Caine Black Knife

HAND OF PEACE

The robe itched. It smelled like meat.

I padded barefoot up an endless spiral of stairs built out from an inner cylinder of granite; the outer drum curved a good six feet clear of the stairs’ empty edge, leaving a long, long drop to the lamplit arc of the Lavidherrixium below.

My hair was drying stiff, and my face felt tight and sticky, and my skin crawled, and I couldn’t stop half a grimace that was at least part smile. So many people would be shocked, shocked, to find me suddenly fastidious about bathing in blood. .

Funny thing: most of them were dead. Really funny thing: I killed a lot of them myself.

I’m not known for my sparkling sense of humor.

Eventually the smell of blood and lampblack gave way to clean after-rain and a sunset breeze, and the steps became damp, and I rounded the curve of the cylinder and found myself outside. Way outside.

An intricate scale model of Purthin’s Ford speckled with pinpricks of firelight stretched away below, and the sudden shift in perspective from six lamplit feet to six moonlit miles kicked me behind the knees and nearly pitched me headlong over the edge.

I lurched away from the rim, slipping, pressing my back against the white-stone curve of the Spire, bare feet scrabbling for purchase on the damp stair, and I held himself there for a year or two until my vertigo began to pass.

Eventually I could breathe again.

“Holy crap.” A faded wheeze: that was all I had. “They couldn’t post a fucking sign? Maybe put up a railing? Holy crap.”

The final curve of the stairs looped up to the topmost reach of the Spire. I went up it with my right shoulder brushing the wall and my eyes on the stairs in front of me; even the top of the escarpment, only a hundred feet below, pulled at my balance, dragging my head toward the brink.

I had a feeling that even Khryllians didn’t come up here lightly.

The five spires around the top of the Eternal Vaunt curved upward like tenmeter fingers of an upraised hand, plated in lustrous white metal; between them the cap was a steep slant of the same metal, polished and still slick after the rain. The stairs ended where the metal began; the slope of metal curved upward in a convex arc so that its apex was out of view.

I reached down and laid my palm on the metal: smooth and slick and colder than the rain.

Hmm.

I knew enough about the physics of magick to understand that the curve of the finger-spires above would focus Flow on that apex-the cup of the stylized palm-so this metal would be conductive. . not silver, though. From this height, a slash of sun still burned the horizon, visible through a rent in the slow clouds; in its light the metal showed no hint of tarnish, and I couldn’t imagine a legion of Khryllians making the climb up here for a daily polish. Not to mention Ma’elKoth and his friggin’ artistic sensibilities. . which meant this had to be something like, well-

Platinum.

And not leaf, either; though I couldn’t guess the thickness, this was clearly designed to be walked on. I frowned up at the vast finger-spires and the plated convex slopes between-could there be this much in the entire world? — but then I shrugged. If your basic Joe Alchemist can turn lead into gold, Ma’elKoth could probably make platinum out of his own turds.

*Figures,* I monologued. *Silver just isn’t quite white enough, is it?*

“Please join me. The view is better from up here.”

My jolt at the unexpected voice didn’t quite send me slipping down the platinum slope, tumbling off the rim of the thousand-foot tower and screaming down through misting drizzle to shatter some random embrasure far below in a cannonball of meat and bone. Not quite. But it came close enough that I saw the whole thing happen inside my head.

“Yeah?” Panting, I crouched and leaned on the platinum. It felt even colder now, smoother, satin ice. “Then it’ll be nice if I live long enough to see it, huh?”

“If Khryl had willed your death for this day, you would have died in the Riverdock customs sequestry. Join me.”

The voice was feminine, educated, with the air of effortless Lipkan aristocracy that Ankhanan society types so desperately try to emulate; at the same time, it had a full-throated chest resonance belonging more to fields than to drawing rooms. A rasping edge hinted that the woman who belonged to that voice spent a fair amount of her time on those fields shouting orders above the clash of weapons and the drum of steel-shod hooves.

I thought blankly, a chick?

I clicked over some decades-old Monastic research on the Order. This’d be the first female Champion of Khryl since, what, Pintelle? Call it eighty-odd years, give or take.

Wow.

Bare feet gave me just enough purchase on the platinum, despite the damp, that if I trusted my weight and didn’t lean too far into my balance I could make my way up the slope.

She stood at the focus of the Purificapex, her back to me, hands folded behind her. She wore a robe identical to mine, stained with old blood, raised hood shrouding her head. Her feet were bare, her ankles pale and thick, her calves trim, chiseled white marble; her folded hands were long and hard on thick corded wrists.

Beside her stood a waist-high extrusion of metal sloping up out of the general flooring, smooth on top, gently sloped, maybe ten inches wide and a couple of feet long. On top of it rested a leather bundle, rolled and tied with a thong like a chef’s knife wrap.

Good size for an altar, maybe. Or an anvil. Or a chopping block.

On the far side of the altar-block there was some kind of a long handle-like the hilt of a bastard sword wrapped in wire-sticking up at an angle. That handle was the only part of the furnishings that wasn’t platinum; it looked old, rusted, eaten by age and exposure.

I padded up behind her. “Think your boy Markham believes this apology crap?”

She didn’t move. “It does not matter what he believes.”

“Then why the story?”

“It is the truth.”

“Oh, come on.”

One shoulder lifted a millimeter. “It is part of the truth. The apology is not on behalf of Knight Aeddharr, but on my own.”

“Shit, lady, you could’ve just sent a card.”

“You are here,” she said, “because it is my wish that you see the Battleground as I see it.”

She unclasped her hands and extended one to swing through a long, slow wave out at the darkening downland: the sprawl of city and the gentle swells of plantations and vineyards beyond. “Purthin’s Ford. The Knightly Estates of the Order of Khryl.”

The gesture turned toward the escarpment, toward distant compounds lit with the glow of coal-gas mantles, and a nearer compound, vast rows upon rows of regimented shacks and cages surrounded by razor wire and guardhouses and greenish beams of roving searchlights. “The Upland Manufactories, and BlackStone Mining, and the Pens.”

She returned her hand behind her back, and lowered her shrouded head toward the tiers of the vertical city below. “And of course, the face of Hell.”

“Yeah. Pretty. So?”

“Five hundred Knights of Khryl. Ten thousand armsmen. Thirty thousand sworn Soldiers, man, woman, and child. There was a time that the Order of Khryl was so respected-so feared-that the mere chance we might enter battle was enough to end a war. Whole empires bowed before us.”

“What’s your point?”

“Now we are-” This time her shrug was big enough to hurt. “-jailers. Keepers of the Boedecken ogrilloi.”

I nodded a shrug of my own at the platinum spires around us. “But you’ve got a really nice house.”

“Bitter though it may be, this duty has fallen to us, and I shall see it done. For the sake of all that you see around you here. Do you understand this? It is not for mine own sake, nor for Khryl’s, nor for the Order’s alone-certainly it is not for glory, nor for any hope of the return of bygone days. It is for the lives and hopes and happiness of forty thousand Khryllians, near that many again of the Civility, and near to two hundred thousands of the ogrilloi themselves that I do this. They are each and all my responsibility. My duty. Thus do I fulfill it.”

“Thus?” I frowned. “What, you mean by bringing me up here?”

“Yes. By bringing you to the Purificapex of Khryl. By standing you at my side, in a place where only ordained Knights of Khryl have stood till now. By showing you what I see. For we must understand one another, you and I.”

Wincing, the pounding in my head telling me I wasn’t going to like the answer, I asked, “We must? How come?”

“Because,” she said, turning to me finally, pulling back her blood-stained cowl, “I know who you are.”

For long enough that the platinum numbed my bare toes, I could only stare.

She missed good-looking by a yard on the hard side: her face might have been shaped from chrome steel by a cutting torch. Her hair hung straight and limp, the color of maple leaves that have lain under snow cover all winter long. Her neck was corded with knife-etched muscle, and her jaw looked to have been modeled on a splitting maul.

But her eyes-

Those eyes. . damn. I knew that color.

Lifetimes ago, I trained at the Studio Conservatory on Naxos, in Earth’s Aegean Sea. At twilight in late summer, as the last arc of the sun slips into the sea and the first stars kindle, the sky goes to indigo velvet: warm, and soft, and impossibly remote. That color.

But in her eyes that remote melancholy was overlaid with cool unselfconscious speculation, a direct and level interest that examined my face, my shoulders. The shape of my hands. The drape of my robe.

I offered another blank mental Damn. .

I played dumb. I’ve had plenty of practice. “Have we met?”

She spread her hands. “I am Angvasse, Lady Khlaylock, currently the Champion of Khryl.”

“Khlaylock?” My stomach lurched. “Any relation?”

“I have the honor to be that great man’s niece.”

I said, “Uh.”

Another Khlaylock was the last thing I needed in my life right now. Or, say, ever. I coughed. “Sorry. I’m supposed to take a fu-a knee or something, right?”

“Formalities need not be observed; I am not in Khryl’s Battledress. Here in the Palm of God we are equals. You may stand. You may even call me Angvasse.” Faint creases appeared around those startling eyes as though she might be about to smile. “You should understand that these liberties are not taken elsewhere.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“And you may speak freely here; Khryl is a warrior god. His Sanctum cannot be profaned by mere words, no matter how coarse.”

I coughed again. “How do you-who do you think I am?”

She waved a dismissive hand. “Please. An Ankhanan Esoteric enters the Battleground, speaking of Black Knives? I am not ignorant of our history. And now, meeting you in person-I passed my youth in my uncle’s house. His portrait of you hangs in his study.”

I blinked. “It does?”

“Of a much younger you, of course. Slimmer. Less scarred.” Her eyes creased again like she was thinking about smiling but decided against it. “And I thought you’d be taller.”

“Everybody does.” I scowled at her. “Are you putting me on? A portrait?”

“He is an accomplished painter. When he retires as Justiciar, I have no doubt he will become a noted artist.”

I started to monologue, *God save me from the fucking sensitive artistic types,* until I remembered that the god to whom I was bitching is Himself one of those fucking sensitive artistic types. “But in his study? I mean, in his study doesn’t he want, I don’t know, a picture of his father? Or Khryl or something?”

“Such paintings grace other rooms in his manor. You hang on the wall of his study, he has said, as a constant reminder-” Her melancholy took on a curious note of schadenfreude. “-of the price of vanity.”

“He was never short on that.”

“You would find him,” she said, “quite changed.”

“I’d rather not find him at all.”

She nodded. “He does not remember you fondly.”

“But still-I mean, I’m supposed to be defended against-”

“Not from God. The Lord of Valor directs my attention to threats against His Soldiers and His land.”

“I’m a threat?”

“Are you not?”

“I wasn’t planning to be.” Another shrug. Why lie? “Getting beaten more-or-less to death might have changed my mind.”

“And thus I offer my apology. The incident occurred at my command, and I sincerely regret the necessity.”

I chewed on that. It tasted like the inside of my lip. “You ordered that bastard to kill me?”

“Not to kill. Never.”

“Did you explain that to him?”

“We are a young land, freeman; I have not seen thirty years, yet I saw the birth of the Battleground-as you must know, you who had so much a hand in creating it. We are still building the customs and tradition-constructing a society entire-that will fulfill Our Lord’s Command to tame His Land and defend the innocents who seek to thrive here.”

A wistful undertone hinted that she used to believe it.

I did my best to sound encouraging. “Uh-huh.”

“And our circumstance has become desperate. It was necessary to be certain of your intentions.”

“What’s this got to do with Orbek?”

“Certain. . elements. . have begun to interfere in Khryl’s society. Violently.”

“Yeah, I gathered. So, what, he’s hooked in with this Freedom’s Face?”

“Freedom’s Face is nothing.” She turned a hand as though releasing a fly from her fist. “Overprivileged and underexperienced scions of your Ankhanan burghers. Children with too much time on their hands, who have somehow come to believe that the romance of Liberty outweighs skill at arms. Who believe that casual vandalism, minor sabotage, and demonstrations of civil disobedience can bend the Will of God. We own Freedom’s Face; we can destroy it at a whim. We allow its survival only because we find it a useful beer pot in which to gather your juvenile wasps.”

“Has anybody explained that to Tyrkilld?”

“Explained it?” She looked honestly puzzled. “He is Khryl’s leading Knight in the control of Freedom’s Face. They are no serious threat.”

Oh, really? Well.

Well, well, well.

I said, “The rifles and checkpoints looked serious enough.”

“We have a problem of our own; they call themselves the Smoke Hunt.”

“I gathered that,” I said slowly. “What’s it got to do with Orbek?”

“This is where the matter becomes. .” She sighed. “. . complicated.”

I shrugged. “I call it Caine’s Law: Everything’s more complicated than you think it is.”

“Ah.”

“There’s a corollary,” I offered, going for an amiable keep on chatting, lady kind of tone. “Whenever somebody tells you shit’s simple, they’re trying to sell you something.”

Again she almost smiled. Almost. “Perhaps. Yet I tell you matters are complex, and I too am. . selling you something.”

“Yeah? What’re you selling?”

She fixed me with the infinite melancholy of her twilight eyes. “This Orbek-his claim of being a Black Knife-is this truth?”

“Far as I know.” I shrugged and found something to look at in the darkening sky. “That’s what his father told him, anyway-Orbek was born after the-after, uh, y’know-”

“And you truly claim him as brother? You, of all men living?”

“It’s-kind of a longer story than I really want to get into right now.”

She shook her head. “You are an interesting man.”

“He’s pretty interesting too.”

“I meet too many interesting people,” she said distantly. “Most of them I have to kill.”

“Probably just coincidence.”

Her voice went sad and cold: autumn winds dropping toward winter. “Not in this case.”

The evening damp turned to winter on my neck. “Maybe you want to tell me what you mean by that.”

She lifted her face to the heavens and murmured, “Ammare Khryl Tyrhaalv’Dhalleig, hrereteg yroshallai ti Hammantellentlei av uvranishai terishiin,” which I somehow knew, without being surprised at the knowledge, in the way you know things in a dream, was Old High Lipkan. Which wasn’t a shocker; I have heard Old High Lipkan before. The shocker was that I knew what it meant.

Beloved Khryl, Lord of Valor, I do this only for the honor of Your Name and the future of Your people.

This was a shocker because I don’t speak Old High Lipkan.

I found myself chewing the inside of my lip again while I waited for her to pull her nerves together. Eventually she lowered her head and took a deep breath. “How much do you know of your-brother’s-doings on the Battleground?”

“Uh-uh.” I folded my arms. “That’s not how this works.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“This is your party. You lay out the snacks.”

Infinite weariness in her nod. “I met him, this Orbek who styles himself kwatcharr of the Black Knives.”

“He does?”

She went on like I hadn’t spoken. “He was sought for questioning in an unrelated incident-a murder, in the fourth tier of Hell.”

“That wasn’t murder,” I said.

“Oh?” she said mildly, angling her head toward me.

I met her gaze squarely. She waited for me to elaborate. I waited for her to get tired of waiting.

She sighed. “The killing was done with a firearm-merely to bring such a weapon into Purthin’s Ford-”

“How d’you know he didn’t get it here?”

Again she waited for me to elaborate. Again I waited for her to get tired of waiting. Eventually she surrendered a nod. “He avoided armsmen and Knights together for some days; he was not taken until I myself joined the hunt. He defied me personally, in Khryl’s Battledress, which is an affront to God Himself.”

“Ankhanans are like that.”

“Yes. You are. While the Empire maintains a pretense of careful neutrality, it is known that some of the Battleground’s current difficulties are of Ankhanan origin, and your own relationship with the Empire, and the Emperor, is known to Khryl’s Order. This why you were mistreated; it was necessary to ascertain whether you might be associated with these elements. Knight Aeddhar felt he had no better way to prove your innocence. And for this I apologize, on my own behalf, as well as on behalf of Knight Aeddhar, the Order of Khryl, and the Civility of the Battleground. This apology is profound and sincere, as is my hope that you might accept it.”

“I’m not there yet. Get back with Orbek.”

“There are no gentle words for this, freeman.” Her voice hardened out of that wistful tone, but her eyes were still all melancholy twilight. “Your brother is in the Pens.”

“Pens.” An empty echo, no meaning behind it.

“Yes. At Shortshadow tomorrow, he will face Khryl’s Justice. By my hand.”

“Khryl’s Justice? Son of a bitch. He’s gonna fight you?”

“Yes.”

“That’s not a fight, it’s an execution.”

She didn’t even blink. “It is at his own request: a request that I am, as Khryl’s Champion, obliged by custom and by Law to answer.”

For a long cold minute, I looked at her. Just looked. She let me. I wasn’t really seeing her anyway.

I was seeing Orbek in the Donjon’s Pit, walking like he lived only to fight and to fuck and didn’t much care which he did to who. I was hearing the trace of a Boedecken burr in his bleak Warrens growl-

— i am black knife. my dead father is black knife, from before. from when the land likes black knives-

I was feeling Orbek’s fist tangle in my filthy shirt, his hot carnivore breath down the side of my neck-

— but remember. you win this one? you remember I coulda hurtcha. maybe i be dead, but you be hurt, hey? i want some fuck-me consideration-

And I was remembering Orbek in the Shaft and Orbek in the Donjon riot and how Orbek had taken care of Faith and all the leagues we’d walked together in the years since Assumption Day, and after a while I turned back to her and my voice came out flat as roadkill. “That’s why you set your boy Markham to babysit me.”

She picked up the leather bundle and began to unroll it. “Were the Order of Khryl ever to forget the. . potential hazards. . presented by Esoterics,” she said softly, “my uncle’s face would serve as infallible reminder. As might the new scars borne by Knight Aeddhar.”

“Huh.”

“And you are no ordinary Esoteric. No one wants your hand raised against us.”

“I haven’t thought that far ahead.”

She paused, holding the bundle half closed across the altar-block. “Have you not?”

I scratched idly at the knurls of scar and callus that layer my knuckles. “I guess it depends on what he’s in for.”

It seemed like a useful lie.

“He was taken,” she said, “during a submission violation incident.”

“What the hell’s that?”

“All Khryl’s ogrilloi must make submission when addressed by any Knight. It has to do with how ogrilloi were originally bred; the elves selected for-”

“I know how they were bred. Orbek isn’t Khryl’s, he’s an Ankhanan freeman.”

“On the Battleground, all ogrilloi are Khryl’s. He refused submission.”

“I’ll bet he did.”

black knives don’t kneel

A quiet hiss whished on inside my head, like the ignition of an internal pilot light. “I’ll bet he did,” I repeated.

“Instead, he shouted out his name-as though it might be some sort of battle cry-”

“Yeah.”

“-and he attacked.” She opened the bundle. “With this.”

Inside were Orbek’s two KA-BARs-the ones he liked to wear up his sleeves, some kind of half-ass emotional compensation shit for his amputated fighting claws-and a sleek black 10mm Automag.

She picked up the pistol by the barrel and offered it to me.

I went to take it. Slowly. I felt old and stiff. But each step toward her carved ten years off me. I took the pistol and weighed it in my hand. The grip was molded for a hand twice the size of mine-Orbek’s size. It felt heavy enough to be loaded. I thumbed the clip release and checked. It was loaded.

I slapped the clip back in and racked the slide, then sighted it toward the gleaming floor. “And the Knight survived?”

She said softly, “One of them did.”

Her voice caught me. Her eyes held me.

I said, “You?”

In the uncertain light, I could just make out what could have been a pair of new scars like the ones I’d found over my liver: a long ragged smear of pink under her left ear, and a thumbnail-size rippled disk just above her sternal notch. It was a good bet she had an assload more like them under that robe.

Orbek had always been a stellar shot.

I looked down at the gun, then at her, then back at the gun. “Fuck me like a goat. .”

She set the knives aside and spread her hands. “If your desire is for preemptive vengeance, you need seek no further.”

I stepped back and leveled the pistol. “I know how Khryllian power works. I know how fast you must be.” I took another step back. “I can still put one through your eye before you can move.”

“I am certain of it.”

Moisture trickled down my spine. I licked my lips and found sweat there. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“I am waiting for you to decide.”

I stared at her over the sights. “Even if I decide to shoot you.”

“Yes.”

I flicked a glance toward the stairs. If my hand twitched when I squeezed the trigger, I’d need all the head start I could get.

Her stare remained steady. Calm. Empty.

Waiting.

It’d been a long time since I killed a woman.

A shimmer of memory, a quarter-century old: her uncle’s broken face, left eye dangling from the optic nerve below its shattered socket, punctured and leaking vitreous humor down his nasolabial fold past the corner of his mouth. Christ, I thought, tangling in my life is pretty fucking hard on this family.

I gave my head a quick irritated shake. This was the wrong time for that shit.

Besides, tangling in my life is hard on everybody.

“This has to be,” I ground out through my teeth, “just about the most fucked-in-the-ass stunt anybody’s ever pulled with me.”

“And?”

“Shit.” The pistol got heavy: like straight-arming an anvil. “Oughta shoot you just for creeping me out.”

“Is your brother a blooded warrior, freeman?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I was flanked by two Knights Venturer.” The sad distance in her eyes became somehow less distant but more sad. “He shot them first.”

I stared. She stared back. After a minute, I blinked. She didn’t.

“What?”

“Need I rephrase?”

The pistol sank. It didn’t matter. I’d forgotten the pistol. “You had your back to him. Or something. He never saw your blazon.”

“No.”

“He didn’t know who you are.”

“He knew.”

“No goddamn way. Not a chance in Hell, and that’s not a fucking pun, either. No way.”

“And yet it is so.”

“If he wanted to die, he could have just blown his own bloody head off-”

“Yes.”

“Then why?”

“This is a question which has troubled me for three days now. Can he have been enchanted? Pixilated in some way? Has his reason been driven from him, or is it simple despair and a desire for a memorable end? — for it is no small thing to be slain by Khryl’s Own Fist.”

She put out a hand to the altar-block as though she needed some strength she could draw there. “When I learned of your arrival, it struck me that you might become interested in answers to these questions.”

I looked at her for a while again. Again she let me.

Pretty soon I shrugged down at the gun, then tossed it back on the leather wrap. I stared off over the city to hide the look on my face. “I want to see him. Tonight.”

“Freeman, civilian access to the Pens-”

My neck clamped down on my voice, making it scrape like a red-hot rasp.“I’m his next of goddamned kin.”

“You truly claim this?”

I looked down at the bracelet of scar around my right wrist. I traced its wrinkled surface with my left index finger, remembering-

Remembering dragging myself on my belly up the Shaft in the Ankhanan Donjon, half-dead legs twitching and useless, lantern in one hand and ring of keys in the other. Remembering finding Orbek chained to the wall.

Remembering what they’d done to him.

“Yeah. I do.”

“As a member of his immediate family, you have the right to visit your ogrillo on this, his final night of life. Say to Lord Tarkanen that such is my will.”

“He’s not my-ah, fuck it anyway.” I stared down at the cloudy smear of sunset gleaming from the platinum floor. “Thanks.”

“It is our way.”

“Are we done here? I better leave before I blow past sad and show up at angry.”

“Angry at whom?” Her eyes said that for her, sad was the edge of the world; angry was a mythical monster somewhere beyond. “Would you punish a sword for the acts of its wielder?”

“I’ve done it before.” I looked away again. “That’s another story I don’t want to get into right now.”

“Would you not prefer to strike at those truly responsible?”

I thought it over. No, really: I did. I’m no great believer in justice, and-like Ma’elKoth used to say-revenge is the shibboleth of spiritual poverty. But-

This was Orbek.

I sighed. “I’m listening.”

So here’s yet one more way this whole shitstorm’s my fault.

That book-writing friend of mine would say you can arrange any story you’re in to make anything your fault, and maybe that’s true. But I knew it then. I could feel it.

We were standing in a boundary condition: on one of those infinitely complex fractal positions where the smallest gesture might trigger the slide toward an infinitely unpredictable resting state. We were the butterfly in Hong Kong, and the whisper from our wings was going to alter the path of the category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic.

I could feel it because that’s what I do. When I breathe myself into mindview, I can even see it: black Flow, the energy of change itself. The cosmic web of causation. Quantum smears of probability, and the islands of order that are the heartbeat of chaos.

Hell, it’s more than what I do. According to a certain pack of demented clusterhumps who are a chronic hornet’s nest in my buttcrack, it’s what I am.

But fuck them, anyway. This story isn’t about them.

She took a deep breath, and her hand tightened on the altar-block. “Your brother had fallen among bad company, here on the Battleground. The truth, I fear, is in fact darker: that he had become part of the Smoke Hunt.”

“If you really want to know what’s going on, why aren’t you just sending down some Knights with a list of questions? With that truthsense of yours-”

“It is not ours, freeman, but Khryl’s. And even so, it has its. . limits.” Her indigo gaze darkened. “Are the Monasteries unaware of this?”

I met that squarely. “Still, though. What do you think I can do that you can’t?”

“I’m sure I couldn’t say, freeman.” That wistfulness had slipped back under her voice, and I realized it had been always there, deepening subtly every time she called me freeman. “I suppose that would be between you and your conscience.”

“Yeah. Conscience. Sure.” I sighed. “What do I have to do?”

“You will pledge yourself to a Call of Duty, sealed and sanctified by the Witness of Our Lord of Valor.”

“You want me to work for you.” I squinted at her. “That’s not as good an idea as it sounds.”

“You would. . work. . not for me, but for Khryl.”

“He might not like it either.”

“Nothing in the Battleground is a question of what we like, freeman. It is necessary that the enemies of Our Lord meet His Justice.”

“You mean your justice,” I said, nodding down at the pistol.

Her eyes went bleak as winter dusk. “It is the same.”

“The coincidence’s kinda funny, huh?”

“Not to me.”

“Not much is, I bet. What’s involved in this Call of Duty shit?”

“Through me, you will pledge yourself to Khryl’s Service in this matter. Your pledge will be Witnessed by the Lord of Battles Himself, and your compliance will be enforced by His Will until He is satisfied that you have completed your task. Once invested, the Call of Duty is absolute; you will faithfully comply with the terms of His Call and pursue its resolution to the exclusion of all other concerns.”

My teeth found the inside of my lower lip again. It was starting to swell.“What if I don’t want to?”

“Freeman, you will want to. Taken freely, His Call becomes your own most potent desire. For the duration of His Call, you will burn for its completion.”

“You sound awful damn sure I’m going to do this.”

“Your alternative. .” One finger twitched at the Automag. “. . remains.”

“What if I don’t like that one either?”

“The ogrilloi of the Smoke Hunt,” she said tonelessly, “bear marks at the bases of their spines. The mark is a simple curve of black, shaped like a fighting claw.”

I found myself dropping my gaze toward the red-smeared streets, but I didn’t see them because I wasn’t looking down a thousand feet at the city. I was looking down twenty-five years at lean, stringy, desert-hard Black Knife bitches. Dancing in the firelight below my cross.

“And now, today, to my city, comes the legendary Bane of the Black Knives. The Skinwalker himself. I cannot believe this is coincidence.”

I shook the flashback out of my head. “It’s not. Not even a little.”

“Thus it is that I have brought you to my side.”

“You want me to stop the Smoke Hunt.”

She said, “Yes.”

“And you think I’m gonna jump at the chance because they’re playing at being Black Knives.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re willing to turn me loose in Purthin’s Ford because you’re afraid that Justice and Truth aren’t gonna cut it this time. Because Khryl makes you play by too many rules.”

“I told you it was. . complicated.”

“Lady, that’s not complicated at all. Think about who I am.” An effort of will unknotted fists I did not remember clenching. “That’s what I came here for.”

“Yes,” she said. “I believe that of all living creatures, perhaps you alone truly understand what it is that Khryl’s land faces: the doom that lours upon His people. Perhaps you alone truly understand what the Black Knives were, and would be once more.”

“Screw Khryl’s land. And his people.” I stared into the clouds. “Even Orbek. It’s not like he’ll thank me.”

“Yes,” she said. “You still hate them. The Black Knives. Even after so many years. It burns in you. I can feel it.”

“Some things,” I said slowly, “you don’t get over.”

“Yes.” Starfire kindled in her eyes. “Yes.”

She thought she knew what I was talking about. I could read in those eyes that she did know something about hate. Something. Not everything. I remember being that young. I remember thinking I knew what it is to hate.

“I believe it is Khryl Himself who has brought us together,” she said. “That Khryl Himself has decided that you are the last best hope of His people.”

“I’m just a guy. A guy who’s gotten lucky a couple times, that’s all.”

The creases around her eyes squeezed toward a smile. “And many who believed so now moulder in the dirt.”

I couldn’t exactly argue the point.

Her face hardened. “Thus it is that I have brought you to my side. Thus it is that Khryl excuses my defiling His Purificapex with your presence-you, the disrespecter. The blasphemer.” Her voice could have cut glass. “The Enemy of God.”

I shrugged. “Not your god.”

“Prince of Chaos. Blade of Tyshalle.”

“I always heard Tyshalle and Khryl were on pretty good terms.”

“Not even human.”

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

“It is known to the Order that you are of the Aktiri. That you escaped from the True Hell-not this pale irony below us-along with your demon Artan brethren, on what has become known in Ankhana as Assumption Day.”

“My demon brethren. Oh, sure.” I made a face. “Y’know, one of your Order’s greatest Knights was one of my ‘demon brethren’-”

“You speak of Jhubbar Tekkanal.” Now the smile did break through her weary mask, but it was a smile without joy or humor. “Did you think his origins unknown? Did you think his true nature could be concealed from Khryl?” She tossed her head like an offended mare. “Why do you think his epithet was the Devil Knight? It was his purity of heart-the power of his faith-that enabled him to transcend his demon heritage. You-”

Her stare was bleak. “You are known to be without purity, and without faith.”

“Yeah, okay, whatever.” Though truth is a fine thing, it’s still not much fun to have everybody I meet shove it in my face. “We’re demons, sure. Fine. Must not bother you too much having us around, though, right?”

The corners of her mouth turned down. “We are not here to speak of these things.”

“Yeah. Fancy guns your armsmen carry. And that razor wire. And the searchlights and those coal-gas lamps at the Pens down there. How many Artans you got living in Purthin’s Ford, anyway?”

“In Purthin’s Ford?” Her eyes glinted. “None.”

“Sure, all right. Where do you keep ’em, then?”

“They have nothing to do with you.”

“Where I come from-what you call Hell, I guess; we just called it Earth-a lot of people wanted to work for the Company. The Overworld Company. I mean a lot. A lot more wanted to be Aktiri. Only the smartest, toughest, most ruthless bastards made the cut in the first place, and the ones who have survived here since Assumption Day aren’t just smart, tough, and ruthless, they’re goddamned lucky, too. Which makes them just about the most dangerous sonsofbitches you ever didn’t want to meet in a dark alley. I’ve spent three years making sure these rimjobs behave themselves. Or making them dead.”

Her eyes were cold as the space between stars. “They have nothing to do with you.”

I stopped myself from spitting on the floor. If I did, she’d probably belt me so hard I’d land in Thorncleft.

Maybe she didn’t understand what they were after. Hell, maybe I didn’t either; I could be wrong. After all, anybody Earthside would know Retreat from the Boedecken; they’d know better than to fuck around with Black Knives. Or with me. “All right. Let’s have it, then.”

“It?”

“Your pitch.” I rolled a hand. “Your offer. The deal.”

The starfire in her eyes smoked over. “You said this is why you came to Purthin’s Ford.”

“Yeah.”

“Yet now you require a fee?”

“I came here to dope-slap some sense into my brother. I sure as fuck didn’t come here to get the snot stomped out of me by Right Arm of God theofascists in the middle of some butt-raping terrorist insurgency. And I’m not real interested in having it happen again.”

The smoke in her eyes thickened. “Not money, then, nor land; you seek no reward.”

“Two. Well, one reward. One tool.”

She lifted her head. “The reward?”

“Orbek’s life.”

“It cannot be.”

“Then no deal.”

“Ask anything else. The Justice is ordained by Khryl Himself, and I have no authority to alter, gainsay, or refuse to answer. Orbek Black Knife made this Challenge; he has placed his fate under the Regard of Khryl, and that is where it lies.”

“What if he withdraws?”

She turned toward me. “Then he must make submission.”

“Let’s say that’s not a problem.”

“There is still the murder in Hell.”

“Let’s say that’s not a problem either.”

She offered a reluctant shrug. “Perhaps the Lord of Justice might be satisfied with exile, upon pain of death, from all His lands forever.”

“Done.”

“Then-granted your assertions-done. What tool do you require?”

I tried to look casual. “Authority.”

Her stare said she was pretty sure I was about to sprout horns and a tail and come after her with a red-hot pitchfork.

“Your authority comes straight from Khryl, right? That’s what I want. I want freedom of action. The next time some asswipe Tyrkilld takes a swing at me, I want to flip out the Holy Foreskin and tell him to suck it, I’m working for God’s Own Motherfucking Self.”

She gave me that pitchfork stare for a long time. When she finally decided to talk, her expression hadn’t changed. “It is said that you are a man without limits.”

“That was Ma’elKoth.”

“Boundaries, then. That there is no line you will not cross.”

“People say lots of shit about me.”

Sunset began to burn through the smoke that hooded her eyes. “You must understand that I am the same.”

“Yeah, all right.”

“In service to my Lord-in the defense of His Land and His Soldiers-I have no boundary.”

“I believe you.”

She idled back to the altar-block pedestal that protruded seamlessly from the cool smooth platinum on which we stood. She reached to lay her hand lightly on that angled handle, fingers curling gently around it in what was almost a caress.

The universe snapped into focus.

— the soft prickle of blood-rusted wool against skin drying tight and stretched-

— the damp-glazed chill of the platinum under feet colder than the breeze that smelled of coal smoke and rain-

— eyes shrouded with limp wet hair the same bleak brown as the robes-

— the swell of breath bringing small hard breasts up along the inner curve of fabric-

— both hands buzzing with the memory of knives-

Words came from me without volition-

“What the fuck did you just do?”

— because these were the words I always said now.

These were the words I’d been planning to say at this moment since the birth of the universe.

And by the time she spoke, I already knew-

“This,” she said softly, “is the second most sacred relic of our Order. It is all that remains of the Accursed Blade that struck off the Peaceful Hand of Our Lord of Valor.”

And it happened-

— the flash of grey steel and the jewel-spray of blood in firelight blossomed inside my head blazing the silent anguish of a wounded god-

— as it was going to happen five hundred years ago.

Again.

And again from my mouth came the words I always said now-

“What’s happening-? This is-this is-I’ve felt this before. .”

I knew her answer.

“You have not. It is the Regard of Khryl.”

The words echoed within me endlessly, as though she still had yet to say them, but they had been said long ago but were forever speaking now.

“The Gods exist beyond the grip of time. When we draw Their Eyes, They brush us with Their Power.”

“No,” I insisted forever. “No, I know this feeling. .”

She always said, “It is the echo of the future.”

“No. . no, I really have. .”

I have always been here because there is no past: all that exists of the past is the web of Flow whose black knots are the structure of the present. I will always be here because there is no future: everything that is about to happen never will.

Now is all there is.

I have always sat in the rubble of the Financial Block, facing down the length of God’s Way over the carnage and ruin of Old Town, perched on a blast-folded curve of assault-car hull with Kosall’s cold steel across my lap. The rumpled and torn titanium wreckage permanently ticks and pings as it eternally cools under my ass. A few hundred yards to my left, there has always been a smoldering gap where the Courthouse once stood, surrounded by a toothed meteor-crater slag of melted buildings; even the millenial Cyclopean stone of the Old Town wall sags and bows outward over the river, a thermal catenary like the softened rim of a wax block-candle.

I face the god in the infinite now. .

I said again forever, “It’s an echo of my past. Or something. Let the fucking thing go, will you?”

She released it, and time leaked back into the universe.

I stared. “So that’s what’s left of the Godslaughterer’s sword? For real?”

“Do you not know it so?”

I nodded thoughtfully, scratching at my beard. Threads of dried blood wormed across my fingertips. “The Peaceful Hand?”

“The hand He extended in friendship to Jereth of Tyrnall, when Our Lord-Father Dal’Kannith sent Him to offer truce in the Deomachy. The hand that Jereth treacherously struck from his wrist. With this very blade.”

“Huh. That’s not the version we learn in the Monasteries.”

Her forefinger tapped the plain age-eaten knob that once must have been the pommel; even this was enough to claw my brain with deja vu.

— I squeeze its hilt until its hum matches my memory: it buzzes in my teeth-

“Shit, don’t do that, huh?”

She took her hand away and turned her palm upward. “And do you have reason to believe your version of the tale true and ours false?”

I shrugged, opening my own hand toward her. “History depends on who’s telling the story.”

“The power of Justice that runs in the very Blood of Our Lord destroyed the Accursed Blade,” she said, “but His Peaceful Hand was severed, and Our Lord maimed, by treachery; so it was that Dal’Kannith decreed on that black day the birth of the Knights, that we should become the Hands of Our Lord. As Champion, I am His Living Fist. In His service, what I do is His Will. Whatever I do. That is how I can bring you-even you-to this holy place.”

My smile of understanding wasn’t a smile. “All your sins are forgiven in advance.”

“I am righteous by definition. Until He proclaims by Terranhidhal zhan Dhalleig that I am no longer his chosen Champion, I am incapable of sin.”

“Not exactly peaceful hands.”

“No. The Hand of Peace was struck from him. We are Hands of War. The Hand of Peace is-” She gave a negligent flip of the head that spun blood-damp hair around her eyes. “-where we stand.”

I looked around. Those spires resembled fingers for a reason. . *You and your candy-ass artistic metaphors,* I monologued.

God did not reply.

“So what’s the point of all this?”

“You must understand,” she said, “that I treat with you only because you are a lesser evil than the darkness we face. You must understand-though we stand upon the holiest sanctum of our Order, though we are on Khryl’s Own Palm of the Peaceful Hand itself, despite the lineage of the Accursed Blade, its sanctity so vast that a lesser being might be struck dead for merely daring to gaze upon it-you must understand that if I ever even suspect you might be a more immediate threat-”

She wheeled on me. Her lips had peeled off her teeth and her eyelids had vanished, and there was nothing human in her chrome-steel face. She seized the naked hilt of the Accursed Blade and banished time and sense from the universe. She said forever, “Here under the Eyes of God Himself, I swear upon Mine Own Legend of Honor that I will pull this hilt from its resting place and fuck you to death with it.”

She let her echo die at the end of all things.

When, after several cosmic ages, she finally let go and the world started to turn again, I said, “I take it that’s a yes.”