Caine Black Knife by Matthew Woodring Stover Page B

Black Knives don’t kneel.
    Bu bu bu hrk? He smears crimson tears off his face with a greasy hand. Black
Knives?
    You palm the
KA-BAR and roughly square his shoulders. You’re filthy,
little brother. And soft: too long in Hell. Your tusks are grey. Your
neck bends easy.
    He slobbers. And
you—you—and you—I am Black Knife. You flip the
KA-BAR pommel-first and hand it to him. Now, so are you.
    My Gift has now
been given, and I release you: you open your all-too-human eyes,
stare at the mold-eaten plaster ceiling above your bed, and mutter,
“Son of a bitch. â€

PART ONE

BELOW HELL
    I leaned on the
deck rail and silently numbered my dead.
    The slow
heartbeat of the riverboat’s steam-driven pistons pulsed in my
bones. The waterfall hush from the sidewheel’s rising flukes
shuffled the chatter and bustle of passengers and crew into white
noise. I preferred it that way.
    I’ve never
been exactly social.
    I had barely
spoken since Thorncleft. I traveled alone. I couldn’t have made
myself bring companions.
    Not to the
Boedecken. Not on this river. My river.
    Fucking
astonishing: how many people I knew who died up here. I couldn’t
remember all the names. Rababàl, Stalton, that Lipkan
supposed-to-be priest of Dal’kannith . . . Pretornio. Hadn’t
really thought of them, any of them, in maybe twenty years. Lyrrie.
Kess Raman. Jashe the Otter. Others. Dozens of others. Thirty-five?
Thirty-six?
    I couldn’t
pin down how many. I wasn’t sure it was important, but somehow
I thought it ought to be.
    Back on Earth,
it’d have only taken a minute or two to dig the cube out of my
library and start to live the whole thing again. I didn’t think
I would have.
    Didn’t
think I could have.
    After I
retired—in the bad days, that seven years when my legs never
quite worked and the background music of my life was a mental track
of the nearest bathroom because I could never tell when I was about
to shit myself—I sometimes cubed my old Adventures. Caine’s
old Adventures. Just on the really bad days. In the bad nights, when
the shitswamp I’d made of my life sucked me down and drowned
me. But I never cubed this one.
    Not that I had
to. All I had to do was stop holding it all down.
    I still held it
all down. Still hold it all down. I didn’t even know why.
They’re fucking dead. Every one of them. Dead in the
Boedecken Waste. Nameless corpses in the badlands’ dust. Left
to the buzzards, the crows and the khoshoi.
    Left to the
Black Knives.
    And if somebody
let any of them out of Hell long enough to take a new look at this
fucking place, the shock’d probably kill them all over again.
    The
gravel-scoured folds of the badlands had softened into rolling fields
of maize and beans, well-ordered woodlots and neat rows of birch and
alder windbreaks. Where the land was too rugged for food crops, the
hills were terraced with vineyards: long trellised racks of twisting
bark-shagged vines hung with purple and red and green clusters that I
could smell even down here on the river. The river was itself new:
shallow with youth and careful engineering, its broad slow curves fed
the vast network of irrigation ditches and ponds and reservoirs that
had brought the Waste to life. And somehow I couldn’t make
myself believe this was a good thing.
    These waves of
living green looked like less to me.
    The old
Boedecken had been exactly that: old. Carved by time into its true
shape. Harsh, jagged, scarred by existence, grim grey jaws locked
onto the ass end of life.
    I’d kind
of liked it that way.
    The river was
the only change up here that hadn’t surprised me. Whenever I
let myself, I could make the river’s birth happen inside my
head vivid as a lucid dream. Like lots of births, the river’s
had been ugly. A sea-wrack of pain and terror. A hurricane of blood.
    The kind of fun
I