I’ve always had an eye for weakness. It’s a little late to start apologizing for it now.
Then a while after that, down in Yalitrayya during Race for the Crown of Dal’kannith, I’m pretty sure it was at least partly her lingering issues with me that made her get stupid with Berne, which I know for damn sure made her and Tizarre both wish they’d died back with the Black Knives. I’ve second-handed their final cubes. I owed it to them.
Remember what I said about Saving people is not among my gifts?
Anyway, here’s the thing-
As entertaining as it was to kill dozens, maybe hundreds, of Black Knife bucks, I never kidded myself that we were actually accomplishing anything. Except making me, Marade, and Tizarre into overnight superstars. We never forgot that we were there to entertain people; half the battle was coming up with ever-more-inventive ways to slaughter bucks, and the other half was to make sure we never actually escaped.
No fear of that, anyway.
The bucks weren’t our enemies, though, not really; probably starting with Spearboy all the way back outside the gate of Hell, they kept coming at us because they were more afraid of their bitches than they were of dying. For good reason.
So the goal wasn’t to kill bucks (except to amuse the folks back home-who, as it turned out, never got tired of it). And Marade seemed to enjoy herself, but y’know, she had different issues.
All I was trying to do was lead the surviving bucks as close as possible to North Rahndhing, because I had it on, ahem, reliable authority, that there were between five and ten Knights posted there, and one of the few creatures on Home that can outpace a friar or an ogrillo over the long haul is a Knight of Khryl. It’s why they don’t ride. Khryl doesn’t approve of it; Knights bear their arms and armor with their own strength-actually His Own Strength, but let that go. So they run in full armor, and they run like hell. With armsman cavalry to engage the bucks, I could lead Knights on foot to their rear and take out the bitches.
All of them.
I had gotten enough out of that weird-ass three-way I’d had with their god and their top bitch, one I’d nicknamed Crowmane, to understand who was really in charge. Only females entered their fucked-up priesthood of the Outside Power. So once the bitches were gone, we’d have not only wiped out the next generation of Black Knives, we’d also have cut them off from the thing that really made them Black Knives in the first place. Simple, yes?
Simple no.
Try explaining this to Knight Captain Purthin Soldiers-of-the-Lord-of-Battles-Do-Not-Make-War-Upon-Women-and-Children Khlaylock.
So I didn’t bother. Explaining, that is.
His attitude was no mystery to me; it was the institutional attitude of the Order of Khryl, which-as the most militant cult of the Lipkan pantheon-was not exactly unknown to the Monasteries. They all felt that way, and I knew it going in, and timing, as they say, is everything.
Back in the day, it seems that the chance to take a chunk out of the Black Knives was the kind of thing that’d make any Knight Officer of Khryl cream his surcoat. Five hours after Marade had a chance to tell our story, Purthin Khlaylock strode forth from the white gates of North Rahndhing at the head of a column of seven Knights Venturer, a Knight Attendant, and three hundred mounted armsmen, which seemed like a ridiculously small number to head-on a couple thousand-odd Black Knife warriors. Until I saw them in action.
There was only a single engagement in the field, before the big one that ended it, back at Hell. It wasn’t much of a contest.
Khryllian armsmen are the finest soldiers on Home. Lacking the spiritual gifts that would qualify them as full-fledged Knights of Khryl, they compensate by obsessively developing their physical skills, and by their absolute devotion to a code of honor that does not permit even the thought of defeat.
One hundred brilliantly coordinated heavy cavalry with superior armor, razor-barbed lances, and the devastating seven-bladed morningstar, supported by two hundred disciplined, starkly courageous mounted arbalestiers who also carried short billhooks for close work, against a mass of lightly armed ogrilloi who, for all their advantages of size, strength, and speed, had a concept of warfare dependent upon the sort of personal heroics that went out of style at Troy. To handle any necessary personal heroics of our own, we had nine Knights of Khryl.
I don’t know how many bucks we expedition survivors had killed during the Retreat. It was a lot. I mean a lot. Over a hundred, anyway. Maybe one-fifty. In thirty-four days. So the Black Knives were not exactly pussies, y’know, because they just kept coming, no matter how many we took out. But they ran from the Khryllians.
They had reason.
By the time the grills broke and ran and the Khryllians finished riding down the stragglers that afternoon, the Black Knives had lost roughly seven hundred warriors. In a little over two hours. The Khryllian dead numbered, I seem to recall, a couple dozen. Armsmen.
There were no casualties among the Knights.
Khlaylock wanted to harry them on their retreat. I told him to save his horses. I knew where they were going.
They were running home for Mommy.
We caught up with them four days later. They were dug in on the far side of what is now called the Caineway, using that half of the vertical city as a defensive emplacement and the river as the world’s biggest moat. They still had thirteen hundred or fourteen hundred warriors over there, and almost all of them had bows, and even though the river was no more than chest deep now that it had spread across the badlands, wading through it into a storm of those five-foot-long thumb-thick arrows was nobody’s idea of fun.
And even if Khlaylock had made the swing south and found a crossing a few miles downstream, what the hell were he and his armsman cavalry supposed to do against thirteen hundred Black Knife bucks and maybe eight hundred-odd bitches dug in among the streets and alleys and ruined buildings of the vertical city?
On the other hand, the Black Knives weren’t in such a good position either, because if they set foot out of the city the Khryllians could cut them to shit on the plains, and they knew it. So Khlaylock decided to send a couple riders back toward North Rahndhing to alert the Order that he had the entire Black Knife Nation bottled up; then he could settle in to wait a few weeks for the six thousand or so heavy infantry it’d take to clean them out house to house. Nice and neat and safe.
Nice and neat and safe, however, was emphatically not what I was getting paid for.
Besides, I knew how Khryllians operate. Once the battle was over, they’d release the bitches and the cubs and just castrate any bucks who’d make submission.
I considered this an unacceptable outcome.
I was back in my cover, y’know, scout and resident ogrillo expert, so I didn’t have any authority or standing to argue with a Knight Captain of the Order of Khryl. All I had was a tip from Marade that her Khryllian truthsense had never worked on me at all.
And, y’know, that eye for weakness.
So early in the evening after he’d sent off the riders, I stopped by Khlaylock’s tent to commiserate.
The Knight Attendant had just finished preparing Khaylock’s dinner, and the Great Man was relaxing on his camp stool in front of a small turd fire. I ambled over and squatted on my heels across from him without waiting for permission. “That was a fine thing you did today, Knight Khlaylock,” I told him. “I admire you for it. Not many Khryllian commanders would have the courage to put the lives of their men above their own honor.”