When they had walked far enough that Shadowspawn’s laughter no longer echoed, the thief said, “What’s wrong? Like I said, I was out at the barracks. I’ve never seen him scared of anything, but he’s scared of that girl he’s got in his room. And he’s meaner than normal—told me I couldn’t stable my horse out there, and not to come around—” Shadowspawn broke off, having said what he did not want to say, and kicked a melon in their path, which burst open, showing the teeming maggots within.
“Maybe he’d like to keep you out of troubles that aren’t any of your business. Or maybe he estimates his debt to you is paid in full—you can’t keep coming around when it suits you and still be badmouthing us like any other Ilsig—”
A spurt of profanity contained some cogent directions to the Vulgar Unicorn, and some other suggestions impossible to follow. Niko did not look up to see Hanse go. If he failed to take the warning to heart, then hurt feelings would keep him away from Niko and his commander for a while. It was enough.
Directions or no, it took him longer than it should have to find his way. Finally, when he was eyeing the sky doubtfully, trying to estimate the lateness of the hour, he spied the Unicorn’s autoerotic sign creaking in the moist, stinking breeze blowing in off the harbor. Discounting Hanse, since Niko had entered the close and ramshackle despair of the shantytown he had seen not one friendly face. If he had been jeered once, he had been cursed a score of times, aloud and with spit and glare and handsign, and he had had more than his fill of Sanctuary’s infamous slum.
Within the Unicorn, the clientele did not look happy to see a Stepson. A silence as thick as Rankan ale descended as he entered and took more time to disperse than he liked. He crossed to the bar, scanning the room full of local brawlers, grateful he had neglected to shave since the previous morning. Perhaps he seemed more fearsome than he felt as he turned his back to the sullen, hostile crowd just resuming their drinking and scheming and ordered a draught from the bartender. The big, overmuscled man with a balding head slapped it down before him, growling that it would be well if he drank up and left before the crowd began to thicken, or the barkeep would not be responsible for the consequences, and Niko’s “master” would get a bill for any damage to the premises. The look in the big man’s eyes was decidedly unfriendly. “You’re the one they call Stealth, aren’t you?” the bar-keep accused him. “The one who told Shadowspawn that one of the best kills is a knife from behind down beside the collarbone, and with a sword, cut up between your opponent’s legs, and in general the object is never to have to engage your enemy, but dispatch him before he has seen your face?”
Niko stared at him, feeling anger chase the disquiet from his limbs. “I know you Ilsigs don’t like us,” he said quietly, “but I haven’t time now to charm you into a change of mind. Where’s One-Thumb, barkeep? I have a message for him that cannot wait.”
“Right here,” smirked the aproned mountain, tossing his rag onto the barsink’s chipped pottery rim. “What is it, sonny?”
“He wants you to take me to the lady—you know the one.” Actually, Tempus had instructed Niko to tell One-Thumb about Askelon’s intention to confront Cime, and wait for word as to what the woman wanted Tempus to do. But he was resentful, and he was late.” I have to be at the Mageguild by sundown. Let’s move.”
“You’ve got the wrong One-Thumb, and the wrong idea. Who’s this ‘he’?”
“Bartender, I leave it on your conscience—” He pushed his mug away and took a step back from the bar, then realized he could not leave without discharging his duty, and reached out to pick it up again.
The big bartender’s thumbless hand curled around his wrist and jerked him against the bar. He prayed for patience. “And he didn’t tell you not to come in here, bold as brass tassels on a witch-bitch whore? He is getting sloppy, or he’s forgotten who his friends are. Why didn’t you come round the back? What do you expect me to do, leave with you in the middle of the day? I—”
“I was lucky I found your pisshole at all, Wriggly. Let me go or you’re going to lose the rest of those fingers, sure as Lord Storm’s anger rocks even this god ridden garbage heap of a peninsula—”
Someone stepped up to the bar, and One-Thumb, with a wrench of wrist, went to serve him, meanwhile motioning close a girl whose breasts were mottled gray with dirt and pinkish white where she had sweated it away, saying to her that Niko was to be taken to the office.
In it, he watched the man called One-Thumb through a one-way mirror, and fidgeted. Eventually, though he saw no reason why it happened, a door he had thought to be a closet’s opened behind him, and a woman stepped in, clad in Ilsig doeskin leggings. She said, “What word did my brother send to me?”
He told her, thinking, watching her, that her eyes were gray like Askelon’s, and her hair was arrestingly black and silver, and that she did not in any way resemble Tempus. When he was finished with his story and his warning that she not, under any circumstances, go out this evening—not, upon her life, attend the Mageguild fete, she laughed, a sweet tinkle so inappropriate his spine chilled and he stiffened.
“Tell my brother not to be afraid. You must not know him well, to take his terror of the adepts so seriously.” She moved close to him, and he drowned in her storm-cloud eyes while her hand went to his swordbelt and by it she pulled him close. “Have you money, Stepson? And some time to spend?”
Niko beat a hasty retreat with her mocking, throaty laughter chasing him down the stairs. She called after him that she only wanted to have him give her love to Tempus. As he made the landing near the bar, he heard the door at the stairs’ top slam shut. He was out of there like a torqued arrow—so fast he forgot to pay for his drink, and yet, when he remembered it, on the street where his horse waited, no one had come chasing him. Looking up at the sky, he estimated he could just make the Mageguild in time, if he did not get lost again.
Chapter 4
THINKING BACK OVER the last ten months, Tempus realized he should have expected something like this. Vashanka was weakening steadily: something had removed the god’s name from Kadakithis’ palace dome; the state cult’s temple had proved unbuildable, its grounds defiled and its priest a defiler; the ritual of the Tenslaying had been interrupted by Cime and her fire, and he and Vashanka had begotten a male child upon the First Consort which the god did not seem to want to claim; Abarsis had been allowed to throw his life away without regard to the fact that he had been Vashanka’s premier warrior priest. Now the field altar his mercenaries had built had been tumbled to the ground before his eyes by one of Abarsis’ teachers, an entelechy chosen specifically to balance the beserker influence of the god. And he, Tempus, was imprisoned in his own quarters by a Froth Daughter in an all-too-human body intent on exacting from him recompense for what his sister had denied her.
Glumly he wondered if his god could be undergoing a midlife crisis, then if he too was, since Vashanka and he were linked by the Law of Consonance. Certainly, Jihan’s proclamation of intended rape had taken him aback. He had not been taken aback by anything in years. “Rapist, they call you, and with good reason,” she had said, reaching up under the scale-armor corselet to wriggle out of her loinguard. “We will see how you like it, in receipt of what you’re used to giving out.” He could not stop her, or refrain from responding to her. Cime had interrupted Jihan’s scheduled tryst with Askelon, perhaps aborted it. The body which faced him had been chosen for a woman’s retribution. Later she said to him, rubbing the imprint of her scale-armor from his loins with a high-veined hand: “Have you never heard of letting the lady win?”
“No,” he replied, genuinely puzzled. “Jihan, are you saying I was unfair?”
“Only arcane, weighting the scales to your side. Love without feeling, mind caress, spell-excitation … I am new to flesh. I hope you are well chastized and repentant,” she giggled, just briefly, before his words found her ears: “I warn you, straight-out: those who love me die of it, and those I favor are fated to spurn me.”
&nb
sp; “You are an arrogant man. You think I care? I should have struck you more viciously.” Her flat hand slapped, more than playfully, down upon his belly. “He—” she meant Askelon “—cannot spare me any of his substance. I do this for him, that he not look upon me hungry for a man and know shame. You saw his wrist, where she skewered him….”
“I don’t fancy a gift from him, convenient or no.” He was going to pull her up beside him, where he might casually get his hands around her fine, muscular throat. But she sat back and retorted, “You think he would suggest this? Or even know of it? I take what I choose from men, and we do not discuss it. It is all I can do for him. And you owe me whatever price I care to name—your own sister took from me my husband before ever his lips touched mine. When my father chose me from my sisters to be sent to ease Askelon’s loneliness, I had a choice—yea or nay—and a year to make it. I studied him, and felt love enough to come to human flesh to claim it. To become human—you concede that I am, for argument’s sake?”
He did that—her spectacular body, sheathed in muscle, taut and sensuous, was too powerful and yet too shapely to be mortal, but even so, he did not critique her.
“Then,” she continued, rising up, hands on her impossibly slim waist, pacing as she spoke in a rustle of armor-scales, “consider my plight. To become human for the love of a demiurge, and then not to be able to claim him… It is done, I have this form, I cannot undo it until its time is up. And since I cannot collect satisfaction from her—he has forbidden me that pleasure—all the powers on the twelfth plane agree: I may have what I wish from you. And what I wish, I have made quite plain.” Her voice was deepening. She took a step toward him.
He objected, and she laughed, “You should see your face.”
“I can imagine. You are a very attractive … lady, and you come with impeccable credentials from an unimpeachable source. So if you are inexperienced in the ways of the world, brash and awkward and ineffective because of that, I suppose I must excuse you. Thus, I shall make allowances.” His one hand raised, gestured, scooped up her loinguard and tossed it at her. “Get dressed, get out of here. Go back to your master, familiar, and tell him I do not any longer pay my sister’s debts.”
Then, finally, she came at him: “You mistake me. I am not asking you, I am telling you.” She reached him, crouched down, thighs together, hands on her knees, knees on what had once been Jubal the Slaver’s bed. “This is a real debt, in lieu of payment for which, my patron and the elementals will exact—”
He clipped her exactly behind her right ear, and she fell across him, senseless.
Other things she had said, earlier in passion, rang in his head: that should he in any way displease her, her duty would then be plain: he and Vashanka could both be disciplined by way of the child they had together begotten on one of Molin Torchholder’s temple dancers.
He was not sure how he felt about that, as he was not sure how he felt about Askelon’s offer of mortality or Vashanka’s cowardice, or the positives and negatives of his sister’s self-engendered fate.
He gave the unconscious woman over to his Stepsons with instructions that made the three he had hailed grin widely. He could not estimate how long they would be able to hold her—however long they managed it, it had better be long enough. The Stepson who had come from seeking Niko in Sanctuary found him, garbed for business, saddling a Trôs horse in the stables.
“Stealth said,” the gruff, sloe-eyed commando reported: “ She said ‘stay out of it, no need to fear.’ He’s staying with the archmage, or whatever it is. He’s going to the Mageguild party and suggests you try and drop by.” A feral grin stole over the mercenary’s face. He knew something was up. “Need anybody on your right for this, commander?”
Tempus almost said no, but changed his mind and told the Stepson to get a fresh horse and his best panoply and meet him at the Mageguild’s outer gate.
Chapter 5
THERE WAS A little mist in the streets by the time Tempus headed his Trôs horse across the east side toward the Mageguild—nothing daunting yet, just a fetlock high steaminess as if the streets were cobbled with dry ice. He had had no luck intercepting his sister at Lastel’s estate: a servant shouted through a grate, over the barking of dogs, that the master had already left for the fete. He had stopped briefly at the mercenaries’ hostel before going there, to burn a rag he had had for centuries in the common room’s hearth: he no longer needed to be reminded not to argue with warlocks, or that love, for him, was always a losing game. With his sister’s scarf, perhaps the problem of her would waft away, changed like the ancient linen to smoke upon the air.
Before the Mageguild’s outer wall, an imprudent crowd had gathered to watch the luminaries arriving in the ersatz-daylight of its ensorceled grounds. Pink clouds formed a glowing canopy to the wall’s edge—a godly pavilion; elsewhere, it was night. Where dark met light, the Stepson Janni waited, one leg crooked over his saddlehorn, rolling a smoke, his best helmet dangling by his knee and his full-length dress-mantle draped over his horse’s croup, while around his hips the ragged crowd thronged and his horse, ears flattened, snapped at Ilsigs who came too near.
Tempus’ gray rumbled a greeting to the bay; the curly-headed mercenary straightened up in his saddle and saluted, grinning through his beard.
He wasn’t smiling when the Mageguild’s ponderous doors enfolded them, and three junior functionaries escorted them to the “changing rooms” within the outer wall where they were expected to strip and hand over their armaments to the solicitously smirking mages-in-training before donning preferred “fete-clothes” (gray silk chitons and summer sandals) the wizards had thoughtfully provided. Askelon wasn’t taking any chances, Tempus thought but did not say, though Janni wondered aloud what use there was in checking their paltry swords and daggers when enchanters could not be made to check their spells.
Inside the Mageguild’s outer walls, it was summer. In its gardens—transformed from their usual dank fetidness by artful conjure into a wonderland of orchids and eucalyptus and willows weeping where before moss-hung swamp-giants had held sway over quickmires—Tempus saw Kadakithis, resolutely imperious in a black robe oversewn with gems into a map of Ranke—caught in the web-of-the-world. The prince/governor’s pregnant wife, a red gift-gown splendid over her child-belly, leaned heavily on his arm. Kitty cat’s approving glance was laced with commiseration: yes, he, too, found it hard to smile here, but both of them knew it prudent to observe the forms, especially with wizards…
Tempus nodded and walked away.
Then he saw her, holding Lastel’s hand, to which the prosthetic thumb of his disguise was firmly attached. A signal bade Janni await him; he did not have to look back to know that the Stepson obeyed.
Cime was blond, tonight, and golden-eyed, tall in her adept-chosen robe of iridescent green, but he saw through the illusion to her familiar self. And she knew it. “You come here without your beloved armaments or even the god’s amulet? The man I used to know would have pulled rank and held on to his weapons.”
“Nothing’s going to happen here,” he murmured, staring off over her head into the crowd looking for Niko; “unless the message I received was in error and we do have a problem?”
“We have no problem—” glowered Lastel/One-Thumb.
“One-Thumb, disappear, or I’ll have Janni, over there, teach you how to imitate your bar’s sign.” With a reproachful look that Tempus would utter his alias here, the man who did not like to be called One-Thumb outside the Maze lumbered off.
Then he had to look at her. Under the golden-eyed illusion, her char-and-smoke gaze accused him, as it had chased him across the centuries and made him content to be accursed and constrained from other loves. God, he thought, I will never get through this without error. It was the closest he had come to asking Vashanka to help him for ages. In the back of his skull, a distant whisper exhorted him to take his sister while he could … that bush on his right would be bower enough. But more than advice the god could no
t give: “I have my own troubles, mortal, for which you are partly responsible.” With the echo of Vashanka’s last word, Tempus knew the god was gone.
“Is Lastel telling the truth, Cime? Are you content to face Askelon’s wrath, and your peril, alone? Tell me how you came to half-kill a personage of that magnitude, and assure me that you can rectify your mistake without my help.”
She reached up and touched his throat, running her finger along his jaw until it found his mouth. “Ssh, ssh. You are a bad liar, who proclaims he does not still love me. Have you not enough at risk, presently? Yes, I erred with Askelon. He tricked me. I shall solve it, one way or the other. My heart saw him, and I could not then be the one who stood there watching him die. His world beguiled me, his form enthralled me. You know what punishment love could bring me… He begged me leave him to die alone. And I believed him… because I feared for my life, should while he died I come to love him. We each bear our proper curse, that is sure.”
“You think this disguise will fool him?”
She shook her head. “I need not; he will want a meeting. This,” she ran her hands down over her illusory youth and beauty, “was for the magelings, those children at the gates. As for you, stay clear of this matter, my brother. There is no time for quailing or philosophical debates, now. You never were competent to simply act, unencumbered by judgment or conscience. Don’t try to change, on my account. I will deal with the entelechy, and then I will drink even his name dry of meaning. Like that!” She snapped her fingers, twirled on her heel, and flounced off in a good imitation of a young woman offended by a forward soldier.
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