Soul of the City tw-8

by Robert Lynn Asprin

  He caught the skull-sized artifact on the tips of his fingers. The momentum of his leap brought the searing object hard against his breast as he forced the center of a very small universe to shift from one existence through an infinity of others. It clung to him; passed through him; absorbed him; shattered and expelled him utterly.

  Ischade was hurled against the rafters by the force of the globe's destruction. Wrapped in the fullness of her fire-magic she barely reached the stairway when the roof itself was swallowed in the flames. Her robes were in flames before she reached the streets.

  A tower of fire soared from the open roof of the Peres house to the heavens themselves. The demon, trapped in fire, warred with Stormbringer, whose thundercloud form was illuminated by each lightning-bolt He threw. A crowd was gathering, a crowd which saw her try to squeeze the flames from her hair and robes and called after her when she raced down the streets with fire still licking after her.

  Molin Torchholder had been one of the first to climb to the palace rooftops for a clearer view of the flame pillar. Bracing himself against the gritty wind he looked past the light to the dark cloud beyond.

  "Stormbringer?"

  He nearly fell from the roof as a hand closed tightly over his shoulder. "Not tonight," Tempus said with a laugh.

  There were others appearing at the myriad stairways, making their way to the railing circling the Hall of Justice: Jihan and Randal, leaning on each other for strength, with Niko close behind; Isambard, dragged forward by the exuberant Storm-children; the functionaries, retainers, and day-servants all barefoot and in their nightclothes. The palace was no different than the rest of Sanctuary this night-every rooftop, courtyard, and clearing had its collection of awestruck mortals.

  Brilliant light streamed into the prince's bedroom. He awoke, sighing with the knowledge that the best must also seem the shortest, and meant to leave Shupansea undisturbed. His heart sank when he realized he was alone in the bed; it did not rise when he saw her transfixed by the column of light in the open window.

  Dragging a silken blanket behind him, he came slowly to join her.

  "She has kept her promises," Shupansea explained, taking a comer of the blanket around her shoulder and pressing close against him. "Stormbringer fights the demon."

  It did not seem like gods and demons at first glance. It seemed like a single, great cloud spewing lightning at a flame of impossible size and brightness-but such a vision was, in itself, so improbable that the Beysa's explanation was as acceptable as any other. Certainly the lightning struck only the flame and the flame directed spirals of its substance at the cloud. The stormcloud, with its percussive thunder, deflected the fire away from itself to the ocean and, occasionally, the city.

  "He has it trapped," the Beysa said, indicating the precision with which the Stormgod's bolts prevented the demon-fire from shifting its location. "They will fight until the demon accepts annihilation."

  The prince was unable to look away from the awesome spectacle. Armed with Shupansea's explanations he could see the flame shrinking each time it launched a missile against the lightning. He stayed Shupansea's hand when she tried to close the shutters.

  "The end is inevitable," she assured him, holding him tightly.

  A fine powder blew through the window. The Beysa protected herself but tears flowed freely from Kadakithis's eyes.

  "I want to see if there's a beginning as well."

  "The beginning is here," she reminded him, closing the .shutters and leading him back to the bed.

  PILLAR OF FIRE by Janet Morris

  Death was riding the feral wind that blew in off Sanctuary's harbor-even Tempus's Tr6s horse could smell it on the sooty breeze as horse and rider picked their way down Wideway to the wharf and the emperor's barge made fast there.

  The Tr6s danced and snorted, its hooves sending up sparks from ancient cobbles that seemed, in the dusky air, to have lives of their own. The sparks whirled round the Tros's legs like insects swarming; they darted hither and thither on smoky gusts drawn seaward from the pillar of fire blazing between the heavens and the Peres house uptown; they skittered along Tempus's clothing like dust motes from hell, stinging when they touched his bare arms and legs; they lighted upon the Tros's distended nostrils and that horse, wiser than many human inhabitants of this accursed thieves' world, blew bellowing breaths to keep from inhaling whatever dust it was that glowed like fire and burned like hot needles when it landed on the stallion's dappled hide.

  The hellish dust was the least of Tempus's troubles on this morning that had lost its light, as if the sun had slunk away to hide from the battle under way beneath the sky. Oh, the sun had risen, brazen and bold, illuminating the flaming pillar raging up to heaven and the storm clouds with their lightning ranged round it. But it had been eaten by the stormclouds and the soot of the fire and the lightning spewing up from the grounds around the uptown Peres house and down from the furious heavens of the gods, who smote at witches' work and cheeky demons with equal force.

  And it was this absence of the morning, this vanquishing of natural light, that bothered Tempus (accustomed to analyzing omens and all too familiar with godsign) as he rode down to greet Theron, the man he'd helped bring to Ranke's teetering throne, and Brachis, High Priest of Vashanka, while around the town civil war and infamy reigned, unabated.

  If the chaos around him (which he'd once been sent here to banish) weren't enough of an indictment of his performance, then the skittishness of the Tr6s horse made it certain: he was failing ignominiously to bring order-even for a day-to Sanctuary.

  And though some men would not have taken the responsibility and clasped the fault for all Sanctuary's catalogue of evils to his bosom, Tempus would and almost gladly did-the state of town and loved ones fulfilled his own dire prophecy.

  Only the Tr6s horse's distress truly touched him now: animals were pure and honest, not dour and divisive like the race of men. It might not be his fault that Straton lay, somewhere, in the clutches of the revolution (Crit was sure), dead or held for ransom; it might not be because of Tempus, called the Riddler, that Niko was the perennial pawn of demons and foul witches; it might not be directly attributable to him that his daughter, Kama, was now sought as an assassin and revolutionary by his own Stepsons and the palace guard, thus creating a rift between her unit, the Rankan 3rd Commando, and the other militias in the town that no amount of diplomacy would ever bridge if she were executed; it might not be on his account that Randal, once a Stepson and the single "white" magician Tempus had ever trusted, was a burned-out husk, or that Niko stared sightlessly at the pillar of flame uptown in which Janni, his one time partner and a Stepson who'd sworn Tempus a solemn oath of fealty, burned eternally, or that Jihan had been stripped of her Froth Daughter's attributes, humbled to the lowly estate of womankind, or that Tempus's own son, Gys-kouras, looked at him with fear and loathing (even trying to shield his half-brother, Alton, from Tempus whenever the children saw him come).

  But it probably was-he was the root and cause of all this slaughter: it was his curse, habitual (as Molin Torchholder, a Nisi-blooded slime in Rankan clothing, maintained) or invoked by jealous gods or hostile magic. He didn't know or care which force now drove him: he'd lost interest in which was right and which was wrong.

  Like the day around him, black and white and good and evil had lost their character, merging like the sullen dusky noon in an unsavory amalgam to match his mood.

  But it bothered him that the Tr6s was nervous, sweating, and distressed. He reined it down a side street, hoping to avoid the greater gusts of dust. For he knew that dust as he knew the voices of the gods who plagued him: each particle was a remnant of pulverized globes of Nisi power, magical talismans reduced to pinprick size and myriad in number.

  If Sanctuary needed anything less than a dusty cloak of Nisi magic wafting where it willed, he couldn't think what it might be.

  And then he realized what lay ahead, down a shadowed alleyway, and drew his sword: a little honest swo
rdplay might cheer him up, and ahead, where PFLS rebels in rags and sweat-bands fought Rankan regulars in the street, he knew he'd. find it.

  Though he was overqualified for street brawls-a man who couldn't die and had to heal, whose horse shared his more-than-human speed and more-than-mortal constitution-numbers made the odds more honest: four Rankan soldiers, against a mob of thirty, were trying to shield some woman with a child from whatever the mob had in mind.

  He heard shouts over the Tros's hoofbeats as it lifted into a lope and trumpeted its war cry as it sped gladly toward the fray.

  "Give her up, the slut-it's all her doing!" cried one hoarse voice from the mob.

  "That's right!" a shrill woman's voice seconded the rebel demand: "S'danzo slut! She bore the accursed Stormchild's playmate! S'danzo wickedness has taken away the sun and turned the gods' ire upon us!"

  And a third voice, streetwise and dark, a man's voice Tempus thought he ought to recognize, put in: "Come on, Walegrin, give her up and you go free-you and yours. We're only killing witches and their children today!"

  "Screw yourself. Zip," one of the Rankans called back. "You'll have to take her from us. And we'll have a couple lives in exchange-yours for certain. That's a promise."

  Tempus had only an instant to realize that Walegrin, the garrison commander, was one of the Rankans under siege, and to add up all he'd heard and realize that the blond soldier's sister-of-recoro, Illyra, must be the woman whose life was the subject of a traditional Sanctuary streetcorner debate.

  Then the Tr6s was sighted by the rebels at the rear of the crowd, which began to part but not disperse.

  Missiles pelted him, some barbed, some jagged, some meant for rolling bread or holding wine-and some designed for war.

  He ducked an arrow hurtling toward him from a crossbow, his senses so much faster that he could see the helically-fletched blue feathers on its tail as it sped toward his heart.

  The Tros was hit between the eyes with a tomato: it had seen the missile coming, but never flinched or ducked, its ears pricked like a sighting mechanism aligned upon the crowd: it was a warhorse, after all.

  But Tempus found this affront unacceptable, and took exception to the brashness of the crowd. Reaching up with his left hand while still holding his reins, he plucked the arrow from the air when it was inches from his heart and, as he seldom did, flaunted his supernatural attributes before the crowd, holding the arrow high and breaking it between his fingers like a piece of straw as he bellowed in his most commanding voice: "Zip and all you rebels, disperse or face my personal wrath- a retribution that will haunt you till you die, and then some: you'll leave my fury to your descendants as a bequest."

  And Zip's voice called back from a gloom in which all white faces looked alike and darker Wriggly skins faded to invisibility: "Come get me, Riddler. Your daughter did!"

  He set about just that, but not before the crowd surged inward as one body, pinning the four Rankans and the girl they thought to shield against the wall.

  He kneed the Tros in among confusion, took blows, and swung back and down with his sharkskin-hiked sword, inured to the death he dealt, his conscience salved before the fact by giving warning, so that his blood-lust now reigned unimpeded and rebels fell, like wheat before a scythe, under his blade, a sword the god of war had sanctified in countless bodies just like these, across more battlefields than Tempus cared to count.

  But when, finally, the crowd broke to run and none clawed at his saddle or bit at his ankle or tried to blind the Tros horse with their sharpened sticks or hamstring it with their bread knives, he realized he'd been too late to save the day.

  Oh, Walegrin, bloody and with a face pummeled beyond recognition so that Tempus could only recognize him by his braided blond locks and the tears streaming from his blackened sockets unheeded, would live to fight another day: he'd been innermost, protecting Illyra-the S'danzo seeress who should have forseen all this-with his own big body. But of the other three soldiers, one's gullet was split the way a fisherman cleans his catch, one's neck was hanging by a thread, and the third was hacked apart, limb from limb, his trunk still twitching weakly.

  It was not the soldiers, however, who drew Tempus's attention, but the woman they'd tried to shield, who in turn had been protecting her child. Illyra, S'danzo skirts heavy with blood, cradled a young girl's body in her arms, and wept so silently that it was Walegrin's grief, not her own, that let Tempus know that the child was surely dead.

  "Lillis," Walegrin sobbed, manliness forgotten because an innocent, his kin, was slain; "Lillis, dear gods, no... she's alive, 'Lyra, alive, I tell you."

  But all the desperate wishes in the world would not make it so, and the S'danzo woman, whose eyes were wise and whose face was tired beyond her years and whose own belly bled profusely where the axe that had hewn her daughter had gone through child and into mother, met Tempus's eyes before she turned to the field commander who could no longer command so much as his grief.

  "Tempus, isn't it? And your marvelous horse?" Illyra's voice had the sough of the seawind in it and her eyes were bleak and full of the witch-dust settling all about. "Shall I foretell your future, lord of blood, or would you rather not read the writing on the wall?"

  "No, my lady," he said before he looked above her head and beyond, to where graffiti scribed in blood defaced the mud-brick. "Tell me no tales of power: If doom could be avoided, you'd have a live child in your arms."

  And he reined the Tros around, setting off again toward Wideway and the dockside, forcing his thoughts to collect and focus on the audience with Theron soon to come, and away from the writing on the wall behind the woman: "The plague is in our souls, not in our destiny. Ilsig rules. Kill the witches and me priests or perish!"

  It sounded like a good idea to him, but he couldn't throw in his lot with the rebels: he'd made a truce with magic for the sake of his soldiers; he'd made a truce with gods for the sake of his soul.

  And perishing wasn't an option for Tempus. Sometimes he wondered if he might manage it by getting himself eaten by fishes or chopped into tiny pieces, but the chances were good that his parts would reassemble or-worse-that each morsel of him would reconstitute an entire being.

  It was bad enough existing in one discrete form; he couldn't bear to be replicated countless times. So he smothered the rebellious impulse to throw in his lot with the rebels and see if it was true that any army he joined could not lose its battles.

  He was bound by oath to Theron, to the necromant Ischade in solemn pact, to Stormbringer in another, and to Enlil, patron god of the armies now that Vashanka was metamorphosing into something else within the body of Gyskouras, their common son. And he'd spent an interval with the Mother Goddess of the fishfaces in which he'd learned that Mother Bey had lusts as great as any northern deity.

  So he alone, acquainted with so many of the players intimately and capable of standing up to more-than-human actors, was competent to negotiate a settlement among the heavens through supernal avatars and earthly rulers, the representatives of their respective gods.

  This task was complicated, not helped, by Kadakithis's impending marriage to the Beysib ruler, as it was obstructed, not advanced, by Theron's arrival here and now, when all was far from well and men had brought their hells to life by meddling with powers they did not understand.

  So he didn't care, he decided, what happened here, beyond his personal goals: to protect the souls of his Stepsons and those who loved him, to reward constancy where it had been demonstrated (even by mages and necromants), to clear his conscience so far as possible before he trekked back north, where the horses still grazed in Hidden Valley and the Successors on Wizardwall would welcome him back to what had become the closest thing to home he could remember.

  But to do that, he must see Niko on the mend and on his way back to Bandara; he must do what Abarsis had counseled, and more.

  He must get rid of that thrice-cursed pillar of fire burning with renewed fervor uptown, and spewing fireballs and attra
cting lightning and spitting bolts into the sea, before a storm blew up from the disturbance.

  For if a storm came riding the wake of all this chaos, then Jihan's powers would be restored, and Tempus would be sad dled with the Froth Daughter for eternity.

  Now he had a chance to slip away without her and let her father, the mighty Stormbringer, keep His word: find Jihan some other lover.

  So he was hurrying, as he reined the Tros toward dockside where the Rankan lion blazon flapped in a sea-wind too strong not to be promising wild weather.

  And the Tros, scenting the sea and his mood, snorted happily, as if in agreement: the Tros would as soon be quit of Jihan, who curried him to within an inch of his life daily, as would he.

  And if a storm would bring the dust to ground, and all the magic of Nisi antiquity with it, then that was not his problem- not if he played his cards right.

  For once, Crit was grateful for the witchy weather that plagued Sanctuary worse than all the factions fighting here.

  "Getting Strat" was not going to be the easiest thing he'd ever done, but he wasn't arguing that the job was his to do: Ace was his partner; their souls were too bound up to chance letting Strat die with any strings on him, no matter which witch was holding the end of them.

  And Strat wasn't going to die in flames, not in some burning house that wouldn't burn down but only burned on and on like no natural fire.

  Not that common sense was saying otherwise: crouched at the heat's end, where waves of burning air licked his face despite the water he was palming over it intermittently. As he stared at the flaming funnel waiting for a plan to come clear, Crit reflected that his Sacred Band oath made no distinction between natural and unnatural peril. He hadn't swom to stand by Strat, shoulder to shoulder, until death separated them if it must, only in cases where it was convenient, or magic wasn't involved, or Strat was behaving as a rightman ought, or the problem didn't involve an urban war zone and the possibility of being roasted alive.