Blood Ties tw-9

by Robert Lynn Asprin

  And then he realized why these uptown hotshots were down in Ratfall; Kama's father. Tempus's minions, all of these were, some by choice, some by duty, some by coercion. And none of them with a good word to say of Zip, except perhaps for the Riddler's daughter.

  Fear sharpened his eyesight, and he looked beyond the gathered luminaries to their troops, and farther: to where his rebels skulked. None of them would move to save him-the odds weren't good enough.

  And neither Ratfall nor Zip were worth saving, not at the kind of price the 3rd Commando would exact, if the sentry was a good example.

  And he was. They'd made sure of that, had his visitors.

  As he took deep breaths and resolved to tell nothing to this corps of fancy fighters (including the Stepsons' chief interrogator, Strat), Zip realized that something was indeed worth saving here: Behind the men, in the long shed against which 3rd Commando regulars leaned with studied insolence, was a store of incendiaries purchased from the Beysib glassmakers: bottles in which were alchemical concoctions that, once their wicks were lit and the bottles thrown, exploded with such force that the shards and flame and concussion from even one such bottle could clear a street-or a palace hall.

  With or without him, the revolution could continue, as long as the Beysib glassblowers took the PFLS's money and Ilsig will-to-fight held out.

  So, having determined that he had something to lose. Zip said again, "Talk, I said. What do you think this is, an uptown dinner party?"

  "No," said the woman he didn't know, the one with the hawkish bird upon her shoulder, "it's a revolutionary council -a trial, actually: yours."

  When Kama came back from Ratfall, her eyes were red-rimmed and she was so disarrayed that she ran up Molin's back stairs, hoping to have the girls draw her a bath so she could get the Zip-smell off her and the straw out of her hair before the Torch saw her.

  But Molin was home: She could hear Torchholder's voice, and that of another Rankan, coming from the front rooms.

  She froze in horror, realizing suddenly that she couldn't face him-not now, with her thighs sticky and her blood up, and all her father's heritage aroused in her so that she wanted nothing to do with the half-Rankan, half-Nisi who had saved her life, and whom she owed so much.

  But was debt the same as love? Zip's faked and fated "trial" had broken her heart thrice over.

  The outcome-the verdict of conditional acquittal-was assured, by Tempus's decree. Zip was the only one who hadn't known it.

  It was the crudest thing she'd ever seen men do to another man, and she'd been a willing part of it, the operator in her fascinated by all she saw, by human emotion and its interplay, by the passions of those who'd lost loved ones, and face, trying to justify the one and regain the other-all because Kama's father had ridden down from Ranke, looked upon the doings of Sanctuary's puny mortals, and not been pleased.

  Sometimes she hated Tempus more even than she hated the gods.

  And so she'd stayed with Zip, after the others had left, to lick the nervous sweat from his fine young body and to wipe the confusion from his heart in the only way she knew.

  Zip was... Zip, her aberration: a physical match such as Molin could never be. But that was all. She could never make it more, or let it make itself more, or let Zip convince her it could be more.

  He needed help, that was all. And everyone was' using him, dangling him this way and that. She felt sorry for him.

  So she gave him comfort in the night. It was nothing.

  Yet the memory sent her bolting from Molin's doorstep, because the Torch was too intelligent to be fooled by mumbled excuses or headaches, because Kama just couldn't fake it tonight.

  She roamed night-hot streets, though she knew better, almost hoping that some pickpocket or zombie or Beysib would accost her: Like her father, when pushed too hard, Kama craved only open violence. She'd have killed a Stepson or a 3rd Commando ranger, one of her own, if any dared cross her this evening.

  She stopped in at the Unicorn, half-hoping for a fight, but no one paid attention to her there.

  She wandered back streets on a borrowed horse, letting it drift barracks-ward, until she realized that it had brought her to the White Foal Bridge.

  And then, as she gave the horse its head and it crossed the river bridge, she began in earnest to cry.

  It was Crit she wanted now, whether to hold him or kill him, she couldn't have said if her life depended on it. But Crit was, as Zip would say, old business, and Crit had noticed that she'd stayed with Zip.

  Maybe she'd stayed with Zip because of Crit, brushing hips with his partner, and because even that partner, Strat, had sought warmer company than Critias's Ischade for warmth that Crit reserved to formed ranks and duty squadrons and the next covert operation on his docket.

  So when the sorrel string-horse ambled toward Ischade's funny little gate, as if by habit, Kama brushed her eyes angrily with her forearm and blinked away her tears.

  In her nostrils was the rank smell of the White Foal in summer, carrying its carrion to the sea, and the perfume of night-blooming flowers of the occult sort that Ischade grew here.

  And the smell of heated horse: Two were stamping, reins tied to Ischade's gate, and one of those was Grit's big black. She recognized it by the star and snip as it turned its head to whicker softly to the mount she rode.

  The mare under her gave a belly-shaking acknowledgment and she realized that the horse she rode, and his, were lovers.

  Hating herself for resenting even that, for her confusion and her doubts, she dismounted, trying not to think at all.

  And walked up to the vampire-woman's gate, and pushed it with a sweaty palm.

  Perhaps she was meeting her doom here-Ischade had no reason to cut Kama the kind of slack she allowed Straton, and Crit because of their pairbond, and Kama's father because of some bargain whose specifics Tempus had never revealed.

  If Crit was in there, Kama wanted to see him. She focused on that and nothing else.

  Love sucks, she told herself, and wondered what he'd say.

  She'd knocked upon Ischade's door, which was lit somehow, though no torch gleamed or candle flickered in its lamp, before she'd thought of an excuse to give. She could always say she needed to debrief.

  If he was there. If it wasn't a trap. If the necromant wasn't into women this summer.

  Then the door opened and a small and dusky figure stepped out, closing it behind her so that Kama was forced to retreat a pace, then take a step down the stoop's stairs.

  That put them eye to eye and the eyes of Ischade were deeper than Kama's hidden grief for a child lost long ago on the battlefield and the man who'd refused to give her another chance.

  "Yes?" said the velvet-voiced woman who held Strat in thrall.

  Kama, who was more woman than she'd have chosen, looked deep into the eyes of the woman who was all any man who'd seen her had ever dreamed of wanting, and felt rough, unkempt, foolish.

  "Crit's horse... is it... ? Is he... ?"

  "Here? The both. Kama, isn't it?" Ischade's dark eyes delved, narrowed just a fraction, then widened.

  "It, I-I shouldn't have come. I'm sorry. I'll just go and..."

  "There's no harm. And no peace, either," said the vampire-woman who seemed suddenly sad. "Not if your father has the say of it. You want him-Crit? Take care for what you want, little one."

  And Kama, who had never known her mother and thought of other women as if she herself were a man, found her arms outstretched to Ischade for comfort, weeping freely, sobbing so deeply that nothing she tried to say came out in words.

  But the necromant drew back with a hiss and a warding motion, a shake of her head and a blink that broke some spell or other.

  Then she turned and was gone inside, though Kama hadn't seen the door open to admit her.

  Suddenly alone with her tears on the doorstep of one of the most feared powers in Sanctuary, Kama heard words within- low words, some spoken by men.

  Before the door could reopen, before
Crit could see her weeping like a baby, she had to get out of here. She didn't mean it; she shouldn't have come. She needed nobody-not her father, not his fighters, not Zip or Torchholder and, most especially, not the Sacred Bander called Crit.

  She'd run down the path and thrown herself up on her saddle before the door opened again.

  Anything the man in the doorway might have shouted was drowned out by the mare's thundering hooves as Kama slapped her unmercifully with the reins, headed toward the Stepsons' barracks at a dead run.

  There was nothing Crit could tell her that she wanted to hear-except perhaps why she could forgive Zip, who had betrayed her and tried to pin Strat's attempted murder on her, when she couldn't forgive Crit, who had wanted to marry her and have a child with her.

  * * *

  Tasfalen's uptown estate had once been luxurious and fine, the centerpiece of one of Sanctuary's most exclusive neighborhoods.

  Now it stood alone, blackened and charred but whole, while all around it skeletal remains of burned-out homes teetered for blocks, frameworks leaning on lumps of fused brick, so that occasionally a charcoaled timber snapped of its own weight and came crashing down to break an eerie silence that spread from here to the uptown house where the pillar of fire had once raged, and beyond.

  Not even rats ran these streets at night, since the pillar of flame had cleansed an uptown house and all the witchery that once had centered in its velvet-hung bedroom.

  But Tempus had called a meeting here, across the street from Tasfalen's front door, in the dead of night-a meeting of those concerned, once all his preparations had been made.

  The sleepless veteran was the only one unaffected by the hours he and his had kept this week in Sanctuary.

  Crit, who'd born the brunt of delegated tasks, weaved on his feet with exhaustion as he set torches in the rubble of the house across from Tasfalen's; had the light been better, the black circles under his eyes would have told a clearer tale of what he'd been through and what it cost him to petition Is-chade for leave to do what tonight must be done here.

  Strat, Crit's partner, worked silently beside him, unloading ox thighs rich with fat from a snorting chestnut who didn't like its burden, and oil in child-sized stoneware rhytons, and placing all on a makeshift plinth exactly opposite Tasfalen's door.

  Tempus watched his Stepsons work without a word, waiting for the witch to show. Ischade had decreed this meeting be at midnight-necromants will be necromants. She was crucial to this undertaking, so Randal said.

  Tempus hardly cared; the god was in him fierce and strong, making everything seem fire-limned and slow: his task force leader; the witch-ridden Stepson, Strat; the horses bearing sacrificial burdens. If he hadn't remembered that he'd thought it mattered, that he'd felt need to leave here owing nothing, he'd have left this stone unturned.

  But Ischade owed him this favor-if it really was one. And he, in turn, owed a debt he was loath to carry-a debt to the Nisibisi witch last seen behind that ward-locked door across the street.

  Tasfalen's door. It had not opened since the pillar of flame had scoured the neighborhood about it. What might come out of there, not even Ischade was certain. Powers had convened to cleanse the ground here, but stopped just short of the house. Powers that no one thought would ever work together had taken a hand to bar that door-Ischade's sort of powers, and others from deeper hells; Stormbringer's primal fury, and thus those from the sort of heaven Jihan's father ruled.

  Or thus, at any rate, Tempus understood it. The god in him understood something different-something of passion inbound and lust unreleased.

  There was a something in there all right, the god was telling him: something very hungry and very angry.

  Whatever it was-Nisibisi witch, a ravening ghost thereof, a demon entrapped, a shard of Nisi power globe-it hadn't survived in there since winter's end on stored foodstuffs and the occasional mouse.

  If it was Roxane, behind Ischade's iron wards that not even the rip in magic's fabric could weaken, then the Unbinding would have to be carefully done. If it was Something Else, Tempus was prepared to give it battle-he'd once fought Jihan's own storm-cold father to a draw over matters he had less stake in.

  Snapper Jo scuttled up to the Tros horse by which Tempus stood, the fiend's knuckles nearly dragging on the ground, its snaggle teeth gleaming in the torchlight: "Sire," it grunted, "see her? Snapper can't tell." The fiend, in its distress, ramped like a bear-side to side, side to side. "Mistress won't like, won't like ... Snapper go now?"

  "Did you place the stone. Snapper?" The stone'in question was a bluish gem, crazed and fractured, Ischade had given Crit. For what payment, when the stone would help release her enemy and perhaps release Straton, too, for duty to the east, Tempus hadn't asked.

  And Crit never made excuses. But there'd been no soldierly cursing, no banter between the Stepsons here this evening. When Randal had come by briefly, to say Jihan would attend, there had been none of the obligatory teasing of the mage that passed for fellowship. Strat hadn't even called Randal "Witchy-Ears."

  Tempus knew he was pushing matters, but he had his reasons. And the god, risen in him, was all the sign he needed that his instinct wasn't wrong.

  A part of this outrageous enterprise-the freeing of whatever lurked behind Tasfalen's doors-he undertook to right a balance out of whack. It was something none of those about him sensed, but Niko, the absent Stepson, would have understood: Tempus labored now for maat, for equilibrium in a town that teetered toward anarchy; and for the Stepsons, who soon might go where Nisibisi magic was still strong and had better not, with a debt outstanding to a witch of Nisi blood.

  But the greatest part of this seemingly evil deed-that Randal had begged him not to undertake and that had troubled Ischade enough to bring her here-he did because of Jihan, and her father, and a marriage that, if consummated, would bind a god to Sanctuary that no little thieves' world could or should contain.

  Three hundred years and more of kicking around this world of god-inspired battlefields and wizard-won wars had taught Tempus that instinct was his only guide, that any man's sacrifice went unappreciated unless it was to propitiate a god, and that the only satisfaction worth having was wrested from the deed itself-was in the process of accomplishment, never in the result.

  So the sacrifice he was about to make-not the sacrifice of laying the ox thighs on the'oil and sending smoke up to heaven, but the sacrifice of his own peace of mind-would go unremarked by men. But he would know. And the god would know. And the powers who tended the balance which expressed itself in fate and weather would know.

  How Jihan's father would react, only Jihan would know.

  A movement caught his eye, and the god's eye within him knew it female. His scrotum drew up, ready to face Jihan in all her insatiable glory.

  But it was Ischade, not Jihan, who came.

  Tempus felt a twinge of distress, of uncertainty-something he'd rarely felt in all these years. Could Jihan ignore his invitation? His challenge? The power in the game he played? Could Stormbringer have gotten wind of Tempus's intention and mixed in? Tricking a god wasn't easy. But then, neither was tricking the Riddler.

  Randal had assured him Jihan had said she'd be here. He knew she thought she was involved with Randal to make him jealous, to make him fey, to make him come to heel. The question was, however, whether Jihan herself understood what she did and why-that Stormbringer had turned her eyes toward Randal.

  Tempus wondered, suddenly, whether it would matter to Jihan if she did know. She wasn't human, any more than Ischade, so slight and yet so full of menace, or Roxane.

  Jihan was still learning how to be alive; womanhood lay heavy and confusing on her, as it didn't on the witches and the accursed women who fought the witches of blood.

  Ischade, no bigger than a child to Tempus, came striding up swathed in black,

  her face like a magical moon on midsummer's eve, her eyes wide as the hells she guarded.

  "Riddler," she breathed, "are you su
re?"

  "Never," he chuckled. "Not about anything."

  And he saw the necromant draw back, sensing the god cohabiting with him, a god the fighters called Lord Storm, whose name had been translated into more languages than the thieves' world knew, but always meant the same: the nature of man to fight and kill for lust and territory. On bad days, Tempus thought that the god who dogged him, chameleonlike, adapting by syncretism to different wars in different lands, was merely an excuse his mind made up-a way to hang his excesses and his sins on others, a faceless repository for all the blame of every death he'd caused.

  But seeing Ischade's reaction to the god high in him made him realize it wasn't so.

  The necromant took a step forward resolutely, cocked her head, licked her lips, and said, "You jest with me? When He is here?" Then, when he didn't respond, she made a warding sign, withdrawing with a mutter: "Have your witch loosed, then. There's less trouble over there than is right here, with you."

  And my fighter, Strat? he or the god wanted to ask, but did not. You didn't ask Ischade, you negotiated. Tempus wasn't in a position to negotiate, right now. Unless ...

  "Ischade, wait," he called. Or the god did. And when she came close, he leaned down and let the Lord of Rape and Pillage whisper in the ear of the necromant who commanded all the partly dead and restless dead who never went to Sanctuary's gods.

  He tried not to listen to what the god said or what the necromant replied, but it was a bargain they made which concerned him-concerned the flesh of his flesh, and the soul of his Stepson, Strat.

  When he straightened up, the frail, pale creature touched his forearm and looked into his eyes. For a moment he thought he saw a tear there, but then decided it was the brightness that passion lent to necromants and their kind.

  He could survive what the god had promised Ischade-or at least he thought he could.

  It might be interesting to find out... if, of course, Stonn-bringer didn't kick his ass from one dimension to another for meddling in the Froth Daughter's affairs before he had time to make good his promise to spend a night with the necromant.