Caine's Law (12 page)

T
he only one he said good-bye to was the horse-witch.

He rode out into the frost-crackled morning on Carillon. The
breeze rolling down through the tree line was bleak with oncoming snow. He didn’t bother to belt closed the serape draped over his hunched-down shoulders; the young stallion pumped out plenty of heat going upslope. With the village an hour behind, he found the witch-herd gathering below a sawtooth ridge, horses of a dozen breeds cropping scrub among shoulders of rock.

The herd parted around them like water. They knew him now. This was a good thing.

The witch-herd wasn’t man-friendly, as wild horses sometimes are. The horses of the witch-herd were feral. Runaways, rescues, desperate escapees, whip-scarred and spur-scarred and brain-scarred, branded inside and out with every kind of damage two-legged creatures can inflict. Kind of like him.

Horses never forget. They can’t. That was kind of like him too.

And it was exactly like her.

Carillon snorted at him when he slid down off the young stallion’s back. He was careful to keep not only his motion but his whole energy smooth and slow; the horse-witch to this day teased him about being jagged as a cat, and it had taken him a long time to figure out she wasn’t just teasing. She wasn’t talking about a housecat.

Carillon nipped at the serape’s hem, gave it a tug, and shook his head, ears twitching in opposite directions. This late in the year, he was in full coat; the pathetic human need for artificial protection against the weather tickled the shit out of him. The man went through his pockets for kober and hocknuts and bits of dried fruit, feeding them gravely one by one to the big dapple-grey, who just as gravely ate them.

Clothing is funny. Food, though, is serious, and sweets are absolutely fucking dire.

“Go on, go find a girlfriend. Go get lucky,” he told the stallion with a
take a hike
toss of the head. “Somebody around here should.”

Carillon gave his shoulder a farewell nudge and trotted away, quartering toward a tall sleek one-eyed mare with grey burn-scars down her neck below her missing eye, careful to approach on her sighted side.

He stood and watched the young stallion dance his way into a cautious courtship. He couldn’t help remembering the reinforced stud-cell in the stables back at Faith’s manor in Harrakha; if Carillon hadn’t broken out with Hawkwing and Phantom, he would have grown up in solitary confinement. Never would have learned herd manners. Never would have learned anything except that he’s huge and strong and has a dick like a
fencepost, and that every once in a while Kylassi the stablemaster would let him out to rape a couple mares.

Now Kylassi was dead, and Carillon had become a seducer with the elegance and grace of Casanova; the mare spun and threatened a kick, but there was a sparkle in her eye and a playful arch to her neck and Carillon respectfully gave way … and just as respectfully sidled toward her once again.

The man shook his head. “I should be so good with women.”

The horse-witch was above him on the slope.

She was in her traveling clothes, that sleeveless leather jerkin and long split skirt that looked like they’d been tanned in an old stump, her cabled arms bare, her long hard legs the color of oiled oak.

She never felt the weather.

On one knee behind a shaggy chestnut pony, one of its rear hooves resting on her other knee, her strong brown hand holding a curving flicker of soot-grey blade. Wild sun-streaked hair floated free over her downturned face and parted behind her neck, where the first faint tips of her own whip-scars gleamed like old ivory above the jerkin’s collar.

He felt a sudden dark lurch in his chest that he just flat refused to consider the meaning of. He’d gotten pretty good at the whole refusing thing.

He’d gone out there with an idea of what he’d tell her: about his difficult relationship with God, and the Black Knives, and the ghosts riding his back these twenty-five years. He expected it to take a lot of talking. The weeks he’d spent with her, drifting with the witch-herd among the mountains and high plains and isolated villages and trading posts of the Harrakhan Marches, couldn’t have prepared her for how deadly complicated his life could suddenly become. Shit,
he
wasn’t prepared.

But the closer he came, the fewer words he had. By the time he reached her, all he could say was, “You were gone.”

She didn’t look around. He couldn’t surprise her; she knew what the herd knew.

“So were you.” A blurred flicker of her hand exchanged the hoof knife for a short rasp. She began scraping at the inner walls of the pony’s heel.

“Maybe you might tell me what you mean by that.”

“I felt you leave in the night.” She still didn’t look up. “How are you here talking to me, when you’re already gone?”

Steel-colored flakes began to spin out of the iron sky.

“It’s not like that.”

“All right.”

“It isn’t,” he said. “I’m not leaving you.”

“All right.”

“It’s just—you know about God. Ma’elKoth. Home. Whatever. It was a dream.” He shifted his weight. “One of His. Its. Somebody’s.”

“What’s He want?”

“I was Orbek. He’s in trouble. Or he’s going to be.”

“God cares about Orbek now.”

“Not fucking likely.” He folded his arms to tighten up the serape. He was starting to shiver. “He’s just—y’know, just … bait.”

He twitched a shoulder and tried to loosen his jaw. “A hostage.”

She kept working.

“You maybe never heard about the Black Knife clan. About what I did.”

“This is about what you did?”

“I’m pretty sure it is.” He tried to swallow around the razor-knuckled fist tangled in his guts. “It’s about what I did. And about what I didn’t do.”

“So you’re going.”

“When God calls you, His Voice can get real fucking loud.”

“Are you sure it’s Him?”

He spread his hands. “Is there some other god who yanks my chain?”

“That’s what I’m asking.”

A cold whisper went up his pants. It creeped the fuck out of him: like getting his balls licked by a ghost. A carnivorous ghost.

“Doesn’t matter.” Didn’t sound real convincing, so he said it again. “It doesn’t
matter
. I have to go.”

“Don’t pretend.”

For a while the only sound was the scrape of the hoof rasp and the irritated snuffle of the impatient pony.

He looked up into the wind. “There’s a debt up there.”

He could feel that debt swinging loose and rotten when the razor-fist unhooked inside his guts: a corpse from a gibbet. “Not just to Orbek. Unfinished business.”

“Business.”

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.