“What?”
I can barely make myself say it. “I lost the bladewand.”
She nods exhaustedly. Her eyes drift briefly closed. “All right. All right. We can—we still can—”
“Still can what? Die ugly?”
She fumbles under her gorget for the cuirass buckles. “Khryl loves me—once I can breathe, I can pray. He’ll Heal me. Us. Fight on.”
“Yeah, okay.” I reach down and smooth blood-soaked hair out of her eyes. “That was a real pretty neckbreak, Marade. Since when do Khryllians teach the sleeper?”
Her fingers slip on the buckles, and that guilty flash crosses her face again.“Caine, I—I mean—”
“Forget it.” A few of the downed Black Knives are still twitching. One drags himself painfully toward the shadows. The flames of oil clinging to the crumbling walls and across the sand-packed street gutter and fade; we’re about to lose the light. Much as I’d enjoy watching Marade remove her breastplate, I better get with business.
Her last kill had dropped his warhammer; I pick it up. “If you’re okay with getting that plate off, I’ll go smoke the wounded.”
She gets the straps unbuckled and slips the cuirass enough that she can sit up, then freezes, her head cocked.
“What?”
“Tizarre.” She lifts one arm in the I hear you wave at the night-black parapet far above. Her face goes blank, then grim. “Pretornio’s in trouble.”
“Worse than us?”
She yanks at her breastplate. It comes off with a squeal of ripping metal.“Yes. The porters broke. They’ve been overrun. Some of them have already been taken.”
“Taken? Taken alive?”
A single nod. “We have to—have to get to them—” She heaves herself to her feet, swaying. Her surcoat gleams red-black, soaked through with gore. She takes an unsteady step, and another, and stumbles against a wall. She leans there, retching blood.
“You’re in no shape to go anywhere. You shouldn’t even be upright.”
“Have to,” she says. She pulls the collar of her surcoat up to mop her mouth and chin. “We stand to pray. By the time we all get down to Pretornio, I’ll be able—”
She stops and looks around, blinking stupidly. “Where’s Stalton?”
I ape her, feeling stupider than she looks. “Fuck me. He was right over—”
Right over where there is now only fading flames and Black Knives in various states of disrepair.
“Stalton! Hey, Stalton!”
“Caine—!” she hisses, making shushing motions with her hand.
I ignore her; anybody who can hear me already knows where we are. “Stalton! Come on, man, link up! We gotta move!”
I stand for a while in the quiet wind, listening to the whuff of dying flames.
A stir in the sand looks like it might be tracks.
“Stay here and pray,” I tell her. “I’ll find him.”
Blood streaks and scuffled sand lead me beyond the firelight. Another dip into the Control Disciplines fully dilates my irises and floods my retinal rods with rhodopsin. It’s not quite Nightsight, but I am trained to see things clearly without looking straight at them; in the starlight, the fringes of my meditation-enhanced peripheral vision are sufficient to find a spot in a right-of-way between two crumbled dwellings where Stalton’s boot tracks disappear into the prints of bare ogrillo feet.
My hauberk suddenly gains a couple hundred pounds and I really, really need to sit down. Better not. Don’t know if I’ll get up again.
This glorious death thing could be going a hell of a lot better.
“Caine? Where are you?” Her voice is stronger already. “What happened to the lantern?”
“I don’t know. Lost.”
“Stalton?”
“Him too.”
She comes stumbling toward me, blundering through what is to her impenetrable darkness. “What do you mean? Is he dead?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. His tracks stop here. Theirs go on. There’s no body.”
“How can you—” She stops herself, and the night goes silent around her. “You can see.”
“Sort of.” Why bother to lie? “A little.”
For what feels like a long time, she stands perfectly still. I can hear her breathe.
“What are you?” Her voice is quiet. Slow. Fatal. “Monastic?”
In the distance: fading human screams.
“What difference does it make now?”
“Some kind of Esoteric. You must be. Why did you not tell anyone?”
“We all have secrets,” I remind her.
“An assassin,” she murmurs, a bleak dropping half-whisper, as though discovering what I am has broken something precious inside her. An inexplicable hint of tears. “Who is your target? Is it me?”
Given the history between the Monasteries and the Order of Khryl, there is some justification for paranoia. “It’s not like that.”
“What, then? All of us? This is what you’ve been pushing for, is it not? We all die. A brilliant strategem—”
“Marade, cut it out. Pull yourself together.” I need to do the same. “We’re not done yet.”
Her silhouette gives a silent nod. A sniffle in the darkness. “Yes. Yes. Pretornio, his men. Stalton. They need us.”
“That’s right.” I unbuckle my belt and let it drop, then shuck my hauberk and surcoat off over my head. Finally. Just the leather tunic and pants. I can move again. “You go for the priest and the porters. Do what you can.”
“And you?”
“I’ll find Stalton.” One way or another.
“If he is dead—”
“Then no problem. Tizarre can link us up.” I breathe adrenalized strength back into my legs. Some, anyway; there’s a limit to the Disciplines, and I’m not far from it.
I’m as ready to go as I’ll ever be.
“Caine, I—this is—” The outline of one hand, reaching. “We’ll not see each other alive again, I think.”
“I guess probably not.”
That shadowed hand gropes in the darkness. I let it find me, and she gathers me into a bearhug, lifting me effortlessly from the ground with steel-sleeved arms that could crush my spine with a shrug, but through her sodden surcoat her breasts are soft and round and instead of crushing death I get her bloody lips on mine in one copper-salted kiss.
Before I can even clearly think What the fuck? she sets me on my feet again.
“Die fighting, Caine,” she says, and stumbles off toward the guttering flames beyond.
I watch her go for a second, and two, and three and four, and I am such a useless sack of shit coward that I can’t say a word. Not a word even now.
And she’s gone.
Shit.
My good-byes go only to the night and to the dead.
The last of the flames flutter out. All that’s left is to breathe back my night-vision, find a warhammer, and trot off on the Black Knives’ trail.
>>scanning fwd>>
So these two decided on a snack. Easier than lugging his body all the way back to their camp, I guess. Just goes to show: your average Black Knife can be every bit as selfish, undisciplined, and lazy as your average human.
Somehow that should be more comforting than it is.
I should blow. Leave them to their dinner and go see if I can find Marade, because there’s really fuck-all anyone can do for him now, and I would go, I would, but the moon’s finally coming up and in that strengthening silver-bleached glow, there’s something weird about how they’re kneeling over his belly.
One keeps a hand on the bunched hauberk where it’s pulled up over Stalton’s face, and the other is half turned on all fours so that his legs pin Stalton’s to the sand, and while the meaning of this is still seeping through my mental wall of no fucking way his body twists and bucks and the tangled mess of guts twitches and—
And fuck me fuck me fuck me God he’s still alive—
With all their grunting and slurping they can’t hear me as I slip ov
er the sill of what must have been, a thousand years ago, somebody’s bay window, hammer over my shoulder, and with a big slow backswing, I step up and golf the head-end one right in front of the ear.
The impact straightens him upright on his knees, eyes blank and staring over his shattered cheekbone, and the one kneeling on Stalton’s legs manages to lift his head in time to catch my downstroke between his eyes like a steer in a slaughterhouse. The peen leaves a fist-size dent in his skull and his eyeballs splatter and he topples sideways and before his corpse can even hit the ground I spin and let the first one have the back-spike through the nape of his neck. It punches though bone and I use it like a gaff to drag the bastard backward off Stalton’s chest and out of the mess of guts and black soggy sand.
The two Black Knives flop and twitch and kick and grunt as their autonomic nervous systems refuse to believe they’re actually dead, but after a while their hukk-hukk-huhhkkkkk becomes fading hisses of escaping breath, and the only sound in the broken chamber is thick hitching gasps that could be sobs, and I can’t tell if it’s Stalton or if it’s me.
The chainmail over his face twists side to side. His hands are still bound under his back. I drop to my knees beside him, just where that ogrillo had been, and gently pull the hauberk down to his shoulders.
His eyes are squeezed shut like he’s afraid they’ll burst, and his mouth and chin and cheeks are thick with tear-streaked blood. He’s sobbing like a heartbroken teenager. I slide one hand under his head and stroke his hair with the other and say some stupid meaningless shit about how he can quiet down now because everything’s okay, it’s all over and it’s okay, and somehow that stupid meaningless shit must not sound stupid to him, because his breathing starts to even out, and pretty soon he lets himself open his eyes. “Who—?”
“It’s Caine, Stalton.”
“C-Caine? Caine, I . . . hurt. It hurts, Caine.”
“Yeah, I know.” Fuck. Better if he dies now. Better if he died twenty minutes ago. Fuck. “Shh. Hush now. Let it go.”
“It’s not . . . I’ve had worse . . . it’s not too bad. The pain.” His voice is blurred. Shaky. “Like a little—little food . . . food poisoning . . . that’s all. Caine?”
I’d tell him to save his strength, but, y’know, for what? “Yeah.”
“Got . . . water? Thirsty. Mmm, really thirsty.”
Me too. I don’t remind him what we did with our canteens. “Yeah. Yeah, sure. I’ll get you some water. In a minute.”
“Wasn’t supposed to be like this . . .”
Tears roll out from the corners of his eyes and trail down his temples. “Just a j-j-job, that’s all. Little . . . bodyguarding. Lead to something better, you know? Nobody said it’d be like this. It’s not—it’s not supposed to end here . . .”
“Yeah.” I lower his head back down to the sand-packed floor. The moon glows in over my shoulder. “I’d make it different if I could.”
“I, uh—I . . . ahhh, fuck.” His back arches. “Can’t—can’t even sit up . . .”
Not with his abdominals chewed away. “I know. Don’t try.”
“Can you—? Can you help me see—?”
“You don’t want to.”
“It’s really bad . . . ? I can’t see. It is. It’s really bad.”
“Trust me.”
I get to my feet and pick up the warhammer. It’s gained a ton or so; I have to rest it on my shoulder, and the weight still buckles my knees. I’ve killed men before. But I’ve never killed a man who’s real to me. Who’s a person. A guy I like.
A man I wish could have been my friend.
“Yeah. Yeah, okay. Caine, don’t—don’t—”
“It’s better like this. Quick.”
“No. No, not that. It’s okay. Just don’t—” Fresher tears roll along the streaks down his face. “—don’t tell anybody, okay?”
“Tell—?”
His raw streaming stare begs me to promise. “Don’t tell them I went out like a . . . like a punk. Tell them I . . . died fighting. Tell them. Okay?”
Like there’s anybody I can tell who’d care. But I guess that’s not the point.
“Yeah.” I shift my grip on the hammer. My arms tremble. My hands prickle sweat inside my gloves. “Ready?”
“Does it have to be—is there . . . is there any way—? Marade or Pretornio or—”
“No. It’s just me. And I don’t know anything about Healing.” I show him the hammer. “This is what I know.”
His eyes fix on mine. “Don’t tell them I went out like a punk.”
“You won’t.”
The hammer goes up over my head and I bring it down like it’s an axe and his skull’s a log, and there is a crunch and a splatter and y’know in the end, I told him the truth. He didn’t go out like a punk at all.
Didn’t even close his eyes.
Tougher than me . . .
What I just did bitches my candy ass before I get back out the window.
Reaction buckles my knees and throws me retching against the sill. I crumple just beyond the mess of corpses and skid myself into a corner. And all I can do is sit and shake.
Because I’m looking at my future. What’s left of it.
It’s here. It’s this.
Fighting them is pointless. I don’t really give a rat’s butthole about that glorious-last-stand crap I sold everybody on. Sounded good coming out of my mouth, but it was dogshit and I can taste it now.
This is a hell of a time to find out I’m no hero.
Only one thing I can still do for them. One thing. For these people I conned into dying ugly. I hope the next one is easier. No, I don’t.
Shit, I don’t know. Can it get easy to kill your friends?
What if it does? What does that make me?
Huh.
Guess I’ll be finding out.
HALF ELIGIBLE
I don’t have a clear memory of the Rite of Investment, which is probably a good thing. Like nearly everything else Khryllian—once you get past the pretty armor and nice white buildings and the defend-the-innocent-and-be-kind-to-peasants crap—what I do recall is flat-out nasty.
It all took place under the Regard of Khryl, which makes it bleed together in my head, but there was some bare-fingered ripping of flesh involved, hers or mine or both, and a lot of precious bodily fluid likewise, and at one point I’m pretty sure I had my hand inside her rib cage.
With my fingers wrapped around her beating heart.
Get what I mean about flat-out nasty?
Or maybe it was her hand and my heart. Like I said, I’m not real clear on the details. Somebody’s hand was inside somebody’s chest. Khryllians are big on sticking their hands into people. Penetration of flesh and shit. It’s that goddamn Healing of His. Once you sand the corners off consequences, people start to get really fucking weird.
Some people say that’s what happened to me. But screw them anyway. None of them could have lived through my consequences.
Anyway, I came walking down out of there with my right fist full of metaphoric Holy Foreskin, and it was not the most comfortable thing I’ve ever held.
But I was fucking right going to get my handjob’s worth.
Rounding the last curve of stair down into the Lavidherrixium, rubbing worm-threads of dried blood from my skin and hoping these sick bastards at least had a goddamn shower I could use before I had to go out in public, I didn’t notice how the murmur of breeze above became the murmur of voices below until the voices took on actual words.
“. . . and that, my Lord, is a matter to offer up unto the Regard of the Lord of Valor. Which is none other than my full intention here, and which you, my Lord, have a truly astonishing lack of authority to prevent.”
I could clearly hear the nailed-shut clamp of Markham’s Lipkan jaw. “I repeat: You may not ascend. You must depart immediately. That is an order.”
“The Love of Our Lord of Valor has cleared the clamor from my ears, my Lord; I kenned you well at first breath. And every time
since. What I have not heard is by what authority you propose to stand between a Knight of Khryl and the Regard of God, nor yet, precisely, how you propose to enforce this preposterous tyranny upon my person.”
“I am Lord Righteous in service to the Champion of—”
“Oh, aye, there is that, and the trifle of authority you wield is held in fief from her, true enough. But even Herself can stand between a Knight and Our Lord only if the unfortunate Knight in question is proven Recreant, Craven, or Base. Is one or more of these a charge you’d care to offer a poor halfcrippled Knight the barest glimpse of a wink to Answer? For the dispute can be settled between us right now, my Lord Righteous in Et Cetera. Assuredly it can; we need only step out where we will not defile—”
“I repeat. You may not ascend. You must depart immediately.”
I could imagine the look on Markham’s face. It made me smile as I followed the curving walkway above the long pool. Despite recognizing the other voice.
“This unlawful, sacrilegious—one might even say blasphemous, were one of a more judgmental temper than my poor self—insistence of yours could, within the bounds of reasonable possibility, lead a Knight of suspicious nature to wonder if there might be something, above in the Purificapex, that you’d mislike him to encounter. And to speculate what this mysterious something might, in fact, turn out to be.”
“Yeah, Markham, tell the man.” I ducked under the last of the hanging lanterns above the walkway. “What is it you don’t want him to see?”
In the meat-smelling damp, Markham stood blankly still, pale as a Lipkan corpse. Trickles of condensation rolled down his armor.
One of the racks now held an impressively polished set of Khryllian plate that could have been made for a short bear. From one of the wall hooks, an arm’s length from where my clothes lay in a wadded pile, hung a padded surcoat and leggings, and bleached linen underclothes. From another hook hung a long white cloak.
Standing facing the armored Lord Righteous, buck naked as the day he was born but with a shitload more hair, arms akimbo, the white-shot thatch that covered his vast chest and asscheeks and tree-trunk legs not managing to conceal an impressive array of scarring that included an angry red knot on a scarlet rope around his right thigh, stood Tyrkilld, Knight Aeddharr.