Matthew Stover - Caine Black Knife

RETREAT FROM THE BOEDECKEN (partial)

You are CAINE (featured Actor: Pfnl. Hari Michaelson)

MASTER: NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.

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The dirt-colored cloud spreads wide, hugging the horizon, draining into hollows of the distant hills. “That’s them,” I say to no one in particular.

The bloody sun behind my left shoulder stains cloud and hills together, and the shadow of the escarpment overhead spreads like oil across the badlands.

Tizarre stares. Her face goes pinched, and her knuckles whiten on the scabbard of her broadsword. “You’re sure? How can you be sure?”

I could quote Sun Tzu at her: Dust high and sharp will be chariots. Dust low and wide is infantry , but instead I shrug and hand her the monocular. If Sun Tzu had ever seen infantry like this, he would’ve crapped his silk fucking pajamas.

Tizarre puts the monocular to her eye, and what’s left of her color drains out of her cheeks. “Shapes in the cloud. .” A whisper. “A lot of them.”

I nod at Rababal. “Maybe you want to have a look, huh?”

Platinum flashes in the flick-flick-flick of the coin-size disk that appears, disappears, and appears again between Rababal’s stubby fingers: this is what he does instead of thinking. His jowls, gone slack and sweat-streaked through the grey-coating dust, belie his carelessly nimble hands. “We have only a tendays’ supplies. We cannot afford any delay; our backers-”

“Aren’t about to get assboned by a couple hundred ogrilloi. Unlike, say, us.” I lean on the parapet and look down into the rumpled badlands. “If that band weren’t coming here, we could have maybe broken camp and scattered into the wadis. Maybe.” the wadis. Maybe.”

“Get away ? You mean retreat? Run? Flee ?” Marade gives me a reproachful stare I can see upside down in her impressively curved cuirass. Must have caught her at prayer: she’s in full armor, and I can’t pretend I don’t like the look. She gives whole new meaning to the word breastplate. The twist of scorn on her face favors her-S amp;M cheesecake on steroids. “I would dislike to use the C-word-”

“My name’s a C-word.”

Her sudden booming laugh spills blond hair down her back. The hair’s almost as shiny as her armor, and I can’t help thinking one more time that I could really kinda get into her if she ever gave me look one. Those thighs. . man. She could crush my pelvis like a biscuit. “But we cannot let them simply drive us like woodcocks, can we? Without a single engagement?”

“You’d know more than me about wood cocks.” Her smile slips a little. Sure: dyke jokes. Brilliant. That ’ll make her like me. “One engagement is all we’ll get.”

“We have more than two dozen men under arms-”

“Porters with swords.”

Pretornio, fumbling within his cassock: “With the Skills of Dal’kannith Wargod, those porters-”

“Sure. Those porters.” I make a face. “You think they’re looking to fight ogrilloi on five royals a month? They’re just hired labor.”

The platinum disk suddenly stills. “ Need I point out-” Rababal’s scowl probably used to really impress teenage apprentice necromancers. “-that you, Caine, are yourself ‘just hired labor’?”

“Shit, no. You remind me twelve times a fucking day.” This work-for-hire stuff sucks dogshit. The best boss in the world is still only a butt-whisker this side of a collar and a whip. “So if you ignore my advice, you’re not exactly getting your money’s worth, huh?”

“Perhaps-” Pretornio coughs a wad of dust out of his throat, and wipes sand from his lips with the back of one bloodstained sacramental glove. “Perhaps we should, um, pray. For guidance-?”

“Maybe he’s right.” Dark swipes underline Tizarre’s eyes when she lowers the monocular. She’s talking about me, not the Lipkan priest. Out of all of them, she’s probably the only one who buys what I’ve told them. A close-up view-courtesy of Mr. Zeiss-of a few hundred ogrilloi converging on you in that twenty-mile-an-hour grizzly-bear lope can make a believer out of anybody. “Maybe we need to run. Right now.”

That gets the partners squabbling again. Everybody’s worried about their fucking money.

Shitheads.

I let them argue for a little, then I break it up with a sharp “ Hey. Nobody said run now. We can’t run. They’re coming here .”

They stop and stare at me like I just blew tentacles out my nose. I swing an arm over the parapet at the fever-tossed bedsheet of the Boedecken badlands. Wadis spray out from the base of the city in a sagebrush tangle that used to drain off whatever dead river once fed this hellhole. Though a thousand folds cover you from pursuers at ground level, from this high up the cliff wall you can see the bottom of every twist. Probably why those millennium-dead elves built a city here in the first place. “Once they hit these ruins, where are we gonna hide?”

Rababal’s gallowglass Stalton nods toward the dusk-shadowed lip of the plateau that eclipses half our sky. “What about upland?”

“You’ve seen it. A tabletop for five days’ ride. Rising to the mountains. We can’t even hide over the horizon.”

He nods, understanding. Grim. “At least we’d have a head start.”

I could get to like him. We working stiffs oughta stick together. Except I keep wanting to smack the crap out of Rababal, and if I try it Stalton’ll stomp me into a Caine-shaped grease stain. Not personal. Just his job. But it puts a cramp in our friendship.

I give him a shrug. “Nothing outpaces a hunting ogrillo. Especially not us.”

“A Cloak.” Tizarre’s looking a little wild around the eyes. “I can do a Cloak-”

“No, you can’t.”

“It’s just grassland, right? Right? Grassland’s easy. It all looks alike anyway. Easy. Even all of us. Even the horses. I could-I really could- ”

“-waste your time,” I finish for her. “Ogrilloi are scent hunters. How good’s your nose?”

“How do you know they’re coming here?” The platinum disk vanishes again, and Rababal heaves himself off the stone-cut bench. He joins me at the parapet. “They could just be-I don’t know, following a herd of bison. Migrating. Something.”

I open my hand toward Tizarre. She puts the monocular in it, and I pass it to Rababal. He hefts it appreciatively. “Nice metalwork. Dwarven?”

“Yeah. Dwarven.” Like I’d tell you even if I could. “Pick up the vanguard just below that double notch.”

He puts the monocular to his eye. He flinches, and has to swallow twice before he can say, “Yes.”

I don’t blame him for the flinch. “Now track straight down, about halfway from them to here. See the two riders?”

He smothers an indistinct curse. “They look human.”

“Yeah.”

“ That’s what the ogrilloi are chasing-?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re leading them straight here !”

I spread my hands silently: quod erat demonstrandum.

Everybody goes quiet, and their gazes all turn inward while they calculate what that might mean. I flash my teeth at Pretornio. “You want to pray? Pray the grills catch those guys.”

He stiffens, and color flares high on his cheekbones. “I will not ! We should be trying to find a way to help them-”

“I’d help them, if I could. I’d help them to a couple arrows through their skulls.” I get the monocular back from Rababal and squint through it again. “But my bow doesn’t have the range. And anyhow I’m a crappy shot.”