Caine's Law (35 page)

“Which was why you just about put it through my heart.”

“You startled me.”

“And then you decided to open my skull with the lath.”

“Look at it from my side,” he said. “Here I am trying to creep my friend Jonnie Fist and give him a nice nap—just long enough for me to get in, get the girl, and blow. Then all of a sudden there’s flashes and thunderclaps and something hits the rock so close to my face that my hair’s still full of granite chips, and my friend Jonnie’s around the corner telling me he’s not Jonnie at all, he’s the single scariest motherfucker in the entire recorded history of scary motherfuckers, and he wants me dead. Except he wants to hurt me first, and hurt my family after. What would
you
do?”

“Lie my balls off, just like you,” he said. “Get the girl and blow where?”

“Someplace dark and quiet would be my guess.”

“She’ll die first.”

“I know.” Tanner tried to settle himself into a less uncomfortable position, apparently without success. “I’ve killed her twice myself.”

Jonathan Fist tried to think of something to say more intelligent than, “Huh,” with a similarly unsatisfying result.

“Hence the nonlethal, you follow?”

“Is it a coming-back-to-life thing?”

“She doesn’t. It’s more like replacements. We’ve got remains of at least five of her already.”

“Five.”

“Five confirmed. Verified kills. A couple dozen probables. As near as we’ve been able to tell, there’s only one of her at a time, but somehow the world never seems to run out.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Me neither. It’s not my end of the business.”

Fist rubbed his forehead, which reopened a cut, and Control Disciplines or not this was all starting to really fucking hurt. “So what is she?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

Fist nodded, which made his head hurt even more. “Have you tried asking her?”

Tanner stared.

Fist shrugged. “Unless you’d rather lie there and bleed while we guess some more.”

“Well, when you put it that way …” He shrugged. “There’s a guy on the Council of Brothers who’s pushing a crazy theory, but at least he’s
got
a theory. Damon of Janthogen Bluff.”

“I know him. He’s not the crazy theory type,” Fist said. “He’s probably the sanest guy I ever met.”

“He thinks it’s spontaneous theogony.”

“Come
again
?”

“Spontaneous theogony. That’s when—”

“I know what it means, goddammit. Seriously?”

“She is nothing like an ordinary person.”

“She’s not much like a god either.” He tried to shrug. It hurt. “That’s an informed opinion.”

“So I hear,” Tanner said. “Things do start to get strange in her vicinity, though. In the vicinity of any of them.”

Any of them. Fist let his head tip back to rest against the rock wall. “There’s more?”

“Looks like it.”

“Horse-witches?”

“Nah, other kinds of nothing-like-ordinary types—you know, a jack-o’-the-green here, a Wild Hunt there. It’s raining weird all over the damn place.”

“Has anybody correlated timelines?”

Tanner shrugged. From the spasm of pain that crossed his face, his shrug had been a mistake too. “That’s not my end of the business either. They tell me tales of the horse-witch predate the Deomachy. They tell me we’ve got an unsourced Lipkan translation of the West Branch of the
Danellarii Tffar
that claims she was here already when the damn
elves
got here. That’s, what, like thirty thousand years?”

Fist scowled. “Was she human then?”

“Is she human now?”

“You know what I mean. That long ago, there weren’t any humans. Not on this world.”

“You want to go argue with a ten-thousand-year-old elf saga in person, I can tell you where to find it.”

“What happened to the fucking Covenant of Pirichanthe?”

“You happened,” Tanner said. “That’s what Damon thinks, anyway. You and your pal Ma’elKoth.”

“Bullshit. Who’s doing the counterfactuals?”

“Supposedly Damon’s got Inquisitors and Reading Brothers all over the world working the Vaults through a timeframe of three or four tendays. A few months shy of three years ago. That date strike a gong, pappy?”

He let his eyes drift shut. “Fuck me inside out.”

“Can’t be that much of a surprise, can it? You had to at least suspect, considering you hooked Ma’elKoth a physical Aspect your own self.”

“I guess I’ve been kind of hoping the Covenant doesn’t apply.”

“Then hope crashes into reality and people get hurt.”

“Too fucking right.” He shook his head and sighed a time or two. “If you’d told me what you were really up to a month ago, you wouldn’t be dying here right now.”

“And if you’d told me who you really are a month ago, I wouldn’t be dying here right now either. Because instead of me coming up this mountain, it would have been ten or twelve Esoteric strike teams. And maybe a dragon or five.”

“Stop. You’ll make me blush.”

Tanner stared, squinting through the moonlight like he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. “You don’t know, do you? You really don’t.”

“So these, whateverthefuck, sorta-kinda-demi-semi-gods—the horse-witch and all the whateverthefuck others. They have anything in common outside of being basically impossible?”

“Probably should ask yourself that question.”

“How the fuck would I know?”

“No reason, I guess,” Tanner said. “Except you’re one of them.”

His back against the cold, night-damp stone, he waited for the horse-witch.

He’d pushed himself farther upslope, away from Tanner. No sense taking chances. The unconscious assassin lay where he had fallen, his breath hitching and shallow, his eyes rolled up until only white slits showed in the moonlight. He was pretty sure Tanner wasn’t faking this time, but it’d suck to be wrong.

While he waited, he tried to fit it all together in his head, but he just couldn’t. This had somehow become something so much more than he’d ever guessed. Than he could have dreamed. He got lost in it. In what and why. When. Even how. Who, on the other hand …

Then came a clatter of rock, closer, and then there was someone at his elbow. In a flicker, faster than thought, an arm was seized and yanked even through the screaming of broken wrist and a head wedged against rock and a knife in a hand stopped just short of gutting a torso, then dropped free to clank on rocks.

“Goddammit, don’t
do
that! I could have
killed
you,” he snarled. “Say something when you’re coming up blind. Anything.
Hey, dumbass, I’m here
would work.”

“Hey, dumbass,” the horse-witch said. “I’m here.”

He sagged back down to the ledge. “Jesus suffering Christ.”

His knife lay where it had fallen, a dull smear of reflected moonlight. He couldn’t pick it up. He couldn’t look at it. He couldn’t look at her. “Orbek says you’re mad at me.”

“I am.”

“So you punish me by making me kill you?”

“I’m not here to punish you, dumbass.”

“You say that like it’s my name.”

“It isn’t?” The cloud-filtered moonlight made her witch-eye shimmer like a snow opal. “Do you want it to be?”

He shook his head, cradling his wrist. “And all this time I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I wanted to see you again, and now I can’t remember why.”

“I could tell you—”

“—but I wouldn’t believe you, yeah, I remember. Except that’s not it. Just the opposite.”

“I was going to say,” she murmured, “I could tell you, but you don’t want to know.”

And just as he opened his mouth to remind her—in the most colorfully emphatic terms he could devise—how incredibly fucking aggravating she was, the last of the clouds parted around the moon and he could see her smile then, her sly sidelong look-how-much-fun-we-have-together smile, and some stopcock inside him finally twisted loose, just a little bit, and some of his permanent sick black rage began to trickle out, as if it might just drain off and wash away.

Like it wasn’t permanent at all.

And because it had never seemed to do anything like this before, he discovered that he didn’t really know how he felt about it. Except he was pretty sure it wasn’t a bad thing.

That was as much as he could manage while the moon gleamed in her eyes. Maybe he’d figure it out later. When he wasn’t looking at her.

“So, okay, uh …” He coughed. “Uh, hi.”

“Hi.”

“Nice to see you.”

“Thanks. I’d say something nice, but I’m still mad at you.”

“Okay. Uh, listen—if you
weren’t
mad at me, y’know … Uh, do you
think maybe you might tell me what the nice something would have been? Y’know. If you weren’t mad.”

“I’d say that since we met, every day without you is a thousand years, and every night without you is forever.”

He gaped until he decided to close his mouth before he started to drool. “Uh. Mm. Well.”

She shrugged. “If you don’t want to know—”

“Yeah, yeah, right. I should probably write that down.”

“Don’t be frightened. Beginnings are difficult.”

“You seem to manage.”

“This isn’t my beginning. And it’s not our beginning. Only yours.”

“I, uh … I, uh …”

“Sh.” She touched his lips with her forefinger. “Talk later. Work now.”

“Work? Horse-witching, or whateverthefuck?”

She touched her face with two fingers, pointing at her eyes, and he understood what she meant.

Forgiveness. Permission
.

“I still don’t get it.”

She had a waterskin slung over her shoulder, which she now passed to him. “Wine,” she said. “Rinse your mouth.”

He barely quelled an instant, astonishing impulse to tell her that he loved her, because he wasn’t sure it wasn’t true. “Um, when you’re not mad anymore—”

She walked past him without another glance. “I’ll let you know.”

He worked loose the stopper and squirted wine into his mouth. It was sharp and resinous, and it awakened an astonishing array of cuts and tears inside his mouth by stinging them savagely, and it was fucking magnificent. He spat and rinsed and spat again, and after that, he kept rinsing, but without spitting, because he hadn’t had a drink in almost a tenday and he’d earned this one.

She reached inside her tunic and brought out about half a handful of wilted, soggy-looking leaves. Her other hand filled itself with a small pouch of some kind of powder. She shook a judicious amount of it into the leaves, then returned the pouch to whatever nonpocket she’d taken it from—probably next to the one where she kept those knives—then rolled the powdered leaves between her palms until it all turned into a darkly gooey ball. When the ball began emitting a nasty-smelling smoke, she slapped it onto the face of the stone fold as high as she could reach. “Don’t look straight at it.”

He shaded his eyes with his good hand as the goo crackled and spat
magnesium-white fire. Even shaded, the glare hurt his eyes. When he could see again, what he saw was the horse-witch looking at Tanner, and at him, at the ruin of their clothing and at the crossbow and all the blood they two had spilled.

She said, “Now do you believe what I said?”

“About what?”

“That it’s less trouble to let them kill me.”

Over the course of the month since he’d last seen her, Jonathan Fist had repeatedly promised himself that if he ever found her again, he would stop and think for a second or two every time he was about to open his stupid goddamn mouth.

“I believe that you think so,” he said slowly, “and I believe I understand why. But I disagree. Strongly. I probably always will.”

“I know,” she said gravely. “I feel the same about you. That’s why I was mad at you.”

“Was? Is this you letting me know you’re not mad anymore?”

“No, I am. But for a different reason now.” She squatted beside him, inspecting his wounds. “I want you to take better care of yourself.”

“I’ll try,” he said. “I will.”

“I believe you.” She palpated a rip over his eyes that he’d gotten from the butt of the crossbow, frowned, and nodded to herself. “You’ve changed the way you speak.”

“Blame it on a woman I met.”

Her fingers dug into the swelling of his broken wrist hard enough to prickle beads of sweat across his face. “We need to set the bone. It’ll hurt.”

“Okay.”

“I can give you something for the pain. It’ll still hurt, but you won’t mind.”

“Will it make me sleepy?”

“Usually.”

“Then not now.”

“Uh,” Tanner said, coughing like a heavy smoker awakening from sleep. “Would it be rude to point out that he’s not actually dying? And that I am?”

“Not at all,” she said without the slightest flicker of a glance in his direction. “Did you think I didn’t know? I can see how you might make that mistake. You assume that I don’t know and do care. The truth is the other way around.”

“Always the charmer.”

“I don’t have to be polite to people who murder me.”

“Well, when you put it that way …” He sighed, and coughed some more. “Guess I’ll go back to sleep. Wake me or bury me. You pick.”

She stayed in front of Jonathan Fist, gazing steadily into his eyes with her head cocked just a bit, to hold him in her eye of grey-blue ice. He said, “What?”

“Will he live?”

Fist shrugged. “You tell me.”

“No,” she said. “Decide.”

He got it. “Yeah. Sorry. This has been kind of a tough night.”

“I know. You still have to decide.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay, in a minute.” He closed his eyes. “He wants to know what you are. The people he works for want to know.”

“I’m the horse-witch.”

“I think,” he said slowly, “the real question is why there would be a horse-witch. At all.”

“There isn’t. We’re all just pretending there is.”

“Okay.”

“You get confused by names,” she said. “Most people do.”

“Um …”

“People call me the horse-witch,” she said patiently, “because they find me strange. Witchy. And because they find me among horses. But I’m found among horses because I like horses, and horses like me. We understand each other. We share power with each other. Most horses deserve me. Most people don’t.”