Caine's Law (24 page)

She shrugged the corpse toward a pair of burly armsmen who staggered under its sudden deadweight. She went to the artesian fountain and lowered her face into its cold boil; she scrubbed drying blood from her cheeks and forehead and fingerbrushed it from her hair, and the water shaded straw-brown where it rolled over the white marble spill-wall into the granite cistern below.

He watched her drift among the wounded and the dead. Here and there she knelt, reaching out to a hand or a forehead. The only notice she seemed to take of the roars and the cheering was how close to someone’s ear she had to lean while she spoke soft words, and where she passed, light kindled in glazing eyes, agonized writhing stilled, blank shock released into clean tears.

In his vision, the arrival of the Champion—

Armor like a mannequin of convex mirrors. Walking out from the shadows of a street’s mouth across the plaza, a massive two-handed morningstar propped casually over one shoulder. Reflected firelight dancing across the buildings. Three of him sprinting across the flagstones, smeared with the blood of the finest soldiers of Home. The Champion walking to meet the multiple him, casually removing her helm, shaking loose her hair. On her face no fear. No anger. Only a reserved, remote sadness.

Vasse Khrylget, they called her.

He had a pretty good idea why.

She moved a little bit apart from the triage area and spoke to a couple of armsmen. One of them nodded and moved away. The other stood respectfully behind her as she unbuckled the straps of her blood-smeared paldrons and cuirass, slid them off, and handed them to him.

The warm weight of the Automag dragged at the back of his pants. He could do it. Right now. With all the shouting, they wouldn’t even hear the shot.

Her surcoat was shredded at the shoulder and rib, and was dark with blood; as she turned to examine the battered plates, the shreds of her surcoat parted and he glimpsed a white curve of breast striated with red. Pink keloidal starfish puckered the flesh over her ribs beside it. Their pattern matched the holes in her armor: probably buckshot. He carried dream-images of prying a couple of those fancy riot guns from the cold dead hands of armsmen.

Half an hour from now, you’d never guess she’d been wounded.

He nodded to himself: no point in going center-mass unless the slug took out her spine too. Khryl’s Healing won’t do a hell of a lot for damage to the central nervous system. As he knew from bitter experience.

A head shot was probably as close to merciful as he could afford.

In his vision—confirmed by the dark clots of blood she’d scraped from her face and hair—she’d fought without a helmet. Asking for major head trauma. Begging for it. Arrogance. Maybe a death wish. Maybe something else he couldn’t even guess.

He wondered what she’d say if he asked her.

He stood and watched and felt the metallic solidity of the Automag’s grip nudging his kidney, while she took the armor in her bare hands and started smoothing out the dents as though the chrome steel plates were only electrum foil. She sat on the fountain’s rim to do the smaller details. He watched her bending shut buckshot holes with her thumbs, and reflected that he’d better take her from range. Long range. If he missed, he’d need a head start.

All he had to do was draw and fire.

And run. Better not forget
run
.

He slipped his hand under his tunic and slid it around to the small of his back to find the gun. His fingers closed upon the warm diamond-scored grip.

But—

The angle of her shoulders as she bent over her armor. The way the rising sun gleamed in the wet hair that screened her eyes. The long slim grace of her impossibly powerful fingers, and the thin line of inner pain described by her lips …

Forget that she was the chief headpounder of a theocratic police state. He never kidded himself. If you have to justify an action, you shouldn’t have done it in the first place.

She was clearly a better person than he’d ever be. He could see it on her. She wore the warrior-saint thing like a crown of thorns. And he was about to shoot her for it.

Or not. Dammit.

Maybe that’s what getting old really is: when you can no longer bear the consequences of being wrong.

The other armsman to whom the Champion had spoken passed among the crowd-control troops, and now they started gently but firmly expanding their perimeter.
All right, all over, go home. Excuse us, please. The area will be reconsecrated. Please be about your business. The public will be allowed to return by dusk
.

He didn’t pay much attention to their polite insistence, and he didn’t move as the crowd began to quiet, and part, and reluctantly drift away around him. He remembered how things had seemed the last time he’d been in the Boedecken. Perfectly straightforward. Run or fight. Die fast or die screaming. Simple.

Not anymore.

He regulated his breathing, emptied his consciousness of the hope and fear that blind mortal eyes and watched Weaver’s Square fog with a chaotic webwork of night.

The vast spidery blur of energy-channels that resolved into existence around him was too complex to directly interpret. There are levels on which everything is connected to everything else, levels on which all existence is a single system linking the motion of each individual quark to the metastructure of galactic clusters. Understanding, on a human scale, required that he selectively blind himself: conscious perception is a filtering of reality, and it takes practice.

What he saw here was mostly how everything in this plaza was connected to him. Personally. On some level, everyone here was here because
he
was here.

And vice versa.

Oh
, he thought, blank as stone.
Oh, crap
.

Having some goddamn Role to Play in the Grand Fucking Scheme of Things was a lot like having something spiny burrow up his ass.

Some of those cables of black were strengthening even as he watched: a gathering of energy into the threads that joined his life to theirs. His presence was already changing the lives around him. And black channels twisting outward from the pile of dead ogrilloi were thickening …

Some of the blackest, thickest channels tied them to him.

And tied him to the Champion.

It wouldn’t have made any goddamn sense at all, except for the note on the cold-post board. And even that didn’t help much. The longer he looked, the less sense it made.

He remembered a line from a book in his father’s collection: when one eliminates the impossible, whatever remains—however improbable—must be the truth. But on Home,
impossible
is a slippery concept.

He gave his head an irritable shake.
Great fucking Detective I’ll never be
.

Lacking superhuman resources of observation and inductive reasoning, maybe he should just ask somebody. When he turned back toward the somebody he had in mind, she was already staring at him.

Even from twenty yards, the Aegean dusk of her eyes took his breath away.

She laid her cuirass aside with her paldrons. With expressionless deliberation, she rose and gave him her back while she unbuckled her sabatons and the girdle-straps that held her cuisses high upon her thighs. She bent over as she worked her legs out of their steel sheaths, and he found himself staring at an ass that could crack walnuts.

He remembered Marade in the storm cellar, all those years ago. He remembered that nothing in the Laws of Khryl requires a Knight to be chaste. He remembered the white curve of the Champion’s breast, pinked with healing scars …

He folded waxed paper around the blood sausage and stuck it in his purse, then shrugged and walked toward her. Just as he was about to step among the ranks of the dead, an armored hand fell hard upon his shoulder. “Your pardon, goodman.”

A courteous tone. Respectful. Freighted with authority. “You must clear the area. For your own safety.”

She had removed her cuisse-and-greave leggings. An armsman was strapping the various pieces of her armor together into a bundle, and she was already walking away.

“Lady Khlaylock!” he called. If she heard, she gave no sign. He couldn’t blame her; being seen with him in public had to be pretty high on her
No Fucking Way
list. Admitting she knew him would be higher.

“Goodman.” The hand on his shoulder tightened. “Be about your business. You are required to leave the plaza.”

He could ask her to come back. He could. He could drop to one knee and beg that she might condescend to notice him. And right after that he could sprout wings and fly over the plaza farting fairy dust.

“Goodman, I must insist.”

He’d made a career of looking for trouble. He’d had a gift for it, an instinct. When he couldn’t find trouble, he’d made some of his own. He’d had a gift for that too. But that was long ago; mere years could not compass the difference between the Actor he’d been and the man he was. That’s what he kept telling himself. But sometimes he forgot how old he was. Sometimes he forgot the scars he carried.

Sometimes he just got tired of being grown up.

He looked at the hand: a big hand, strong, sheathed in a butcher’s gauntlet of interlocking steel rings. “People touch this body,” he said, “by invitation only.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I don’t like strangers’ hands on me. Please keep yours to yourself.”

“Goodman—”

“I said please. I won’t ask again.”

The hand tightened and pulled to turn him around. “Goodman, I am required by the Law to inform you
ermgh—
”

The devolution of words into an animal grunt of surprise and sudden pain coincided with a smoothly unhurried wrist-lock that levered the armsman forward from the waist; the smaller man’s thumbs folded the armsman’s hand in toward his own forearm while a twist of his body kept the armsman’s elbow locked.

The armsman’s wrist made a squishy popping sound.

He twisted the armsman’s wrist a bit more, drawing a strangled wheeze and forcing the armsman to one knee. “You don’t like it much either, huh?”

“This insult,” the armsman said in a voice thin with fury, gaze fixed on the flagstones a span from his nose, “will be requited in blood.”

“You sure? Nobody’s really hurt. That can change.”

“By the righteous Law of Khryl Battlegod—” He sounded like he was chewing bricks. “I require that you arm yourself, and meet me upon a field of—”

“Maybe after your wrist heals.” He pivoted, twisting until that squishy popping sound became a wet squelch. A low grunt forced itself through the armsman’s grimace.

“You! Stop!” Armsmen swarmed toward him from around the plaza. A few yards away, he saw the Champion glance over her shoulder. The nearest armsman whipped out his riot gun and leveled it. “Unhand that Khryllian!”

“You want him any more unhanded, you’ll have to lend me a knife.”

“Release him and step away.” The Khryllian’s finger slipped through the trigger guard. “Do it. I
will
shoot you.”

“We’re having a discussion. That’s all.” He shifted his grip on the armsman’s hand so that he could put one palm against the man’s extended elbow joint, and held it there about five foot-pounds short of breaking the arm. “He thought it was okay for him to put his hands on me. I’m in the process of explaining that it’s not.”

Pain-sweat dripped from the end of the armsman’s nose. He spoke through a locked jaw. “The goodman assaulted me without warning or Challenge. He has broken my wrist.”

“It’s just a sprain. Whiner.”

The riot gun’s muzzle came into sharp focus: steadied at the bridge of his nose. “To assault a servant of Khryl without warning is a serious offense.”

He shrugged. “This
is
the warning.”

The Champion slid among them, and laid one slim hand along the Khryllian’s weapon to gently turn it aside. “Release him, goodman.”

“Ask me nicely.”

“Goodman, I am the—”

“I know who you are. It’s not goodman. It’s freeman.”

“You are Ankhanan. Dominic Shade, isn’t it?” She lifted her head and her expression cleared, as though this explained much. Maybe it did. He had to give her points for style. “Please, then, freeman. Release this man.”

“Sure.” He gave the armsman’s shoulder a fatherly pat as he let him go. “Don’t do anything stupid, huh?”

The armsman straightened, cradling his wrist. His face could have been carved from ice. “I will take my satisfaction on the field of honor.”

“Honor. Yeah, okay. Sure.”

Tiny crow’s-feet etched themselves in the smooth skin above the Champion’s cheekbones. “What is your business here, freeman?”

“A word with you, Lady Khlaylock. That’s all.”

She tilted her head toward the cold fury of the armsman. “You did this … to get my
attention
?”

He shrugged.

The Khryllian at her shoulder twitched his weapon. “Take a knee.”

“Hm?”

“Take a knee when addressed by the Champion.” His tone said:
Or I’ll pound you
.

He looked into faces of the armsmen around him and found there a growing anticipation. Growing to eagerness. The Khryllian said, “Take a
knee
.”

… black knives don’t kneel …

He closed his eyes, sighed, and opened them again. “I am a freeman of the Ankhanan Empire. Maybe you don’t understand what that means.”

“You are not in the Empire now.”

“Doesn’t matter. Want me off my feet? You’ll have to knock me down.”

The Khryllian shifted his weight forward and poised his firearm like a short bo. Others did the same. “Do you think I can’t?”

“I’m sure you can. The point is, you’ll have to.” He offered the Champion half an apologetic smile. “Don’t we have something more important to do right now?”

Her indigo eyes went distant. She turned to the armsman with the sprained wrist. “You should withdraw your Challenge.”

The armsman dropped to one knee as though his shin had been shot off. “With all respect, my lady: you may not lawfully order this.”

“It is no order, armsman. It is advice. He is Armed as he stands. Do you wish to fight him here and now?”