Free Caine's Law by Matthew Stover Page A

I appreciate your help. Sorry it had to be like this, but you’re the only guy in either universe I can trust to give me good advice.”
    “What? Advice?” His eyes blink open. “Is that all this is?”
    “No.”
    Caine holds the sword in both hands. If it burns his hands with interstellar cold, he gives no sign.
    “Hari …? Hari, what is this? What are you doing?”
    “I told you.”
    Caine lunges with casually brutal expertise. The blade spears through Duncan’s sternum and carves his heart in half, and as darkness falls upon his life, he hears only this:
    “I don’t go by that name anymore.”

 

 
    “See, the whole point of being a god is that there’s no such thing as consequences, right? You don’t like how something turned out, you reach into reality and stir it around until you get something you like better.”
    — POSSIBLY SOMEBODY
Potentially Somewhere
     
    T his time, they sit together on a bench in the Railhead, Thorncleft’s largest structure, and the headquarters of the Transdeian Heavy Rail Company.
    “It’s because I’m going to make a deal with your god.”
    “My god? Ma’elKoth?”
    “No. The Black Knife god. Out in the Boedecken. I don’t think it has a name.”
    “So? You say
going to
, hey? Then don’t.
Y no hay problema
.”
    “It’s not that simple, big dog.”
    Usually, the young ogrillo leans back into a pillar with one leg up and resting on the bench between them, his other foot on the bulging bundle of his pack on the floor. Usually, the man leans forward on his elbows, stares off through the smoky gloom half-lit by dim greenish globes of coal-gas lamps, and speaks in a low, flat voice that draws no attention from idle passersby or the patient fellow passengers who wait there for the Thorncleft Falcon, the express train that speeds to Ankhana and back twice a day.
    Usually. Not always.
    In the past, this conversation has occasionally taken place in a haze ofsleet below the Monastic Embassy in Lower Thorncleft. Several times it has happened among the vast stacks of creosote-soaked timbers waiting for transport to the Battleground Spur, still under construction. Once it was on a cliff-ledge at night, so dark the mountains around weren’t even shadows; it might have been nowhere at all, except for the sweet copper scent of freshly spilled blood.
    “The deal isn’t the problem,” the man says. “It might be the solution.”
    “So?”
    “So it might blow up the fucking planet too. Or worse. Or nothing at all, or anything in between. I don’t know. I
can’t
know.”
    “You talk too much about what you don’t know, little brother.”
    “Everybody does.” A rasp of bitter chuckle. “The difference is I
know
I don’t know. Everybody else is blowing smoke out their assholes and they can’t even smell fire. See, the thing is, I shouldn’t be able to make a deal at all. Not with a god. Especially not with
that
god. But I will. I already have. Even though it hasn’t happened yet.”
    “And that’s where you lose me every time.”
    “Yeah, that’s where the mortal brain generally takes it in the butt. The Monasteries have some technical jargon and shit, but even having the right words doesn’t help all that much. Look, in the Breaking—the Horror, right?—there came a, kind of, a turning point. I don’t know what else to call it. Your guys had us all captured, and you were doing your usual shit, which was torturing people to death. An offering to your god, because the old Black Knives worshipped a demon that was Bound in the vertical city.
By
the vertical city.”
    “Demon? Just now you say god.”
    “Same thing. Well, not exactly, but there isn’t time to recap the whole Abbey school Intro to Applied Deiology seminar. So look, the top bitches had me nailed to a cross, which is a slow and shitty way to die, and they were doing some other things that weren’t much fun either, and I should have died there. All of us should have. Instead I