by Janet Morris
At one point, when he had turned a corner near the reviewing stand and seen Jihan, on his other Trôs, working at crowd-control like a veteran, Tempus had found himself next to one of the nondescript riders who'd chosen to lend a hand.
The Trôs that Tempus rode was greeting its brother with a belly-shaking squeal just at that moment. The dark-clad rider whom Tempus didn't know turned in his saddle and saluted, "Hail to thee, founder."
Then Tempus saw the 3rd Commando device high on a leather breast plate and grinned his wolfish grin. "And to thee, soldier. Glad to have you with us." And he was. "There!" He pointed with his sword and charged toward a small group of insurgents, fleeing counter to the press of the crowd.
The 3rd Commando member kept pace, using his horse skillfully to part the crowd. "We didn't think you'd mind. We're tired of waiting for the seers to tell the omens," he called to Tempus as their horses leaped in tandem. "We're here without portfolio—or money—but we thought you'd have us anyway."
"How many are you?" Tempus grunted, leaning low to avoid a flying missile passing close. And so, as they fought their way toward victory, he learned that his terms had not been met in the capital and that, because of this, the 3rd had detached itself from the empire's army. Unless a coup or natural death made a change in emperors, these fighters were his for as long as he would have them. That they could keep their unit separate and distinct from the Stepsons was all they asked.
As the two of them backed six insurgents against a mud-brick wall, and the commando on his right put bolts enough into spread-eagled forms to hold the prisoners by the fleshy parts of arms and thighs until they could be collected for interrogation, Tempus allowed that the 3rd could stay, although silently he added that the rivalry between these fighters and his Stepsons might be more difficult to handle than even the three undeads among this captured cadre right before him, who calmly tore their flesh from the crossbow bolts pinioning them, leaving muscle, and in one case, a whole arm behind, and with a final, white-eyed gaze of taunt and silent fury, dashed away in three directions.
They chased no more rebels after that; they had the floats to tend and magic on their minds.
Over the reviewing stand the sky had darkened and Tempus pointed there: he had a suspicion blacker than those roiling thunderheads as to just what he might see when he got close.
To do so, he jumped his Trôs across the yet-heaving street where paving stones were restless and cracks had claimed extremities of man and beast.
When he looked back from the other side, the 3rd Commando fighter was crouched low and forward on his horse's withers, leaping it after his. Judging horse and rider, form and fettle, brains and courage, Tempus had to admit he was impressed.
The true test of this commando came, however, when they rode up to the reviewing stand and found the spectators who had huddled there, afraid to leave, with hands over their heads, and Jihan and her father, his red eyes piercing heaven and his growls making people hide their faces, arguing with lightning bolts and thunder claps over whether or not she would remain.
"Jihan," he shouted. "Stay or go, the choice is yours. I'll miss you," Tempus could not resist adding, "if you should leave. But ask your father's help with this—banish the curse from our parade."
"For you, my darling, anything!" Jihan's eyes were as red as her sire's and it seemed that sparks flew from her hair. She raised her hand and, in a way he still could not understand, she "spoke" to her father, Stormbringer, progenitor of all the weather gods, and things began to fall from heaven.
Falcons, eagles, condors, and winged things Tempus had never seen before came crashing to the bleachers so that the crowd there broke and ran.
The ground ceased its complaining and the paving stones of the street undulated like a troubled sea and came to rest in perfect order.
The mist that clung yet to byway and alley sparked bright and blew away.
At Brother Bomba's, lumber raised itself, casks reformed and filled themselves with wine, and all was as it had been before.
In the free zone, the Spring of the Prophet no longer ran as red as blood, but was clear and bubbling, pure. The toads that had fallen from the sky became stationary, turned to diamond, ruby, and emerald effigies which the starving free-zone Maggots trampled one another in their haste to grab.
The mageguild roof snapped tight again; no mortar fell or timber groaned.
And on a Trôs horse before the bleachers, Jihan, whose hands had been raised to heaven, lowered them until they were extended straight out to Tempus. "Your word is my command, lord of my heart. My father, too, accepts your gratitude. Look!"
Above her head, the clouds dispersed; a sunny morning blazed down upon her glowing form. "Now kiss me, prodigious human lover, for I have earned it!"
Tempus cursed himself for allowing her to construe his words as a deal he'd made with her and, worse, her father. But Stormbringer was gone, the sky was clear, and there was nothing right there and then that he could do but make the best of it.
Book Four:
IN THE SHADOW OF THE WALL
A fortnight after the harvest festival parade, the Machadi ambassador gave a dinner party in honor of the "valorous souls, men and women, whose bravery, above and beyond the call of duty, saved Tyse from peril and destruction during that night of horror…" etc., etc.
"What he's really grateful about," said Straton to Critias sourly as, on the pretext of checking their horses, stabled with the other guests' in the Machadi embassy's rear court, they marked with jeweler's files the horseshoes of mounts and dray beasts whose destinations later this evening might prove to be of interest, "is Niko having saved that niece of his from some Frog's Marsh demon. The rest of us are just here to make it look good."
Straton didn't like this sort of party, where a man had to dress like a fop and act like a politician, where the portions of food were small and the drinks smaller, where he had to laugh at bad jokes and be polite to the seldom-seen Tysian nobility, commanders of the local garrisons, and functionaries of the Rankan government.
Strat especially didn't like the feeling he got when Critias set eyes on Grillo: Tempus had taken Strat aside and told him that no matter how obvious it was to Crit that Grillo had been out to interdict the caravan bringing drugs from Caronne to Bomba's (and not, as Grillo maintained, to escort and, as it "turned out," save the shipment from insurgents), there was no proof of Grillo's treachery and thus Tempus was counting on Straton to keep Crit from going on record with his suspicions.
"Good?" Crit grunted, putting down the hoof of the 3rd Commando leader's roan and straightening up. "There's no way to make this collection of power brokers, rogues, and well-placed back-stabbers look civilized, let alone 'good." Five Stepsons certainly won't do it, not when one's Niko, one's a Froth Daughter, and one's a damned Hazard."
Crit, palm sliding along the roan belonging to Sync, the 3rd's commanding officer, spat over his shoulder in disgust when Straton didn't rise to his bait, and added with a theatrical sigh, "That's the lot. Let's gird for the forthcoming war of words and go back in there." From his pocket he fished a broadleaf sprinkled with pulcis, lit it with a flint from his beltpouch, then passed it to Straton.
Taking it, Strat tried not to notice how tired his partner and left-side leader looked. In the light of the flaring leaf, the dark circles under Grit's eyes seemed to dominate his face, the lines around his mouth were deeper, his forehead was crisscrossed with furrows. Strat had been careful not to argue with Crit lately; though he might survive it, it wasn't going to do any good.
Handing the smoke back to his leader, Strat inclined his head toward the party in progress, its laughter and music spilling out into the courtyard through open doors. "Let's go, Crit. Maybe Tempus needs us in there."
"Maybe the sapphire toads that bought passage out of the free zone for some of the worst criminals in town will turn back to warty flesh and hop away," Crit said cynically, but came along with no further urging.
Critias's pr
oblems in Tyse stemmed as much from a flaw in his character as from the town itself: Crit didn't know how to fail, never gave up on an operation in progress, couldn't turn away from a job—even an impossible one. Worse, he couldn't say no to Tempus. And Tempus was asking Crit to sort out the bad apples in a barrel which increasingly seemed to contain nothing but.
Not only had Tempus decreed that Crit must officiate as his first officer of record and liaison with the garrisons, but also work with Sync and his 3rd Commando, although the forty fighters billeted at the northern garrison were here as much to prove their superiority to Stepsons as to assist their founder in his endeavors.
Perhaps Crit could have done it if Kama hadn't been in the picture, but the woman was 3rd Commando first and woman second. When the 3rd came into town, she'd picked up and moved in with her unit, leaving Crit with all the problems she'd caused him and nothing to make it worthwhile.
So Crit had thrown himself into an operational tizzy, trying to turn up the culprits responsible for the destruction of the governor's float and prove that Grillo had been up above the pass when the Caronne caravan came through it not to preserve order or capture insurgents, but to give the Stepsons tit for tat in repayment for a shipment of Grillo's that Crit had interdicted earlier in the season.
The only cure for Crit's troubles, Straton was sure, would be a month or two out of town on long reconnaissance. When Strat had mentioned this to Tempus, the Stepsons' commander had said slyly, "I'm working on it."
Strat had chosen to take Tempus at his word, let the veiled promise buoy him as he'd sortied into the mageguild earlier this evening to collect Randal, who'd been sequestered there since parade eve and who, Crit had insisted, probably wouldn't come with anyone but Strat.
Now, as he and Crit reentered the embassy ballroom, Strat felt as if he were walking into a snake pit.
Everyone was there who shouldn't be: Niko, his leg healed and his witchy partner beside him in mageguild velvet and lace, was seated at the head table with the Machadi ambassador and Aisha, who might well be as guilty as her uncle of intrigue in Mygdon's behalf.
Strat, as chief interrogator, had produced from three different subjects the information that had led Crit to the conclusion that the fat Machadi ambassador was a pawn of Mygdonia: the girl's parents, the ambassador's sister and her husband, hadn't escaped when the Mygdonian Alliance conquered Machad. If the girl was personally involved, Niko wasn't going to take it well. Right now he bent his head to hers and smiled through a close-trimmed beard at some private joke. Only Niko was fool enough to pretend that any relationship could proceed normally in the middle of this muddled, treacherous war.
Beside Niko's girl was Sync, the 3rd Commando leader, dark and rangy in his formal panoply. Next to him sat Madame Bomba and her husband, a scarred veteran as tall and stoutly made as Tempus. Then came Kama, with Grillo on her left, and those two were getting on like old friends. On Grillo's left was the Rankan lieutenant-governor, fair and supercilious and vain; then Tempus and Jihan.
Crit had gone to Tempus earlier in the week and suggested that if Tempus was serious about quelling unrest in the town, four assassinations would do the trick: Grillo, the Machadi ambassador, Palapot the information-monger from the souk, and Oman.
Tempus had replied, "Find another way." However, Crit had not been willing to let the matter drop: he tried to tell Tempus what Niko had learned from the Caronne caravan master and while watching Oman's weapons shop. Tempus had dismissed Critias abruptly, the first time Strat could remember him ever having done so, and come later to Straton wondering how deeply, in Strat's estimation, Crit was involved with Kama and to what degree his association with her might be coloring Crit's perceptions.
The whole situation made Straton very uneasy. Crit's tenacity when on a trail was legend; eventually, the four were going to end up dead, and most likely Crit would deserve the credit.
So Strat was trying, as best he could, to keep four enemies alive while at the same time amassing incriminating evidence against them all as he'd been bid.
Just as Strat and Crit reached their table, parallel to Kama's, and Crit slid his chair back until it bumped the wall, the Machadi ambassador rose, tapping his electrum goblet with a two-pronged fork so that metal rang on metal and all fell silent, then joined him in a toast to "Tempus and his worthy fighters, every one."
Then, as luck would have it, Tempus proposed an end to "internal strife and the formation of a united front against our enemies, the foul Myg-donians and the Nisibisi adepts," and Straton noticed those who dared not drink to that one: Oman, present because of some accident of birth, Grille, and their Machadi host himself—all had empty glasses or mouths to wipe or dropped cutlery to retrieve.
Neither Strat nor Critias noticed that Kama had leaned over to Madame Bomba and both had left the table to seek the ladies' lounge until, when music commenced and folk began to circulate, the two women approached Crit and Straton's table to take seats a local merchant and his wife had just vacated.
Crit had been watching another girl across the room who looked, to him, entirely too much like the witch Cybele, a/k/a Roxane, to be coincidence, and asked Straton what he thought: "Would she dare, Ace, come here, brazen as a free-zone whore? Or am I—?" He broke off in mid-sentence as Madame Bomba in red satin, her mighty breasts powdered and perfumed, sat down beside him and Kama, in gray silk loose enough to have accommodated any manner of weaponry or armor underneath, slid into a vacant seat opposite him.
Crit greeted Madame Bomba profusely, ignoring Kama.
So it was Strat who noted the red-rimmed eyes and fresh-scrubbed face of the 3rd Commando's unit historian, Strat who saw Kama flush, then blanch, then pick nervously at the table's soiled cloth, and Strat who had to bid her welcome and wish her well. But his training told him something was not well with this one; he'd never seen Kama flustered. He'd never noticed anything girlish about her before. Even enthralled and cursed and bleeding, blinded upon what might have been her deathbed, this woman had behaved like a fighter; Strat had always thought of her as one.
Yet the voice which returned his greeting was tremulous. Her eyes were too bright. Kama had been crying, he realized, and when she'd said, "A pleasant evening to you, Straton. It's good to see you both so well…" and trailed off into silence, he found himself wanting to pat her hand or ask her what the trouble was.
Instead he turned away, to join the other conversation in progress.
Madame Bomba was saying softly, "… better sort this out, Crit, right here and now, before we have a situation no boy of mine would want to have a hand in causing. Straton, would you leave us for a bit? My husband, there, has got a packet of goodies we brought along to lighten up the evening. Tell him—"
"Anything you've got to say, you can say in front of Straton," Crit said flatly, still ignoring Kama, who pushed back her chair, rising, and said, "This isn't going to do anyone a whit of good, Madame. I'm going. Forget I said—"
"Sit down, Commando, if you are one!" Madame Bomba's hand flashed out and Kama, her arm in a grip the strength of which Straton well recalled, sat back down in her chair.
Strat's tongue probed at the hole where a tooth had once been. "Whatever this is, I want no part of—"
"Strat, you move and you can find yourself another partner," Crit said through gritted teeth, his eyes more pleading than angry.
Strat didn't blame him: alone with these two women was something he wouldn't want to be.
"We're all settled in now?" Madame Bomba teased in a dry, unfriendly voice. "Good. You are a little less than brave, the lot of you. I'm disappointed. You're lucky, Critias, that I didn't go over your head with this. The sleepless one might not be so patient as I with rampant childishness among your ranks. Now Crit, give Kama a civil greeting. And you, Kama, say hello to Crit—you know him well enough."
The two ex-lovers mumbled polite phrases neither meant.
"That, I suppose, will have to do. Straton, I'm sorry you're here for this, but
perhaps it'll be a help—perhaps you can talk some sense into your leftman's addled head."
"What? He's sensible enough, now he's quit of her," Straton couldn't help but say.
"Marvelous." The Madame tsk'd and shook her head. "I should leave this to the Riddler, it'd serve you all right if I did."
Kama buried her face in her hands, elbows splayed upon the table. The Madame indicated her. "Look at what you've done to her—a noble fighter, once, she was. Now she'll murder an innocent unborn on your account and carry a stain no valor can erase, all the way to heaven."
"Oh, no. That can't be…"
"You deny it's yours, Critias?" The Madame's mouth turned down in disgust. "There's ways to figure out…"
"Wait up," Strat interjected. "I don't understand… oh, yes I do. By Enlil's most holy privates, is she—?"
Kama seemed to shrink smaller. Her hands slipped down to expose her reddened eyes, then her nose, then her puffy lips. She said, "All I want is to be rid of it. Madame Bomba seems to think you," she glared at Crit, "have some say in what I do with my own body. I told her you wouldn't give a damn. And she's told me that she can't help me abort—"
Critias put an elbow of his own upon the table and rested his forehead against his thumb and index finger. "Hold on now. Let me get this straight. She's pregnant; you think it's some business of yours or mine. Is that it, Madame?"
"Good boy, Critias," Madame Bomba nodded with a humorless grimace. "Now, let's do the decent thing and make the Riddler a grandfather, nice and legal. We can't have unwed parents of—"
"There'll be no baby, if I have to fall on my sword and kill us both." Kama choked, cleared her throat. "Can you see me at my post, or on my horse, big with child? Do you know how long and hard I've worked to earn the 3rd's respect and pay my unit dues? Crit, tell her you want no part of it… or me. Then it's done and I can go."