Just push.
I lean deeper into the harness. Rope grinds through skin and muscle and burns into bone okay not really but still it feels like hot staggering fuck-
Fucking push.
It’s too loud the rain’s stopped they can’t hear me but they can, I know they can hear me and I can’t go any faster but I just can’t get there push goddammit push-
I make the point just as my knees give out. I slip the harness and throw myself into the point’s muddy sand and let the blood from my chest and shoulders mix with the puddles while I try to figure out how I’m ever gonna get my breath.
“Caine-”
I jerk and spasm onto my back and roll to my feet by reflex with knives in my hands before I register that it was Tizarre’s voice. I fade from the lip of the point and get my back to a wall.
“Shit,” I mutter through my teeth as I put away the knives. “Might as well, y’know, slap my balls or something. Be nicer.”
A hand I cannot see attached to an arm I cannot see lands lightly on my shoulder, and a shuddering wave of dream-wakening twists through my mind because I can see her, and now that I can, I know I always could. . but only with my eyes. Not with my brain.
Until she decided to let me.
Thaumaturges creep the shit out of me, and Cloak is one of the reasons why.
“Everyone’s as ready as I can make them.” She has the bladewand, and she offers it to me butt-first. “Any fucker close to Marade when the show starts is in for a hell of a surprise.”
I take the bladewand. “I’ll bet.”
“You have no idea.” Her face is still bleak, but now a grim fire glimmers deep in her eyes. “Instead of the shackles on her wrists, she had me half cut the staples that fix the chains to the stone.”
“Um.”
The image is vivid: Marade rising naked from that pile of rubble while from each hand three feet of chain as thick as my wrist screams into a lethal iron blur-
Hell of a surprise is one way to put it, I guess.
Makes me wish I could be there to watch.
I stick the bladewand in the top of my boot and extend my hands. “Dawn’s coming. Set me up.”
She takes my left hand in one of hers. I get a faint half-orange image of her licking her lips, frowning. “It should really be, y’know, copper or silver paint-”
“Blood’ll be fine. Do it.”
“You do it.”
I pull a dagger and gash the base of my thumb; she catches my blood in the cup of her palm. “Have you ever done this before? Used a Shout?”
“I know how it works.”
She nods. “Don’t forget to cover your ears.”
“Yeah.”
“This’ll take a little bit. Go ahead with the oil barrels now. After I do your hands, you can’t use them for anything else.”
I put the dagger away and draw the bladewand out of my boot. “Get on it.”
She stares down at the pool of blood in her palm and starts taking the deep, slow, regular breaths that will drop her into mindview. The blood begins to shimmer with a faint alcohol-flame glow that casts no light.
A twist of intention sends a blue plane of force flickering out from the tip of the bladewand; the lashings on the barrels fall away, and the tops of the barrels themselves slip sideways on glass-smooth cuts. I slap the top off the first one and just tip it over. Oil floods out onto the point, oozing and rolling and twisting over the water-soaked sand, flowing thick and sluggish down toward the apex, where the wall has fallen away. I kick the second one off the other side of the sledge and let it spill there, then lift the third and the fourth carefully to the gap in the retaining wall and set them there as the spilled oil begins to roll over the lip and drain along branching channels below.
“Caine-” Her voice has that spooky emptiness; she’s still in mindview. “Now.”
I scrub oil and grit from my palms onto my breeches, then give her my hands. She dips a forefinger into my blue-shimmering blood.
Humming under her breath, she paints sigils in blood on my palms. Pretty soon she lets my hands drop and brings her finger to my face, painting around my mouth and up onto my cheeks. After a few seconds of this, she sighs, and full consciousness swims back up to the surface of her eyes.
“All right.” She gives herself a little shake. “Whenever you’re ready.”
My breath goes short, whistling faintly through my clamped-tight throat. “Get in position.”
“Caine-” She squints against a half-strangled cough. “We won’t live through this, will we?”
“Hard to say.” I shrug to cover the shakes that are starting to ripple along my arms. “A couple days ago, I would have said no way. But my luck’s been running good lately.”
“When I-” Another cough, choked, with maybe a little bit of sob behind it. “When I was telling Marade the plan, Whispering to her-y’know, the diversion, the rendezvous, everything-she started to cry. It’s the-I’ve never seen her cry, Caine. I don’t think. . what they did to her. . But she started to cry when I told her the plan, and I asked her-well, she just said she was grateful, that’s all. She kept saying thanks. But not for the, y’know, the escape. The rescue.”
She swallows. “For the chance to hit back.”
My eyes burn. Not with tears. “Yeah.”
“That’s what I want to say too. Thanks. For the chance to hit back.”
“It’s more than a chance,” I tell her. “You remember what I said the night they took us, how the Black Knives would remember us for a thousand years?”
“But that was just-”
“Yeah, it was. Then.”
Storm clouds part. Stars wink into being.
“You and I, Tizarre, right here, right now-”
Can she see my teeth?
“-we just might make it true.”
››scanning fwd››
Even the wind goes still. Rich fruity fumes steam up from the oil on the point.
From the apex, the Black Knife camp is a clutter of cinders and ash and smolder like a kicked-out campfire. The cinders are the hide tents, the ashes are knots of bachelor males sleeping out under the stars and the rain, and the smolder is the remains of watch fires burning down now with the approach of dawn.
I’m in place. Go.
I don’t bother to signal her that I heard.
She’ll figure it out.
Vengeance is mine saith the Lord but this morning He’s gonna fucking well have to share.
I press my painted palms to my painted cheeks. I draw as deep a breath as I can and open my mouth as far as it’ll go, then clap my hands once, crisp and sharp, in front of my open mouth.
It makes a sound like most of the Boedecken just exploded.
The magick of the Shout directs the sound away from me, but still the blast is physical, staggering me, buckling my knees and smacking stars into my eyes.
Cover my fucking ears too fucking right-!
Like I have any hearing left to lose.
I can’t even imagine what it must have sounded like to the Black Knives, but that sleepy kicked-through campfire just became a kicked-over anthill as ogrilloi jump up and rush out of their tents and spin around and fumble for weapons and probably shout and howl and squeal, if I could hear them, and I’m not even started yet.
Now I do cover my ears, and I Shout:
YOU
WERE
WARNED
The sound is too vast to be called speech: it is as though the escarpment itself roars at them. The anthill of Black Knives slows, and stops. Dim smears of ogrillo faces turn toward the sky.
THIS PLACE
IS MINE
With a foot, I tip one of the remaining oil barrels carefully, so that it pours over the lip of the point into the branching stone channels that drain down the face of the vertical city.
I SAID
I WOULD FEED YOU
YOUR FUTURE
On cue, the spill of oil running down the channels catches fire.