Niko nodded. 'See, Crit? This is Vis. Vis, this is Crit. I'll be the contact for his reports. Go on, now. You, too, freedman, go. Run!'
And the two, taking Niko at his word, dashed away before Crit could object.
The third, in Straton's grasp, writhed wildly. This was a failed hawkmask, very likely, in Straton's estimation the prize of the three and one no word from Niko could make the mercenary loose.
Niko agreed that he'd not try to save any ofJubal's minions, and that was that... almost. They had to keep their meeting brief; any could be peeking out from windowsill or shadowed door; but as they mounted up to ride away, Janni saw a cowled figure rising from a pool of darkness occluding the intersection. It stood, full up, momentarily, and moonrays struck its face. Janni shuddered; it was a face with hellish eyes, too far to be so big or so frightening, yet their met glance shocked him like icy water and made his limbs to shake.
'Stealth! Did you see that?'
'What?' Niko snapped, defensive over interfering in Crit's operation. 'See what?'
'That - thing ...'Nothing was there, where he had seen it. 'Nothing... I'm seeing things.' Crit and Straton had reached their horses; they heard hoof beats receding in the night.
'Show me where, and tell me what.'
Janni swung up on his mount and led the way; when they got there they found a crumpled body, a youth with bloated tongue outstuck and rolled up eyes as if a fit had taken him, dead as Abarsis in the street. 'Oh, no ..." Niko, dismounted, rolled the corpse. 'It's one of Tamzen's friends.' The silk-and-linened body came clearer as Janni's eyes accustomed themselves to moonlight after the glare of the torch. They heaved the corpse up upon Janni's horse who snorted to bear a dead thing but forbore to refuse outright. 'Let's take it somewhere. Stealth. We can't carry it about all night.' Only then did Janni remember they'd failed to report to Crit their evening's plan.
At his insistence, Niko agreed to ride by the Shambles Cross safe haven, caulked and shuttered in iron, where Stepsons and street men and IIsig/Rankan garrison personnel, engaged in chasing hawkmasks and other covert enterprises, made their slum reports in situ.
They managed to leave the body there, but not to alert the task force leader; Crit had taken the hawkmask wherever he thought the catch would serve them best; nothing was in the room but the interrogation wheel and bags of lime to tie on unlucky noses and truncheons of sailcloth filled with gravel and iron filings to change the most steadfast heart. They left a note, carefully coded, and hurried back on to the street. Niko's brow was furrowed, and Janni, too, was in a hurry to see if they might find Tamzen and her friends asa living group, not one by one, cold corpses in the gutter.
The witch Roxane had house snakes, a pair brought down from Nisibis, green and six feet long, each one. She brought them into her study and set their baskets by the hearth. Then, bowl of water by her side, she spoke the words that turned them into men. The facsimiles aped a pair of Stepsons; she got them clothes and sent them off. Then she took the water bowl and stirred it with her finger until a whirlpool sucked and writhed. This she spoke over, and out to sea beyond the harbour a like disturbance began to rage. She took from her table six carven ships with Beysib sails, small and filled with wax miniatures of men. These she launched into the basin with its whirlpool and spun and spun her finger round until the flagships of the fleet foundered, then were sunk and sucked to lie, at last, upon the bottom of the bowl. Even after she withdrew her finger the water raged awhile. The witch looked calmly into her maelstrom and nodded once, content. The diversion would be timely; the moon, outside her window, was nearly high, scant hours from its zenith.
Then it was time to take Jagat's report and send the death squads - or dead squads, for none of those who served in them had life of their own to lead into town.
Tamzen's heart was pounding, her mouth dry and her lungs burning. They had run a long way. They were lost and all six knew it, Phryne was weeping and her sister was shaking and crying she couldn't run, her knees wouldn't hold her; the three boys left were talking loud and telling all how they'd get home if they just stayed in a group - the girls had no need to fear. More krrf was shared, though it made things worse, not better, so that a toothless crone who tapped her stick and smacked her gums sent them flying through the streets.
No one talked about Mehta's fate; they'd seen him with the dark-clad whore, seen him mesmerized, seen him take her hand. They'd hid until the pair walked on, then followed - the group had sworn to stay together, wicked adventure on their minds; all were officially adults now; none could keep them from the forbidden pleasures of men and women - to see if Mehta would really lay the whore, thinking they'd regroup right after, and find out what fun he'd had.
They'd seen him fall, and gag, and die once he'd raised her skirts and had her, his buttocks thrusting hard as he pinned her to the alley wall. They'd seen her bend down over him and raise her head and the glowing twin hells there had sent them pell-mell, fleeing what they knew was no human whore.
Now they'd calmed, but they were deep in the Shambles, near its end where Caravan Square began. There was light there, from midnight merchants engaged in double-dealing; it was not safe there, one of the boys said: slaves were made this way: children taken, sold north and never seen again.
'It's safe here, then?' Tamzen blurted, her teeth chattering but the krrf making her bold and angry. She strode ahead, not waiting to see them follow; they would; she knew this bunch better than their mothers. The thing to do, she was sure, was to stride bravely on until they came upon the Square and found the streets home, or came upon some Hell Hounds, palace soldiers, or Stepsons. Niko's friends would ride them home on horseback if they found some; Tamzen's acquaintance among the men of steel was her fondest prize.
Niko ... If he were here, she'd have no fear, nor need to pretend to valour... Her eyes filled with tears, thinking what he'd say when he heard. She was never going to convince him she was grown if all her attempts to do so made her seem the more a child. A child's error, this, for sure ... and one dead on her account. Her father would beat her rump to blue and he'd keep her in her room for a month. She began to fret - the krrf's doing, though she was too far gone in the drug's sway to tell - and saw an alley from which torchlight shone. She took it; the others followed, she heard them close behind. They had money aplenty; they would hire an escort, perhaps with a wagon, to take them home. All taverns had men looking for hire in them; if they chanced Caravan Square, and fell afoul of slavers, she'd never see her poppa or Niko or her room filled with stuffed toys and ruffles again.
The inn was called the Sow's Ear, and it was foul. In its doorway, one of the boys, panting, caught her arm and jerked her back. 'Show money in that place, and you'll get all our throats slit quick.'
He was right. They huddled in the street and sniffed more krrf and shook and argued. Phryne began to wail aloud and her sister stopped her mouth with a clapped hand. Just as the two girls, terrified and defeated, crouched down in the street and one of the boys, his bladder loosed by fear, sought a comer wall, a woman appeared before them, her hood thrown back, her face hidden by a trick of light. But the voice was a gentlewoman's voice and the words were compassionate. 'Lost, children? There, there, it's all right now, just come with me. We'll have mulled wine and pastries and I'll have my man form an escort to see you home. You're the Alekeep owner's daughter, if I'm right? Ah, good, then; your father's a friend of my husband ... surely you remember me?'
She gave a name and Tamzen, her sense swimming in drugs and her heart filled with relief and the sweet taste of salvation, lied and said she did. All six went along with the woman, skirting the square until they came to a curious house behind a high gate, well lit and gardened and full of chaotic splendour. At its rear, the rush of the White Foal could be heard.
'Now sit, sit, little ones. Who needs to wash off the street grime? Who needs a pot?' The rooms were shadowed, no longer well lit; the woman's eyes were comforting, calming like sedative draughts for sleepl
ess nights. They sat among the silks and the carven chairs and they drank what she offered and began to giggle. Phryne went and washed, and her sister and Tamzen followed. When they came back, the boys were nowhere in sight. Tamzen was just going to ask about that when the woman offered fruit, and somehow she forgot the words on her tongue-tip, and even that the boys had been there at all, so fine was the krrf the woman smoked with them. She knew she'd remember in a bit, though, whatever it was she'd forgot...
When Crit and Straton arrived with the hawkmask they'd captured at the Foalside home of Ischade, the vampire woman, all its lights were on, it seemed, yet little of that radiance cut the gloom.
'By the god's four mouths, Crit, I still don't understand why you let those others go. And for Niko. What - ?'
'Don't ask me, Straton, what his reasons are; I don't know. Something about the one being of that Successors band, revolutionaries who want Wizardwall back from the Nisibisi mages -there's more to Nisibis than the warlocks. If that Vis was one, then he's an outlaw as far as Nisibisi law goes, and maybe a fighter. So we let him go, do him a favour, see if maybe he'll come to us, do us a service in his turn. But as for the other - you saw Ischade's writ of freedom - we gave him to her and she let him go. If we want to use her ... if she'll ever help us find Jubal - and she does know where he is; this freeing of the slave was a message; she's telling us we've got to up the ante - we've got to honour her wishes as far as this slave-bait goes.'
'But this ... coming here ourselves^. You know what she can do to a man ...'
'Maybe we'll like it; maybe it's time to die. I don't know. I do know we can't leave it to the garrison - every time they find us a hawkmask he's too damaged to tell us anything. We'll never recruit what's left of them if the army keeps killing them slowly and we take the blame. And also,' Crit paused, dismounted his horse, pulled the trussed and gagged hawkmask he had slung over his saddle like a haunch of meat down after him, so that the prisoner fell heavily to the ground, 'we've been told by the garrison's intelligence liaison that the army thinks Stepsons fear this woman.'
'Anybody with a dram of common sense would.' Straton, rubbing his eyes, dismounted also, notched crossbow held at the ready as soon as his feet touched the ground.
'They don't mean that. You know what they mean; they can't tell a Sacred Bander from a straight mercenary. They think we're all sodomizers and sneer at us for that.'
'Let 'em. I'd rather be alive and misunderstood than dead and respected.' Straton blinked, trying to clear his blurred vision. It was remarkable that Critias would undertake this action on his own; he wasn't supposed to take part in field actions, but command them. Tempus had been to see him, though, and since then the task force leader had been more taciturn and even more impatient than usual. Straton knew there was no use in arguing with Critias, but he was one of the few who could claim the privilege of voicing his opinion to the leader, even when they disagreed.
They'd interrogated the hawkmask briefly; it didn't take long; Straton was a specialist in exactly that. He was a pretty one, and substantively undamaged. The vampire was discerning, loved beauty; she'd take to this one, the few bruises on him might well make him more attractive to a creature such as she: not only would she have him in her power but it would be in her power to save him from a much worse death than that she'd give. By the look of the tall, lithe hawkmask, by his clothes and his pinched face in which sensitive, liquid eyes roamed furtively, a pleasant death would be welcome. His ilk were hunted by more factions in Sanctuary than any but Nisibisi spies. Crit said, 'Ready, Strat?'
'I own I'm not, but I'll pretend if you do. If you get through this and I don't, my horses are yours.'
'And mine, yours.' Crit bared his teeth. 'But I don't expect that to happen. She's reasonable, I'm wagering. She couldn't have turned that slave loose that way if she wasn't in control other lust. And she's smart - smarter than Kadakithis's so-called "intelligence staff, or Hell Hounds, we've seen that for a fact.'
So, despite sane cautions, they unlatched the gate, their horses drop-tied behind them, cut the hawkmask's ankle bonds and walked him to the door. His eyes went wide above his gag, pupils gigantic in the torchlight on her threshold, then squeezed shut as Ischade herself came to greet them when, after knocking thrice and waiting long, they were about to turn away, convinced she wasn't home after all.
She looked them up and down, her eyes half-lidded. Straton, for once, was grateful for the shimmer in his vision, the blur he couldn't blink away. The hawkmask shivered and lurched backwards in their grasp as Crit spoke first: 'Good evening, madam. We thought the time had come to meet, face to face. We've brought you this gift, a token of our good will.' He spoke blandly, matter-of factly, letting her know they knew all about her and didn't really care what she did to the unwary or the unfortunate. Straton's mouth dried and his tongue stuck to the roof of it. None was colder than Crit, or more tenacious when work was under way.
The woman, Ischade, dusky-skinned but not the ruddy tone of Nisibis, an olive cast that made the whites other teeth and eyes very bright, bade them enter. 'Bring him in, then, and we'll see what can be seen.'
'No, no. We'll leave him - an article of faith. We'd like to know what you hear of Jubal, or his band - whereabouts, that sort of thing. If you come to think of any such information, you can find me at the mercenaries' hostel.'
'Or in your hidey-hole in Shambles Cross?'
'Sometimes.' Crit stood firm. Straton, his relief a flood, now that he knew they weren't going in there, gave the hawkmask a shove. 'Go on, boy, go to your mistress.'
'A slave, then, is this one?' she asked Strat and that glance chilled his soul when it fixed on him. He'd seen butchers look at sheep like that. He half expected her to reach out and tweak his biceps.
He said: 'What you wish, he is.'
She said: 'And you?'
Crit said: 'Forbearance has its limits.'
She replied: 'Yours, perhaps, not mine. Take him with you; I want him not. What you Stepsons think of me, I shall not even ask. But cheap I shall never come.'
Crit loosed his hold on the youth, who wriggled then, but Straton held him, thinking that Ischade was without doubt the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, and the hawkmask was luckier than most. If death was the gateway to heaven, she was the sort of gatekeep he'd like to admit him, when his time came.
She remarked, though he had not spoken aloud, that such could easily be arranged.
Crit, at that, looked between them, then shook his head. 'Go wait with the horses, Straton. I thought I heard them, just now.'
So Straton never did find out exactly what was - or was not - arranged between his task force leader and the vampire woman, but when he reached the horses, he had his hands full calming them, as if his own had scented Niko's black, whom his grey detested above all other studs. When they'd both been stabled in the same barn, the din had been terrible, and stallboards shattered as regularly as stalls were mucked, from those two trying to get at each other. Horses, like men, love .and hate, and those two stallions wanted a piece of each other the way Strat wanted a chance at the garrison commander or Vashanka at the Wrigglies' Ils.
Soon after, Crit came sauntering down the walk, unscathed, alone, and silent.
Straton wanted to ask, but did not, what had been arranged: his leader's sour expression warned him off. And an hour later, at the Shambles Cross safe haven, when one of the street men came running in saying there was a disturbance and Tempus could not be found, so Crit would have to come, it was too late.
What they could do about waterspouts and whirlpools in the harbour was unclear.
When Straton and Crit had ridden away, Niko eased his black out from hiding. The spirit-track he'd followed had led them here; Tamzen and the others were inside. The spoor met up with the pale blue traces of the house's owner near the Sow's Ear and did not separate thereafter. Blue was no human's colour, unless that human was an enchanter, a witch, accursed or charmed. Both Niko and Janni knew whose house thi
s was, but what Crit and Straton were doing here, neither wanted to guess or say.
'We can't rush the place. Stealth. You know what she is.'
'I know.'
'Why didn't you let me hail them? Four would be better than two, for this problem's solving.'
'Whatever they're doing here, I don't want to know about. And we've broken cover as it is tonight.' Niko crooked a leg over his horse's neck, cavalry style. Janni rolled a smoke and offered him one; he took it and lit it with a flint from his belt pouch just as two men with a wagon came driving up from Downwind, wheels and hooves thundering across the White Foal's bridge.
'Too much traffic,' Janni muttered, as they pulled their horses back into shadows and watched the men stop their team before the odd home's door; the wagon was screened and curtained; if someone was within, it was impossible to tell.
The men went in and when they came out they had three smallish people with them swathed in robes and hooded. These were put into the carriage and it then drove away, turning on to the cart-track leading south from the bridge - there was nothing down there but swamp, and wasteland, and at the end of it. Fisherman's Row and the sea ... nothing, that is, but the witch Roxane's fortified estate.
'Do you think - Stealth, was that them?'
'Quiet, curse you; I'm trying to tell.' It might have been; his heart was far from quiet, and the passengers he sensed were drugged and
nearly somnambulant.
But from the house, he could no longer sense the girlish trails which had been there, among the blue/archmagical/anguished ones of its owner and those of men. Boys' auras still remained there, he thought, but quiet, weaker, perhaps dying, maybe dead. It could be the fellow Crit had left there, and not the young scions of east-side homes.
The moon, above Niko's head, was near at zenith. Seeing him look up, Janni anticipated what he was going to say: 'Well Stealth, we've got to go down there anyway; let's follow the wagon. Mayhap we'll catch it. Perchance we'll find out whom they've got there, if we do. And we've little time to lose - girls or no, we've a witch to
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