Caine's Law

by Matthew Stover

  The Automag had been loaded with shatterslug tristacks. Three rounds, nine slugs, and a guy bleeding out around the fold, and he didn’t smell blood. Which didn’t actually prove anything; evening breezes flow down from the snowcaps, and Tanner was downhill and downwind both, and Fist had never had all that great of a nose anyway. But that wasn’t the only thing.

  The other was that Jonathan Fist had taken a little time to chat with Morgan Blackwood—Charlie—in between taking him down and leaving him to die. Charlie, never a brave man, had been forthcoming about what he knew about those in the outfit who’d survived the orderly succession, in exchange for the prospect of a swift and merciful death. Tanner and Charlie really had been pretty good pals, as such people go. They drank together, whored together, told each other jokes and swapped stories in the still of the occasional midnight, over the embers in the campfire pit. Charlie had a considerable fund of tidbits about his buddy’s life story. One of them was that Tanner’s endless yammer about his momma was an inside joke, to amuse himself and those who were in on the gag.

  Tanner’s mother died ten years ago.

  After a while, the gurgling turned into a rattle, then went quiet. The clouds passed away from the moon. He looked around the area on the moonlit side of the fold. There were plenty of chunks of rock around. He picked out one slightly larger than his doubled fists, then took off his broadcloth tunic and knotted it around the rock. He tied the sleeves together at the cuff, then slipped them over his head so that the rock hung down the middle of his back. “Tanner? You dead yet? Tanner.”

  He waited a few seconds, but there was only the hush of night breeze and the occasional skittering of stones shed by the mountain. “Ten more minutes,” he said softly, as though to himself. “It’s not like either of us has anyplace we need to be.”

  Then he scrubbed some of the dry, sandy grit into his palms and turned to the face of the rock fold. Finding cracks and projections by feel, he slowly and deliberately pulled himself upward.

  He climbed to three times his own height, and waited for the clouds to veil the moon again before he traversed the spine of the fold to look down at Tanner. All he could see was a pool of night, dark as a well.

  He focused his concentration, controlling his breathing and allowing his eyes to defocus; the outline of a man began to gradually resolve itself from the darkness. This man crouched near an empty boot that lay half-exposed to the uphill side, and he held a crossbow at low ready, and just when it struck him that he suddenly was seeing Tanner entirely too well, the bowman whirled and fired without seeming even to aim, but the nonaiming was only seeming, because when Jonathan Fist realized that he’d been so busy with his Control Discipline that he hadn’t noticed the clouds passing away from the moon and his stupid fucking amateur ass casting a shadow where Tanner could see it, he instantly kicked off the rockface in a headlong dive for the ground, and so got a spray of stone shrapnel across his back instead of a half meter of steel through the sternum.

  Fucker could shoot.

  Jonathan Fist had discovered early in life that the difference between a pro and an amateur isn’t that a pro doesn’t screw up. Everybody screws up. What separates the pro from the amateur is that the pro fights first and gets embarrassed later. Get embarrassed first and there is no later.

  He flipped forward in the air, yanking the tunic sleeves from around his neck in time to avoid strangling himself on impact, but the rock threw off his balance and to be perfectly honest it had been an unfortunate number of years since he’d actually done any aerial tumbling, as a result of which he overrotated and sprawled face-first across the ledge, shredding his forearms, and his pants at the knee, and before he could even turn over, Tanner was at his side and the crossbow was coming down at him like a pickaxe, because the spring-steel lath could be considered a reasonable-enough facsimile thereof that his spine would never know the difference.

  Fist rolled out from under just barely fast enough; the lath ripped opened a long gash on his side but glanced off his ribs instead of breaking them, and because Fist was a pro first and nothing else made it as high as fifth, he had rolled toward Tanner instead of away, and now used all the strength of his arms and the torque of his roll to whip his rock-laden tunic like a flail directly at Tanner’s balls.

  The bowman saw it coming and twisted to take it on his thigh instead of into his groin, but it was still a lot of rock moving at a respectable clip; the impact disrupted his balance enough that Jonathan Fist could come up to one knee as he whipped the rock once around his head and fired it straight at Tanner’s kneecap with considerable confidence that this fight was over. Except the kneecap wasn’t there.

  His rock-loaded tunic was met with a sideways swipe of the crossbow. The tunic wrapped around it and Tanner stepped back again, yanking on the crossbow’s butt with both hands, and Fist, knowing a losing position when he was in one, let go of the tunic as it pulled him forward and turned his fall into a shoulder-roll that brought him to his feet, moving straight into Tanner with both of his hands full of boot knife. He jammed one angling up for the underside of Tanner’s chin to draw his eyes while he hammered the other ice-pick-style toward Tanner’s femoral artery, and somehow the crossbow was there again and his knife and hand went between the lath and the string and the crossbow twisted to lock his knife and hand right there while the stock came over the top, deflected his other knife and caught him square in the nose hard enough to make his head ring and his eyes blur and wouldn’t you just fucking know that shooting wasn’t even the best thing Tanner did? He could fight almost like a—

  Almost like nothing; he was. Had to be. Monastic. An Esoteric. A good one. Too entirely good.

  This was a shitty place to come up against somebody more dangerous than he was.

  He leaned into Tanner, using his lower center of gravity to drive the taller man back while he reversed the grip on his other knife and used it to trap the stock against his forearm. He forced Tanner skidding toward the lip of the ledge until Tanner collapsed his legs, dropping flat for the back-throw, and Fist only barely managed to wrench his weight sideways in time to avoid being tossed out into empty space that was bottomless in the moonshadow. He raked his knife hard up along the stock and was rewarded with a wordless snarl and a couple inches of skin and muscle off the side of Tanner’s thumb that flopped on the ground, scattering little dust-clots of blood.

  For a moment they struggled, locked together by the crossbow between them. A handspear doesn’t need a working thumb, and Tanner jammed his into Fist’s throat hard enough to make the older man’s neck spasm and clamp down on his trachea. Tanner paid for the strike by taking a slash across the gut from Fist’s other knife, maybe deep enough to kill but not deep enough to stop him from killing, and they both struck and hooked and gripped with knee and foot, hands and blades and the crossbow itself, trying for anything that might harm or slow or control the other man, and Tanner was younger and stronger and better trained and the outcome wasn’t in doubt, especially considering Jonathan Fist couldn’t breathe much at all.

  Shit, he should have stayed back with the rifle and sent Orbek down here. This was a stupid way to die.

  Tanner stripped his left-hand knife with an expertly executed corkscrew of the crossbow. He twisted to pin Fist’s right hand with his knee, then slammed the bow stock down, equally expertly, onto Fist’s immobile forearm. A wet crunch spread numb deadness up and down his arm. He knew the sound too well: Tanner had broken his wrist.

  On the other hand, if he’d sent Orbek, Tanner would have killed him and Fist would have had to fight the fucker anyway.

  Tanner slammed a knee straight into Fist’s abdomen below the belt, and he must have liked the result because he did it again and one more time—on the last, throwing his weight behind the strike to lever himself up into a mount that straddled Fist’s hips. He lifted the crossbow straight up in a two-handed grip, said, “I planned on taking you with this. Glad it worked out,” then brought it down to crush F
ist’s skull with the butt—but in that second or so Fist had remembered how Tanner kept that half-moon skinner he liked so much in a thigh-sheath and Tanner was right-handed which put the sheath about six inches from Jonathan Fist’s working hand.

  When Tanner brought down the bow Fist jabbed upward with the skinner, gouging a curled shaving out of the bow’s tiller and damn near taking Tanner’s right hand off at the wrist, but clever fuck that he was, Tanner saw the blade and let go with his right, and the crossbow came down and just clipped Fist’s forehead and ripped his ear and Fist couldn’t breathe and his coordination was gone and his strength was going, but he hacked at Tanner with the skinner with everything he had left, no skill, no art, nothing but a blind snarling lust for harm. Tanner blocked the blows easily, contemptuously, with the crossbow.

  “You’re pathetic, you know that? You—son of a bitch! Fuck!” he screeched when he realized that each knife-blow he blocked was chopping chunks out of the crossbow’s tiller and stock. “This is my best bow!”

  He threw himself off his mount with a back-roll to his knees. A hack with the bow sent the end of the steel latch into Fist’s ankle and the foot went dead but Fist was already coming for him, pivoting around his hips, reaching for Tanner with the blade, and the younger man scrambled back, coming to his feet. “Sure, all right, pappy. That’s how you want it? Come and—”

  He was interrupted by a crisp whap. It sounded very much like the noise made by slapping an open hand against a man’s chest. A sliver over a second later: whap whap.

  Tanner staggered, not unlike a man who has taken some unexpected body-blows, but then recovered his balance, frowning as if unsure what could be happening. His frown deepened when he tried to recock the bow and discovered that his hand didn’t want to grip the cranequin, and once he finally got hold of the lever, he couldn’t actually draw it. He peered down at his arm, then at the spreading patches of black that stained his tunic, and only then realized that he was standing fully in the pale moon-glow, out of the shadow of the mountain’s fold. “Fuck.”

  His knees buckled and he pitched forward, catching himself with the crossbow, leaning on it from his knees. He looked into the shadow at Fist. “You fucker,” he said, more in reproach than in anger. “Same fucking trick.”

  He crumpled forward, facedown across his bow, and went still.

  The older man didn’t answer; he still couldn’t force more than a thin whistling wheeze through his spasming throat, and he didn’t get up because he didn’t know yet whether his ankle was broken. He set down the skinner and massaged his throat with his good hand. Shortly after the other man had slipped all the way to the ground, a great gasping whoop of air opened his trachea—just in time to aspirate half a lungful of his own vomit.

  Coughing, gagging, and coughing some more, he struggled to the lip of a low shelf—so he wouldn’t have to kneel in his own puke—then leaned out and let fly, vomit splattering across the dirt and scrub grass a meter or two below, because it’s just better that way. Get it over with.

  Didn’t make his balls feel any better, though.

  “Hey, little brother!” Orbek called from upslope. “Want some help?”

  “Stay where you are,” he rasped through his raw throat, then said it again, louder. “Stay where you are, and for fuck’s sake keep your sights on him.”

  “He ain’t dead?”

  “No.”

  “Looks dead to me.”

  “Do as you’re told. And quit making me shout, goddammit!”

  Using his good hand and good foot, he slowly managed to push himself over to his knives, which he returned to their boot-sheaths. He also collected his tunic and shook the rock out of it; pressed to a wound, the rough texture of the brocade would promote clotting, and he had very little blood to spare.

  Inch by inch, he made his way over to the stone of the fold, and rested his back against it.

  Taking some time to manage his breathing, he focused on his Control Disciplines to suppress the pain that grew now steadily in proportion to the fade of his adrenaline. He looked over at Tanner. Tanner looked at nothing. He lay facedown, eyes glazed and fixed on some impossible distance within the mountain’s heart.

  Knowing what Tanner was made shit different. It wiped out coincidence and chance, and like an incantation over a scrying pool, it brought everything into focus.

  Almost everything.

  “Holy shit,” Orbek said when he peered around the fold, rifle tucked under his arm. “Does he kiss you down?”

  “What part of stay where you are do you not fucking understand?”

  Jonathan Fist sat with his back against the rock wall. His face was painted with drying blood, both from his nose and from a slanting gash across his forehead; his left eye was already in the process of swelling shut, though that was due less to his nose and forehead than it was to Tanner’s devastating straight right. Fist’s arms could pass for hamburger dropped into a gravel pit. In his lap he kept his right arm, already swollen to twice its size. With his left hand, he explored his ankle through the gash the crossbow’s lath had chopped into his boot.

  “Guess I should learn how to follow orders from somebody who’s not you. So, like I say, does he kiss you down?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Him.” Orbek nodded at Tanner’s body. “Does he kiss you down before he fucks you up?”

  He could feel something sharp in the ankle wound. Chipped bone, and maybe worse. “Orbek, my hand to any god you pick, if I could get up right now I would knock your punk ass right off this mountain.”

  “You mean pun’k ass, hey?”

  “Cut it out. Or I’ll cut it out of you.”

  “You use that one already, little brother—couple-three times, even. How’s the pain?”

  “I can suppress awhile. Not long. I’m a little out of practice.” The boot would have to be cut off, and he didn’t have another pair, and it was still spring enough at this elevation that walking barefoot would suck, and even that was a generous assumption, given that he didn’t know whether he’d actually be able to walk anytime soon. He’d given up optimism twenty-five years ago. “If the horse-witch can’t fix my ankle, I’m likely to have a shitty couple of months, though. Maybe a season or two. You got water? I could really use water.”

  “Up with the horse.”

  “Shit. You might have to carry me up there.”

  “Just like old times, hey? Back in the Pit. And we have a water shortage then too, hey?” He came over for a closer look.

  “I just need to rinse out my mouth. In the process of pounding the fuck out of me, he tagged me two-three good ones in the stones.”

  “You eat too many vegetables, little brother. Bad for your stomach.”

  “Yeah, and they don’t taste good the second time either.”

  Orbek looked Tanner’s body up and down. “He don’t seem so tough.”

  “Not anymore.” Tanner’s boots were in good shape. Given the difference in height, they’d likely run a little big, which was better than the reverse. “Last time I fought somebody this good, he was the favorite son of a Monastic personal combat instructor. This guy here might be even better.”

  “Yeah? For real, or for excusing why he kicks your ass so bad?”

  “Both.”

  “Who’s he when he’s at home? I like to know when I kill somebody famous.”

  “All I know is he’s Monastic. Esoteric, and good at it. I rode with him half the month and never caught a whiff. Fucker never broke character. Never. Even tonight, he made the climb without using his right arm. Look at my eye to see how well that arm works. But he played wounded, because he knew I might be watching. Hell, he played wounded for days. He knew that was how I’d recognize him, and he knew that being underestimated is a shitload safer than being mysterious. That’s quality work. This guy’s a motherfucking artist.”

  “One of yours, you think? Like Dane and Blackwood?”

  Fist shook his head. “I would have he
ard of him. Probably would have met him. Listen, I’m gonna need his boots.”

  “In a minute. First you tell me how this guy’s such a motherfucking artist and still you beat this motherfucking artist guy.”

  “I didn’t beat him. You did. I admit it, okay?”

  “Yeah, and you have to admit it later too. In front of witnesses.”

  “I will,” he said. “You saved my life.”

  “Second time this month, hey? Ties my personal best. How do you get him out from cover?”

  “If he hadn’t been beating me to death, I’d have thought of it sooner.” Fist gave an irritable wave toward the crossbow that lay pinned under Tanner’s chest. “He’s a little too attached to his tools, that’s all.”

  “Nice crossbow,” Orbek allowed. “Too bad about the chop-outs.”

  “Didn’t do the knife any favors either.”

  “And so now, what am I waiting to hear you say, hey? Since you live through it?”

  Fist sighed. “Hell of a shot, Orbek.”

  “Yah?”

  “I should say shots. Both times. Great shots. Really great.”

  “All right, then.”

  “Completely pooched the pitch-out, though.”

  “Hah?”

  “Didn’t even nick him, Super Sniper.”

  “No? You fuck-me try a pitch-out a hundred yards downhill in the dark, smart bitch. With a fuck-me mostly empty pistol too.”

  “I’m not saying I can, I’m saying you didn’t.”

  “And I’m saying screw you.”

  “Don’t take it hard. There’s a rock or two down there that’ll never kill again.”

  “Maybe I come back and check on you in the morning. If I can find this place in the light. Do I ever mention there’s khoshoi in these mountains? And that maybe I like this nice crossbow and want to take it with me, hey?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Fist said. “Get close enough to touch it and he’ll kill you.”

  “Hah?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “He’s not dead? He looks dead. He smells dead.”