Caine's Law (42 page)

This time there’s no windup, just a blur of arm and hand and a scream of invisibly fast steel and the ogre’s chest caves in around the impact, chainmail and all, and he goes down like she dropped a building on his head.

“Jesus
Christ
—what did I just
tell
you?”

“Your suggestion was noted.”

“Goddammit—”

But she’s already walking toward the other ogres and the stonebenders. She takes hold of her right wrist and shrugs her shoulder and tugs on the arm, and the splinters of bone withdraw back in through the rips, and the ogres and stonebenders start to give ground. She stops, standing over the dying ogre. “You fought with honor. Should we ever meet again, you may address me as some do in my native land. Vasse,” she says gravely, though with quiet pride. “Vasse Khrylget. Mark it well.”

I imagine he’ll remember. I imagine they all will.

She lifts her head. “Khryl is Lord of Justice as well as Battles,” she says generally. “This honorable creature need not perish. Nor need your spritish comrades; Khryl’s Love can restore even them. But I will implore the Lord of Justice only when the man and I are guaranteed safe passage from this place.”

The elf just glowers at her, probably trying to figure a way he can still pull my guts out an inch at a time.

“Oh, for shit’s sake, you vicious little cunt,” I say, “how many of your friends have to die for your wounded fucking feelings?”

“You
robbed
me. You stole from me, and from the Exotic. By force.”

“What, some scrap of black satin? Give me a fucking break.”

“The privilege of touching my
flesh
, you disgusting feral slaughter-monkey.”

“Nice. You should write greeting cards.”

“I’m a
professional
. I am known, and
respected
, from one edge of this land to the other. Dukes of the
Cabinet
take a knee and
beg
I might deign to let them sniff my
ankle
.”

Oh. Oh, shit, I get it.

I didn’t go at him like his regular trade. I went at him like a grown-up been-around-the-block guy who wanted to have some sophisticated fun with another guy who turns him on—somebody who has similar tastes, and similar experiences, and who might actually take a step or two on the road to actual intimacy, like it wasn’t so much a transaction as it would have been a date, and Jesus Christ, I
knew
better. Of course he’s vulnerable to that pitch. That’s what he’s been hoping to find for centuries.

It’s how he and Kris fell in love in the first place.

It’s one thing to be an asshole. It’s another to be a fucking idiot about it.

“Look, I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I really am. More sorry than words can express. That was a shitty thing to do, and I really, sincerely regret it. If it means anything, there are still six or seven royals behind the bar—”

Now his face is nothing but bloody teeth. “You think this is about
money—
?”

“No, I know. I
know
. I just—I thought you wouldn’t understand, that’s all. I’m sorry. I should have trusted you.”

Now he’s starting to look puzzled, which is a hell of a lot better than homicidal. “Why should you trust me?”

“We … have an acquaintance in common.”

“I find that implausible.”

“His friends call him Rroni.”

His mouth snaps shut so hard I can hear his teeth clack from across the street. “I know no one by that name.”

“Maybe he goes by something else around here. Rroni, he’s been in the wind for a while. His family’s looking for him. And not just them. His family has enemies. These enemies would like to find Rroni too.”

His eyes slit like knife wounds. “And?”

“Maybe I don’t know where Rroni is. But I need to convince some people I do, you follow? I don’t have to tell them. I just have to make them believe I can.”

“And what happens to … your friend?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. This isn’t about him, it’s about his family. Now, he doesn’t have to trust me on this. Once somebody tells him what’s going on … well, if he figures I won’t keep his secret, he’ll have plenty of
time to run off and hide himself somewhere else. If he figures my word’s good, he’s got no reason to do anything at all.”

“And why didn’t you tell me this in the first place?”

“Well, y’know, if I’d had the faintest fucking clue how insanely dangerous you are, I would have done exactly that. On the other hand, you probably wouldn’t have believed me. Now that you see I staked my life on it, I’m hoping you can take my word and we can all part as friends.”

“The word
friends
,” he says, sulky in the dregs of rage, “is an overstatement of breathtaking proportion. Vast beyond the concept of size.”

And I can breathe a little easier still.

Angvasse has already knelt to examine the ogre’s wound, but she looks over at me and her eyelids drift half-down while she gives one brief sketch of a nod, and it’s kind of embarrassing for a general-purpose villain of my age and experience to go warm all over because some girl half his age gives him the
well done
wink.

Well, okay: she’s not
some girl
. She’s a hero. A real hero. The kind most people only hear about in stories. The kind most people don’t even believe exists.

It’s a fucking shame she has to die.

A
ngvasse pays off the scow’s captain and gravely thanks him, then shoulders her satchels and we take the gangway onto the Lyrissan quay through the lengthening shadows.

Lyrissan is decidedly strange. Weirder than anywhere else we’ve been; Ankhana will always be Ankhana, no matter what year it is, and even Harrakha has that English Midlands–village sort of tactile permanence. But the Lyrissan we walk into is only a collection of flops and whorehouses and taverns clustered around the big trading post in the middle of town. It doesn’t even have streets. It’s nothing but a stopover for hunters and trappers up in God’s Teeth, where they can sell their take, then drink and gamble and whore away the money.

Forty-some-odd years from now, when the Overworld Company lays the seaward line of the Transdeian Railway, Lyrissan will become a wealthy market town, the first stop down from Khryl’s Saddle. Right now, the hill where Countess Avery’s manor will stand is a mound of trees two klicks off. There isn’t even a road. Just the river.

And the river gives me the creeps.

I don’t like looking at it. I sure as fuck don’t plan to take a dip. Just knowing that this is part of what Shanna will become … It still makes me queasy, somehow, even after days on the scow. It’s like finding a digigraph of your mom as a teenager and discovering she was high-grade fuckable, right? Anytime you think about it, it gets you again.

At least I don’t have to worry about bumping into Shanna; as a Natural Power, She’s as time-bound as I am. Huh.
More
time-bound than I am, right now.

Somehow that makes me queasy too.

Angvasse has found her way to the Lyrissan version of a market square. She looks from one flop to the next, distaste deepening her frown a little more each time. She casts that distaste in my direction. “Night falls slowly here, but fall it does,” she says reluctantly. “We’ll not have light sufficient to reach the next village.”

“That’s okay because there isn’t a next village. Not where we’re going.”

“The least vile of these establishments inspires nightmare,” she says heavily. “I suspect we’d find better rest among trees upriver.”

“Glad you feel that way.”

There’s no actual stable or organized livery, just a couple of split-rail grass paddocks on the downstream side of town, and everybody in there looks pretty contented. A few others are ground-tied or hobbled a little farther out. A couple of them look pretty grumpy, but that won’t do it. Only four horses are actually amidst the scatter of buildings, tied to hitching rails … and there’s one on a rail by himself, a big old bag-of-bones black gelding going grey on the face.

He’s still full-tacked, saddle and bridle and bags, and he’s tied where he has to crank his neck around to even see the other horses nearby, and after a second or two I realize he’s not looking at the horses, but at the water troughs beside them.

Because he doesn’t have one of his own.

From the building in front of him comes firelight and ale-blurred laughter, and somebody’s started to sing, and if I think too much more about some motherfucker having a few drinks and a leisurely meal while his horse is tied alone and thirsty in the dark outside I’ll just kill the sonofabitch, of which Angvasse won’t exactly approve.

“What do we have left for coin?”

She doesn’t need to count. “Three royals, seven nobles, and a long dozen peasants.”

I squint at the horse. “A royal should be plenty.”

“You gave me to believe we’re not staying,” she says, holding one out for me. “And for an Ankhanan royal one might
buy
a better house than these.”

“I’m not buying a house.”

Inside, the tavern is basically a shack somebody built around a primitive
kitchen. An earth-banked cookfire at the far end is most of the light. A handful of dirty lanterns provide spots of local ambience along the trestle tables and rude benches. Five guys lounge roughly together—four like they know one another and one an extra arm’s length off, though they all seem friendly enough. A fair chunk of both walls is stacked with ale tuns, most of them with rusty iron cups hanging from hooks around their rims.

A guy with soot on his face and hands so grimy Lasser Pratt would have puked in his own beer beckons me in from the other side of the fire without getting up. “Whatcher pleasure, pal?”

“I’m just here to see a man about a horse.”

He shrugs and sinks back down on his stool, clearly uninterested in anything that doesn’t involve collecting coin.

I offer a friendly nod and trader’s smile to the five guys at the table. “Who belongs to the black gelding at the rail outside?”

“Who’s askin’?” This from the guy an arm’s length off from the others, which is reassuring.

“What do you want for him?”

“Yuh-what?” He blinks like all of a sudden he doesn’t see so well. “Yer wantin’ to buy ol’ Shandy?”

Having seen his horse, I understand his disbelief. “I’m not here to dicker, goodman. I’d like to take your horse, and I’d like to leave you with—” With a magician’s flourish, I make the shiny royal appear between my first and second fingers. “This.”

He’s too lit to be subtle; his face goes slack for half a second, then tightens and his eyes go narrow. “I dunno, pal. I’m awful attached to him.”

“Having your balls attached to my boot’ll be more awful. This royal can buy four horses better than him. Take it.”

“My balls to your boot, you little dried-up pissant?” He lurches to his feet. He’s big. Big enough to have had a grill not too far back in his family tree. He pulls a knife that’s not much smaller than he is. “You want to say that again?”

“Depends. You want to walk out of here with a royal in your hand, or get carried out with that knife up your ass?”

He hesitates, which is good and bad. It’s good because we might get through this without me losing too much blood. It’s bad because it means he’s been around enough to know that a smaller, older, unarmed man who doesn’t flinch with a knife in his face might be a little dangerous for a casual brawl. So if this starts, it won’t be casual.

Works for me.

I lean around him to tip a nod at the other four guys. “This shit-hump mean anything to any of you? I’d like to know how many men I’m about to kill.”

“Hard to know, freeman.” One of them swings his legs over the bench and gets up. “Jafe don’t mean much to anybody. But a fella who’s got a royal to piss away on a broke-down old bag of grillshit might mean sumpin to the rest of us. Cuz there’s gotta be more.”