Soul of the City tw-8

by Robert Lynn Asprin

  "Get dressed."

  She stood up, examining the tangled ribbons of her bodice. Heaving an exasperated sigh, Stilcho dropped the sheets and gripped her wrists. The soft flesh of her breasts rested against his hands.

  "Gods, Moria-your clothes, Maria's clothes! You can't get out of here dressed like that."

  Moria's face lost its complete vacantness as the idea penetrated through her terror that Stilcho-living, breathing Stilcho-would somehow get her out of here. She yanked the ribbons free, tearing the dress and its memories from her, diving into the ornate chests where, beneath the courtesan's trappings which Ischade had endowed her with, her stained and tattered street clothes remained.

  She made a fair amount of noise in her industry, hurling unwanted lace and satin to the floor behind her, but between the globe's whine and Strat's screams it was doubtful that anyone in the kitchen heard or cared about the commotion upstairs. Stilcho finished ripping the linen.

  Blood would draw the bay horse. Stilcho pulled the bloody rag from his sleeve and tied it to the linen. He'd used blood to bring the dead across water into the upper town. Strat's blood would bring the horse into conflict with the wards, chipping away at the flaws in them.

  "What are you doing?" Moria demanded, forcing the last of the rounded, Rankan contours into a now snug Ilsigi tunic.

  "Making a blood lure," he replied, lowering the makeshift rope and swinging the dull red knot at its end toward the horse.

  She bounded across the room. "No. No!" she protested, struggling to take the cloth from him. "They'll see; they'll know. We can get out across the roof."

  Stilcho held her off with one arm and went back to swinging the lure. "Wards," he muttered. He had the bay's attention now. Its eyes, in his other vision, were brighter; its coat rippled with crimson anger.

  But wards and warding had no meaning to Moria, though she was one of Ischade's. She rammed stiff fingers into his gut and made a lunge for freedom. It was all he could go to grab her around the waist, keeping her barely inside the house. The linen slipped from his hands and fluttered to the street below. Moria whimpered; he pressed her face against his chest to muffle the sound. Ward-fire, invisible to her but excruciating nonetheless, dazzled her hands and forearms.

  "We're trapped!" she gasped. "Trapped!"

  Hysteria rose in her face again. He grabbed her wrists, knowing the pain would shock her into silence.

  "That's Strat down there. Straton! They'll come for him. The horse will bring them, Moria. Ischade, Tempus: they'll all come for him-and us."

  "No, no," she repeated, her eyes white all around. "Not Her. Not Her-"

  Stilcho hesitated. He remembered that fear; that all-consuming fear he felt of Ischade, of Haught, of everything that had had power over him-but he'd forgotten it as well. Death had burned the fear out of him. He felt danger, desperation, and the latent death that pervaded this house and this afternoon-but bowel numbing fear no longer had a claim on him.

  "I'm going to save Strat-hide him until they come for him. I'm going to save me, too. I'm lucky today, Moria: I'm alive and I'm lucky. Even without the horse...."

  But he wasn't without the bay horse. The bloody rag had landed on the carved stone steps that had been, many years ago, the Peres family's pride. The bay pounded on the steps, surrounded but unaffected by ward-fire. It scented Strat's blood soaking into the wood planks of the lower hallway and heard his anguish. Trumpeting a loyalty that transcended life and death, it reared, flailing at the ephemeral flames which engulfed it. Stilcho watched as the mortal image of the horse vanished and the other one became a black void.

  "Moria, the back stairs, the servant's stairs to the kitchen, where are they? It's only a matter of time."

  Candlelight flickered over Ischade's dark-clad body. She had collapsed backwards into her silken lair. Her hair made tangled webs around her face and shoulders. One arm arced around her head, the other fell limply across her waist; both were marked with dark gashes where the priest's glass had cut her. Ischade had death magic, not healing.

  She was, if not oblivious to her exhausted body, unmindful of it. If her efforts were successful there would be time enough for rest and recovery. She continued manipulating the bonds which made all she had ever owned a focus for her power. She set resonances at each flawed boundary, reinforced them as motes of warding eroded away and tried not to feel the tremors that were Straton.

  It was not her way to move with such delicate precision- but it was the only way she had left. Balancing her power through every focal object within the Peres house which could contain it, she hoped to build her presence until she could pull from all directions and burst the warding sphere Roxane had created. She had discarded the thread tying her to the bay horse. She had never regarded the creature as hers but only as a gift, a rare gift, to her lover. Thus the moment when it had scented Strat's blood passed unnoticed but the instant when it penetrated the wards was seared into her awareness.

  Her first response was a heartfelt curse for whatever was causing havoc in her neat, tedious work. The curse soared and circled the wards until Ischade understood she had an ally within the house. She examined the small skein of living and dead within whom she had a focus and found that one, Stilcho, was no longer anchored. Stilcho, whom Haught had stolen and fate had set to living freedom.

  Smiling, she pushed her imperceptible awareness past the ward-consuming emptiness.

  "Haught," she whispered, weaving into his mind. "Remember your father. Remember Wizardwall. Remember slavery. Remember the feel of the globe in your hands before she stole it from you. She does not love you, Haught. Does not love your fine Nisi face while she wears a Rankan one. Does not love your aptness while she is trapped in a body that has none. Oh, remember, Haught; remember every time you look on that face."

  The ambitious mind of the ex-slave, ex-dancer, ex-apprentice shivered when Ischade touched it. Foolish child-he had believed she would not look for him again and had taken none-of the simple steps to ensure that she could not. She sealed her hypnotic surgery with a gentle caress on the ring he wore: the ring he had thought to use against her.

  Ischade retreated, then, behind the little statues, the gewgaws and the sharp knives she had scattered throughout the house. Her thoughts would eat at a mind already disposed to treason just as the essence of the bay horse ate the ward fire. It was only a matter of time.

  "You have to eat. Magic can't do everything."

  Randal opened his mouth to agree and received a great wooden spoonful of Jihan's latest aromatic posset. His eyes bulged, his ears reddened, and he wanted nothing more than to spit the godsawful curdled lump to the floor. But the Froth Daughter was watching him and he dared do nothing but swallow it in one horrendous gulp. His hands were immobilized in gauze slings, suspended in oval buckets filled with a salted solution of the Froth Daughter's devising. His own magical resources were insufficient to guide the spoon to his mouth- if he had been so inclined in the first place.

  He had been to the Mageguild and found his treatment there even less pleasant. Get rid of the globe; get rid of the demon; get rid of the witches, his colleagues had told him-and don't come home again until you do. So he'd come back to the palace to be tended by Jinan and to fret over the way fate was unfolding for him.

  "You tried," Jihan assured him, setting the bowl aside. "You did your best."

  "I failed. I knew what happened and I let her trick me. Niko would have understood; I knew that Niko would have understood why we had him down here. But I listened to her instead." He shook his head in misery; a lock of hair fell down to cover his eyes. Jihan leaned forward to brush it back, moving carefully to avoid the shiny, less severe bums on his face or the singed, almost bald, portion of his scalp that still smelled of the fire.

  "We've all made more than our share of mistakes in this," Tempus commiserated from the doorway. He unfastened his cloak, letting it drop to the floor as he strode across the room. The hypocaust fires had been banked for two days but t
he room was still the warmest, by far, in the palace. "How is he?" he asked when he stood beside Niko.

  The young man's body showed few traces of his ordeal. The swellings and bruises had all but disappeared; his face, in sleep, was serene and almost smiling.

  "Better than he should be," Jihan said sadly. She laid her hand lightly on Niko's forehead. The half-smile vanished and the hell-haunted mercenary strained against the leather straps binding him to the pallet. "The demon has his body completely now and heals as it wishes," she acknowledged, lifting her hand. Niko, or his body, quieted.

  "You're sure?"

  She shrugged, reached for Niko again, then restrained that impulse by gripping Tempus's arm instead. "As sure as I am of anything where he's concerned."

  "Riddler?" The hazel eyes flickered open but they did not focus and the voice, though it had the right timbre, was not Niko's. "Riddler, is that you?"

  "Gods-no," Tempus took a step forward then hesitated. "Janni?" he whispered.

  The body that contained the demon and Janni and whatever remained of Nikodemos writhed and pulled its lips back into a skull-like grin.

  "The globe, Riddler. Abarsis. The globe. Break the globe!"

  Its fingers splayed backwards, seeming to have no bone within them; its neck snapped from side to side with force enough to make the wooden slats jump. Tempus rushed to weave his hands through Niko's slate-gray hair, cushioning the other-world tortures with his own flesh.

  "Do something for him!" he bellowed as the spasms rocked Niko's body and blood began to seep from his nose and lips.

  "Do something for him!"

  The demon's mocking echo erupted from somewhere in Niko's gut. Sparks sizzled along Tempus's forearm, paralyzing him. Niko's arms, no longer trembling, strained purposefully against the leather straps.

  "It's going to transfer!" Randal screamed, leaping up from his chair. He gestured with bum-twisted fingers. His will called forth fire but his ruined flesh could not support it. Groaning, he sank to his knees.

  "Poor little mageling," the familiar voice issuing from a shimmering blue globe chuckled with strychnine sweetness. "Let me fix that for you." A tongue of indigo flame licked out from the globe; Randal, like Tempus, was motionless.

  Jihan took a deep breath that formed ice in the salt-water buckets an arm's length away. She had been patient with these mortals, abiding by their constraints, accepting their wisdom even when it contradicted everything her instincts demanded, and now that they were finally helpless she was going to do things her way.

  Niko turned endless, empty eyes toward the blue sphere, asking a silent question.

  "Stormbringer's Froth," Roxane replied, with the malice and disdain reserved by women for lesser women.

  A frigid wind swirled through the once-warm room. No one, especially a Nisi witch or a nameless demon, spoke that way about Jihan and survived. No matter that Stormbringer had created his parthenogenic offspring from an arctic sea storm, Jihan knew an insult when she felt one. She pelted the sphere with a thick glaze of ice, then she leaned her palms on Niko's chest.

  "I'm here!" she announced, bringing a howl of cold air into Niko's rest-place. "I'm here, damn you."

  She rode her anger across the once-beautiful landscape of a moat-endowed mind. The dark crystal stream roiled and froze in agonized shapes. Charred trees snapped and crashed to the ground under the burden of the ice that came in her wake. She reached the meadow where the pure light of Janni guarded the gate.

  "I'm going in," she told him, though she had no communion with such spirits and could not hear nor understand his reply.

  The heavy door with its man-thick iron bars loomed before her. Leaving a pattern of rime on the metal, she passed beyond it to confront an eternity as vast and empty as the demon-Niko's eyes had been.

  "Coward!" the Froth Daughter shrieked as nothingness, which was the essence of all demonkind, leeched her substance away. She lashed out blindly, stupidly expending herself against an enemy whose chief attribute was its absence. "Co war-"

  She retreated, a ragged wisp streaming back to the frost-bound doorway, and collapsed in the meadow, her fury and her confidence equally diminished. Demonic laughter using her own stolen voice compounded her shame. In her impotence Jihan gathered shards of ice and hurled them at the gate.

  "I'll be back," she told it as the ice melted into the thawing crystal stream. "You'll see."

  She sniffled and wiped her eyes on a damp forearm. The ground was slick with melting ice; she slipped more than once. Pain and cold became part of her mortal vocabulary as she made her way home, never once looking back to see that the meadow was brighter or the crystal stream rushing fast and clear.

  "I thought we'd lost her," Tempus admitted as he watched the Froth Daughter pick her way slowly across the hillside.

  We? Do we care? Stormbringer inquired in a dangerously friendly tone.

  Tempus didn't bother to turn around. He wouldn't be wherever he suddenly was without some god or another's interference; and he was no longer awed by interference. "I care- isn't that obvious? She damn near annihilated herself for me."

  Your care is not enough. She is mortal now and requires something less abstract. If love is beyond you, surely you remember rape? The Father-of-Weather manifested himself before Tempus: all blood-red eyes and pans that did not become a single whole.

  The man who had been Vashanka's minion shrugged his nonexistent shoulders and gave the god a critical glance. "It is an option / retain," he said defiantly.

  You are a nasty little man-but I have need of you-

  "No."

  She is a goddess.

  "No."

  I'll attend to this abomination.

  "You'll do that regardless-for what it did to her. The answer's still no."

  I'll turn my daughter's eyes toward another.

  "It's a deal."

  The Stormchildren lay in state on a velvet-covered dais in the vault-ceilinged room known as the Ilsig Bedchamber. Musicians gathered in an alcove, playing the reedy, discordant melodies beloved by the Beysib and guaranteed to set Molin Torchholder's neck hairs on end. He pressed his forefingers against the bridge of his nose and sought a pleasant thought, any pleasant thought, that might make the waiting easier.

  Shupansea, in a curtained alcove opposite the musicians, was equally anxious but had not the luxury of isolation. Her waiting-women swarmed around her fussing with her hair, her jewels, and the splendor of her cosa. She was the Beysa this evening-as she had not been since her cousin's execution in the summer. Her breasts had been dusted with luminous powders and gilt with gold and silver; her normally slender hips were augmented by the swaying brocade-jeweled panniers in which her personal vipers were accustomed to ride. Her thigh-length fair hair had been supported and wired until it hung about her like a cloak and condemned her to look neither up nor down, nor side to side, but only straight ahead. It was a costume she had worn since childhood but now, after a season in the modest attire of the Rankan nobility, she felt awkward and feared for the outcome of the rites they were about to perform.

  "You must not sweat," her aunt chided her, reminding her of the physical discipline demanded of Mother Bey's avatar.

  She steeled herself and the offending perspiration ceased.

  Footsteps came through the tiny doorway behind her. "You're nervous," a welcome voice consoled her as the prince reached out to take her hand.

  "Our priests would have us wait until the fifth decoction has been made but we dare not. Not after this afternoon. We have countermanded the priests; it is the first time we have done so. They are anxious but we think the waiting is more dangerous than success or failure."

  "Mother Bey guides you," Kadakithis assured her, squeezing the be-ringed fingers ever so gently.

  Shupansea lifted her shoulders a fraction. "She says only that I must not be alone afterwards."

  The prince, who had finally edged his way through her women to stand where she could see him, made a wry face. "You ar
e never alone, Shu-sea."

  She smiled and gave him a stare which proved Beysib eyes could be erotic and unsettling at the same time. "I will be alone tonight-with you."

  The music changed abruptly. Before the golden-haired prince could express his surprise or pleasure he was politely, but firmly, shoved to one side.

  "It is time."

  The Beysa came forward onto a cloth-of-gold carpet laid between the alcove and the altar. Her first steps were tentative; she tottered between the outstretched arms of her waiting-women. Her glazed eyes held no power, only simple terror of the ancient bald priest who waited for her with a delicate glass' vial and a knife of razor-sharp obsidian.

  Her beynit vipers, tasting the incense and the music, rose from the panniers to begin their own journey. Shupansea trembled involuntarily as the scales slid coldly between her thighs- for the cosa was meant for the display and convenience of the snakes, not the avatar. Three sets of fangs sank deep into sensitive skin: the beynit did not approve of her anxiety. Venom enough for the deaths of a dozen men shot into her. She gasped then relaxed as the languid strength of Mother Bey enveloped her.

  She raised her arms, lifting the cosa away from her body. The serpents emerged, baring their moist fangs and their vermilion mouths. It was her priest's turn to tremble anxiously. The Beysib priest summoned Molin to the altar where, without ceremony or explanation, the ancient, bald man transferred the ritual artifacts from the old order to the new and ran from the room.

  Molin held both with evident discomfort and outright fear. "What do I do?" he whispered hoarsely.

  "Complete the ceremony," the voice he had last heard in Stonnbringer's swirling universe informed him from Shupan-sea's mouth. "Carefully."

  Torchholder nodded. The vial contained blood from the Stormchildren, venom from the snake Niko had slain with Askelon's weapons, and ichor from Roxane's giant serpent which had been combined and distilled four times over with I powders the Beysib priests knew but had no names for. The ' scent of its vapors could kill a man; a drop of the fluid might poison an army. Molin intended to be very careful.