Caine Black Knife

PART ONE
BELOW HELL

I leaned on the deck rail and silently numbered my dead.

The slow heartbeat of the riverboat’s steam-driven pistons pulsed in my bones. The waterfall hush from the sidewheel’s rising flukes shuffled the chatter and bustle of passengers and crew into white noise. I preferred it that way.

I’ve never been exactly social.

I had barely spoken since Thorncleft. I traveled alone. I couldn’t have made myself bring companions.

Not to the Boedecken. Not on this river. My river.

Fucking astonishing: how many people I knew who died up here. I couldn’t remember all the names. Rababal, Stalton, that Lipkan supposed-to-be priest of Dal’kannith. . Pretornio. Hadn’t really thought of them, any of them, in maybe twenty years. Lyrrie. Kess Raman. Jashe the Otter. Others. Dozens of others. Thirty-five? Thirty-six?

I couldn’t pin down how many. I wasn’t sure it was important, but somehow I thought it ought to be.

Back on Earth, it’d have only taken a minute or two to dig the cube out of my library and start to live the whole thing again. I didn’t think I would have.

Didn’t think I could have.

After I retired-in the bad days, that seven years when my legs never quite worked and the background music of my life was a mental track of the nearest bathroom because I could never tell when I was about to shit myself-I sometimes cubed my old Adventures. Caine’s old Adventures. Just on the really bad days. In the bad nights, when the shitswamp I’d made of my life sucked me down and drowned me. But I never cubed this one.

Not that I had to. All I had to do was stop holding it all down.

I still held it all down. Still hold it all down. I didn’t even know why. They’re fucking dead. Every one of them. Dead in the Boedecken Waste. Nameless corpses in the badlands’ dust. Left to the buzzards, the crows and the khoshoi.

Left to the Black Knives.

And if somebody let any of them out of Hell long enough to take a new look at this fucking place, the shock’d probably kill them all over again.

The gravel-scoured folds of the badlands had softened into rolling fields of maize and beans, well-ordered woodlots and neat rows of birch and alder windbreaks. Where the land was too rugged for food crops, the hills were terraced with vineyards: long trellised racks of twisting bark-shagged vines hung with purple and red and green clusters that I could smell even down here on the river. The river was itself new: shallow with youth and careful engineering, its broad slow curves fed the vast network of irrigation ditches and ponds and reservoirs that had brought the Waste to life. And somehow I couldn’t make myself believe this was a good thing.

These waves of living green looked like less to me.

The old Boedecken had been exactly that: old. Carved by time into its true shape. Harsh, jagged, scarred by existence, grim grey jaws locked onto the ass end of life.

I’d kind of liked it that way.

The river was the only change up here that hadn’t surprised me. Whenever I let myself, I could make the river’s birth happen inside my head vivid as a lucid dream. Like lots of births, the river’s had been ugly. A sea-wrack of pain and terror. A hurricane of blood.

The kind of fun I hadn’t had in a long, long time.

I kept my head down while the riverboat churned through the outer sprawl of Purthin’s Ford. I wasn’t ready to look up at Hell.

I knew it was there. When the light was good and the air was clear, I’d been able to see the Spire for two days.

But I didn’t look up now, while neat rows of white brick houses and red tile roofs around well-ordered plazas commanded by greystone Khryllian vigilries drifted south behind the docks and warehouses to either side, while chill black shadows of high-curved bridges wiped the ship from bow to wheel to stern, and the tiled arches were tight enough around the deck that I could smell the soap somebody had used to scrub the stonework clean.

I made a face that cracked the dust on my cheeks. When I licked my lips, they tasted like an open grave.

What was I, superstitious? Didn’t feel like fear. Didn’t feel like what people used to call post-traumatic stress disorder. Sure, if I let it, every second of Retreat from the Boedecken would come alive in my brain just like it was happening all over again. But that shouldn’t scare me. Just the opposite.

This place made me. I came here a nobody on my way to never-was. I left here the legend I always wanted to be.

Everything I’ve ever done pursues me. Like a doppleganger, a fetch, my past creeps up behind and strangles me in my sleep. When hunted by a monster in your dreams, you save yourself by facing the monster and demanding its name. In learning the monster’s name, you rob it of the power to haunt you. But I was awake. And anyway I already knew my monster’s name.

It was Caine.

My father used to tell me that you can’t control the consequences of your actions. You can’t even predict them. So all you can do is your best, and all that matters is to make sure what you do will let you look in the mirror and like what you see.

I can’t remember the last time I liked what I see in the mirror.

There was a writer from Earth’s twentieth century who wrote that “sin is what you feel bad after.” Of all the things I’ve done, what I did up here-

Maybe that was the feeling that made my mouth an open grave. That hung a brick around my neck to hold down my head. Maybe it was shame.

Maybe that was why I couldn’t put a name to it.

I’ve never pretended to be a good man. I have done very, very bad things in my life. Anybody who believes in Hell believes that Hell exists for men like me.

Fair enough. I was on my way.

On my way back.

After a while, I pushed myself off the rail and went into my cabin to organize my shit for debarking.

I still hadn’t looked up at Hell.

Just so we’re clear: I didn’t come to the Boedecken to save Orbek. I didn’t come to save anybody. Saving people is not among my gifts.

Shit needs to be settled eventually. One way or another. That’s the only way I can explain it.

Or even think about it.

There was a novelist on Earth, back around the beginning of the twentyfirst century, a guy my dad admired quite a bit. He wrote some books where the basic idea was that since you can’t control the consequences of what you do, the only thing that really counts is why you do it. You get it? The measure of right action is righteous intention. This writer was a religious type-a Mormon, don’t ask-and I guess he figured that if your heart’s right, God takes care of the rest.

Well, y’know. .

I know some gods. Better than I want to. Not one of them gives a shit about your heart.

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine wrote a book that was supposed to be the story of his lives. Or stories of his life, you pick. Anyway: he wrote that what your life means depends on how you tell the story.

If it makes you feel better to pretend I had some noble purpose, knock yourself out. If you’d rather pretend I was driven by guilt, or by personal obligation, or that I just finally grew up enough to want to clean up my own fucking mess, that’s fine too.

This is the story of what happened when I came to the Boedecken. What happened. Not why. The only why is that I made up my mind. I decided, and I went. That’s it. Anybody who needs to know more about why should go ahead and fuck off.

Reasons are for peasants.

My dead wife-the one who decided she’d rather go play goddess than be married-she used to like to say that not everything is about me.

Screw that.

Who’s telling this story, anyway?

I dragged the travel trunk bouncing down over the ribs of the gangplank. At the foot of the plank I took a couple steps to the side to clear the way for the passengers behind. I stood the trunk on end and sat on it.

*All right, you bastard. I’m here.*

I’ve been doing the Actor’s Soliloquy for so many years it’s mostly reflex: whenever my attention starts to wander, I find myself narrating my life in subvocal twitches of lips and tongue and glottis. I used to make a good living at it; back in the day, such subvocal twitches had been registered by a tiny device inside my skull behind my left ear and transmitted a universe away to Earth, where a sophisticated computer algorithm had translated them into a quasithoughtlike internal monologue for the amusement of tens of thousands of narcotized fans who’d paid obscene amounts of money for the illusion of being me.

My life always played better than it lived.

Those days are long gone, but I still monologue. Now I play for an audience of one.

*Dammit, I’m here. How about a hint? A clue? A pillar of cloud? A burning sonofabitching bush?*

I waited, but there was only dockside chatter and the rustling thump of cargo nets, whistles of distant birdsong and the ripple-slap from the river.

God doesn’t talk to me anymore.

“Fine,” I muttered. “Fuck you anyway.”

Maybe He’d decided to hold a grudge for that sword-through-the-brain thing. Which suits me fine, most of the time; I have a grudge or two of my own.

I shoved myself to my feet and dragged the trunk back into the line of passengers filing toward the customs barn.

The queue was minded by spearmen in cheap-looking hauberks, Khryl’s sunburst displayed on their chests in scuffed and faded yellow paint. Their helmets and the shields slung on their backs looked like quality work, though, the sunburst design inlaid in polished brass, and the half-meter blades that tipped their spears were conspicuously well tended. Hand labor on the docks was done by teams of ogrilloi, who wore light tunics in various degrees of stained disrepair. The tunics seemed to be some kind of uniform; each of the various work gangs had its own distinctive design.

They also had their fighting claws sawed blunt.

Each gang also had two or three grills in oversized versions of the sunburst hauberks, with helmets that bore flares of steel bars descending from their lower rims, fanning to guard the neck. These supervisors each carried thick hardwood staves maybe five feet long, their ends capped with steel and knobbed with nailheads.

More interesting were four humans who patrolled the dockside on the backs of heavily muscled horses. No cheap chainmail for them; theirs was so fine-linked it rippled like watered silk, and their sunbursts gleamed with gold leaf. Most interesting of all were their weapons: in addition to the traditional seven-bladed morningstar of the Khryllian armsman, each of them carried slung on a shoulder what looked like the most serious kind of riot gun, despite being filigreed with gold on the intaglioed walnut stocks and chased with electrum: under short straight no-choke barrels, their tube-mags terminated in foot-long, no-frills, cold steel bayonets.

Times change.

Some people blame me for that. Go figure.

I gave a sidelong squint to the nearest of the horses until my attention drew its gaze. And got nothing. The horse’s stare was bleak: dead as a chip of stone. Curls of foam dripped around the pivots of the curb bit wedged deep into his mouth. A martingale with straps an inch thick locked his head down. And spending all day hauling around two hundred fifty pounds of chainmailed pain-in-the-lumbar wasn’t doing the poor fucker any favors either.

It hurt me just to look at, and I don’t even like horses all that much. Horses in general. About all I can say for horses in general is they’re a hell of a lot better than people in general.

The dockside was eerily quiet, despite the crowd of passengers from the riverboat, despite the teams of sullen hulking dockers cranking donkey-wheel cranes to swing cargo nets off or onto barges, loading or unloading chockedwheel wagons that stood with yokes and traces empty, despite all the sausage carts, the pastry kiosks and the dozens of little freestanding market stalls thrown up in the shade of high warehouse walls. When the riverboat’s steam whistle shrieked noon into the silence, people all over the dockside jerked and jumped and then laughed at themselves-but even the laughter was subdued. Self-conscious. Nervous. People instinctively knew that the quiet here was no accident.

The dockside was quiet because the Khryllians like it that way.

It wasn’t a good quiet. It wasn’t library quiet, temple quiet, evening-by-the-fire quiet. It was lying in bed without moving because Dad’s drunk in the hall and you don’t want to give him the idea of coming into your bedroom quiet. When your authority comes straight from God, shit always turns ugly.

And these were the good guys. I’ve known my share of Khryllians. And they are good guys. Honest, upright, true-motherfucking-blue do-or-die parfit gentil knights of renown. That just makes it worse.

As long as I was just shuffling along in line, it wasn’t too bad. A couple of feet every minute or two, dragging the trunk, leaning on it when I had the chance, shading my eyes against the sun to watch the grills work the docks-

I could take it. Being there.

I didn’t have to do anything. Didn’t have to make any moves. Nobody got hurt. Nobody died. Nothing unlocked the black vault inside my chest. Not even the Spire, a thousand-odd feet of whitestone looming behind my left shoulder. The glare off its facing made a pretty good excuse not to look up at Hell.

The passenger queue snaked to one side of the customs barn; most of the smothering semi-gloom inside was full of cargo crates and livestock and whiteshirted human clerks with clipboards, charcoal pencils in stained fingers and behind blackened ears, damp seeping rings below armpits. Autumn sun heated the corrugated steel roof to a medium broil that cooked human sweat, cow and pig farts, machine oil, wood mold and rotting straw into a chewy stench, familiar, suffocating.

Smelled like civilization.

I passed the time reading an enormous poster of fading edge-curled parchment that listed in six languages the bewildering variety of items which nonSoldiers of Khryl were forbidden to possess or import into Purthin’s Ford. Some were understandable enough: a variety of impedimentia related to combat magick, edged weapons with blades longer than two-thirds handbreadth, that kind of thing. But others made me shake my head. Grapevine cuttings? Beverages of greater than 17 percent alcohol? Live mealworms?

The lower margin contained two vividly recent additions painted in doublesize brushstrokes of arterial scarlet: CHEMICAL EXPLOSIVES