Soul of the City tw-8

by Robert Lynn Asprin

  "Hear it?" Haught asked. "Feel it, dead man? She's worried. She's unweaving her magics. Souls are winging back to hell tonight. Do you feel yours slipping?"

  "Get your ha-hands from me."

  Haught's hands slid up his shoulders and held there. "She's forgotten you tonight. I haven't. I'm holding you, Stilcho. /. And I can peel you like an onion. Or save your wretched soul. Do you feel it now?"

  "Ish-"

  Haught's grip tightened, that of his hands and that on his soul. The paralysis grew, and Haught's voice sank deeper and deeper, so that it was not sound at all, only the dazzle of winter cold, was snowflakes falling on dark wind.

  The Queen of Death is dethroned. Power is free tonight. Fragments of it drift on the winds, sift through the air, fall on the earth.

  It slays the dead.

  It casts down the powerful.

  Stilcho shivered, his living eye widened and the dead one saw abysses.

  He tottered on the edge, reached up hands cold as clay and held to Haught as to his last and only hope.

  There is something that shines and I see it, dead man.

  It beckons the powerful with an irresistible lust.

  And she dares not.

  The dust shines and shimmers and falls everywhere and she dares not gather that power up. She seals up the ways. She burns it with fire.

  Nisi power. She loathes it and desires it.

  I am Nisi, dead man. And I will have that thing. She sits blind and deaf to me what we say she cannot know. That is my power. And it needs one thing.

  Things will change, Stilcho. Consider your allegiances. Consider how you fare when she forgets you.

  He had a very clear picture then what Haught wanted. He held the image of a shining globe that spun and shimmered. Lust was part of it, in the same way that light was. It was raw power. It was dangerous, dangerous as some spinning blade, as some terrible juggernaut let loose. That shining, spinning thing was a humming regularity that beat like a pulse, that held all the gates of hell and creation in harmony with itself, all beating away with the same thump-thump of a living heart, that was the tiniest imperfection in this spinning. If it were perfect there would be nothing.

  The universe exists on a flaw in nothing at all.

  A little wobble in the works.

  He caught at his chest, feeling an unaccustomed hammering. He felt it as threatening at first, and then he realized that it was a thin, occasional beat in a perfect stillness. It was his own heart giving a little thump of life. And he felt it because for a moment it had been utterly silent.

  "You know," Haught said, "you understand it now, what I want." Haught's fine hand touched his face, and a little chill numbed him. "Now forget it, dead man. Just forget it now. Until I need you.... I want to talk to you, Stilcho, Just a moment. Privately."

  Stilcho blinked. It was the living eye he saw from now. It was his enemy Haught, a Haught looking uncommonly void of malice, a Haught holding him gently by the shoulder.

  "I've wronged you," Haught said. "I know that. You have to understand, Stilcho we were both victims. I was yours; you were their pawn. Now I have a certain power and it's you who are the slave. A sweet difference for me; and a bitter one for you. But-" The hand moved softly and warmth spread from it, like life through clay, so poignant a pain that Stilcho's vision came and went. "It need not be bitter. You so scarcely died, Stilcho. Earth never went over you; fire never touched you. Just a little slip away from the body, a little slip and she caught you in her hands before you could get much beyond the merest threshold of hell, drew you back to your body in the next breath; and this flesh of yours-this is solid, it bleeds if cut however sluggishly; it suffers pain of flesh. And pain of pride; and pain of fear-"

  "Don't-"

  "And when mistress wants you, it does infallibly what a man's body ought-tell me: does it feel anything?"

  Stilcho gave a wrench of his arm. It was no good. The paralysis closed about his throat and stopped the shout; Haught's eyes caught his and held and the arm fell leaden at his side.

  "I have the threads that hold you to life," Haught said. "And I will tell you a secret: she has never done as much for you as should be done. She can't, now. But she could have. The power that could have done it is blowing on the wind tonight, is falling like dust, wasted. Do you think that she would have thought twice of you? Do you think that she would have said to herself-Stilcho could benefit by this, Stilcho could have his life back? No. She never thought of you."

  Liar, Stilcho thought, fighting the silken voice; but it was hard to doubt the hand that held the threads of his existence. Liar-not that he believed Ischade had ever thought of him; that he did not expect; but he doubted that there had ever been such a chance as Haught claimed.

  "But there was," said Haught softly, and something fluttered and rippled through the curtains of his mind. "There was such a chance and there still is one. Tell me, Stilcho-ex-slave speaks to slave now-do you enjoy this condition? You'll trek to hell and back to preserve that little thread of life of yours; you'll whimper and you'll go like a beaten dog because even death won't make you safe from her, and your life won't last a moment if she forgets you the way she's forgetting those others. But what if there were another source of life? What if there were someone to hold you up if she neglected you-do you see the freedom that would give you? For the first time since you died, poor slave, you can choose from moment to moment. You can say-this moment I'm hers; or: for these few I'm his. And if anything should happen to me-that choice will be gone again. Do you understand?"

  There was warmth all through him. Warmth and the natural give of his stiffened ribs-it hurt, like cramped muscle. His heart beat at a normal rate and the socket of his eye ached with a stab of pain that was acute and poignant and for a moment giddy with strength.

  Haught caught him as it faded and the river-cold came back. Stilcho shivered, a natural shiver; and Haught's face before him was pale, beaded with sweat: "There," Haught gasped, "there, that's what I could do for you if I were stronger."

  Stilcho only stared at him, and the living eye wept at the memory and the dead one wept blood. It was a seduction' as wicked as any ever committed in Sanctuary, which was going some: and he knew himself the victim of it. Of drugs and temptations he had sampled in his life, of ghassa and krrf and whatever lotos-dreams the smoke of firoq gave, there was no sensation to equal that moment of painful warmth, and it was going away now.

  He needs a focus, Stilcho thought; he had learned his gram-marie in bitter and terrible lessons and knew something of the necessities of black sorcery. He wants a familiar. Nothing so simple as snake or rat, not even one of the birds he wants a man, a living man. 0 gods, he's lying. He knows what I'm thinking. He's in my skull-

  Yes, came a soft, soft voice. / am. And you're quite right. But you also taste what my power would be. I'm still apprentice. But to hide a thing is another of my talents. And Mistress doesn't see me. I've learned the edges of her power, I've mapped it like a geography, and I simply walk the low places, the canyons and the chasms of it. She's committed an error great mages make: she's lost her small focus. Her inner eye is set always on the horizons, and those horizons grow wider and wider, so the small, deft stroke can pass her notice; I can sit in a small place and listen to the echoes her power makes. It makes so much noise tonight it has no sense of a thing so small and soft. And I approach mastery. It lacks one thing. No, two. You are one. The thought will remain. I will seal it up now, I will seal it so you needn't fear at all; all that will remain is a knowledge that 1 am not your true enemy. Wake up, "Stilcho-"

  Stilcho blinked, startled for a moment as he found himself face to face with Haught. Something was very wrong, that he was this close to Haught and feeling no fear. It was a situation that produced fear of its own. But Haught let him go.

  "Are you all right?" Haught asked with brotherly tenderness.

  Witchery did not obliterate memory of past injury. It only made things seem, occasionally, quite mad.r />
  And the fire still roared in the front room, where he had no wish to go.

  Ischade herded another soul home. This one was a soldier, and wily and full of tricks and turns-one of Stilcho's lost company who had deserted in the streets and hid and lurked down by the shambles, where there was always blood to be had. Janni, she thought; that was a soul she sought. It wailed and cursed its feeble curses; not Janni, but a Stepson of the later breed. She overpowered it with a thrust that shriveled its resistance and the only sign of this exertion was a momentary tension of her closed eyelids and a slight lift of her head as she sat with hands clasped before the fire.

  She had grown that powerful. Power hummed and buzzed deafeningly in her veins, straining her heart.

  Small magics stirred about her, which she supposed was Haught at his practice again; but she paid it no heed. She might summon the Nisi slave and use him to take the backload, but that led to a different kind of desire, and that desire was already maddening.

  There was Stilcho. There was that release, which was not available with Straton. But what was in her tonight even a dead man might not withstand; and she had sworn an oath to herself, if not to gods she little regarded, that she would never destroy one of her own.

  She hunted souls through the streets of Sanctuary and never budged from her chair, and most of all she hunted Roxane.

  She smelled blood. She smelled witchery, and the taint of demons which Roxane had dealt with. She felt the shuddering of strain at gates enough for a mortal soul, but not yet wide enough for things which had no part or law in the world to linger.

  One there was which Roxane had called. It was cheated, and vengeful, and demanded the deaths of gods which a mage tried to prevent. It had intruded into the world and wanted through again.

  One there was which ruled it, for which it was only viceroy, and that power tried the gates in its own might: it was more than demon, less than god; but since she had never bargained with gods or demons it had no hope with her.

  Mostly she felt the slow sifting of power everywhere on the winds, profligate and dangerous.

  Leave it to me, she had said to Randal, who had enough to do to cheat a demon of his prey. She felt Randal too, a little spark of fire which gave her location and a sense of Randal's improbable self, cool blue fire which lay at the heart of a dithering, foolish-looking fellow whose familiar/alterself was a black dog: friendly, flop-eared hound that he was, there was wolf in his well-shielded soul; there was the slow and loyal heart of the hound that lets children pull its ears and trample it under knees and hug it giddy: but that same hound could turn and remember it was wolf; and the eyes which were not slitted green lit with a redder fire and a human-learned cunning. Wolf was clever in a wild thing's way; dog on the hunt was another matter. That was Randal. She shed a little touch his way and flinched at once, hearing the thunder rumble and feeling the raw edges of nature gone unstable.

  Warning, warning, warning, he sent; and she gathered it up and felt the rising of the unnatural wind.

  Get the dead hence, send them home. A god lies senseless, at the edge of raving. And he is prey to demons and their minions.

  She located another soul, a lost child. It was glad to go. And another, who loved a man in the Maze. She drove that one away with difficulty; it was wily as the mercenary and more desperate.

  She found a minor-class fiend hiding in an alley; it tried desperately to pretend it was a man. Know you, know you, it protested, does what you want, oh, does everything you want. ... It wept, which was unusual for a fiend, and hid in a tumble of old boxes as if that could save it from the gates. I find HER, it snuffled.

  That saved it. That Her was Roxane. The fiend knew instinctively what she wanted. It proposed treachery (which was its fiendish part) and hoped for mercy (which was its human vulnerability).

  FIND, she told it. And the orange-haired fiend leapt up and gibbered with that hope for mercy. It went loping and shambling off shattering boxes and wine bottles and scaring hell out of a sleeping drunk behind the Unicorn.

  Ischade's head tilted back; the breath whistled between her clenched teeth and the lust came on her with fever-pulse, let loose by this magical exertion. She had expended a certain kind of energy. It had gone far beyond desire, went toward need; and she hunted the living now, hunted with a reckless, hateful vengeance.

  Nothing petty this time. No inconsequential, unwashed victim picked up in the streets, slaking need with something so distasteful to her it was self-inflicted torment.

  She wanted the innocent. She wanted something clean. And restrained herself short of that. She looked only for the beautiful and the surface-clean, something that would not haunt her.

  And a lord of Ranke, who got up to close the shutters against the sudden and importunate wind, inhaled the stench that swept up from riverside and suffered a physical reaction of such intensity he dreamed awake, dreamed something so intense and so very real that it mingled with the krrf-dream he had taken refuge in this storm-fraught night. It had something of terror about it. It had everything of lust. It was like the krrf, destructive and infinitely-desirable in that way that knowledge of other worlds, even death, has a lust about it, and a soul trembles on the edge of some great and dangerous height, fascinated by the flight and the splintering of its own bone and the spatter of its own blood on the pavings-

  Lord Tasfalen took in his breath of a sudden and focused in horror at the starlit pavings of his own courtyard, realizing how close he had come to falling. And how desirable it had been. He blamed it on the krrf and flung himself away and back to the slave who shared his bed, vowing to have a man whipped for the krrf that must have something in it beyond the ordinary. He experienced a taint of fear, stood there in his bedroom with the slave staring up at him in purest terror that the handsome lord was suffering some kind of seizure, that he had perhaps been poisoned, for which she would be blamed, and for which she would die. Her whole life passed before her in that moment, before Tasfalen sank down on the bed in a convulsion he shared with a woman a far distance from his ornate bedchamber.

  That was the extent to which Ischade's power had swelled. It hunted like a beast, and left Tasfalen shaking in a lust he could not satisfy, though he tried, with the slave, who spent the hour in a terror greater than any she had yet experienced in this gilt prison, with this most jaded of Rankene nobles.

  Ischade leaned back and shut her eyes, lay inert for a long time while the thunder rumbled and rattled above the house and a flop-eared, freckled mage labored to save a god and a seer. Sweat bathed her limbs, ran in trails on her body beneath the robes. She felt the last impulses of that convulsion, tasted copper on her tongue, rolled her eyes beneath slitted lids and thanked her own foresight that she had sent Straton to Crit this night.

  Not yet for this fine nobleman. Sweets were for prolonging. She lay there with the fires sinking in the hearth and on the candles round the room; and in her blood. She stretched out the merest tendril of will and wrapped it about the house, ran it like lightning along the old iron fence and up to the rooftree, where a small flock of black birds took flight.

  She sent it pelting gustlike down the chimney and scouring out across the floor with the roll of a bit of ember.

  "Haught!" ,

  Haught was there, quickly, catfooted and sullen-faced as ever, standing in the doorway of the room he shared with Stilcho. Ex-slave and ex-dancer. She gazed at him through slitted eyes, simply stared, testing her resolve; and beckoned him closer. He came a foot or two. That was all. Cautious Haught. Wary Haught.

  "Where's Stilcho?"

  Haught nodded back toward the room. The fires were silent. Every word seemed drawn in ice, written on the still air inside and the stormwind without.

  "This is not a good night, Haught. Take him and go somewhere. No. Not just somewhere." She pulled a ring from her finger. "I want you to deliver this."

  "Where, Mistress?" Haught came and took it, ever so carefully, as if it were white-hot; as if he would not
hold it longer than he had to. "Where take it?"

  "There's a house fourth up and across the way from Moria. Deliver it there. Say that a lady sends to Lord Tasfalen. Say that this lady invites him to formal dinner, tomorrow at eight. At the uptown house. And tell Moria there'll be another place for dinner." She smiled, and Haught found sudden reason to clench his hands on the ring and back away. "You're quite right," she said, faintest whisper. "Get out of here."

  She lay back a moment, eyes shut in her dreams (and Tasfalen's) as she heard the door open and shut. She felt the tremor in the wards which ringed the place about and sealed its gates.

  Come with me, Randal had said, knowing what he faced in god-healing. Ischade, I need you-

  And Strat: Ischade-for the gods' sake-

  For no gods' sake. No god's.

  She had fled Straton's presence as she would have fled the environs of hell... fled running, when she had left that place and left him and the ruin of Roxane's house, in utmost confusion and dread, her heart pounding in terror of what was loose, not in the night, but in her own inner darkness-a thing which made her shun mirrors and the sight of her eyes. So she sat before her hearth and hurled magic into the fires and into the wind and into the gates of hell until she had exhausted the power to control that power and direct it; then the fire went into her bones and inmost parts and smouldered there.

  Thunder rumbled again, instability in the world, fire in the heavens.

  She drew a shuddering breath, tormented the dreams of the fairhaired Rankan and thrust herself to her feet, took up her cloak and put it on with careful self discipline.

  The door opened with a crash, fluttering the candle flames, which blazed white for a moment and subsided.

  So hard it was to manage the little things. The merest shrug was lethal. The gaze of her eyes might do more than mesmerize. It might strip a soul. She flung up the hood and walked out into the wind and the night.