Caine's Law (9 page)

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Me neither.”

“Hari … what
happened
? Is she—?”

“A while ago.”

“But how …?”

Another shrug. “Instead of burning the world to save her, I burned her to save the world.”

“You sacrificed
Shanna
?”

“Not on purpose.”

“Hari, I’m so sorry—”

“Everybody’s fucking sorry.” His face twists and his eyes drift shut. “Yeah, um, look. Now
I’m
sorry. I thought I was a little more over it. It just—uh, it was kind of … vivid.”

“Ah …” Duncan says. “Ah, I think I understand.”

“Cut in half, pretty much.” Caine nods into the campfire. “With a sword a lot like that one there. A piece of her fell on me.”

“I’m sorry …” A whisper. “Hari, I’m so—”

“Yeah, thanks.” Their eyes meet across the flames. “At least I didn’t kill her myself.”

Duncan lowers his head. He hugs his knees to his chest and rests his forehead on them. “I think I’m done talking for a while.”

In time, morning gathers itself beyond their buffalo-hide canopy, the light colder, grey as the sky. The snow flees with the night, and Duncan can finally see where they are: on the lip of an escarpment, overlooking a panorama of raddled badland. Something about it—he can’t say what—is familiar, and that mysterious familiarity draws him to his feet.

Cautiously he wades out toward the brink, moving slowly, feeling his way, conscious that snow cover might make the verge deceptive. He now can see down the face, and below is a curious jumble, too regular to be scree, sloping gradually out toward the badland floor. Had there been people down there, or even a few chimneys releasing smoke, he would have thought it to be some sort of cliff city, like the Anasazi ruins …

“Oh,” he says. “Oh, of course.”

This too he somehow must have known already.

“Hari—I mean, Caine. This is it, isn’t it? The place. The vertical city in
Retreat from the Boedecken
.”

The voice comes from just behind his left shoulder. “Yeah, it’s the place.”

“So that’s what this is about.”

“No.”

“What you did here—”

“Is not what this is about.”

He turns. “This wasn’t the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

Caine’s right behind him, only fractionally on his own side. His eyes are cold as the sky. “Not even close.”

“Would you take it back, if you could?”

“This? Are you kidding?”

“Curious, more.”

“You never did have a sense of humor.”

“Still …”

“Sorry. Thought it was clear. The answer’s no.” Caine gives a head shake that’s half eye roll. “More like
fuck
no.”

“All those cubs. The infants. The juveniles.”

Caine walks back toward the campfire. “You think if you just keep asking, eventually you’ll get the answer you want?”

Duncan stiffens, stung. “An ungenerous sentiment.”

“It’s a lot more generous than
shut the fuck up
. Which is what it meant.”

“You’re angry.”

“I always was. Just not with you.”

“Are you angry with me now?”

“Just—” He lifts a
fucking stop it
hand without looking back. “Just don’t talk to me like you understand. Like you know how it is to have done what I’ve done. To have survived what I’ve survived. Like you can even imagine.”

“One of the things you survived was me.”

“No.” Caine wheels and slices the air between them with a near-invisible blur that is the edge of the hand he’d raised. “That’s what I mean. It wasn’t you.”

“Feels like it was me,” Duncan says softly. “Hurts like it was me.”

Caine’s eyes warm a little. His shoulders sag, and he nods. “Yeah, I guess I can see that. And I’m sorry. I’m not here to hurt you. Or to work out my leftover daddy issues. I forgave my real father years ago.”

“Is that why I’m here instead?” Duncan wades toward the canopy slowly through the snow. “A father younger than you are. Bigger and stronger than you are. I’m not sick. And—as you keep insisting—the father you forgave isn’t me.”

“That’s not what this is about.”

“Are you sure? Are you sure I’m not young and strong and healthy to assuage some unconscious reluctance to beat the shit out of me? We both know I deserve it.”

“I don’t even know what
deserve
means. I know what people think they mean when they say it. I’m just not sure how it applies to real life.”

Duncan spreads his hands. “This is real life?”

“Yeah, well, I’m not all that sure what
real
means either.”

He nods. “In the twentieth century, there was a subbranch of analytic philosophy devoted to parsing the structural linguo-psychology of truth claims—”

“This isn’t a fucking debate. Or a seminar. Jesus.” He shakes his head. “I’d forgotten how fucking aggravating you are.”

“You never knew in the first place. Isn’t that what you keep telling me? I’m not the Duncan you knew. You’re not the Hari I knew. You and I never met before last night.”

“Be whoever you want. Answer the fucking question.”

“But doesn’t my answer have a sensitive dependence on who I really am?”

“Fucking academics. Quit stalling.”

Duncan concedes the point with an apologetic nod. “So if I understand the question, the choice is either to leave the world—the universe, reality, whatever—as it is, in all its darkness and disrepair, or to make, ah, mmm … one thing … happen the way I wish it had happened.” He recovers control of his voice along with his professorial detachment. “Knowing in advance that any consequences, for good or ill or otherwise, are wholly inconceivable.”

“More or less.”

“It’s a Monkey’s Paw choice.”

“You say that like I might actually know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“A short story, three hundred years ago or so. English author, W. W. Jacobs. ‘The Monkey’s Paw.’ Three wishes—three chances to bend fate to your will, yet each brings only horrors. Changing destiny only makes it worse.”

“Sure. Except destiny is bullshit, and
worse
depends on who you ask.”

“I can see why you’d like to believe so.”

“And that matters exactly fucking how?”

Duncan finds himself conceding a point again. “Of course. It’s only that … I mean, I suppose …”

His voice trails away and he lowers himself to the pile of skins beside the campfire. Now he is cold. Weakness creeps along his limbs, and his left hand trembles, and he cannot speak with his eyes open, and so he closes them and gives himself back to darkness.

“I only want to know,” he says, very, very softly, “if it’s real. If it’s true. If I choose to … to take it back … will it happen?”

His closed eyes burn. Tears trail down his cheeks. “That’s all. All I want to know. All I need to know. If I decide to change it, will it change?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe? That’s … all? After all this? All you can give me is
maybe
?”

“Duncan … I thought I was being clear. I guess I wasn’t.” Caine’s voice is low, reluctantly apologetic. “It’s not the change whose consequences are unknowable. It’s the choice. One possible consequence of the choice is … might be … that your change can happen. That’s all I can give you. That’s all there is.”

“So you’re telling me my choice might destroy the universe … for
nothing
?”

“Not for nothing.”

“Ah, I see. Of course. Betrayed by my early training.” The tears roll
thicker now, though his voice is detached and distantly calm, like a kindly professor who continues to lecture through even his most fanciful daydreams. “This isn’t a fairy tale.”

“I wish it was.”

“Easier for you,” he murmurs. “You’ve never known a world without magick.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“It’s not important. And I don’t think I could make you understand.” He draws a deep, shuddering breath. “It really is just the choice. The thing-in-itself.”

“Yeah. Would you risk the universe to change one thing?”

“God help me …” The calm in Duncan’s voice chokes on his tears. “You can’t … I’m only a man. You can’t ask me to make this choice. Not if it really counts for something.”

“Except I do.”

“… gods …” He finds himself reduced to pleading with figments of other people’s imagination. “… have mercy …”

“No gods here, Duncan. Just you.”

He hangs his head. This is not a place for lies.

“Then yes.”

His truth is barely a whisper.

“Yes, I would. For even a chance. For the
hope
of a chance.”

“Okay. Thanks, Duncan. I appreciate your help. Sorry it had to be like this, but you’re the only guy in either universe I can trust to give me good advice.”

“What? Advice?” His eyes blink open. “Is that all this is?”

“No.”

Caine holds the sword in both hands. If it burns his hands with interstellar cold, he gives no sign.

“Hari …? Hari, what is this? What are you doing?”

“I told you.”

Caine lunges with casually brutal expertise. The blade spears through Duncan’s sternum and carves his heart in half, and as darkness falls upon his life, he hears only this:

“I don’t go by that name anymore.”

T
his time, they sit together on a bench in the Railhead, Thorncleft’s largest structure, and the headquarters of the Transdeian Heavy Rail Company.

“It’s because I’m going to make a deal with your god.”

“My god? Ma’elKoth?”

“No. The Black Knife god. Out in the Boedecken. I don’t think it has a name.”

“So? You say
going to
, hey? Then don’t.
Y no hay problema
.”

“It’s not that simple, big dog.”

Usually, the young ogrillo leans back into a pillar with one leg up and resting on the bench between them, his other foot on the bulging bundle of his pack on the floor. Usually, the man leans forward on his elbows, stares off through the smoky gloom half-lit by dim greenish globes of coal-gas lamps, and speaks in a low, flat voice that draws no attention from idle passersby or the patient fellow passengers who wait there for the Thorncleft Falcon, the express train that speeds to Ankhana and back twice a day.

Usually. Not always.

In the past, this conversation has occasionally taken place in a haze of
sleet below the Monastic Embassy in Lower Thorncleft. Several times it has happened among the vast stacks of creosote-soaked timbers waiting for transport to the Battleground Spur, still under construction. Once it was on a cliff-ledge at night, so dark the mountains around weren’t even shadows; it might have been nowhere at all, except for the sweet copper scent of freshly spilled blood.

“The deal isn’t the problem,” the man says. “It might be the solution.”

“So?”

“So it might blow up the fucking planet too. Or worse. Or nothing at all, or anything in between. I don’t know. I
can’t
know.”

“You talk too much about what you don’t know, little brother.”

“Everybody does.” A rasp of bitter chuckle. “The difference is I
know
I don’t know. Everybody else is blowing smoke out their assholes and they can’t even smell fire. See, the thing is, I shouldn’t be able to make a deal at all. Not with a god. Especially not with
that
god. But I will. I already have. Even though it hasn’t happened yet.”

“And that’s where you lose me every time.”

“Yeah, that’s where the mortal brain generally takes it in the butt. The Monasteries have some technical jargon and shit, but even having the right words doesn’t help all that much. Look, in the Breaking—the Horror, right?—there came a, kind of, a turning point. I don’t know what else to call it. Your guys had us all captured, and you were doing your usual shit, which was torturing people to death. An offering to your god, because the old Black Knives worshipped a demon that was Bound in the vertical city.
By
the vertical city.”