Caine Black Knife

GIFT

And you know already it’s not a dream.

You know it by the smell of scorched pig fat trailing up from the lamp’s smoking wick. You know it by the dirty yellow light leaking in through the veiny grease-smeared parchment that covers the shack’s lone window, by the grey splinters in the weathered plank door on trestles that passes for a table, by the mildewblackened straw humped into a pair of beds back by the earth-wall hearth.

But you know only that this is no dream; you have not yet guessed that this is My Gift to you.

There is the feel of alien muscles, too long and hard for human; your arms are now a double-span longer than your legs. Your pebbled hide slides over ribs too heavy, not flexible enough, guarding a heart that beats too hard and too slow. Pale northern sun barely warms your spinal ridge through the heavy leather of your tunic. Your trifid upper lip parts around your upcurved tusks and you growl, Kopav Dust Mirror. They tell me he dens here.

The smaller of the two ogrillo studs inside swivels on his stool till his back is to you. His spinal ridge is bent like a bow: pup rickets, maybe. His skull crest is bald and bleached with age. You smell human.

The big one snorts. Hrk. Human.

You take a step, clearing the doorway. I want to find Kopav Dust Mirror. I can pay.

Bet you can, citybred. The small one glances over his twisted shoulder. Nice boots.

Yeah. Hrk. Boots. The big one snuffles a gust of corruption. Something rotten’s stuck in his teeth. Maybe it’s just his teeth. Don’t see boots like that in Hell.

Or Ignik Dust Mirror. Either one. Ignik ’Tchundiget.

Don’t know you, citybred. The little hunchback flips one fighting claw forward over his fist, examining it ostentatiously. Name your clan.

Black Knife.

Both studs go still. They stare at you so they won’t look at each other.

Finally the hunchback says, Ain’t Black Knives. Ain’t since the Horror. His shell of overplayed boredom has dissolved into wary tusk-display.

You shrug. I can take that up with Kopav.

Black Knife? Hrk. Black Knife? The big one sniggers. Looks more to me like No Knife. He looks at the other. Good one, hey? No Knife.

Your heart thumps into a heavier cadence that swells your brow ridges with angry blood, and you look down at your arms, at the sleeves of your tunic; sleeves longer than any ogrillo ever wears, sleeves so long they’d foul your fighting claws. If you had fighting claws.

Your wrists are empty as a human’s. Blank except for wads of scar tissue.

The stumps of your shame.

You give your shame the answer you carry in a sheath sewn inside your tunic: an SPEF KA-BAR, seven inches of matte-black chrome steel blade so sharp that just its pressure against the side of the big one’s neck draws a thin chain of blood-beads gemlike along its edge.

This enough knife for you?

Hey now. He doesn’t move: not as stupid as he looks. Hey now.

The hunchback rises, slow, hands up and open, the human gesture of surrender. His fighting claws fold along his forearms. No need to hook red, hey? Easy now. Just say what you want, hey?

I want some eyeball with Kopav Dust Mirror.

You might like to tell me what for, he offers, sidling closer.

You might like your fuckbitch’s head where it is. You add a little pressure to the knife. Blood spoor pumps your salivary glands. Keep your teeth off my kill.

Hey-hey, fuck! The big one looks puzzled. Offended. Not frightened. Not hurt. Hey, I’m cut! He cuts me. Hey-

The hunchback considers this. Here’s the call, citybred. Come back two league-walks after sundown-

Your eyes flick toward the window, instinctively, to check the light and gauge the hour, just a flick, less than an eyeblink, but they knew you’d do it and the big one jerks his head back from your blade and one fighting claw jams for your groin while his other slashes for the forearm tendons of your knife hand. You twist sharp enough to knock the groin stab aside, but you feel the tug below your navel and a sudden flood scalds your crotch and thickens the air with sweet hot blood. You flick the KA-BAR in a short arc and the blade sticks in bone; the big one howls and wrenches his arm away into the table and it collapses and he goes with it. The little one lunges fast as a pro but your other hand comes out full of Automag and a single squeeze of burstfire unlaces his belly and blows him spinning backward to crash into the shack wall.

The parchment window rips. Sunlight stabs a curl of gunsmoke.

A continuous clang sings in your ears.

The big one cowers, kneeling, tears painting crimson streaks along his snout. The hunchback sits crumpled against the wall, cursing in a low, steady monotone while he tries to hold his guts in place with both hands. Fuckbitch. You got a gun. A fucking gun. You never say you got a gun, you fuckbitch.

You step over to him, Automag leveled on the big one. Kopav Dust Mirror, you remind him.

Fuck my bitch. I never be shot before. Fucking guns. This kills me, hey?

Likely.

You fuckbitch.

Want to go easy? I track that. You squat beside him and show him the knife.Want to go hard, I can track that too.

He stares through you.

You shrug. Or lie in your shit and hope a Knight comes. Maybe Khryl grants a Healing after you tell him how you try to gut me for my boots, hey?

His eyes drift shut.

What you want?

It’s you, hey? You’re Kopav?

Yah.

You’re Kopav ’Jurginget? Kopav Black Knife once?

His eyes open again. They’re the same color as yours. Once, he says. In puptime. Before the land hates Black Knives. Long gone now. I’m Dust Mirror since the Horror. No more Black Knives.

Your upper lip curls under and your lower peels down, baring your tusks to the roots. Except for me.

His gaze fixes on you, and there’s a hint of a spark there before a spasm of pain smudges his face blank. What you want?

You stand, knife in one hand, Automag in the other. Submission.

Huh. His face goes old now, tired and sad. Just that?

Yeah.

Fuck my bitch. Dint have to shoot me.

You cock your head half an inch. Dint have to rush me.

So-submission. His jaw works. And?

And you go easy.

He stares at you for a long time. From outside come grunts and distant shouts and shuffle and scuffle, drawn by the shots. Inside there is only blood and bowels and the whimper of the bigger one clutching the spurting gash in his forearm. You can see pain picking up steam by the waves of emptiness that roll through the hunchback’s eyes.

Finally he hisses resignation. Dint have to shoot me.

You wait.

He rolls himself forward off the wall, kneeling, and lowers his face until his forehead rests on your insteps. You thumb the Automag over to single shot.

He says, I give myself to you-

You center the muzzle on the crown of his spinal ridge.

— fuckbitch.

The slug splinters a fist-size hole through the floor planks. A wet one. You track the hunchback’s brains over to the other.

Ignik? Ignik Dust Mirror: Tchundiget?

Uh. He lifts eyes like bloody eggs. Kill me too, you gonna?

You twitch the Automag and point it between your boots.

Down.

Whimpering, he presses his forehead into his sire’s gore. I, I, I give-he’s snuffling so hard he can barely get the words out-I give myself to you.

You drop to one knee and tuck the Automag back into its holster by your kidney. Ignik gasps when you grab his wounded arm-bone scrapes together in there: splintered ulna, maybe. You press the gash your knife left on his forearm to the shallow rip his fighting claw gouged in your belly.

This is my battle wound. This is your battle wound. Our wounds are one. Our blood is one.

His jaw hangs open like he’s trying to draw flies to the rot on his teeth. I uh I uh I uh-who are you?

Use your fucking feet. Black Knives don’t kneel.

Bu bu bu hrk? He smears crimson tears off his face with a greasy hand. Black Knives?

You palm the KA-BAR and roughly square his shoulders. You’re filthy, little brother. And soft: too long in Hell. Your tusks are grey. Your neck bends easy.

He slobbers. And you-you-and you-I am Black Knife. You flip the KA-BAR pommel-first and hand it to him. Now, so are you.

My Gift has now been given, and I release you: you open your all-too-human eyes, stare at the mold-eaten plaster ceiling above your bed, and mutter, “Son of a bitch.”

And I imagine that it is the weight of years you shed to rise in that grey dawn. The deep ache in your joints may be the memory of dread: darkness and terror, the cotton-rip of flesh tearing under blunt claws, the icy inevitability of agony and death-

And yet it may be only the scars of half a century at war.

I cannot know. Though I feel the grinding of hip and shoulder and the scrape of hangover-dried eyelid, taste the fewmets of last night’s brandy and smell the old sweat that stains your tunic with salt rings-though I can count the pulse in your temples and calculate to a nicety the uneasy pressure in your bladder-I can never know what you’re thinking. Perhaps this is why you have fascinated me so. It is as good a reason as any.

Which is to say it means nothing at all.

You limp, stiff with morning, to the dirty bubbled window and rest your forehead against the autumn-cool glass. I fancy you wonder how you came to be so inexplicably old; I fancy you recall yourself facing Black Knives at twenty-five and marvel that as many years have passed from then to now.

You turn aside to the water stand and mop your face with a dripping towel that smells of rot. When you regard your reflection in the silvered glass above the basin, you scowl at the scrapes of white at your temples, at the salt in your once-black beard. You scowl and you shake your head and you scowl some more, and you sigh like a tired old man. . but we both know it’s a pose.

Shall we say: an act?

The dark flame in your eye is as plain to you as it is to me.

Your scowl turns thoughtful, and I know: you’re thinking that I could be lying to you.

What My Gift has shown you-is it history? is it news? is it prophecy?

Is it horseshit?

And I watch your scowl settle, and harden, and finally crack toward a grim smile, and I know: you have discovered that you don’t care.

I have Called. You will answer.

Have you found in your heart yet a story you can tell your daughter, that sweet half-godling child who dreams of you in her castle bed so many leagues away from this mountain town? Will you share with her guardian a reason? An excuse?

Or when they call for you, will only echoes answer?

Will you say to Lady Faith, ten-year-old Marchioness of Harrakha: “Your Uncle Orbek’s getting himself into some trouble. I owe him. He went into the Shaft for me.”

Will you say to Lady Avery, the formidable Countess of Lyrissan: “I have to go north for a while; there’s news of Black Knives in the Boedecken. You don’t want that kind of trouble to your north.”

Or will you tell them the truth?

Will you reveal the fresh trip of your pulse? The high sweet song adrenaline hums in your veins, the youth My Gift breathes into your old, tired legs?

Will you tell them that you feel alive again?

This is My Gift to you, My Devil. Come out from your place and walk once more to and fro upon the world and go up and down in it. I give you back your joy. I give you back your passion. Come forth, My Caine. My love.

Come forth and serve Me.

Come out and play.