Caine's Law (23 page)

“A more generous man than my poor self might imply, in your defense, that your day has leaned a bit windward of eventful to be overconcerned with one’s powers of deduction.”

“I guess you probably heard that story of mine just now, huh?”

“Among the variety of tales to cross paths within my ear this night.”

“Do you have to take me in?”

Tyrkilld gave a shrug that sounded like slipping gears. “No sane man would maintain the Lord Justiciar of the Order of Khryl might be struck
down by your miserable assassassitude. Having, as I do, some passing acquaintance with the bewildering webwork of lies bewoven by your dishonest Monassbiteness, I can truthfully aver that I have no slightest cause to suspect the Justiciar enjoys anything other than his customary perfect health. Perfect saving peripheral vision, if you’ll forgive. And depth perception, but nonetheless—”

Fist nodded. “And there’s not a blessed thing wrong with the service of Khryl, saving only the company.”

“Ah, you must be quoting a man of far greater wit than your pitiful—”

“Yeah yeah, okay, drop it. Look, what t’Passe said about me and starting wars … well, it’s true. But this one’s different. You can win it. You
personally
. Get with Kierendal and let her know the balloon goes up tomorrow at sundown.”

“Sundown?”

“That’s when Khryl’s Justice ends, right? If Angvasse doesn’t show?”

T’Passe frowned at him. “A Khlaylock fail to appear for Khryl’s Justice? You have the wrong family, my friend. Not even the death of her closest living relation—”

“It might not be just a relation.”

T’Passe and Tyrkilld traded grim looks.

“My distaste for the Justiciar does not extend to his bloodline. The Lady Champion’s cut of different cloth entire,” Tyrkilld said. “I will with all available force resist any endeavor to do herself the slightest hurt.”

Jonathan Fist nodded. “I get it. I even agree. My source says she’s not going to be there. Something’s going to stop her. Maybe not me.”

“And this unlikely source that whispers to your dishonest self is some variety of prophet?”

“Close enough. Look, Orbek versus Angvasse to the death is a pretty big show, even for the Battlground, yes? Living Fist of Khyl against the Last Kwatcharr of the Black Knife Nation? It’s set for noon. If she doesn’t show, the crowd will keep growing the later it gets. By sundown,
everybody
will be there—to either see the fight, or see Orbek go free. That’s when Freedom’s Face has to move on BlackStone.”

“Your people,” t’Passe said. “You want Freedom’s Face to attack your own people?”

“Not exactly. We just need to hold the compound.”

“Thus you asked about their internal security.”

“Yeah. Tyrkilld, I need you to lead the assault.”

“I? Still hoping to engineer my bloody demise, are you?”

“It’s not a fort. It’s not even military. It’s just a fucking mining operation.
Sure, they’ll have some guys with advanced weapons, but it’s all small-arms shit. Not much different from those riot guns your armsmen carry.”

“Are they not a griffinstone producer? Belike to encounter ferocious magickal defenses.”

“Yeah, and you have Kierendal. I know who my money’s on.” He leaned forward, resting forearms on knees. “Look, we need to control the
dil
. The gate to the True Hell, right? We need good guys in charge of this side, because otherwise bad guys will be coming from the other side, you follow?
Very
bad guys. Ask your girlfriend here about the Artan Invasion. Anyway, it has to look like a Khryllian operation. Win or lose.”

“And why, prithee, would the Knights of Khryl undertake the seizure by violence of BlackStone, which is under Our Order’s own protection by not only law and treaty, but the explicit command of the Justiciar himelf?”

“Well, let’s see. Would this Justiciar be the same one who was murdered in the BlackStone governor’s office? Would this BlackStone be the same place where the murder was covered up and the assassin, still dripping the Justiciar’s blood and brains, was whisked away beyond the reach of Khryl’s Law altogether? Hell, you don’t even have to use the
whisked away
part—play dumb on that. Dumber. Because there’s no reason you’d know about the gate … which means you can pretend the Artans are harboring the assassin. It’s even true. They’re just harboring me—him—somewhere else.”

Tyrkilld looked thoughtful. T’Passe scowled into the distance.

“No need to involve the Monasteries at all, right? Where I come from,” Fist said to t’Passe, “we call this ‘Let’s you and him fight.’ Besides, I told Markham he was facing war with Earth. Wouldn’t want to make me a liar, would you?”

“Hard to deny the scent of a certain rascally foxlike cunning,” Tyrkilld admitted. “But for what gain? War with Arta—I make no pretense of being a Knight of notable honor, but to instigate a calamity of such proportion—”

“Which will never happen. If I pull this off, the war will end before midnight tomorrow, and the Artans will never trouble you again. If I don’t, well, give them back their compound and apologize for the misunderstanding. Pay for the damages. That kind of shit.”

“If you pull this off,” t’Passe muttered darkly. “I hate when you say that. Pull what off?”

“I was telling you about the Butcher’s Fist—ahh, Hand of Peace, whatever.”

“How you thought it might be in the Spire.”

“Yeah, except no. It’s not in the Spire. But I know where it is.”

“Four or five hours ago you weren’t sure it exists.”

“For fuck’s sake, t’Passe, do we need to go over the whole goddamn situation again?”

“No—no, of course not,” she said faintly. “Apologies. Eventful night.”

“Yeah, wait till tomorrow. It’s at BlackStone.”

Tyrkilld lurched to his feet, and suddenly he didn’t look drunk at all. “The
Artans
hold the
Hand of Our Lord of Battles
? I have but to sound an alarm and we will have it
tonight
!”

“You’re a decent guy, Tyrkilld, and I know you’re smarter than you pretend, but you need to work on impulse control.”

“Am I in this so different from your miserable self?”

“Not usually. But we have to get this one right. I’m the only guy who can do it.”

“Your will or you won’t,” t’Passe muttered bitterly.

“Cut it out. Listen, Tykilld, stop and think. How are you going to convince the Order it’s really there? And then you have to explain how you found out about it. And eventually somebody’s gonna ask how it got there in the first place, and that one’s the bomb. Civil war will be the best you can
hope
for.”

“How dire can one truth be?”

“You tell me,” he said. “The Artans have the Hand of Peace because Purthin Khlaylock gave it to them.”

Tyrkilld’s eyes popped wide, and he sat down as abruptly as he had risen.

“It’s what Khlaylock kicked in for the Smoke Hunt. His stake in the game.” Jonathan Fist sighed, and shrugged, and opened his hands in apology. “You know I can keep a secret, no matter how somebody asks. Are you as sure of anybody else?”

Tyrkilld didn’t answer. He stared at the street.

“And don’t even think about blowing all this wide open. You’ll only make it worse.”

“Worse?” he murmured. “In what dark god’s nightmare could it be worse?”

“Like I said: think it through. Were you listening when I said Khlaylock pitched in the Hand of Peace as his contribution to the Smoke Hunt?”

Dawning horror scraped his eyes even wider.

“So the real truth here is that the greatest hero of the Order in modern times took the single most sacred True Relic of Khryl Battlegod,” he said, “and gave it to the Black Knives.”

Tyrkilld only groaned. T’Passe set a hand on his pauldron, and they sat in silence for some considerable time.

At length, she sighed and looked back at Jonathan Fist. “You are,” she murmured, “a perfect fiend.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Can I have my pistol now?”

He took another bite of blood sausage, peeling back grease-soaked paper around his fist, and chewed thoughtfully while he watched Khryllians lay out bodies in the street.

This used to be a tidy neighborhood, neat greystone townhouses and well-kept bungalows fronting the ways, identical truck-gardens fenced in behind. Clean flagstoned streets had radiated from this little plaza around a bubbling artesian fountain. Street signs carved into the corners of the buildings announced that the plaza, and the neighborhood around it, had been called Weaver’s Square. On another world it would have been called lower middle-class: full of grocers and haberdashers, barbers and clerks.

Today all those grocers and clerks and barbers and haberdashers and their wives and their children were crowded around the plaza, white-faced and shocky, crying or whimpering or murmuring streams of half-comprehensible obscenities under half-held breath. Several of those neat greystones and well-kept bungalows were now smoking gutted hulks, choked with broken timbers and rubble. More were splashed with blood, and all bore scatters of fresh, bright white pocks on their stone faces.

Slug scars.

Last night would probably give this place a new nickname.

He didn’t have a hard count yet. Too many armsmen milled around, taking pulses, binding wounds, and generally obstructing his view. Twelve or thirteen corpses.

More to come.

A pair of Knights stood praying in the improvised triage area they’d set up near the fountain. Here and there among the wounded, bloodflow stopped and yellow-lipped wounds zipped themselves shut, accompanied by bubbling groans and thin whistling gasps of agony. Those beyond Healing were turned over to the armsmen to be dragged into the ranks of the dead.

Four ogrilloi so far. A red-soaked pile of grey-leather meat. His mushy brain still stirred up occasional specks of detail like rat turds in oatmeal: he remembered taking most of those wounds.

Good thing he wasn’t superstitious.

He watched with a clinically morbid satisfaction like scratching at the
rim of an infected scab, cataloging correspondences between nighttime prophecy and dawnlit reality. That dream for him was a long time ago—a
long
time ago—but being here was bringing it all back.

That old woman—

He remembered smothering her screams with one grey-leather hand while he tore into her living belly with tusks and teeth.

The dismembered body parts nearby—

Had once been a pair of slim young men; two of him had found them in bed together and had ripped arms and legs from their bodies, cracking hips like wishbones, splintering knees and shredding shoulders, disjointing them while they shrieked until twisting off their heads had torn them to silence.

That middle-aged mother—

Screw it. He was already tired of this game.

Armsmen held back the crowd, those fancy inlaid riot guns slanted across broad hauberked chests. The eyes behind their helmets’ nasals stared, grim and remote, over the heads of the throng they faced. Muscle bulged at angles of clenched jaws. Several of the bodies lined up in the morning sunlight wore armor bearing the sunburst of Khryl.

He recalled that the collective noun for ogrilloi is
massacre
.

That dead armsman, over there: one of him had snapped that man’s spine with a blow of the fist. Finely worked chainmail hung in tattered shreds; he could remember tearing a hauberk with taloned hands as though it were rotten leather. The warhorse sprawled across the cobbles—it had kicked at him, and one of him had caught its hoof in the palm of one hand and splintered its fetlock with a twist.

That scarlet flame without heat or light had made these ogrilloi into more than ogrilloi. Even the dream-memory was an intoxicating fantasy of power.

A fantasy of being stronger than a Knight of Khryl.

Armsmen ranged the smoldering wreckage beyond the cordon. While he watched, another corpse was carried out: the shredded remnants of a young girl, maybe ten years old. He remembered the taste of her clean soft flesh. His daughter was just about that age. Most of the girl’s hair was matted with brown-caked blood. One strand draped across the shoulder of the armsman who bore her, and it was fine and silken and golden. Like Faith’s.

The sausage curdled in his stomach.

“Not my business,” he muttered through his teeth. “Still not my business.”

His business came walking out of a smoke-shrouded doorway with four hundred pounds of dead ogrillo over her shoulder.

Someone in the crowd shouted,
“Khlaylock! Khlaylock and the God!”
and her step hitched and her mouth twisted and her vivid eyes stayed on the wounded and the dead. He remembered hearing the same pious cheer twenty-five years before, from a different voice, for a different Khlaylock, in a different Boedecken.

Other voices echoed the call.
Khlaylock and the God!
Shouts swelled into a roar, and standing silently among them he could pick out individual voices:
killem Vasse
!
killemmall! killallafuckers!
Fists went toward the sky and men slammed each other on the shoulders and women shrieked into their hands, and the pious sentiment gave way to a hungrily choral chant.

Vasse! Vasse! Vasse!

There’d been a time when his own presence could quicken that ravenous pulse in any crowd on Earth. He could hear the echoes even now, and they could still raise a sizzle in his balls. He’d loved being a star. He’d lived for it.

Looked like she didn’t.

Some voices—faint, scattered—did not join the chant. These had messages of their own:
Where was Khryl when they killed my daughter? Where was Khryl when my parents screamed? Where was Khryl last NIGHT?
These faint scattered voices joined, gathering strength and number. The choral
vasse vasse vasse
became blurred by a rising counterchant—

Where was KHRYL? Where was KHRYL? Where was KHRYL?

And there was shoving and flashing of fists that became snarling knots of struggle, and some of the armsmen began to advance from the line, using their long guns as crowbars to pry open paths into the crowd.

The Champion never looked up.