Caine's Law

Several parts of this story take place before the events depicted in Act of Atonement Book I,
Caine Black Knife
.

Other parts of this story take place after. Still other parts take place before and after both. Some parts may be imaginary, and some were real only temporarily, as they have subsequently unhappened.

A
nd in this My Dream, Beloved, you know Me.

Through your eyes I watch your blunt and broken hands scrabble upon the marble stair: spiders maimed and bleeding on frosted glass. The blood in your beard and hair carries a hint of the peat from the incendiary brew spewed from the ragged gape of your late friend Tyrkilld’s throat when you took his head. As you creep up through the mouth of encircling stairwell, out upon the final spiral span that leads upward to the Purificapex of the Eternal Vaunt of the Knights of Khryl, I wish again—as I always have and always will—that I might make you look to the side here. You don’t, you never have and never will. Still, in My dream, you cast wide your gaze over the limitless slaughter that is the work of Our Hand, and find it to be good.

The icy lash of sleet on your bare back. The reek of burning hair twisting up from the fires in Hell. Sawing of broken ribs in and out of your punctured lung. The blaze of the mines, the smoke and haze from the burning city, the storm of battle among the estates. Screams in the distance. Thousands in agony and terror. Tens of thousands to follow. Then millions. Perhaps billions, but We will never know; they will scream long after We have vanished into eternal nothing. After you take Us there, My demon of blessed grace.

My angel of the damned.

I dream this dream though I do not sleep. I have dreamed this dream
though I have no past, and will dream this dream though I have no future. This I dream forever.

I dream that you truly knew the bargain you offered. I dream you were willing, even happy, to pay the price of My Love. That you joyously offered up all you do as well as all done to you. As a gift. A wedding present.

A dowry.

All this is to be savored. It is well that We will share eternity.

When the stone stair gives way to the vast cap of platinum, when you find the summit of the Eternal Vaunt to be icebound under half a span of freeze, when another man would be defeated by unclimbable ice, by a punctured lung, a broken hand, and a compound fracture of the leg … you reach down for your last dagger—the one you had used to secure the tourniquet above your knee—and with your one half-working arm you chip handholds to pull yourself up.

And so, here at the end of days, you are as you have always been. Willing to die. Not willing to quit.

And this is the death for which you were chosen, Beloved. From this place you cannot flee, and there is no life for you beyond Our Consummation; not even I can save you now, should I somehow decide your life outweighs My death.

No, Beloved. Never. I have waited a thousand years for this—and each second of these My thousand years outlasts the age of the universe. Here it ends. Here you give your life to take Mine. Our own private suicide pact.

My infinite millennium forever ends with Our lovers’ leap.

I feel the lick of flame along your nerves, and I feel the shreds of discipline that no longer entirely lock this pain outside your consciousness. I feel the numb burn of frostbite settling into the toes on your good leg, and the fingers of your broken hand. I feel the seductive chill of the ice you climb, how it cools the fire in your nerves, and I feel your overpowering lust to let go, to lie flat and sleep, to fall forever …

But you won’t. You never do. You never have, and thus you never will.

And now you struggle to the platinum altar and try to rise, to go out on your feet. The effort gathers darkness in your eyes and you sag back down, helpless. Hopeless.