Shadows of Sanctuary

by Edited By Robert Asprin

  He had sent a messenger to the capital the next day with a full report of the events as he understood them. He’d written and sealed it himself. The Prince could not have sent word faster; no post could have returned in that time. There was no reason to think that Kadakithis or the Emperor himself would be thinking about Vashanka today. But the Prince’s summons had been preemptive. So Molin hiked the long, empty corridors with a worried look on his face.

  The Ten-Slaying had convinced him to take his Prince more seriously. When the charred tatters of cloth and wood had cooled enough to let the Hounds investigate the blaze, they had found a heap of blackened skulls in one place and the bodies of the ten felons scattered throughout the burned wreckage. For one who had expressed a distaste for bloodshed, Kadakithis had recreated Vashanka’s vengeance to the final letter of the legends—a precision not required and which Molin could not even remember describing to the Prince.

  Tempus stood beside the Prince’s throne, back in town after another unexplained absence. The massive, cruel Hell Hound did not look happy—perhaps the strains of the Sacred Brotherhood’s loyalty were beginning to show. Molin wished, for the last time, that he knew why he had been summoned, then nodded to the herald and heard himself announced.

  “Ah, Molin, there you are. We’d been wondering what was keeping you,” the Prince said with his usual charm.

  “My new quarters, while much appreciated, seem to be several leagues from here. I’d never thought there could be so much corridor in a small palace.”

  “The rooms are adequate? The Lady Rosanda …”

  “The girl who danced Azyuna’s Dance—what has become of her?” Tempus interrupted and Molin turned his attention at once from the Prince to the Hell Hound.

  “A few burns,” he responded cautiously, seeing displeasure in Tempus’s eyes. The Hound had called this interview; Molin no longer doubted it. “Minor ones,” he added. “What little discomfort she may have experienced seems to have passed completely.”

  “You’ve freed her, haven’t you, Molin?” the Prince chimed in nervously.

  “As a matter of course, though it’s too soon to tell if she’ll bear a child. I thought it best to take her survival as a sign of the god’s favour—in the absence of any other information. You haven’t remembered anything yourself, my Prince?” Molin faced the Prince but glanced at Tempus. There was something in the Hound’s face whenever the Ten-Slaying was discussed, but Molin doubted he’d ever get to the bottom of it. Kadakithis claimed the god had so completely possessed him that he remembered nothing from the moment the tent was sealed until sunrise when he found himself in his own bed.

  “If she is with child?” Tempus continued.

  “Then she will live out her days at the temple with the full honours of a freedwoman and the living consort of our god—as you know. Her power could become considerable—though only time will tell. It depends on her, and the child—if there is a child.”

  “And if there is no child?”

  Molin shrugged. “In many respects it will be no different. It is not in the temple’s power to remove the honours we have bestowed. Vashanka saw fit to remove her from the inferno.” It was easier to imagine Vashanka possessing Tempus than the Prince, but Molin had not become High Priest by speaking his mind. “We acknowledge her as First Consort of Sanctuary. It would be best if she had conceived.”

  Tempus nodded and looked away. It was the signal the Prince had been waiting for. He had been even more uncomfortable at this interview than Molin; Molin was used to hiding secrets. The Prince left the chamber without ritual, leaving the High Priest and the Hell Hound together for a moment.

  “I’ve talked with her often these past few days. Remarkable, isn’t it, to discover that a slave has a mind?” Molin said aloud to himself but for Tempus’s benefit. If the Hound had an interest in Seylalha the Priesthood wished to use it. “She is convinced she slept with the god—in all other respects she is intelligent and not given to false beliefs, but her faith in her lover will not be shaken. She dances for him still, in silence. I’ve replaced the silks, but women and eunuchs must come from the capital and that will take time.

  “I watch her each evening at sunset; she doesn’t seem to mind. She is very beautiful, but sad and lonely as well—the dance has changed since the Ten Slaying. You must come and watch for yourself sometime.”

  A Man And His God

  By Janet Morris

  Chapter 1

  SOLSTICE STORMS AND heat lightning beat upon Sanctuary, washing the dust from the gutters and from the faces of the mercenaries drifting through town on their way north where (seers proclaimed and rumour corroborated) the Rankan Empire would soon be hiring multitudes, readying for war.

  The storms doused cookfires west of town, where the camp followers and artificers that Sanctuary’s ramshackle facilities could not hold had overflowed. There squatted, under stinking ill-tanned hide pavilions, custom weaponers catering to mercenaries whose eyes were keener than the most carefully wax forged iron and whose panoplies must bespeak their whereabouts in battle to their comrades; their deadly efficacy to strangers and combatants; the dear cost of their hire to prospective employers. Fine corselets, cuirasses ancient and modern, custom’s best axes and swords, and helmetry with crests dyed to order could be had in Sanctuary that summer; but the downwind breeze had never smelled fouler than after wending through their press.

  Here and there among the steaming firepots siegecrafters and commanders of fortifications drilled their engineers, lest from idleness picked men be suborned by rival leaders seeking to upgrade their corps. To keep order here, the Emperor’s halfbrother Kadakithis had only a handful of Rankan Hell Hounds in his personal guard, and a local garrison staffed by indigenous Ilsigs, conquered but not assimilated. The Rankans called the Ilsigs “Wrigglies”, and the Wrigglies called the Rankans naked barbarians and their women worse, and not even the rain could cool the fires of that age-old rivalry.

  On the landspit north of the lighthouse, rain had stopped work on Prince Kadakithis’s new palace. Only a man and horse, both bronze, both of heroic proportions, rode the beach. Doom criers of Sanctuary, who once had proclaimed their town “just left of heaven”, had changed their tune: they had dubbed Sanctuary Death’s Gate and the one man, called Tempus, Death Himself.

  He was not. He was a mercenary, envoy of a Rankan faction desirous of making a change in emperors; he was a Hell Hound, by Kadakithis’s good offices; and marshal of palace security, because the prince, not meant to triumph in his governorship exile, was understaffed. Of late Tempus had become a royal architect, for which he was as qualified as any man about, having fortified more towns than Kadakithis had years. The prince had proposed the site; the soldier examined it and found it good. Not satisfied, he had made it better, dredging deep with oxen along the shore while his imported fortifications crews raised double walls of baked brick filled with rubble and faced with stone. When complete, these would be deeply crenellated for archers, studded with gatehouses, double-gated and sheer. Even incomplete, the walls which barred the folk from spit and lighthouse grinned with a death’s-head smirk towards the town, enclosing granaries and stables and newly whiled barracks and a spring for fresh water: if War came hither, Tempus proposed to make Him welcome for a long and arduous siege.

  The fey, god’s-breath weather might have stopped work on the construction, but Tempus worked without respite, always: it eased the soul of the man who could not sleep and who had turned his back upon his god. This day, he awaited the arrival of Kadakithis and that of his own anonymous Rankan contact, to introduce emissary to possible figurehead, to put the two together and see what might be seen.

  When he had arranged the meeting, he had yet walked in the shelter of the god Vashanka’s arm. Now, things had changed for him and he no longer cared to serve Vashanka, the Storm God, who regulated kingship. If he could, he was going to contrive to be relieved of his various commissions and of his honour bond to Kadakithis, freed to
go among the mercenaries to whom his soul belonged (since he had it back) and put together a cohort to take north and lease to the highest bidder. He wanted to wade thigh-deep in gore and guts and see if, just by chance, he might manage to find his way back through the shimmering dimensional gate beyond which the god had long ago thrust him, back into the world and into the age to which he was born.

  Since he knew the chances of that were less than Kadakithis becoming Emperor of Upper and Lower Ranke, and since the god’s gloss of rationality was gone from him, leaving him in the embrace of the curse, yet lingering, which he had originally become the god’s suppliant to thwart, he would settle for a small mercenary corps of his own choosing, from which to begin building an army that would not be a puerile jest, as Kadakithis’s forces were at present. For this he had been contacted, to this he had agreed. It remained only to see to it that Kadakithis agreed.

  The mercenary who was a Hell Hound scolded the horse, who did not like its new weighted shoes or the water surging around its knees, white as its stockings. Like the horse, Kadakithis was only potential in quest of actualization; like the horse, Kadakithis feared the wrong things, and placed his trust in himself only, an untenable arrogance in horse or man, when the horse must go to battle and the man also. Tempus collected the horse up under him, shifting his weight, pulling the red-bronze beast’s head in against its chest, until the combination of his guidance and the toe-weights on its hooves and the waves’ kiss showed the horse what he wanted. Tempus could feel it in the stallion’s gaits; he did not need to see the result: like a dancer, the sorrel lifted each leg high. Then it gave a quizzical snort as it sensed the power to be gained from such a stride: school was in session. Perhaps, despite the four white socks, the horse would suit. He lifted it with a touch and a squeeze of his knees into a canter no faster than another horse might walk. “Good, good,” he told it, and from the beach came the pat-pat of applause.

  Clouds split; sunrays danced over the wrack-strewn shore and over the bronze stallion and its rider, stripped down to plated loinguard, making a rainbow about them. Tempus looked up, landward, to where a lone eunuch clapped pink palms together from one of Prince Kadakithis’s chariots. The rainbow disappeared, the clouds suppressed the sun, and in a wrap of shadow the enigmatic Hell Hound (whom the eunuch knew from his own experience to be capable of regenerating a severed limb and thus veritably eternal; and who was indubitably deadlier than all the mercenaries descended on Sanctuary like flies upon a day-old carcass) trotted the horse up the beach to where the eunuch in the chariot was waiting on solid ground.

  “What are you doing here, Sissy? Where is your lord, Kadakithis?” Tempus stopped his horse well back from the irascible pair of blacks in their traces. This eunuch was near their colour: a Wriggly. Cut young and deftly, his answer came in a sweet alto: “Lord Marshal, most daunting of Hell Hounds, I bring you His Majesty’s apologies, and true word, if you will heed it.”

  The eunuch, no more than seventeen, gazed at him longingly. Kadakithis had accepted this fancy toy from Jubal, the slaver, despite the slavemaster’s own brand on its high rump, and the deeper dangers implied by the identity of its fashioner. Tempus had marked it, when first he heard its lilting voice in the palace, for he had heard that voice before. Foolish, haughty, or merely pressed beyond a bedwarmer’s ability to cope: no matter; this creature of Jubal’s, he had long wanted. Jubal and Tempus had been making private war, the more fierce for being undeclared, since Tempus had first come to Sanctuary and seen the swaggering, masked killers Jubal kept on staff terrorizing whom they chose on the town’s west side. Tempus had made those masked murderers his private game stock, the west end of Sanctuary his personal preserve, and the campaign was on. Time and again, he had dispatched them. But tactics change, and Jubal’s had become too treacherous for Tempus to endure, especially now with the northern insurrection half out of its egg of rumour. He said to the parted lips awaiting his permission to speak and to the deer-soft eyes doting on his every move that the eunuch might dismount the car, prostrate itself before him, and from there deliver its message.

  It did all of those, quivering with delight like a dog enraptured by the smallest attention, and said with its forehead to the sand: “My lord, the Prince bids me say he has been detained by Certain Persons, and will be late, but means to attend you. If you were to ask me why that was, then I would have no choice but to admit to you that the three most mighty magicians, those whose names cannot be spoken, came down upon the summer palace in billows of blackest smoke and foul odours, and that the fountains ran red and the sculptures wept and cried, and frogs jumped upon my lord in his bath, all because the Hazards are afraid that you might move to free the slayer-of-sorcerers called Cime before she comes to trial. Although my master assured them that you would not, that you had said nothing to him about this woman, when I left they still were not satisfied, but were shaking walls and raising shades and doing all manner of wizardly things to demonstrate their concern.”

  The eunuch fell quiet, awaiting leave to rise. For an instant there was total silence, then the sound of Tempus’s slithering dismount. Then he said: “Let us see your brand, pretty one,” and with a wiggling of its upthrust rump the eunuch hastened to obey.

  It took Tempus longer than he had estimated to wrest a confession from the Wriggly, from the Ilsig who was the last of his line and at the end of his line. It did not make cries of pleasure or betrayal or agony, but accepted its destiny as good Wrigglies always did, writhing soundlessly.

  When he let it go, though the blood was running down its legs and it saw the intestine like wet parchment caught in his fingernails, it wept with relief, promising to deliver his exhortation posthaste to Kadakithis. It kissed his hand, pressing his palm against its beardless cheek, never realizing that it was, itself, his message, or that it would be dead before the sun set.

  Chapter 2

  KNEELING TO WASH his arm in the surf, he found himself singing a best-forgotten funerary dirge in the ancient argot all mercenaries learn. But his voice was gravelly and his memories were treacherous thickets full of barbs, and he stopped as soon as he realized that he sang. The eunuch would die because he remembered its voice from the workshop of despicable Kurd, the frail and filthy vivisectionist, while he had been an experimental animal therein. He remembered other things, too: he remembered the sear of the branding iron and the smell of flesh burning and the voices of two fellow guardsmen, the Hell Hounds Zalbar and Razkuli, piercing the drug-mist through holes the pain poked in his stupor. And he recalled a protracted and hurtful healing, shut away from any who might be overawed to see a man regrow a limb. Mending, he had brooded, seeking certainty, some redress fit to his grievance. But he had not been sure enough to act. Now, after hearing the eunuch’s tale, he was certain. When Tempus was certain, Destiny got out its ledger.

  But what to write therein? His instinct told him it was Black Jubal he wanted, not the two Hell Hounds; that Razkuli was a nonentity and Zalbar, like a raw horse, was merely in need of schooling. Those two had single-handedly arranged for Tempus’s snuff to be drugged, for him to be branded, his tongue cut out, then sold off to wicked little Kurd, there to languish interminably under the knife? He could not credit it. Yet the eunuch had said—and in such straits no one lies—that though Jubal had gone to Zalbar for help in dealing with Tempus, the slave trader had known nothing of what fate the Hell Hounds had in mind for their colleague. Never mind it; Jubal’s crimes were voluminous. Tempus would take him for espionage—that punishment could only be administered once. Then personal grudges must be put aside: it is unseemly to hold feuds with the dead.

  But if not Jubal, then who had written Tempus’s itinerary for Hell? It sounded, suspiciously, like the god’s work. Since he had turned his back upon the god, things had gone from bad to worse.

  And if Vashanka had not turned His face away from Tempus even while he lay helpless, the god had not stirred to rescue him (though any limb lopped off him still grew back, any wo
und he took healed relatively quickly, as men judge such things). No, Vashanka, his tutelary, had not hastened to aid him. The speed of Tempus’s healing was always in direct proportion to the pleasure the god was taking in His servant. Vashanka’s terrible rebuke had made the man wax terrible, also. Curses and unholy insults rang down from the mind of the god and up from the mind of the man who then had no tongue left with which to scream. It had taken Hanse the thief, young Shadowspawn, chancemet and hardly known, to extricate him from interminable torture. Now he owed more debt than he liked to Shadowspawn, and Shadowspawn knew more about Tempus than even that backstreeter could want to know, so that the thief’s eyes slid away, sick and mistrustful, when Tempus would chance upon him in the Maze.

  But even then, Tempus’s break with divinity was not complete. Hopefully, he stood as Vashanka in the recreation of the Ten-Slaying and Seduction of Azyuna, thinking to propitiate the god while saving face—to no avail. Soon after, hearing that his sister, Cime, had been apprehended slaying sorcerers wantonly in their beds, he had thrown the amulet of Vashanka, which he had worn since former times, out to sea from this very shore—he had had no choice. Only so much can be borne from men, so much from gods. Zalbar, had he the wit, would have revelled in Tempus’s barely hidden reaction to his news that the fearsome mage-killer was now in custody, her diamond rods locked away in the Hall of Judgement awaiting her disposition.

  He growled to himself, thinking about her, her black hair winged with grey, in Sanctuary’s unsegregated dungeons where any syphilitic rapist could have her at will, while he must not touch her at all, or raise hand to help her lest he start forces in motion he could not control. His break with the god stemmed from her presence in Sanctuary, as his endless wandering as Vashanka’s minion had stemmed from an altercation he had over her with a mage. If he went down into the pits and took her, the god would be placated; he had no desire to reopen relations with Vashanka, who had turned His face away from His servant. If Tempus brought her out under his own aegis, he would have the entire Mageguild at his throat; he wanted no quarrel with the Adepts. He had told her not to slay them here, where he must maintain order and the letter of the law.