Caine's Law

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  “Four or five hours ago you weren’t sure it exists.”

  “For fuck’s sake, t’Passe, do we need to go over the whole goddamn situation again?”

  “No—no, of course not,” she said faintly. “Apologies. Eventful night.”

  “Yeah, wait till tomorrow. It’s at BlackStone.”

  Tyrkilld lurched to his feet, and suddenly he didn’t look drunk at all. “The Artans hold the Hand of Our Lord of Battles? I have but to sound an alarm and we will have it tonight!”

  “You’re a decent guy, Tyrkilld, and I know you’re smarter than you pretend, but you need to work on impulse control.”

  “Am I in this so different from your miserable self?”

  “Not usually. But we have to get this one right. I’m the only guy who can do it.”

  “Your will or you won’t,” t’Passe muttered bitterly.

  “Cut it out. Listen, Tykilld, stop and think. How are you going to convince the Order it’s really there? And then you have to explain how you found out about it. And eventually somebody’s gonna ask how it got there in the first place, and that one’s the bomb. Civil war will be the best you can hope for.”

  “How dire can one truth be?”

  “You tell me,” he said. “The Artans have the Hand of Peace because Purthin Khlaylock gave it to them.”

  Tyrkilld’s eyes popped wide, and he sat down as abruptly as he had risen.

  “It’s what Khlaylock kicked in for the Smoke Hunt. His stake in the game.” Jonathan Fist sighed, and shrugged, and opened his hands in apology. “You know I can keep a secret, no matter how somebody asks. Are you as sure of anybody else?”

  Tyrkilld didn’t answer. He stared at the street.

  “And don’t even think about blowing all this wide open. You’ll only make it worse.”

  “Worse?” he murmured. “In what dark god’s nightmare could it be worse?”

  “Like I said: think it through. Were you listening when I said Khlaylock pitched in the Hand of Peace as his contribution to the Smoke Hunt?”

  Dawning horror scraped his eyes even wider.

  “So the real truth here is that the greatest hero of the Order in modern times took the single most sacred True Relic of Khryl Battlegod,” he said, “and gave it to the Black Knives.”

  Tyrkilld only groaned. T’Passe set a hand on his pauldron, and they sat in silence for some considerable time.

  At length, she sighed and looked back at Jonathan Fist. “You are,” she murmured, “a perfect fiend.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “Can I have my pistol now?”

  He took another bite of blood sausage, peeling back grease-soaked paper around his fist, and chewed thoughtfully while he watched Khryllians lay out bodies in the street.

  This used to be a tidy neighborhood, neat greystone townhouses and well-kept bungalows fronting the ways, identical truck-gardens fenced in behind. Clean flagstoned streets had radiated from this little plaza around a bubbling artesian fountain. Street signs carved into the corners of the buildings announced that the plaza, and the neighborhood around it, had been called Weaver’s Square. On another world it would have been called lower middle-class: full of grocers and haberdashers, barbers and clerks.

  Today all those grocers and clerks and barbers and haberdashers and their wives and their children were crowded around the plaza, white-faced and shocky, crying or whimpering or murmuring streams of half-comprehensible obscenities under half-held breath. Several of those neat greystones and well-kept bungalows were now smoking gutted hulks, choked with broken timbers and rubble. More were splashed with blood, and all bore scatters of fresh, bright white pocks on their stone faces.

  Slug scars.

  Last night would probably give this place a new nickname.

  He didn’t have a hard count yet. Too many armsmen milled around, taking pulses, binding wounds, and generally obstructing his view. Twelve or thirteen corpses.

  More to come.

  A pair of Knights stood praying in the improvised triage area they’d set up near the fountain. Here and there among the wounded, bloodflow stopped and yellow-lipped wounds zipped themselves shut, accompanied by bubbling groans and thin whistling gasps of agony. Those beyond Healing were turned over to the armsmen to be dragged into the ranks of the dead.

  Four ogrilloi so far. A red-soaked pile of grey-leather meat. His mushy brain still stirred up occasional specks of detail like rat turds in oatmeal: he remembered taking most of those wounds.

  Good thing he wasn’t superstitious.

  He watched with a clinically morbid satisfaction like scratching at the rim of an infected scab, cataloging correspondences between nighttime prophecy and dawnlit reality. That dream for him was a long time ago—a long time ago—but being here was bringing it all back.

  That old woman—

  He remembered smothering her screams with one grey-leather hand while he tore into her living belly with tusks and teeth.

  The dismembered body parts nearby—

  Had once been a pair of slim young men; two of him had found them in bed together and had ripped arms and legs from their bodies, cracking hips like wishbones, splintering knees and shredding shoulders, disjointing them while they shrieked until twisting off their heads had torn them to silence.

  That middle-aged mother—

  Screw it. He was already tired of this game.

  Armsmen held back the crowd, those fancy inlaid riot guns slanted across broad hauberked chests. The eyes behind their helmets’ nasals stared, grim and remote, over the heads of the throng they faced. Muscle bulged at angles of clenched jaws. Several of the bodies lined up in the morning sunlight wore armor bearing the sunburst of Khryl.

  He recalled that the collective noun for ogrilloi is massacre.

  That dead armsman, over there: one of him had snapped that man’s spine with a blow of the fist. Finely worked chainmail hung in tattered shreds; he could remember tearing a hauberk with taloned hands as though it were rotten leather. The warhorse sprawled across the cobbles—it had kicked at him, and one of him had caught its hoof in the palm of one hand and splintered its fetlock with a twist.

  That scarlet flame without heat or light had made these ogrilloi into more than ogrilloi. Even the dream-memory was an intoxicating fantasy of power.

  A fantasy of being stronger than a Knight of Khryl.

  Armsmen ranged the smoldering wreckage beyond the cordon. While he watched, another corpse was carried out: the shredded remnants of a young girl, maybe ten years old. He remembered the taste of her clean soft flesh. His daughter was just about that age. Most of the girl’s hair was matted with brown-caked blood. One strand draped across the shoulder of the armsman who bore her, and it was fine and silken and golden. Like Faith’s.

  The sausage curdled in his stomach.

  “Not my business,” he muttered through his teeth. “Still not my business.”

  His business came walking out of a smoke-shrouded doorway with four hundred pounds of dead ogrillo over her shoulder.

  Someone in the crowd shouted, “Khlaylock! Khlaylock and the God!” and her step hitched and her mouth twisted and her vivid eyes stayed on the wounded and the dead. He remembered hearing the same pious cheer twenty-five years before, from a different voice, for a different Khlaylock, in a different Boedecken.

  Other voices echoed the call. Khlaylock and the God! Shouts swelled into a roar, and standing silently among them he could pick out individual voices: killem Vasse! killemmall! killallafuckers! Fists went toward the sky and men slammed each other on the shoulders and women shrieked into their hands, and the pious sentiment gave way to a hungrily choral chant.

  Vasse! Vasse! Vasse!

  There’d been a time when his own presence could quicken that ravenous pulse in any crowd on Earth. He could hear the echoes even now, and they could still raise a sizzle in his balls. He’d loved being a star. He’d lived for it.

  Looked like she didn’t.

  Some voices—faint,
scattered—did not join the chant. These had messages of their own: Where was Khryl when they killed my daughter? Where was Khryl when my parents screamed? Where was Khryl last NIGHT? These faint scattered voices joined, gathering strength and number. The choral vasse vasse vasse became blurred by a rising counterchant—

  Where was KHRYL? Where was KHRYL? Where was KHRYL?

  And there was shoving and flashing of fists that became snarling knots of struggle, and some of the armsmen began to advance from the line, using their long guns as crowbars to pry open paths into the crowd.

  The Champion never looked up.

  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 youermgh—”

  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.