He didn’t even blink. “Have a care, Caine Lackland. Think twice before suggesting dishonor to a Knight of Khryl.”
This Lackland moniker was something he’d hung on me, believe it or not, as a sign of respect. Knights all have House names and carry the name of their lands, or the lands they are sworn to; Marade, for example, was formally Marade, Knight Tarthell of Kavlin’s Leap. In the Lipkan Empire, only serfs have a single name-like, say, Caine. So, in deference to my actions in freeing Marade and Tizarre and escaping the Black Knives, he did me the honor of nicknaming me Lackland, as though my not having lands and a surname was some kind of oversight.
“Oh, shit no, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean it like that. No disrespect intended.” I shook my head like your average amiable dumbass. “I was talking about-what d’you Khryllians call it? Your Legend, right? The story Knights and arms-men and all the Soldiers of Khryl will tell each other about your life, for as long as the Order survives. Everything good or bad about who you are that might help another Khryllian face a tough situation, right?”
He nodded at me over the top of a steel mug of wine. “It is in our Legends that Knights continue to serve Our Lord of Valor, even long after we fall in His Service.”
“Well, yeah. That’s what I’m talking about. I mean, a few days ago you fought what will probably go down in your Legend as one of the greatest cavalry engagements in Khryllian history. Maybe in the history of the world. Now today, though. .”
He squinted at me. “You find fault with my orders?”
“No, no, no. Not at all. That’s my point. I think it’s great that you have so much compassion for your men. Rather than lose any more, you’re willing to be remembered as the Knight who let the Black Knives slip away.”
He set his mug on the ground beside his boot, and sighed. “I am no fool, Caine Lackland, and a fool you must be not to have discovered so before now. The Order of Khryl does not exist to serve your private vengeance.”
Tell me that again tomorrow, I thought, but I said, “All right, look, sure, I can’t play you. I get that. But now lend me half an ear, huh? The Black Knives are settled in over there, and they’re spoiling for a fight. On their terms, right? Because you made them fight on your terms four days ago, and they want some payback. But when they find out you’re not gonna attack-when they find out it’s a siege instead of a battle-things are gonna change. Especially when their food starts to run short. It’ll be more than a month before your infantry can get here. I know for a fact they don’t have supplies to last that long.”
Khlaylock leaned into the firelight. “Then fight they must, and we can-”
“No. Run they will, and you can’t.”
He scowled at me.
“They’ll leave just enough bucks behind to keep some fires lit and shit to make it look like they’re still there, while the rest of them slip away. Once they’re gone, they’ll scatter. And the Order will never catch them together again. Not in your lifetime, anyway.”
He turned that scowl toward the darkness beyond the Khryllian camp. He was seeing the badlands inside his head, the way any good cavalry commander could: the way they had looked at sunset, the way they would look from any vantage points he could reach, from any scouting arcs he could order.
The way they would look from the vertical city, once it was empty.
He murmured, “You are saying there is another way out.”
“Yeah. But better than that-better for you, and for that Legend of yours,” I told him. “I’m saying there’s another way in.”
He brought his gaze back across the fire and spoke the two words that if I were a more demonstrative guy I might have kissed him on the mouth for. “Show me.”
Which is how, a couple hours later, Khlaylock and I found ourselves in that tactical dispute I mentioned earlier.
We were on the plateau overlooking the vertical city, next to the topside access tunnel. Getting up there wasn’t a problem; the cliffs were limestone, which made sedimentary layers that I could go up better than most men climb stairs. I towed a light cord attached to hemp rope that I pulled up and tied off to an outcropping, and Khlaylock, with Khryl’s Strength, just hand-over-handed himself straight up the rope without raising a sweat. The prairie grass on the plateau was waist-high by then and there was a night breeze from the west, which put us downwind from the access tunnel and covered our motion. Sound was not an issue, because my waterfall was roaring out from the escarpment only thirty-odd feet below the lip, which made it an easy sneak, even for Khlaylock, who was less than ideally stealthy, despite leaving his armor behind and carrying only a long knife and his morningstar.
The Black Knives had posted a couple of sentries up there, but the sentries got lazy, as sentries do, and when one of them went back down the access tunnel for something, I got the other with my garrotte. He made enough noise-thrashing around, trying to get me off his back-to draw the attention of the other one, who poked his head up the access tunnel to see what was going on, which news was delivered to him by Khaylock’s morningstar at something like lightspeed.
The medium, as they say, was the message.
And sure, the lightspeed thing is hyperbole, but not as much as you think. That particular strike graphically demonstrated the distinction between a Knight Venturer, like Marade, and a Knight Captain; whereas a shot from Marade could lift a full-grown ogrillo from his feet and hurl his corpse a yard or two, when Khlaylock hit that buck in the face, the poor bastard’s head just fucking vaporized.
Which almost made me reconsider. But only almost. Like somebody I used to know had liked to say: I died the day I passed my Boards.
From the lip of the escarpment, the vertical city fanned out below us in a spray of pinprick campfires fogged by the waterfall’s spray. A gibbous moon hanging in the southeast whitened the peeled-back levels while I laid out my half-fake plan. I pointed out the downramp from the vault and explained how easy it’d be for Khlaylock to lead his Knights down the tunnel to take the Black Knives from the rear.
Khlaylock, unsurprisingly, was having some difficulty seeing the tactical advantage in this. His scowl kept getting deeper the longer he looked down at the city. “In the best case, our surprise attack turns the Black Knife line long enough for my cavalry to ford the river. Which leaves my Knights and me inside the city with two thousand Black Knives and my cavalry-again at best-funnelled into narrow streetways as they strike inward to join us, forced to fight Black Knife warriors on the worst possible ground.”
I shook my head. “You do this the way I tell you, you won’t have to fight them. They don’t want to fight you-”
“Black Knives are the fiercest warriors of the Boedecken-”
“That’s because what their-uh-priesthood does to cowards is far, far worse than dying in battle.” He turned that scowl on me.
I nodded down into the scatter of spray-fogged campfires. “You know the Black Knives practice sorcery. What you don’t know is that it’s not just sorcery, it’s their religion. And this is their most holy place. It’s the seat of their god. I killed their. . high priest, I guess you’d say-” Because I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell Knight Captain Khryllians Do Not Make War On Et Cetera that I had murdered a female noncombatant. “-and I know where the rest of their priesthood will be. I can take you straight to them. Once you wipe them out, the warriors will crumble. Shit, they’ll be grateful.”
Well, maybe. I had a feeling they wouldn’t be lining up for a chorus of “Ding Dong, the Bitches’re Dead,” though even if my conditioning would have let me tell him that, he wouldn’t have gotten the joke.