Soul of the City tw-8

by Robert Lynn Asprin

  "The Rankan Empire, my lady," Tempus explained. "Come to find out what's going on in this forsaken backwater."

  "How many ships?"

  "Lots," the big man said with a feral grin.

  The Beysa stepped back from the window, suddenly remembering that she had dismissed her guard and that none of those between herself and the door could be considered willing allies to her cause. "We must make preparations," she said, edging backward toward escape.

  "You put the fear of Ranke's strong right arm into her," Crit snorted, once the nervous woman had disappeared down the narrow steps. The lone ship fighting its way through the tidal currents carried no more than two hundred men, including oarsmen, and was equipped for tribute, not combat.

  "I should have killed her," Jihan muttered.

  "You would never have left this room alive," Tempus informed her.

  "I? I would never have left this room? I could have frozen that little bitch before she knew what happened to her."

  "And what would your father have said to that?" Tempos retorted.

  The Froth Daughter went red-eyed and icy for a moment. She raised a fist toward the Stepson's commander and shook it at him. Her scale armor creaked as she stomped back to the table where Niko was moaning softly. Molin peered intently out the window lest she see his smile; Crit was fighting laughter himself and nearly lost the battle when he glimpsed the priest biting his lower lip.

  "I'm taking Stealth back downstairs," Stormbringer's daughter announced, effortlessly holding the grown man in her arms. "Is anyone coming with me?"

  She had strength and power it was dangerous to mock, however immature its manifestation. Not even Randal, who of the men was the most clearly respectful of gods and magic, dared to answer her.

  "What now?" Randal asked, easing himself onto the stool Ischade had used. Jihan's touch had cleansed and sealed the surfaces of his wounds; he had his own healing resources to call on but his continuing tremors indicated that the little mage had not yet paid the full price for the day's exertions.

  With the last of the women departed, Tempus felt his confidence returning: "For you-rest. If we need you again we'll need you healthy. Go stay with Jihan and Niko if you can't finish the job yourself over at the Mageguild. Crit, you get someone in that damn house others. And get Kama-however you have to do it. The rest of us will see about restoring the appearance of order in this damn place before that ship docks."

  He looked out the window again as trumpets blared from the gateways; Shupansea had evidently reached her advisors. Squads of Burek fighters, deadly swordsmen and archers despite their baggy silk pantaloons and polished scalps, were double-timing across the courtyards. Either all Beysib were nearsighted like their empress and believed the entire Rankan fleet loomed beyond the horizon, or they were taking no chances.

  When the triple portrait had burned, the fire had touched Tempus-not as it had touched Randal, but purging him of the dark associations between Death's Queen, Niko, and himself. The shock, and the pain, were still strong-he'd kill the witch when he could for the crippling scars she'd left in Niko- but the compulsion he'd felt since the black storms in the capital was fading.

  "Damn plague town," he said to himself. "Infecting everything it touches with its disease. Let the fish people have it."

  Torchholder looked over at him. "You just. might have something there, Riddler." He liked the idea coalescing in his thoughts; unconsciously he tugged at his sleeves as a sense of competence returned to him. "Now, then-whatever we might feel about the long-term implications of Theron's delegation I think we all agree that this is not the time to have any outsider wandering around. Right?"

  The other men nodded reluctant agreement.

  "We also know them well enough to know that once they suspect we're hiding anything they'll make imperial nuisances out of themselves. And they're suspicious right now just from the smoke." He didn't wait for them to nod this time. "They'll want to be out there unless we give them a bloody good reason for staying exactly where we put them: plague-quarantined for their own protection."

  Critias arched an eyebrow. "Priest, I could find myself liking you."

  Ischade made her way to the White Foal alone. She'd separated from her Beysib escort near the Peres house when the anarchists and so-called revolutionaries had challenged them. With their twirling swords they'd seemed more than a match for the poorly-armed quartet that had come charging out of the alley and she had been grateful for the opportunity to slide into the shadows unnoticed.

  The house had called out to her: her possessions, her lover, her magic, the tiny ring now on Haught's slender finger. Not long before-before her explosive journey to the palace-the call would have been irresistible. She would have had the power to sunder any wards Roxane had concocted. And she would have done just that: gone blundering into another abortive confrontation with the Nisi witch.

  If the battle within Niko's rest-place had done nothing else it had vented the excess of power which had blighted her vision since Tempus had returned to Sanctuary and ordered the destruction of the Globes of Power. Purged and refreshed, she perceived the wards not simply as Haught's betrayal or Rox-ane's arrogance but as the finely strung trap that they were.

  They think I am still blind to the finer workings, she'd said to the raven perched on the stone finial beside her. Their first mistake. Let's see if there are others.

  No one bothered her as she picked her way across the open expanse of mud surrounding the new White Foal bridge. It was probable that none of the bravos running between Downwind and the more profitable riots uptown could see her though even she was uncertain how far her magic, or her curse, extended in such directions, now that her power had resumed its normal proportions.

  Her house showed signs of her indisposition. The black roses brawled with each other, sending up bloomless canes armed with wicked thorns that flaked the rusted iron fence where they rubbed against it. And the wards? Ischade shuddered at the sight of the heavy blotches of power smeared stridently across her personal domain. With small movements of her hands, hands now less powerful but once again skilled and certain, she constrained the roses and reshaped the wards into a more acceptable pattern.

  The gate swung open to greet her; the raven preceded her to the porch.

  Once across the threshold, Ischade kicked the heavy-soled boots the Beysib soldier had given her into a comer where, in time, her magic would twist them into something delicate and brightly colored. She retrieved her candles, lit them, and settled into the small mountain of shimmering silk that was, in the final sense, her home.

  Inhaling the familiarity-the lightness-of it, she gathered the tangled skein of imaginary silk which bound the Peres house to her and studied her options. She touched each strand gently, so gently that no one in the uptown house would suspect her interest as she reacquainted herself with what rightly belonged to her. Then she drew the thread that bound her to Straton as surely as it bound him to her.

  Straton!

  Ischade lived at the fringes of time, as she lived at the fringes of the greater magics practiced by the likes of Roxane or even Randal. She was older than she looked; probably older than she remembered. Straton was not the first who cut through her defenses-even her curse-to hurt her, but anguish had no sense of proportion: it was now. The Peres house, Moria, Stil-cho, even Haught; she wanted those back through pride but the sandy-haired man who hated magic had a different claim. Not love.

  Partnership, perhaps-someone who, because he had shattered the walls which surrounded her, lessened the loneliness of existence at the fringes. Someone whose demands and responses were simple and who, like all the others, eventually broke the rules which were not. She'd sent Straton away for his own good and he'd come back, like all the others, with his simple, impossible demands. But, unlike the others, he hadn't died and that, the necromant realized with a shiver, might be- for want of a better word-love.

  He would not die, or be stripped of his dignity, in the Peres ho
use, if she had to destroy the world to stop it.

  Walegrin paced the length of the dark, malodorous cellar. Life, specifically combat, had been much easier when he had been responsible for no more than the handful of men he personally led. Now he was a commander, forced to stay behind the lines of imminent danger coordinating the activities of the entire garrison. They said he did the job well but all he felt was a vicious burning in his gut as bad as any arrow.

  "Any sign?" he shouted through the slit window to the street.

  "More smoke," the lookout shouted back so Walegrin missed Thrusher's hawk-call.

  The wiry little man swung himself feet first through another window, landing lightly but not before Walegrin had his knife drawn. Thrush took the arrows out of his mouth and laughed.

  'Too slow, chief. Way too slow."

  "Damn, Thrush-what's going on out there?"

  "Nothing good. See this?" He handed the blond man one of his arrows. "That's what the piffle-shit are using. Blue fletch-ings-like the one that took Strat down up near the wall."

  "So it wasn't Jubal starting all this?"

  "Hell no-but they're in it now: them, piffles, fish. Stepsons-anyone with an edge or a stick. They're giving no quarter. It's startin' to bum out there, chief."

  "Are we holding?"

  "Holding what-" Thrusher began, only to be interrupted by the lookout and the arrival of a messenger with a scroll from the palace. "There's no territory bigger than the ground under your feet."

  Walegrin read Molin's message, crumpled the paper, and stomped it into the offal. "Shit-on-a-stick," he grumbled. "It's gonna get worse-a lot worse. The palace wants plague sign posted on Wideway and the Processional; seems our visitors have arrived."

  "Plague sign?" Thrusher whistled and broke his remaining arrow. "Why not just bum the whole place to the ground? Shit-where're we supposed to get paint?"

  "Use charcoal, or blood. Hell, don't worry about it; I'll take care of it. I got to get out of here anyway. You find me Kama."

  The little man's face blanched beneath his black beard. "Kama-she started the whole thing... taking Strat down with Jubal's arrow! There isn't a blade or arrow out there not marked for her back!"

  "Yeah-well, I don't believe she did it, so you get her back to the barracks for safe-keeping. You and Cythen."

  "Your orders, chief? She's probably meat by now anyway."

  "She'll be alive-hiding somewhere near where we caught her that night."

  "An' if she's not?"

  "Then I'm wrong and she did start it. My orders, Thrush: Find her before someone else does."

  Walegrin endured Thrush's disappointed sigh and watched as the little man left the same way he'd come; then he went up to the street.

  Plague sign: the palace wanted plague sign to keep the visitors on the straight and narrow. It might work. It might keep the Imperials tight on their ship, away from the madness that was Sanctuary. But it would sure as hell bring panic to what was left of the law-abiding community and, the way things were going, it would probably bring plague as well.

  He wrenched a burning brand out of a neighboring building and, after sending the lookout down to the cellar, headed off to the wharves. It wasn't two hours since the afternoon sky had been split by a dark apparition streaking between the Peres house and the palace. Damn witches. Damn magic. Damn every last one of them who made honest men die while they played games with gods.

  * * *

  Understanding came slowly to Stilcho, which was not at all surprising. There was no peace in Ischade's one-time house for understanding and a man, once he understood himself to be dead, did not reconsider the issue. Indeed, his first reaction on seeing Straton there with an arrow by his heart was considerably less than charitable. This bleeding hulk who had supplanted him in Her affections; this murder-dealing Stepson who had massacred his comrades was getting naught but what he deserved.

  His opinion hardened further when the globe was spinning madness into all of them and the injured Stepson had summoned the strength to reach into that dazzling blue array of magic to disrupt it. At first, all Stilcho had seen was the globe passing from Haught to Roxane: from bad to worse; he had cursed Straton with all the latent power his hell-seeing eye possessed. He had not been gentle getting his hands under Strat's shoulders and dragging him along the hallway while Roxane gloated and Haught wore a superficial obsequiousness.

  Then he saw the little things they did not: the subtle wrong-ness in the globe wrought wards, the holes through which She might be yet able to reach. He felt the pulse of fear and anticipation pounding at his temples, making his hands sweat-and that he had never expected to feel again; he even remembered, distantly, what it meant.

  Haught had said She had cut him loose-had proved it- but now Haught had nothing except what Roxane had allowed and Death's Queen would surely have claimed him... if he'd been dead.

  "I'm alive?"

  He paused for a heartbeat's time and went immediately back to moving the Stepson, as they had ordered. What man could bear to lose such a precious gift? But he tugged more gently now; Strat, whatever he had meant with his gesture, had given him life. He pushed the kitchen door shut with his foot and wiped the spittle from the fallen man's chin.

  "Kill me," Strat begged when Stilcho bent over him.

  Their eyes locked. Stilcho felt himself assaulted and dragged to a level of consciousness he had never, living or dead, imagined.

  Strat was going to be tortured; was going to be systematically stripped of every image his memory held. Death would spare him nothing but the pain and, for Strat, the pain would not be the true torture. Stilcho remembered his own torture at Moruth's hands. He shrank with the knowledge that no little heroics, like a slash to the carotid, would spare this man. He had never, at his best, risen above little heroics but he would now, for Straton. The determination came instantaneously and suffused the resurrected man with a glow that would have chilled the Nisi witches beyond the door-had they seen it.

  "It won't work. Ace," he informed the Stepson as he contrived to make him a bit more comfortable on the floor. "Think of something else. Think of lies until you believe them. Haught can't see the truth; he can only see what you believe is the truth." He ripped a comer from Strat's blood-soaked tunic and tucked it up his sleeve. "Don't fight them; just lie."

  Strat blinked and groaned. Stilcho hoped he'd understood. There wasn't time for more. The door was opening. He prayed he wouldn't have to watch.

  "I said the table," Haught said in his soft, malice-laden voice.

  Stilcho shrugged and thought, carefully, about being dead. But Haught had no energy for the likes of him, not with Roxane-Stilcho's empty eye saw Roxane, not Tasfalen-hovering behind him and Strat helpless at his feet.

  "Find me Tempus's secrets," a man's voice with strange, menacing inflections commanded. "If they hide the son from me, I'll have the father."

  The witch produced the globe from wherever she had hidden it. Stilcho clutched his sleeve where the bloody cloth was hidden and backed toward the door. They didn't notice him leaving-or perhaps they did. They were laughing, a laughter that rose in pitch until it blended with the maniacal whine of the globe itself. But they didn't call him back as he edged around the newel-post and slunk upstairs.

  It was not difficult to find Moria. She had only gotten to her bedroom doorway before succumbing to the horror around her. Stilcho found her with her arms wrapped around her ankles and her Rankan-gold hair spilling past her knees onto the floor.

  "Moria!"

  She lifted her head to look at him-blankly at first, then wide-eyed. Her breath sucked in and held, ready to scream if he came any closer.

  "Moria, snap out of it," he demanded in an urgent whisper.

  Her scream was nothing more than a series of mewling squeaks as she scuttled away from him. She froze, except for her eyes, when her spine butted into the wainscoting. Stilcho, no stranger to utter terror himself, felt pity for her but had no time to give in to it. Grabbing
her wrist he hauled her, one-handed, to her feet and slapped her hard when the mewling threatened to become something louder.

  "For godssakes get control of yourself-if you want to live through this at all." He shook her hard and she went silent, but alert, in his arms. "Where's a window that overlooks the street?" He had never willingly come to the uptown house, never wanted to remember the times that he had.

  Moria pulled back from him. Her bodice, much torn and retied, fell down from her shoulders. She did not seem to notice but Stilcho, with death still in his nostrils and hell itself downstairs in the kitchen, knew beyond all doubt that he was as alive as he had ever been.

  "Moria, help me." He took her arm again. Haught hadn't slighted her with his magic: tear-streaked and disheveled she retained her beauty. 0 gods, he wanted to go on living.

  "You're ... you're-" She put a hand out to touch the good side of his face.

  "A window," he repeated even after she fell against him, burying her face in a shirt that had seen better days. "Moria, a window-if we're going to help him and save ourselves."

  She pointed at the window beyond her bed and sank back to the floor when he left her to fight, oh so silently, with its casement.

  Stilcho panicked for a second when the salt-rusted window swung wide open. Not from the noise, because Strat screamed then, but from the wards he could see shimmering like whorehouse silks flush against the outer walls. He forgot to breathe until his heart pounded and his vision blurred, but it seemed the wards were for larger forces and were not affected by the iron-and-glass casement.

  The horse was still out there: Strat's bay horse that Ischade had painstakingly restored to life. It danced away from the fires burning beyond the wards and the occasional bravo racing down the street but it had no intention of abandoning its vigil-not even when Stilcho reached out to it as he had learned to reach for all of Ischade's creations. Eyes that were red, vengeful, and not at all equine regarded him for a moment, then turned away.

  Stilcho stepped back from the window, smiling. He retained the ability to see the workings of magic but magic no longer took notice of him. It was a very small price to pay for the ordinary sensations returning to him. Moreover, it was one he had anticipated. He grabbed a handful of rumpled linen from the bed and had begun tearing it into strips before he noticed Moria huddled on the floor.