Tales From The Vulgar Unicorn tw-2

by Robert Lynn Asprin

  'I think that is not the right word for it. Aspect. What are you about, here?'

  'Now, now. Hell Hound-' .''

  'Tempus.'

  'Yes, Tempus. You have not lost your fabled sense of irony. I hope it is a comfort.'

  'Quite, actually. Do not interfere with the gods, guildbrother of my nemesis.'

  'Our prince is justifiably worried. Those weapons-'

  '-equal out the balance between the oppressors and the oppressed. Most of Sanctuary cannot afford your services, or the prices of even the lowliest members of the Enchanters' Guild. Let it be. We will get the weapons back, as their wielders meet their fates.'

  'I have to report to Kitt - to K-adakithis.'

  'Then report that I am handling it.' Behind the magician, he could see the ranks whispering. Thirty men, the archmage had brought. Too many.

  'You and I have more in common than in dispute, Tempus. Let us join forces.'

  'I would sooner bed an Ilsig matron.'

  'Well, I am going in there.' The archmage shook his head and the cowl fell back. He was pretty, ageless, a blond. 'With or without you.'

  'Be my guest,' Tempus offered.

  The archmage looked at him strangely. 'We do the same services in the world, you and I. Killing, whether with natural or supernatural weapons, is still killing. You are no better than I.'

  'Assuredly not, except that I will outlive you. And I will make sure you do not get your requisite burial ritual.'

  'You would not!'

  'Like you said, I yet bear my grudge - against every one of you.'

  With a curse that made the ranks clap their hands to their helmeted ears, the archmage swished into the street, across it, and through the door marked 'Men' without another word. It was his motioned command which made the troops follow.

  A waitress Tempus knew came out when the gibbous moon was high, to ask him if he was hungry. She brought him fish and he ate it, watching the doors.

  When he had just about finished, a terrible rumble crawled up the street, tremors following in its wake. He slid from his horse and held its muzzle, and the reins up under its bit. The doors of Vashanka's Weaponshop grew shimmery, began taking colour. Above, the moon went behind a cloud. The little dome on the" shop rocked, grew cracks, crazed, steamed. The doors were ruby red, and melting. Awful wails and screams and the smell of sulphur and ozone filled the night.

  Patrons began streaming out of the Vulgar Unicorn, drinks in hand. They stayed well back from the rocking building, which howled as it stressed larger, growing turgid, effluescing spectrums which sheeted and snapped and snarled. The doors went molten white, then they were gone. A figure was limned in the left-hand doorway, and it was trying to climb empty air. It flamed and screeched, dancing, crumbling, facing the street but unable to pass the invisible barrier against which it pounded. It stank: the smell of roasting flesh was overwhelming. Behind it, helmets crumpled, dripped on to the contorted faces of soldiers whose moustaches had begun to flare.

  The mage who tried to break down the invisible door had no fists; he had pounded them away. The ranks were char and ash in infalling effigy of damnation. The doors which had been invisible began to cool to white, then to gold, then to red.

  The street was utterly silent. Only the snorts of his horse and the squeals of the domed structure could be heard. The squeals fell off to growls and shudders. The doors cooled, turned dark.

  People muttered, drifted back into the Unicorn with mumbled wardings, tracing signs and taking many backward looks.

  Tempus, who could have saved thirty innocent soldiers and one guilty magician, got out his silver box and sniffed some krrf.

  He had to be at the Lily Garden soon.

  When he got there, the mixed elation of drug and death had faded.

  What if Shadowspawn did not appear with the rods? What if the girl Cime did not come to get them back? What if he still could hurt, as he had not hurt for more than three hundred years?

  He had had a message from the palace, from Prince Kadakithis himself. He was not going up there, just yet. He did not want to answer any questions about the archmage's demise. He did not want to appear involved. His only chance to help the Prince-Governor effectively lay in working his own way. Those were his terms, and under those terms Kitty's supporters in the Rankan capital had employed him to come down here and play Hell Hound and see what he would do. There were no wars, anywhere. He had been bored, his days stretching out never ending, bleak. So he had concerned himself with Kitty, for something to do. The building of Vashanka's temple he oversaw for himself more than Kadakithis, who understood the necessity of elevating the state cult above the Ilsig gods, but believed only in wizardry, and his noble Ranke blood.

  He was not happy about the spectacle at Vashanka's Weapon-shop. Sloppy business, this side-show melting and unmelting. The archmage must have been talented, to make his struggles visible to those outside.

  Wisdom is to know the thought which steers all things through all things, a friend of his who was a philosopher had once said to him. The thought that was steering all things through Sanctuary was muddled, unclear.

  That was the hitch, the catch, the problem with employing the supernatural in a natural milieu. Things got confused. With so many spells at work, the fabric of causality was overly strained. Add the gods, and Evil and Good faced each other across a board game whose extent was the phenomenal world. He wished the gods would stay in their heavens and the sorcerers in their hells.

  Oh, he had heard endless persiflage about simultaneity; iteration - the constant redefining of the now by checking it against the future-; alchemical laws of consonance. When he had been a student of philosophy and Cime had been a maiden, he had learned the axiom that Mind is unlimited and self-controlled, but all other things are connected; that nothing is completely separated off from any other thing, nor are things divided one from the other, except Mind.

  The sorcerers put it another way: they called the consciousness of all things into service, according to the laws of magic.

  Not philosophy, nor theology, nor thaumaturgy held the answer for Tempus; he had turned away from them, each and all. But he could not forget what he had learned.

  And none of the adepts like to admit that no servitor can be hired without wages. The wages of unnatural life are unnatural death.

  He wished he could wake up in Azehur, with his family, and know that he had dreamed this impious dream.

  But instead he came to Amoli's whorehouse, the Lily Garden. Almost, but not quite, he rode the horse up its stairs. Resisting the temptation, he reflected that in every age he had ever studied, doom-criers abounded. No millenium is attractive to the man immured in it; enough prophecies have been made in antiquity that one who desires, in any age, to take the position that Apocalypse is at hand can easily defend it. He would not join that dour Order; he would not worry about anything but Tempus, and the matter awaiting his attention.

  Inside Amoli's, Hanse the thief sat in full swagger, a pubescent girl on each knee.

  'Ah,' he waved. 'I have something for you.' Shadowspawn tumbled both girls off of him, and stood, stretching widely, so that every arm-dagger and belted sticker and thigh-sheath creaked softly. The girls at his feet stayed there, staring up at Tempus wide-eyed. One whimpered to Shadowspawn and clutched his thigh.

  'Room key,' Tempus snapped to no one in particular, and held out his hand. The concierge, not Amoli, brought it to him.

  'Hanse?'

  'Coming.' He extended a hand to one girl.

  'Alone.'

  'You are not my type,' said the thief, suspicious.

  'I need just a moment of your evening. You can do what you wish with the rest.'

  Tempus looked at the key, headed off towards a staircase leading to the room which bore a corresponding number.

  He heard the soft tread of Shadowspawn close behind.

  When the exchange had been made, the thief departed, satisfied with both his payment and his gratuity, but n
ot quite sure that Tempus appreciated the trouble to which he had put himself, or that he had got the best of the bargain they had made.

  He saw the woman he had robbed before she saw him, and ended up in a different girl's room than the one he had chosen, in order to avoid a scene. When he had heard her steps pass by, stop before the door behind which the big Hell Hound waited, he made preclusive threats to the woman whose mouth he had stopped with the flat of his hand, and slipped downstairs to spend his money somewhere else, discreetly.

  If he had stayed, he might have found out what the diamond rods were really worth; he might have found out what the sour-eyed mercenary with his high brow, suddenly so deeply creased, and his lightly carried mass, which seemed tonight too heavy, was worried about. Or perhaps he could have fathomed Tempus's enigmatic parting words: 'I would help you if I could, backstreeter,' Tempus had rumbled.

  'If I had met you long ago, or if you liked horses, there would be a chance. You have done me a great service. More than that pouch holds. I am seldom in any man's debt, but you, I own, can call me anytime.'

  'You paid me. Hell Hound. I am content,' Hanse had demurred, confused by weakness where he had never imagined it might dwell. Then he saw the Hell Hound fish out a snuffbox of krrf, and thought he understood.

  But later, he went back to Amoli's and hung around the steps, cautiously petting the big man's horse, the krrf he had sniffed making him willing to dodge the beast's square, yellow teeth.

  4

  She had come to him, had Cime. She was what she was, what she had always been.

  It was Tempus who was changed: Vashanka had entered into him, the Storm God who was Lord of Weapons who was Lord of Rape who was Lord of War who was Lord of Death's Gate.

  He could not take her, gently. So spoke not his physical impotence, as he might have expected, but the cold wash of wisdom: he would not despoil her; Vashanka would accept no less.

  She knocked and entered and said, 'Let me see them,' so sure he would have the stolen diamonds that her fingers were already busy on the lacings of her Ilsig leathers.

  He held up a hide-wrapped bundle, slimmer than her wrist, shorter than her forearm. 'Here. How were they thieved?'

  'Your voice is hoarser than I have ever heard it,' she replied, and: 'I needed money; there was this man ... actually, there were a few, but there was a tough, a streetbrawler. I should have known - he is half my apparent age. What would such as he want with a middle-aged whore? And he agreed to pay the price I asked, without quibbling. Then he robbed me.' She looked around, her eyes, as he remembered them, clear windows to her thoughts. She was appalled.

  'The low estate into which I have sunk?'

  She knew what he meant. Her nostrils shivered, taking in the musty reek of the soiled bedding on which he sprawled fully clothed, smelling easily as foul. 'The devolution of us both. That I would be here, under these circumstances, is surely as pathetic as you.'

  'Thanks. I needed that. Don't.'

  'I thought you wanted me.' She ceased unlacing, looked at him, her tunic open to her waist.

  'I did. I don't. Have some krrf.' On his hips rode her scarf; if she saw it, then she would comprehend his degradation too fully. So he had not removed it, hoping its presence would remind him, if he weakened and his thoughts drowned in lust, that this woman he must not violate.

  She sat on the quilt, one doe-gloved leg tucked under her.

  'You jest,' she breathed, then, eyes narrowed, took the krrf.

  'It will be ill with you, afterwards, should I touch you.'

  Her fingers ran along the flap of hide wrapped over her wands. 'I am receiving payment.' She tapped the package. 'And I may not owe debts.'

  'The boy who pilfered these, did it at my behest.'

  'Must you pander for me?'

  He winced. 'Why do you not go home?' She smelled of salt and honey and he thought desperately that she was here only because he forced the issue: to pay her debt.

  She leaned forwards, touched his lips with a finger. 'For the same reason that you do not. Home is changed, gone to time.'

  'Do you know that?' He jerked his head-away, cracking it against the bed's wooden headboard.

  'I believe it.'

  'I cannot believe anything, any more. I surely cannot believe that your hand is saying what it seems to be saying.'

  'I cannot,' she said, between kisses at his throat he could not, somehow, fend off, 'leave ... with ... debts ... owing.'

  'Sorry,' he said firmly, and got out from under her hands. 'I am just not in the mood.'

  She shrugged, unwrapped the wands, and wound her hair up with them. 'Surely, you will regret this, later.'

  'Maybe you are right,' he sighed heavily. 'But that is my problem. I release you from any debt. We are even. I remember past gifts, given when you still knew how to give freely.' There was no way in the world he was going to hurt her. He would not strip before her. With those two constraints, he had no option. He chased her out of there. He was as cruel about it as he could manage to be, for both their sakes.

  Then he yelled downstairs for service.

  When he descended the steps in the cool night air, a movement startled him, on the grey's off side.

  'It is me, Shadowspawn.'

  'It is I, Shadowspawn,' he corrected, huskily. His face averted, he mounted from the wrong side. The horse whickered disapprovingly. 'What is it, snipe?'

  As clouds covered the moon, Tempus seemed to pull all night's shadows round him. Hanse might have the name, but this Tempus had the skill. Hanse shivered. There were no Shadow Lords any longer ... 'I was admiring your horse. Bunch of hawk masks rode by, saw the horse, looked interested. I looked proprietary. The horse looked mean. The hawk-masks rode away. I just thought I'd see if you showed soon, and let you know.'

  A movement at the edge of his field of vision warned him, even as the horse's ears twitched at the click of iron on stone. 'You should have kept going, it seems,' said Tempus quietly, as the first of the hawk-masks edged his horse out past the intersection, and others followed. Two. Three. Four. Two more.

  'Mothers,' whispered Cudgel Swearoath's prodigy, embarrassed at not having realized that he was not the only one waiting for Tempus.

  'This is not your fight, junior.'

  'I'm aware of that. Let's see if they are.'

  Blue night: blue hawk-masks: the sparking thunder of six sets of hooves rushing towards the two of them. Whickering. The gleam of frothing teeth and bared weapons: iron clanging in a jumble of shuddering, straining horses. The kill trained grey's challenge to another stallion: hooves thudding on flesh and great mouths gaped, snapping; a blaring death-clarion from a horse whose jugular had been severed. Always watching the boy: keeping the grey between the hawk-masks and a thief who just happened to get involved; who just happened to kill two of them with thrown knives, one through an eye and the other blade he recalled clearly, sticking out of a slug-white throat. Tempus would remember even the whores' ambivalent screams of thrill and horror, delight and disgust. He had plenty of time to sort it out: Time to draw his own sword, to target the rider of his choice, feel his hilt go warm and pulsing in his hand. He really did not like to take unfair advantage. The iron sword glowed pink like a baby's skin or a just-born day. Then it began to react in his grip. The grey's reins, wrapped around the pommel, flapped loosely; he told it where he wanted it with gritted words, with a pressing knee, with his shifting weight. One hawk -mask had a greenish tinge to him: protected. Tempus's sword would not listen to such talk: it slit charms like butter, armour like silk. A blue wing whistled above his head, thrown by a compatriot of the man who fell so slowly with his guts pouring out over his saddle like cold molasses. While that hawk-mask's horse was in mid-air between two strides, Tempus's sword licked up and changed the colour of the foe-seeking boomerang. Pink, now, not blue. He was content to let it return its death to the hand that threw it. That left just two.

  One had the thief engaged, and the youth had drawn his wicked, twenty-i
nch Ibarsi knife, too short to be more than a temporizer against the hawk-mask's sword, too broad to be thrown. Backed against the Lily Garden's wall, there was just time for Tempus to flicker the horse over there and split the hawk-mask's head down to his collarbones. Grey brains splattered him.. The thrust of the hawk-mask, undiminished by death, shattered on the flat of the long, curved knife Shadowspawn held up in a two-fisted, desperate block.

  'Behind you!'

  Tempus had known the one last hawk-mask was there. But this was not the boy's battle. Tempus had made a choice. He ducked and threw his weight sideways, reining the horse down with all his might. The sword, a singing one, sonata'd over his head, shearing hairs. His horse, overbalanced, fell heavily, screaming, pitching, rolling onto his left leg. Pinned for an instant, he saw white anguish, then the last hawk-mask was leaping down to finish him, and the grey scrambled to its feet. 'Kill,' he shouted, his blade yet at ready, but lying in the dirt. His leg flared once again, then quieted. He tried it, gained his knees, dust in his eyes. The horse reared and lunged. The hawk-mask struck blindly, arms above his head, sword reaching for grey, soft underbelly. He tried to save it. He tried. He tackled the hawk-mask with the singing sword. Too late, too late: horse fluids showered him. Bellows of agony pealed in his ears. The horse and the hawk-mask and Tempus went down together, thrashing.

  When Tempus sorted it out, he allowed that the horse had killed the hawk-mask at the same time the hawk-mask had disembowelled the horse.

  But he had to finish it. It lay there thrashing pathetically, deep groans coming from it. He stood over it uncertainly, then knelt and stroked its muzzle. It snapped at him, eyes rolling, demanding to die. He acceded, and the dust in his eyes hurt so much they watered profusely.

  Its legs were still kicking weakly when he heard a movement, turned on his good leg, and stared.

  Shadowspawn was methodically stripping the hawk-masks of their arms and valuables.

  Hanse did not notice Tempus, as he limped away. Or he pretended he did not. Whichever, there was nothing left to say.

  5