“Kris always said fire was easy.” He made the other hand into a fist, and the fires swiftly dwindled to ordinary red and yellow. “Extinguishing’s trickier. Don’t have the hang of it yet.”
Raithe returned his hand to the water tun. “Where did you learn to cast fire?”
“Ma’elKoth. When we destroyed Kosall. And when He sent me back to Earth and I blew Marc Vilo’s estate to the far side of fuck. Fire really is easy, even for me. All I need is focus. It’s not like thaumaturgy. Thaumaturgy is limited by local Flow characteristics. It’s limited by reality. This isn’t Flow.”
He opened his fists and turned his palms for Raithe’s inspection. “It’s the power of a god.”
Every trace of the black oil was gone; the logs burning in the fireplace were the only evidence it had ever been there. Raithe’s ears rang and his jaw hurt and he realized he was clenching his teeth hard enough to chip them. Very slowly, very carefully, he withdrew his left hand from the water and began to wrap the sodden bandages in fresh gauze. “A god who is your bitterest enemy. Who is the greatest threat to life on this world.”
“I used to think so.”
“And nothing has changed, except it’s getting worse,” Raithe said. “When I—when this happened to me—the oil was only corrosive, flammable rather than actively incendiary.”
“Everything changes.”
“I still don’t understand how you can do these things.”
“I’m hoping you can help me find out.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea where to begin.”
“I have a theory—well, a guess, really, but it’s an educated guess.”
He looked down. “Applied Legendry. First day. Why does no one know where the Covenant of Pirichanthe was negotiated? Why does no one even know where the fuck Pirichanthe was?”
Raithe blankly offered the standard response. “So that no one land, nor one people, can claim the Covenant as their own, and so that every land and every people can claim the Covenant as their own.”
“So Jantho Ironhand for humanity and Khryl Battlegod for deity forged the Covenant blah blah blah. Whatever. But they weren’t the only ones there; each of the Great Folk sent witnesses. Remember who was there for the primals?”
“T’ffarell Ravenlock.”
“Yeah. The son of Panchasell Mithondionne, who Bound a Power to seal the gates between Home and the Quiet Land. Panchasell wasn’t afraid of ferals—us, I mean. The humans. He was afraid of our gods.”
The corners of Raithe’s mouth drew back and downward; his eyebrows drew back and up. “What are you saying?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying. I just get the feeling I might know what Pirichanthe is.”
“What,” Raithe said warily. “Not where.”
“Yeah, and it’s not so much a what as it is a who. And …” He took a deep breath and released it in a long slow sigh. “And it’s starting to look like I’ve been its assbitch for twenty-five years.”
“In lands to the south, from Kor to Yalitrayya, the wise women say your horse is who you are without your name.”
— THE HORSE-WITCH
History of the Faltane County War (ADDENDUM)
In the crosshairs, she looked pretty good.
With just the slightest tightening and relaxing of his fingers, he could keep the reticle centered on her chest as the big bay she was bare-backing moved slowly along the ravine floor, scavenging scraps of grass left behind by the vast herd. He couldn’t guess her age; her skin was the color of oiled oak, and streaks of sun bleach coiled through her wild mass of hair. Her sleeveless leather jerkin looked like it had been tanned in an old stump, and showed off arms cabled with long muscle under half a teaspoon of fat. Or less. Her legs were long and hard under a split skirt that divided into loose duster-style chaps. She rode with her heels out and her knees loose and nothing at all in her hands.
“Son of a bitch,” he said. “They weren’t pulling my dick after all.”
Even after all the years he’d spent on Home, he still wasn’t used to the way any random myth once in a while decided to jump out of the bushes and bite a chunk off his ass.
The ogrillo beside him, staying low, touched him on the ribs. “Let me see.”
Slowly, carefully, he pushed himself, scraping back from the rim of the bluff. When he was sure none of the horses below would sense his movement, he passed the SPAR-12 to the young ogrillo. Nobody at Heckler-Colt had ever imagined their weapon in hands like his, but an enterprising stonebender had modified this one with an oversized trigger, a guard big around as a coffee cup, and a divot cut out of the stock so the ogrillo could sight the rifle without breaking off his right tusk.
“Mmm. Good enough to eat.”
“The horse or the girl?”
“You pick.” The ogrillo’s trifurcate upper lip peeled back around his tusks. “They’re down there, little brother.”
“Yeah?”
He laid a talon along his wrinkled snout. “Nose of Orbek, hey?”
“Spare me the Great Hunter crap, citybred.”
Orbek shrugged a couple dozen kilos of shoulder. “Can see Carillon from here. Looks like your boy’s gettin’ some.”
The human snaked back up to the rim of the bluff and squinted into the broad shallow ravine. His eyes weren’t what they used to be, but by following the angle of the sniper rifle’s long black barrel he could pick out a black-dappled grey blotch that looked like it had mounted a chestnut blotch, and he nodded. If the big four-year-old was here, odds were Hawkwing and Phantom would be too. Unless they’d run across a mountain lion or a griffin or a pack of hungry ogrilloi or any of the other dozen-odd large predators that roamed the southern foothills of God’s Teeth.
“Any idea where we are?”
The ogrillo shrugged again. “Don’t look like Kansas.”
The human made a face. “Should never have told you that goddamn story.”
“How many we gonna take?”
“Just the ones we came for.”
The ogrillo gave him a look sour enough to curdle milk. “Long damn way for three damn horses. Specially when I’m hungry.”
“Stay up here and keep the sights on her.” He took a long last look down into the ravine. “I want to get out of this with nobody dying, but if it looks like I’m in trouble, drop her.”
“Like you say, little brother.”
The man slid down through the rocks to where Kylassi the stablemaster and the two grooms waited with the mounts. “She’s down there: one twist in the middle of a herd of maybe ten thousand head. Maybe twenty.”
Kylassi whistled. “That’s a lot of horses.”
“Forget about them. All we’re taking is what’s ours. Mine. Faith’s.” He made a face and waved a hand. “You know what I mean. There’s a defile below to the south. Swing down there and come out slow. No screwing around. Go straight for Hawkwing, if you can see her; Carillon and Phantom will both follow her, right?”
The stablemaster nodded. “Maybe. Probably. What’re you going to do?”
The man squinted thoughtfully into the slanting afternoon sunlight.
“I’m gonna have a word with this horse-witch.”
He came out of the rocks on foot.
His boots made less noise through the sparse scrub than the horses’ chewing. Only a couple actually looked at him, but they all knew he was there; the herd drifted outward from him, thinning and expanding and parting as naturally as a breeze parts a cloud. He kept his pace a step slower than theirs, giving them whatever distance they needed.
She sat her bay a couple hundred yards up the far slope of the little valley. Crumbling crags the color of bone shouldered out of the scrubfield that rose behind her. The slanting sun raised a curtain of shadow across her face, and she looked at him.
He kept walking. The same steady pace. Giving her plenty of time to think him over. Plenty of time to decide to get shy.
She just looked.
He could feel the tidal ebb of the
herd around him in the curling shifts of breeze, the dry crisp crunch of horse teeth on fescue, the nervous jitter of a drumming hoof. The jitters rose to the occasional clatter and the chewing faded entirely away and the clean grass-sap smell curdled into a musk of sweat and piss.
Kylassi and the grooms had swung out to where the herd could see them, and were working their way out of the defile onto the ravine floor.
The breeze shifted to put the three horsemen downwind. The herd began to tighten up, like he’d known they would: now they could smell Orbek.
Horses on Home know what it means to be downwind of ogrilloi.
He stopped when he got close enough that he figured Orbek could hold both him and her in the sight.
“Hey,” he said softly. “You got a name?”
She turned her head slowly to one side, then the other. One of her eyes was brown as a doe’s, warm and sparkling; the other had a cast the grey-blue of dead winter ice. She looked at him out of each eye in turn like she was making sure they both saw the same thing.
“What’s your name?” he said, louder. “Down the village, they call you the horse-witch.”
She looked bored.
“Dammit.” He felt like an idiot. “Do you speak Westerling at all?”
Her chest rose and fell briefly: a little huff of disappointment. “Not if I don’t have to.”
“Jesus Christ.” He scowled and looked around. He could imagine the grin Orbek would be wearing about now, and it made him want to punch somebody. “Look. I don’t want any trouble. I didn’t come all this way to hang you, or arrest you, or do anything to you at all. I don’t give a rat’s ass about you. I just want my horses back.”
“All right.”
He blinked. She still looked bored.
“What do you mean, all right?”
“If they’re your horses, they’re your horses.” She made him feel, somehow, as if he was lying to her.
“Well—” He shifted his weight. “They’re my daughter’s.”
She nodded. “You don’t like horses.”
“What does liking them have to do with anything?”
“That’s what I mean.”
His scowl deepened. He shook his head and made himself unclench fists he didn’t remember making. “I have a feeling talking to you is gonna piss me off.”
She gave him her ice-blue eye. “Then don’t.”
He squinted up at her. The Automag registered weight inside the waistband holster at the small of his back. He reminded himself that she hadn’t actually given him reason to use it.
She looked over her shoulder. Something about the slope behind her was apparently a lot more interesting than he was. The big bay made a slow half pirouette; he found himself looking at her back and a quarter ton of horse ass. The bay flipped up its tail and squeezed out a turd as big as his head.
It plopped on the slope, black-green and wet and steaming faintly in the crisp air.
“And now I ask myself, why the fuck would I want to talk to a fucking horse-witch in the first place?”
“I could tell you,” she said, still seeming to be interested in something above the crest of the slope. “But you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Yeah, okay.” He glanced toward where Kylassi and the grooms were circling a small cluster of horses. He caught Kylassi’s eye and lifted his hand in a small circle of get on with it. “We’ll take the horses and be out of here. I’d say it was nice to meet you if it, y’know, was.”
He felt her attention return to him. He had a sense for that kind of thing: a warm tingle lit up his back like carbonated sunlight. “It’s not going to work that way.”
“Want to bet?”
He could hear the big bay’s hooves shuffling unhurriedly among the rocks. Coming toward him from behind. “Don’t turn around,” she said.
He went still. This wasn’t a freeze; just the opposite. All tension flowed out from him, and he stood relaxed and balanced and if she wanted to get frisky within his arm’s reach, that suited him right down to the road-rot between his toes. “Is there a reason why I shouldn’t?”
“Don’t look straight at him,” she said, still with that tone of patient explanation that made him want to administer a boot-leather enema. “You have predator eyes.”
“I bet you say that to all the boys.”
“On the front of your head, dumbass. Binocular vision.”
He ratcheted his head around to look up at her over his shoulder. “What?”
“Binocular vision,” she repeated absently, gazing off toward where Kylassi was cutting Hawkwing out of the small cluster. “How predators see the world.”
He was a long way short of giving a shit about details of taxonomy. “Did you just call me dumbass?”
From this close, weather creases around her eyes said she was probably closer to forty than thirty. Probably. “Were you being a dumbass?”
“I—” Dammit. “Maybe I was.”
“Then why are you complaining?”
He shook his head in frank disbelief. “People have died for trash-talking me.”
“Not lately.”
He didn’t ask what made her so sure; he had an uneasy feeling she’d tell him.
“That man.” She lifted her chin toward Kylassi, still mounted, playing out rope on the lasso around Hawkwing’s neck while the two sweating grooms, on foot, tried to get a halter on her. “He is master of the horses you want. The man you would call the trainer.”
That was another thing he wasn’t going to ask how she knew. “He works for my daughter. Maybe you’ve heard of her. The Marchioness of Harrakha. Those are her horses you stole.”
“I don’t steal.”
“Oh, right. They ran away. Three weeks’ ride. To you.”
She was still gazing thoughtfully toward Kylassi. “Have you ever been whipped?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Imagine being enslaved. Imagine being whipped. Whipped for not doing what your masters want, but they won’t tell you what they want. They just keep beating you until you figure it out for yourself.”
He stared up at her. He had a really good view of the underside of her fine straight jaw and long, gracefully muscular neck, but he wasn’t seeing with his eyes.
He was seeing a gnarled old slave wrangler in the Khulan Horde, from twenty-odd years ago: the run-up to Last Stand at Ceraeno. Three hundred fifty pounds of ogrillo weathered to the color of a granite cliff, one puckered eye-socket filled with old scar, in the other a lazily malevolent eye the color of dog piss. He was seeing the black lead-loaded tails of the grill’s longcat draped over a fist the size of a human head.
He was hearing the half second of flat whooshh that was the only warning anyone got. He was feeling the loads in those leather straps smacking breath from his lungs. He was remembering a shot across his kidneys that’d had him pissing blood three days straight.
“Yeah, that’s kind of familiar.”
She nodded, still staring over at Hawkwing struggling against the noose, her whinnies scaling up from nervous toward black panic. Carillon had come out of the herd from somewhere; the big dapple-grey danced skittishly around Kylassi and the grooms. Even from here, he could see the whites around Carillon’s nut-brown eyes.
“So what would you do?” she said softly. “What would you do if it was your mother he whipped? Your child?”
He didn’t have to think about it. “Same as I did to the one who did it to me.”
—the look in the wrangler’s one good eye when his longcat tangled around an upraised arm that he’d thought had been securely shackled: a look smashed along with the eye by the impact of a pound of rock in the other less-than-securely-shackled hand—
She nodded again. “All right.”
He was never sure exactly how it happened; later, the best he could reconstruct was that a sudden twisting lunge from Hawkwing must have shoulder-slammed one of the grooms off his feet while the other had wisely cleared the hell away from her rump as she swung aroun
d, ducking; her duck put unexpected weight on the rope Kylassi had wrapped around his fist, which yanked him half out of the saddle while both her hind legs shot out and up in a rising donkey kick that took him on the point of the chin, while behind him Carillon had spun and leaped into the air in the biggest goddamn capriole in recorded goddamn history, and the stallion’s hooves had caught Kylassi at the base of the skull at the same instant the mare’s had hit his chin.
Kylassi’s head spun straight up into the air. The rest of him didn’t.
His gelding screamed and bolted with the stablemaster’s twitching corpse still in the saddle. A fan of blood from the stump of his neck broke into scarlet gemstones in the afternoon sun. The herd parted to let the panicked horse pass. Then it closed again.
The standing groom sat down. Hard. The other didn’t look inclined to get up.
Kylassi’s head hit the scrub and bounced.
The man looked at the severed head, and at the white-faced grooms. They were beginning to shake. Then he looked at the herd. Which now surrounded them, shoulder to shoulder.
Still and silent. Ten thousand horses. More.
Watching.
He looked up at the horse-witch. She looked down at him. He nodded down at Kylassi’s head without taking his eyes off her. “That was a friend of mine.”
“He wanted you to think so.”
“What’d he do that’s worth killing him for?”
She shrugged. “Ask the horses.”
“Oh, sure. Why didn’t I think of that? Oh, right, I remember. They’re fucking horses. They’ll tell me all about it.”
“Not if you don’t listen.”
He put his hands on his hips, a position from which his right could slip under the back of his tunic and draw the Automag in about the same amount of time it takes normal people to blink. “Sure. Fine. So if I listened, what would they tell me about what you just did to them?”
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