Caine Black Knife by Matthew Stover

Author:Matthew Stover
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780345509710
Publisher: Doubleday Publishing
Published: 2008-04-22T22:00:00+00:00

FOREVER AND A MEN

RETREAT FROM THE BOEDECKEN (partial)

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

MASTER: NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.

© 2187 Adventures Unlimited Inc. All rights reserved.

Sffrins a lxry. Heerz manser.

Here.

Is my.

Answer.

Maxmum bad.

Snot nough.

Not.

Enough.

Hav topen meyes.

Have to.

Fuh kk kk k—

Fuck.

Me.

God.

Hrrr.

Air. Air is all.

Air’s everything but—

So . . .

Tired . . .

But.

Don’t need air to talk to you.

Technology is a wonderful fucking thing.

I just—

Need.

To hurt more.

It’s night.

Must be night. No sun on my skin.

I can open my eyes. I can. And I will. Pretty soon.

I will.

Keep . . . breathing.

Motherfucker.

Wind . . . ’s still shifting. Cookfire smoke . . . mulch of rotten blood and gamy meat high and soft and blue . . . funerary platforms west of camp . . . staked out their dead for the buzzards and the crows . . .

Just.

Breathe.

Out.

In’s no problem.

Breathe.

Out.

It took J—ahh, hrr. Hrrgh . . . conditioning . . .

Still can’t—

Here, then. Here. I can do this.

Control Disciplines.

I can.

I can.

I can do this.

I can.

Okay.

This is what I mean.

The son of that old-fashioned god back home, where you are, took all day to die. Not sure how long it’s been for me. Guess I’m in a little better shape. Or maybe it’s because I’m up here for my own sins . . .

Or—

Grunting, alien words, the creak of rope and greased wood and yes, and yes, it’s me, they are, yes.

Yes.

My scaffold of timber reclines, rotating slow as the wheel of stars that must be somewhere above, angling backward on its horizontal axle like an easy chair until my over strained diaphragm spasms out of muscle failure and gasps and wheezes and pumps my starving lungs again: this is the real reason I’m outlasting the son of that old-fashioned god.

Because they won’t let me die. Not yet.

Oxygen whispers away the shadows in my head.

I open my eyes.

My hand—that’s my hand, above on the weather-greyed arm of the Y-shaped cross. Looks like I’ve got a cramp: fingers twisted into talons of somebody else’s agony. I can see the cramp. I can’t feel it. My hands and feet are gone: blocks of wood. Lumps of stone. Maybe my pain center’s finally burned out.

Maybe the rusty spikes through my wrists and ankles severed the nerves.

The blood that wells around the spike is dark in the orange light of the bonfires. It gathers brighter rose as it trickles thick and cooling down crusted channels to my shoulder.

Not hanging from the spikes. Grill-size cross: wrist shackles beyond my fingertips. Not worth a custom job. Tied me on. Spikes’re just to keep me from slipping the rope.

The Y to which I am nailed eventually rotates far enough back to take some of the pressure off the spikes they drove between my Achilles tendon and ankle joint. Now my struggle is to hold up my head. To look upon our torturers. Their half-assed let’s-pretend sorcerors.

Bitches.

Would have guessed it would be bitches. Would have known. Even if I never seconded the Barand. Would have known.

Dad showed me that

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