And there were about three thousand of them.
Three thousand of the toughest, meanest, fastest, strongest bitches and bucks of the Black Knife Nation pulled themselves out of the wreckage of their most sacred holy ground to find themselves standing among the broken corpses of their brothers and sisters. Their parents. Their children.
The remnants of the Black Knife Nation were, as one might imagine, immoderately pissed at me.
I was top of my entire novitiate in Smallgroup Tactics at Garthan Hold, but I barely even needed my training. Every one of the seven surviving “porters” had graduated from the Studio Conservatory’s Combat School, so even though none of them were superstar material-except maybe Jashe-they knew their business inside and out. And Tizarre, whose Cloaks could make us more or less invisible, and we had the bladewand, and a shitload of other stuff Kollberg had strategically placed for us. . not to mention Marade, who was a homicidal Wonder Woman and kinda immoderately pissed herself.
Screw tactics.
All I needed was to remember some of those books Dad used to make me read. Such as War and Peace.
According to Tolstoy, Kutuzov beat Napoleon on the French retreat from Moscow by refusing to do battle. He kept their armies in contact, so Napoleon could never relax-he had to keep his army in battle order at all times-but every time Napoleon would march out to fight, Kutuzov would retire. When Napoleon would go back to his camp, Kutuzov would advance: the military version of Push Hands.
I combined this principle with some basic concepts of guerrilla warfare I’d picked up from The Life of Geronimo. So when the Black Knives would come out in force, we’d circle behind and murder wounded in their camps. When they’d send out single-pack scouting parties, at least one entire pack, sometimes two or three if they weren’t too far apart, would vanish. . and be found later as skinned corpses, missing their scent glands. If they posted pickets, we killed the pickets. If they picketed whole packs, well. .
Ogrilloi bunch up when threatened. It’s instinctive. So when spooky noises would start coming from the darkness, they’d drift together-then one swipe of the bladewand. .
We’d drag the bodies around before we skinned them and piled them up, to make it look to the Black Knives like we’d been able to kill the pack because we’d caught them spread too far apart. Get it?
And, y’know, the corpses wouldn’t be only skinned, either. They’d be partially eaten.
This was not just for effect.
I could pretend it was simple pragmatism. We had to be mobile. Our lives depended on it. So none of us carried supplies other than water skins. We lived on what we took off Black Knife corpses. And on the corpses themselves. Sure, blood’s thicker than water. But you get used to it.
Tastes good, too.
I’m not into pretending, though. Not anymore. The real reason everyone was eating Black Knife meat and drinking Black Knife blood is because I made them do it.
Partly it was my innate sense of justice.
Yes, justice, goddammit. If they want to kill and eat me, I will kill them, and I will eat them.
Period.
This was not the argument I made to the rest. I didn’t make an argument. Our first day out, I came back into our cold night camp with a skinned ogrillo leg over my shoulder and told Tizarre to take the bladewand and start carving off chops.
They weren’t real excited about this idea.
After all, the only differences between ogrilloi and humans are some details of phenotype; the two species are closely related enough to even be cross-fertile, to a limited extent, kind of like horses and donkeys. Eating ogrilloi was close enough to cannibalism to make everybody but me more than a little queasy.
I won’t go into the details of the scene, who said what and all, because that’s not what this story is about. Let’s just leave it at this: It started with me telling everybody that we’d be eating ogrilloi because it’d make us all smell more like ogrilloi-we’d be sweating their proteins and crapping their fats, y’know? — which was starting to work until somebody, Jashe, I think, pointed out that it wouldn’t make us smell like grills, it’d make us smell like humans who are eating grills, which was when things started to turn ugly.
I ended up explaining in a very calm, very quiet voice that we didn’t have enough supplies to survive, and we couldn’t carry people who weren’t pulling their weight, and anyone who wasn’t willing to go all the way with this should just trot on back and give themselves to the Black Knives right fucking now.
This was not the real reason I made everyone eat ogrilloi either. The reason was another of those books Dad made me read.
Heart of Darkness.
There was one thing I never understood about that book: why people think Kurtz went crazy out there. The way I saw it-the way I still see it-Marlow was the crazy one. When Kurtz was murmuring the horror, the horror, I always figured he was talking about having to go back to Europe.
I guess it’s because, y’know, I grew up in the jungle. My jungle had gutters and alleys and CID prowl cars circling just below the cloud deck, but it was a jungle just the same. That was why when the Black Knives showed up was when I started to get happy for the first time since I graduated from the Conservatory. Who says you can’t go home again?
And that’s what I had to do for the others. I had to bring them over to my yard: make them understand that they were in the jungle now. That everything they thought they knew about Who They Were and How Things Are Done and What the World Is All About had been fucked up the ass with a live grenade. That the trick to the jungle is to be top predator.
To eat everybody.
After what we’d been through, they didn’t need a lot of convincing. Oh, there were some token protests about holding the line between us and them and that kind of moral-high-ground bullshit, but the real lesson of Heart of Darkness is that the jungle is always there, inside even the most civilized of us. It whispers shadow love in the twilit corners of our minds, and no matter how deaf we pretend to be, we can’t help but listen.
Don’t believe me? Check the rental figures for my Adventures.
The only survivor with the moral authority to stand up to me would have been Marade, who not only had that parfit gentil Khryllian Knight of Renown thing going but also had been through so much worse at the hands-and otherwise-of the Black Knives than any of the rest of us that if she’d said no, I probably couldn’t have made anybody else say yes without holding knives to their throats. But Marade, for all her power, for all her certain knowledge of Khryl’s Love for her, was not to the manor born; underneath all that Armor of Proof and Morning Star in Her Hand and the rest of it was still just an Actress after all, and I. . well-
I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of.
Saying she was not to the manor born doesn’t say enough. She wasn’t really Marade, not the way I’m Caine. Marade was just a character she was playing. She was still really Olga Bergmann, third daughter of a failing Business family from the Swedish southland who had turned to Acting because her two older sisters’ marriages hadn’t managed to revive the family fortunes. Nothing in her privileged upbringing had remotely prepared her for the brutalization she suffered from the Black Knives; hell, I don’t think anything could prepare anyone to go through something like that. I doubt a Home-born Knight could have survived it any better. I know I wouldn’t have.
She put a good face on it; as long as we were running and fighting, the pressure we were under held her together. But once she was safely at North Rahndhing. .
Her breakdown isn’t really part of this story either. Let’s just say that when the Knights of Khryl came out to face the Khulan Horde at Ceraeno a year and change later, Marade wasn’t with them. She was undergoing drug therapy in the inpatient unit of the Vienna Institute for Social Wellness. She never did recover enough that she could enjoy sex; she’d do it-when it was in her contract-but she’d freeze up and start to shake, and it was always pretty ugly. Which, though nobody ever actually said so, was maybe mostly my fault.