Caine Black Knife (4 page)

water fuck me
it’s
water

hakHAKH

fuck that hurts

fuck hurts just
breathe

breathe

a pinhole star
in the void bright and brightening and going red and wind hushing to
a roar and the star screams toward me and yawns beyond the universe—

And I’m
awake. And it wasn’t a dream.

I’m still
on the cross.

Tilted back so I
can breathe. Must be some—

It’s
Crowmane. Cold yellow eyes framed with gloss feathers gleaming
black-red in the light from the bonfires. Looking in her face feeds
the furnace in my chest with dreams of fist-fucking her eye sockets.

She lifts a
dipper to my lips and I take a mouthful of cool clean water—fuck
me, it
is
water, it
is—
and I spit it on her
anyway.

Try to.

My gut just
won’t push that hard right now.

Water dribbles
down my chin and neck and chest and some of it goes down my throat,
and y’know, if she’d bring that dipper up again I’d
just fucking
drink
it, but instead her raw-liver lips peel
back around her tusks and she says something to me, waving down at
the lower tier with the dipper, splashing carelessly the water that
is my sole hope of heaven, painting the retaining wall with little
black wet dustballs that I would gladly lick off her asshole just to
get that moisture past my lips . . .

Down where she
points, the other bitches have Pretornio.

Shit, they
haven’t even stripped him yet. I couldn’t have been out
more than a couple of minutes.

Shit.

I wanted to miss
this one.

Next to where
the bitches hold him rises a pole seven feet tall, blunt as a knuckle
and big around as my wrist. It’s fixed on a sprawling iron
stand so it won’t tip over when he starts to struggle. I wish I
could look away. I have, y’know, some, what you might call,
issues with anal penetration. In general. And this will be, y’know—

Overly specific.

I
really
wanted to sleep through this.

I wish there
were some way I could stop myself from imagining how it’ll
feel.

The bitches go
to work on his clothing, cutting it off so they can strip him without
opening his shackles, and he’s still staring up at me—I
mean, it
looks
like he’s staring up at me, kind of, in a
sick way—with that same stupid dreamy smile he had when he
begged me to pick him for this. Which is bone-fucking creepy on a
face with only clot-crusted holes where eyes used to be.

Well, this is
what you asked for, man. You can fuck me if I have a clue why.

Under his robes
he’s all soft and white. It’s hard to look. I mean, sure,
priests don’t have to be athletes, even Kannithan priests, but
shit he’s got these little saggy man-tits . . . and when they
cut away his pants, his crotch is just a thatch of mud-colored hair.
Huh. Since when is Dal’kannith one of those, y’know,
those full-castration type of—

Oh.

Holy shit. I get
it. I get it now. Those aren’t
man-
tits.

Pretornio—

He’s a
chick.

>>scanning
fwd>>

When the world
comes all the way back the smell is still turd-smoke and old meat;
the feel is still easterly breeze on my face and my chest and my
balls but not on arms and legs that are numb as the wood they’re
nailed to. The sound on the wind is still Pretornio’s voice,
gone high and ragged, still chanting away in Old High Lipkan, and
when my eyes fall open she’s still impaled on the pole like a
trout on a fish spear.

Doesn’t
wriggle, though.

Me, I’d be
thrashing with everything I’ve got. Drive my weight down onto
the blunt end of the pole.
Make
it rip through me. End it
fast.

She’s
perfectly still. Must be holding out for something from Dal’kannith.

Good fucking
luck.

Moon’s
out, way over in the west. The top bitches are back up here. I catch
Crowmane’s voice behind me, and Dugsacks leans on the retaining
wall and chews wood-roasted meat off what looks a little like it
could be half a giant chicken wing but is actually the forearm of
somebody I know.

Knew.

Maybe somebody
who died in the fight. Stalton. Rababàl. Maybe somebody who’s
died since. Somebody I chose. Maybe Kess, or Nollo.

Maybe Tizarre.

Dugsacks sees me
watching her eat and tosses the arm to Cornholes, who gives me a
friendly snort that sounds like a lion’s cough because each of
her nostrils is bigger around than my dick. Teasingly, mockingly, she
lifts the arm up within reach of my teeth.

So I take a
bite.

Why not? Better
than a sop of vinegar. Tastes good too.

The ridges of
flesh that serve her for eyebrows pop wide. While I chew, she
chuckles and says something to the other bitches and they hoot and
when she turns back and lifts her head to laugh up at me, I figure my
gut’s recovered some. I make an experiment: I spit the hunk of
somebody-I-know in her eye.

Dammit. Wanted
it up her nose.

She starts for
me and Crowmane stops her with an authoritative bark. Dug-sacks says
something that gets a laugh from the other bitches and Cornholes’
eyes bulge and she whaps Dugsacks a good one with the roasted arm and
they go for each other and Crowmane has to wade in personally, and
while they’re all still hooting and clawing and shrieking and
struggling—

This place is
suddenly getting
light . . .

Shadows sharpen
and stone glares and what exactly the hell is going on here? Not
dawn. Can’t be. Dawn here is vermillion dust. This light’s
yellow as a lamp and it’s coming from—

It’s
coming from—

Hot staggering
fuck. Pretornio’s on
fire.

A crown of
flames fans the night from her skull, lightning-blue where it springs
from naked bone, rising to a sunflower spray, and across the badland
camp Black Knives turn and stand and stare, and the world goes quiet
except for the night wind’s whisper and the harsh spit of
flame. Flesh has burned off her spine, and the exposed bone spits a
column of blue blaze up to join her crown, bright as an arc-welder.
Bright as a star.

Shit, she’s
in overload.

And she’s
still chanting . . .

Guess
Dal’kannith’s coming through for her after all. With
something Old fucking Testament.

The bitches have
forgotten about me now. They’ve forgotten about each other.
They line the retaining wall, staring down in brain-dead stupefaction
at their homemade fusion torchsicle.

Crowmane
recovers first. She roars something into the camp, where awed Black
Knives have stopped eating and fucking and gambling and everything
else to stand and stare with stupid looks scorching into their
warthog faces. Crowmane roars again, and a couple of bucks grab a
water barrel and run at Pretornio. This tickle in my guts might be
the pre-echo of an oncoming laugh. They’re gonna be sorry.

The bucks skid
to a stop at the base of the impale-o-matic and heave the barrel. A
gout of water splashes up onto her and power explodes through it like
a fuel-air bomb. The shockwave blasts cook fires into showers of
burning shit and shreds tents and sends ogrilloi tumbling. What’s
left of the two bucks looks like Daffy Duck after the dynamite goes
off in his beak.

And Pretornio
chants on.

Another roar
from Crowmane. Bucks scramble to string their bows, and four-foot
arrows as big around as my thumb zip out of the night and smack into
her unresisting flesh with a stutter of flat whaps like bored
applause.

Every one of
them bursts aflame: instant torches fed with her melting body fat.
And I finally manage that laugh.

The laugh shakes
me. It rocks me. It rips barb-wire chunks off my
ass-boned-to-Neverland diaphragm. I don’t mind.

It always did
hurt.

“Hey . .
.â€

The Pratt &
Redhorn was a small but well-appointed hostelry of three floors and
maybe twenty-odd rooms that occupied a lively corner of the
River-dock parish not far from the vigilry. I paid off the cartboy
and tracked rain through the foyer.

A sign on the
table in the tiny lobby advised me in three languages to ring the
bell for service, so I did. Tobacco and meat smoke and considerable
noise—voices raised in drunken song, accompanied by the
planking of tuneless metallic percussion—billowed through a
half-doored archway, which was blocked by a sign that advised, with
apologies in the same three languages, that the dining hall was
reserved for a private function. My sigh was more than half growl
when I rang the bell again, louder.

I was in no
mood. For anything.

I don’t
know what reaction I’d been expecting out of t’Passe. It
sure as hell wasn’t a gleam in her hard bright eyes and a nod
and a brisk
I’ve been wondering how it might turn out.

I didn’t
make a hassle over it at first; after all, she’d been still
unconscious in the Monastic Embassy infirmary on the day I’d
driven Kosall into the stone at the upstream tip of Old Town and let
Ma’elKoth’s flame flow through my hands to destroy that
fucking blade forever. But when I reminded the World’s Greatest
Living Expert On Me of this detail of trivia, she just shrugged.
“Destroyed? Not while you live, I suspect.â€

I linger upon
this moment, as I have a thousand times, or a million, or only once
forever; no number can signify, because times have no more meaning
than does Time. All of you is present here: your painful birth and
your blasted childhood, your criminal youth and murderous manhood,
your sad slipping-down maturity and all your many deaths—

And yet none of
you is here now, too.

In this moment,
for this moment, you have erased yourself. No longer an Actor, a man,
Hari Michaelson, Caine.

You vanish into
the legend you are still creating.

The conference
room is institutional green. The conference table is faux-granite
grey. The conference chairs are mauve.

Do they look
comfortable to you?

Do you somehow
sense the quantum smear of futures in which you’ll someday sit
in them—when you’ll have conversations too much like this
one with other, younger Actors?

This question
will hang suspended without answer until I have voice to ask.

For now, I focus
on the hum of the motorbed under your ass, on the saline drip
streaming drool into your strapped-down left arm, and on the salt I
taste on the back of your tongue.

The vast curving
screen that fills the far wall of the conference room shows a glowing
skeletonized schematic of the vertical city. The schematic rotates
slowly, displaying differently colored pinpoints of light: a virtual
orrery of fourteen planets.

“I, ah,
must say, Michaelson,â€

I woke with the
taste of raw human flesh still fresh and bloody on my tongue.

I rolled over
and scrubbed at my face with one hand while my other groped for the
pitcher on its stand beside the bed. I rinsed my mouth with stale
water, then made a face and spat it on the floor. Fucking water
tasted worse than the blood.

I hacked goo up
the back of my throat and muttered, “Now, that was a
party .
. .
â€

RETREAT FROM THE BOEDECKEN (partial)

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

MASTER: NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.

© 2187 Adventures Unlimited Inc. All rights reserved.

“
Ti
zarre—
!â€

It wasn’t
a good dream.

I couldn’t
make it make sense, even as a nightmare: it should have been a net
over my face, not a burlap sack. Chunks of puke shouldn’t be
flopping around my head. I was sure of that.

The next time
awareness knocked a hole in my skull, I started to worry that I was
naked, when I should have been suited up in my black leathers. And
this wad of cloth tied into my mouth with what felt like rope? Where
the fuck had
that
come from?

It did, however,
explain why the chunks of puke were pretty much all small enough to
have come out of my nose.

Later, a dimly
foggy realization chewed into my forehead that the shoulder I was
facedown over should have been flesh instead of metal.

The last worst
part: it wasn’t rope on my wrists and ankles. Forget that I
didn’t have the throwing knife that was supposed to be in the
concealed sheath behind the collar of my missing tunic; not only
would that knife have been useless against the armor on this
particular back but it wouldn’t have cut what was binding my
wrists anyway, which I could recognize because I still had some
feeling in my fingers, because he hadn’t put them on as tight
as the Los Angeles Social Police had a few years back when they
pinched me for Forcible Contact Upcaste.

Stripcuffs.

I puked into the
sack again.

Then I fell back
down the black hole.

I’ve been
lucky enough to make it through my life so far with less than my
share of major head trauma. Sure, I’ve been knocked around,
bashed with sticks and stones, quarterstaves and iron-bound clubs,
warhammers and friggin’ morningstars, even a brick or two;
stabbed with stilettos, daggers, knives, and smallswords; taken a
broadsword through the liver and an axe into the thigh; been
variously shot with arrows, sling stones, bullets and motherfucking
blowgun
darts—not to mention being once or twice hurled
from high places—but I’ve mostly managed to avoid being
whacked on the head hard enough to produce more than a few seconds of
unconsciousness.