“He went in with her,” he murmured. “That makes sense.”
“It is not known if together they saved any horses. It is not known whether he survived the fire. She didn’t. The last thing she said to him was, After the horses, we can rescue each other.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Yes.”
Night had gathered darkness around them. “He made it out. Survived,” he said. “That’s what he does.”
“Were she able to know this, it would make her glad.”
“Horses too. They saved some. Not all. But some. I don’t know if it was enough to be worth dying for.”
“What’s worth dying for, and what isn’t, is too deep for me. Such matters must be left to mortals.”
“Can I look away now?”
“If you must.”
“Did he—uh.” He swallowed and tried again. “You said he spoke to her. Is it, uh, known what he said?”
“It is known.”
“Will you tell me? Please.”
“You may find this difficult to hear.”
“That’ll be a damn shame, considering how the rest of it was a fucking carnival.”
No moon yet peered above the canyon rim, and the firelight did not reach her face. He could see only glistening highlights where her cheeks would be and the faint silver gleam of her witch-eye.
“These are his words, exactly as he spoke them.
“He said, What you call yourself, what others call you, what you have done and what has been done to you—none of this touches what I know. I know you. You met me days ago. I have known you since the world was born.
“Everything you are is what you should be. Everything you should be is what you are.
“I know all of you, and there is nothing in you I do not love.”
The fire showed only embers. The night was very dark, and very still. Even the frogs had gone quiet; there was no sound of any living thing.
Then eventually, slowly, finally: “Holy shit.”
“Yes.”
“Fuck me inside out.”
“You were warned.”
“Does that mean—? Wait, or did we—? Huh. I can’t make that into anything that even looks like sense.” Every way he tried to think about it only spun the whirl inside his head faster and higher. “Son of a bitch.”
He looked up and found a sliver of moon creeping over the canyon’s rim. “I just don’t fucking know anymore.”
“Nobody knows,” she said. “Except me. And I don’t know everything. Only what I remember.”
“But I knew about her. Somehow I knew. I didn’t remember her. Still don’t. But I knew.”
“There are ways in which you are very like a mortal man,” she said. “There are ways in which you are more like something else.”
His head jerked up. “I’m not mortal?”
“I don’t know. I’d rather not test it,” she said. “Now you understand why I worried for you.”
“No shit. So when we first met, and I said I didn’t know why I was even talking to you, you said—”
“ ‘I could tell you.’ ” She sounded like she might be smiling, just a bit, as she quoted herself. “ ‘But you wouldn’t believe me.’ ”
“That. Yeah. This was what you were talking about.”
“Some of it.”
“I was drawn to you because of what happened between … that guy who looked like me, and the slave woman.”
“You’re drawn to me because you need forgiveness and permission. And, I think, a girlfriend. The other?” A shrug in her voice. “There was a stable fire in your Faltane County War, but no horses died. Why?”
“How do you—yeah, never mind. Dumbass question. The manor stables were empty—I had Tanner drive the horses off just before …”
“You had,” she said. “You decided to empty the stables. Why?”
“Well … I mean, y’know, to deny remounts to Faltane’s cavalry, obviously.”
“Which the stable fire would have accomplished. Obviously.”
“Well, yeah, but after meeting you, I wasn’t about to … oh. Holy shit.”
“Again: yes.”
“It’s making me dizzy. Does this ever get less fucked-up?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you doing this? Making this happen?” He shook his head, helpless in the whirl. “Am I?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“Do you know anything more? Anything at all that might help us make sense of all this shit?”
“Yes,” she said. “I know you’ll smell better after you take that bath.”
The moon hung silver on the riverbanks and splashed the water with platinum sparks. The water was lazy, too slow to be cold, and the scent of flowers upstream reminded him of something. A dream he’d had, maybe. Or maybe he had been here before.
He’d scrubbed out his clothes and boots with sand from a small bar a few yards out. Now they hung on a twisted dwarf cedar just back from the water’s edge, and he went back out for more sand to scrub himself down. The water was deeper just beyond the bar, and after scraping off his top couple layers of grime, he anchored himself with one hand and let himself float.
The canyon, the river, the moon. Calm. Clean. All of it.
In this place, it was hard to imagine a world where the slave woman’s life and death could happen. But it did. Every day. In every land. The slave’s life, and worse. Girls suffered. Boys suffered. Women and men. At least she had the horses, at the end. That was a lot more than a lot of people ever get.
He thought then that he finally understood what Ma’elKoth had been about all along. How can you know such things and not want to make the world better? Shit, if he were God, he’d have burned this motherfucker down a long time ago.
And started over with people who don’t do that shit.
“You’re sad now,” she said from somewhere not far away.
“I guess.”
“Do you remember ordering me to not be sad for you?”
He felt himself smile. “Sometimes I talk faster than I think.”
“Not anymore.”
“That’s a nice thing to say.”
“It’s also true.”
“Well, thanks.”
“You wondered once why there should be such a creature as a horse-witch. The only answer I have is the answer I am. I only know I’m grateful for it.”
“Me too,” he said to the stars. “The world would be a better place with more of you and less of everything else.”
“And thanks in return.”
Then for a while there was only the night and the water, until she said, “I still like you.”
Something inside him stirred, rousing from a decade’s hibernation, and it woke up hungry. But the darkness inside him wouldn’t let it out. “I don’t see how you can like anybody, much less a man. Much less me. After everything that happened—”
“It didn’t happen to me,” she said. “It happened to the slave woman. I am not her. I look like her because her human friend looked like you.”
“But—”
“She was a slave. I can’t be caught, much less chained. She was alone. I have friends without number. She was damaged; every part of her that wasn’t scar was open wound. If I live a million million years, I will never take another mark upon my flesh. She lived in fear. I barely recall such a feeling. She was killed, and she died. I am killed, and I live. For a man, she had Dominic Shade a few days. For a man, I have you forever.”
“Forever,” he echoed, because he discovered he liked the sound of the word. “It’s like we—wait. Dominic … Shade? What the hell?”
“That’s the name her friend gave to her. It’s how he was called by the mercenaries, and the Faltane’s men.”
“Nobody’s called me Dominic in thirty years,” he said slowly. “And I haven’t used Shade since I left Kirisch-Nar. Why the hell would I go by that?”
“You didn’t. He did.”
“Still,” he said.
“I wonder. Dominic Shade instead of Jonathan Fist.”
“Maybe he hadn’t yet made the bargain you can’t get out of.”
He sat upright in the river. “Holy shit.”
He turned to look at her. She was on the riverbank. Her clothes were somewhere else. The moon on her skin was the most dazzling vision ever to grace his eye. He tried to say holy shit again, but the sight of her had left him no breath with which to speak.
“I told you I still like you,” she said. “And I know you still like me.”
“You do?”
She pointed. “Looks like you like me a lot.”
“Uh …”
“Just say yes,” she said, “and we will make this happen.”
“That’s what I—I mean, he—said, when …”
“I warned you the story could take you somewhere you might not like.”
“No—that’s not … I mean, of course I—but I think I kind of need to …”
She folded her arms across her breasts in a way that somehow subtly altered the curve of her shoulder and hip from sublimely erotic to frankly pornographic.
“What you need is to make up your mind,” she said. “I’m immortal. You, on the other hand, aren’t getting any younger, tough guy.”
“A religion that teaches you God is something outside the world—something separate from everything you see, smell, taste, touch, and hear—is nothing but a cheap hustle.”
— DUNCAN MICHAELSON
Tales of the First Folk
Caine and Ma’elKoth converse softly, some distance away. Kris and Angvasse walk together idly among the trees. The horse-witch braids her garland, and Duncan finally gets it.
“Ah …” He sighs into the dappled green. “Ah, of course.”
He understands now, or thinks he does. Someone unhappened the slave woman, and now there is a horse-witch … which means she can be unhappened too.
He rolls his head to look up into the horse-witch’s face. “So it really is all about the girl.”
She holds her wildflower garland out, squinting critically. “Too much? Maybe more subtle in the shades of blue?”
“He’s done this—is doing this, is … rewriting the entire structure of reality—for you?”
She smiles past the flowers. “That’s very romantic.”
“Capital R as well.”
“He doesn’t believe in happy endings.”
Duncan nods. “He has reason.”
“He’s not doing this for me. He’s doing it for love.”
“He loves you. I see it every time he even thinks about you.”
“Oh, yes. But I don’t need defending. I need nothing. We have an uncomplicated relationship.”
“Compared to his others, I daresay it is.”
“This may be difficult for you to understand, because it’s not easily expressed in the words you and your son still need. You could say that he’s doing it for Love in the abstract sense—for the right to love, and the chance to be loved. Not for himself. For everyone. He would deny this, angrily, because he thinks the abstract is where good things turn bad, and he may be right. That is a matter too deep for me. I can tell you that there is nothing abstract in his love; his love is specific, and concrete. Love is his law. His only law.”
She smiles at Duncan, and hangs the garland of wildflowers from the guard of the Sword. “I think he gets that from you.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Duncan. I don’t know you well, but him I know very well. I’ve known him a lot longer than you have. When he thinks of love, he thinks of you. You’re the example he’s trying to live up to.”
“That’s …” He shakes his head. “I know better than to argue with you, but I want to. I want to deny it. I wish I could make that unhappen. He deserves better.”
“If you mean by deserve what I think you mean, everyone does.”
“I was a terrible example. Of practically everything.”
“You were what you were. Now you can be what you are. You did what you did. Now you can do what you do.”
“I don’t understand.”
She nodded, and for a moment her brows drew together in thought. At length she said, “I don’t love horses.”
“You don’t?”
“Of course not. Horses are large smelly dim-witted creatures who serve no higher purpose than processing grass into shit.”
“Then—”
“But there is a one-eyed mare, with a white scar just here, for whom I would give all my lives if it might keep her happy forever. Your son’s horse, the one he calls Carillon, is so bright and playful that I start to laugh when I first smell his approach. There’s a medicine-hat paint, who has a cast in one eye—sometimes I look at her and think I’m seeing myself. One old gelding, who used to be black, follows her around like a body servant, because she won’t let the younger geldings and stallions pick on him.”
“You don’t love horses. You love each horse,” Duncan says slowly, with a distantly thoughtful nod. “Personally.”
“He doesn’t love people. He doesn’t even like people. He dislikes everyone he meets, on principle, because it gives him an excuse to be an asshole. But he loves you. He loves me. He loves Kris, and Deliann. Angvasse. Even Pallas Ril. Ma’elKoth. Personally.”
“Yes.”
“He loves the slave woman in Faltane most of all.”
Duncan frowns. “A woman he never met? One who never really existed …?”
“I told you,” she says lightly, “some things he loves are more unlikely than you.”
“Still.”
“He grieves for her. Not for her death. For her life. He grieved for her before he had any idea there was such a person. He grieves for everyone like her. For everyone like you.”
“Me?”
“What hurts him most is imagining how she begged and prayed and pleaded for mercy, and mercy never came. She screamed and no one listened. She bled and no one cared. He would have helped her. He wanted to help her. His heart is still broken because he didn’t. He’ll never get over it.”
“I think I understand.”
“For more than forty years, you begged and prayed and pleaded for mercy, and mercy never came. You screamed and no one listened. You bled and no one cared.”
“He cared,” Duncan says fiercely.
“Yes. And you cared about him. And both your hearts are still broken because you didn’t save each other.”
Sometime later, Caine gathers them all together around Duncan and the Sword. When he sees the garland hanging from the guard, he smiles at the horse-witch. “Nice.”
“Thank you.”
“So here it is,” he says. “Here we are. We’re up against the hard shit now. The Sword can’t stay here forever, and neither can we. I need everyone together on this. It’s gonna be fucking hard enough with everybody pitching in; we can’t afford to have anybody working at cross-purposes. Am I being clear?”
He looks from one to the next, meeting every gaze. Ma’elKoth. Pallas Ril. Deliann Mithondionne. Angvasse Khlaylock. The horse-witch, and Duncan.
“This all happens at the instant the Sword is moved. Actually, at the instant the decision is made. Your decision, Duncan.”
He nods. “I understand.”
“This is the outcome I’ve been playing for. In Purthin’s Ford, Angvasse and Jonathan Fist fight our way up to the Purificapex, to rejoin the power of the Sword and the Hand. We’re not gonna survive—probably—but that’s not important. Both Powers exist outside time, so every version of us will be able to tap in.”
“In theory,” Ma’elKoth rumbles.
“In the vertical city, T’farrell Mithondionne will use part of the Power Rejoined to re-purpose the dil T’llan to Bind a different consciousness. To put somebody else in charge of the dillin. Somebody we can trust to manage traffic between Earth and Home. On Earth, Dominic Shade will Bind the power of the blind god to our new dil T’llan, to give the, whateverthefuck, the Gatekeeper, I guess, plenty o
f power to open or close the gates.”
Duncan suddenly feels lost again. “You’re using the blind god?”
Caine shrugs. “Fifteen billion people on Earth want to live just as much as anybody else. We already know we can’t stop traffic between the universes; they’ll always find a way around any wall we can build. So our next best option is to manage it. We can make being responsible and respectful of Home profitable. As soon as people start making money off being good guys, the market for bad guys dries the fuck up, right?”
“It’s … possible,” Duncan says. “That’s as much as I can say for sure. You won’t know till you actually do it.”
“And that’s the big one, right there. Up to now, we’ve had a little wiggle room with this. It’s how I’ve got it as close to fine-tuned as it can be. But the instant the Sword’s in play, everything’s for keeps. We can use it to time-bind Ma’elKoth, at least for a while, so He won’t unhappen right away; it’ll limit Your power, but You’ll still be in the game.”
“A superior option to nonexistence, one supposes.”
“You always wanted the power to help people. You’ll still have some. You’ll need it. I’m pretty sure the Spire’s coming down.”
“The Spire?”
“Probably. Since we’re about to steal the whole power of both True Relics that hold it up. Look, I told Kierendal that I’d break the Khryllians like I broke the Black Knives. If You don’t pitch in, that’s gonna get way too literal.”
Ma’elKoth looks appalled—and then distantly thoughtful …
“Cut it out,” Caine says. “Don’t even have that idea.”
“I can’t imagine what you might be—”
“Behave yourself. Same goes for you, Pallas. And all your fucking deific ass-buddies. We’re moving into uncharted territory here. You all understand that, right?”
Again he meets each pair of eyes in turn.
“We all know what the world was like with the Covenant of Pirichanthe. A shithole. Since the True Assumption, it hasn’t been much better. From here on out, all bets are off. People turn to gods to make the world better. Shit, we make ’em up right and left. So we’ll give them a little room to work. As long as they’re, y’know, helping more than they hurt, fine. But if shit starts to get out of control … Well, the gods—all the gods—need to understand that there are consequences now.”