Caine's Law (47 page)

“What Khryl was, and what he is thought to have been, are not the same,” the Ravenlock says. “The political ambitions of the Lipkan Empire required a Lord of Battle, to be the obedient son and handboy of Dal’kannith Wargod, and so thus He has been worshipped, and so thus He has become. In life, Khryl hated Dal’kannith with a loathing that beggars my powers of description; war was the opposite of everything Khryl valued. The opposite of everything he stood for.”

Angvasse looks like her whole life just collapsed around her ears. “But—if Khryl was no Lord of Battle and never hoped to be … what
was
He?”

“He was a hero, child,” the Ravenlock says gently. Almost regretfully. “Very like yourself.”

“Like …” Her eyes are wide and they start to glisten with tears. “I? A hero … like
Khryl
? I am only a mortal woman—”

“At the end, he too was only a mortal man. He surrendered deity when he began what men now call the Deomachy.”

I sit forward. “
Khryl
began the Deomachy? That’s not how we learn it in the Monasteries.”

“Because thus was his will,” the Ravenlock says. “He surrendered his name with his immortality, as did his twin.”

“Twin …?
Wait
a second—are you trying to tell me—”

“
Jantho
and
Jereth
are, in a tongue so ancient not even the First Folk still speak it, words for
dawn
and
dusk
.”

“Dawn and dusk …” I hear myself mutter. “Light and dark.”

“Yes. Also beginning and end.”

“Jantho—Khryl—began the Deomachy …”

“Because the other gods would have destroyed all existence with their infantile squabbling. Khryl was always the protector of humanity—he it was who, in human tales of the time, stole fire from the sun, and taught men its secrets.”

“And Jantho—
Khryl—
founded the
Monasteries
?”

“After his maiming and the loss of his brother, he hoped that he might teach men to turn to each other, instead of to gods.”

“His maiming … the Butcher’s Fist …”

“Thus he earned his epithet Ironhand, for of such was forged its replacement.”

“Holy shit. And all this time, we never suspected …”

“As he intended. The enchantment to conceal the truth of Pirichanthe was to conceal the truth of Khryl and his brother as well.”

“And Jereth—?”

The Ravenlock’s eyes go distant. “Before he chose mortality, Jereth was called only ‘the Dark Man.’ If he ever had a name, I do not know it; no human being would willingly speak it, for fear of drawing his gaze.”

“What, like a god of death?”

“A god of murder. The god of massacre. Of every kind of killing, and the black despair that attends both victim and villain. The bitterest enemy of Khryl’s light and hope.”

“Twins. Opposites.” Dad would recognize the trope instantly: Osiris and Set. No, wait—Nissyen and Evnissyen. “Why would a god of murder give up immortality to fight beside his worst enemy?”

“He never said.” The Ravenlock shakes his head just barely enough that I can see it. “When I spoke of it to Jantho, he would say only that dark
knows love even as does light, and love’s power springs as much from despair as from hope.”

Angvasse’s eyes have gone dark as the sky. “And His loving brother maimed Him forever.”

“It was the price of Pirichanthe. And he devoted the rest of his mortal days to the service of what he believed was the best hope for humanity. He gave up eternity to help men who would never know him. Who would, he hoped, someday come to curse his name.”

“Curse him …”

“And then to make of his name a thing of derision. Contempt and scorn, and finally only an empty, obscure jest.”

“I cannot imagine … and you claim my heart resembles … You do not understand. He might have chosen scorn, as you say. But I
deserve
it. You—you have no … I am so desperately unworthy …”

Her voice fails and she turns away, and the horse-witch is there, at her shoulder, sitting on her heels in Angvasse’s shadow like a Fantasy conjured by the night and the stars, and her voice is too soft to be heard across the fire but in the ember-glow I can read her lips.

Hero is a word. You are more than a word. Don’t be afraid
.

Be who you are
.

I blink, blink again, and frown at her. “What the hell are you doing here? When did you get here?
How
did you get here?”

She gives me the witch-eye, cold as frozen milk. “I go where my work takes me.”

I’ll have to take that for an answer. I know better than to argue with the witch-eye.

“Greeting to you,” the Ravenlock says softly, coaxingly, like he’s calming a spooked horse. “And well-met.”

“Thanks. Likewise.”

“How are you called in this time?”

“The horse-witch. I don’t mind.”

“I have not seen you since the Binding, I think. Some five hundred years.”

The Binding …? Wait—
five
hundred years?

She shrugs. “I don’t like forests.”

“As well I recall,” he says, and they go on and make chitchat for a while during which I entirely lose the thread of their conversation, because I really can’t get my fucking mind around it.

Eventually I can’t hold it in. “You were
there
?
You?
”

“I have been to interesting places,” the horse-witch says, “and seen—”

“Exotic things, yeah, I know, but—hot staggering
fuck
! Were you ever gonna tell me?”

“I didn’t think I had to.”

“Jesus Christ, you’re worse than Angvasse! What in eight ways to ass-fuck would make you think you didn’t need to, y’know, mention in
passing
that you happened to be
present
at the Binding of the Covenant of motherfucking
Pirichanthe
?”

She shrugs at me. “You were there too.”

I sit there. For a long time. Just sit.

It doesn’t help. There’s no way I’m gonna convince myself she’s just making that up.

And the really fucking appalling thing is that I’m the only one appalled.

I can give Angvasse a pass, I guess; she’s kind of going through something of her own right now. The Ravenlock just frowns at me, then says to the horse-witch, “I don’t see it.”

“That’s because you think he’s a person.”

“
Excuse
me?”

“I’m sorry, did you not know this?” She looks like she really is sorry. She looks like it hurts her to upset me. “You said yourself how the god built you and the girl for this purpose.”

“Well, yeah, but—I mean, you didn’t say anything about me not being a person. Not being human. I mean, you won’t. When I meet you.”

She shrugs. “It may be that recalling how I’ve upset you tonight will make me avoid the subject, because I’m not good at tact. Or it may be that the you I will meet will actually be a human person. He’ll have to ask me then.”

“Oh.” The Ravenlock stares at me, his voice gone small with awe. “I see it now—and I ken now why he cannot be read as men are read. He was the Weapon …”

“I was the—wait,
what
weapon?”

“I understand now,” the Ravenlock says slowly. “Many things begin to make sense. Black Flow—joined with Jereth, not part of him. Lunatic confidence. Inhuman self-possession. Single-minded ruthlessness. Without fear, without doubt. Without regret and without mercy.”

“Yeah, okay, except I’ve got my share of self-doubt, and I get scared all the time. Shit, I’m scared right
now—
”

“That’s because you still think you’re human,” the horse-witch says. “You’ll get over it.”

“Oh, for fuck’s
sake
.”

“And self-loathing is not self-doubt.”

“Well, okay, self-loathing, then. What kind of weapon hates itself?”

“A knife that thinks it’s a spade,” the Ravenlock replies gently.

Angvasse looks thoughtful. “A sword that can’t understand why it’s such a poor plowshare.”

Now I can’t even really fucking breathe.

“There is what a thing is thought to be,” the Ravenlock says, “and there is what a thing is. You can’t be intimidated. You can’t be bargained with. You can’t be diverted, or persuaded, or deceived. Your every gesture displays the elegance of pure destruction.”

And again, all I can do is sit there.

It still doesn’t help.

Professional Tallman, my personal combat instructor at the Studio Conservatory, was mostly an idiot, but he knew a thing or two about swordplay, and he could throw down the kenjutsu like nobody I’ve ever seen. When we started on basic sword, he opened the class by asking us what, exactly, a sword is.

Because, y’know, sure, you can use a sword to clear brush, but you’re better off with a scythe and an axe. And you can use it to loosen dirt, but a pick does it better. You can use it to cut fabric or rope, or even carve wood; you can use it for all kinds of shit, but none of those are what it’s for. None of those are what it is.

The answer Tallman was looking for was “A sword is a tool for killing.”

No matter what you try to make it do.

“Very well then,” the Ravenlock says. He inclines his head toward the horse-witch. “Thank you for your insight. Will you be there when we arrive?”

The horse-witch shrugs. “Ogrilloi make me nervous.”

“Arrive?” I frown at him. “We’re going?”

“The attempt will be made.”

He fades into darkness, and Angvasse evaporates along with the forest and the campfire and as the stars go out, the last thing I see is the witch-eye, pale as the moon.

Permission to be who you are
.

Standing by the figurehead of the Mithondion flagship, looking out upon the Ravenlock’s landfleet spreading across a fair chunk of the northern Boedecken, I can’t help reflecting for the thousandth or millionth time
that the Living Palace should have been my first clue that this family doesn’t do anything small.

The flagship isn’t really the size of an aircraft carrier, or even a battleship, but it still kind of feels like one because it’s the biggest fucking thing I ever thought to see rolling over grassland. The main deck would make a fair approximation of a football field, and the abbey, my mansion from my superstar days in San Francisco, could get lost in a corner of the main hold. I don’t know how the gigantic rollers it rides on are engineered, but the sheer size of the thing gives it an almost ridiculously smooth ride—not to mention flattening and compacting the earth over which we roll into a reasonable facsimile of pavement. Where we pass, we leave a road.

The landships aren’t built, they’re grown, woven of living trees—some kind of banyan, I think, given that the massive hawsers trailing from its hull are braided of peripheral rootlike tendrils that seek out the earth whenever we stop, and dig into the ground to nourish the ship as well as anchor it. Those same hawsers connect to the yokes of the landships’ motive power: instead of engines, we have ogrilloi.

Lots of ogrilloi.

The flagship complement alone must be four or five thousand. They make a solid mass just barely wider than the flagship and almost a mile long—maybe two thousand to haul at any given time, with some insanely complicated substitution system, continuously moving fresh grills in to take over so tired grills can fall out and rest … which they do by jogging along our freshly flattened trail.

I can’t even guess how fast we’re actually going; I mean, I know how fast unburdened ogrilloi can run, but judging by how the distant mountains are getting visibly less distant, we’re going a
lot
faster than that. The Ravenlock—in his cabin preparing the ritual—can’t be bothered to explain how, and none of the rest of the bastards will talk to me at all. To be fair, they’re all busy too—over a hundred primal mages on the flagship alone, all conjuring like hell, throwing out so much power I can see it even without mindview: heat shimmer and miragelike mirror flashes and somehow it’s like every step counts for ten or something. Twenty. So fast I start to worry we’ll get there before the horse-witch, Angvasse, and Dad.

I really don’t want the Ravenlock to think we’ve been stood up.

Needn’t have worried—when the sun one morning sparks the cliffline into view, the trail of smoke twisting up into the sky’s blinding blue is visible even to me. It comes from the tip of the escarpment, probably right by the little passage that is the only way from the vertical city into the upland.

The landfleet spreads out like a wave that’ll break against the base of the cliff.

We’re here.

Dusk shades blue into the softly falling snow. My knees hurt from sitting here on the ground so long, at the tip of the escarpment, but I don’t feel inclined to move.

Spread below me is the vast Mithondion landfleet, ground-tethered, campfires and roasting meat and tens of thousands of ogrilloi. Bigger than the Black Knife Nation. Smaller than Purthin’s Ford. A couple hundred yards behind my left shoulder, the flagship looms like a Mission District Labor tenement.

Everything comes back to here.

There’s enough snow on the ground now that Angvasse’s boots crunch a little as she comes up behind me. “Are you well?”

“I’m all right.” Not really, but what’s the point yapping about it? “I wish she was here.”

“Ogrilloi make her witch-herd nervous.”

“They make me nervous too.”

Angvasse lowers herself to the white-dusted grass beside me, with a sigh as faint and hopeless as the wind. “It is … eerie,” she murmurs, staring down at the badlands. “To see the lights, and know that they are not lamps and hearths of goodmen in city windows, but instead campfires of elves and their brutish warriors …”

“Yeah.” I twitch a nod back toward the yurt that stands alone beyond our tiny fire. “Any progress? Anybody say anything? Anything at all?”

“Nay. No sound. No motion. Doubtless some eldritch magicks let them commune in silence.”

“Or they both fell asleep.”

She tilts her head. “Do elves sleep?”

I shrug. “When they want to, I guess.”

They’re not asleep. Whatever else T’ffarrell Mithondionne and Dad have been doing in there all these hours, it hasn’t been sleeping. I don’t even really want to know.