Matthew Woodring Stover - Caine 01 -Heroes Die

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Book Information:

Genre: Blend of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Author: Kate Elliott

Name: Child of Flame

Series: Book one in theCaine series

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MATTHEW WOODRING STOVER

HEROES DIE

A Novel of Caine

Exclusive Interview with Matthew Woodring Stover(at the end of the book)

prologue

with my handon the doorjamb, some buried-alive instinct thumps within my chest: this is going to hurt.

I take a deep breath and step inside.

The bedchamber of Prince-Regent Toa-Phelalhon is really pretty restrained, when you consider

that the guy in the bed there rules the second-largest empire on Overworld. The bed itself is a modest

eight-poster, only half an acre or so; the extra four posts—each an overcarved slab of rose-veined thierril

thicker than my thigh—support lamps of gleaming brass. Long yellow flames like blades of spears waver

gently in the breeze from the concealed service door. I close the door soundlessly behind me, and its

brocade paper-covered surface blends seamlessly into the pattern of the wall.

I wade through the billowing carpet of silken cushions, a knee-high cloud of vividly shimmering

primary colors. A flash of maroon and gold to my left, and my heart suddenly hammers—but it's only my

own livery, my servant's dress, captured briefly in the spun-silver mirror atop the Prince-Regent's

commode of lacquered Lipkan krim. The reflection shows me the spell, the enchanted face I present:

smooth, rounded cheeks, sandy hair, a trace of peach fuzz. I tip myself a blurry wink and smile with my

sandpaper lips, ease out a silent sigh, and keep moving.

The Prince-Regent lies propped on pillows larger than my whole bed and snores happily, the silver

hairs of his mustache puffing in and out with each wheeze. A book lies facedown across his ample chest:

one of Kimlarthen's series of Korish romances. This draws another smile out of my dry mouth; who

would have figured the Lion of Prorithun for a sentimentalist? Fairy tales—simple stories for simple

minds, a breath of air to cool brows overheated by the complexities of real life.

I set the golden tray down softly on the table beside his bed. He stirs, shifting comfortably in his

sleep—and freezing my blood. His movement sends a puff of lavender scent up from the pillows. My

fingers tingle. His hair, unbound for napping, falls in a steel-colored spray around his face. That noble

brow, those flashing eyes, that ruggedly carved chin exposed by careful shaving within his otherwise full

beard—he's everybody's perfect image of the great king. The statue of him on his rearing charger—the

one that stands in the Court of the Gods near the Fountain of Prorithun— will make a fine, inspiring

memorial.

His eyes pop open when he feels my hand grip his throat: I'm far too professional to try to stifle his

shout with a hand over the mouth, and only a squeak gets past my grip. Further struggle is discouraged

by his close-up view of my knife, its thick, double-edged point an inch from his right eye.

I bite my tongue, and saliva gushes into my mouth to moisten my throat. My voice is steady: very

low and very flat.

"It's customary, at times like this, to say a few words. A man shouldn't die with no understanding

of why he's been murdered. I do not pride myself on my eloquence, and so I will keep this simple."

I lean close and stare past my knife blade into his eyes. "The Monasteries kept you on the Oaken

Throne by supporting your foolish action against Lipke in the Plains War; the Council of Brothers felt, on

balance, that you would be a strong enough ruler to hold the Empire together, at least until the Child

Queen reaches majority."

His face is turning purple, and veins in his neck bulge against my grip. If I don't talk fast, I' have

choked him out before F m done. I sigh through my teeth and pick up the pace.

"They have discovered, though, that you're an idiot. Your punitive taxes are weakening both

Kirisch-Nar and Jheled-Kaarn— they tell me ten thousand free peasants starved to death in Kaarn alone

last winter. Now you've bloodied the nose of Lipke over that stupid iron mine in the Gods' Teeth, and

you're making noises like you want to fight a full-scale war over two crappy little eastern provinces. You

have ignored and insulted the Lipkan trade delegation and have dismissed the Council of Brothers'

admonitions. They've decided that you're no longer fit to rule, if you ever were.

They are tired of waiting. They've paid me a great deal of money to remove you from the throne.

Blink twice if you understand."

His eyes widen stiffly, bug out staring from his head as though he'd make them lidless if only he

could, and his throat works under my hand. He mouths words at me that my poor lipreading skill can't

follow beyond theinitial please please please. He'd like to argue with me, no doubt, or perhaps request

leniency or asylum for his wife and two daughters. I can grant neither; if a war of succession follows this

murder, they'll have to take their chances along with the rest of us.

Finally his eyeballs begin to dry, and he blinks—once. Funny how our reflexes conspire to kill us,

sometimes. In terms of my contract, I'm to ensure his comprehension; if I'm to do this properly, I should

wait for his next blink. All proprieties should be observed, in the death of a king.

His gaze shifts minutely—the old warrior is going to make a try forme, a last desperate convulsion

of his will to survive, calling on other, more recent reflexes to rescue him.

When it's a choice between observing the proprieties and getting caught in the Prince-Regent's

bedchamber, nine infinite floors up the spire of the Colhari Palace, the proprieties can fuck off.

I jam the knife into his eye. Bone crackles and blood sprays. I use the knife to twist his face away

from me: a bloodstain on this livery could be fatal, on my way out. He flops like a salmon that's found

unexpected land beneath an upstream leap. This is only his body's last unconscious attempt to live; it goes

hand-in-hand with the release of his bowels and bladder. He shits and pisses all over himself and his

satin-weave sheets—another one of those primordial reflexes, a futile dodge to make his meat

unappetizing to the predator.

Screw it. I'm not hungry anyway.

He quiets after a year or so. I brace my free hand against his forehead and work the knife back

and forth. It comes free with a wet scrape, and I set about the grisly part of this job.

The serrated edge slices easily through the flesh of his neck, but grates against his third cervical

vertebra. A slightly altered angle of attack puts the edge between the third and fourth, and a couple

seconds' sawing loosens his head. The copper scent of his blood is so thick I can smell it through the

stench of his shit; my stomach twists until I can barely breathe. I uncover the golden tray that I'd carried

up from the kitchens, gently set the plates of steaming food to one side, and put Toa-Phelathon's head in

their place, picking it up carefully by the hair so that none of the gore that drains from it will stain my

clothes. I replace the golden dome and strip off my bloodstained gloves, tossing them carelessly onto the

body beside the discarded knife. My hands are clean.

I lift the tray to my shoulder and take a deep breath. The easy part's over. Now I have to get out

of here alive.

The trickiest part of this escape is the first hurdle: getting away from the body. If I pass the pair of

guards at the service door cleanly, I'll be out of the palace before anyone knows the old man is dead. My

adrenals sing to me a potent tune that makes my hands tingle and raises goose bumps up my back. My

heartbeat thunders in my ears.

In the upper left corner of my vision, the red Exit Square blinks. I ignore it, even as it moves with

my eyes like an afterimage of the sun.

I'm only halfway across the room when the service door swings open. Jemson Thai, the master

steward, starts talking before he even clears the doorway. "Your pardon, Majesty," he begins in a hasty

breathless gabble, "but there is a rumor of an impostor among the serv..."

Jemson Thai takes in the headless corpse on the bed, he takes in me, and his gabble trails into

gasping. His eyes go round and the color drains from his face; his mouth works like he's strangling. close

the distance between us with a long, smoothcroise and kick him in the throat. It drops him like a bag of

rocks, and now he's strangling for real as he tries to breathe around the splinters of his larynx, clawing at

his throat and writhing on the service-passage floor.

I didn't even tip the tray.

One of the guards is, will be, easy. With a wordless exclamation he drops to one knee beside Thai

and tries stupidly to help him. What's he think he's gonna do, thump the poor bastard's back until he

coughs up his windpipe? The other isn't in sight; smarter than his partner, he's pressed against the wall of

the service passage, waiting for me.

Both of these guards wear long sturdy hauberks under their mantles of maroon and gold, with

padded chainmail coifs reinforced by studded steel skullcaps. Toa-Phelathon spared no expense in

outfitting his Household Knights; my knives are useless against them, but hey, that's all right—I'm deep in

it, now.

The waiting is over. I'm happy again.

The smarter guard has a brainstorm and begins to shout for help.

I uncover the tray and gravely regard Toa-Phelathon. The lower third of his flowing hair is soaked

in blood, but his face isn't too contorted; even with the ruin of his eye he's still clearly recognizable. I

thrust the tray through the doorway about chest high; the sight of its cargo cuts off the shouted alarm as

efficiently as an arrow down the throat.

While the portion of the guard's brain that handles signal processing still struggles to assimilate the

concept of the disembodied head of his king, I skip out into the service passage; I have two seconds,

maybe more, before Smartguard there can use his mind for anything beyond saying, "Huh?"

The guard on one knee claws at his sword as he surges to his feet. I drop the tray with a clang,

and the head bounces away as I get a hand on the dumb guard's wrist and keep that blade where it

belongs. I follow with a sharp headbutt that rings in my ears with a slapstickbonk; Dumbguard's nose

spreads like deviled ham, and his eyes drift together. I wrap both forearms around his coif and pivot

away from him, twisting him sideways into a hangman's throw that sends him tumbling forward to crash

into Smartguard. The padding behind his chainmail coif didn't give his neck enough support to save him:

his neck bones parted with a sharp pop as I levered him over my back. He twitches out the last of his life

as I leap lightly across Jemson Thai's convulsing body to go over and kill Smartguard.

That's when Toa-Phelathon gets his piece of me, a bit of petty revenge that must have him

snickering in the afterlife.

I'm coming down—it's just a little jump—but I've got my eyes on Smartguard, who's disentangling

himself from Dumbguard, and my foot lands on Toa-Phelathon's head.

It rolls out from under me, and I upend like Elmer Fudd.

I barely manage to take the fall on my shoulder instead of the back of my neck, and only the

narrowness of the service corridor saves my life: when Smartguard swings his broadsword at my head,

its tip hangs up in the woodwork. I try to roll away, but I come up against Jemson Thai, who's still

choking, and this time Smart-guard gets it right. Instead of swinging his sword, he lunges with a stiff arm

and drives a foot of steel through my liver.

A sword in the belly is a disconcerting thing: it doesn't really hurt, much, but it's really fuckingcold,

it radiates freezing cold that surges through your whole body and drains the strength out of your legs, like

the brain freeze you get from chewing up an ice cube only you feel it all over, and you can feel the blade

sliding around in there, slicing things up, and frankly, the whole process sucks, if you ask me.

A couple of pounds of steel in the belly also plays fuckass with the forcepattern of the spell that

makes me look like a teenage eunuch. The magick flickers like a dying CRT, and the discharge lifts hair

on my neck and makes my beard tingle.

Smarlguard pulls the blade instead of twisting it around in there—a mistake of inexperience that

I'm going to kill him for. It scrapes a rib on the way out, a sensation that's analogous to fingernails across

a blackboard combined with having your teeth drilled without anesthetic; screaming clouds of blackness

bloom inside my eyes. I moan and shudder with pain, and Smartguard mistakes these for death rattle and

convulsion—more inexperience.

"There, you bastard, an easy death is better than you deserve!" he says.

Tears well in his eyes for his fallen lord, and I don't have the heart to tell him that I agree with him.

He bends toward me a little as the enchanted disguise finally fades, and his eyes go wide. There's awe in

his voice when he says, "Hey, you could be...you look like, likeCaine! Youare, aren' t you? I mean, who

else would...Great K'hool, I've killed Caine! I'm gonnabe famous!"

I don't think so.

I hook my right toe around his ankle to hold his leg while I stamp his knee with my left. It snaps,

loudly, and he collapses into a wailing heap. That's the trouble with chainmail: it's no defense against joints

bending in ways they're not designed to bend. He doesn't drop his sword, though; the kid has heart.

I come to my feet with an acrobat's kip, tearing something inside my wounded belly. He jabs at me

with the sword—but from the ground he's slow, and it's easy to slap my palms together around the flat of

the blade, kick his wrist, and take it away from him. I flip the sword end-for-end and neatly catch the hilt.

"Too bad, kid," I tell him. "You'd've been pretty good, if you'd lived."

I shortarm the swing, and it takes him across the top of the ear, half an inch below the studded rim

of his skullcap. The edge doesn't penetrate the chain coif, but it doesn't have to; I'm good with swords,

and the impact alone is enough to fracture his skull and kill him.

I pause a bare moment to get my breath and take stock of my situation. I'm bleeding, front and

back where he ran me through, and no doubt internally as well. I figure I've got ten minutes of useful

action before I hit shock. Could be longer, could be a lot less; depends on how much damage that

broadsword actually did and how badly I'm hemorrhaging.

In that time I must descend eight heavily guarded floors of the Colhari Palace and lose myself in

the crowds of Ankhana's Old Town—all while carrying the head of the Prince-Regent. The alarm's been

raised, and I'm probably bleeding to death, but that's no reason to leave him behind; without the head, I

don't get paid, and besides, carrying a severed head won't make me any more conspicuous than I

already am. With blood running down my legs, I can't bluff, I can't hide, and I'll leave a trail behind

wherever I go. Now I can hear the pounding of booted feet approaching at a run.

The red Exit Square is back at the upper left corner of my field of vision, flashing on and off.

Yeah, all right. Time to go.

I get the rhythm of it and start triggering my blink reflex in synch with the flashing. The service

passage and the dying men around me fade into nonexistence.

hari michaelson's eyesratcheted open when the Motorola rep swung back the helmet, and he

ground his teeth against the sliding non-pain of the IV needle that the rep's assistant slowly drew out of

his neck. He lifted his hand and hacked a cough against the thick callus that ridged his knuckles, and the

Motorola rep hastily produced a paper cup for him to spit into. He stretched slowly, with much creaking

and joint popping, and sat forward in the simichair, elbows to knees. His straight black hair was glossy

with sweat, and his eyes of the same color were rimmed in red; he turned away from the reps and rested

his face on his hands.

The Motorola girl and her assistant both looked at him with the kind of hopeful puppy-dog eyes

that sickened him.

From the depths of an immense, genuine calf-leather lounger, Marc Vilo asked, "Well? How was

it, Hari? What do you think?"

Hari took a deep breath, sighed it out, scratched his beard, rubbed the sallow scar that crossed

the bridge of his crooked, twice-broken nose, and tried to find the energy to speak. He called this,

privately, his post-Caine shits: a shattering cocaine-crash depression that hit him every time he came back

to Earth and had to be Hari Michaelson again. Even today—not even a real Adventure, only a

three-year-old recording—had been enough to trigger it.

And let's be honest: There was more going on here than post-Caine shits. There was a sizzling hole

in his guts—like he'd swallowed acid and it had burned its way out through the skin, right alongside the

scar Smartguard's broadsword had left on his liver. Whythis cube, out of all Caine's Adventures? What

in Christ's name was Vilothinking"?

To bring him here and put him through part ofA Servant of the Empire again—even a small

part—was an exquisite refinement of cruelty, a lemon squeezed into an already-salted wound. It chewed

at him, gnawed that hole in his guts like a little fucking rat.

Most of the time, he could kid himself along, pretend that he wasn't really hurt, pretend that this

empty burning ache that took over his chest whenever he thought of Shanna was just indigestion, just an

ulcer. Most of the time, he could pretend the pain came from a hole in his guts, instead of the hole in his

life. He'd gotten good at kidding himself: for months now, he'd had himself believing he was getting over

her.

What the fuck, huh? Practice makes perfect.

"Hari?" Vilo leaned forward in his lounger, an edge of dangerous impatience sharpening his voice.

"Everybody'swaiting on you, kid. Let's have it."

Slowly, Hari managed to force words from his throat. "It's illegal, Biz'man. This is illegal tech."

The Motorola rep gasped like a Leisurewoman meeting a flasher. "I assure you,I personally

assureboth of you, this technology was developed entirely indepen—"

Vilo cut her off with a smoke-trailingshut up wave of his cigar, a thick black ConCristo almost as

big as he was. "I know it'sillegal, Hari, shit. Am I an idiot? I just want to know if it's any good."

Mark Vilo was a little salty-haired fighting cock, a self-upcasted Businessman pushing sixty from

the far side, a swaggering bowlegged bastard who was the majority stockholder in Vilo

Intercontinental—ostensibly a worldwide transport firm. He was the lord and master of this sprawling

estate in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos, and was the Business Patron of the superstar Actor whom

everyone called Caine.

"Good?" Hari shrugged, sighing. Why argue? "Yeah, you better believe it. Next best thing to being

there." He turned to the Motorola rep. "Your neurochem feed—that's a fake, isn't it?"

The rep made protesting noises until Hari cut her off with a weary, "Ahh, shut up."

He was glad, really, that the Motorola rep was an idiot; it gave him something to think about

beyond the cold hurt that lived in Shanna's eyes whenever he pictured her face. It had been months since

he'd been able to even imagine her with a smile.Keep your mind on fucking business, he snarled at

himself. He turned to Vilo and tried to stretch some life back into his voice by flexing his aching

shoulders. "Don't let them shit you, Biz'man. This whole Exit Square business, what do they call that?

Blink in Synch?"

The Motorola rep offered a glassy, professional smile. "It's only one of the cutting-edge features

that make this unit the best value on the market today."

Hari ignored her. "So you trigger your blink reflex to exit the program," he went on. "It's not a

mechanical trigger. It reads the impulse as feedback on the inducers; this is wholly owned Studio

technology, and the Studio takes this kind of shit seriously. The neurochem feed is just camouflage.

Nothing's going through that line but the hypnotics—and not much of them, if you want to know: they

pooched the feed. They're playing all the sensation through the same kind of direct neural induction that

the Studio uses in their first-hander chairs—and they've got it turned up too high. The smell, when I cut

off Toa-Phelathon's head? The real thing's not that potent. And they had the adrenal level ja/zed so high I

could barely breathe. Finally, the sword in the guts, ithurt too much."

"But, but Entertainer Michaelson—" the rep sputtered, exchanging a quick worried glance with her

assistant,"—we have to make itbelievable, you know, I mean—"

Hari rose slowly; the post-Caine shits made him feel boneless, as if only extreme concentration

kept his head on his shoulders— but a little bit of Caine's edgy threat began to leak into his voice, into the

cold darkness of his eyes.

He lifted the hem of his tunic to expose the brown lines of the twin scars, front and back, on his left

side below the short ribs, where Smartguard's broadsword had pierced his liver just less than three years

ago. "You see these? You want totouch them? So who should know better? You?"

"Hari, Jesus Christ, don't be such an asshole," Vilo said. He waved his cigar dismissively at the

rep. "Don't mind him; it's not personal, y'know. He's like this with everybody."

"I'm telling you," Hari said lifelessly, "they screwed it up. If that sword scraping my rib had hurt as

much when it really happened as it did just now, I'd have spent a couple more seconds stunned. When

something hurts that much, there's not much you can do except moan or scream, writhe around, or pass

right out. That poor bastard guard would have put his next thrust into my throat. All right?"

He opened a hand toward Vilo and sighed. "You want to invest in proprietary tech, that's your

business. But I'd think you wouldn't want to deal with idiots who can't even tune an induction helmet."

Vilo grunted. "Invest, nothing. I'm just gonna buy the goddamn thing, Hari; this is a quote-unquote

prototype. Not even a dinosaur like Motorola is gonna freemarket tech that pirates Studio effects. I just

wanted to have one so I can go over cubes on my own time, without blowing a couple weeks on a

first-hander berth." "Yeah, whatever. Do what you want."

"Hari..." Vilo said mildly, returning his ConCristo to a corner of his mouth. "Attitude."

It was a mild chill that settled into the silence Vilo's admonition left in its wake, just enough that the

rep and her assistant exchanged a flickering glance—no one actually shivered. Vilo blandly nodded

toward the reps, indicatingput on your company manners, son.

Hari lowered his head sullenly. "Sorry, Biz'man," he muttered. "I'm out of line. But I've got one

more question—with your permission."

Vilo gave his lord-of-the-manor nod, and Hari turned to the woman from Motorola. "The cubes

this chair plays—they're not standard Studio-issue recordings. They can't be; standard cubes don't carry

scent or touch/pain data, and I can't believe your in-ducers can read off the neurochem channel and

compensate for time lag and dosage and everything else. You're getting bootleg masters from

somewhere, aren't you?"

The Motorola rep smiled her best corporate smile and said, "I'm afraid I can't answer that. But, as

guaranteed under the purchase contract, Biz'man Vilo will receive cubes appropriate for this

equipment—

"That's enough," Hari said disgustedly. He turned back to Vilo. "Look, it's like this. These idiots

have another idiot inside the Studio processing labs who's feeding them bootleg masters. First, that means

that what you'll get is gonna be, most likely,uncut. A two-week Adventure is going to run two weeks in

that chair, just like if you were sitting in the Cavea in a first-hander berth, only worse. This chair doesn't

have twitch-response units, comfort hookups, or an internal food supply. Second, they'll be feeding you a

steady stream of these bootlegs. There'll be records of regular delivery, that kind of thing, and one of

these days, their idiot is gonna get caught. Then before they cyborg him and sell him for a Worker, the

Studio cops will get enough out of him to roll up the whole network, which they'll turn over to their

friends in the government. And these won't be friendly and courteous CID guys knocking on your door,

because this isn't just tech violation anymore. By now, it's about intellectual property, and copyright

infringement, and all of a sudden you're looking at the Social Police. Even you, Businessman, do not want

to get on the short end of the fuckstick with Soapy."

Vilo leaned back in his chair, snugging his head against its gel-pack headrest. He puffed a couple

rolling mushroom clouds of his stinking cigar smoke, then sat up again, a half grin wrinkling his

crow's-feet. "Hari, you still think like a criminal, you know that? Twenty years later, you're still a street

punk at heart."

Hari stretched his lips into a humorless smile in response; he didn't know what that was supposed

to mean, and he didn't want to ask.

Vilo went on, "Why'nt you go on up to the pond and have a drink while I wrap things down here,

hey?"

There was a time, Hari reflected dully, that to be dismissed like a child, like a little fucking kid,

would have felt like a slap. Now, it produced only a blank amazement that he still seemed to be going

about his business, going on with his life, as though it still had meaning.

But it was an act, as hollow a pretense as was Caine himself. Without Shanna, the world was

empty, and he couldn't really manage to care about anything at all. He nodded. "Sure. See you there."

hari prowled thesunlitrocks that surrounded the shimmering pond and the twin waterfalls that fed it.

The pond was a beautiful piece of work: only the faint scent of chlorine and a sneaking conviction that

nature wouldn't have arranged stone and water with so much attention to human comforts betrayed its

artificial origins.

Hari paced back and forth, sat down, stood up. Once or twice he started out toward the scrub

desert, into the gritty wind and barren mounds of slag and tailings from the surrounding mines. Each time,

he stopped at the fringes of Vilo's artificial oasis, came back, and started the cycle over again. He stared

out at the toxic sludge of the barrens with a kind of wistfulness; he could imagine himself walking among

the heaps, all the way up into the dead rock of the mountains. He wasn't sure that tramping through the

poisoned waste would make him feel any better, but he knew it couldn't make him feel much worse.

Take it easy,he told himself over and over again.It's not like she's dead. And each time, a dark

whisper in his heart told him that maybe he'd be better off if she was. Or if he was.

With her death, he could start to heal; with his, he'd be beyond pain.

What the fuck was taking Vilo so goddamn long? Hari hated waiting, always had. Nothing to do

but stand around and think—and there were too many things in his life that didn't bear thinking about.

He looked around for something, anything, he could use to distract himself. He even looked up the

wall of the artificial cliffs down which the waterfalls streamed into the pond, thinking that maybe a

fifty-meter free climb up a vertical water-slickened face might be just the thing to lake his mind off

Shanna.

This had been his tactic ever since the separation: Keep busy. Divert the mind. Don't think about

it. And it was a good tactic, one that worked, day to day. Sometimes hours would pass, days, even a

week, during which he barely thought of her.

But he'd always been a better tactician than he was a strategist. He won every battle, but on days

like today he couldn't help realizing that he was losing the war.

Even climbing the fucking waterfall wouldn't help; his experienced eye picked out innumerable

handholds and footholds that could only have been put there by intention. This cliff had beendesigned to

be climbed, and he could go up it more easily than most men could climb a ladder. He shook his head

disgustedly.

"Hey, Caine!" called one of the girls who swam in the pond. "Want to come in and play?"

In the pond a couple of the ubiquitous Vilo Intercontinental party girls had been swimming and

splashing and dunking each other. Long-limbed, lean, athletic, with perfect teeth and breasts that were

better yet, their job was to be available to Businessman Vilo's guests. They both were staggeringly

beautiful. Surgical glamour was part of their bonus for their five years' service, at the end of which they'd

be released to seek their leggy fortunes elsewhere. They were playing up for him now, arranging lovely

flashes of thigh and butt, the graceful arc of a well-toned back thrusting a nipple toward the sky; if it

hadn't been so deliberate it might've been appealing.

Now the one who had called to him slid behind the other and drew her into an embrace; one hand

cupped her breast while the other slid below the water's surface toward her crotch. She bent her graceful

neck to kiss her partner's shoulder, all the while inviting him with her eyes.

Hari sighed. He supposed he might as well jump in; at least fucking a couple party girls would have

a certain honesty. Unlike the celebrity-hungry women who put themselves in his way wherever he went,

these girls were professionals. There wouldn't be any pretense that they cared about him, or he about

them.

A few years ago, sure, he would have done it. But now, so late in his life, after he had finally found

someone who had loved him, whom he had loved, who had made truth of the ancient euphemismmaking

love, he couldn't. He couldn't even get interested. Fucking those girls would be like sticking his dick in a

knothole: a complicated, slightly painful way to masturbate.

A waistcoat-and-cummerbund servant slid silently up beside Hari and offered a tray with a snifter

of scotch. "Laphroaig, right?" Hari nodded and took it. "Uh, Caine?"

Hari sighed. "Call me Hari, all right? Everybody forgets I have a name."

"Oh, okay, uh,Hari. I just wanted to say, y'know, I'm a big fan of yours, I even, well, y'know...ah,

never mind."

"All right."

But the servant—Andre, Hari thought his name might be—still hovered expectantly at his elbow.

Hari took a slow pull from the snifter and watched the girls swim.

Matthew Woodring Stover - Caine 01 -Heroes Die

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