The Face of Chaos tw-5

by Robert Lynn Asprin

  The one thing that could be said of them for certain was that they weren't Stepsons or Sacred Banders or nonaligned mercenaries from the guild hostel. But there was no convincing the terrorized populace of that.

  And Niko and Janni - under the guise of disaffected mercenaries who had quit the Stepsons, been thrown out of the guild hostel for unspeakable acts, and were currently degenerating Sanctuary-style in the filthy streets of the town thought that they were close to identifying the death squads' leader. Hopefully, this evening or the next, they would be asked to join the murderers in their squalid sport. '

  Not that murder was uncommon in Sanctuary, or squalor. The Maze, now that Niko knew it like his horses' needs or Janni's limits, was not the town's true nadir, only the multi-tiered slum's upper echelon. Worse than the Maze was Shambles Cross, filled with the weak and the meek; worse than the Shambles was Downwind, where nothing moved in the light of day and at night hellish sounds rode the stench on the prevailing east wind across the White Foal. A tri-level hell, then, filled with murderers, sold souls and succubi, began here in the Maze.

  If the death squads had confined themselves to Maze, Shambles, and Downwind, no one would have known about them. Bodies in those streets were nothing new; neither Stepsons nor Rankan soldiers bothered counting them; near the slaughterhouses cheap crematoriums flourished; for those too poor even for that, there was the White Foal, taking ambiguous dross to the sea without complaint. But the squads ventured uptown, to the east side and the centre of Sanctuary itself where the palace hierophants and the merchants lived and looked away from downtown, scented pomanders to their noses.

  The Unicorn crowd no longer turned quiet when Niko and Janni entered; their scruffy faces and shabby gear and bleary eyes proclaimed them no threat to the mendicants or the whores. Competition, they were now considered, and it had been hard to float the legend, harder to live it. Or to live it down, since none of the Stepsons but their task force leader, Crit (who himself had never moved among the barracks ranks, proud and shining with oil and fine weapons and finer ideals) knew that they had not quit but only worked shrouded in subterfuge on Tempus's orders to flush the Nisibisi witch.

  But the emergence of the death squads had raised the pitch, the ante, given the matter a new urgency. Some said it was because Shadowspawn, the thief, was right: the god Vashanka had died and the Rankans would suffer their due. Their due or not, traders, politicians, and moneylenders - the 'oppressors' - were nightly dragged out into the streets, whole families slaughtered or burned alive in their houses, or hacked to pieces in their festooned wagons.

  The agents ordered draughts from One-Thumb's new girl and she came back, cowering but determined, saying that One-Thumb must see their money first. They had started this venture with the barman's help; he knew their provenance; they knew his secret.

  'Let's kill the swillmonger. Stealth,' Janni growled. They had little cash - a few soldats and some Machadi coppers - and couldn't draw their pay until their work was done.

  'Steady, Janni. I'll talk to him. Girl, fetch two Rankan ales or you won't be able to close your legs for a week.'

  He pushed back his bench and strode to the bar, aware that he was only half joking, that Sanctuary was rubbing him raw. Was the god dead? Was Tempus in thrall to the Froth Daughter who kept his company? Was Sanctuary the honeypot of chaos? A hell from which no man emerged? He pushed a threesome of young puds aside and whistled piercingly when he reached the bar. The big bartender looked around elaborately, raised a scar-crossed eyebrow, and ignored him. Stealth counted to ten and then methodically began emptying other patrons' drinks on to the counter. Men were few here; approximations cursed him and backed away; one went for a beltknife but Stealth had a dirk in hand that gave him pause. Niko's gear was dirty, but better than any of these had. And he was ready to clean his soiled blade in any one of them. They sensed it; his peripheral perception read their moods, though he couldn't read their minds. Where his maat - his balance once had been was a cold, sick anger. In Sanctuary he had learned despair and futility, and these had introduced him to fury. Options he once had considered last resorts, off the battlefield, came easily to mind now. Son of the armies, he was learning a different kind of war in Sanctuary, and learning to love the havoc his own right arm could wreak. It was not a substitute for the equilibrium he'd lost when his left-side leader died down by the docks, but if his partner needed souls to buy a better place in heaven, Niko would gladly send him double his comfort's price.

  The ploy brought One-Thumb down to stop him. 'Stealth, I've had enough of you.' One-Thumb's mouth was swollen, his upper lip crusted with sores, but his ponderous bulk loomed large; from the corner of his eye Niko could see the Unicorn's bouncer leave his post and Janni intercept him.

  Niko reached out and grabbed One-Thumb by the throat, even as the man's paw reached under the bar, where a weapon might lie. He pulled him close: 'What you've had isn't even a shadow of what you're going to get, Turn-Turn, if you don't mind your tongue. Turn back into the well-mannered little troll we both know and love, or you won't have a bar to hide behind by morning.' Then, sotto voce: 'What's up?'

  'She wants you,' the barkeep gasped, his face purpling, 'to go to her place by the White Foal at high moon. If it's convenient, of course, my lord.'

  Niko let him go before his eyes popped out of his head. 'You'll put this on our tab?'

  'Just this one more time, beggar boy. Your Whoreson bugger-buddies won't lift a leg to help you; your threats are as empty as your purse.'

  'Care to bet on it?'

  They carried on a bit more, for the crowd's benefit, Janni and the bouncer engaged in a staring match the while. 'Call your cur off, then, and we'll forget about this - this once.' Niko turned, neck aprickle, and headed back towards his seat, hoping that it wouldn't go any further. Not one of the four - bouncer, bar owner. Stepsons - was entirely playing to the crowd.

  When he'd reached his door-facing table, Lastel/One-Thumb called his bruiser off and Janni backed towards Niko, white-faced and trembling with eagerness: 'Let me geld one of them. Stealth. It'll do our reputations no end of good.'

  'Save it for the witch-bitch.'

  Janni brightened, straddling his seat, both arms on the table, digging fiercely with his dirk into the wood: 'You've got a rendezvous?'

  'Tonight, high moon. Don't drink too much.'

  It wasn't the drink that skewed them, but the krrf they snorted, little piles poured into clenched fists where thumb muscles made a well. Still, the drug would keep them alert: it was a long time until high moon, and they had to patrol for marauders while seeming to be marauding themselves. It was almost more than Niko could bear. He'd infiltrated a score of camps, lines and palaces on reconnaissance sorties with his deceased partner, but those were cleaner, quicker actions than this protracted infiltration of Sanctuary, bunghole of the known world. If this evening made an end to it and he could wash and shave and stable his horses better, he'd make a sacrifice to Enlil which the god would not soon forget.

  An hour later, mounted, they set off on their tour of the Maze, Niko thinking that not since the affair with the archmage Askelon and Tempus's sister Cime had his gut rolled up into a ball with this feeling of unmitigated dread. The Nisibisi witch might know him - she might have known him all along. He'd been interrogated by Nisibisi before, and he would fall upon his sword rather than endure it again now, when his dead teammate's ghost still haunted his mental refuge and meditation could not offer him shelter as it once had.

  A boy came running up calling his name and his jug-head black tossed its rust nose high and snorted, ears back, waiting for a command to kill or maim.

  'By Vashanka's sulphurous balls, what now?' Janni wondered.

  They sat their mounts in the narrow street; the moon was just rising over the shantytops; people slammed their shutters tight and bolted their doors. Niko could catch wisps of fear and loathing from behind the houses' facades; two mounted men in these streets meant trouble, no matter w
hose they were.

  The youth trotted up, breathing hard. 'Niko! Niko! The master's so upset. Thank Us I've found you ...' The delicate eunuch's lisp identified him: a servant of the Alekeep's owner, one of the few men Niko thought of as a friend here.

  'What's wrong, then?' He leaned down in his saddle.

  The boy raised a hand and the black snaked his head around fast to bite it. Niko clouted the horse between the ears as the boy scrambled back out of range. 'Come on, come here. He won't try it again. Now, what's your master's message?'

  Tamzen! Tamzen's gone out without her bodyguard, with -' The boy named six of the richest Sanctuary families' fast-living youngsters. 'They said they'd be right back, but they didn't come. It's her party she's missing. The master's beside himself. He said if you can't help him, he'll have to call the Hell Hounds - the palace guard, or go out to the Stepsons' barracks. But there's no time, no time!' the frail eunuch wailed.

  'Calm down, pud. We'll find her. Tell her father to send word to Tempus anyway, it can't hurt to alert the authorities. And say exactly this: that I'll help if I can, but he knows I'm not empowered to do more than any citizen. Say it back, now.'

  Once the eunuch had repeated the words and run off, Janni said: 'How're you going to be in two places at once. Stealth? Why'd you tell him that? It's a job for the regulars, not for us. We can't miss this meet, not after all the bedbugs I've let chomp on me for this...'

  'Seh!' The word meant offal in the Nisi tongue. 'We'll round her and her friends up in short order. They're just blowing off steam - it's the heat and school's end. Come on, let's start at Promise Park.'

  When they got there, the moon showed round and preternatur-ally large above the palace and the wind had died. Thoughts of the witch he must meet still troubled Niko, and Janni's grousing buzzed in his ears: '... we should check in with Crit, let the girl meet her fate - ours will be worse if we're snared by enchantment and no backup alerted to where or how.'

  'We'll send word or stop by the Shambles drop; stop worrying.' But Janni was not about to stop, and Niko's attempts to calm himself, to find transcendent perception in his rest-place and pick up the girl's trail by the heat-track she'd left and the things she'd said and done here were made more difficult by Janni's worries, which jarred him back to concerns he must put aside, and Janni's words, which startled him, over-loud and disruptive, every time he got himself calmed enough to sense Tamzen's energy trail among so many others like red/yellow/pink yarn twined among chiaroscuro trees.

  Tamzen, thirteen and beautiful, pure and full of fun, who loved him with all her heart and had made him promise to 'wait' for her: he'd had her, a thing he'd never meant to do, and had her with her father's knowledge, confronted by the concerned man one night when Niko, arm around the girl's waist, had walked her through the park. 'Is this how you repay a friend's kindness. Stealth?' the father'd asked. 'Better me than any of this trash, my friend. I'll do it right. She's ready, and it wouldn't be long, in any case,' he'd replied while the girl looked between the soldier, twelve years older, and her father, with uncomprehending eyes. He had to find her.

  Janni, as if in receipt of the perceptive spirit Niko tried now to reclaim, swore and mentioned that Niko'd had no business getting involved with her, a child.

  'I'm not your type, and as for women, I drink from no other man's tainted cup.' So Niko broached an uneasy subject: Janni was no Sacred Bander; his camaraderie had limits; Niko's need for touch and love the other man knew but could not fill; they had an attenuated pairbond, not complete as Sacred Banders knew it, and Janni was uncomfortable with the innuendo and assumptions of the other singles, and Niko's unsated needs as well.

  The silence come between them then gave Stealth his chance to find the girl's red time-shadow, a hot ghost-trail to follow south-west through the Maze...

  As the moon climbed high its light shone brighter, giving Maze and then Shambles shape and teasing light; colour was almost present among the streets, so bright it shone, a reddish cast like blood upon its face, so that when common Sanctuary horrors lay revealed at intersections, they seemed worse even than they were. Janni saw two whores fight for a client; he saw blood run black in gutters from thugs and just incautious folk. Their horses' hoofbeats cleared their path, though, and Maze was left behind, as willing to let them go as they to leave it, although Janni muttered at every vile encounter their presence interrupted, wishing they could intervene.

  Once he thought they'd glimpsed a death squad, and urged Stealth to come alert, but the strange young fighter shook his head and hushed him, slouched loose upon his horse as if entranced, following some trail that neither Janni nor any mortal man with God's good fear of magic should have seen. Janni's heart was troubled by this boy who was too good at craft, who had a charmed sword and dagger given him by the entelechy of dreams, yet left them in the barracks, decrying magic's price. But what was this, if not sorcery? Janni watched Niko watch the night and take them deep into shadowed alleys with all the confidence a mage would flaunt. The youth had offered to teach him 'controls' of mind, to take him 'up through the planes and get your guide and your twelfth-plane name'. But Janni was no connoisseur of witchcraft; like boy-loving, he left it to the Sacred Banders and the priests. He'd gotten into this with Niko for worldly advantage; the youth ten years his junior was pure genius in a fight; he'd seen him work at Jubal's and marvelled even in the melee of the sack. Niko's reputation for prowess in the field was matched only by Straton's, and the stories told of Niko's past. The boy had trained among Successors, the Nisibisi's bane, wild guerrillas, mountain commandos who let none through Wizardwall's defiles without gold or life in tithe, who'd sworn to reclaim their mountains from the mages and the warlocks and held out, outlaws, countering sorcery with swords. In a campaign such as the northern one coming, Niko's skills and languages and friends might prove invaluable. Janni, from Machad, had no love for Rankans, but it was said Niko served despite a blood hatred: Rankans had sacked his town nameless; his father had died fighting Rankan expansion when the boy was five. Yet he'd come south on Abarsis's venture, and stayed when Tempus inherited the band.

  When they crossed the Street of Shingles and headed into Shambles Cross, the pragmatic Janni spoke a soldier's safe-conduct prayer and touched his warding charm. A confusion of turns within the ways high-grown with hovels which cut off view and sky, they heard commotion, shouting men and running feet.

  They spurred their horses and careened round corners, forgetful of their pose as independent reavers, for they'd heard Stepsons calling manoeuvre codes. So it was that they came sliding their horses down on haunches so hard sparks flew from iron-shod hooves, cutting off the retreat of three running on foot from Stepsons, and vaulted down to the cobbles to lend a hand.

  Niko's horse, itself, took it in its mind to help, and charged past them, reins dragging, head held high, to back a fugitive against a mudbrick wall. ''Seh! Run, Vis!' they heard, and more in a tongue Janni thought might be Nisi, for the exclamation was.

  By then Niko had one by the collar and two quarrels shot by close to Janni's ear. He hollered out his identity and called to the shooters to cease their fire before he was skewered like the second fugitive, pinned by two bolts against the wall. The third quarry struggled now between the two on-duty Stepsons, one of whom called out to Janni to hold the second. It was Straton's voice, Janni realized, and Straton's quarrels pinning the indigent by cape and crotch against the wall. Lucky for the delinquent it had been: Straton's bolts had pierced no vital spot, just clothing.

  It was not till then that Janni realized that Niko was talking to the first fugitive, the one his horse had pinned, in Nisi, and the other answering back, fast and low, his eyes upon the vicious horse, quivering and covered with phosphorescent froth, who stood watchful by his master, hoping still that Niko would let him pound the quarry into gory mud.

  Straton and his partner, dragging the first unfortunate between them, came up, full of thanks and victory:'... finally got one, alive. Jann
i, how's yours?'

  The one he held at crossbow-point was quiet, submissive, a Sanctuarite, he thought, until Straton lit a torch. Then they saw a slave's face, dark and arch like Nisibisi's were, and Straton's partner spoke for the first time: 'That's Haught, the slave-bait.' Critias moved forward, torch in hand. 'Hello, pretty. We'd thought you'd run or died. We've lots to ask you, puppy, and nothing we'd rather do tonight ...' As Crit moved in and Janni stepped back, Janni was conscious that Niko and his prisoner had fallen silent.

  Then the slave, amazingly, straightened up and raised its head, reaching within its jerkin. Janni levered his bow, but the hand came out with a crumpled paper in it, and this he held forth, saying: 'She

  freed me. She said this says so. Please ... I know nothing, but that she's freed me ...'

  Crit snatched the feathered parchment from him, held it squinting in the torch's light. 'That's right, that's what it says here.' He rubbed his jaw; then stepped forward. The slave flinched, his handsome face turned away. Crit pulled out the bolts that held him pinned, grunting; no blood followed; Straton's quarrels penetrated clothing only; the slave crouched down, unscathed but incapacitated by his fear. 'Come as a free man, then, and talk to us. We won't hurt you, boy. Talk and you can go.'

  Niko, then, intruded, his prisoner beside him, his horse following close behind. 'Let them go, Crit.'

  ' What? Niko, forget the game, tonight. They'll not live to tell you helped us. We've been needing this advantage too long -'

  'Let them go, Crit.' Beside him his prisoner cursed or hissed or intoned a spell, but did not break to run. Niko stepped close to his task force leader, whispering: 'This one's an ex-commando, a fighter from Wizardwall come upon hard times. Do him a service, as I must, for services done.'

  'Nisibisi? More's the reason, then, to take them and break them-'

  'No. He's on the other side from warlocks; he'll do us more good free in the streets. Won't you. Vis?'

  The foreign-looking ruffian agreed, his voice thick with an accent detectable even in his three clipped syllables.