Caine Black Knife (5 page)

Now, even those
few seconds are serious enough; that’s a concussion right
there, and anybody who thinks an untreated concussion isn’t
serious should go recheck the mortality figures. Still, though, it’s
something you generally live through. You wake up with a bad headache
and persistent dizziness and nausea, general weakness and shit, and
you need some bed rest—or, say, a Khryllian Healing, like the
one I got after Tyrkilld slapped me up—to get over it, but you
do. Eventually.

When those
seconds stretch into minutes, you go from bad headache into the
territory of, say, subdural hematoma, which is a fancy way of saying
that your brain’s bleeding and starting to swell, which means
that you’re not gonna just open your eyes and shake it off and
go beat up the bad guys. It means it’s a roll of God’s
dice whether you’re gonna open your eyes at all, and if you do
it’ll probably be a lot like it was for me: a fucking
nightmare.

This is not just
a metaphor.

The
bleeding-brain kind of unconsciousness is a fall across an event
horizon of oblivion: an infinitely instant shredding of everything
you are as psychic tidal forces smear you into an eternal scream.
Waking up is no treat, either; it doesn’t happen all at once,
but in little flickers and flashes that start out as needles and
graduate to razors in the eye and the grip of God Himself upon your
balls, and it involves a lot of vomit and choking and wishing you
could go back to falling into that black hole, because the eternal
scream is a helluva lot more fun.

That’s how
it is for me, anyway.

Maybe it’s
because it seems like every time it happens to me, I start that whole
razors-in-the-eyes waking-up crap in a bag over somebody’s
shoulder while the sonofabitch is out for a jog.

The only way I
can reconstruct roughly how long I must have been out before I
started twilighting up from semiconsciousness is to guess how fast
Markham could haul my twitching ass from the Pratt & Redhorn to
the jitney ramp up Hell while making a wide circle around the Spire,
because he wouldn’t exactly want to bump into any inquisitive
Khryllians on the way.

Did I not
mention that part?

Turns out I
wasn’t wrong about Calm Guy’s backup. I wasn’t even
wrong about the really, really good nerves. My only mistake was
assuming that the backup in question would have reason to be afraid
of the Smoke Hunt.

Well, okay. That
wasn’t my only mistake.

There are ways
in which I think really, really fast. Like how to kill people. There
are ways in which I don’t think really, really fast. Like
working out that the only way Faller’s gunmen could have known
I was at the Pratt & Redhorn was if they found out from Kierendal
& Tyrkilld & Co.—not fucking likely—or if they
found out from, say, the all-too-conveniently
lurking-in-an-alley-across-the-street Lipkan ass-cob who booked me
the room in the first place.

At the time I
was playing sack of meat potatoes, I didn’t have any idea of
any of this. There were some inexplicable images swimming around the
brimstone swamp inside my head, of Boedecken badlands covered in
grain and vineyards and a river dividing a city of neat whitewashed
brick tangled up with headless ogrilloi burning with a red fire that
cast no light. And that was about it.

I don’t
remember much of the early part of my visit to BlackStone. Somebody
must have taken the sack off me, because I remember somebody saying
good lord, clean him up
, and sometime after that I was wet and
there was a blinding-bright haze pumping in through my eyeballs that
was overinflating my head until I could feel the bones of my skull
grinding against each other along jagged fissures as they began to
separate and a distantly familiar voice said from the top of the well
I’d fallen down—

lord
tarkanen—you hit him too hard

Then another
distantly familiar voice, not Markham’s—like the voices
of Actors from Adventures I’d cubed a few times when I was a
kid, I always had a good ear for voices—

or perhaps
not hard enough—were you not once the practicing necromancer,
simon faller? a shade will answer honestly where a man may not—

Which I tried to
laugh about, y’know, because of the pun, but I’m pretty
sure I only managed a dull moan.

no no no, he
has to be alive—my orders—a healing—do a healing—

Nay.
This
voice
was
Markham’s. I could even make out a strict grey
cloud among the bright haze that filled my universe.
This hurt was
not taken in battle. Khryl’s Love will not avail.

A round pale
shadow in the bright haze began to resolve toward the blur of a face.

Michaelson?
Michaelson, can you understand me at all? Do you know where you are?
Caine, talk to me.

I remember,
here, trying to answer.

Dead . . .
I
was trying to say.
Dead . . .

Simon Faller
,
said that familiar voice which wasn’t Markham’s,
he
raves. Let him die. If he lives, we will all come to regret it. This
I know from bitter experience.

Here I would
have laughed again, if I could laugh. Somehow thinking how many
people could honestly say the same made me giggly.

It’s
not up to me
, the blur of a face replied.
And it’s not
up to you, either. We’ll turn him over as is. Let them deal
with him however they want; then if he dies, it’s their
problem.

Are Artan
Healing magicks superior to Khryl’s?

Just—ah,
different, that’s all. Let them in.

That face-blur
leaned down closer, and more details came into focus: grey
cream-plastered wisps of comb-over, a crisp salt-and-pepper beard
giving shape to soft jowls . . .

It was Rababàl.

Michaelson—maybe
you can’t hear me, but—I know you always say that
everything’s personal, but this really is business. Really. I
got over hating you a long time ago. This is just business.

“Dead . .
.â€

I met Purthin
Khlaylock at the end of the actual retreat part of
Retreat from
the Boedecken.
By my best count—because I don’t make
a habit of reviewing my old Adventures, especially that one—it
was thirty-four days, give or take, after I destroyed the Tear of
Panchasell and unleashed the Caineway.

I still can’t
remember how many people were in Rababàl’s original
expedition—thirty-nine or forty, something like that. Ten of us
got out of Hell alive.

Not counting
Rababàl himself. But let that go.

The cook, Nollo,
supposedly of Mallantrin; his lover, also supposedly of Mallantrin,
Jashe, the guy everybody called the Otter; three “brothersâ€

Once I woke up,
it didn’t take long to figure out where I was. I’d been
there before.

Too many times.

The plain
cream-colored walls, blank, windowless, featureless except for the
touchpad beside the door. The flat cream-colored door itself, also
without window. Or handle. The simple desk and chair,
injection-molded of a single piece with the floor. Nothing on them.
No books. No screen and stylus, and certainly no pen or paper. The
lo-flo crapper in the corner. The bed, with the padded
wire-and-plastic straps to secure my arms to the cold round rails of
brushed stainless steel. No straps for my legs, because they didn’t
need any, and they knew it.

This was Earth.

The computerized
spinal bypass that let my legs work in this universe hadn’t
been reinitialized since I left three years ago; the mental trick
that lets me walk on Home is magick. From the waist down I was just
dead fucking meat. Like—as Deliann once wrote—having a
couple dead dogs strapped to my ass. Except I can’t eat ’em.

I had a tube
coming out of my dick, and a big diaper, and I didn’t have any
self-consciousness about crapping all over myself. If they didn’t
feel like cleaning up my shit, they could fucking well unstrap an arm
so I could use the bedpan—the one success of my literally
half-assed spinal regeneration therapy had been bowel and bladder
control. But nobody minded cleaning up my shit. They weren’t
capable of minding.

If I’d had
any doubt about where I was being held, it would have vanished the
first time my attendants came in to empty my urine bag, replace my
IVs, and change my diaper. I could see the lobotomized vacancy in
their eyes before I saw the neural yokes on their necks.

Workers.

I didn’t
bother to try to talk to them. With their higher cognitive function
overridden by the yokes, Workers can’t do anything beyond give
simple answers to direct questions. These couldn’t even do
that. They were deaf. Stone fucking deaf.

Surgically
deafened.

To make sure
that an inmate here had no one to communicate with. That the inmate
has absolutely no unapproved contact whatsoever with anyone beyond
his cell. Which I knew because for about ten years, I used to
regularly bribe my way into this place, to talk to my father.

I was in the
Buke.

The Buchanan
Social Camp is one of the places Geneva puts people who need to have
their antisocial attitudes rectified, or at least interdicted from
healthy society. Usually permanently.

It’s hard
to say how long I was there; time has little meaning in the Buke.
Workers came and went. My relief bag and diaper got changed, as did
my sheets and my IV. My headaches went away. I got stronger.

I had time to
think.

Thinking—real
thinking—is not something I do often, nor particularly well. I
was never trained for it, and I sure as hell don’t have any
natural inclination.

Thinking gets in
my way. In a fight it’s fatal.

In the real
world, instinct and experience are superior to thought; Tolstoy wrote
that in a contest of cunning, the peasant consistently defeats the
intellectual, and he was right. Not because the peasant is smarter
but because he doesn’t have the self-doubt and the second
thoughts and all the other mind tricks that make the intellectual
out-think himself.

I was born to be
an intellectual. Before his illness and multiple breakdowns, my
father was arguably the most famous anthropologist of the century;
his book
Tales of the First Folk
is still the standard text on
Primal oral culture. My mother, before her death, had been his
brightest student. Even after the Social Police arrested him and
busted us down to Labor, he was still trying to make me think like a
Professional, teaching me out of books on the net. Even after my
mother died. Even after the madness had him wholly in its grip; on
his semilucid days, he would make me read and talk and read some
more. But I did that only to keep him from beating me into bloody
unconsciousness. Any real chance of growing up an intellectual was
over for me by the time I was six. My real education was street
school.

I might have
been born an intellectual, but I was raised a peasant.

Which—along
with what a number of people have described as lunatic
self-confidence and a truly staggering degree of
self-absorption—might explain why I wasn’t really
worried.

It was clear why
they put me in the Buke. This was tactical. Because of all those
years of visiting Dad here. They were expecting my presumed future to
smother me in wet-wool layers of claustrophobia.

Dickheads.

I spent days
hanging from a fucking
cross.
I spent fuck knows how long
chained to the wall of the Shaft in Ankhana’s Donjon, dying of
gangrene in a river of other people’s shit. Spending the rest
of my life in a nice clean quiet cell is gonna scare me?

Oh, yeah. Sure.

One of the books
that Dad made me read—one that I’ve read again a few
times on my own, in fact—was
The Art of War.
Because,
like a lot of those old-timey Chinese guys, Sun Tzu had a gift for
metaphor. The book isn’t just about war, it’s about
handling conflict. You could even say it’s about how to live
well in a dangerous world.

One of the
things Master Sun wrote is that a general who knows his enemy and
knows himself need not fear the outcomes of a thousand battles.

I knew my enemy.
That was my edge.

When I finally
got a visitor, he seemed a little surprised to find me smiling.

His
Professional’s suit and tie didn’t really fit—looked
like it was cut for a guy with twenty extra pounds on him—and
he scuffed the soles of his brown wingtips along the floor when he
came through the door, but maybe it wasn’t the suit so much as
it was my eyes.

My eyes kept
wanting to see his hair in a brown comb-over instead of grey strings
waxed flat across bare scalp, and a dirt-colored stubble on thicker
jowls instead of the stiff salty beard neatly trimmed. Age suited
him, really: he’d lost weight and gained gravity.

And he could
walk straight in and just sit down and let me stare at him and get my
mind around his existence, and he didn’t even have to do his
goddamn coin tricks with nervous hands. He just kept them folded in
his lap.

I kept smiling.
I didn’t have anyplace I had to be.

Pretty soon he
leaned forward. “You don’t seem to understand how much
trouble you’re in.â€

This story concludes in Act of Atonement: Book Two:

His Father’s
Fist

M
ATTHEW
S
TOVER
believes that nearly everything worth
knowing about his life can be found in his books.