“Does it hurt?” His tone is perfunctory, but his gaze is not.
“Will it matter if it does?”
“It might.”
Duncan pauses to examine, with his customary precision, exactly how he feels. “I can feel my sternum scrape up and down the blade when I breathe. I’m pretty sure that should hurt.”
“Yeah.”
“Mostly, it’s cold. I recall from secondhanding your Adventures how cold a blade feels when you’re stabbed, but this isn’t like that. It’s like cold is what it’s made from.”
“ ‘Cold is what it’s made from.’ Huh. I guess that’s true enough.”
He lowers himself to the snow on Duncan’s other side. “Do you understand what’s happening? What this place is, and what you’re doing here?”
Duncan frowns up at the hilt of the black sword. He feels the beat of his riven heart against the metal. “Well, I’m pretty sure it’s not Kansas.”
“Can I just mention here how fucking tired I am of that joke?”
“Then you shouldn’t use it so often.” Duncan shrugs. “Some sort of shamanic dream quest or journey, I suppose. Except I can’t actually journey until somebody pulls the sword out of my chest.”
“That’s the idea.”
“What is this sword?”
“It’s a metaphor.”
“I gathered that. A metaphor for what?”
“Another sword.”
“Oh, come on.”
“Hey, it’s not like I just make this shit up. It is what it is. Just like everything else.”
“This other sword,” Duncan says patiently. “Is it a metaphor too?”
“Since you ask, yeah.”
“For what?”
Caine says, “Me.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I know.”
“No, I mean—there’s a sword that’s a metaphor for you?”
“Sometimes it’s the other way around.”
“You do understand what language is used for, don’t you?”
“You’d be amazed what I understand.”
“See? You’re doing it again. You use words, but assign no content specific enough to be meaningful. How many times do I have to tell you this? What are words once abstracted from their meaning?”
Caine shrugs. “Music.”
Duncan opens his mouth for a biting reply, then closes it again. “You’ve been saving that one.”
“Like you said, you’ve had this conversation before. So have I.” He draws his knees to his chest and wraps his arms around them. “My father told me once that a powerful-enough metaphor grows its own truth.”
Duncan nods. “I remember. You asked about the blind god, after you were arrested by the Social Police. Right before they arrested me.”
“After the arrest—well, let’s just say a lot of shit happened. More than I can tell you about. What happened showed me a lot of the blind god, and it showed me more of me, and for a while I thought I had shit pretty well worked out. Who I was, how the universe worked. What it all meant, sort of. Not just me. Shanna. Faith.”
“How is Faith? Is she well? Did you ever pry her loose from Avery Shanks?”
“You know about Faith and Shanks?”
“It was all over the nets the day you were arrested. Is she all right?”
“Mostly. Shanna’s death hit her pretty hard, and what happened after hit her harder. But there’s a lot of her mother in her. Nobody ever really understood how strong Shanna was. Not even me.”
“And Tan’elKoth? A fine mind, and a formidable rhetorical opponent. Is he still at the Curioseum?”
“He’s dead.”
A dully freezing shock ripples through him, slow and low like a splash in a puddle of slush. Shanna and Tan’elKoth both? He tries to imagine how much that must have hurt him—but then he registers the hard flat grin Caine had turned out toward the brink of the escarpment, and a darker and colder shock breaks over him.
“It was you,” he says slowly. “You killed him.”
“That metaphorical sword we were talking about? I cut him in half, then jammed it through his face.”
“Hari, I’m so—”
Caine turned a blackly glittering stare on him that freezes the word in his throat. “Hari’s dead too. He died after Shanna. Before Tan’elKoth. And before you ask, yeah. I killed him too.”
“Yes. Caine, then. I understand.”
“You don’t.”
Duncan lifts a hand to touch the blade that stands from his chest. It’s not even sharp. “You killed Tan’elKoth with this, didn’t you?”
“Metaphorically.”
“You said Shanna was—”
“Yeah. Same blade. The same blade Berne used to cripple me.”
“Kosall?”
“Kosall was the literal blade, yeah. But that’s just a detail. The one that counts is the metaphor.”
“Which is you.”
“That’s right. Listen, things are about to get weird around here.”
“Says the man who put a few pounds of steel through my heart and then sat down for a friendly chat.”
“Yeah, okay. Weirder. Look, do you remember meeting me before? Not Hari, or even Caine. Me. This age. These scars. Forty-some-odd years ago.”
Duncan frowns. “Not that I recall. Can you give me a specific context?”
“It was the day Mom died.”
This hurts far worse than the sword could have, even were it not a metaphor at all. Hurts worse than anything he can remember feeling. He closes his eyes. “No. I—don’t remember very much of that day.”
“Okay. Here’s the thing: I remember meeting me. In the Labor clinic. Some old guy sat down to chat with me—and that old guy was who I am now. Or looked like me, anyway. And my father almost got in a fistfight with him.”
“A fistfight? With Caine?”
“It wasn’t his best day.”
“I hate to think what would have become of you if you’d lost us both that day.”
“It could still happen.”
Duncan goes quiet.
“That’s what I mean about shit getting weird. People are going to start showing up here. Some of them might look like people you know, same as how I look like your son. These people will not be who you think they are. Some of them are not friendly. No matter what any of them say or do, don’t let anybody pull that sword, all right?”
“How do I stop them?”
“Say no.”
“No? Just no?”
“Here, yeah. It’s the magick word.”
“I thought that was please.”
“That’s the magic word. The point is, that sword won’t come out until you decide it can go. And you have to decide who draws it.”
“Excalibur in the stone …”
“Something like it. Excalibur is another metaphor for the Sword.”
“You say that with a capital S.”
“Yeah. And Durendal. And the Black Metal Sword. Sauvagine. Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi. Dyrnwyn. Stormbringer. I could go on. It’s a long fucking list.”
“Then I’m flattered to be stabbed with it.”
“It’s not a fucking joke, Duncan. What is done by the Sword is absolute. Get it? God Himself can’t change the slightest fucking detail.”
The names of legend have awakened Duncan’s inner anthropologist. “Is the converse true? That is, as long as the Sword stays where it is, things can be changed?”
“Some.” Caine hangs his head as if his sigh is a weighted chain around his neck. “It’s complicated.”
“Okay.”
“Look, you need to understand what’s at stake here.”
“End of the world isn’t specific enough?”
“The world ended a long time ago. What we’re doing here is figuring out what comes after. Forever after, or near as fucking dammit.”
“It must be a long story.”
“Not so much. It’s just that it doesn’t always make sense. Or at least, not the kind of sense we’re
used to.”
“You said Causes don’t have effects unless they never happened.”
“Yeah. I can show you some things. Mostly stuff that involves guys who look like me. You need to understand that they’re not me. Not yet. And they’re not your son either. Some of them might be one or the other of us after the Sword is drawn, okay? But there’s no way to know in advance.”
“Huh.” Duncan laces his fingers behind his head and turns his gaze to the limitless blue above. “Turns out to be a lot like one of my fucking culture hero stories after all.”
“Maybe. Close your eyes.”
And he does, and—
“I sometimes wonder if one reason he so intractably resists conventional analysis arises of prejudice inherited from your European aesthetician Aristotle. His analysis of narrative structure in Poetics is invaluable for comprehending the elements of drama; because it is so valuable—and because a human being is after all primarily a creator of narrative—we reflexively reach for Aristotle’s pen to etch our understanding of Caine.
“Aristotelian drama begins with the recognition that the world has become disordered; dramatic structure is the bringing of order from chaos. In tragedy, order is restored through destruction; in comedy, order is restored through marriage or reunion. What is fundamental is the conception that disorder is an unnatural state. Order is not created, but restored.
“I believe this is why we falter in the face of Caine.
“No single principle can capture him completely; as he likes to observe, all rules are rules of thumb—yet this in no way justifies abandoning our attempt. I have compelling reason to reflect upon Caine’s mythometaphysical significance; as your viewers will recall, I was not only destroyed by his hand, but was in a sense created by him as well.
“Caine’s life has nothing to do with the restoration of order. It has nothing to do with restoration of any kind. He sees nothing to restore.
“For Caine, order is delusion: a film of rationality we create to veil the random brutality of existence. His narrative arc leads from one state of chaos to another. And this is related only tangentially to the Prince of Chaos twaddle promulgated by the Church of Beloved Children in Ankhana, which has made of him a convenient Satan to my Yahweh.
“It is more accurate to see in him an expression of natural law: what your thinkers call the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Though this too is incomplete enough to be deceptive; there is nothing random or disordered in his actions. Quite the opposite: the supposed order he destroys is one in which those he loves are in danger or in pain.
“He does not seek safety; for him, safety is illusory at best, and the very concept is a dangerous delusion. He seeks only a more congenial chaos.
“This is, I believe, the root of his power.
“The concept of restoration limits most thinking creatures. We fear to do that which cannot be undone—to break the order that comforts us—because to do so lets chaos in. But because for Caine there is no safety and no order, there is nothing for him to fear. He does the irrevocable without hesitation because for him everything is irrevocable.
“Caine may be Earth’s greatest living master of the absolute.”
— ARTSN. TAN’ELKOTH (FORMERLY MA’ELKOTH, 1ST ANKHANAN EMPEROR AND PATRIARCH OF THE ELKOTHAN CHURCH), A RECORDED INTERVIEW WITH JED CLEARLAKE ON Adventure Update, FOR THE (NEVER AIRED) 7TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION OF For Love of Pallas Ril
“Christ, shut up, will you? If I’d known I’d have to listen to you yap for the rest of my fucking life, I would have let you kill me.”
— CAINE
Blade of Tyshalle
The only one he said good-bye to was the horse-witch.
He rode out into the frost-crackled morning on Carillon. The breeze rolling down through the tree line was bleak with oncoming snow. He didn’t bother to belt closed the serape draped over his hunched-down shoulders; the young stallion pumped out plenty of heat going upslope. With the village an hour behind, he found the witch-herd gathering below a sawtooth ridge, horses of a dozen breeds cropping scrub among shoulders of rock.
The herd parted around them like water. They knew him now. This was a good thing.
The witch-herd wasn’t man-friendly, as wild horses sometimes are. The horses of the witch-herd were feral. Runaways, rescues, desperate escapees, whip-scarred and spur-scarred and brain-scarred, branded inside and out with every kind of damage two-legged creatures can inflict. Kind of like him.
Horses never forget. They can’t. That was kind of like him too.
And it was exactly like her.
Carillon snorted at him when he slid down off the young stallion’s back. He was careful to keep not only his motion but his whole energy smooth and slow; the horse-witch to this day teased him about being jagged as a cat, and it had taken him a long time to figure out she wasn’t just teasing. She wasn’t talking about a housecat.
Carillon nipped at the serape’s hem, gave it a tug, and shook his head, ears twitching in opposite directions. This late in the year, he was in full coat; the pathetic human need for artificial protection against the weather tickled the shit out of him. The man went through his pockets for kober and hocknuts and bits of dried fruit, feeding them gravely one by one to the big dapple-grey, who just as gravely ate them.
Clothing is funny. Food, though, is serious, and sweets are absolutely fucking dire.
“Go on, go find a girlfriend. Go get lucky,” he told the stallion with a take a hike toss of the head. “Somebody around here should.”
Carillon gave his shoulder a farewell nudge and trotted away, quartering toward a tall sleek one-eyed mare with grey burn-scars down her neck below her missing eye, careful to approach on her sighted side.
He stood and watched the young stallion dance his way into a cautious courtship. He couldn’t help remembering the reinforced stud-cell in the stables back at Faith’s manor in Harrakha; if Carillon hadn’t broken out with Hawkwing and Phantom, he would have grown up in solitary confinement. Never would have learned herd manners. Never would have learned anything except that he’s huge and strong and has a dick like a fencepost, and that every once in a while Kylassi the stablemaster would let him out to rape a couple mares.
Now Kylassi was dead, and Carillon had become a seducer with the elegance and grace of Casanova; the mare spun and threatened a kick, but there was a sparkle in her eye and a playful arch to her neck and Carillon respectfully gave way … and just as respectfully sidled toward her once again.
The man shook his head. “I should be so good with women.”
The horse-witch was above him on the slope.
She was in her traveling clothes, that sleeveless leather jerkin and long split skirt that looked like they’d been tanned in an old stump, her cabled arms bare, her long hard legs the color of oiled oak.
She never felt the weather.
On one knee behind a shaggy chestnut pony, one of its rear hooves resting on her other knee, her strong brown hand holding a curving flicker of soot-grey blade. Wild sun-streaked hair floated free over her downturned face and parted behind her neck, where the first faint tips of her own whip-scars gleamed like old ivory above the jerkin’s collar.
He felt a sudden dark lurch in his chest that he just flat refused to consider the meaning of. He’d gotten pretty good at the whole refusing thing.
He’d gone out there with an idea of what he’d tell her: about his difficult relationship with God, and the Black Knives, and the ghosts riding his back these twenty-five years. He expected it to take a lot of talking. The weeks he’d spent with her, drifting with the witch-herd among the mountains and high plains and isolated villages and trading posts of the Harrakhan Marches, couldn’t have prepared her for how deadly complicated his life could suddenly become. Shit, he wasn’t prepared.
But the closer he came, the fewer words he had. By the time he reached her, all he could say was, “You were gone.”
She didn’t look around. He couldn’t surprise her; she knew w
hat the herd knew.
“So were you.” A blurred flicker of her hand exchanged the hoof knife for a short rasp. She began scraping at the inner walls of the pony’s heel.
“Maybe you might tell me what you mean by that.”
“I felt you leave in the night.” She still didn’t look up. “How are you here talking to me, when you’re already gone?”
Steel-colored flakes began to spin out of the iron sky.
“It’s not like that.”
“All right.”
“It isn’t,” he said. “I’m not leaving you.”
“All right.”
“It’s just—you know about God. Ma’elKoth. Home. Whatever. It was a dream.” He shifted his weight. “One of His. Its. Somebody’s.”
“What’s He want?”
“I was Orbek. He’s in trouble. Or he’s going to be.”
“God cares about Orbek now.”
“Not fucking likely.” He folded his arms to tighten up the serape. He was starting to shiver. “He’s just—y’know, just … bait.”
He twitched a shoulder and tried to loosen his jaw. “A hostage.”
She kept working.
“You maybe never heard about the Black Knife clan. About what I did.”
“This is about what you did?”
“I’m pretty sure it is.” He tried to swallow around the razor-knuckled fist tangled in his guts. “It’s about what I did. And about what I didn’t do.”
“So you’re going.”
“When God calls you, His Voice can get real fucking loud.”
“Are you sure it’s Him?”
He spread his hands. “Is there some other god who yanks my chain?”
“That’s what I’m asking.”
A cold whisper went up his pants. It creeped the fuck out of him: like getting his balls licked by a ghost. A carnivorous ghost.
“Doesn’t matter.” Didn’t sound real convincing, so he said it again. “It doesn’t matter. I have to go.”