Caine's Law (11 page)

N
onexistence has no duration, and so it is that when Duncan Michaelson opens his eyes, no time has passed.

His son—the man who refuses to be his son—stands over him, silhouetted against a sky so featurelessly blue that it might have been a solid thing within the reach of his hand. Between him and the man who looks like his son stands the plain black blade with its simple crossguard and its salt-stained leather grip.

The blade and the guard and the grip belong to the sword his non-son had driven through his chest into the stone on which he lies, and still pins him there like an insect on a mounting board.

“Does it hurt?” His tone is perfunctory, but his gaze is not.

“Will it matter if it does?”

“It might.”

Duncan pauses to examine, with his customary precision, exactly how he feels. “I can feel my sternum scrape up and down the blade when I breathe. I’m pretty sure that should hurt.”

“Yeah.”

“Mostly, it’s cold. I recall from secondhanding your Adventures how cold a blade feels when you’re stabbed, but this isn’t like that. It’s like cold is what it’s made from.”

“ ‘Cold is what it’s made from.’ Huh. I guess that’s true enough.”

He lowers himself to the snow on Duncan’s other side. “Do you understand what’s happening? What this place is, and what you’re doing here?”

Duncan frowns up at the hilt of the black sword. He feels the beat of his riven heart against the metal. “Well, I’m pretty sure it’s not Kansas.”

“Can I just mention here how fucking tired I am of that joke?”

“Then you shouldn’t use it so often.” Duncan shrugs. “Some sort of shamanic dream quest or journey, I suppose. Except I can’t actually journey until somebody pulls the sword out of my chest.”

“That’s the idea.”

“What is this sword?”

“It’s a metaphor.”

“I gathered that. A metaphor for what?”

“Another sword.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Hey, it’s not like I just make this shit up. It is what it is. Just like everything else.”

“This other sword,” Duncan says patiently. “Is it a metaphor too?”

“Since you ask, yeah.”

“For what?”

Caine says, “Me.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I know.”

“No, I mean—there’s a sword that’s a
metaphor
for you?”

“Sometimes it’s the other way around.”

“You do understand what language is used for, don’t you?”

“You’d be amazed what I understand.”

“See? You’re doing it again. You use words, but assign no content specific enough to be meaningful. How many times do I have to tell you this? What are words once abstracted from their meaning?”

Caine shrugs. “Music.”

Duncan opens his mouth for a biting reply, then closes it again. “You’ve been saving that one.”

“Like you said, you’ve had this conversation before. So have I.” He draws his knees to his chest and wraps his arms around them. “My father told me once that a powerful-enough metaphor grows its own truth.”

Duncan nods. “I remember. You asked about the blind god, after you were arrested by the Social Police. Right before they arrested me.”

“After the arrest—well, let’s just say a lot of shit happened. More than I can tell you about. What happened showed me a lot of the blind god, and it showed me more of me, and for a while I thought I had shit pretty well
worked out. Who I was, how the universe worked. What it all meant, sort of. Not just me. Shanna. Faith.”

“How is Faith? Is she well? Did you ever pry her loose from Avery Shanks?”

“You know about Faith and Shanks?”

“It was all over the nets the day you were arrested. Is she all right?”

“Mostly. Shanna’s death hit her pretty hard, and what happened after hit her harder. But there’s a lot of her mother in her. Nobody ever really understood how strong Shanna was. Not even me.”

“And Tan’elKoth? A fine mind, and a formidable rhetorical opponent. Is he still at the Curioseum?”

“He’s dead.”

A dully freezing shock ripples through him, slow and low like a splash in a puddle of slush. Shanna and Tan’elKoth both? He tries to imagine how much that must have hurt him—but then he registers the hard flat grin Caine had turned out toward the brink of the escarpment, and a darker and colder shock breaks over him.

“It was you,” he says slowly. “You killed him.”

“That metaphorical sword we were talking about? I cut him in half, then jammed it through his face.”

“Hari, I’m so—”

Caine turned a blackly glittering stare on him that freezes the word in his throat. “
Hari
’s dead too. He died after Shanna. Before Tan’elKoth. And before you ask, yeah. I killed him too.”

“Yes. Caine, then. I understand.”

“You don’t.”

Duncan lifts a hand to touch the blade that stands from his chest. It’s not even sharp. “You killed Tan’elKoth with this, didn’t you?”

“Metaphorically.”

“You said Shanna was—”

“Yeah. Same blade. The same blade Berne used to cripple me.”

“Kosall?”

“Kosall was the literal blade, yeah. But that’s just a detail. The one that counts is the metaphor.”

“Which is you.”

“That’s right. Listen, things are about to get weird around here.”

“Says the man who put a few pounds of steel through my heart and then sat down for a friendly chat.”

“Yeah, okay. Weirder. Look, do you remember meeting me before? Not Hari, or even Caine. Me. This age. These scars. Forty-some-odd years ago.”

Duncan frowns. “Not that I recall. Can you give me a specific context?”

“It was the day Mom died.”

This hurts far worse than the sword could have, even were it not a metaphor at all. Hurts worse than anything he can remember feeling. He closes his eyes. “No. I—don’t remember very much of that day.”

“Okay. Here’s the thing:
I
remember meeting me. In the Labor clinic. Some old guy sat down to chat with me—and that old guy was who I am now. Or looked like me, anyway. And my father almost got in a fistfight with him.”

“A fistfight? With
Caine
?”

“It wasn’t his best day.”

“I hate to think what would have become of you if you’d lost us both that day.”

“It could still happen.”

Duncan goes quiet.

“That’s what I mean about shit getting weird. People are going to start showing up here. Some of them might look like people you know, same as how I look like your son. These people will not be who you think they are. Some of them are not friendly. No matter what any of them say or do, don’t let anybody pull that sword, all right?”

“How do I stop them?”

“Say no.”

“No? Just no?”

“Here, yeah. It’s the magick word.”

“I thought that was
please
.”

“That’s the
magic
word. The point is, that sword won’t come out until you decide it can go. And you have to decide who draws it.”

“Excalibur in the stone …”

“Something like it. Excalibur is another metaphor for the Sword.”

“You say that with a capital
S
.”

“Yeah. And Durendal. And the Black Metal Sword. Sauvagine. Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi. Dyrnwyn. Stormbringer. I could go on. It’s a long fucking list.”

“Then I’m flattered to be stabbed with it.”

“It’s not a fucking
joke
, Duncan. What is done by the Sword is
absolute
. Get it? God Himself can’t change the slightest fucking detail.”

The names of legend have awakened Duncan’s inner anthropologist. “Is the converse true? That is, as long as the Sword stays where it is, things
can
be changed?”

“Some.” Caine hangs his head as if his sigh is a weighted chain around his neck. “It’s complicated.”

“Okay.”

“Look, you need to understand what’s at stake here.”

“End
of the world
isn’t specific enough?”

“The world ended a long time ago. What we’re doing here is figuring out what comes after. Forever after, or near as fucking dammit.”

“It must be a long story.”

“Not so much. It’s just that it doesn’t always make sense. Or at least, not the kind of sense we’re used to.”

“You said
Causes don’t have effects unless they never happened
.”

“Yeah. I can show you some things. Mostly stuff that involves guys who look like me. You need to understand that they’re
not
me. Not yet. And they’re not your son either. Some of them might be one or the other of us after the Sword is drawn, okay? But there’s no way to know in advance.”

“Huh.” Duncan laces his fingers behind his head and turns his gaze to the limitless blue above. “Turns out to be a lot like one of my
fucking culture hero stories
after all.”

“Maybe. Close your eyes.”

And he does, and—