Caine Black Knife

Rating NR Genre sci-fi Author Matthew Stover Publisher Del Rey

Reality TV is going to get so far out of hand one day, people won't be satisfied unless someone gets killed.  Check that - in Caine Black Knife, we're way beyond that.  Reality shows take place in their own pocket universe with gods who grant powers to those who serve them, and Caine, an assassin with heightened reflexes, becomes a superstar during a snuff film that he alone survives. Through his survival, he nearly exterminates the Black Knives, a clan of part ogrilloi, sentient half gorilla/half elephants, known for their vicious combat skills and powerful sorcery.  And now he's returning to the site of that battle.

Caine returns to the Boedecken for the first time since his battle there with the Black Knives a much older, physically weaker man.  The Boedecken is much different than when Caine first arrived there - a river rages where he once walked.  The land is occupied by the Khryllians, an order of holy knights whose god, Khryl, offers healing to anyone wounded in battle, and who value - or at least pay lip service to - honor above all else.  Caine has come at the request of a Black Knife named Orbek, who he claims as a brother, an idea the Khryllians do not buy.  They believe Orbek to be involved in the Smoke Hunt, an underground resistance movement thought to be run by surviving Black Knives.  Caine is interrogated upon his arrival, but when he defeats his interrogator in combat, the Khryllians believe Caine's cause to be favored by Khryl. The Champion of Khryl summons Caine and appoints him to discover the source and purpose of the Smoke Hunt and to stop it.  Given his history with this place, few people are interested in helping him, and even more fear him for what he did to the Boedecken and its inhabitants.  Caine's history and the Boedecken's are clearly linked, and both the Black Knives and Khryllians hate him for their positions in the land he left behind.

We learn that history through flashbacks that make clever use of a second person narration that suggests the reader is watching the way Caine's audience would.  We see The Retreat from the Boedecken, the Adventure that made Caine a star.  A group of Actors, including Caine and two Khryllians, who volunteer to be recorded in dangerous situations for entertainment slowly realize that they have been set up to be wiped out.  Despite their attempts at resistance and escape from the Black Knives, they are all captured, tortured, or killed.  The Black Knives see Caine as the leader, and their shamans force him to watch from his cross as the other Actors are tortured and killed.  Caine, though, is granted a world-shattering second chance, and his unscrupulous willingness to fight dirty and his seething need for vengeance allow him to overcome his captors, but not to save the others.  Caine uses guerilla tactics to run the remaining Black Knives into a small force of Khryllian Knights, and his dispute with their leader over the proper way to handle the threat leads to his lifelong conflict with the Order of Khryl, the near eradication of the Black Knife clan, and Caine's banishment from the Boedecken.

This novel sits somewhere in the middle of fantasy, science fiction, reality TV, and massively multiplayer online role playing game (think World of Warcraft).  Caine's Monastic training requires him to know each religion's gods, who are very real and active, so the fantasy enclosed in the science fiction pocket dimension is thorough and pervasive.  The Khryllians especially display a disturbing comfort with agonizing pain and mutilation, since they know they will be healed by their god.  The jump from one reality to another is disorienting for a while, but once you get used to it, the way the two storylines draw together is satisfying.  New, even more disorienting jumps begin near the end of the novel, and while not quite as satisfying, still work to establish the setting's strange combination of worlds.  This is the first book in a series, so there is no clear cut resolution to the story, but the story is compelling enough on its own.