“You’ve won … what?” He looks around, still baffled. “Anything? You can’t go anywhere. You can’t do anything. All you’ve done is murder a few thousand innocent men in the middle of a radioactive wasteland.”
“It’s not murder. It’s war. Well, it was war. Now it’s an occupation.”
“By the ogrilloi? What, five hundred? A thousand?”
“More than ogrilloi, Gayle. Black Knives. A thousand Black Knives with modern weapons? Take my word for it. A thousand is a lot.”
“Black Knives hate you—”
“They worship me.” I spread my hands again. “Things have changed.”
“You’re insane.”
“I get that a lot. You—you the Board, and you the Leisure Congress, and you the Social Police—need to understand. It’s over.”
“What’s over? What exactly do you think you’re going to be able to do?”
“It’s already done. The gate’s been under our control for weeks.”
“We get regular reports—”
“From Monastic agents. We’re good at this.”
“And there has been traffic—”
“Yeah, that’s the good part. We took down the dil T’llan.”
“You what?”
“Well, sort of. Maybe I should say, we took it over. It was in the way.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Yeah, mine too. Now you fuckers go to Home only when we decide to let you. That’s what’s been going on for a couple of weeks now.”
“And the transit—the operation of BlackStone—”
“Like I said: the Monasteries are good at this.”
“You’re bluffing. You have to be.”
“People keep telling me that. What they never get around to telling me is if they remember the last time I was bluffing. Or any time I was bluffing. Even one. Go ahead and think it over. There’s nowhere I have to be.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. He has his eyes closed.
When he speaks, he speaks very softly, and very clearly, overenunciating as though talking’s painful. “What about me? What happens to me now? I can’t imagine I have any value as a hostage. And it seems the Overworld Company no longer requires a Director of Operations for this installation.”
“That pretty well sums it up.”
“So. Is this when you …” He coughs. Sounds like that hurts too. “Is this when you kill me?”
“I thought about it.”
He opens his eyes. “Past tense?”
I shrug. “I can’t think of any plausible harm you can do. And I know you’re not a ratfuck just for the sake of being a ratfuck.”
“That might be the closest you’ve ever come to giving me a compliment.”
“What I’d like to give you,” I tell him, “is a job.”
His eyelids droop in a long, slow blink, like he’s about to faint.
“Think about it, Gayle. I’m pretty sure you’re currently unemployed.”
He just lowers his face into his doubled knees. “Nothing makes any sense to me anymore.”
That’s all right. He’s not the one who needs to understand this. You do.
I do not bluff.
Watch.
“Hey, Gayle, check it out. Did you know the collective noun for dragons is conflagration? I love that word. A conflagration of dragons. Beautiful. Almost poetic, don’t you think?”
He lifts his head, frowning. “Dragons? Why are you talking about—”
Then the shadow, vast and dark, sweeps over us and ripples across the emplacements outside, and Gayle chokes on the word. He lurches to his feet and presses his face against the window, mouth hanging open.
And I’m right next to him doing the same thing. I’d be cooler about it, but occasions like this transcend dignity. Fuck being cool.
This is awesome.
It’s too big to really see as it swoops low over the installation. The shadow is too dark and my eyes just refuse to take it all in, because after all the only one I’ve ever seen in person was Sha-Rikkintaer in the San Francisco Curioseum and live ones are kind of fucking scarier. Maybe a quarter mile out it folds its wings—dragons don’t need to flap their wings any more than a jet fighter does—and blasts straight up. I mean, straight up. Like a fucking rocket.
I can just get a hint of a colorful scale pattern like a reticulated python and it fires up its Shield and sun-colored flame blossoms around it, and here’s another Merciful Jesus moment, because I so wish I could see the looks on the soapies’ faces as they listen to their threat monitors try to figure out just what kind of vehicle is coming for them at just below the speed of sound. If only.
Oh, my god, if only.
Just as I spot a tiny dark speck near its haunches, Gayle says, “There’s a man on the back of that dragon” in a perfectly calm, slightly bemused ordering-dinner tone.
He’s got better eyes than I do. “Facing backward, right?”
“Could be.”
“Probably Ankhanan military. Thaumaturgic Corps. Could be Monastic.”
“But facing backward?”
I shrug. “Tail gunner.”
And now the two behind it roar past and hit parallel verticals, and Gayle says, “Oh, my God …”
“A different god this time. Wait for it.”
The third rank, three more, swings wide to take the slant.
“My late wife,” I tell him, “can be very, very persuasive.”
“Holy shit …” I don’t think I’ve ever heard him use vulgar language before. Except when he’s quoting me.
And when flashes and flares begin to expand around the intersecting vectors of six dragons and a couple dozen riot cars and it’s riot cars that come spiraling down, spewing smoke and flame as they tumble into the badlands, Gayle whispers, “Fuck my ass like a chicken pot pie …”
Okay, that one’s a quote.
I catch my own eye in my reflection on the armorglass.
So.
Does anybody not see what is happening here? Does anybody need it explained?
The badlands belong to us now. It’s a no-fly zone. It’s also a no-drive, no-march, no-missile, no-bomb no-whateverthefuck-else zone. Just in case you doubt our ability to enforce this …
“Hey, Gayle, trivia question. How many dragons do you think there are on Overworld?”
He shakes his head. “I have no idea.”
“Me neither,” I tell him. “But I bet it’s a lot more than six.”
“Uh. Mm.” He nods thoughtfully. “Yes.”
He turns to me with a quizzical frown. “So all this time—ever since you woke up in the Buchanan Social Camp—you’ve been planning this?”
“Me plan? Are you kidding? I have people for that. Some of my friends are really fucking smart.”
“And if the Board had surprised everybody by accepting your offer?”
“Exactly what I said.” I shrug. “If nothing else, I am a man of my word.”
“Apparently so,” he murmurs. “But still—all this time—you knew. You knew what their answer would be. You knew about this installation. About the black oil. About your father.”
“People get so used to listening to me monologue, they forget that what my thoughtmitter transmits isn’t actually thought. It’s narration. Like I’m talking, except softer.”
“But—how you went pale. The trembling. The tears. The flush of rage—”
“Oh, the rage is real enough. So’s the rest. It’s not about faking shit. It’s about using shit that’s already there.”
“Still—”
I spread my hands. “There’s a reason it’s called Acting.”
Now another shadow sweeps over us, and into the rocks and sand outside settles a huge iridescent black sphere, like an obsidian marble for somebody with a thumb the size of the Spire.
“What’s that?”
“The sphere? That’s a Shield. She’s probably having a little trouble retuning it to let visible light through without letting in the less
friendly radiation. So listen, about the job?”
“Yes. I, ah … I’m not sure either of us would be comfortable with me working for you again.”
“You won’t be working for me. You’ll be working for Faller. He won’t be working for me either.”
“Faller?”
“Yeah. I’m promoting him. And the new management here doesn’t give a shit about return on investment, so we’ll take care of that cancer first thing. He’s going to be in charge of Earthside operations. We need a liaison to the Leisure Council. Interested?”
He nods again, back with the distant and thoughtful. “Mm. Yes. I believe I am. The, ah—the Shield?”
The obsidian shimmer pales, slowly revealing what stands within the Shield, which is a lion the size of an elephant with the head of an eagle and wings roughly the span of a city block. Just below the feather-line, it has a multisaddle harness buckled across its back and around its forelegs, and standing in the stirrups waving wildly to me is the most beautiful ten-year-old girl who has ever lived. In either universe. And who has a smile that makes everything right with the world. Worlds.
“Wait …” Gayle squints through the window. “Is that—?”
“Yeah,” I say with a smile of my own. “That’s my ride.”
“You should have known better than to fuck with my family.”
— CAINE
Blade of Tyshalle
So one more thing.
Just between you fuckers and me, this is a gesture of goodwill.
Seriously.
We currently command more than enough power to conquer your world, but to tell you the truth we don’t fucking want it. And an awful lot of people—human and otherwise—would get killed along the way. Which is, believe it or not, exactly what I’m trying to prevent. And it’s brutally fucking clear that if you were the kind of people who gave a shit about whether anybody else lives or dies, you wouldn’t be you. Earth wouldn’t be Earth. So a billion people die. Five billion. Ten. It’s no skin off your ass. I’m not gonna get anywhere by threatening them. So I’m threatening you.
Personally.
I want to be clear on this. Crystal fucking clear. That man in the Studio Security armor, who introduced himself as Mark Tanner—he’s a Monastic Esoteric. An assassin. I’ve been telling people for decades that I’m not even close to the best killer the Monasteries have.
Him? He’s close.
Compared to him, I’m about as dangerous as day-old bread. He’s the best assassin I’ve ever met. The thing is, I haven’t met that many assassins. There might be dozens—hundreds—even better than he is.
This is pertinent because we now control the dil T’llan, which allows us to do more than move through this particular dil. It allows us to move through any of them.
Get it?
This place, here in this fucking radioactive wasteland, is the only place you can come at us. We, on the other hand, can come at you from any dil. At will. All over the world. Do you know where all these dillin are?
Do you know where any of them are?
We do.
And, y’know, that’s not all we know.
Know that kids’ story about the country mouse and the city mouse? That’s us in reverse. Your technology on Overworld can fuck us up pretty good. Our magick on Earth can fuck you up better.
Like your Social Police? Guess what? Their identities, postings, and files are, as of right now, freely available on the net. And nothing you do can change that. So when Soapy goes to strike back, he’s gonna get a nasty fucking surprise.
So are you.
There is nothing on any computer, anywhere, that we can’t get to. For example: I have recently been informed that the Board of Governors currently has, ah, sixteen members, isn’t it? Let’s go through some names off the top of my head …
Edward Charles Windsor. Theresa Dayton Walton. Ruhollah Mohammed Ahmedinajad. Adrej ibn Saud.
You get the idea, I imagine.
We know who you are. We know where you live. Shit, we know where you are right now.
We can find you. We can hurt you. We can kill you.
You personally.
I know you still don’t really believe we can touch you. One of you is going to be the first to die. Two of you will be second.
Third, it’s all of you.
If you want to live through this, you need to follow the rules. Some of you may not be familiar with them. Pay attention. There’s gonna be a quiz.
Rule One: fuck with me and you die. This is your only warning.
Rule Two: what I say goes. Break Rule Two, you get hurt. Break it again, you die. Again: this is your only warning.
Rule Three: fuck with my family or my friends, and you’re fucking with me. When in doubt, see Rule One.
Just so you know: my family and friends now includes everybody who isn’t you.
So.
Any fucking questions?
prologue
This story is about what happened after the end of the world.
The end of the world had passed unmarked by most who lived in those days. How could they notice? The sun still shone yellow and hot, the winds still blew from thunderstorm to blizzard and back again, the silver moon still sailed across a starlit sky. There were fish in the sea, cattle in the fields, birds in the air, deepwood glens still rustling with the dry-leaf laughter of the fey, mountain mines ringing with the steely chime of stonebender tools, treetoppers fluttering and ogres growling and dragons slumbering in forgotten lairs.
For a long time, the only people who knew the world had ended were certain clever men and clever women whose lives were devoted to knowing clever things of this nature, and even they weren’t certain; the end of the world was a serious matter, and they didn’t want to be wrong.
One of the ways in which they were clever was in the naming of things. They were very concerned with comprehending what they named, to ensure the name they gave it was the name it should have. They knew that names are masks, but they also knew masks can reveal truth that might otherwise remain occult. The names we give to things channel how we think of them, and because the end of the world began small and subtle and slow to burgeon—despite being locally dramatic—at first they called it by the wrong name.
They called it the True Assumption of Ma’elKoth.
The Age of Gods had lasted five hundred years, from the Feral Rebellion—when the human gods overpowered the combined might of the Folk of Home, and set humanity free—until the Deomachy, when Jereth of Tyrnall, called the Godslaughterer, rose up against his gods and those of all humanity, and his brother Jantho, called the Ironhand, crafted the Covenant of Pirichanthe to bind the human gods beyond the walls of time, and together these brothers ushered in the Age of Man.
The Age of Man lasted also five hundred years, until Ma’elKoth—who Himself once had been, briefly, a man—became a god and took all Home to be His Body and worked His Will upon it, and thereby rent the Cov–enant that had been Jantho Ironhand’s greatest work. The Age of Man was over, and the world it had shaped was gone forever.
This is the story of how the end of the world gave birth to the Age of Caine.
for the horse-witch
ALSO BY
MATTHEW STOVER
Iron Dawn
Jericho Moon
Heroes Die
Blade of Tyshalle
Caine Black Knife
Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Traitor
Star Wars: Shatterpoint
Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor
Written with Robert E. Vardeman:
God of War
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MATTHEW STOVER believes that nearly everything
worth knowing about his life can be found in his books.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Author’s Note
Epigraph
/> One Thin Slice of Forever
Beloved of God
Introduction
Fear by Definition
The Whole Story
Scars and Scars
Beginning of the End
Bound
The Now of Always
What Dreams May Come
Premise
Times that Bind
The Now of Always 2
Powerful Enough
End of the Beginning
Mister Good-Bye
The Now of Always 3
Complicated
End of the Beginning 2
Assbitch of the Gods
The Horse-Witch
Feral
The Horse-Witch 2
Professionals
The Horse-Witch 3
Propositions
The Now of Always 4
Enter Hero
Yesterday’s Tomorrow
Meat Puppets
Yesterday’s Tomorrow
Intervention
The Now of Always 5
Love Absolute
Middle of the End
The Mockingbird Test
Raining Weird
Good and Evil
Raining Weird 2
All About the Girl
Raining Weird 3
Reliable Sources
The Now of Always 6
Consider Insanity
Tomorrow’s Yesterday
Elfshot
Tomorrow’s Yesterday 2