“I’m not there yet. Get back with Orbek.”
“There are no gentle words for this, freeman.” Her voice hardened out of that wistful tone, but her eyes were still all melancholy twilight. “Your brother is in the Pens.”
“Pens.” An empty echo, no meaning behind it.
“Yes. At Shortshadow tomorrow, he will face Khryl’s Justice. By my hand.”
“Khryl’s Justice? Son of a bitch. He’s gonna fight you?”
“Yes.”
“That’s not a fight, it’s an execution.”
She didn’t even blink. “It is at his own request: a request that I am, as Khryl’s Champion, obliged by custom and by Law to answer.”
For a long cold minute, I looked at her. Just looked. She let me. I wasn’t really seeing her anyway.
I was seeing Orbek in the Donjon’s Pit, walking like he lived only to fight and to fuck and didn’t much care which he did to who. I was hearing the trace of a Boedecken burr in his bleak Warrens growl-
— i am black knife. my dead father is black knife, from before. from when the land likes black knives-
I was feeling Orbek’s fist tangle in my filthy shirt, his hot carnivore breath down the side of my neck-
— but remember. you win this one? you remember I coulda hurtcha. maybe i be dead, but you be hurt, hey? i want some fuck-me consideration-
And I was remembering Orbek in the Shaft and Orbek in the Donjon riot and how Orbek had taken care of Faith and all the leagues we’d walked together in the years since Assumption Day, and after a while I turned back to her and my voice came out flat as roadkill. “That’s why you set your boy Markham to babysit me.”
She picked up the leather bundle and began to unroll it. “Were the Order of Khryl ever to forget the. . potential hazards. . presented by Esoterics,” she said softly, “my uncle’s face would serve as infallible reminder. As might the new scars borne by Knight Aeddhar.”
“Huh.”
“And you are no ordinary Esoteric. No one wants your hand raised against us.”
“I haven’t thought that far ahead.”
She paused, holding the bundle half closed across the altar-block. “Have you not?”
I scratched idly at the knurls of scar and callus that layer my knuckles. “I guess it depends on what he’s in for.”
It seemed like a useful lie.
“He was taken,” she said, “during a submission violation incident.”
“What the hell’s that?”
“All Khryl’s ogrilloi must make submission when addressed by any Knight. It has to do with how ogrilloi were originally bred; the elves selected for-”
“I know how they were bred. Orbek isn’t Khryl’s, he’s an Ankhanan freeman.”
“On the Battleground, all ogrilloi are Khryl’s. He refused submission.”
“I’ll bet he did.”
black knives don’t kneel
A quiet hiss whished on inside my head, like the ignition of an internal pilot light. “I’ll bet he did,” I repeated.
“Instead, he shouted out his name-as though it might be some sort of battle cry-”
“Yeah.”
“-and he attacked.” She opened the bundle. “With this.”
Inside were Orbek’s two KA-BARs-the ones he liked to wear up his sleeves, some kind of half-ass emotional compensation shit for his amputated fighting claws-and a sleek black 10mm Automag.
She picked up the pistol by the barrel and offered it to me.
I went to take it. Slowly. I felt old and stiff. But each step toward her carved ten years off me. I took the pistol and weighed it in my hand. The grip was molded for a hand twice the size of mine-Orbek’s size. It felt heavy enough to be loaded. I thumbed the clip release and checked. It was loaded.
I slapped the clip back in and racked the slide, then sighted it toward the gleaming floor. “And the Knight survived?”
She said softly, “One of them did.”
Her voice caught me. Her eyes held me.
I said, “You?”
In the uncertain light, I could just make out what could have been a pair of new scars like the ones I’d found over my liver: a long ragged smear of pink under her left ear, and a thumbnail-size rippled disk just above her sternal notch. It was a good bet she had an assload more like them under that robe.
Orbek had always been a stellar shot.
I looked down at the gun, then at her, then back at the gun. “Fuck me like a goat. .”
She set the knives aside and spread her hands. “If your desire is for preemptive vengeance, you need seek no further.”
I stepped back and leveled the pistol. “I know how Khryllian power works. I know how fast you must be.” I took another step back. “I can still put one through your eye before you can move.”
“I am certain of it.”
Moisture trickled down my spine. I licked my lips and found sweat there. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“I am waiting for you to decide.”
I stared at her over the sights. “Even if I decide to shoot you.”
“Yes.”
I flicked a glance toward the stairs. If my hand twitched when I squeezed the trigger, I’d need all the head start I could get.
Her stare remained steady. Calm. Empty.
Waiting.
It’d been a long time since I killed a woman.
A shimmer of memory, a quarter-century old: her uncle’s broken face, left eye dangling from the optic nerve below its shattered socket, punctured and leaking vitreous humor down his nasolabial fold past the corner of his mouth. Christ, I thought, tangling in my life is pretty fucking hard on this family.
I gave my head a quick irritated shake. This was the wrong time for that shit.
Besides, tangling in my life is hard on everybody.
“This has to be,” I ground out through my teeth, “just about the most fucked-in-the-ass stunt anybody’s ever pulled with me.”
“And?”
“Shit.” The pistol got heavy: like straight-arming an anvil. “Oughta shoot you just for creeping me out.”
“Is your brother a blooded warrior, freeman?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I was flanked by two Knights Venturer.” The sad distance in her eyes became somehow less distant but more sad. “He shot them first.”
I stared. She stared back. After a minute, I blinked. She didn’t.
“What?”
“Need I rephrase?”
The pistol sank. It didn’t matter. I’d forgotten the pistol. “You had your back to him. Or something. He never saw your blazon.”
“No.”
“He didn’t know who you are.”
“He knew.”
“No goddamn way. Not a chance in Hell, and that’s not a fucking pun, either. No way.”
“And yet it is so.”
“If he wanted to die, he could have just blown his own bloody head off-”
“Yes.”
“Then why?”
“This is a question which has troubled me for three days now. Can he have been enchanted? Pixilated in some way? Has his reason been driven from him, or is it simple despair and a desire for a memorable end? — for it is no small thing to be slain by Khryl’s Own Fist.”
She put out a hand to the altar-block as though she needed some strength she could draw there. “When I learned of your arrival, it struck me that you might become interested in answers to these questions.”
I looked at her for a while again. Again she let me.
Pretty soon I shrugged down at the gun, then tossed it back on the leather wrap. I stared off over the city to hide the look on my face. “I want to see him. Tonight.”
“Freeman, civilian access to the Pens-”
My neck clamped down on my voice, making it scrape like a red-hot rasp.“I’m his next of goddamned kin.”