Storm Season

by Edited By Robert Asprin

  After the horror of the house of Kurd, Hanse was an uncharacteristically pensive fellow; a different Hanse. The eeriness of a regenerated Tempus was almost more than he could bear. Immortal! O gods of us all-immortal, a human newt who survived all and healed all and regrew even vivisectioned parts—scarless!

  Nor had that enigmatic and ever-scornful immortal said aught concerning Hanse’s expenses in freeing him, or his promise to retrieve a certain set of laden moneybags from a certain well up on Ea—a certain place.

  Oh, it had cost.

  For weeks Hanse had been idle. He did nothing. No; he did do something; he drank. His income stopped. He even sold some of his belongings to buy the unwatered wine he had always avoided.

  Even so he did not sell the gift of a dead Stepson; an entirely mortal one. It hung now on the wall of Hanse’s lodgings: a fine, fine sword in a silvered sheath. He would not wear it. He would not touch it. Only he was sure that it was not the gift of that dead man but of a god. Tempus’s god, Who had spoken to Hanse and rewarded him for his rescue of His servant Tempus—as that god, Vashanka, had promised. [i]

  That sword hung, minus its silver sheath, on Hanse’s wall. The scabbard trailed down his right leg. It was wrapped all in dull black leather, knotted and pegged and knotted again. Nor was he one with the mercenaries cluttering the city, bullying the city, and he had no wish to be.

  Hanse had another need for becoming proficient with arms, and better than proficient. It was Hanse’s secret, and it was bigger than Sanctuary itself.

  He collected from Tempus, though not in coin. That immortal had offered to make him a bladesman. (As for the horse … well, it was something of value and prestige, at least. Horses and Hanse were not friends and he hoped never, never to fight from the back of one. But for a horse, he’d be rich!) [ii]

  Tempus did not know why Hanse had changed his mind and sent word that he was minded to learn swordsmanship. He was pleased, Hanse was sure of that. Just as he and his ego were sure that he must be the best student Niko had ever had. Already, he was sure, he was incredibly good. Hanse never needed the same instruction twice. He never repeated an error. He was good. Niko said so, and Niko spoke for Tempus.

  Leaving Niko now, the thief called Shadowspawn wore a tight little smile. It was the pleased smile of one on whom a god has smiled; a pleased but enigmatic smile. He says that I am good.

  I hope so, Vashanka’s minion, he mused. Oh, I hope so. And I hope Vashanka finds me better than good!

  Hanse wended home, compact and lithe and darkly menacing, weighted with blades at leg and hips and arms. There were those who were in the act of departing this place or that but waited within doorways until he had passed; there were those who stepped aside for him though he made no hostile move. They did not like it, or like themselves for doing it, but they would do it again, for this menacing street-tough.

  Hanse went home. I’m ready, he thought, and tight-smiled.

  ****

  AFTER THAT BUSINESS with Kurd and with Tempus and the absolute ghastliness of Tempus’s mutilations—and the ghastlier reality of his complete recovery even unto regrowing several parts—Hanse had taken to drink.

  He was not a drinker. Never had been. That was no deterrent to millions of others and it was not to Shadowspawn. So he drank. He drank to find an alternate state, an alternate reality, and he succeeded admirably in achieving the unadmirable.

  The problem was that he did not like that. Getting away from everything was getting away from Hanse, and Hanse was the poor wight he was trying to find.

  O Cudget, if only they had not slain you—you’d have shown me and told me as always, wouldn’t you?

  (Put another way, he had been shaken badly and dived for solace into a lake of alcohol. He stayed there, and he was drunk quite a lot of the time. He didn’t like that either; he didn’t even like the taste of the stuff. Most especially he didn’t like the way he felt when sleep stopped his body and let it awake with a mouth like vinegar and the desert all at once, a mouth with the feel of a public restroom for horses and a tongue in need of a curry-comb and a stomach he’d willingly have traded for a plate of pigs’ trotters and a head he’d have traded for nearly anything at all. Something had come loose in there and was rolling around, and it banged against the inside of his head when he moved it. Alcohol helped. More scales off the snake that had bit him. That merely started the whole process again. Besides, he preferred control, control or some feeling of it. Strong drink washed that away on a river of vomit and sank it with explosive belches and retching.

  (He had the need for control, back there in the barely lighted shadows of his mind. All dark, back in there, in the mind of the bastard son from the wrong side of everything. He had never been in control, and so sought it, or its semblance. He had no need for any drug, and now he knew he had no desire for it either. Not to mention head or stomach.)

  (That was that. Hanse was off the sauce.)

  He returned to being what most others were, certainly most who were his age: a creature of his own subconscious, a stranger dwelling within him, and he lived as its captive.

  One day someone mentioned his “obvious sense of honor”—and it was obvious—as he put it. Learned, that fellow said, from Hanse’s respected mentor Cudget Swearoath, master thief. And Shadowspawn sneered and looked menacing. That the innocent spewer of insults offered to buy him a drink did not advance his cause or Hanse’s mental state in the least measure. The poor fellow soon remembered an important appointment elsewhere, well apart from Hanse, and he repaired there at speed. Hanse predictably spent the rest of that day behaving as if he had no notion what honor might be.

  And still he sought, and remembered.

  “Thou shalt have a sword,” that voice had said inside his head, a lion agrowl in the shadowed corridors of his mind, “if thou free’st my valued and loyal ally. Aye, and a fine sheath for it, as well. In silver!”

  Hanse knew fear and some anger; he wanted nothing of that incestuous god of Ranke, for it had to be Vashanka whom Tempus served close. No! I serve—I mean… I do not… No! Tempus is my… my… I go to aid a fr—a man who might help me, he tried to tell that god in his mind, for he admitted to no friends and had sworn to Tempus that he had none and wanted none. He who had friends was vulnerable, and Hanse much preferred his image of himself as a separate room, a person apart, an island.

  Leave me and go to him, jealous god of Ranke! Leave Sanctuary to my patron Shalpa the Swift, and Our Lord Ils. Ils, O Lord of a Thousand Eyes, why is it not You who speaks to me?

  Yet a miracle surely transpired that night, and it served to save the life of Hanse and thus of Tempus, whom Hanse freed. Hanse knew no pride in having served and been saved by the god of the Rankan overlords, and he found his lake of alcohol. When he emerged and dried out, he was still troubled.

  He was not the first in such straits to have turned god-ward.

  Not Vashanaka—ward! On four separate occasions he had visited the sanctuaries of Ils and Shipri All-mother, His spouse. Ils, god of the Ilsigi who long ago fled one land and found this one, and founded Sanctuary. (There was no temple to their fourthborn, Shalpa, who shared birthdate with his sister Eshi. Shalpa was He to Whom There is no Temple, and The Shadowed One, in his night-dark cloak. He was Shalpa the Swift, too. Shalpa of the night, and untempled: patron of athletes and of thieves.)

  Hanse went avisiting the house of gods, and came the time there he felt his hair quiver and start up while his stomach went chill and as if empty, for he felt sure that one of Them spoke to him. A god, aye.

  Ils Himself? Shalpa His son? (Considering his recent drinking, Hanse later wondered if it might more likely have been Anen. He was firstborn of Ils and Shipri, and he was patron of bibbers and taverners.)

  Whoever it was spoke to him in his head, it was not Vashanka, not there in the house of the gods of Ilsig.

  Hanse of the Shadow, Chosen of Ilsig, Son of the Shadow.

  We exist. We are here. Believe. And look for
this ring.

  He saw it. The gaud appeared from nowhere and hung there before his eyes. Now it was as if solid, and now he seemed to see through it, into the temple appointments beyond. A ring that seemed a single piece of gold, unfused, and set all about with twinkling little blue-white stones like stars. In its center a big tiger’s-eye, caged in gold bands. And that orange-yellow gemstone, that tiger-eye—seemed to stare at him, as if it was more than merely a chatoyant stone of quartz fibers.

  And then it was gone, and so was the voice that had been inside his head, addressing him—hadn’t it Had it?—and he was left slumped and slick all over with sweat. He had to apply his mind and then make conscious effort even to close his mouth. The temple’s coolth had become chill.

  After a while he felt strong enough to move. Move he did, for he was not minded to remain there in that joint temple of Ilshipri. He departed, all prickly still and wet with sweat even down his legs. He squinted on leaving the dimness of the temple, for the time was mid-afternoon, not night at all.

  Had it begun then, even in daylight?—the hallucinations, the false feeling of importance that was a lie swarming up like a nest of spiders from the lees of swilled wine?

  Or did I hear—could I have heard … a god? … The god?

  He had walked from the temple, seeing nothing and no one. A person apart and an island indeed! Until, as if a hood had been lifted off his head to bare his eyes, he saw Mignureal.

  She came directly toward him, looking at him, that S’danzo daughter of his friend Moonflower of the Seeing eyes. Moonflower who so well knew him—and did not want him having aught to do with her daughter. Mignureal. Heading purposefully toward him, gazing at him. A girl who looked thirteen and was older, long since pubertous and interested in Hanse—fascinated with Hanse as a woman is ever fascinated by and with the rascal. It pleased her to act as if she was thirteen, not a woman of sixteen, most of whose age-peers were wedded or at least bedded.

  “My daughter is very young and thinks you are just so romantic a figure,” that great big woman said, who was such a pretty little woman inside the masses of flesh her husband so loved. “Will you just pretend she is your sister?”

  “Oh you would not want that,” Hanse had assured her, in one of those rare revelations as to the sort of childhood he must have had. “She is my friend’s daughter and I shall call her cousin.”

  Hanse meant that promise. Besides, Mignureal had seen him quaking and blubbering with fear, a victim of that fear-staff of the perverse gods, and he did not care to look her in the eyes. It was she who had rescued him and led him, a tremulous mouse helpless against the power turned on him, back to her mother.

  And now here she came, bearing some colorful bundle. Small and dark and yet not at all a creature of night and shadows as he was. Mignureal was a creature of day and this day in her bright yellow skirt she wore a strange look, as if she was drugged.

  If she is, Hanse thought fiercely, I will beat her and take her home and curse Moonflower for allowing it to happen to this… this dear maiden.

  But then he stopped thinking. She was before him, stopping and forcing him to stop. And when she spoke her voice was odd and flat as her eyes, emotionless as her face. She spoke as if she said words she had only learned—the words, not their meaning—like a girl who had learnt her part for some temple rite on a god day.

  Dark brown eyes like garnets and just as lacking in softness, she said, “You are invited to dinner tomorrow night. You will be in no danger. Wear this clothing. The place is known to you. It is long unpeopled, but its water is a silver pool. The silver is your own, Son of the Shadow, Chosen of Ilsig. Come, tomorrow even as the sun sets, to the aerie of the great ruler of the air.”

  Without blinking, she pressed into his hands that which she carried, and turned and ran in a butterfly flurry of yellow skirts and streaming blue-black hair. Hanse stood, stupidly staring after her until she rounded a corner and was gone down another street. Then he looked down at his gift. All in shades of blue and some green, with a flash of yellow-gold embroidery. A fine tunic, and a cloak considerably better than good. Good clothing!

  Clothing so fine existed in Sanctuary, of course. No S’danzo girl had any of it though, nor did a youth who gained his living by stealth.

  Whence, then, came this soft fabric?

  From the same place those words came from, he thought, for they were not Mignureal’s words. And again the phrases Son of the Shadow and Chosen of Ilsig! A shiver claimed Hanse then, and possessed him for a long moment.

  “ ‘Day to you, Hanse—ah! I see you had a good night, ‘s more like it, hum?” And that acquaintance went on smiling, for what else could he think? Where else could Hanse have gained such a bundle of finery, save through a bit of climbing and breaking-and-entering on yesternight?

  Hanse stood directing thoughts to his feet, and at last they began to respond. He walked on, trying to make his bundle as small as he could, lest some member of the City Watch espy him, or a Hell-Hound from the palace, or someone nosy enough to consider turning him in or blabbing it about that Hanse had stolen good soft, decorated clothing sufficient to pay his room’s rent for the next twelvemonth.

  ****

  HANSE HAD RECEIVED coded messages beforetimes, and had devised the meaning. He did so this time. He knew where he was invited. (Invited? Bidden! Summoned!) Away up on the craggy hill now called Eaglebeak was a long untenanted manse. It lay partially in ruins, that magnificent home its long-ago builder and tenant had called Eaglenest. Nearby, beyond scattered fallen columns and tumbled stones, rotted planking marked a well. Down in that well languished two leathern bags. Saddlebags. Hanse knew they were there, for he had put them there, in a way, though it had not been his intent.

  He hoped they were there, for they contained a great deal of silver coins, and a few that were gold.

  They were the ransom of the Rankan symbol of power, the staff called Savankh, which a thief called Shadowspawn had stolen from the palace of the Prince Governor. The P-G knew they were there, but had agreed that they would remain Hanse’s property. Hanse had, after all, uncovered a spy and a plot and saved Prince Kadakithis’s face, if not his life.

  But for a horse and a dead man named Bourne, Hanse would have had all that gleaming fortune in his possession, rather than “banked” down in the earth, atop a hill, in a narrow well that was like to have been the death of him!

  He was to go to Eaglebeak, then. To dine in dark and deserted aerie: Eaglenest! So he quietly told Moonflower. For aye, once again he betook himself to her in quest of information and advice. (Mignureal was not about when he approached, and neither he nor Moonflower was sorry.)

  He sat before her now in his nondescript tunic the color of a field mouse, his feet in dusty buskins, knees up. And only three blades showing on him. He sat on the ground and she on her stool. The fact that she overflowed all around was disguised by her voluminous skirts; Moonflower wore red and green and ochre and blue and another shade of green. Across her lap lay his new clothing.

  She fondled and sniffed and tasted it, closed her eyes and drew it through her dimple-backed hands. And all the while she was moving her lavender-tinted lips. The vastness of her bosom was almost still as her breathing slowed, her heartbeat slowed, her muttering slowed and she slid away from herself, a great gross kitten at her divining.

  No charlatan, this mother of eleven who had raised nine, but one with the Gift, the power. Moonflower Saw.

  Now she Saw for Hanse as she had before, and he was not all that happy with it. Nor was she, even in trance.

  “I See you, darling boy, all nobly turned out in this finery, and I See a great light hosting y—oh! Oh, oh Hanse … it is, it is He! Here is Hanse, aye, and here is He, Himself—Ils, god of gods! And I See… ah! Hmp. I like not what else I See, for it is Mignue, my Mignue, with you and the Lord of Lords.”

  He nodded, frowning. That was her pet name for her daughter. He accepted that somehow Mignureal was a part of this… whatever thi
s was.

  “Ah! Here is Hanse with a sword, and wielding it well, well … for a god, Hanse, soldierly Hanse I See… for a god, against a god!”

  Against a god. Father Ils, what means this all? What would you make of me? And he had an idea: “Who… who gave me the sword?”

  “A bas—no, no, a foster son. Ah—a stepson. Yes. A s—”

  “And who gave me the clothing? Is that Mignureal?”

  “Mignue? No, oh no, she is a good g—ah. I see her. Eshi! It is Eshi Herself who has given you this clothing, Han—” And she shuddered of a sudden, and sagged, and her eyes came alive to stare into his. “Hanse? Did I See? Was it of value?”

  He nodded. He was unable to look other than grim. “You Saw, O Passionflower. This time I must owe you, beyond the binding coin.” (Which she had already dropped into that warm crevasse she called her Treasure Chest.)

  Eshi, Hanse thought. Eshi!

  A jealous and passionate god, Ils created all the world, and from his bodily wastes He peopled it. The gods He created from his two extra toes, and the eons passed and the first-created challenged Ils. This was Gunder, and he lost. He was hurled to the earth. His daughter Shipri, though, was thrice-fair, and her the great Lord Ils spared—and couched. By him Shipri became All-mother; of him she bore Shils, and Anen, and Thufir, and the twins Shalpa and Eshi, their first daughter, and another; the god no one spoke of. Now Anen was called firstborn, for jealous, passionate Ils sinned; in rage he slew his firstborn son, Shils.

  Eshi. Much spoken of She was, and prayed to as well, but it was little reverence she gained. Everyone knew that she was a sensuous beauty who sought out and had her way with each of her brothers, and indeed sought to bring to couch even her father. In that She failed; even Ils was not that passionate, and one sin for a god was enough.

  Eshi was fond of jewellery, and so gemworkers took a manifestation of her as patron. She was known to love love, and thus lovers, of course. Cows were special to her, and so were cats. Her sign was the liver, which any child learned early was the seat of love and its younger sibling, infatuation. Eshi!