Caine's Law (51 page)

“Blanks. Ever do armoring? Like knife blanks, except they’re fetch blanks.”

“I get it—Black Knife blanks.”

“Yeah, funny. Put your weapon down, goddammit. Want to live through this?” He put Benson’s pistol on the floor and started pulling knives to lay beside it. “You used the pistol and grenades on the Social Police, so it knows what those are, if it didn’t already. Any spells you’ve used on the Battleground, ever—those have to go too.”

“You are batshit insane.”

“So?”

“So I’ve always admired that about you.” He knelt to disarm. Along with his pistol and three knives, he laid out a handful of differently shaped and colored crystals, several tiny metal figurines of unlikely-looking creatures, and three coin-size disks of dark wood inlaid with delicate traceries of gold.

“That’s everything?”

Tucker shrugged. “Everything you’ll find without a body-cavity search.”

“I’m sure you’ve still got enough shit stashed to perpetrate ten or twelve different flavors of stupid. Don’t. I mean it. Play anything but straight low and you will not walk out of here.”

“Ain’t I always been the brains of this team, pappy?”

“I told you cut it out.” He stepped forward to the front rank of the half-cooked Smoke Hunters. He touched one on the chest and said, “All right, I’m ready. Let’s do this.”

The fetch blanks pressed themselves back from him, parting enough to give him space to walk. Tucker said, “Um … you kind of said that like you know what’s happening.”

“Come on.”

The blanks pushed themselves against the walls as they passed, then filled in the corridor behind them.

He shrugged. “I still don’t have it all. But every step we take sharpens the focus.”

“That doesn’t tell me as much as you seem to think it does.”

“It’s not deep. Look, I don’t know how much t’Passe told you about my situation here, and I don’t have time to explain. I have detailed intelligence about this place on this day, but it’s not reliable. At all. For reasons I can’t really go into right now either. I have an idea of what’s happening, but it’s provisional. More than provisional. Probabilistic. Shit, if they taught quantum mechanics in abbey school, it’d be easier to
explain. It’s close enough to say that nothing here is entirely real until I see it.”

“You’re talking about time-binding.”

He shot Tucker a sharp look. Tucker spread his hands. “After our last conversation, I was debriefed by the Thorncleft Inquisitor.”

“Figures.”

“He said you parted on friendly terms.”

“More so than most. So look: cutting What Might Be down into What Actually Is works kind of like analytic elimination. That you were t’Passe’s inside guy cut off a whole universe of possible. The Earth Normal vault was powered by the black oil; that carved away more. Social Police at the door to the gate told me a lot—and having more soapies inside than outside, and the inside having fucking defensive hardpoints, told me more. Then Soapy bleeds the blind god’s oil. Then Smoke Hunt fetch-blanks come from the gate. Then the blanks don’t attack. They wait.”

“Like they were expecting us.” Tucker’s eyelids fluttered. He nodded to himself, resigned. Suddenly tired. “Not us. You.”

“I told you to go.”

“I swear to you on any kind of sacred whateverthefuck you favor: if I live through this I will absolutely start taking your advice.”

“That’ll look nice on your headstone.” He sighed. “There’s one other thing you should probably know. When I was telling you about the big nasty monster that scared the fuck out of the Social Police? Some of that was less than entirely true. It was mostly to convince you to fuck off and live homicidally ever after somewhere else.”

“What, they weren’t scared? There’s no monster?”

“Oh, they were scared. There is a real monster. That’s all true.”

“So what’s the lie?”

He shrugged apologetically. “I said it wasn’t happy to see me.”

The corridor opened into a huge ovoid chamber. It was full of ogrilloi.

“Rint diz Ekt Perrog’k, Nazutakkaarik.”

“Oh, crap. Hi.” Caine waved. “And, y’know, fuck yourself.”

This could have been going better already.

“ ‘Welcome to our place, Skinwalker’? Seriously?” Tucker murmured. “You two know each other?”

“Shut up.”

The ceiling was a huge dome, deep enough to echo a raised voice. The floor was polished until it gleamed like travertine in the rain. The topmost
level, where they stood, was at least fifteen yards deep; in the center of the cavern, the polished stone descended in shrinking steplike rings nine or ten feet wide and a couple feet high, ten levels down to a central disk like the bull’s-eye on a target. The bull’s-eye looked to be twenty-some-odd feet across, some kind of crystal, glowing with a soft yellow light of its own. The ceiling was a mirror of the floor. The walls were polished like the floor and ceiling, and were engraved with elegantly artistic renderings of ogrillo petroglyph clan-sign.

“Look at this fucking place …” Tucker breathed.

“Yeah, they’ve remodeled since the last time I was here.”

“You were here?”

“Long time ago.”

The uppermost floor was packed with the fetch blanks. He couldn’t guess how many. Two other archways spread wide as the avenue down which they’d come, and there was nowhere not full of half-made grills.

Two steps above the bull’s-eye stood fifty or sixty ogrillo bucks, clearly real, warts and all, scowling like they knew who he was. Across the dome from where he stood rose a stepped pyramid that appeared to have been carved out of the wall. Ten steps up. Every other step had been fashioned into seats. Below the apex sat three bitches. Two steps down sat nine more. Then what was probably twenty-seven, because the threefold thing seemed to be the order of the day, which wasn’t good news.

Asshole estimation: over three hundred and fifty bitches. The entire Black Knife priesthood, give or take. In their holiest sanctum. Instead of being out to watch Khryl’s Justice.

Sometimes shit just is what it is. Sometimes you do what you do, and let the rest go.

He walked toward the first ring. “Come on. Act like you know what you’re doing.”

“You look worried.”

He nodded toward the pyramid. “She’s not who I was hoping to find.”

“The top bitch? Who were you expecting?”

“Anybody else.”

He jumped down. Tucker dropped in right beside him. “If she’s a problem for us, I can drop her from here. Nobody’ll know. Looks like a heart attack.”

He kept moving. “Make a move on her and I’ll kill you myself.”

Tucker kept up. “What’s she to you?”

“My sister-in-law.”

“You are pulling my dick.”

“Do not harm her. Don’t even think it too loud.” He jumped down another level. “You think coming at me sucked? Wait till I come at you.”

“But—I mean, your s
ister-in-law
is the head of the fucking
Smoke Hunt?
You
have
to be pulling my dick.” Tucker sounded distinctly offended. “Is there anything about you the Monasteries actually has right? One fucking thing?”

“Sure. Lots.” He jumped down to the next lower ring. “Probably.”

He came to the step above the one the bucks stood on. Christ, these bucks were big—he stood two feet up, and the grill in front of him still came up to his nose—and they didn’t seem inclined to get out of his way. He looked up at the apex of the pyramid.

She scowled down at him for a second or two, then snapped an abrupt bark. The bucks parted to let him and Tucker pass.

He jumped down into the bull’s-eye and looked back. Tucker had stopped one ring up.

“You coming?”

“I’m good here, thanks.”

The bull’s-eye was smooth as glass. Hairs on his arms and the back of his neck lifted and crackled with blue sparks. “All right, goddammit, a hint, huh?” he muttered under his breath. “You didn’t Call me here to enjoy my fucking company.”

Kaiggez barked something in Etk Dag. He ignored her. “Tucker, make yourself useful,” he said, low. “There’s a Triple Aspect here. Somewhere.”

“A
Triple
?”

“Yeah, we hit the trifecta. Outside/Ideational/Natural. Find it.”

“Names might help.”

He took a deep breath. “The Natural Power doesn’t have a name. Call it the Blind God. The other two are Pirichanthe and Khryl.”

“Khryl, sure, the Fist and all. Who’s the other again?”

“Pirichanthe.”

“Somehow I’m not understanding you.”

Kaiggez barked again. He didn’t even look up. “You read my History of the Breaking of the Black Knives. The Outside Power that was Bound in the vertical city—the entity that maintains the
dil T’llan
. It’s
Pirichanthe
.”

“Sorry.” Tucker looked baffled. “I still can’t figure out what you’re trying to tell me.”

“Yeah.” Of course. That would have been too easy. “Listen, it’s the Smoke God, all right? The Power that animates the Smoke Hunt.”

“Whyn’t you say so? This Smoke whatever of yours—don’t you know its name?”

“Never mind.”

Kaiggez was leaning forward on her throne, and her barking had gone thick with anger.

Finally he looked up at her. “You know I don’t speak that shit.”

“Paggallo?”
she said.
“Paggannik ymik, paggtakkuni,”
which he was pretty sure would be Etk Dag for
Say what? See what you say in a minute, cockroach
.

More or less.

“Kaiggez. We can stand here while everybody listens to you yammer and watches me get bored, or you can grow the fuck up and speak Westerling.”

“Grow up?” She sounded even more icily contemptuous when she spoke Westerling. “What does Skinwalker know of
grow up
except to burn cubs so they never do?”

“Huh.” He caught the accent. “You’re Ankhanan.”

She lurched to her feet. “I am
Black Knife
!”

“Sure, okay. Whatever. Where’s the Hand?”

She showed him a grin full of tusks and made a fist. “Here? Only
my
hand.”

“The longer this takes, the less you’ll like it.”

“I shove you through
taggannik
once already. I can shove you again.”

“What, the gate? I don’t think so.”

She raised her fist and her eyes flashed the same sunlight yellow of the bull’s-eye. The crystal’s glow became radiance that flared to blinding in a single eyeblink. It entirely erased the chamber and the bucks and the bitches and even his own body … but there was something he saw when he was blind to everything else. Below his feet, half-buried in the impossible brilliance, hung a shadow.

A human-shaped shadow.

“Huh,” he said under his breath. “Well, all right, then.”

The radiance faded as suddenly as it had arisen. Everybody looked kind of surprised that he was still there.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “You’re not in charge here anymore. Black Knives, Butt Sporks, whatever. You’re done. Pack up your bitches and get the fuck out. Take the females too.”

Kaiggez was still on her feet and still had her fist clenched. She growled, “What voice do you have here to say what I am? What voice do you have here to even speak?”

“It’s not a debate. It’s an order.”

“
You?
Order
me
?”

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

“You still have tongue to speak only from respect for my buck. You breathe only from respect for his love for you.”

“Well, there’s a coincidence.”

“How do you get out from True Hell where I put you, little bitch?”

“You’re gonna have to get used to shit not depending on what you do or don’t do.”

“What I do? I speak with Voice of God Itself. One
word
from me crushes light from your eye forever.”

“Yeah, big talk. You want to do this with me?” He opened his arms as though offering a hug. “Make a move.”

This got a dangerous rumble out of the bucks, right up until Kaiggez made her move, which cut off the rumble like a punch in the throat. She leaned forward and peeled back her lips around her long and impressively sharp tusks, and her yellow eyes burned with furious triumph.

She raised her fist. Around her upraised fist gathered power that was visible mainly in how it made everything else less real.

He’d seen that power before, the ball of Reality: the power that had allowed Crowmane to bend time and space like a fever nightmare. He had felt it on the Purificapex, when the Living Fist of Khryl laid her hand upon the Sword of Man.

He had felt it at the west end of God’s Way in Ankhana, as he watched the Incarnate Ma’elKoth descend from the heavens.

Tucker was edging back. “This is you not being stupid?”

“Shut up.”

He lifted his fist and extended his middle finger up toward her, then waggled his fist to make sure she got a good look. “To avoid any, y’know, cross-cultural misunderstanding: this gesture—the one I’m making at you right now—this gesture has a meaning, where I come from, that translates roughly as
Try me and I will fuck your asshole with my fighting claw
.”

“God can hurt you and leave you alive,” Kaiggez growled. “My first word can make you
beg
for death—”

“Your entire fucking vocabulary can’t mess up my hair.”

Tucker said from the side of his mouth, “You sure about that?”

He replied the same way. “We’re about to find out.”

“When I apologize to Orbek later, he forgives because he knows you. Knows how you can be hornets in God’s own Cunt.”

“Okay.”

“How do we hurt you, little bitch? Do we make you ancient so your bones snap like reeds? Do we make you rot so we hear you scream as your parts fall off?”

“Look, is this gonna happen or not? I’ve got shit to do.”

“Then it happens,” she snarled, and snapped her fist toward him.
“Burn.”

“Oh, that’s original.” He didn’t burn. He didn’t even move, except to raise his left hand.

On that upraised left hand coalesced a shimmering nonsphere of Reality. By the time it assembled itself, it was the only Reality in the chamber. Her fist was now only the flesh and bone it had always been.

“See, here’s another thing,” he said. “I know your god, and your god knows me. And it likes me better than you.”