by Janet Morris
Normal police and Elite Guard stations were so outnumbered as to be useless. Jails were full. Hangmen were busy. Common graves were the order of the day.
On every street corner and byway army patrols were deployed. Sandbagged bunkers hosted infantry squadrons in Embassy Square; siege engines and "mountains" on wheels with men atop the towers and great slings to throw naphtha fireballs rivaled Wizardwall with their threatening profiles against the moonlit night sky.
The sewers were overtaxed, and the refuse stacked high, and the stench, even in the better quarters, far from the teeming refugee camp, was intolerable; people burned cedar and pennyroyal and walked with kerchiefs bound over their noses and mouths.
"But it's so terrible!" Jinan whispered, as he chuckled at her naivete. "You told me Sanctuary was the nadir of the human condition!"
"It is. This is transitory, a condition imposed from without. In Sanctuary, the status quo is maintained by choice. Those who live there make the town what it is. As for terrible—I'm not sure it's terrible enough to have the desired effect."
"And what is that?" She turned her head to look at him in the torch- and moonlit street; he saw the red flecks stirring in her eyes: she was earnest, angry, or distressed.
"To stop insurrection here: containment. No one wants this to be the state of empire. Civil war—"
"No, no. What is that?" She pointed toward the intersection they were approaching, lighted on every side with panniers of oil borne by colossal lions of chocolate granite.
"Oh, that…the palace. There's a royal family in there somewhere, gnashing their teeth and picking at motheaten ceremonial brocades. Tyse's being administrated by a provisional military governor, invited in along with the Rankan army to reestablish order…" He thought better of explanations. He wasn't about to get into politics with Jihan.
Coming out onto the palace square of a once-sovereign city-state which was now a client and buffer-state of Imperial Ranke, Jihan asked innocently: "How long ago, sleepless one, was the army invited?" She had seen one permanent garrison; he had mentioned the other three. Despite the factions warring in the streets, order was being maintained from four Rankan garrisons—one at each compass point—which made sure that no street in town save in the central refugee camp was free from the tramp of Rankan boots.
"Invited? Nearly three years, but there's been a Rankan presence here ever since the treaties were signed—"
"And before?" She bared her teeth.
He did likewise: "How else would the treaties have been signed?"
The "free zone" was in the middle of the city; the refugees observed no curfew. Getting in through the gates wasn't difficult. Tempus hoped it would be as easy getting out again.
They were warned by a bored, fat sentry that they might lose their property, their identity, or even their lives, and that neither the provisional governor of Tyse nor the Rankan government would redress any grievances incurred within. When his rote speech was done, the portly sentry, who was posted right between two braces of torches flanking the entrance, removed his helmet to wipe a perspiring brow and offered to put them in touch with "various sources of hire or pleasure… for a fee."
Tempus asked pointblank if the sentry knew of any agents of the Successors in the camp, and the man held out his hand.
He followed the directions he'd bought for a Rankan soldat through a press of stinking humanity: the weak ones who could only survive on the outskirts, the beggars, the worst of the working women, cripples, handless thieves, sleeping drunks, lots filled with snoring mortal refuse so thick it seemed a flock of penned sheep slept there. Jihan hugged his arm to her breast and leaned her head against his shoulder as they made slow progress through the living dross of war.
"Successors?" she whispered, finally. "What success lies here?"
"Bashir's commandos recruit from streets like these." They were entering the "business" section, where tents and hovels had in common tightly-laced flaps or shuttered doors. He knew what to look for.
He'd left word at the hostel that he wanted to see Grillo. Wherever he was, he'd get Tempus's message. Going to the embassy asking for him might be the most harmful thing Tern-pus could do to the man whose help he sought. Meanwhile, other means must be explored.
The free zone's center was pocked with circular depressions once used as meeting places and temples when the walls around towered three stories high. Now the thatch-and-cane roofs had crumbled, and the felled trees which once supported them were but stumps protruding from mortared walls.
But the refugees had found their own use for the pits; even in this chaos, a social order existed: the powerful and the feared held the circular sunken theaters and the open spaces and the few defensible buildings which had once served as the Tysian city-state's administrative headquarters. It was toward these that Tempus guided Jihan, passing trading stalls and colored tents whose greasy flaps told that they'd been here for years; goats and sheep and the occasional pony were strung on tethers; men in brightly colored tatters made deals before their stalls; the smell of krff and beer and wine going to vinegar mixed with garlic and pig and unwashed woman on the breeze.
They passed between a man selling boys and two boys selling their sisters and skirted a goatskin tent. Before them was the first of the great circular depressions, this one filled with makeshift altars raised to the glory of a dozen gods. Here incense burned and blew their way so that Tempus's sore eye stung. An ox bellowed and lunged on his tether while three men hacked at his neck with dull-edged axes.
Jihan turned her face against his shoulder and refused to descend the steps into the pit. He said something he'd been meaning not to say—that her father, Stormbringer, had wreaked such havoc and slaughter in Sanctuary that even the god Tempus served was vanquished, perhaps destroyed, and she had stood by unmoved, uncaring: he felt her despair at the human condition to be overblown, inappropriate, since her sort decreed the fates of men.
"You cannot know that my father had a hand in the god's disappearance! Perhaps He became despairing of you, which anyone might—"
And so they argued their way through innumerable makeshift alleys until a child, tow-headed and gasping, in headlong flight their way, crashed through pots and crates, colliding with Jihan, his arms going round her hips to stay both their falls, then struggling to get by while Tempus reached down and grabbed him by his filthy nape. "What's this, boy?"
The child, in torchlight flush-cheeked and better fed than most Tempus had seen here, writhed until Jihan grasped Tempus' arm: "Put him down," while the boy wriggled, lips pressed tight together, neck craned, and eyes darting back in the direction from which he'd come.
"God got your tongue?"
"He's afraid!"
"Are you, boy?"
"Let me go!" The boy's voice was imperious, his accent Mygdonian. Tempus held onto him.
Two men came careening around a corner, shouting to Tempus to hold the wretch, and there was a soldat in it for him.
Jihan stepped in front of Tempus and the child, who could be no more than eight or ten, her arms crossed and her flesh chilling the air.
"Jihan, don't do it! Perhaps they have good reason, perhaps he's a thief, a—"
"Then we shall pay his debt," Tempus heard her say as the boy, who had ceased struggling, fixed him with a gray-eyed gaze too fatalistic for his years.
He lowered the child so that his feet touched the ground. The urchin stood uncertainly for a moment, turned once full around, deciding which escape route might serve him, then bolted toward Jihan, burying his head against her mailed waist: "Help me, lady, they'll make a slave of me. Oh, help me…"
"We'll help you, little one, never fear." She ruffled the tow-head's hair and Tempus almost left her then, to deal with complications of her own making.
But the men had slowed to a walk and approached, hands on their swords. Their cuirasses were scuffed and duty; their boots were worn through and their smell preceded them. Yet there was something wrong about them—their s
houlders were too straight, their backs unbowed, and their command of the dirt they strode through taken too much for granted.
Tempus came up beside Jihan and felt the boy's fingers clutch his belt. He pried them away, not looking down: "What's the trouble here?"
"You've a hold of it. That's our boy, there."
"He says not." Tempus didn't like their eyes—too calm, too steady for slavers'; too pale for Mygdonians'…"My friend fancies him. I'd not argue with her, if I were you. A disputed person in the free zone is not uncommon—"
Their hands went to draw their swords, but Jihan was quicker two throwing stars whispered through the air and stuck in two bearded throats. The men went down like sacks of flour, crumpling in place; then they began to smoke, or to crumble—he couldn't tell which. Like smoke, their substance diffused, leaving only clothing and weapons lying abandoned in an empty street.
A man or two muttered wards; most lingering by the stalls and tents roundabout merely turned away. "Come on, then— bring him," Tempus allowed, and out of the corner of his eye saw camp snipes scuttle out from shadows to fight over the swordbelts, cuirasses, and boots lying in the dirt.
The boy was weak, so Jihan hoisted him and bore him on her hip, his head against her breast; Tempus could hear him choking back sobs as he thanked her and she promised him salvation Tempus doubted they could accord. His was not a family outing; she was becoming more trouble than she was worth.
Without her, he'd have gone down into the altar pit and supplicated Enlil for a sign; this was the ancient Storm God's territory. With her, and now the fleeing boy, in his company, he was constrained from it. He thought of turning back, taking her to the hostel and having her wait there for him, but the youth couldn't be boarded where mercenaries lodged: Tempus couldn't break the rules of his guild, not here.
So he strode onward toward the tent he sought, hoping they'd get lost or disappear. When he found it, he bade her wait outside, and this she was willing to do. The child had her full attention. At the time, he thought it a stroke of luck.
Within the tent a score of reavers lounged, and he asked for someone who could take a message to Bashir when two barred his way—nearly his height and looking older and more worn than three centuries had left him.
"Bashir? Why not? For a fee… And then the gods, too… any you choose," one said, and his companion, then the others behind, all rising, laughed.
"Who wants him?" the second said, half-turning his head to make a signal behind his back that Tempus understood.
"A friend of his father's. From the old wars."
"The long wars? You're not old enough to remember them," a grizzled veteran with half of his cheek gouged away and scars dragging the flesh tight and leftward above his eye said, pushing between and past the pair of sentries. The man had grayish-yellow hair and a trio of symbols etched into the shoulder of his cuirass where bronze plates met leather: he'd fought the Defender, one of the symbols proclaimed to all who could read them; he'd fought the Nisibisi, and fought them still; he'd fought Ranke...
Tempus named Bashir's father, who'd formed the Successors, premier guerrilla fighters turned high-mountain bandits; he spoke a safe-passage code he hadn't had to use in twenty years. Had the man not been close to fifty, he wouldn't have remembered it.
As it was, the old fighter was suspicious: "At the mercenaries' hostel, you say? Rankan, are ye? Friendly calls by Rankans aren't welcome. The scumbag army regulars pay us too many of 'em. But we'll send someone with your message… fight beside us, you say? How many men?"
Tempus was careful not to give his name or divulge that those who followed him were Stepsons and Sacred Banders: "Enough to make a difference. Send word where I can meet him." He backed out of there and, when the tent flap fell, breathed a sigh of relief. He'd collect Jihan and pry her from the boy, who'd got his freedom, who'd be happy with some coin and an escort out of the free zone. Then he'd go back to the hostel and wait…
She wasn't there. No Jihan, no boy. He looked around cursorily, then more thoroughly, searching first in anger (composing his scathy critique of her behavior) and then in earnest. But he couldn't find them. No one remembered seeing them and not even Rankan gold could jog their memories. Jihan was not easy to miss—her stature, her swagger, her expensive mail. He didn't like this turn of events one bit.
As the waning moon crawled across the sky, and he couldn't find her, he began to worry. The boy's gray eyes, wizard eyes, danced in his inner sight. Halfway around the perimeter of the camp, turning sleeping bodies and corpses too new to stink, a voice came out of the gloom behind him: "Riddler!"
"Grillo!"
"By the god's seething eye...I'd thought it was a poor joke…" Grillo was tall, well set-up, a Rankan of the upper class. His hair was light brown, and his skin was pale, the bones under it well-formed, and the mind in that handsome head quick and cold; his kind always prided themselves on being able to blend into any population and anticipate the strategy and tactics of their enemies. But here, despite his ragged mantle and some artfully smeared dirt on his boots and soot on his brow, he stood out like a torchlit statue of the god.
And he knew it: "I shouldn't be in here; all perdition's breaking loose in town tonight. Come, let's get very drunk and—ah, you don't drink… well, I'll get drunk and you can watch and we'll talk things over…" A hand on Tempus's arm, he guided him toward an ill-lit section of the perimeter wall. "I still don't believe it's you…"
"It is, and it's not. I've fallen into disrepute. I'll drink my share. But I've lost my traveling companion…" He described Jihan.
Grillo chuckled. "That's what I heard, the description I got, all right. I didn't believe the report." He whistled piercingly through his teeth. A quartet of beggars who had been fighting over a refuse pile got to their feet; a pair of male prostitutes left potential customers with whom they'd been haggling and sauntered their way. "Gentlemen," Grillo said when the prostitutes accosted them, "this is a friend of mine, who's lost his girl." He described Jihan in more detail than Tempus had to him. "See what you can do. We'll be at my place."
The prostitutes swished their scarves and made kissing noises, and Grillo shouted at them to stay out of his way or they'd lose the tools of their trade.
As they headed toward the deepest of the wall's shadows, the four beggars followed. "Yours?" Tempus asked.
"Them? Sure, yes. And what of yours? Sacred Banders and such?"
"You know, then?"
"My business is hearing things. Believing them is another matter. We've trouble with the mercenary hordes—keeping them on our side and off the townspeople's necks. If you're going to be here awhile, perhaps we could work a trade— service for service, like the old days."
"This is a nice little staging area you've got here," Tempus remarked as they entered the blackest shadows, and out of them voices asked for passwords and, receiving them, suggested that they "step right this way, lords."
"Is that what I've got? Maybe I'll need it, with you here. What happened to your face?"
"A little disagreement with a witch or two. That's why I'm here. My people are coming upcountry a few at a time. We've a score to settle with Datan and his crew, witch taunts aside. One of my men—"
"I heard. This way." Grillo ducked through a postern gate, taking Tempus's hand and pressing it to the lintel which was so low they had to bend nearly double.
When they'd come through and out, they were beyond the free zone's curving wall of rubble faced with stone. "So, you were saying that your cohort is coming?…"
"A few at a time."
"Again, I could use them, and you. This way…"
Tempus paced the Rankan officer until they were out of the wall's shadows, and two men came up leading horses.
"Ride with me?"
Tempus mounted and Grillo pulled his horse up beside: "My house isn't safe for this sort of thing; no one's is. Damn wizards have spies everywhere. We'll just ride around until we're thirsty. You didn't answer—assist me, and I'
ll return the favor."
They rode until the specifics were ironed out: Tempus would help Grillo keep order among the unruly mercenary contingent, lend his Sacred Banders for special assignment; Grillo would help Tempus find Jihan, put him in touch with various special agents, but: "As far as the Successors go, I think your own Nikodemos, if it's the same Niko—ashy hair, good fighter, western-trained—is your best hope. He's fought with them. They don't like me, I can't imagine why." Teeth gleamed in the dark. "Unless it's that I can't pay them the way I used to be able to… this is one damnably expensive revolution. We're down to contingency funding; every six months Ranke evaluates us. One of these times, they're going to decide it's cheaper to turn Tyse over to the Mygdonians as an object lesson to Machad and the other buffer states. But, for the rest of it, I'll work with you. We'll share information; we'll find your friend; we'll get the Nisibisi warlord. To that end, I have what might be a pleasant surprise for you." "Which is?"
"A Mygdonian general, Lacan Ajami's brother, no less. Came in tonight seeking asylum. Seems the Nisibisi warlord— Osprey, they call him—" "Datan."
"Whoever… he had the general up in the high keeps; the man's eldest son died in mysterious circumstances while on guard duty; his wife went blind; his youngest son disappeared. He's had enough, so he says. Wants to help us convince Lacan he's got the wrong allies—get him to join with us and destroy the Nisibisi mages once and for all. Then, he thinks, a real treaty could be drafted." "I'll talk to him."
"There's one problem." Grillo pulled up his horse. Tempus followed suit. "What's that?" "You… You were working for that Rankan faction down in Sanctuary, the one that thinks Kadakithis might make a good puppet emperor—now, let me finish. I can't get involved in anything seditious. Assure me you're not here on their—"
"I'm not. I'm here to avenge, and to war. You don't trust me, after all these years?"
"I trust that if you're here, there's a good reason. Your word's enough for me. We'll make an end to the mages of Nisibis, and show Mygdonia where her salvation lies." He held out his hand.