Caine's Law

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  Shit.

  If they’d give me half a fucking second I could detune myself from the treetoppers’ Cloak, but that takes concentration that I really kind of need to duck, dodge, dive, and roll to get a horse trough between me and the ogres without getting my ass knocked to downtown fucking Thorncleft. The getting-inside-somewhere is looking problematic too, as this crowded street of busy storefronts transforms in seconds to a deserted ghost-town street lined by locked-down storefronts that look more like bunkers, which is another fucking crisis because clearing the street means my buddies out there don’t have to worry anymore about hurting bystanders, and now from the general direction of the Exotic Love comes the regimented chmp chmp chmp chmp of hobnail boots in perfect step along with a syncopated clanging like steel drums played by overcaffeinated gorillas, and Jesus wept it’s a troop of stonebenders. With at least one rockmagus.

  All this for one damn elvish whore? They must really like him.

  Or maybe Kierendal knows who he is.

  A couple heavy thumps and a splintery ripping noise from the far side of the horse trough proclaim that nobody’s forgotten about me. Higher ground. I need higher ground, treetoppers or not, because standing on a cobbled street is not how sane people confront rockmagi.

  I roll from the trough up onto the boardwalk and keep rolling until I can get up with my back to the wall. One of those lethal bearings shatters the cedar planks less than a handspan from my left hip, but at least I’m on wood with wood at my back, which means the stonebenders can wait. The store two doors down is built out—a six-foot corner’s worth of cover from the ogres—and I go for it in a high arching dive-roll with my arms wrapped around my head, a bit of tactical defense for which I pay by taking one of those steels into my right buttcheek hard enough that it spins me all the way over and my whole leg goes numb.

  Sometimes it’s worthwhile to hang your ass out in a firefight, because there’s always some son of a bitch on the other side with a sense of humor who’ll peg you there instead of your head, and while getting shot in the ass is no bushel of roses, it’s better than most of the alternatives.

  I come up into a one-knee crouch because my right leg refuses to cooperate, and I manage to wrench myself around to face straight back along the boardwalk, because that’s the best flightpath for treetoppers to come at me full speed, and though experienced lancers go for the eyes, the one who spiked my knee was clearly trying to immobilize rather than maim, and Cloak is not the same as true invisibility; it doesn’t affect light or space or anything outside your mind. So I keep my eyes wide and my arms loose and hands open, and let my reflexes take care of the rest, because even though my mind doesn’t register them, my eyes work just fine.

  Hands too.

  My left flicks out in front of my knee, and half a birdlance blossoms from its back, stopped only by the grip of the lancer who jammed it through my palm. I get his legs with my right, half twist, and put his back in his partner’s way. Her lance goes straight through him and stabs into the front of my left shoulder—through my subclavius deep enough to scrape my first rib, which doesn’t improve my mood one tiny fucking bit—and since turnabout is more than fair play, I yank my left hand off the male’s lance, reverse the steel, and impale her through the groin.

  She snarls and grabs the lance and starts to pull herself along it toward my hand, shrilling what sounds like some really nasty curses from an enraged chipmunk. Her partner just screams. A treetopper’s scream isn’t all that loud, but it stabs into your ear like an audio feedback squeal of fingernails on slate.

  “Shut up.” I enforce my suggestion by wrapping both hands around both ends of the birdlances and squeezing them together, which turns shrieks and curses into thin grunts and wheezes. “Oh, I’m sorry, does that hurt? Well, so does my fucking hand. And my shoulder. And knee. And I will rip you off these lances sideways if you don’t shut the fuck up.”

  They seem to get the message, because they quiet down and quit struggling. Or maybe they both just passed out. Or died in my hands. I can’t find it in myself to worry much about it either way.

  Now it’s time to figure out just how deep this shitpool really is. “I’m coming out! I have hostages!”

  Holding the two treetoppers in front of me, I step out onto the boardwalk to get a look at what I’m dealing with here. So: the three ogres, twenty-five or so stonebenders in armor, an unknown number of treetoppers, and at least one very, very angry elf. I nod to him. “Hey, sorry, man. It wasn’t supposed to go like this.”

  “I am no man.” His lips peel so far back, his face is nothing but eyes and bloody teeth, and that blood’s mine. “Feral rapist scum. Kill him.”

  Rapist? “Now, hold on—”

  “Kill him!”

  “Fucking hold on!” I lift the treetoppers. “Nobody’s dead. Tell them.”

  I encourage them with a little shake. “Fucking tell them.”

  The female pipes reluctantly, “I yet live,” and her male chimes in, “I as well.”

  “You get it?” I call. “I haven’t killed anybody. Today. But it’s not gonna be long before these two pass the point where kids can save them by clapping their fucking hands.”

  Everybody looks blank. Brilliant, dumbass—a Tinkerbell reference. That’ll impress ’em. “Okay, look. If I was the bad guy here, some of you’d be dead already. These two for sure. And not just them.”

  I tip a nod toward the whore. “I could have had your life in the bar. At least twice. You can tell these fuckers whatever you want, but I’ve seen your skills. I know you’re not a fool. You have an idea what I can do. You know you’re alive because I left you that way. Twice. Shit, three times—I could have killed you before you came over the bar. But I didn’t. Nobody’s dead unless you decide to make them that way.”

  “And what then, should I thank you? Humans. Feral scum. You take and you take and you take, you rob and you reave and you rape, and you want thanks from us for having left a victim alive!”

  “Yeah, humans suck, whatever. Except apparently not so bad that you weren’t about to let me fuck you in the ass.”

  He goes even whiter—except for those red teeth and now eyes to match—and he raises his hands and the air around him crackles with white fire, and you know I really should try to remember that no matter what somebody does for a living, it’s usually a good idea to be at least polite, because I think right now he doesn’t care about the treetoppers or the stores or the whole fucking city as long as he burns my ass down.

  One of the ogres, though, displaying a degree of good sense that we don’t usually ascribe to them, touches his shoulder and leans down to speak a word or two in his pointy little ear, and those teeth go back in his mouth and his eyes turn back to violet and instead of blasting me into the next world, he just points at me and mutters, “Strength of limb I strike and slay—”

  Lightning crackles between us. I shrug. “I think you missed.”

  He frowns, and power again gathers around him. “Light of eye to midnight pray—”

  “Yeah, good luck with that too.”

  He snarls something in Primal, and the air around me suddenly sparkles like my head’s inside a glitter rainbow, and my eyes water and my nose tickles. “Fairy dust? Seriously?”

  And apparently he is serious and so is the fairy dust, because I uncork a sneeze so violent it doubles me over and I drop the treetoppers and try to get a breath which turns the tickle in my nose into a colony of hyperactive bullet ants marching around my sinuses, which unleashes another sneeze that sprays blood from my mouth and nose and drops me to my knees and my vision is mostly ragged splotches of black and the bullet ants have turned into a gallon of concentrated sulfuric acid which my convulsive whooping gasp sucks into my lungs and somebody says—

  “Khryl bless you, my friend, and may Our Lord’s Justice stand betwixt you and the fell magicks of darkling Folk.”

  —and apparently it will, now that she mentions it, because I can breathe again and even see a
little.

  I stand and wipe my face. The author of my blessing and cure stands a couple dozen feet back down the street, facing the ogres and stonebenders and elf and me with a kind of abstracted, skeptical bemusement on her face and a quarter-keg wooden barrel under her arm. “A few hairs of his head, says he,” she says. “Only hairs. No fuss. No rumpus. Only a dozen royals and no trouble at all, says he. None of the slaughter that pursues him as crows follow an army. A few hairs of his head, says he.”

  “Um …” If I weren’t so beat up I’d be blushing. “It’s complicated.”

  “Oh, indeed? Strewth, from this scene no trusting soul would suspect complication.”

  “Holy shit.” Now I’m scared. “You’re drunk …”

  “Holy shit,” she replies, “you’re bleeding.”

  I look from her to them and back again. “Um, I’ve got what we need. Maybe we can just, kind of, back away …?”

  “Flee? Surrender the field? For fear of these … animals?” She looks distinctly offended. “Have I then so misjudged your courage?”

  “Everybody does.” I shake blood out of my eyes. “They aren’t animals. And they are a fuckload and a half more dangerous than they look.”

  “As am I.”

  Something about her bearing, about her simple, solid, unbreakable self-assurance brings Marade back to me so vividly—You mean retreat? Run? Flee? I would mislike to use the C-word—that I can’t remember what I was going to say.

  “Far fallen though I have, I am still to be numbered among the Lords Legendary.”

  Oh, yeah, that was it. “Yeah, like fifty fucking years from now—”

  “I am what I am. Wherever—whenever—I am. My duty remains.”

  I’d like to tell her where she can shove her duty, but that seems a little ungracious considering her duty is why I’m breathing right now.

  “This is no affair of yours, human cow,” the elf spits. “He is a thief, a robber, and a rapist. Leave him to us.”

  “And I say he is not, and so I shall not,” she replies equably. “Shall we here make trial of our respective convictions?”

  “You’re mad—”

  “Perhaps. I am also a Knight of Khryl.”

  This gets everybody’s attention. The ogres go decidedly uneasy, and the stonebenders exchange dark looks. Every variety of Folk knows the Order, at least by reputation.

  They’re an assload scarier than I am.

  “You could not know this man stands in the Shield-shadow of the Lord of Battles. Thus I will not demand your life for having drawn his blood,” she goes on. “Now, though, none can protest ignorance. The next who raises hand ’gainst him will raise no further hand in this world.”

  “You, a Khryllian Knight? Please,” the elf sneers, and I can’t really blame him, because just standing in the street in simple travel clothes of unbleached linen, she really looks like nothing more than a sexily butch twenty-something with dark auburn hair and an aversion to makeup—at least until you take in the cords in her neck and her suspiciously thick and powerful-looking wrists. “What’s your name, then? Aren’t you supposed to boast? Some bestial yammer about your family, your rank, and your lands?”

  Which makes my stomach twist even tighter, but she fields it like a natural. “Were you a man here to face me, courtesy would require that I Declare the truth of my name, rank, and lands. As you are not human, I have granted already more than you deserve.”

  “If you’re Khryllian, what are you doing walking around in public without your armor? Where’s your fucking morningstar?”

  She doesn’t even blink. “I’m on vacation.”

  Like I said: natural. I smother a snort of laughter, because I don’t want to remind anybody I’m still standing here.

  “Vacation, my father’s balls.” He looks up at the ogre next to him. “Chase off this madwoman.”

  The ogre frowns dubiously, but he goes into his windup anyway.

  She doesn’t move.

  He fires his steel ball so fast it’s only a silvery blur, and she doesn’t even flinch as the quarter keg under her arm explodes into splinters and soaks her leggings and boots with amber foamy liquid. Ale. Good ale, by the smell.

  I look at the ogre. “Probably shouldn’t have done that.”

  Not that I’ll cry many tears for him—not when the mass of deep muscle bruise that is my right buttcheek weighs in—but the poor bastard really has no way to imagine how much trouble he’s in.

  She frowns down at the ruin of the cask and its contents, then bends down and picks up the steel ball. She weighs it in her right hand. “Interesting.”

  “Don’t kill him.”

  She looks at me. “Should I not?”

  I open my blood-soaked hands. “Could as easily have hit you in the face.”

  She nods judiciously and draws back her arm—but the ogre was ahead of us on this one, and his next shot shrieks through the air and takes her solidly at the joining of chest and right shoulder with shattering force. Splinters of bone rip through her skin and shred her sleeve. She staggers but stays on her feet. Now she looks annoyed.

  And she didn’t even drop the ball.

  “Soundly struck, and well cast.” She passes the ball to her left. “But I’m not right-handed.”

  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.