Caine's Law (19 page)

H
e trotted after the horse-witch.

She was up on the bay now, sitting his big bounding trot like the horse was actually just her legs. He leaned forward and picked up speed. He ran without effort, and found himself wearing a fierce grin at how good it still felt when his legs did what they were told. The bay must have heard him coming; its trot lengthened until his
without effort
dried up and blew away. “Will you for fuck’s sake please just
stop
?”

They did.

He caught up with them, puffing. “Finally. What changed your mind?”

“Nothing.”

“Then—?”

“A girl likes to be asked, dumbass.” She had her doe eye on him, and her unexpectedly gentle, good-natured smile made something in his chest lurch sideways.

“Yeah, all right,” he said, shaking his head, looking away to stop himself from smiling back at her. “I should probably take notes.”

“You’re very rough,” she said. “With you, everything’s harsh. Jagged. You’re always pushing. Shouting. Bullying. That’s a bad way to come at a horse.”

Or a woman, apparently. This one, anyway.

“Sorry,” he said, surprised to discover that he actually was. “I’ve been living a life where manners don’t count.”

“That’s sad for you.”

“Sad doesn’t count either.”

She seemed to consider this for a moment. “I’m sad for you anyway.”

“Don’t be.” People getting sad for him might lead him to getting sad for himself, which could be fatal in a multiplicity of ways. “Don’t worry about me.”

“You’re ordering me to not be sad?”

“Lady, seriously, you have bigger problems than my shitty life.”

“How do you know?”

“Will you stop that?” He lifted a hand. “Please. Don’t answer. Listen.”

Her gaze was patient as the bluffs behind her.

“That guy with the bow, he’s not the only swinging dick out here to kill you today. There’s more. A lot more. And compared to the guy running the outfit, I’m about as dangerous as a bag of puppies. The herd is what they want. They think killing you will get it for them.”

“They’ll be disappointed.”

“Yeah, and it’d be nice if somebody could explain that to them
before
you die.”

She nodded thoughtful agreement. “That would be nice.”

“They don’t want to come after you when you’re with the herd, but if that’s the only way to get you, they’ll do it. Then horses will get hurt too. Killed.”

“Very likely.”

“You don’t look too worried about it.”

“That’s not what I do.”

“What, you don’t worry about the horses? And you don’t protect them or rule them, and really what the fuck
do
you do?”

She gave him both eyes. “Forgiveness—”

“And permission, yeah yeah, whatever. Forgiveness, permission, and the occasional hoof trim.”

She smiled down at him, and spoke clearly, companionably, without the slightest trace of condescension. “Sometimes a horse has a problem I can help with—a sore foot, a cut, cactus needles. Other things. Many things are done best by someone with thumbs. Sometimes I have a problem a horse can help me with—when I must travel swiftly, or far, or need someone to watch over me when I sleep. Many things are done best by someone with hooves. They don’t do this because I’m the horse-witch, and being the horse-witch isn’t why I do this. These things are what friends do for friends.”

“Hey, wait.” He frowned. That had actually made sense. “What happened? This is suddenly almost a real conversation.”

“You’re starting to understand what I am.”

“I said
almost
.” He waved a hand. “I’d like to understand you. I would. I was wrong before, when I said I didn’t give a shit. But trying seems like a waste of time, when you’ll be dead by sundown.”

The crinkles around her eyes bespoke only impenetrable serenity and a reserved, patient compassion. “I’m never dead.”

“What happened to
I get killed all the time
?”

“Being killed isn’t the same as being dead.”

“For most people, one follows kind of hard on the heels of the other.”

A dismissive shrug. “People.”

He knew this would piss him off, but somehow he couldn’t help himself. “You’re not people?”

“I’m the horse-witch.”

“The horse-witch isn’t a person?”

“The horse-witch,” she said, “is me.”

He opened his mouth to retort, then changed his mind and just lowered himself onto the rocks and sat, resting his forehead on the palm of his hand. “Never mind. I was having this dream, I guess, where I was talking with this nice-looking woman on a horse and actually
getting
somewhere. Shit was starting to make sense.”

“You’re getting farther than you think,” she said. “I like you now.”

“Excuse me?”

“I like you,” she repeated. “When you’re quiet. You get sane. You care. Even about me, though you don’t know me. I wanted to like you from the instant I saw you. But you’re difficult to like.”

“So I hear.”

“I hope I can keep on liking you, because I want you to like me. When I look at you, I think about sex.”

He coughed, caught his breath, and coughed again. “I’m sorry?”

“You are a conspicuously beautiful man, and you’re very fit, and strong, and competent in unexpected ways. You expect women to be attracted to you, and I am. When I look at you, I think about sex. With you. Sex with you will be very, very good.”

He coughed again, but it didn’t help. “Little old for you, aren’t I?”

“Old?”

She laughed, and in her laugh was the creak of calving glaciers, the grind of rock along subterranean faults, the hush of surf and the soft, wet layers of decay that become the rich dark earth thundering under a billion
years of hooves and feet and claws of creatures so ancient that all trace of them was gone from the world …

But not from her.

In her they still lived and ran and fought and fucked and called to her to come play with them in their vanished eternity.

He said, “Ah … ah, shit, come on, don’t …”

She fixed him with her ice eye, and something in the back of his life broke open and left all of him naked to the winds of forever. They curled and twisted and raked his existence with whispers of razor-edged ice.

“Stop it. Stop it,
please
.” He covered his eyes with his hands but it didn’t seem to help. “Don’t
do
that.”

“Years mean nothing.” Her voice was warm and human again, and when he saw the invitation dancing playfully in her eyes, warm and cold together, something inside his chest lurched again. One more time might break it altogether. “We’re on horse-time.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Sometimes eating an apple can last all day.”

“So that’s, like, a metaphor for sex?”

“Do you want it to be?”

“Uh … Shit. All right, I get it. Maybe. So I, ah, I mean—doesn’t sex usually come up after we’re, like, actually introduced?”

“I know you. You’re getting to know me.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

“What name?”

That one he wasn’t even going to try to answer.

“I’ve been told I’m skilled,” she said. “At sex.”

“Uh, okay.”

“Uniquely skilled.”

“I can’t even imagine.”

“That’s true.” Her smile broadened. “It’ll change your life. For the better. That’s only an opinion, but it’s informed. Well informed.”

“Listen, uh—” He rubbed his eyes. He’d had some kind of lie ready, he was sure he had, but now he couldn’t even guess what it might have been. He sighed. “When I look at you, sex is not what I think about. When I look at you, I don’t really think at all. I sort of can’t.”

“Thank you.”

“I didn’t mean it as a—” He stopped himself, because he realized he
had
meant it as a compliment, and she knew it, and trying to deny it would just make him feel even stupider. “I like you. I do. But I’m not a, y’know,
a casual sex guy. Besides, I’m kind of in the middle of something right now, okay? My life is a complicated place.”

“You misunderstand what’s happening here.”

“You’re not making a pass at me?”

“In your world, people say things to test, persuade, seduce, manipulate, deceive, or dominate others. But this is my world. I say things because I think they’re true, and because I want you to know them. I want you to know that I like you, and that if I still like you when you decide you want to have sex with me, we’ll be happy. Both of us. For a long time.”

“And if I, like, decide to have sex with you sometime when you don’t like me?”

“Then one of us will die.”

“Um …”

“I can’t be forced. Into sex, or anything else.”

“Not that you need to worry—”

“I don’t.”

“But really? You can’t be forced? Like in general?”

“Submission is not what I do.” She gave him the winter eye. “People who try get hurt. Many die.”

“But you don’t.”

“Sometimes. But I’m never dead, so I don’t really mind.”

“Just so you know? If you get killed today, forget about the sex. No matter what people say about me, I’m not into cold.”

Her brows drew together just enough to hint that a line could someday develop there. “All right,” she said. “Usually it’s less trouble to let them kill me. But you might be worth it.”

“Flatterer.”

“I said
might
.”

He smiled at her. She smiled back. The whatever-it-was inside his chest lurched sideways one more time, and this time it cracked, and he knew this was going to end in tears.

Being old enough to know better but still too young to resist mostly sucks.

He shook it off. “First, we need to find these fuckers. Orbek’s a pretty good scout—”

“They’re over there,” she said, waving vaguely eastward. “Three dry washes come together. Lots of rocks.”

She saw the inquiring look on his face, and shrugged. “The herd knows. Orbek is the ogrillo?”

“Yeah.”

“Then he’s already found them.”

For the span of a breath or two, the wind shifted east. When it did, Jonathan Fist heard an irregular scatter of distant coughs, and saw flares of power swell upward from behind the hills that made an open question of who found whom, and without a word he lurched into a sprint. As he took his first steps, three blasts erupted over there, painting the sky with fire and shattered rock, and then the whole mouth of the ravine blasted into a living wave as the witch-herd boiled out and galloped for the open savannah.

He ran hard.

Those bluffs were barely over half a mile away; some tinkering in his blood chemistry with Monastic Control Disciplines would get him there flat-out. He’d be winded, but he’d be there, and he wouldn’t have to catch his breath to pull a trigger.

Thunder rolled behind him, and when he remembered there hadn’t been so much as a cloud in the sky for three days, he looked over his shoulder. The thunder was the big bay that carried the horse-witch, coming on at a gallop.

She extended a hand toward him and he had just long enough to get a really vivid picture of the bay, the horse-witch, and him hitting the scrub in a full speed face-plant, because she didn’t have a saddle or a bridle or even fucking
stirrups
or any of the shit that makes this kind of bullshit maneuver possible, but she caught his hand and threw herself the opposite way over the bay’s withers just enough to keep the horse and herself perfectly balanced as she swung him up behind her and he caught her round her slim hard waist and hugged her exactly as tight as he would have if he hadn’t been thinking about having sex with her.

She nodded to him over her shoulder, and raised her voice to be heard over the wind and the bass-drum pounding of the bay.
“What friends do for friends …”

He answered her nod with one of his own, and hung on.

Tight.

Apparently the herd had a good fix on the location of everyone in the area. The horse-witch brought the bay to a halt on a sunlit slope, just below the rocks that would force them to proceed on foot, and Jonathan Fist hadn’t seen so much as a wisp of the raiders. “This way.”

She led him on a winding course over the shoulder of that hill and up the southern slope of one that was taller, and rockier, and Jonathan Fist
heard the sharp clatter of the SPAR-12 on autoburst. “Orbek!” he shouted. “
Orbek
, goddamn you sorry fucking excuse for a broke-down assbitch, what do you think you’re
doing
?”

There came a brief interval of silence as the echoes died away.

“Um … hey there, little brother. Um, sorry.”

“What part of
stay out of sight
do you not fucking understand?” Jonathan Fist strode up through the tumbled boulders. The young ogrillo lay prone in a natural barricade of jagged rock, still with his eye to the scope as he aimed downhill. “Put the goddamn rifle down.”

“One second, little brother.”
Crack
and somebody down there yelped. “Fucker.”

“Orbek.”

“Time to shift anyway.” Orbek snaked backward from the firing point and rolled into a sitting position, rifle across his knees. “Hey.”

“Fucking right hey, goddammit.”

His grey-leather cheeks darkened. He looked down.

“They sneak me while I’m watching you, coming up downwind. Shifty breeze, though, good for me. If the breeze don’t shift, I never know they’re there. Can have take me with a knife. How’s that for suck? Who wants to die embarrassed? But instead I nose ’em and shuck off for high ground, and one comes out and says
We got thirty guys down here! What you got up there?
and since he asks so nice …” He shrugged. “I show him.”

Jonathan Fist rubbed his eyes. “How many dead?”

“None. I’m an amateur now?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

“Winged some. What you humans call, you know, kneecapped? Three, maybe four, before they work their Shield. And then this fucker just now.”