glacier cracking free of a mountainside to slide into an arctic sea.

The Social Police, wisely, stopped. So did I, perforce.

Purthin, Lord Khlaylock, Justiciar Impeccable of the Order of the Knights of Khryl, turned that Revealed Truth glare on Markham, Lord Tarkanen, Lord Righteous in service to the Champion of Khryl. “Is this truth?”

Markham didn’t so much as blink, let alone flush. “I was tasked by My Lord Justiciar to deliver this man without fail,” he said simply. “I did not fail.”

“Ambushed me. .” I slurred. “Abducted. . while I w’s tryin’ t’ save people. .”

Now Markham did have the grace to flush, just a little bit. So I twisted the knife. It’s what I do. “While I was doing his duty. . defending the Civility of the Battleground. .”

It was more than moderately gratifying to watch color rise through the face of that supercilious Lipkan asscob all the way to the roots of his crewcut.

“A direct order-my duty is to the-”

“Everybody’s got. . a fucking excuse. .” Adrenaline sang in my ears. I didn’t know the words but I could sure as hell hum the goddamn tune. “You abandoned your people to danger. . you swore an oath to Khryl H’mself. . the word’s recreant, yeah? You ambushed me. . without warning or Challenge-makes you, ah-craven-”

The red in Markham’s face had gone white around the eyes. He wheeled on Khlaylock. “My Lord Justiciar-this abuse, my Lord-”

His niece’s jaw had looked like it could split logs; his could crack rocks. “You need not suffer it.”

“He seeks only to cheat the carnifex.”

“It is never wise,” Purthin Khlaylock murmured mordantly around that rock-breaker jaw, “to assume that one knows this man’s intention.”

He didn’t actually lift a gauntlet to the ruin of his empty eye socket, but I’ll bet my nuts he was thinking about it.

Markham aimed that Lipkan nose toward my face like a blade at garde, then waved a mailed hand as he turned away. “I see no reason to allow a personal affair of honor to interfere with the course of justice.”

“Personal. .?” I forced out. “I’m an Armed Motherfucking Combatant. .”

Markham went still. So did Khlaylock.

“ ’S your fucking Law. .”

“It is Khryl’s Law,” Mount Khlaylock rumbled above me, “and you would do well to mind your-”

“Yeah. . sure. Whatever.” My shrug made my head hurt worse, which helped me grin and kept the haze at bay for a few seconds so my mouth could work. “I did not Yield, and I was not defeated in Combat. Markham, Lord Tarkanen, is no true Knight, but is a whatthefuck-a recreant craven ambusher and common criminal, yeah-and I call upon Khryl and His Justiciar to Witness the truth of my charge. I swear by your God and His Law, I am by right a free man.”

This looks on the page a lot more impressive than it sounded drooling out of the smashed-up mouth of a middle-aged blood- and puke-smeared naked guy with stripcuffed wrists and ankles who was hanging from the grips of a pair of homicidal supercops in high-tech body armor, but it worked.

Markham stared like I’d invited him to bend over and lube his asshole. Rababal-Faller-dropped his face into one hand with an English “Ohhh, for Christ’s God damn sake.” The soapies tilted their mirrors at each other, then pointed them back at Khlaylock.

“Legality is moot,” one said. “Administrator Michaelson is our prisoner now.”

“No.” If the stone tablets on which God carved the Ten Commandents could talk, they would have sounded a lot like Khlaylock’s voice did then. “Khryl is Lord of Justice. If Our Lord affirms his charge, this man is free. It is the Law.”

He faced Markham. “Lord Tarkanen, will you Answer?”

Markham looked appalled. “My Lord, he is but grade six-hardly more than an armsman-and his injury. . I misdoubt he can so much as stand-”

“If the Lord refuses my Challenge, I’ll do more than stand.” I tried to sound like I believed it. “I’ll walk right the fuck out of here, and it’s your goddamn duty to make sure I-”

“Do not presume to instruct me on Khryl’s Law.” Khlaylock’s stare never wavered from Markham. Maybe he didn’t want to dirty his eyes with the image of my face. Deliberate as the planet’s turn, and as relentless, he said, “Will you Answer?”

Markham sighed. “My Lord, I will.”

Khlaylock lowered his head. “So let it be. I will Witness.”

“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.

I ended up explaining in a very calm, very quiet voice that we didn’t have enough supplies to survive, and we couldn’t carry people who weren’t pulling their weight, and anyone who wasn’t willing to go all the way with this should just trot on back and give themselves to the Black Knives right fucking now.

This was not the real reason I made everyone eat ogrilloi either. The reason was another of those books Dad made me read.

Heart of Darkness.

There was one thing I never understood about that book: why people think Kurtz went crazy out there. The way I saw it-the way I still see it-Marlow was the crazy one. When Kurtz was murmuring the horror, the horror, I always figured he was talking about having to go back to Europe.

I guess it’s because, y’know, I grew up in the jungle. My jungle had gutters and alleys and CID prowl cars circling just below the cloud deck, but it was a jungle just the same. That was why when the Black Knives showed up was when I started to get happy for the first time since I graduated from the Conservatory. Who says you can’t go home again?

And that’s what I had to do for the others. I had to bring them over to my yard: make them understand that they were in the jungle now. That everything they thought they knew about Who They Were and How Things Are Done and What the World Is All About had been fucked up the ass with a live grenade. That the trick to the jungle is to be top predator.

To eat everybody.

After what we’d been through, they didn’t need a lot of convincing. Oh, there were some token protests about holding the line between us and them and that kind of moral-high-ground bullshit, but the real lesson of Heart of Darkness is that the jungle is always there, inside even the most civilized of us. It whispers shadow love in the twilit corners of our minds, and no matter how deaf we pretend to be, we can’t help but listen.

Don’t believe me? Check the rental figures for my Adventures.

The only survivor with the moral authority to stand up to me would have been Marade, who not only had that parfit gentil Khryllian Knight of Renown thing going but also had been through so much worse at the hands-and otherwise-of the Black Knives than any of the rest of us that if she’d said no, I probably couldn’t have made anybody else say yes without holding knives to their throats. But Marade, for all her power, for all her certain knowledge of Khryl’s Love for her, was not to the manor born; underneath all that Armor of Proof and Morning Star in Her Hand and the rest of it was still just an Actress after all, and I. . well-

I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of.

Saying she was not to the manor born doesn’t say enough. She wasn’t really Marade, not the way I’m Caine. Marade was just a character she was playing. She was still really Olga Bergmann, third daughter of a failing Business family from the Swedish southland who had turned to Acting because her two older sisters’ marriages hadn’t managed to revive the family fortunes. Nothing in her privileged upbringing had remotely prepared her for the brutalization she suffered from the Black Knives; hell, I don’t think anything could prepare anyone to go through something like that. I doubt a Home-born Knight could have survived it any better. I know I wouldn’t have.

She put a good face on it; as long as we were running and fighting, the pressure we were under held her together. But once she was safely at North Rahndhing. .

Her breakdown isn’t really part of this story either. Let’s just say that when the Knights of Khryl came out to face the Khulan Horde at Ceraeno a year and change later, Marade wasn’t with them. She was undergoing drug therapy in the inpatient unit of the Vienna Institute for Social Wellness. She never did recover enough that she could enjoy sex; she’d do it-when it was in her contract-but she’d freeze up and start to shake, and it was always pretty ugly. Which, though nobody ever actually said so, was maybe mostly my fault.

I’ve always had an eye for weakness. It’s a little late to start apologizing for it now.

Then a while after that, down in Yalitrayya during Race for the Crown of Dal’kannith, I’m pretty sure it was at least partly her lingering issues with me that made her get stupid with Berne, which I know for damn sure made her and Tizarre both wish they’d died back with the Black Knives. I’ve second-handed their final cubes. I owed it to them.

Remember what I said about Saving people is not among my gifts?

Anyway, here’s the thing-

As entertaining as it was to kill dozens, maybe hundreds, of Black Knife bucks, I never kidded myself that we were actually accomplishing anything. Except making me, Marade, and Tizarre into overnight superstars. We never forgot that we were there to entertain people; half the battle was coming up with ever-more-inventive ways to slaughter bucks, and the other half was to make sure we never actually escaped.

No fear of that, anyway.

The bucks weren’t our enemies, though, not really; probably starting with Spearboy all the way back outside the gate of Hell, they kept coming at us because they were more afraid of their bitches than they were of dying. For good reason.

So the goal wasn’t to kill bucks (except to amuse the folks back home-who, as it turned out, never got tired of it). And Marade seemed to enjoy herself, but y’know, she had different issues.

All I was trying to do was lead the surviving bucks as close as possible to North Rahndhing, because I had it on, ahem, reliable authority, that there were between five and ten Knights posted there, and one of the few creatures on Home that can outpace a friar or an ogrillo over the long haul is a Knight of Khryl. It’s why they don’t ride. Khryl doesn’t approve of it; Knights bear their arms and armor with their own strength-actually His Own Strength, but let that go. So they run in full armor, and they run like hell. With armsman cavalry to engage the bucks, I could lead Knights on foot to their rear and take out the bitches.

All of them.

I had gotten enough out of that weird-ass three-way I’d had with their god and their top bitch, one I’d nicknamed Crowmane, to understand who was really in charge. Only females entered their fucked-up priesthood of the Outside Power. So once the bitches were gone, we’d have not only wiped out the next generation of Black Knives, we’d also have cut them off from the thing that really made them Black Knives in the first place. Simple, yes?

Simple no.

Try explaining this to Knight Captain Purthin Soldiers-of-the-Lord-of-Battles-Do-Not-Make-War-Upon-Women-and-Children Khlaylock.

So I didn’t bother. Explaining, that is.

His attitude was no mystery to me; it was the institutional attitude of the Order of Khryl, which-as the most militant cult of the Lipkan pantheon-was not exactly unknown to the Monasteries. They all felt that way, and I knew it going in, and timing, as they say, is everything.

Back in the day, it seems that the chance to take a chunk out of the Black Knives was the kind of thing that’d make any Knight Officer of Khryl cream his surcoat. Five hours after Marade had a chance to tell our story, Purthin Khlaylock strode forth from the white gates of North Rahndhing at the head of a column of seven Knights Venturer, a Knight Attendant, and three hundred mounted armsmen, which seemed like a ridiculously small number to head-on a couple thousand-odd Black Knife warriors. Until I saw them in action.

There was only a single engagement in the field, before the big one that ended it, back at Hell. It wasn’t much of a contest.

Khryllian armsmen are the finest soldiers on Home. Lacking the spiritual gifts that would qualify them as full-fledged Knights of Khryl, they compensate by obsessively developing their physical skills, and by their absolute devotion to a code of honor that does not permit even the thought of defeat.

One hundred brilliantly coordinated heavy cavalry with superior armor, razor-barbed lances, and the devastating seven-bladed morningstar, supported by two hundred disciplined, starkly courageous mounted arbalestiers who also carried short billhooks for close work, against a mass of lightly armed ogrilloi who, for all their advantages of size, strength, and speed, had a concept of warfare dependent upon the sort of personal heroics that went out of style at Troy. To handle any necessary personal heroics of our own, we had nine Knights of Khryl.

I don’t know how many bucks we expedition survivors had killed during the Retreat. It was a lot. I mean a lot. Over a hundred, anyway. Maybe one-fifty. In thirty-four days. So the Black Knives were not exactly pussies, y’know, because they just kept coming, no matter how many we took out. But they ran from the Khryllians.

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 the face, the poor bastard’s head just fucking vaporized.

Which almost made me reconsider. But only almost. Like somebody I used to know had liked to say: I died the day I passed my Boards.

From the lip of the escarpment, the vertical city fanned out below us in a spray of pinprick campfires fogged by the waterfall’s spray. A gibbous moon hanging in the southeast whitened the peeled-back levels while I laid out my half-fake plan. I pointed out the downramp from the vault and explained how easy it’d be for Khlaylock to lead his Knights down the tunnel to take the Black Knives from the rear.

Khlaylock, unsurprisingly, was having some difficulty seeing the tactical advantage in this. His scowl kept getting deeper the longer he looked down at the city. “In the best case, our surprise attack turns the Black Knife line long enough for my cavalry to ford the river. Which leaves my Knights and me inside the city with two thousand Black Knives and my cavalry-again at best-funnelled into narrow streetways as they strike inward to join us, forced to fight Black Knife warriors on the worst possible ground.”

I shook my head. “You do this the way I tell you, you won’t have to fight them. They don’t want to fight you-”

“Black Knives are the fiercest warriors of the Boedecken-”

“That’s because what their-uh-priesthood does to cowards is far, far worse than dying in battle.” He turned that scowl on me.

I nodded down into the scatter of spray-fogged campfires. “You know the Black Knives practice sorcery. What you don’t know is that it’s not just sorcery, it’s their religion. And this is their most holy place. It’s the seat of their god. I killed their. . high priest, I guess you’d say-” Because I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell Knight Captain Khryllians Do Not Make War On Et Cetera that I had murdered a female noncombatant. “-and I know where the rest of their priesthood will be. I can take you straight to them. Once you wipe them out, the warriors will crumble. Shit, they’ll be grateful.”

Well, maybe. I had a feeling they wouldn’t be lining up for a chorus of “Ding Dong, the Bitches’re Dead,” though even if my conditioning would have let me tell him that, he wouldn’t have gotten the joke.

His scowl vanished into a pale stone stare colder than the moonlight. “Knights of Khryl are warriors, not assassins.”

“Oh, grow up, for shit’s sake. What’s more important to you: Playing fair? or winning?”

“To act with Honor at all times is the absolute obligation of every Knight. Maintain the Honor of your Person, the Order, and Our Lord. Speak the Truth, though it mean your Death. Defend all those who cannot-”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it before.”

He was already turning back toward the topside access stair. “And there is no need for attack, nor to fear escape of the Black Knives below. Two Knights alone-three perhaps at most, given resupply up the rope we have ourselves lately employed-might hold this shaftway ’gainst the Black Knife Nation entire.”

He was right, of course, which was the problem. Well. . not exactly a problem. .

The only reason I was arguing with him in the first place was that I kind of liked the guy. I had a soft spot for the true-blue Honor-and-Justice types. Still do, a little.

When I was a kid, second-handing pirated Adventures bootlegged off the Net, I was as big a Jhubbar fan as the next guy-even though I couldn’t admit it, exactly. Or even at all. Not in my neighborhood. In the Mission District, you pretty much had to worship Mkembe, though he was long dead; Jhubbar-Raymond Story-was too goody-goody, y’know, noble and courageous, defend the weak and Show the Power of Truth through Righteous Action and all that shit. I was a sucker for it. Though I couldn’t tell anybody-not even Dad-I even wanted to be him when I grew up. He was a Knight of Khryl.

Sometimes I still want to be him.

Sometimes I wonder how much of the stupid shit I’ve done was just to punish myself for not growing up to be Jhubbar Tekkanal. I wonder sometimes if that’s why I married my late wife: because, down deep, we both despised the man I really am. It was the only thing we had in common.

I got over hating myself. Mostly. She didn’t. But let that go.

The point is, I hadn’t brought Khlaylock up there to sell him the plan. My plan wasn’t my plan. My plan was to bring him up there and kill him so I could tell the rest of the Knights he’d been taken by the Black Knives, and then I could lead them in a “rescue” raid; basically, to con the Knights into killing the Black Knife priest-bitches before they found out Khlaylock was dead. Liking the guy was giving me a little trouble pulling the trigger, that’s all.

And that wasn’t the only issue; I had my audience to consider.

We were close enough to the lip of the escarpment that a grab of his arm and a drop to my back for a simple tomenage would have done the trick-and that’s exactly how I’d have handled it, later in my career. But this was early days, and I had no idea just how popular Retreat from the Boedecken had become.

Kollberg was a genius at marketing; he was selling first-hander seats on a per-day basis, with discounts for multiple-day purchase and an option to re-up for extra days if the audience member processed the credit request before he or she left the building. He was also licensing the Adventure to other Studios across Earth, along with a cut-down second-hander cube of highlights starting when I spotted the Black Knives coming across the badlands, so new first-handers could get up to speed on the story arc. Every Studio in the world ended up splitting out some excess capacity; the Studio system hadn’t seen an extended Adventure with this level of nonstop slaughter since Mkembe and Mast in Westmarch Raiders.

By the time I was standing on the escarpment next to Khlaylock, I was already an international star; I just didn’t know it yet. So I was still looking to turn the High Drama volume knob up to eleven.

Which is why I said, “Wow. So Khryl loves cowards now?”

There are lots of cliches for how he took it-pillar of salt, turned to stone, that kind of shit-but none of them capture his eerily explosive stillness; he was locked down like a vault around a bomb. Somebody took the millisecond pause between triggering the detonator and the blast and stretched it into a long, long silence empty of everything but the waterfall’s roar. It really kinda gave me a shiver.

A hot black shiver, just above my balls.

I took that shiver in both fists of my Control Disciplines and jammed it into my adrenals. The night went bright and sharp and loud. Electric jolts along my arms and legs whispered that if I needed to, I could fly. .

When he finally spoke I could barely pick out his voice; it sounded like boulders grinding together in the river beneath our feet.

“You are no Knight, Caine Lackland, and I am not in Khryl’s Battledress-”

“I know a coward when I see one. Khryl does too.”

The look he sent over his shoulder shot those hot black jolts all the way up to the top of my skull. “Were you Armed-”

“Fuck Armed.” I pulled the knives out of my sleeves. A sharp flip of my wrists shot them both hilt-deep into the earth. “You have Khryl’s Strength. I have the truth. You think I’m wrong, prove it.”

“A Challenge? With you?” He stared, morning star hanging slack as his mouth. “Are you mad?”

“Yeah. Crazy too.” He finally turned toward me, slowly, considering, rolling it over in his head to get a good look at the angles. “You claim Khryl favors your plan-?”

“I claim,” I said, “you’re a gutless butt-weasel. You’re a Knight Captain, for shit’s sake. Even if you didn’t have Khryl’s Strength and Khryl’s Speed and Khryl’s Farts and who knows what else, you’re twice my fucking size. What are you afraid of?”

“My reluctance,” he said slowly, “arises of the debt you are owed by the Order, in the rescue of Knight Tarthell, and your aid against the Black Knife Nation. Do you understand that should I choose to Challenge and you Answer, your health, limb, and life itself are at peril? That even should Khryl favor your cause, you may be injured beyond the capacity of His Love to repair?”

I grinned. “Likewise.”

He stared a moment longer. “Will you not retract? You cannot hope to stand against me, Caine Lackland, and I would not willingly do you harm.”

“Sacrilege along with cowardice.” I wasn’t even talking anymore. It was the black jolt working my lips and 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 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.”

“Do you threaten me?” Incredulity ratcheted Khlaylock’s head another inch or two to his right, which was more or less what I’d been waiting for. “Here, I’ll settle it. Ch’syavallanaig Khryllan’tai.”

Social Police stripcuffs are designed with a shear-strength high enough to lift a passenger car, and will withstand not only knives but also bolt-cutters and cold chisels, blowtorches, and maybe even arc welders. Basically anything that doesn’t send out the coded electronic pulse that triggers the doohicky to rearrange the cuffs’ long-chain molecules is pretty much useless. They are not, however, designed to bind the wrists of a guy whose right hand can suddenly become roughly as hot as the surface of the sun.

I admit that that’s more hyperbole-which anyone reading this might guess by the general lack of setting the atmosphere on fire and wiping out all life on the planet-but the point is that the Holy Foreskin was a couple orders of magnitude beyond the heat tolerance of the stripcuffs, so in addition to burning the staggering fuck out of my left wrist and freeing my hands, I shocked a quart of living crap out of Soapy Two, good nerves or not, when his peripheral vision registered a handful of sunfire swinging upside his head.

Nothing wrong with his reflexes: he let go of my arm and twisted toward me with a smoothly professional bob-and-weave that cleared his helmet under my swing, which was okay because I wasn’t aiming for him anyway.

Markham jerked back out of my reach with his gauntlets coming up like a boxer’s guard and some Old High Lipkan trigger word burst from his mouth to drape his entire body in electric blue witchfire-also top-rate reflexes-which was also okay because I wasn’t aiming for him either.

Purthin, Lord Khlaylock, Justiciar Et Cetera, Radiant Mantle of Whothefuckcaresanyway, had just barely time to blink his eye and begin to draw breath for his own Old High Lipkan trigger word when my handful of Holy Foreskin came up his blind side and caught him below his left ear.

There’s an esoteric variant of the Southern Cobra style of chi tao chu’an called Python; it’s based on wrist and open-palm strikes that lead into joint locks and strangles. It was in that Python spirit that my slap didn’t follow through after impact; instead my open palm hooked around the back of his neck so that his reflexive jerk away drove the base of his skull hard against the Holy Foreskin, which was-though less hot than the surface of the sun-plenty hot enough to blast the water content of his skin and muscle into a burst of superheated steam. A shotgun fired beneath the surface of a bathtub filled with blood would make pretty much the same sound.

And nearly as much mess.

Being a minor expert on destruction of the human body, I could go through the technical details, such as how the blast vaporized his upper trapezius and most of his capitor group, crushing his cervical vertebrae into chunks that blew out through his levator scapulae, and so on and so forth-not to mention coming way too damn close to blowing my own damn hand off-but the actual significance of all this was the sum total effect: by the time the Holy Foreskin faded from my palm, Khlaylock’s half-severed head had flopped onto his breastplate and dragged his balance forward over locked knees so that he toppled like a felled tree.

Soapy One, still holding my left arm, took a reflexive step away from the arterial blood spurting out the ragged remnants of Khlaylock’s carotids, which is the only reason a hundred-forty-some-odd kilos of armored meat didn’t actually land on me.

Holy Foreskin-dazzle slowly faded from my eyes, and color slowly leached back into the lamplit room, and from the way Faller and Markham were blinking, they couldn’t see any better than I could. We all stood there for a stretching second or two, staring down at Khlaylock’s corpse while the only sounds were the soft plopping as scorched shreds of his flesh peeled off the walls and dripped to the floor, the sizzle of the steam coming off my newborn-pink palm, and Fallerbal’s low psychotic-fugue moan of oh god oh fuck me fuck me fuck me god. .

Looking back on it, I feel like I should have had some kind of flash then, a life-passing-before-my-eyes vision of all the things Purthin Khlaylock has meant to me in the last twenty-five years. Who he was and what I did to him are so intimately intertwined with everything I am that without having kicked his armored ass off the escarpment above Hell, I can’t imagine ever becoming me.

Instead I just sighed. “Well. That’s done.”

Maybe I’m not so sentimental after all.

Markham stood in a half-jittering immobility, like the blue witchfire crawling over his armor was a few thousand volts AC. I nodded to him. “Hey, you win. Congratulations. Here’s your prize: you get to explain all this to Angvasse Khlaylock. She’ll probably be here in a minute or two; I’m surprised she’s not here already.”

Markham and Faller favored me with identical owl-eyed blinks. “What?”

“Did I not mention that part? Hey, sorry.” Guess I didn’t look sorry either. “Think about it, Markham-you took me out of an alley that’s in the middle of the Riverdock parish. In full view of Tyrkilld Aeddhar’s favorite bar. Where one of his best friends happens to be an ogrillo. You think those shadows were dark to him? What do you think’s gonna happen when he tells Tyrkilld that you slapped me into a skull fracture and hauled me off? In the middle of a Smoke Hunt. With Smoke Hunters standing right in fucking front of you. You don’t think Tyrkilld’s gonna be kinda curious? You don’t think Angvasse’s gonna be, say, a little interested in what happened to her Invested Agent of Motherfucking Khryl?”

“I–I was-” Markham had to cough his throat clear before he could go on. “I was acting on the direct order of the Justiciar-”

“Sure, all right. Did you waste those Hunters? Or do they have some way to recognize you? So they don’t, y’know, kill one of the guys who’s on their side.”

Markham’s mouth snapped shut with an audible clack.

“What are you gonna tell Angvasse about why you’re even here tonight? You gonna tell her you were never in her service at all? Gonna tell her you’re a lying bastard whose main job is to babysit her so that she never finds out what’s really going with the Smoke Hunt?”

“An order of the Justiciar,” Markham said though locked teeth, “which still stands.”

“Sure. Good luck with that, huh?” I swung my ton-and-a-half of head toward Faller. “Shit, man, you’ll have to tell her yourself.”

Faller just gave back the empty stare of a jacklighted deer.

I pointed my chin at Khlaylock’s corpse. “That pile of meat was the local head of state, who just got himself murdered by an Earthman on Earth territory. And you’re about to whisk his killer out of reach of Khryl’s Justice. You get it? You’re maybe five minutes away from war with the Order of Khryl. And because he’s also the Lipkan viceroy, you can likely toss in war with Lipke on top.”

“I–I-I can’t-I mean, the Social Police-I-” Faller’s eyes bugged out and his stammer dissolved into choking.

“Listen to me, Rababal. I’m showing you the way out, get it? All you have to do is tell the truth.”

“What? What truth?”

“Tell her I killed him. Tell her I said I was doing my job. My Invested Agent of Khryl gig. Remind her she knew going in that hiring me doesn’t always work out how my bosses hope it will.”

“Hiring-? Your job?”

I nodded. “She hired me to stop the Smoke Hunt.”

“To-what makes you think-?”

“That was the tricky part of this job. It’s usually easy enough to figure out who’s in charge of shit-all you have to do is find out who’s getting the most out of it, you follow? Who’s gonna win if it goes all the way. But the Smoke Hunt? Everybody gets theirs. It’s a stable system. Nobody wants it to change. The Smoke God gets an endless banquet of dread, fury, and terror. The Hunt’s leadership gets political power-they’ve unified the Boedecken clans in a way this world hasn’t seen since the Khulan Horde. The Khryllians get a permanent enemy that keeps the whole population militarized and obedient. Black Stone gets an open dil, an exploding business in export griffinstones, not to mention a stable slave-labor supply because the toughest, most committed troublemakers get chopped piecemeal into each new round of Smoke Hunters. The Board of Governors gets new access to Home. Hell, even Khryl wins; as an Ideational Power, His Power is a function of the devotion of his worshippers. When shit goes bad, what do people do? They fucking well pray. Khryl’s never been happier. That’s how I knew. It wasn’t one of you, or two or three. It’s too neat. There’s too much to go around. That’s how I knew you’d made a deal. It’s all of you. All you fuckers. Everybody wins.”

My mouth was full of blood and acid bile. “Everybody except the ordinary grills, living in slave ghettoes, trading their balls for a chance at a better life.

Everybody except the regular fucking folk getting ripped limb from fucking limb by the fucking Smoke Hunt. Christ, I hate you people. If you only knew how I hate you.”

I spat the blood on the floor. I was panting. My breath felt hot enough to ignite the room. “And now I’ve fucked you, because there actually are a couple decent fucking people in this artesian shitspring of a town, and they’re on their way here, and there’s no way you’re gonna talk your way out of this. Hell, you can’t even want to. The truth’s your only fucking hope.”

“Perhaps,” Markham murmured. “And perhaps not. Do you believe Khryl’s Champion is likely to defy the expressed Will of the Lord of Battles?”

“Just bet my life on it, didn’t I?”

Soapy One snorted. “What life?” he said, and his shock baton came up on my own blind side and blasted starshells across my brain.

On Home, the physics are wrong for the capacitors in the shock baton. So he had to hit me a couple more times. I remember saying, as I went down, “Tell her-tell her she owes me. Tell her I want to get paid. .”

Then the event horizon surged out from inside my head and swallowed me whole.