Free Caine's Law by Matthew Stover Page B

escaped.”
    “You escaped? From being nailed to a cross? Nice trick.”
    “Fucking impossible trick.” The man hangs his head and sighs. “What happened was, the head bitch took me down herself. Then I killed her and the Studio pulled me out and whatever. You know the rest.”
    “What, she just lets you go? And stands around while you kill her? How’s that work?”
    “It was the answer to my prayer.”
    “You pray? What, Tyshalle gets wet and sloppy for you all of a sudden?”
    “No. I prayed to
your
god.”
    The grey-leather lumps of muscle that serve ogrilloi as eyebrows rippled and knotted. “And why does the Black Knife god give a shit for you?”
    “That’s one question, but there’s one more important. The real one is
how
. Not why. Somehow the god made the head bitch do what I was praying for. That’s what the Monasteries call an Intervention, and it’s supposed to be impossible. It’s exactly what the Covenant of Pirichanthe is supposed to prevent.”
    “What, gods aren’t allowed to do miracles?”
    “Exactly.
Exactly
. The power of a god can be expressed
only
through the intercession of a living creature. That’s the fundamental principle that underlies the Covenant: a god can grant power or take it away and that’s fucking well it. Again, it’s complicated—the Monasteries call it
theophanic attunement
, and there’s a shitload of variable specifics, but basically the more you’re like what the god wants you to be, the more of its power you can channel. So the god doesn’t even tell you what to do with its power, because the reason you have the power in the first place is that you’re already the kind of person who’d use it the way your god wants you to. You follow?”
    “Maybe. Maybe not. Better with nose than with brain, hey?”
    “Interventions—what people call miracles—are direct actions by a god. Direct expression of the god’s will. An Intervention literally changes reality. That’s the problem with gods. Human gods. Ideational Powers, the Monasteries call them. Natural Powers are expressions of natural law. Outside Powers exist beyond reality. More or less in the middle are the gods of humanity. It’s kind of like they’re half Natural and half Outside. They don’t dramatically violate natural law at any given moment, but they exist outside time. Some religions teach that to their gods, time is a dream, which is as good a way of thinking about it as any. A god can choose any moment—past, future, whatever, to them it’s all the same—any moment they happen to feel like, then reach in and stir shit up to make something happen somewhen else.”
    “Somewhen.”
    “Yeah, I know.” The man shrugs apologetically. “Say a god wants to destroy the Railhead here. Say it’s pissed at me and wants to make the whole fucking building fall on our heads. Something really spectacular—an earthquake, a meteor strike, whatever—that takes a shitload of power. It’s a hell of a lot easier to pick a couple seconds ten years ago and give some poor bastard a heart attack right when he was making some criticalload calculation and so here we are, ten years later, and the weight of this ice storm finally overtakes its structural fatigue limits and the whole fucking thing collapses and kills us all. Control the past, control the future.”
    The ogrillo rolls his eyes toward the ice-packed armorglass vault above. “Just an example, hey? Serious-like.”
    “It gets worse when there’s more than one. Say some other god wants us to live through it, or maybe just wants to fuck with the first one, so he reaches back ten years and has some other guy spot the dead guy’s error and correct it, and then the Railhead’s sturdy and solid and warm and here we sit. But then the first god can go back and kill the
other
guy, and we’re back to being buried in rubble and glass.
    “When an assload of gods are fucking with the past so they can control the future, shit goes crazy. Nothing is