Caine's Law

by Matthew Stover

An empty echo, like his own voice coming back at him from the far end of a desert canyon.

  “Home might not be Calling me at all.” He wrapped his arms tighter. “He might think He’s doing me a favor. If Black Knives are rising again …”

  A cold scrape of the rasp.

  “I can’t let that happen. I can’t. Not for Orbek. Not for anybody.”

  “It’s still a choice.”

  His gaze went from the wind to the rocks, then he let his arms fall, and he looked down at his hands. “Yeah.”

  “So?”

  “So it’s a choice I made a long time ago.”

  Her neck bent a little more, lowering her face closer to the pony’s hoof. She turned the rasp to the heel buttress. Her silences had a way of making him feel like a liar.

  After a while, he said, “It’s … complicated.”

  Her answer came from behind her hair. “Everything is, with you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s a desperate life, to be beloved of God.”

  He got interested in the snow-smoked distance. “Depends on the god.”

  “Does it?”

  “Christ, I hope so.”

  His eyes followed the ascending saw-curve of the mountain’s flank, toward its blunt, vaguely spork-shaped peak pewtered with last year’s winter. He didn’t know its name. He didn’t know the names of any of these mountains, or the passes. Or the valleys that opened below them. Something about being with her let names slip away from him. Names are only words people assign to things.

  He didn’t know hers. She’d told him once that she’d never had a name. She didn’t use his. Any of them. He’d asked her about it once. She only shrugged.

  She didn’t talk much, most of the time.

  Eventually he figured it out. Took a while; he could be kind of slow about some things. Horses don’t deal in abstractions. They have no use for them. She knew him. He knew her. Names are masks. They get in the way.

  Like how all his names had gotten in his way, all these years.

  What few names she had for him were nicknames, usually to mock his sillier poses. He had more than his share: affectations left over from his Acting career. She called him tough guy sometimes, and sometimes wolf king. More often, if she used a name at all, it was dumbass. He never minded. He usually earned it.

  When she was mad at him, she called him killer. He never told her his father used to call him that. A lifetime ago. A universe away.

  He looked down at the long fine curve of her neck parting the fall of her honey-streaked hair, and for a second his body hummed like a harp string tightened to breaking. He didn’t let himself touch her.

  “So,” he said, eventually. “Where you headed?”

  Her nearside shoulder lifted the thickness of the blade of her knife: a ghost-shrug that somehow took in the witch-herd, and the mountains, and the sky. And him. “Winter’s coming.”

  This was why she didn’t talk much. She didn’t have to.

  “Yeah.” He looked up into the steel swirl; the wind had freshened enough that the flakes were starting to sting his eyes. “I’m going the other way.”

  She gave the pony’s hoof a last few light scrapes, then set it down. She held out her hand and the pony shifted its weight; she touched its opposite hock and it picked up the other foot. “This is about the end of the world.”

  “Probably.” He looked at his hands. “Orbek probably figured he didn’t have anything to lose.”

  “He’s very young.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The world didn’t end, you know. It changed. Not for the better. It didn’t end.”

  “Without the Covenant … look, the Deomachy isn’t actually over, y’know? All Jantho did was engineer a five-hundred-year truce.”

  “What do you think you can do about it? Any of it. Even Orbek.”

  “Sometimes life surprises me.”

  “You hate surprises.” She still hadn’t looked at him. “Where?”

  “Over the mountains, north of Thorncleft,” he said. “Into the Boedecken. The Khryllian holdfast, now—they call it the Battleground.”

  He felt her nod more than saw it. “You still haven’t said why you’re here.”

  He shrugged into the mountains. “The herd’ll be passing Harrakha on your way downland. I was hoping maybe you could stop at the manor and tell Faith good-bye for me—”

  The pony jerked its hoof off her knee and bucked as it skipped away. The hoof knife clattered off a rock a foot or two past him. It had missed his leg by almost an inch.

  Almost.

  This was how he knew she cared for him: she did not miss by accident.

  And she was walking away, stiff-kneed, arms folded like she finally felt the cold.

  “Hey,” he said, going after her. “Hey, c’mon, don’t—”

  “What do I call you today? Not asshole.” Her voice was colder than the ice on the wind. “Assholes are good for something.”

  “Hey, goddammit. Stop.” A suggestion; she didn’t take orders any better than he did.

  “You think this is easy for me?”

  “You love saying good-bye, killer. It’s who you are.”

  He stopped, stung. He didn’t try to sting her back. She could smack his best snide right down the mountain. “It’s not forever.”

  Her head bent over her folded arms. “Everything’s forever until it isn’t.”

  He thought about that for a second. Then another, and more.

  “Is this what you wanted …?” she murmured toward the sweep of bracken and scree below. “Did you just want me to be … to be still human enough to …”

  “No,” he said. “No, c’mon, it’s not like that …”

  “Or did you want me to be petty like your dead River Bitch? To say don’t go? Choose him or me? Or Him or Me?”

  It was like she’d stabbed him with a needle. A horse needle. Because he wasn’t sure she was wrong. And Christ, she knew right where it hurt.

  She lifted her head. “Would you make me choose between you and the herd?”

  “That,” he said solidly, glad to be back on firmer ground, “is a stupid question.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It is.”

  He found the start of a smile.

  “It still hurts,” she said. “I’m still afraid.”

  “Talk to me.” The dark ache in his chest pushed open his palms. “Tell me what I can do to make it better.”

  Her shoulders lifted half an inch. “Take me with you.”

  He chuckled. “Oh, sure.”

  A couple seconds later he discovered she wasn’t laughing with him, and then it wasn’t funny anymore. Not even a little. “No fucking way.”

  She kept staring downslope. He followed her gaze. Carillon wasn’t having a lot of luck with his scarred mare either. “I told you how shit gets around Caine. I mean, you know about the Faltane County War.”

  “Better than I want to.”

  “This’ll be worse. Goddamn Knights of Khryl are—you ever hear of the Knights of Khryl? They ever get down your way?”

  She looked away from him, up into the iron sky. The sunstreaks of her hair began to frost with snow.

  “These aren’t just guys in armor. Their guys in armor—the Khryllian armsmen—they’re the best soldiers on the planet, and they’re just the goddamn grunts. Knights of Khryl are priests of the Lipkan god of personal combat … Shit, one of the three Actors ever to play a Knight of Khryl was this guy Raymond Story. He played Jhubbar Tekkanal. They called him the Devil Knight. We called him the Hammer of Dal’Kannith. Ever hear of him? He’s the man who killed Sha-Rikkintaer. Took him three days. Nonstop battle. Against a dragon. He won. By himself. Are you listening to me?”

  “Aktiri.” She sounded bored.

  “You don’t get it. I can’t fight these guys. Nobody can.”

  “They can’t be killed?”

  “Well—no. They just can’t be fought.” He flicked a hand through the snowflakes. “That’s not the point.�
��

  “I know.”

  “I can’t protect you up there—”

  “You don’t protect me down here.”

  He bit down on his temper. “I will not watch you die.”

  She stared off toward the snow-shrouded angle of a distant peak. “I die all the time.”

  “We’ve been over that.”

  “Then you need to decide what you want.”

  Christ, he hated when people started that shit. “Please, for the love of fuck, tell me you haven’t gone Cainist.”

  “That depends. Do you want to be caned?”

  He couldn’t manage even a courtesy laugh. His only answer was to half surrender to the ache in his chest.

  One hand floated free of the serape and laid itself along the bone-clenched muscle of her shoulder and she spun like a spooked mare and in the half second while he half expected her to belt him one, she folded herself against his chest and buried her face into the angle of his shoulder and neck and her cheeks were icy wet like she’d been standing in freezing rain, and he got it then, or thought he did: why she wouldn’t let him see her face.

  Something broke inside him.

  Putting his arms around her he wrapped her in the serape, and he pressed his face into the wind-scoured tangle of her hair and smelled horses and aspen and ice and high mountains.

  She was shaking.

  “All right,” he whispered into her hair. To say it ate him alive, but to keep silent would have killed him. “Come with me.”

  Her shaking became shuddering, then a huge sigh filled her and emptied her again. She said, “No, thanks.”

  “What?”

  “I hate cities.”

  “Now, hold on, goddammit—”

  She lifted her head just enough that he could find through the curtain of her hair the curve of a wicked grin. “A girl likes to be asked, dumbass.”

  He said nothing. He didn’t want the idiotic stammer inside his head to leak out through his mouth. That shaking started again and she folded herself against him again but now he knew what that shaking really was. “You—” She could barely get the words out. “You are so easy …”

  Eventually he managed a chuckle of his own.

  “And you,” he said into her hair, “are a rotten human being.”

  “I’m the horse-witch.”

  “I remember.”

  “Then why do I have to remind you?”

  “Yeah,” he said, still smiling, surrendering. “Yeah, okay, I’m a dumbass.”

  “Just remember,” she murmured against his neck, “remember you’re not getting any younger, tough guy …”

  His smile opened like a flower. The first time she’d said that to him … where they’d been, and what she hadn’t been wearing, and what she’d talked him into with no more words than those … and he nearly asked if she remembered, but he didn’t have to.

  She never forgot. Anything.

  “I almost left this morning.” He lifted his face from her hair. Her favorite mare, an elegant medicine-hat paint, tugged at a brush of scrub in a cleft of bone-colored stone nearby. A squeal of half-playful outrage came from somewhere downslope, accompanied by snuffles and snorts unspecific through the thickening snow. Hooves drummed on earth and rock, and he could feel the beat of her heart against his chest. “I was going to. Y’know: just go. I figured, you taking off like that, you must’ve had reason.”

  Her only answer was a tightening of her arms.

  “But I—” He shook his head and huffed a tired sigh. “I couldn’t, that’s all. I couldn’t go without seeing you. Without looking into your eyes again.”

  She chuckled against his shoulder. “Which one?”

  He cupped her chin and lifted her face and brushed snow-damp hair from the creases that sun and wind and pain had etched across the sharp angles of her cheeks, and he kissed the pale scar that pulled one corner of her mouth down toward the subtle curve of her jaw, and she looked at him first with her right eye, as she often did—the one that sparkled warm and alive and brown as a doe’s—then with her left, the witch eye with the grey-blue cast cold as dead winter ice, like she had to make sure both of them saw the same man, and he said, “Either of them. Both. I don’t care. I never did. There’s nothing about you that I don’t—” but her hands had already migrated, one north to the back of his neck and the other south to the curve of his ass and she pulled him against her and brought his lips to hers again and her body spoke to his without words.

  And then for a time the mountain was their bed, and the sky their blanket, and the snow nothing at all.

  But only for a time; the witch-herd had to winter downland, toward the south and west, and she was who she was, and there was trouble in the north and east, and he was who he was.

  She rode. He walked.

  He looked back, but only in his heart. Because he was going into the Boedecken, and there would be Black Knives there, and he couldn’t afford to bring anything along.

  Everything’s forever until it isn’t.

  “Does this ever get less fucked-up?”

  — JONATHAN FIST

  History of the Faltane County War (ADDENDUM)

  “With me so far?”

  Duncan opens his eyes. “It seems straightforward enough, if a bit abrupt.”

  “Good. That’s good.” For a moment, Caine almost smiles. Almost. “It’s just that—well, these are what I want to happen. These are how I hope it ends up being.”

  “Is this about this ‘horse-witch’ woman you’re, ah, seeing?”

  “Mostly.”

  Duncan recalls how it felt to be in love with someone who isn’t dead. “She seems nice.”

  “Thank you.”

  Her voice gives him a lurch, as he only now realizes he is no longer alone with Caine. “Ah. Um, hello.”

  “Hello.”

  She is seated on the ground on the opposite side of him from Caine, legs folded, arms loose, exactly as she had appeared in the vision. Same sleeveless leather jerkin. Same farrier’s skirt. Same hair.

  Same eyes.

  Caine says, “I’m glad you’re here.”

  The smile she aims at him past the sword says more than words.

  “Remember anything I need to know?”

  She shrugs. “I remember what happens if I don’t show up.”

  “And so?”

  “And so I’m here.”

  With a trace of a frown, Duncan realizes that she’s not sitting on the snow on which he lies—she’s on grass, thin and pale but clearly alive. Some crocuses have poked blossoms up through the snow around her, and she picks a few and slides them into her hair.

  He says, “You have power.”

  “Everyone does.”

  He thinks about this for a while, and while he thinks about it, the flowers in her hair grab his heart like a fist; in the next instant, he understands. Davia had loved the expeditions to Overworld even more than he had—and she had always made a point to wear flowers in her hair. On Earth, flowers were a ludicrously expensive indulgence. “You’re my son’s, ah—you’re Caine’s current lover?”

  “You mean him?” she says with another smile past the sword. “More than current.”

  “More than—?” He catches the expression on Caine’s face. “Don’t tell me. It’s complicated, right?”

  “I can’t even tell you.”

  “And the, ah, River Bitch?”

  “That’s what she calls Shanna when she’s trying to piss me off.”

  “It works too,” the horse-witch says gravely. “He doesn’t like to be reminded that she is not a nice person.”

  “Is?” He looks to Caine. “You said—”

  “She’s one of the people who might be showing up here. If she does, remember that she is not Shanna. She’s an Aspect of Chambaraya, and the elKothan goddess of the wild, and she is not on my side. Not even a little.”

  “And Faith—”

  “Is somebody else too. But she is on my side. Usually. Look, forget about
them. This isn’t about them.”

  Duncan rubs his eyes. “How am I supposed to know what’s important and what isn’t?”

  “He’ll tell you,” the horse-witch says. “He likes that.”

  “You’re not helping.”

  Duncan squeezes shut his eyes and makes a deliberate choice to forget about what he wants to know, because what counts here and now is what Caine wants to show him. “So this Orbek you—I mean, he—spoke of? He’s a friend?”

  “More than. He’s the brother I never had.”

  “Like the brother you never had.”

  “That’s not what I said.” He dismisses this with a wave. “You’ll see. He’s an ogrillo.”

  “Like the Black Knives?”

  “More than.”

  “Wait—” Incredulity brings Duncan’s head up. “The brother you went back to the Boedecken to save—that you came here to save—was a Black Knife?”

  “Yeah. I’d say it was ironic if it, y’know, had anything to do with irony.”

  “You came back to where you personally wiped out the Black Knife Nation in order to save your brother who is a Black Knife? How is that not irony?”

  “Because I didn’t go there to save him.”

  “What happened?”

  Caine shrugs. “Eventually you and I are gonna figure that out, but there’s shit you need to see first.”

  The horse-witch says, “Told you.”

  “The trouble with happy endings is that nothing is ever truly over.”

  — ARTSN. TAN’ELKOTH (FORMERLY MA’ELKOTH, 1ST ANKHANAN EMPEROR AND PATRIARCH OF THE ELKOTHAN CHURCH)

  Blade of Tyshalle

  The Monastic Embassy on the island of Old Town in the heart of Ankhana—only a bowshot and change from the Colhari Palace itself—had been considered a uniquely hazardous post since the days of the Khulan Horde. It became substantially more hazardous some years later, after a Monastic assassin was implicated in the murder of Prince-Regent Toa-Phelathon. The Monasteries had maintained a queasy pretense of neutrality during the First and Second Succession Wars, but the actions of some renegade friars, during the events of the Artan assault now known as the Assumption Day Massacre, had convinced rival powers that the Monasteries had effectively become an adjunct of the Ankhanan Empire—an auxiliary, in fact, of the Eyes of God, collecting intelligence and performing covert operations.