Caine's Law

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  For a long moment, none of us moves. The only sound is the trickle of the creek, and the rustle of a small animal skittering through the scrub. Then for the first time, the gelding makes a move I haven’t ordered him to: he turns his head far enough that he can look me over with his other eye too, and apparently what he sees is reassuring, because his head lowers by his front hooves and he begins to munch the weeds.

  Well, all right, then.

  “What just happened here?” Angvasse speaks only a hair above a whisper. “Did you cast some glamour? Since when do you do magick?”

  “It’s not my magick,” I tell her, just as softly. “It works best at dusk or dawn. Half-light. If you can’t manage that, it’s best to be outdoors, somewhere dark and quiet, without too many people around. Like here.”

  “To do what?”

  I open my hands, a sort of gestural apology in advance for how this is gonna sound. “When you speak to a horse of the witch-herd, sometimes she can hear you.”

  “Witch-herd?” She pantomimes looking around in bafflement. “A herd of one? Through which you speak to a woman you won’t meet for another fifty years?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Assuredly. And how long must we wait before you decide she’s not coming?”

  “We don’t have to wait at all. If she’s coming, she’ll—”

  The black gelding lifts his head and nickers softly. From somewhere back in the star-shadowed night, a horse nickers in reply.

  “Like I was saying.”

  As the upper rim of the moon slips over the eastern peaks, she comes out of the darkness as if made of night. The horse is big, powerful, and in the moonlight I can’t even guess his color. He walks slowly, easily, bare hooves making only the occasional knock when he steps on a stone. She is just another moon-silvered shadow, an outline, her face invisible within the haloed cloud of her hair.

  Except for her witch-eye. Her witch-eye glitters like an ice dagger.

  “I see I have underestimated you again.” Angvasse gets up and starts toward her. “I give you greeting, good—”

  “Angvasse. Don’t.”

  She stops and frowns back at me.

  I nod at the gelding. “Business first.”

  “But—”

  “You don’t need introduction. Just wait.”

  The big horse stops just short of the creek, and she swings down off him. She walks into the creek and stops in the middle. She stands there, watching the gelding. He snorts and tosses his head. He sidles one way, then the other, then takes a few steps backward, tosses his head and snorts again.

  She just stands there.

  He starts to move forward, still kind of sidling but the sidle’s getting bigger, almost bouncing, stiff and gawky like some ancient geezer trying to show his grandchildren how he used to dance, and there’s an arch to his neck now and he pulls himself up and gives a couple of big huffs like a stallion and stamps a forehoof.

  She stands. Watching. Nothing else.

  Angvasse moves close to me. “You’ve seen this before, but still you watch. She watches the horse. You watch her. As though to fix in memory every slightest detail.”

  “It’s that obvious?”

  “It’s your smile,” she murmurs. “I’ve never seen you smile. Not once. I’ve seen you grin. You bare your teeth like a dog about to bite—”

  “I prefer to think it’s a wolf.”

  “And I’ve seen that hard false smile you get when something hurts you. But this smile—”

  “Shh. This is my favorite part.”

  The gelding reaches the bank of the creek. He snorts again, stamps a couple times, and leans away like he wants to run but some gravity, some magnetism, something draws him closer and closer, and the closer he gets the less he wants to get away, until he finally steps down into the creek beside her.

  She lifts her hand toward his face.

  He dances back from her, throwing his head, hand-shy and spooky. She doesn’t move. Just stands there in the water up to her knees with her hand up and out and she watches him and she doesn’t have anything more important than this to do, ever. She can stand there till the stars burn out if that’s how long it takes, but of course it doesn’t.

  Sooner than I would believe if I hadn’t seen this a hundred or a thousand times before, the gelding comes to her, takes a deep breath to gather every last scrap of his courage, and then just kind of leans forward against her hand.

  They stand there together, neither moving except to breathe, like all he wants is to feel the warmth of her hand and all she wants is for him to feel it, and after a while he slips aside from her hand, lowers his head, and sets his face against her shoulder. She rests her cheek against his neck, and they stand together in the moonlight, and my hand to Jesus it’s still the most beautiful fucking thing I ever hope to see.

  “Does it—” Angvasse sounds a little choked up herself. “Does it always work?”

  “No. Sometimes they’re too damaged. Then the most you can do for them is leave them alone.”

  “But usually. Usually it works.”

  I recognize the need in her voice. I give her the best answer I have.

  “It did on me.”

  Soon enough the gelding is calm, over cropping weeds alongside the horse she rode in on, and she comes out of the creek toward us. She looks us over silently.

  Angvasse takes a breath like she’s gonna say something. I lift a no, just wait palm, and she does.

  Eventually the horse-witch sighs and nods to herself. She comes over to Angvasse. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I know it hurts.”

  “What hurts?”

  “It’s possible I can help you someday. Not today. You’re not ready.”

  “And I am grateful for your concern,” she says. “I am Angvasse, Lady Khlaylock of …”

  Her voice trails off because the horse-witch has already moved on. “You,” she says. “I know you.”

  “You will. We’re gonna meet about fifty years from now.”

  “I know you,” she repeats. “You’re the walking knife. The shape-shifter’s echo. The shadow cast by darkness and scars.”

  I turn that over in my head for a few seconds, and discover I don’t mind the sound of it at all. “I’m okay with that.”

  “You are now. You won’t always be.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what you’re gonna save me from.”

  “I’m glad to know it. What are you going to save me from?”

  I manage to swallow instead of choking. Just barely.

  She tilts a just between us smile toward me. “It must be I’ve already suggested we should rescue each other.”

  “It’s come up in conversation.”

  “So well and well, then. Why are you here?”

  “The fate of the world entire rests upon us, and we—” Angvasse begins.

  “Yes, of course,” the horse-witch says gently. “Except fate doesn’t mean what you think it means. Please don’t be offended, but I was asking him.”

  I take a deep breath. “I need a favor.”

  “Yes?”

  “I need you to watch something for me.”

  “And a man … a man can be excused … taking a certain amount of pride in his only son.”

  — DUNCAN MICHAELSON

  Heroes Die

  Water springs clear and sparkling from a crack in the rock and washes a broad lip of granite before it tumbles fifteen feet to the grassy streambed. My breath smokes in the morning chill. The horse-witch touches my arm. “It’s beautiful.”

  I cough some knots out of my throat. “Yeah.”

  “It’s beautiful every time you bring me here.”

  In her past. One or more of her pasts. Some of my futures. Potentially. In the disjointed time-stream of our relationship, it’s most useful to stick close to present tense.

  “When I’m here without you, it’s not beautiful. Even a little.”

  By the time Berne’s demon-mount corpse will drop me by this
stream, it’ll be fouled with oil and human waste and fuck knows what kinds of toxic runoff from the mines. This heather will be gone, and all the wildflowers, and the vast stand of aspen below us will be only blackened stumps left behind by Palatine Camp loggers.

  But there’s no point telling her that. Besides, I’m pretty sure I can’t actually make myself say the fucking words. And she probably knows already anyway.

  “I’m sad for you.”

  I take her hand off my arm and lace my fingers into hers. “I’m okay.”

  “I know. But this place makes you sad always. I know how much you love her.”

  “Loved.”

  She pulls my arm around her shoulders and snuggles in against my chest. “Don’t pretend.”

  Her hair smells of heather and pine. “It’s … it was, it’s going to be, bad. For me. For Faith it’s worse.”

  “Your daughter.”

  “You meet her about fifty years from now. You and she … have a lot in common. She adores you.”

  “I’m glad for that,” she says. “Are we going down to the water?”

  I shake my head. “I just wanted to look. To … I don’t know. To have a different memory of this place.”

  She turns her doe eye up on me with a smile like summer rain. “One with me.”

  Now I feel bad about it. “Maybe I shouldn’t have.”

  She sighs against my shoulder. “I’m sorry I won’t be here then.”

  “You can’t save her.”

  “And you won’t need saving. I’m sorry anyway.”

  “Me too.”

  After a moment, she stirs and slips out from under my arm. She tips a nod at the mountain shadow’s retreat upslope, toward where patient Angvasse waits with the horses below the crest of Khryl’s Saddle. “It’s a long road …”

  “… and it won’t get shorter till we start walking. Yeah.”

  It’s a slow ride down to Thorncleft. The sun passes us going the other direction, and the shadow of Khryl’s Saddle gathers us deep in a chill damp dusk for hours before sunset. Angvasse skirts the town with the horse-witch and our tiny witch-herd while I go in to see if I can winkle out a lead.

  Thorncleft of this era is not far removed from the small city I will come to know; a bit smaller in these days, streets narrower and more crooked, smelling of garbage and horse shit rather than the coal smoke and petroleum grease of my native era. Lacking their future gaslights, the streets’ thick shadows are only faintly brushed by the silver moon.

  From the unpublished journals that will become the main source for his Tales of the First Folk, I know how he goes about hiring guides for these expeditions. A couple hours buying beers and brandies through a string of outlying pubs peels the necessary slim, and it’s not good news. I cut short my evening’s entertainment in favor of half an hour’s friarpace down the East Road out of town, until a horse knickers at me from the black gloom of the aspen forest and I stop, panting, my sweat-soaked shirt icy against my back. I wave, and beckon toward the trees. “We missed them. They’re almost half a day ahead of us, and they’re in trouble.”

  “Trouble?” Angvasse walks out into the moonlight, and behind her comes the horse-witch on the back of a thick-bodied mare. The rest of the horses trickle nervously into the open. “Are you certain?”

  “The thing is, they’re really just academics with guns. They were trolling the wayfarer pubs for guides to Diamondwell. They spent last night and part of this morning spreading around way too much silver, then a couple hardguys came up to them and claimed to know an overland shortcut to Shimmerrift Gap.”

  The horse-witch nods gravely and her gaze goes distant—I guess our hardguys don’t take good care of their horses. Angvasse looks puzzled. “How is that ‘trouble’?”

  “There is no overland shortcut,” the horse-witch murmurs. “Sharp thunder and red lightning and blood and man shit …”

  Angvasse’s fists curl. “Bandits.”

  The horse-witch nods at the northeastern shoulder of Mount Cutter: a jagged ridgeline descending away from us. Far below, a thin ghost-ribbon of smoke twists toward the moon. “They’re not far. Greenwood campfire because they’re not hiding. Two hours on horseback.”

  She turns her witch-eye on me. “Less on foot.”

  Their lookout picked a pretty comfortable spot on the top of the knoll, his back against the trunk of a small scrub oak. He’s damn hard to spot, and whenever the clouds clear away from the moon he’s got a good view of the road and the approaches to his pals’ camp. If he had enough training or natural discipline to hold still, he might have lived through this.

  But y’know, boys and toys—he can’t stop playing with his new knife, because it’s such a novel piece of technology: a spring-loaded tactical folder of a type that won’t be seen again around these parts until a few get looted off the corpses of Social Police after Assumption Day. Shhkck he folds it closed, and ksnpp he clicks it open, then closed, then open, and he’s having so much fun with it that he doesn’t even know I’m there until my own knife—a long double-edged dagger of a much more traditional style, because I’m just old-fashioned that way—stabs into one side of his throat till its point comes out the other, its grip making a convenient handle for leverage while I quietly break his neck.

  I close his knife and stick it in my pocket, because it really is a nice piece, action like silk, bead-blasted titanium nitride blacking, sharp as a ceramic scalpel—and besides, if the next ten minutes go well, I might get a chance to return it to whoever he stole it from.

  I’m flat on the ground before my brain registers what put me there: a sharp and shockingly loud pkow from entirely too close by—gunshot, maybe a rifle. My heart beats twenty or thirty times while a couple of seconds pass. Then one more pkow, fractionally less loud, which is good, and a few seconds later a third, which is better. Probably just somebody playing with another new toy—a firearm is gonna look pretty impressive to a guy whose highest-tech weapon is probably a crossbow. Or they might be, y’know, executing prisoners, which would suck, but it could be worse.

  At least they’re not shooting at me.

  Fifty or sixty yards away, a campfire lights trees above a tiny hollow in the side of a hill. I sing out before I get too close. “Heyo the fire!”

  Some rustling, and a clank or two. “Heyo the woods …”

  “Coming in. All I got’s knives.”

  “How many are you?”

  “Just me to come in. There’s a couple more, but they favor darkness till I give them the shout.”

  “What’s your business here?”

  “Some folk of my acquaintance took this direction out of Thorncleft today. Should you come across any of them alive, I can arrange reward.”

  Crickets and soft breeze. For a long time.

  Then: “What, like a ransom?”

  Fucking amateurs. “If you want.”

  More crickets and soft breeze.

  Eventually: “Come on in, then. Slow. Hands empty where we can see them.”

  So I do.

  Amateurs can be dangerous. But usually only when you expect them to act like pros.

  I drag the last corpse over to the rest of them. Another seven guys the world is better off without: filthy and unshaven, once-expensive clothes worn through and stained and obviously made for people who died wearing them. That is, other people who died wearing them. I safety both pistols and set them alongside the rifle and the shotgun. My ear still stings like a bastard, and the scorched hair around it reeks, but a powder-burnt cheek doesn’t count as a serious wound. Besides, the girls are busy.

  The horse-witch is off with their remuda, in the corral of rope strung between trees. A couple dozen nervous, spooky horses, snorting and stamping at her, at one another, at the wind. I go over by her because he’s in the camp and I’m really not ready to face him.

  “Hey.”

  The horse-witch comes to me and reaches across the rope to take my hand. “You look scared.”

  “Is it
that obvious?”

  “Probably only to me.”

  “I guess you’ve known me a lot longer than I’ve known you.”

  She smiles. “I’ve known you a lot longer than you’ve known anybody.”

  I’ll give her that one. “What about my—uh, the girl?”

  “I don’t know.” The horse-witch tilts her head. A trace of frown wrinkles her brow. “Sometimes she’s here. This time she isn’t.”

  “All right.” A long sigh heaves some of the weight off my shoulders. “Maybe it’s better this way.”

  “That’s a matter too deep for me.”

  “You know how to get there from here, right? The whole place is probably concealed somehow. Glamour or something.”

  “I’ve been there before.”

  I blink. “You have?”

  “I have been—”

  “Unusual places, yeah, I remember. Listen, you and Angvasse can get him up there even if he’s, well … if he has to be tied up or something?”

  She looks thoughtful and shrugs with half a nod. “It’d be more convenient if you can talk him into cooperating.”

  “Yeah, except that’ll involve, y’know, talking to him.”

  “Is that why you’re scared? Is it him?”

  “No, it’s me. Well, it is him. And me. Hell, I don’t know. It’s just … it’s like I can’t make myself talk to him. Not here. Not when I’m … well, me.” A heavy sigh. Letting it go doesn’t make it any lighter. “I know what he thinks of men like me.”

  “He doesn’t know any men like you. Except the one he sees in mirrors.”

  “That’s not exactly a compliment. To either of us.”

  “It wasn’t flattery.” She squeezes my hand. I squeeze hers.

  And smile.

  In the camp, Angvasse cradles one survivor—Ridpath, if I’m remembering the right digigraph in Tales, a University cop on detached duty for field security—as she prays away his wounds. Nearby, the other survivor is on one knee, his shoulders bowed, his big square hand resting lightly on the brow of the one who didn’t survive.