by Janet Morris
"We'll take him," Tempus decided. "Critias, go spread the word among his men and see what you can do to ease their fears—the whole camp will be sitting up on doubled watch after this, and we cannot afford to let fear of magic waste their strength."
"I'll tell them," Crit said wryly and slipped away, touching Cime's neck as he passed by: "You can heal me any time."
"Now, brother, don't say anything," she warned when Crit was gone.
"I was going to remind you that I have first claim on your services," he replied.
"Which ones?" she rejoined wickedly, but as she did, Bashir groaned and tried to rise up on his elbows, then thrashed as some men will in delayed shock, and they had their hands full trying to hold him still.
* * *
Three days after being bitten by a hell-spawned demon, Enlil's priest still lived. This troubled Datan greatly; watching Jinan sleep in his seraglio, his massive head propped upon one fist, his other hand on the tow-headed boy who cuddled by his knee, he brooded. The poison in Bashir's wound had failed to do its work; the priest had too much aid from higher realms: his own pious soul, the god Himself, and Aškelon's mage-destroying bitch, sicced on Datan straight from the archipelago of dreams.
The improbable was fast becoming likelihood, the unthinkable now had to be considered: he was about to find his fortress under siege. Every adept and lesser mage and first-class sorcerer and warlock who'd lounged about under Datan's wards for eons knew it. Some were packing up belongings; some were making safety vaults secure; some struck further bargains with the loan officers of hell to whom they'd one day be consigned; some even came to him with urgent pleas to underwrite a slim chance of Wizardwall's survival by surrendering up the boy and Jihan to these grim soldiers of the gods who ignored their mortal fears and smiled in death's foul face.
But these forgot that death, to god-fearing armies, was but a well-earned rest, an end to a life as full of terrors as death was to those who'd forfeited eternal peace and given up their souls. The Riddler's troops sought only death with honor, their places in the finest afterlife a man could claim were well assured. And so the fear Datan had once thought to strike into hardened commando hearts had boomeranged, come back upon his subjects like a flying wing to demoralize the high peaks' lords with doubts. Only Roxane and a handful of her cronies huddled hatching counterschemes, and those might do more harm than good.
He'd thought long on the fate of Jihan, and his feeling was that the risk he took by keeping her asleep, unwitting hostage, in order to forefend her father's mixing in, was well worth taking. Otherwise, if he'd sent her with the boy as once he'd thought to do, Stormbringer might be tempted to join the fray. And that chance, Datan couldn't take.
It was ironic that the superstitious fear he'd thought to foster in the hard young men who braved his spells and curses had come back to settle at his own hearth. But he'd not lived so long or gained so much to lose it to a motley crew of mercenaries led by a pair of accursed siblings and an all-too-human priest.
He was glad now that he'd kept the boy; he saw a different kind of salvation in those wide-set, worshipful eyes. He tousled the flaxen hair beneath his hand and told the boy, "Rise up. Quietly now, we mustn't wake her." To hold Jihan thus, he needed to let her wake awhile every day or so, and then Shamshi was necessary to make fast the illusion Datan fostered in her that both the Froth Daughter and the prince of Mygdon were still resting up to leave—that only days, not weeks, had passed since they'd come into his care. And when she woke he wooed her, and put into her impressionable head resentment toward the Riddler.
With her, he'd made good progress; as with the boy, he'd already won what mattered: the child was his, heart, soul and mind, as Jihan soon would be. Let the legion of the damned who clambered up his mountain come; let them clamor for revenge and even tear down his venerable citadel stone by stone. In child and more-than-human Froth Daughter he had aces yet to play.
"Where now, father?" young Shamshi asked, once they'd left the sleeping Jihan and were out among the wenches of the seraglio and, behind, the wall of stone which came and went at Datan's bidding entombed her once again, its faceless, unmarked expanse giving no hint that Froth Daughter or room of summoning or anything at all but solid rock was there.
"We'll have a bit of sport with some of these," his father said, indicating the herd of fawning women, "then go seek out our friend Roxane. AH adepts must help one another now that our hour of crisis has begun."
He saw young Shamshi's eyes go wide with wonder and excitement mixed in just the right proportion.
And he smiled down at his son. He might win this yet, on the larger scale eternals used to weigh their work. Let Enlil melt his snow and dissolve his demons and fend off his fiends, it didn't matter. All that mattered was the outcome—just survival, and the leave of those he served to "live" to fight again.
* * *
Crit could see the peak now, the ramparts black and craggy as if just natural rock scratched at the dusky sky. "See? There?"
Straton blinked and rubbed his eyes and cursed the blurriness through which he saw the world: "If you say it's there, I'll take your word, Crit, but it's just rocks to me."
Twisting in his saddle, Crit said to Cime, "Strat's vision, my lady. I'd take it as a favor if you could do anything for him."
Her tinkling laugh was gentle: "One victory at a time. Stepson. Now, let's firm this up: leave Straton with the men to secure the horses and plant the charges and take positions, or not—But one way or the other, I am going in there. With you or without you."
"I don't know…" Crit had five pairs of Sacred Banders to take care of; he couldn't seem to make her understand the gravity of that responsibility.
"Now you sound like Tempus. Decide, soldier, or muddle through alone," She slipped off the big roan the Riddler had loaned her and handed Straton its reins. She was wraithlike in the fading light; brown-armored with her crested helm, she might have been a man. But Critas knew from sweat-drenched nights that Cime was all woman, and enough more that she made him uncomfortable whenever she wasn't making him more comfortable than he'd dreamed a man could be.
This whole operation was a mess; she should have stayed with Tempus, attended to Bashir. "I'm not a nurse," she'd said, and invited herself along once Bashir had regained his hold on life, and the poison he fought off was no longer an imminent threat. When Bashir was well enough to begin supplicating Enlil to melt the snow, she'd proclaimed him healed, and that was that.
They'd spent one day slogging through the mud and slush Enlil's bright sun and warm winds had made of Datan's snow, the whole main contingent kept together by Tempus's order because, he said, the men should see their priest surmount his plight and gain their spirit back by watching gods make light of hostile magic. This extra day spent altogether put Niko's squadron far ahead and sore at risk. Critias didn't understand why neither Tempus or Bashir nor Cime were concerned with that. The Riddler simply refused to discuss sending a man or god-facilitated message to warn Niko to lay back another day, Cime had laughed at Grit's concern that timing and coordination were crucial to the venture, saying only: "I have conferred, dear lover, with Randal. All contingencies have been covered. Now come here and kiss me…"
He had a feeling that Tempus was piqued, withdrawing from his sister and Critias so as not to tacitly sanction their affair. But when he'd tried again to either talk it out or simply shake off his infatuation, first brother and then sister had merely smiled at him.
And now she was all but calling him a coward, He handed his own reins to Strat; their strategy was so precisely planned that either left- or right-side partner could recite it in his sleep. Beyond the point where strategy or planning would apply, every man was on his own in any case. The attack was set for dawn. He slipped an arm around her waist and said, "I'm a fool, but I'm coming with you. Just tell me what the point is; I've got to have a sufficient reason to leave my men."
Straton muttered a farewell blessing and reined the horses b
ack. They stood before a deep defile across which they'd just come, every horse and man intact under Cime's aegis: she'd made a bridge of cloud where empty air had been before. They'd planned to leave their mounts on its far side when they'd gone over the terrain in the Outbridge maproom with Bashir. But Cime changed everything, every rule of every game—he'd been warned, but had chosen not to listen.
He turned on his heel to give his friend more than a cursory godspeed, but Straton waved him off in genuine disgust. That, too, he'd have to solve soon. Cime was disruptive, a passionate influence, just as Tempus said. Yet his own instinct told him that the opportunities she offered, in more than just the sphere of lust, might never come again. And if the dream lord took offense, or even Tempus… well, then, that was life.
"We'll be in and out of there and back among your fighters, leader, before they have time to miss you. We'll like as not have slain the archmage or his favorite witch; we'll surely reconnoiter unseen halls, maybe open up the doors. Enough 'point' for you, soldier?"
"Just tell me how," he insisted, uncomfortable, and let her go, squatting down on turf that felt like permafrost, so cold it numbed him through his boots. They'd suffered from this weather, horse and man alike.
"Disguises, soldier. We'll look like familiar mages, like friends of whomsoever we chance to meet."
"How? By magic? No thanks, lady. It's against my religion."
She raised her visor, studied him. "Yes," she sighed, "I suppose it is. Well, I shouldn't be surprised that you are all alike. You, my brother, all these men. It's a wonder any of you live to regret your prejudices. I thought you'd do, but I was wrong. Stay here, then, soldier. And may your god protect you. I cannot."
He put out a hand to object, opened his mouth to explain, but as he closed his fist where her shoulder had just been, there was nothing there but air.
The mage-killer Cime was gone, winked out of existence as if she'd never been.
Feeling foolish, but relieved, he headed back toward his men and his horses.
Straton had never been so glad, he said, to see him as when he came back from the edge of that deep defile alone.
* * *
Niko and Randal weren't getting on as paired fighters should. But then, Randal wasn't Niko's sort of fighter. When they'd used the Successors' tactic of soaring across chasms so deep even wizards' snow couldn't hide them, depending on natural updrafts and the favor of the gods to guide them to a safe landing, higher up, on the far side, Randal had balked at using the "flimsy" kites and come across some other way.
No one among Niko's squadron wanted to dwell on how. Having a magician with you when you're out to slay magicians might have benefits, but it had debits: the tough talk fighters used to up their courage and fan their hatred offended the young adept; outlandish boasts of what Nisibisi commandos did to Nisibisi mages when they caught them made Randal's ears turn red and wards drip from his lips, and oftentimes he blanched.
But now, a thousand yards from the high keep's sprawling blackness, whose sentries seemed so tiny atop the gargantuan blocks of stone piled high, everyone could see how labyrinthine the fortress was, and men had begun to watch their tongues.
"Why do you think they let us get so far?" Ari wondered through teeth clenched against a sharper, less natural cold than that which had made them leave their horses in a Successor-guarded cave where they'd spent the day and regained their strength and eaten from stores protected by Enlil's talismans.
Men were caring for their weapons, checking springs on crossbows, pulleys on Nisibisi double-strung bows which used helically-fletched arrows instead of bolts or short flights, putting poison on their tips with careful fingers. Each bowman had brought up "first line" ammunition: ninety bolts or feathered shafts apiece. The archers' concern was rain, which would make the fletched shafts go wide and some go useless; the swordsmen just talked low of prior exploits hand-to-hand and what they'd do when, ramparts breached, at last they were free to "mix it up" with an enemy so long vilified and so hard to convince to stand and fight. This time, all were sure, they'd have to; Niko never could remember men so eager for a fight. All the years of being polite to foul enchanters and enduring their excesses as if Sacred Banders were a lower class made Stepsons just as passionate to shed mages' blood as were the men of Free Nisibis.
Of all his men, only Ari was reluctant. Niko had requested him because he had liked what he'd seen when they first met, and taken Ari's measure while schooling him with blossoms and throwing stars. But Haram hadn't liked that, and Tempus' decree was all that came between Niko and Haram setting the matter with naked blades.
Now Niko heard Randal whispering to Ari, who had dared to ask a question no one wanted to consider: this whole, easy ascent could have been a trap. The snow might have slowed them but it didn't stop them; surely the feared wizardry of Nisibis could wreak more havoc than this. Niko crouched and scuttled toward them, keeping low. The lights were lit above them in the magicians' fortress; guardians of the ramparts could be seen, in torchlight, to be not quite human.
Reaching Randal and Ari, Niko broke in: "Randal, nobody really cares why they 'let' us get so far, or if they did. Just hold your tongue. Supposition has no place on a battle line." And he pulled the junior Hazard away from the omen-conscious special when the mage was succeeding in scaring half to death by answering his question in ways a soldier didn't want to hear.
"Gods, Randal, can't you keep shut? Why I ever brought a pud like you upcountry, I don't know. If you live through this, maybe you'll become a man, but if you open your mouth again to one of mine with this portentous drivel, I'm going to shut it permanently, on the spot, myself. Clear?"
Niko would have given the panoply he wore—charmed cuirass, dagger, sword, the lot—to have his old left-side leader back, or Janni instead of Randal on his right. This was his first sortie as a unit commander; he had to do it right.
The mournful look on Randal's face made him try to explain just a little of what it meant to be a professional soldier, what a leftman expected from his right, and what commanding fighters like these demanded in the way of white lies and the exercise of common sense. He took the mage off alone: "… so you see, you don't advise them of purported dangers they can't see, you don't tell them to beware what they don't know how to fight. We've got to stir them up and help them face this thing as if we're engaging an enemy who's equal; let them clutch at winning, not convince them that they don't know how to meet this enemy. By Enlil's—"
"Don't invoke any of your doting deities to me, Nikodemos. I've got enough problems. I'm cold and wet and I'm not fool enough to believe we'll live to face the battle in the morning. If you haven't realized it, your beloved Riddler sent us out ahead as diversionary fodder, to take the warlocks' attention from the real incursion force. We're dead, you just don't know it yet—" Randal's voice was a rising wail.
Niko slapped him, backhanded, across the cheek without even thinking. "Lies. Didn't Cime 'contact' you in some mysterious way and tell you to tell me to pull back a day and wait?"
"Yes, yes, but that's just what I mean—"
They were arguing in low and urgent tones, walking upright now behind a shielding tumble of high boulders through which not even Wizardwall's best could see, when suddenly Niko heard his name whispered, and Randal his, and both men stopped.
"Oh, by the Writ, we've done it now," the Hazard said, and clutched at Niko: "Go on, soldier. Run. Flee. Your men can't do without you… I'll handle—"
But then the whispers came into view, and Randal's hissing voice was stilled.
Undeads with pure white eyes shuffled through the snow with hands outstretched and smiling faces: Tamzen, his beloved Tamzen, in the lead. And each child was weeping, begging Niko to help them, please, to free them and to comfort them and to take them home. They missed their mothers and their fathers and they missed their home, and they were damned because of him,
"Don't listen. Draw your weapons, fighter," Randal urged, his own fingers weaving blue
-tinged wards before his face.
There were six undeads, Tamzen, her girlfriends, and other children Niko wished he didn't know: youngsters slain in battles long ago, in sacks of towns, or afterwards, when those who can't be saved must be dispatched; one even from the slavepits where he'd been incarcerated, a boy who'd died beside him of soldiers' rape in chains.
Randal's voice was distant, indistinct. Tamzen's face implored him. He'd seen it in too many dreams to let the white eyes frighten him. He was used to her; his soul cried for her; he thought they'd come to take him off to play their games amid the grass and summer of his rest-place. He had to touch her, to hold, console her; he had to make amends…
He was walking toward her, arms spread wide, when Randal tripped him and he fell face down into the snow. The cold of it upon his cheeks and in his mouth helped to bring him to his senses—that and the way his cuirass was heating up. It steamed where it touched the snow and he heard: "Draw your blade, idiot. Or you'll be wandering around like them for eternity!" but the voice was muffled.
Niko rolled, confused, onto his back and saw Randal with three undeads hanging on his arms and pulling at his clothing, their teeth bared and their mouths open wide, and they were chanting awful, low sounds interspersed with clacks of snapping jaws. He could see the mage's popping eyes, his fearful struggles.
"Hold on, Randal!" He vaulted up, cross-drawing sword and dirk as he gained his feet and leaped toward the struggling Hazard, being pulled down into the snow.
He remembered wondering why the mage's magic couldn't help him, and hearing Tamzen tell him it could, he needn't worry, just come with her; and then, slipping in the melting snow, he reached the embattled mage upon his knees and swung his sword in a downward arc meant to sever undead necks.
But as his sword went through the first, head and torso disappeared, and when his continuing swing touched the shoulder of the second, it howled and fell apart; and the third, Randal's blood running from its mouth, scrambled back, its hands outstretched, calling: "Niko, Niko, don't! We're friends. You can't slay me!" But the dirk in his left hand, with a will of its own, shot forward out of his grip and impaled itself in the neck of the boy he'd watch die so long ago upon a slaver's chain.