The smooth cheek of Stepson ticced. “I must,” he murmured. “You are the man I have emulated. All my life I have listened after word of you and collected intelligence of you and studied what you left us in legend and stone in the north. Listen: “War is sire of all and king of all, and some He has made gods and some men, some bond and some free”. Or: “War is ours in common; strife is justice; all things come into being and pass away through strife”. You see, I know your work, even those other names you have used. Do not make me speak them. I would work with you, O Sleepless One. It will be the pinnacle of my career.” He flashed Tempus a bolt of naked entreaty, then his gaze flickered away and he rushed on: “You need me. Who else will suit? Who else here has a brand and gelding’s scars? And time in the arena as a gladiator, like Jubal himself? Who could intrigue him, much less seduce him among these? And though I—”
“No.”
Abarsis dug in his belt and tossed a golden amulet on to the table. “The god will not give you up; this was caught in the sorrel’s new shoe. That teacher of mine whom you remember …?”
“I know the man,” Tempus said grimly.
“He thinks that Sanctuary is the endpoint of existence; that those who come here are damned beyond redemption; that Sanctuary is Hell.”
“Then how is it, Stepson,” said Tempus almost kindly, “that folk experience fleshly death here? So far as I know, I am the only soul in Sanctuary who suffers eternally, with the possible exception of my sister, who may not have a soul. Learn not to listen to what people say, priest. A man’s own mistakes are load enough, without adding others.”
“Then let me be your choice! There is no time to find some other eunuch.” He said it flatly, without bitterness, a man fielding logic. “I can also bring you a few fighters whom you might not know and who would not dare, on their own, to approach you. My Sacred Band yearns to serve you. You dispense your favour to provincials and foreigners who barely recognize their honour! Give it to me, who craves little else …! The prince who would be king will not expose me, but pass me on to Jubal as an untrained boy. I am a little old for it, but in Sanctuary, those niceties seem not to matter. I have increased your lot here. You owe me this opportunity.”
Tempus stirred his cooling posset with a finger. “That prince…” Changing the subject, he sighed glumly, a sound like rattling bones. “He will never be a Great King, such as your father. Can you tell me why the god is taking such an interest?”
“The god will tell you, when you make of the Trôs horse a sacrifice. Or some person. Then He will be mollified. You know the ritual. If it be a man you choose, I will gladly volunteer… Ah, you understand me, now? I do not want to frighten you …”
“Take no thought of it.”
“Then… though I risk your displeasure, yet I say it: I love you. One night with you would be a surfeit, to work under you is my long-held dream. Let me do this, which none can do better, which no whole man can do for you at all!”
“I cede you the privilege, since you value it so; but there is no telling what Jubal’s hired hawk-masks might do to the eunuch we send in there.”
“With your blessing and the god’s, I am fearless. And you will be close by, busy attacking Black Jubal’s fortress. While you are arresting the slavemaster for his treasonous spying, whosoever will make good the woman’s escape. I understand your thought; I have arranged for the retrieval of her weapons.” Tempus chuckled. “I hardly know what to say.”
“Say you look kindly upon me, that I am more than a bad memory to you.”
Shaking his head, Tempus took the amulet Abarsis held out to him. “Come then, Stepson, we will see what part of your glorious expectations we can fulfil.”
Chapter 7
IT WAS SAID, ever after, that the Storm God took part in the sack of the slaver’s estate. Lightning crawled along the gatehouses of its defensive wall and rolled in balls through the inner court and turned the oaken gates to ash. The ground rumbled and buckled and bucked and great crumbling cracks appeared in its inner sanctum, where the slaver dallied with the glossy-haired eunuch Kadakithis had just sent up for training. It was profligate waste to make a fancy boy out of such a slave: the arena had muscled him up and time had grown him up, and to squeeze the two or three remaining years of that sort of pleasure out of him seemed to the slaver a pity. If truth be known, blood like his came so rarely to the slavepens that gelding him was a sin against future generations: had Jubal got him early on—when the cuts had been made, at nine, or ten—he would have raised him with great pains and put him to stud. But his brand and tawny skin smacked of northern mountains and high wizards’ keeps where the wars had raged so savagely that no man was proud to remember what had been done there, on either side.
Eventually, he left the eunuch chained by the neck to the foot of his bed and went to see what the yelling and the shouting and the blue flashes and the quivering floorboards could possibly mean.
What he saw from his threshold he did not understand, but he came striding back, stripping off his robe as he passed by the bed, rushing to arm himself and do battle against the infernal forces of this enemy, and, it seemed, the whole of the night.
Naphtha fireballs came shooting over his walls into the courtyard; naming arrows torqued from spring-wound bows; javelins and swordplay glittered nastily, singing as they slew in soft susurrusings Jubal had hoped never to hear there.
It was eerily quiet: no shouting, not from his hawk-masks, or the adversaries; the fire crackled and the horses snorted and groaned like the men where they fell.
Jubal recollected the sinking feeling he had had in his stomach when Zalbar had confided to him that the bellows of anguish emanating from the vivisectionist’s workshop were the Hell Hound Tempus’s agonies, the forebodings he had endured when a group of his beleaguered sell-swords went after the man who killed those who wore the mask of Jubal’s service for sport, and failed to down him.
That night, it was too late for thinking. There was time enough only for wading into the thick of battle (if he could just find it: the attack was from every side, out of darkness); hollering orders; mustering point leaders (two); and appointing replacements for the dead (three). Then he heard whoops and abysmal screams and realized that someone had let the slaves out of their pens; those who had nothing to lose bore haphazard arms, but sought only death with vengeance. Jubal, seeing wide, white rimmed eyes and murderous mouths and the new eunuch from Kadakithis’s palace dancing ahead of the pack of them, started to run. The key to its collar had been in his robe; he remembered discarding it, within the eunuch’s reach.
He ran in a private wash of terror, in a bubble through which other sounds hardly penetrated, but where his breathing reverberated stentorian, rasping, and his heart gonged loud in his ears. He ran looking back over his shoulder, and he saw some leopard-pelted apparition with a horn bow in hand come sliding down the gatehouse wall. He ran until he reached the stable, until he stumbled over a dead hawk-mask, and then he heard everything, cacophonously, that had been so muted before: swords rasping; panoplies rattling; bodies thudding and greaved men running; quarrels whispering bright death as they passed through the dark press; javelins ringing as they struck helm or shield suddenly limned in lurid fiery light.
Fire? Behind Jubal flame licked out of the stable windows and horses whistled their death screams.
The heat was singeing. He drew his sword and turned in a fluid motion, judging himself as he was wont to do when the crowds had been about him in applauding tiers and he must kill to live to kill another day, and do so pleasingly.
He felt the thrill of it, the immediacy of it, the joy of the arena, and as the pack of freed slaves came shouting, he picked out the prince’s eunuch and reached to wrest a spear from the dead hawk-mask’s grip. He hefted it, left handed, to cast, just as the man in leopard pelt and cuirass and a dozen mercenaries came between him and the slaves, cutting him off from his final refuge, the stairs to the westward wall.
Behind him, t
he flames seemed hotter, so that he was glad he had not stopped for armour. He threw the spear, and it rammed home in the eunuch’s gut. The leopard leader came forward, alone, sword tip gesturing three times, leftward.
Was it Tempus, beneath that frightful armour? Jubal raised his own blade to his brow in acceptance, and moved to where his antagonist indicated, but the leopard leader was talking over his shoulder to his front-line mercenaries, three of whom were clustered around the downed eunuch. Then one archer came abreast of the leader, touched his leopard pelt. And that bowman kept a nocked arrow on Jubal, while the leader sheathed his sword and walked away, to join the little knot around the eunuch.
Someone had broken off the haft; Jubal heard the grunt and the snap of wood and saw the shaft discarded. Then arrows whizzed in quick succession into both his knees and beyond the shattering pain he knew nothing more.
Chapter 8
TEMPUS KNELT OVER Abarsis, bleeding out his life naked in the dirt. “Get me light,” he rasped. Tossing his helmet aside, he bent down until his cheek touched Stepson’s knotted, hairless belly. The whole bronze head of the spear, barbs and all, was deep in him. Under his lowest rib, the shattered haft stuck out, quivering as he breathed. The torch was brought; the better light told Tempus there was no use in cutting the spearhead loose; one flange was up under the low rib; vital fluids oozed out with the youth’s blood. Out of age-old custom, Tempus laid his mouth upon the wound and sucked the blood and swallowed it, then raised his head and shook it to those who waited with a hot blade and hopeful, silent faces. “Get him some water, no wine. And give him some air.”
They moved back and as the Sacred Bander who had been holding Abarsis’s head put it down, the wounded one murmured; he coughed, and his frame shuddered, one hand clutching spasmodically at the spear. “Rest now. Stepson. You have got your wish. You will be my sacrifice to the god.” He covered the youth’s nakedness with his mantle, taking the gory hand from the broken haft, letting it fasten on his own.
Then the blue-grey eyes of Abarsis opened in a face pale with pain, and something else: “I am not frightened, with you and the god beside me.”
Tempus put an arm under his head and gathered him up, pulling him across his lap. “Hush, now.”
“Soon, soon,” said the paling lips. “I did well for you. Tell me so … that you are content. O Riddler, so well do I love you, I go to my god singing your praises. When I meet my father, I will tell him … I… fought beside you.”
“Go with more than that. Stepson,” whispered Tempus, and leaned forward, and kissed him gently on the mouth, and Abarsis breathed out his soul while their lips yet touched.
Chapter 9
NOW, HANSE HAD got the rods with no difficulty, as Stepson had promised he would be able to do, citing Tempus’s control of palace personnel as surety. And afterwards, the young mercenary’s invitation to come and watch them fight up at Jubal’s rang in his head until, to banish it, he went out to take a look.
He knew it was foolish to go, for it was foolish even to know, but he knew that he wanted to be able to say, “Yes, I saw. It was wonderful,” the next time he saw the young mercenary, so he went very carefully and cautiously. If he were stopped, he would have all of Stepson’s Sacred Band as witnesses that he had been at Jubal’s, and nowhere near the palace and its Hall of Judgement.
He knew those excuses were flimsy, but he wanted to go, and he did not want to delve into why: the lure of mercenary life was heady in his nostrils; if he admitted how sweet it seemed, he might be lost. If he went, perchance he would see something not so sweet, or so intoxicating, something which would wash away all this talk of friendship and honour. So he went, and hid on the roof of a gatehouse abandoned in the confusion. Thus he saw all that transpired.
When he could in safety leave his roost, he followed the pair of grey horses bearing Tempus and the corpse ridgeward, stealing the first mount he came to that looked likely.
The sun was risen when Tempus reached the ridgetop and called out behind: “Whoever you are, ride up,” and set about gathering branches to make a bier.
Hanse rode to the edge of the outcropping of rock on which Tempus piled wood and said: “Well, accursed one, are you and your god replete? Stepson told me all about it.”
The man straightened up, eyes like flames, and put his hand to the small of his back: “What do you want, Shadowspawn? A man who is respectful does not sling insults over the ears of the dead. If you are here for him, then welcome. If you are here for me, I assure you, your timing is ill.”
“I am here for him, friend. What think you, that I would come here to console you in your grief when it was his love for you that he died of? He asked me,” Hanse continued, not dismounting, “to get these. He was going to give them to you.” He reached for the diamond rods, wrapped in hide, he had stolen.
“Stay your hand, and your feelings. Both are misplaced. Do not judge what you do not understand. As for the rods, Abarsis was mistaken as to what I wanted done with them. If you are finishing your first mercenary’s commission, then give them to One-Thumb. Tell him they are for his benefactor. Then it is done. Someone of the Sacred Band will seek you out and pay you. Do not worry about that. Now, if you would honour Abarsis, dismount.” The struggle obvious in Tempus’s face for control was chilling, where nothing unintentioned was ever seen. “Otherwise, please leave now, friend, while we are yet friends. I am in no mood for living boys today.”
So Hanse slid from the horse and stalked over to the corpse stage-whispering, “Mouth me no swill, Doomface. If this is how your friends fare, I’d as soon be relieved of the honour,” and flipped back the shroud. “His eyes are open.” Shadowspawn reached out to close them. “Don’t. Let him see where he goes.”
They glared a time at each other above the staring corpse while a red-tailed hawk circled overhead, its shadow caressing the pale, dead face.
Then Hanse knelt stiffly, took a coin from his belt, slid it between Stepson’s slightly parted lips, and murmured something low. Rising, he turned and strode to his stolen horse and scrambled clumsily astride, reining it round and away without a single backward glance.
When Tempus had the bier all made, and Abarsis arranged on it to the last glossy hair, and a spark nursed to consuming flame, he stood with clenched fists and watering eyes in the billows of smoke. And through his tears, he saw the boy’s father, fighting oblivious from his car, his charioteer fallen between his legs, that time Tempus had hacked off an enemy’s arm to save him from the axe it swung; he saw the witchbitch of a sorceress the king had wed in the black hills to make alliance with what could not be had by force; he saw the aftermath of that, when the wild woman’s spawn was out other and every loyal general took a hand in her murder before she laid their commander out in state. He saw the boy, wizard-haired and wise, running to Tempus’s chariot for a ride, grasping his neck, laughing, kissing like the northern boys had no shame to do; all this before the Great King discharged his armies and retired home to peace, and Tempus rode south to Ranke, an empire hardly whelped and shaky on its prodigious feet. And Tempus saw the field he had taken against a monarch, once his liege: Masters change. He had not been there when they had got the Great King, dragged him down from his car and begun the Unending Deaths that proved the Rankans barbarians second to none. It was said by those who were there that he stood it well enough until his son was castrated before his eyes, given off to a slaver with ready collar … When he had heard, Tempus had gone searching among the sacked towns of the north, where Ranke wrought infamy into example, legends better than sharp javelins at discouraging resistance. And he saw Abarsis in the slaver’s kennel, the boy’s look of horror that a man of the armies would see what had been done to him. No glimmer of joy invaded the gaunt child’s face turned up to him. No eager hands outflung to their redeemer; a small, spent hero shuffled across soiled straw to meet him, slave’s eyes gauging without fear just what he might expect from this man, who had once been among his father’s most valued
, but was now only one more Rankan enemy. Tempus remembered picking the child up in his arms, hating how little he weighed, how sharp his bones were; and that moment when Abarsis at last believed he was safe. About a boy’s tears, Abarsis had sworn Tempus to secrecy. About the rest, the less said, the better. He had found him foster parents, in the rocky west by the sea temples where Tempus himself was born, and where the gods still made miracles upon occasion. He had hoped somehow the gods would heal what love could not. Now, they had done it.
He nodded, having passed recollection like poison, watching the fire burn down. Then, for the sake of the soul of Stepson, called Abarsis, and under the aegis of his flesh, Tempus humbled himself before Vashanka and came again into the service of his god.
Chapter 10
HANSE, HIDDEN BELOW on a shelf, listening and partaking of the funeral of his own fashion, upon realizing what he was overhearing, spurred the horse out of there as if the very god whose thunderous voice he had heard were after him.
He did not stop until he reached the Vulgar Unicorn. There he shot off the horse in a dismount which was a fall disguised as a vault, slapped the beast smartly away, telling it hissingly to go home, and slipped inside with such relief as his favourite knife must feel when he sheathed it.
“One-Thumb,” Hanse called out, making for the bar, “what is going on out there?” There had been soldierly commotion at the Common Gate.
“You haven’t heard?” scoffed the night-turned-day barman. “Some prisoners escaped from the palace dungeon, certain articles were thieved from the Hall of Judgement, and none of the regular security officers were around to get their scoldings.”
Looking at the mirror behind the bar, Hanse saw the ugly man grin without humour. Gaze locked to mirror-gaze, Hanse drew the hide-wrapped bundle from his tunic. “These are for you. You are supposed to give them to your benefactor.” He shrugged to the mirror.
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