Caine's Law (15 page)

“It’s that bad?”

“Let me show you something.” He reached toward Raithe with his left. “Give me your hand.”

Raithe lifted his right. The other man shook his head. “Not that hand.”

Raithe hesitated. “The bindings are soaked nearly through,” he said, raising his bandaged fist to illustrate. A stain near the cup of his palm darkened as it spread. “It is why this embassy has an open tun of water in every room. Even a pinprick can ignite a fire in your flesh that will burn until the oil is burned away, and flesh with it. It can burn through your bones.”

“Maybe. What happened the last time I touched that oil?”

“I—I mean …” He frowned. The chaos of slaughter, agony, and terror that was now called the True Assumption of Ma’elKoth had branded itself indelibly into Raithe’s memory; this morning he would have sworn an oath that he recalled it in every detail, but now uncertainty muddied his recollection. His powers of mind allowed him to see previous events as clearly as he might see across this room …

Usually.

“I don’t know,” he said at length. “I don’t remember that you ever did … but I’m not certain. You bear no scars from it.”

“Let’s not start about my scars. Where do you keep fresh dressings?”

Raithe pulled a large roll from a drawer in the writing table. “Yet still I—”

“Watch.”

He took Raithe’s bandaged left hand in both of his own, and gently squeezed it between them until the black oil soaked through to the surface. The bandage ignited with a whisperlike
whumpf
, and burned with the crackle of a pine-pitch torch.

He stepped back and spread his hands. They were coated with the oil, so thickly that he had to cup his palms to keep it from dripping and setting the rug on fire … but from his flesh rose not so much as a wisp of smoke. “How about this?”

Raithe stared in awe, the flames licking upward from his left hand forgotten. “That’s impossible.”

“You’ll probably want to douse that hand.”

Raithe did so in the water tun beside the table, soaked the rolled dressing in the water, and began to wrap it around his fist. “That oil burns
everything
 …”

“Except you.”

Raithe looked exasperated. “I’m different. You know I’m different, and you know why.”

“That’s kind of my point. What I want to find out is why
I’m
different.”

Raithe picked at the white fringes of his dressing, adjusting how it lay even as he continued to wrap. “How did you know it wouldn’t burn you?”

“I didn’t. But it was a pretty good bet. Remember Kosall?”

Skin stretched tight around Raithe’s winter eyes. “Vividly.”

“You were there when I picked it up. When I pulled it out of the floor of the Pit. Remember?”

Raithe’s eyes narrowed, and his lips drew thin. “Actually, no.”

The other nodded, his face set and grim. “Me neither.”

“How is that possible?”

“Here’s another: who wiped the oil off the hilt? You?”

“No. No, that I would remember.”

“Yeah, I would too. But I don’t. Kosall’s hilt was wrapped in leather. You’d been using it in your left. The leather must have been soaked. Remember how it burned my hand when I picked it up?”

“No.”

“Because it didn’t.”

Raithe found himself blinking through his frown. Over and over again. “Why not?”

“Exactly. Why not
exactly
.”

Raithe could only sit and stare, though what he saw had nothing to do with the scene before him.

“I figure nobody wiped the hilt. I figure most likely, I just grabbed the fucking thing, and the oil … went away. And everybody forgot it was ever there or something.”

“Or something …” Raithe echoed faintly. “You’re talking about Intervention. A miracle.”

“I’m just getting started.”

“It’s a pity we can’t examine the blade itself. If you and Ma’elKoth hadn’t destroyed it—”

“Shit would be worse.”

“Worse than this?”

“Believe it.” He made a fist with his right hand, and the logs stacked in the study’s limestone fireplace against the chill of morning now exploded into a blaze of white unnatural flame.

Raithe lifted an arm to shield his face against the instant blast of heat—and found that his left hand burned with an identically fierce white fire within a cloud of sudden steam. He spat an expletive he had not used since his boyhood on the fringes of the Warrens. “Caine—Hari—Fist, whatever you are called. Make it stop!”

“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.”

I
n 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.