Caine Black Knife (3 page)

I can open my
eyes. I can. And I will. Pretty soon.

I will.

Keep
. . .
breathing.

Motherfucker.

Wind . . . ’s
still shifting. Cookfire smoke . . . mulch of rotten blood and gamy
meat high and soft and blue . . . funerary platforms west of camp . .
. staked out their dead for the buzzards and the crows . . .

Just.

Breathe.

Out.

In’s no
problem.

Breathe.

Out.

It took J—ahh,
hrr. Hrrgh . . . conditioning . . .

Still can’t—

Here, then.
Here. I can do this.

Control
Disciplines.

I can.

I can.

I can do this.

I can.

Okay.

This is what I
mean.

The son of that
old-fashioned god back home, where you are, took all day to die. Not
sure how long it’s been for me. Guess I’m in a little
better shape. Or maybe it’s because I’m up here for my
own
sins . . .

Or—

Grunting, alien
words, the creak of rope and greased wood and yes, and yes, it’s
me, they are, yes.

Yes.

My scaffold of
timber reclines, rotating slow as the wheel of stars that must be
somewhere above, angling backward on its horizontal axle like an easy
chair until my over strained diaphragm spasms out of muscle failure
and gasps and wheezes and pumps my starving lungs again: this is the
real reason I’m outlasting the son of that old-fashioned god.

Because they
won’t let me die. Not yet.

Oxygen whispers
away the shadows in my head.

I open my eyes.

My hand—that’s
my
hand, above on the weather-greyed arm of the Y-shaped
cross. Looks like I’ve got a cramp: fingers twisted into talons
of somebody else’s agony. I can see the cramp. I can’t
feel it. My hands and feet are gone: blocks of wood. Lumps of stone.
Maybe my pain center’s finally burned out.

Maybe the rusty
spikes through my wrists and ankles severed the nerves.

The blood that
wells around the spike is dark in the orange light of the bonfires.
It gathers brighter rose as it trickles thick and cooling down
crusted channels to my shoulder.

Not hanging from
the spikes. Grill-size cross: wrist shackles beyond my fingertips.
Not worth a custom job. Tied me on. Spikes’re just to keep me
from slipping the rope.

The Y to which I
am nailed eventually rotates far enough back to take some of the
pressure off the spikes they drove between my Achilles tendon and
ankle joint. Now my struggle is to hold up my head. To look upon our
torturers. Their half-assed let’s-pretend sorcerors.

Bitches.

Would have
guessed it would be bitches. Would have known. Even if I never
seconded the Barand. Would have known.

Dad showed me
that story—was it horsemen out of the far eastern steppes? was
it nomads I cannot name in a desert I cannot name?—how they
took as an article of faith that a man’s only proper role is
war; that to inflict pain upon the helpless will ruin a warrior for
battle. So when they had taken someone they despised so much that
only infinite suffering could answer the ache in their blood—

They’d
give him to the women.

Bitches dance
around me in their gloss-black feathers and blood-brown paint and
swinging swollen dugs, and they pinch me and pull my hair and
talon-flick my balls and tease my shrinking flesh with any petty
insult they can imagine. And when they get bored, they offer me spit
and urine in a wooden ladle, and the thirst that consumes me is
stronger than my disgust.

And that’s
exactly the problem. Suffering is a luxury. I don’t hurt
enough. Haven’t hurt enough.

Not yet.

Far below us, a
vast field of bonfires paints the badlands with pools of sunset. Down
among them Black Knives pursue their Black Knife lives: cooking and
washing and eating and drinking, telling jokes and dancing, lying and
singing and wrestling and fucking and doing whatever else ogrilloi do
when nothing special is going on.

Very few even
give us a glance.

Fuckers.

They were not
real to me before. Even the ones I fought hand-to-hand. They were
abstract. Impersonal. A natural disaster. A flood, a fire, an
avalanche. Something to deal with.

Things are
different, now.

Now I see them.
I smell them.

I
know
them.

And if I can
just hurt
enough . . .

But that’s
the problem. Suffering is a luxury.

This is
different from the Barand. A whole different world. He and his boys
were taken far out in the Waste; they were used, and used up, on the
spot. That was just a clutch of them, long-range raiders. This is a
whole different world.

This is some
kind of fucking Althing.

More than that.

They didn’t
need us for this party. It’s BYOV. The screams and whimpers
that are their favorite dinner music come mostly from other ogrilloi.
Criminals. Cowards. Captives from other clans. Who gives a shit? The
point—the sharp end of the fuckstick—

This wasn’t
something staged just for us. This was what they came here for.

This. Not us. It
was never about us. It was about being
here.

Shit, y’know—?

Shit.

We might’ve
got away after all.

Ahh, there it
is. There. Now I’m starting to hurt.

Good. Good. I
need
to hurt. Because some things are starting to make sense
to me.

Because this
Althing of theirs is more than an Althing—it’s some kind
of mass combined
baptism-confirmation-bar-and-bat-mitzvah-rite-of-fucking-passage. The
walled bowl against the perimeter, where we paddocked the horses . .
. see how crowded it is?

Those are cubs.
Can you see them? Their children. Baby Black Knives. Hundreds of
them. Some kind of crèche: all in there together, from
blood-wet infants to half-grown juvie bucks, walled away from the
rest of the camp.

Kiddie prison.
Or something.

And on the line
of crosses below me, the ones hung with ogrilloi . . . shit, there
they go again: another handful of juvenile bitches—they look
about the same age as the ones who have been looking after the cubs
in the kiddie prison—come trailing out behind that big fat cunt
in the glossy headdress like a mane of crow feathers, the one who
acts like she owns the fucking planet. They spread themselves out
obediently, turn their backs and bend over to present like baboons in
heat, and Crowmane goes up to the crucified prisoners one at a time
to jab her blood-crusted thumb-talon up their butts . . .

Yeah. Here’s
one for you science geeks out there: ogrillo males carry their
prostates the same place humans do.

And as she
manually collects each one, she lifts each handful to the night and
howls something in the local babble before she jams it up the snatch
of the next juvenile bitch, which is the exact point in the process
of Black Knife ritual-exogamy-by-manual-insemination where this whole
deal jumps the sword from revolting to downright fascinating.

How fascinating?
It’s holding
my
attention, and I’m dying on a
fucking cross.

Funny thing is,
you probably can’t see it. Not even with my eyes.

If I’d
stayed in Battle Magick, I could show it to you: I’d have
learned to turn visualization into vision, imagination into
hallucination. But if I’d stayed in Battle Magick, I wouldn’t
understand what it
means.

That’s the
thing, here. I know what it means. That’s my edge. The
difference between me and Mick Barand.

A Monastic
education.

This is what you
can’t see with my eyes:

Crowmane raises
her fistful of goblin jizz and hacks out her hairball invocation, and
around her hand—around her head, her mane of glossy feathers,
around her rows of nipples dangling like boneless thumbs, around her
mounded rolls of asscheek—there gathers a significance, a
realness
, a vivid lucid-dream intensity that makes everything
else in the screaming bloody night fade like it’s barely even
here.

I mean
everything.

The crucified
ogrilloi. The juvie bitches. The Black Knife camp, and the shackled
rows of captives waiting their turns. Even Kess, who’s still
twitching and struggling where he hangs from meathooks through his
jaw while ants and nightflies chew the coils of his guts that trail
in the dirt around the scrabbling balls of his feet . . .

Even me. Even
the new pain I’ve found.

We don’t
count right now.

Right now, we’re
only details. We don’t matter. All that matters is that
Crowmane’s fistful of jizz is gonna grow up to be a Black Knife
superhero. Fast. Strong. Physically flawless. Completely without
fear. The perfect warrior.

How do I know? I
know the way you know things in your dreams. I just
know.
That’s
the
real
that makes the rest of us into a dream. That’s
what she’s paying for with our pain.

It’s
exactly like a dream. Because it
is
a dream. But it’s
not
my
dream.

That’s why
I need to suffer. I need to get the attention of the dreamer.

And I can.
That’s the kicker. That’s the punchline. That’s
what’d make me laugh if I could laugh. That’s why
suffering is a luxury.

Because their
demon isn’t Bound. Not by them, anyway.

Now, like an
answer to my silent prayer, they bring out the next two.

It’s
Marade and Tizarre.

Streaked and
stained with filth and blood. They both are gagged with thick
mouth-jamming knots of rope. Tizarre’s lips are smashed and her
eyes swollen near to shut with bruise. Marade’s golden skin is
flawless beneath the crust of clot and muck, for Khryl still loves
her. She must have fought them even here, even after she awoke within
their camp: she is shackled with chains that could bind a dragon,
where Tizarre is tied only with rope, cruelly tight; her hands are as
swollen as her eyes and shading toward the same necrotic black.

The bitches kick
their knees from under them and cast them to the stone before me.

I have figured
out what it is. Why they have put me where I am. Why they make me do
what they make me do. Did I tell you? Did I say it inside my throat,
or only in my mind? I can’t remember.

It’s
because I showed brave the way a grill stud might show brave. Because
I went out against them alone. Because even now they cannot make me
beg for death.

It is possible
they intend this as an honor.

So I will be the
last. I will watch the others. Their infinite pain. Their
unimaginably ugly deaths. I could close my eyes, but I won’t.

I will not.

To be their
witness is the only penance I can offer.

This is how I
pay for making myself the star of the Caine Show.

And now it’s
time to choose.

The final
refinement, one that some remotely clinical part of my mind can even
appreciate: the bitches remove their gags. So I have to hear them
beg.

And because it’s
them, because it’s Marade and Tizarre, because they are both
heroes in a way I can barely imagine, each of them begs me to choose
her, to spare her partner.

To let her
partner live one more day. One more hour.

Their begging
turns to shouts as they try to drown each other’s voice. Their
shouts become desperate screams and finally wordless siren wails.

And I will make
the choice.

It is what I do,
now.

I will send one
of them to a deeper circle of Hell, and the screaming of the chosen
and the curses of the spared will rain as fire upon my head.

Should be
grateful. Isn’t this what I wanted? Isn’t this what I
asked for? Swallowed by dark. Blind beyond the memory of day.

All the way
down.

And—

I
am
grateful. This is what I wanted. This is what I asked for. Didn’t
know it was possible to hurt this much.

For this I thank
You.

Make of this
suffering a sacrament: a covenant between us.

Do this one
thing, and there will be agony beyond Your imagination. Only grant my
one small desire, and I promise You a universe of pain.

Just get me off
this cross.

That’s
all. Get me down from here. So I can
hurt
them.

Get me down from
here, and I will be Yours forever. We’ll make our
own
Caine
Show. Together.

A universe of
pain. Everlasting. Forever and amen.

Just get me down
from here.

I sat on that
bench outside the Cathedral for a long time.

I sat while
night took the city. I sat while Khryllian lamplighters tromped by,
kindling the hurricane lanterns that hung from tall wrought-iron
hook-poles to mark each street corner: faint candles in the vast
Boedecken dark. I sat while the night clogged up with rain again and
barely visible people hurried past me with lowered heads and
shoulders hunched against the chill, carrying shuttered lanterns that
leaked strips of flickering yellow light. I sat long enough that my
ass either warmed the bench’s polished stone or went dead numb.

Finally I got
up. “Fuck this for a joke; I’m freezing my balls off. I’m
leaving.â€

RETREAT FROM THE BOEDECKEN (partial)

You are CAINE (featured Actor: Pfnl. Hari Michaelson)

MASTER: NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.

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