by Janet Morris
"Anything," Shamshi replied thickly, and she realized that his voice was beginning to deepen with age as Grillo mounted the top stair of her dais and with an effort visible on his face began to try to make sense of what he was seeing.
"What? Who are you? Where am I? There's nothing like this place around—" His hand indicated the throne, the dais, the canopy of sky splitting the darkness. "—Tyse. What do you want with me?"
"Shamshi," Roxane murmured sweetly, as if she had not heard, "fetch me my water bowl." The boy scrambled off her lap to find it.
"Grillo," she said then, "surely you know who and what I am. Or is this my more familiar aspect?" With a wave of hand before face she became Cybele, the fair-haired girl whom Niko had loved during the summer war. Another wave, and she was the dark-tressed, magnificently torrid Roxane again. "You may call me Roxane, since we are to be cohorts."
"Cohorts? Witch-bitch, you've got the wrong—" "Gently," she warned. "I'm your only chance for salvation. Do not offend me. These are my… troops of revolution, those who have previously been your enemies. Join with us now and survive what is to come." As she spoke, she probed his soul, finding the weaknesses of greed and fear and ambition that she knew were there. "Before you declare your loyalty to the Rankan empire and suggest that I kill you, if I must, but you'll never join me, know that I speak for Lacan Ajami."
Grillo crossed his arms and widened his stance still more. His mental acuity, she knew, was fully returned now. She wanted him to know exactly what he was doing. It was much more satisfying when a soul turned upon itself in full understanding that it was choosing evil over good. He said, "Fine. Speak," and she knew this to be only a ploy. He thought to trick her, gain information from her, escape with his life and soul intact. This, though he did not yet realize it, he could never do.
She nodded to the closest demon, red and snaggle-toothed, and to the nearby fiend whose eyes looked in every direction at once, and they came up the stairs and took Grillo by the arms. At the same time, Shamshi brought her scrying bowl. "Good. Go stand there." The boy went to stand beside her globe.
"Take your hands off me!" Grillo ordered the nonhumans.
"Come look in my scrying bowl of your own free will, Grillo. Come, see the riches awaiting you. See Lacan Ajami and make your pact with him. What difference is it to you whose banner flies over Tyse, so long as you prosper?"
And he came forward to look into her bowl and see what she would have him see. He couldn't know that he pacted with a dark father, not Ajami, or that his soul would be the interest charged on every gold coin he gained and moment of pleasure he enjoyed. He need just look, and he was hers.
When he did, a hiss of ecstasy escaped her as she tasted the bit of him she then acquired.
He looked up, but then looked again into the bowl, where he saw not only Lacan Ajami, but the caravan of drugs and precious wares headed overland from Niko's uncle in Caronne to Madame Bomba's Outbridge warehouse.
Again Grillo raised his head, his eyes somewhat glazed, for Lacan Ajami had just, as far as he knew, taken an oath of allegiance from him in far Mygdonia.
This one was not afraid of witchery; she'd known she could work with him, own him, and savor him. "Our gift to you, this caravan of contraband. Surely you'll confiscate it all and remember our generosity."
Grillo nodded, stiff and cold, not knowing that he was minus a fraction of his soul and that at every future meeting he would lose still more, so that someday he would be too weak to crawl from her presence and she would have him, in entirety, to feed her needs. No, now he was still suspicious, able to fight the euphoria she was offering him. But soon he would not be.
"What do I have to do? And who's that kid? He looks familiar…"
"Kid? There are no goats here." The boy, Shamshi, saw her signal and hid his face. The demon clacked its jaws, hoping Grillo would refuse her offer and all would dine on rare fare this evening. "Ah," she said, putting the golden talisman down before her slippered feet, "this, you mean." She nudged it with a toe and it seemed about to topple. Then its tiny golden legs spread and it took a step, then two, toward Grillo.
"That's right," Roxane purred, "take him. Pick him up. He's our contact. Our go-between. This little one will summon me whenever you need me. Just tell him to fetch me. Or even to fetch help. Or to carry a message."
Grille's hand reached out, touched the diminutive golden statuette, clutched it. "Ouch! It scratched me!"
The closest demon smirked; beside him, the fiend giggled out loud and the demon elbowed him.
"Nothing but a rough edge. His gold was smelted long ago." There was no turning back for this soul now, fight though it might. Grillo was hers. He had yet to discover this, but that delight she could wait to savor. Roxane had many things to attend to, and the wizardspawn of Datan was not the least of these. "Shamshi," she said softly, so that Grillo could not hear, "come spin the globe and deliver this new ally of ours back to his office." Then, to Grillo, in a normal voice: "Since you will be among us, go you down and study the faces of those who are your friends and cohorts. Study well, and work well. Prosperity is thine, and success whilst all of Tyse fails. Rejoice, Grillo, thou art saved."
Before the fiend and demon could assist him, Grillo backed of his own accord down the stairs.
Probably, she admitted to herself, the operations officer would still fool himself into thinking he could spy among her people and walk away, tell all he'd seen, to his Rankan allies, double-cross, even triple-cross her if he had to. Soon he would know better.
As he walked among the undeads, the insurgents, the peasants to whom it was an affront that others suffered less than they, these greeted him. Only her finest spell kept Grillo calm among the white-eyes, whose cold hands he had to shake, the demons, who fondled him wistfully, and the fiends, who kissed hum, lapping the salt sweat from his skin with rough and hungry tongues. But she was up to her tasks: she was Roxane.
When she nodded and the boy, Shamshi, utilized a power globe to alter a human's fate for the first time, Grillo disappeared from among those hideous and pathetic celebrants she'd picked to counter the harvest fetes in town.
Then she's«nt the boy down into the crowd to choose the sacrifices from among the living. He'd touched a fifteen-year-old girl and two strapping youths before she called him back. Tonight, Shamshi would sup on, tortured souls, an indescribable and addicting experience the likes of which did not exist among all the addictions and perversions of mankind.
But first, they would have some sport with them, so that the souls would be filled with concupiscence. It was this giving of pleasure and of pain that made a soul tender. It must not want to give up its life, but find that the very thing it lusted after would kill it.
When Shamshi came up from the midst of the revelers, Roxane gave the signal that the pleasuring begin. Succulent pigs on platters and whole roasted lambs appeared, and cushions and amphorae of wine and gurgling pipes wafting sweet blue smoke. She called the boy close.
It was Roxane's teat, she knew, he wanted to suckle; her legs were those he longed to part. Since he couldn't stay for the entire feast—he might be missed—and because she was kind, she allowed Shamshi a few moments with her.
And so, in as fine a fashion as had ever been done, the witch Roxane and the wizardspawn Shamshi began the debauch that would counteract, desecrate, and defile the harvest prayers which even then rose to a score of gods in Tyse's behalf.
* * *
Above the Outbridge barracks station, the moon was high and full and seemed to smoke, so misty was the night. Some of the Stepsons hustling about with ribbons and streamers and gilded wooden weapons for their harvest festival float peered up at the sky occasionally, muttering to one another about "wizard weather" and mumbling favorite wards.
Wizard weather come upon the town during harvest festival would be the worst of omens, all agreed. Second worst would be the failure of the Sacred Band's float to join the processional up Embassy Row. In it, effigies of the S
torm God and his consort, nine feet tall and painted gold, must ride in honor and glory to the Spring of the Prophet where, if all went well, the squadron's entry would win the governor's prize.
As it was, their float might be the last to join Tyse's favorite parade, for which the provisional government had even lifted curfew—for the entire harvest month, martial law had been suspended. It was because of this that Critias was in a blacker mood than the oxen being hitched between the wagon's traces, who kicked and bellowed and generally behaved like the foul-mouthed mercenaries who struggled against time and superstition and the bad luck which had put the first pair of oxen that the band had purchased down with colic.
At times like these, Crit longed for bygone days, regular army postings, simpler men, and simpler wars than those he managed now. Belize's death still bothered him, although officially it was solved and because of it the resilient trader Palapot was an agent of his task force. But since that night when he'd sent Randal off for Niko and Kama had come into his life, everything smelled of fate and wizardry. He often wondered, now, if he had any free will left—if, by taking up with Tempus's daughter on the sly, he hadn't inherited some part of the family curse.
Straton thought he had. Strat didn't like Kama one bit. And now Strat was sick, and Madame Bomba, the only barber-surgeon any of the Stepsons trusted in this faction-ridden hellhole of a town, had to be persuaded to tend him—no easy task, since Brother Bomba's dining hall had been razed by hostiles pretending to be Stepsons, who'd left "evidence" around to prove they were.
Gayle came up, panting, stripped down to his tunic. "The porking porker's porking-well porked, pork it."
By this Crit deduced that the wagon's front axle wasn't salvageable—it would have to be replaced. "God's breath, man, then find another! Wait!"
Gayle had turned to go. He swung about, lines deep on his brow in the moonlight. "If you ask me, what we need is a priest to lift the curse off this whole job."
Crit jumped at his chance. "Fine. You find one. As a matter of fact, I'm putting you in charge of this mess." He waved his hand to encompass the oxen being unhitched once more from their traces, the obscenity-spouting work crew, the menials hanging about pretending to be useful but in reality gloating that so simple an undertaking had gone so undeniably and comprehensively awry. "As I remember, it was you who were telling me just last week how much good will we'd earn by joining in the local rites."
"But—"
"Stepson, that's an order. I've got better ways to waste my time." Kama was in Grit's quarters, waiting. Strat might need help at Bomba's. "If Tempus comes in, tell him I'll be at Bomba's or the Lanes station. And get that float rolling before dawn, or we won't be able to hold our heads up in the town." And Crit set off at a brisk pace, ignoring Gayle's sardonic, "Yes, sir, commander."
Discipline, Crit well knew, was breaking down in the face of Tempus's absence, death squads with incendiary pellets, dead squads with all-white eyes—and the prospect of the band quartering in Tyse for the winter. If they didn't get another assignment soon, and quit this town, the snows would come down over Wizardwall and none would fight in the north until spring.
This depressing thought weighed on everyone's mind and made personality clashes inevitable, Crit told himself, though the senior Sacred Banders had come to him, all six expressionless and icy-eyed, and blamed this deterioration of the esprit de corps on the return of Niko, with his "witch taint," and on Randal, whom no one among the Stepsons was anxious to call a brother. Crit had told Tempus that he'd see that the band accepted Randal. He'd given his word and he'd see it through, though Critias had never dreamed that the Rid-dler meant to keep a magician—worse, a Hazard-class adept—as a permanent member.
So consumed with his private problems was Critias that he paid no mind when a horse came galloping full-tilt through the double gates—everyone was in a hurry, these days.
The task force leader had almost reached his quarters in the smaller officer's wing of the rambling estate when the rider, now on foot, reached him, panting. "Crit, Critias! We've trouble."
"Don't tell me… the goddess can't keep her skirts down, even for one night: the god's having her on the float."
"What? No, sir." It was Ari, one of the few locals the unit had absorbed, who'd been one of Grillo's specials and, like Gayle, was an expert on the town. "It's Grille, sir, he's disappeared. Right out of his office during a briefing. Three specials were there, told me themselves, after a couple ales to ease the telling. There's no formal alert; only those who saw what happened know he's been snatched… or gone missing, or been witched away. But they'd like our help, seeing as Tempus was talking up the need for better security around him…"
"I'll be damned and accursed. Disappeared, you say? Tsk, tsk." Crit and Grillo had too much in dispute to settle. "Luck's not all bad tonight, is it? All right, I'll take care of it."
Ari, falling in alongside when Crit moved away, wouldn't let it go at that. "I'd like to pick a search party, lead them myself. It'll look better—look like we tried, at least."
"Don't tell me you think I won't try to find our favorite Rankan? I'll put Niko and Randal on it. You can't compete with their kind of expertise, not without slogging knee-deep in magical attributes and Bandaran tricks of tracking. If you insist, you can accompany them—"
"No, no!" Hands up, Ari backed away. He was a friend of Niko's, but none of the Stepsons wanted to be seen with Randal—they sneaked off to consult him when they needed help, but took pains that no one else would know.
Crit had just entered his quarters, tiptoeing through the front room to his tiny bedroom where Kama lay, a wet rag over her eyes and a candle guttering on the bedside table, when he heard a knock at his front door. He ignored it.
"Critias? Is that you?" Kama had been on the street doing task force work one night when the insurgents struck. She'd see again, most probably, but no one knew how long she'd have the headaches or whether the fever which racked her now was related to the swordcuts she'd taken and the claw-mark scabs that scored her upper arms. It wasn't going to be easy to explain to her father how he'd let her, get into this kind of shape.
"It's me, all right. Grillo's missing. Your father hasn't come in. The float's in trouble. I've got to go into town to see Straton." As he spoke he rummaged in his trunk, the room's other piece of furniture, and came up with a blanket-wrapped bundle—the stand to Randal's globe, part of the spoils from the summer war. Crit couldn't put off the junior Hazard much longer. And Randal was right—whatever rendered the single mage committed to the Stepsons more effective served them all.
The knock he'd heard forgotten, he bent low over Kama, touched her face. It was hot. He put his lips to her forehead. "I'd like Randal to have a look at you, in case there's more than simple fever here—a curse, some evil eye or poison in those wounds. You should see it out there—it's mages' mist and—" Having told her she should see what she could not, he bit his lip.
Her fingers found his wrist, brought his hand to her mouth. She buried her dry, cracked lips in his palm. "Come back soon," she said in a childlike voice.
"I will." He really hoped she was going to live.
Closing the bedroom door behind him, the blanket-wrapped stand under his arm, he realized that the knocker had entered. It wasn't good protocol and he was looking for an unfortunate upon whom he could vent his wrath—Critias wasn't used to problems he couldn't solve. A scathing rebuke on his lips, he looked up and saw not a Stepson or a hired townie, but Jihan, Tempus's Froth Daughter, glowing with health and eerie beauty.
First he noticed that she was frowning, then that she had on her scale-armor, gray/green/brown and impossibly supple. "Jihan, what's the occasion?" This inhuman creature made him nervous; her eyes held the fire of unnamed, primeval gods.
"Shamshi has disappeared. I missed him less than an hour ago. From his bed, he disappeared." Crit put the blanket-wrapped parcel down on the table; he had never seen Jihan distressed: her eyes glowed.
She crossed the room and took his shoulders in a crushing grip—Jihan was as tall as he, and twice as strong. "My sweet child… Tempus will never forgive us. You must help me, Critias. My father, who abides in the primeval sea, will show his gratitude. Now and forever, you will be blessed. But we must find him before the sleepless one returns, or my life will be ruined! The Riddler will spurn me! Do you understand?"
Crit understood that she was crushing the very joint upon which his sword-arm depended. He said, "Right. Got it. Don't worry, we'll turn him up," and was rewarded by a lessening of pressure on his shoulder. But then she slapped him in a display of good fellowship and he almost staggered. What could even Tempus want with such a woman? He couldn't fathom it. But, all things considered, any blessings from any god would be welcome right now—he'd take what he could get. It was shaping up to be one hell of a night.
* * *
Madame Bomba stood over Straton, a prizing tool a foot long in her hand. The big Stepson, mouth firmly closed, was shaking his head, arms crossed, his eyes watering with pain.
They were upstairs in Brother Bomba's, in the Madame's private quarters where the smoke and water damage had left no mark. "Strat," Madame Bomba said, "you've got to let me pull that tooth. It's not going to hurt any more than it hurts right now."
Niko and Randal had come by to pay their respects and to convince the Madame, as Crit was sure only Randal and Niko—or Tempus himself— could, that no Stepson had had a hand in the destruction of Peace Falls's—indeed, all of Tyse's— finest inn and victualer, and had walked in upon Straton, hand holding his jaw and his temper raw, and the Madame arguing.
Randal glibly confirmed her diagnosis. "A tooth. Yes, I see it now. It's a tooth and no magic can heal it: it's dying and if you delay it may just take you with it."
Straton declared in language which made even Madame Bomba blush that Randal was addled—it wasn't his tooth that hurt, but his ear which ached, his head which throbbed, his neck which had been strained and now was too sore to turn.