Caine's Law (38 page)

“Possibly.
True
is a word very like
never
. Perhaps the easiest way to think about it is as a truth that has been unmade. Some of our theoretical thaumatologists have speculated that unhappened events cast a shadow on reality—an echo—that might be expressed as fiction, or legend, or myth.”

“Maybe I should come back some time when I can get in that Vault. Sounds like I could learn all kinds of shit about myself.”

“I’m afraid that can’t be allowed.”

“Huh?”

“The edict has gone out worldwide, via Artan Mirror. You will not at any time be admitted to any Vault of Binding. Ever. Your entry is to be opposed by all available means, including lethal force. Including, if necessary, the destruction of the Vault and the Abbey where it resides.”

“Son of a bitch.” He could barely get his mind around it. “So the extra security out front
was
about me.”

“I proposed the ban myself over a year ago; it was confirmed by the Council of Brothers as soon as the Vault-bound Prior of the Faltane County War was discovered.”

“You proposed it. You. For what fucking reason?”

“You can never be allowed to enter a Vault of Binding because, quite simply, no one on Home has any way to predict what might happen if you do.”

Fist stared.

For a long time.

Eventually he said, “I used to think my own personal permanent shit-storm wasn’t really about me. I thought the shitstorms were already wherever they were, and I’d get dropped into the middle of them all the time because that’s how my masters got their jollies.”

“There may be,” the Reading Master said carefully, “more to it than that.”

“Oh, you think?”

“I recommended the ban after spending more than a year researching the True Assumption. Something didn’t feel right.”

“A hunch?”

“I felt considerable unease, both concerning the account of the Assumption itself, and concerning the accounts of the various investigations we have performed. It was only after your Vault-bound Prior surfaced that
I was able to formulate exactly what was so disturbing. There was a question left unaddressed—not even acknowledged—in any account or investigation.”

“What, one unanswered question? That’s all?”

The Reading Master came close to having an actual expression on his face: a compression around his mouth, a tightening of the skin around his eyes, a blotch of flush at his temples. “Not answered—yet—but that isn’t the issue. Unasked. Unasked by everyone, including me. A question that is central to the True Assumption, and central to the peril the universe faces as we speak. A question so plainly essential to understanding the event that our failure to ask it may itself arise of an Intervention.”

“Holy crap.”

“Here we have the single most significant event since the Deomachy; Monasteries all over the world investigating; thousands of reports, millions of words, written, reviewed, criticized, revised and edited, and in the nearly three years since the True Assumption, no one seemed capable of realizing it
was
a question, and now it’s too late.”

“Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“The question?” The Reading Master gave an infinitesimal sketch of an apologetic shrug. “How did you survive?”

Fist stared. He blinked. He stared some more.

Blank. Numb.

Empty.

He should be arguing, or mocking, or raging, or interrogating, or doing basically anything other than sitting like a boil on his own ass. All the ways in which his life was fucked had become too tangled for him to comprehend, much less formulate any idea of an appropriate response.

“Ah,” said the Reading Master. “I see you haven’t been asking that question either.”

“No.”

“You can appreciate the issue.”

“You think I didn’t. Survive. You think I’m not really me. That I’m some kind of fetch.”

“It is difficult to formulate–”

“A plausible alternative, yeah.” He squeezed his eyes shut, scratched his head, and scraped the broadcloth robe across his eyes. “I have another question.”

“And that is?”

In his other hand was now the matte black pistol. “How many people do I have to kill to get out of this place tonight?”

Both Masters froze. The Reading Master said, “You don’t want to do that.”

“Oh, I really think I do.”

A wisp of fleeting frown passed over the Master’s face. “You want to put the pistol on the table,” he said with gathering force. “You want to put it
down
. Now.”

“There are some kinds of magick that work on me,” Jonathan Fist said. “That isn’t one of them.”

He rose and backed toward the door. “A nice line, about the research team. You’re pretty smooth, you know that? You tell me about Inquisitors so I won’t notice the fucking Inquisition is who I’m talking to already. Smooth. Really. A better interrogator than I ever was.”

“Interrogation wasn’t your specialty,” the Reading Master said equably. Though neither Master moved or even altered expression, the heavy bolt on the kitchen door behind Jonathan Fist clacked into place.

“Wait, what
was
my specialty? Oh yeah, I remember.” He pointed the pistol at the Reading Master’s forehead. “Do you really want to do this with me?”

“Your pistol isn’t loaded.”

“And you know that because your truthsense works so much better on me than your Dominate.”

The Reading Master accepted this with a sigh. “I did say that you wouldn’t need your weapon.”

“And
my
truthsense would be all over that. If I had one.”

“Everything I have said to you has been true.”

“If nobody tries to stop me—or follow me—there’s no need for killing, which would be nice. It’s worth remembering that if nice is not the option, I don’t really mind killing. Both of you. Everybody in this embassy.”

“I apologize for the misunderstanding,” the Reading Master said quietly. “I have advised the Council of Brothers—and generally the Inquisition—that it’s better to be your friend than your enemy. Especially now. No official decision has yet come down, but I believe in taking my own advice.”

“That’ll be more reassuring after this door’s unlocked.”

The Reading Master inclined his head and the bolt clacked open. “And in the spirit of this friendship, I see no reason to mention, in my report, that you fabricated a confrontation in hopes that a dramatic exit might obscure the fact that you’re considerably more adept at interrogation than you pretend. So adept that neither of us noticed how you learned a great deal while revealing nothing we didn’t already know.”

“Never kid a kidder. You told me what you want me to know. The pistol—” He shrugged. “That’s in case you don’t like how I took the news.”

“Ah. You may trust we’ll do nothing so rash as an attempt to restrain or harm you. As I said, our archive on you is extensive, and liberally planted with accounts of such attempts, each of which seems to bear painfully bitter fruit.”

“Maybe anyway we should get the Ambassador down here to walk me out, huh? Just to make sure nobody gets stupid.”

The two Masters exchanged a glance, and Master Ptolan gave an
okay you caught me
bob of his head. “Oh, I’m the Ambassador too,” he sighed apologetically. “We really are a very small embassy.”

“So the private kitchen thing was just a dodge.”

“I’ll see you out,” the portly Master said. “Please keep the robe; the evening has turned cold, and it’s begun to snow.”

Jonathan Fist almost asked how he knew, but then decided his luck had been pushed enough for one day. For one lifetime. Or two. Or however many he was actually living.

He found Orbek waiting down the street from the embassy, tucked into a shadowed corner, shoulders hunched against the spit of sleet on bitter wind. Spring comes late to Transdeia, and later still to Thorncleft, high upon the eastern reaches of the Gods’ Teeth.

“Ain’t you cold? Holy shit,” the young ogrillo muttered, low and surly. “No point having balls if I freeze ’em off, hey?”

Fist put a hand to his eyes and brought it away, a sleepwalker awakening. “It is cold,” he said. He hadn’t noticed. “You have the gear?”

“Right in front of you.”

He looked down. It was.

“Where else do I put it? Since you don’t bother to tell me which inn.”

“I didn’t think it’d take this long,” he said. He hadn’t thought a lot of things. He wished he could have kept it that way. “They fix your arm, huh?”

He looked at his right wrist. It looked to him like it belonged to somebody else. He flexed his hand and made a fist. “As a courtesy. No charge.”

He picked up his pack and began climbing the steeply rising street. “Come with me.”

Orbek came after him, puffing. His pack was six times the weight of Fist’s. “You know there’s these new inventions, hey? Porters. You pay them. They carry shit.”

“I don’t have money.”

“What happened to your thousand royals?”

“In your pack.”

The ogrillo stopped, frowning. The man kept climbing. After a moment, the ogrillo shook his head, his frown darkening, and followed.

The air got colder. The wind trickled to nothing. The sleet became snow, a shroud of white falling silently on the stoneworked streets and gathering on eaves and garden gates. Orbek stopped again. “Tell me where we go, hey?”

“Keep up.”

Orbek sighed and climbed faster. “I hate when you get like this.”

“Me too.”

They climbed into what once had been called Lower Thorncleft, though now it was the center of a much larger city; it had become a bleak gaslit tangle of railroad tracks that spidered out from the Thorncleft Railhead: a vast dome of glass, stained black by coal smoke, built over and around the formerly fashionable homes that now housed the offices of Transdeia Rail.

Orbek’s scowl deepened when the structure came into view. “We taking a trip, little brother?”

“You are.”

He stopped. “Alone?”

The other kept walking.

“Don’t like traveling alone,” the ogrillo said. “Maybe I don’t go.”

“You’re going.”

“Maybe you give me a reason. And take your reasons are for peasants horseshit and pack it in your ass.”

He stopped. “Orbek, goddammit—”

“No.
No
, fucker.” Orbek unslung his pack and threw it on the ground. Veins twisted in his neck. “You say carry me around the Pit. I carry you around the Pit. You say come with me. I come with you. You say stay with the girl and I stay with the fucking girl. You tell me stand in the fucking
street
and
wait
for you, and where do you fucking find me? I’m assbitch to you
three years
. You want to send me away by myself, you fucking well
talk me into it
. One time, hey? One fucking time.”

The man unslung his own pack, dropped it and sat on it, leaning into his hands, massaging his forehead. “You don’t understand.”

“Make me understand.”

“Yeah, good plan. Except I don’t understand either.”

“Then what problem we got, hey?”

“It’s not like that, big dog. Since the fight with Tanner. Since we met
the horse-witch. Something’s going on. Something’s
not
going on. I can’t tell which. But if it’s going on, it shouldn’t be. If it’s not, it should. All I know is that whatever it is, it’s wrong. It’s been wrong for a long time.”

“And how come you and nobody else gotta fix it?”

“I’m not fixing it. I
am
it. Part of it. Something chose me.”

“Chose you for what?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. All I know is that it’s gonna suck. For everybody. You remember Assumption Day?”

“No, shit-for-brains. Remind me.”

“Everybody within two hundred yards of me died. Everybody. You would have too if Raithe hadn’t pulled you off that rooftop. They found me at the bottom of a twenty-foot-deep
crater
, for shit’s sake. Ma’elKoth fucking
vaporized
. There was nothing left but me and the sword.”

“So?”

“So what do you call a guy who stands at ground fucking zero of a nuclear shit bomb and walks away with just some new scars and a limp?”

“I give up.”

“You call him Caine.”

The ogrillo’s eyes narrowed, and he did not reply.

“I think whatever chose me, that’s what it chose me for. Everybody else dies. I go off to the next pack of fucking idiots who don’t have enough sense to run like hell when they see me coming. Jesus, Orbek, if you could have seen Faltane you’d be running right now.”

“So what do you do about it?”

“All this time, it’s been like … like I knew all this, but I couldn’t actually
think
about it. It’s like a Cloak—the thaumaturge is right there in front of you, but he’s stopping your mind from registering that your eyes can see him. This is like a Cloak for ideas. For concepts. Dad used to tell me that the next best thing to knowing something is knowing who to ask. But you can’t ask anybody anything when you don’t even know there’s a question.”

“And your horse-witch, she got answers?”

“Maybe. If I figure out how to ask.”

“This don’t have to do with her looking tasty, even if on the lean side, hey?”

“It might.” He offered half a shrug. “If everybody around me gets killed, and the only everybody in the neighborhood turns out to be a nice-looking lady who can take getting killed and shrug it off with a nod and a wink, well … you get what I’m saying.”

“Sure.” Orbek shrugged equably. “Pallas Ril probably gets it too, hey? Not to mention Ma’elKoth.”

“Sure. Cheer me up.” He sighed and heaved himself to his feet. “Let’s get out of the goddamn snow.”

He shouldered the smaller pack. Orbek lifted the other. “You got some candidates? For who’s maybe choosing you for his nuclear shit bomb?”

“Yeah. I do.” He started walking toward the Railhead. “Your sire lived through the Breaking, right? The Horror?”

“Yah. Why ask?” he said to the man’s retreating back.

“Because there’s some shit we need to talk about. About who the Black Knives used to be.”

The wind kicked up. Sleet began to sting. Orbek only faintly heard the rest.

“About the Black Knife god.”