Soul of the City tw-8

by Robert Lynn Asprin

  The other groups Tempus had assigned to guard the oxcart's progress were beginning to appear. Crit came up with a half-dozen Stepsons, most of whom appeared to have heard Strat's accusations or at least had no desire to look their erstwhile field commander full in the face. The 3rd Commando, or a good sized part of it, rode up from behind. Whatever Tempus's opinion of the operation, he'd made certain it didn't lack for manpower.

  "I think we've found out what we wanted to know," Molin said, not quite takingcommand away from Strat, Crit, and Walegrin, but eliminating the need for them to decide who was in command. "Randal, borrow a horse. We'll head back for the palace. They'll want to know what's happened. Straton- you should probably come along. The rest of the Stepsons can lend a shoulder to the garrison men in getting this cart turned around and back to the palace. I'll leave it to you two," he nodded toward Critias and Walegrin, "to decide if you need the Third's help. I've arranged for brandy and roast meat to be waiting at the palace barracks: Be sure that everyone- regulars. Stepsons, and the Third if they want it-gets a share."

  Molin waited until Randal had directed a docile-looking horse toward Straton before turning his own gelding away from the men gathered around the ox-cart. Critias had ridden down to talk to the 3rd and Walegrin was proving himself quite capable of getting the oxen to turn the cart around. A few riders from the 3rd split off toward Strat and Randal but most of them headed back toward the General's Road and whatever billets they had Downwind or near the Bazaar.

  He held the gelding to a slow walk a good number of paces behind them. They were all Rankan people, allied in one way or another to the Emperor or the remnants of the Vashankan priesthood he was no longer on good terms with. They were probably as uncomfortable around him as he was around them but here they had him outnumbered.

  The riders were well beyond the ox-cart and still a good distance from the walls when Molin felt the first twinges of divine curiosity. Blood-red auroras rose from the horizon; the ground heaved and stretched, moving him further apart from the others. Despite the rain soaking through every garment he wore, the priest felt a cold, nauseous sweat break out on his forehead and spread, quickly, until it reached his weak, suddenly numb knees.

  Stormbringer.

  Gathering every mote and shred of determination, Molin concentrated on weaving his fingers around the saddle hom. Not there. Not on a rain-swept field with Tempus's men all around him. His heart pounded wildly. He heard, but could not feel, the loose stirrups clanking against the lace-studs of his boot.

  One step. One more step. The longest journey is made of single-

  The red auroras rose until they touched the zenith. Molin felt the scream trapped in his throat as the god reached out and pulled him from his body, mind and soul.

  "Lord Stormbringer," he said, though he had no proper voice in the featureless, ruddy universe where he met with the primal storm god.

  You tremble before me, little mortal.

  The roaring came from everywhere and nowhere. Molin knew it well enough to know it could be louder, more painful, and that the present modulation revealed a certain, dangerous, humor.

  "Only a foolish mortal would fail to tremble before you, Lord Stormbringer."

  A foolish mortal who seeks to elude me? I do not have time to waste searching for foolish mortals.

  Here, in the god's universe or perhaps within the god, there was no place for hidden thoughts or verbal gymnastics. There was only nothingness and the raw, awesome power of Stormbringer himself.

  "I have been such a foolish mortal," Torchholder acknowledged.

  You trouble yourself with the opinions of those not sworn to me or the children. You know that all Stormgods are but shadows of me-as Vashanka is a shadow I have abandoned, the llsig god a shadow I have forgotten, and the one they call "Father Enlil" a shadow which shall not fall across Sanctuary.

  "I did not know. Lord Stormbringer."

  Then know now! The universe throbbed with Stormbringer's pique. I am Sanctuary's god. Until the children claim their birthright I am their, and Sanctuary's, guardian. Fear only me!

  Of course they fear you. A second presence, feminine but no less awesome, wove its way through and around the presence that was Stormbringer. Mortals fear everything. They fear the woman's god more than they fear the man's god, and they fear a woman without a god most of all. You must tell them where to find the witch-woman who killed my snakes.

  The deities twisted around each other but did not mix or merge. Molin knew he was in the presence of what was already being called the Barren Marriage. Yet there was something like mortal affection, as well as immortal lust, between these two. He felt the part that was Stormbringer contract, and an upright figure with the head of a lion, the wings of an eagle, and the lower parts of a bull manifested itself out of the red mist.

  "I cannot tell you where she is," the apparition said in a voice that was both male and female. "There are things forbidden even to me. Demonkind is brother and sister to you mortals, but no kin to gods. The S'danzo have the greater part of the truth; the Nisi witches have the rest.

  "Roxane promised the souls of the children-or her own if she failed. She is not where you or I can find her-and she is not fallen among the demons. What I cannot find, what the Archdemon cannot find, must lie in Meridian or beyond."

  Molin discovered that he, like Stormbringer, had become corporeal and, so far as he could tell, very much the man he had always been. Tracing his fingers along the familiar, imperfect embroidery of his sleeves, he considered what he knew of the topology of nonmortal spheres and Meridian, the realm of dreams where ASkelon held sway. He thought about ASkelon as well and reflected that if there were one entity-ASkelon hardly qualified as a man-who could both complicate and resolve their problems, the Dream Lord was that entity.

  He made the mistake, however, of thinking that because he felt like himself, he was himself and slipped into rapid considerations as to which of the players would be best for the part.

  "That is not for you to decide," the lion reminded Molin, baring its glistening teeth. "ASkelon has already made his choice."

  "Tempus will not go."

  "Give him this, then." Stormbringer laid a linen scarf across Molin's unwillingly outstretched hands.

  The netherworld that was the gods' universe fractured. Molin held the scarf to his face for protection as the lion-head apparition became hard, dark pellets that beat him into a dizzying backward spiral. The scream he had left frozen in his throat tore loose and engulfed him.

  "It's over now; relax."

  A strong, long-fingered hand was wrapped around his wrist, pulling his hands away from his face. The hard pellets were wind-driven raindrops. His hands, Molin realized as he unclenched them, were empty. He was on his back-had fallen from his horse.

  "You're back with us ordinary folk," the woman told him as she yanked on his cloak and twisted his torso until his shoulders were propped on a relatively dry pile of straw. "Are you all right? Your tongue? Your lips?"

  He pushed himself up on his elbows. There wasn't a muscle, bone, or nerve that didn't ache-as it always did after Stormbringer. But it was, he told her while still trying to understand where he was and what had happened, nothing worse than that.

  "They say that my... Tempus would bite through his lip, or break a bone. I never saw it. He wouldn't notice it, really. You're not him, though."

  "Kama?" Molin guessed.

  He was in some crude shelter-a lean-to the shepherds used, by the smell of it. The worst of the weather was deflected, anyway. She'd hung a lantern from the center-pole but it didn't provide much light and the priest had only seen Tempus's daughter a few times, mostly when she was considerably younger.

  "I saw you stiffen up like that. I guessed what would happen. It wasn't Vashanka, was it?"

  "No."

  She squatted down beside him; the lantern lifted her profile from the surrounding darkness. She wore a youth's leather tunic, laced tight and revealing nothing. Her hair
was twisted into a knot at the crown of her head and was clinging to her face in damp tendrils where it had come loose. She shuddered and went looking for her own cloak which, when she found it, was covered with mud and useless from the rain.

  "Did the others go on?" Molin asked.

  Kama nodded. "They'll have reached the palace by now. Strat knows I'm with you. He won't say anything."

  Molin looked into the lantern. He should, by right, stagger to his feet and hie himself back to the palace. His life was full of gods, magic, and the intrigue that went with them. There was no room for love, or lust-especially not with Kama.

  "You needn't have stayed with me," he said softly, shifting the focus of his analysis and persuasion away from politics.

  "I was curious. All winter I've been hearing about the Torch. Almost everything that worked had your fingerprints on it. Nobody seems to like you very much, Molin Torchholder, but they all seem to respect you. I wanted to see for myself."

  "So you saw me falling off my horse and foaming at the mouth?"

  .She gave him a quick half-smile. "Will the Third actually share that brandy and meat?"

  "I don't have the Empire or the priesthood behind me anymore," Molin admitted. "I can't coerce a man's loyalty and I can't inspire it either-I know my limits. I bribed the cooks myself long before I left the palace." A stream of water broke through the branch-and-straw roof, hitting him full in the face. "No one, if he's done work for Sanctuary, should be out on a night like this without some reward. If the Third went to the barracks, they got their share."

  "What about you?"

  "Or you?"

  Kama shrugged and picked at the loose threads of a bandage tied around her right palm. "I won't find what I want at the barracks."

  "You won't find it with the Third-"

  Kama turned to stare darkly at him.

  Stormbringer, the witches, the children: everything that was important in the larger scheme of things fell from Molin's thoughts as he sat up, closing his hands over hers. "-You won't find it with any of his people."

  It was a thought that had, apparently, already occurred to her, for she unwound into the straw beside him without a heartbeat's hesitation.

  They returned to the palace after the sky had turned a soft, moist gray but before, they hoped, any of those whom Molin had to see were awake. There was nothing to set them apart from any other weary, soaked travelers coming to shelter within the palace walls. Molin did not help her from the saddle or see to the stabling of her horse. True, he found himself gripped by an emotion uncomfortably close to sudden love, but not even that was enough to make him a fool. He would have said nothing if she had wheeled her horse around and headed back toward the Maze; he said the same when she followed him up the gatehouse stairs.

  He led the way to the Ilsig Bedchamber where, in consideration of all that hadn't happened during the night, he expected to find Jihan, the Stormchildren, Niko, and the bedlam residents. He found, instead, a funereally quiet chamber with only Seylalha hovering between the cradles.

  "The mere's guild?" Kama inquired, reading the same omens the priest did. "The mage's?"

  Molin shook his head. His mind reached out to that distant comer where his Nisi magic heritage, the gods, or his own luck sometimes placed reliable inspirations. "With the Beysa," he said slowly, then corrected himself: "Near the snakes."

  When the Beysib arrived in Sanctuary they had brought with them seventy of the mottled brown eggs of their precious beynit serpents. These eggs, packed in unspun silk, had been installed in a specially reconstructed room where a hypocaust kept the stones comfortably warm. The eggs had hatched before the start of winter and the room itself, filled with the fingerling snakes, had become the favorite haunt of the Beysa and her immediate entourage.

  It had also become, because of the skill of the Beysib snake-handlers in preparing decoctions of any venom or herbal, the meeting place of all the palace healers. Jihan brewed Niko's vile unguents there and occasionally, when the other residents of the Ilsig Bedchamber objected loudly enough, administered them there as well. Molin knew he had guessed correctly when he saw Beysib snake-handlers milling forlornly in the hypocaust antechamber.

  "You took your own time getting down here," Tempus grumbled as the priest entered the room. He might have added more, but he fell silent when Kama eased through the doorway as well.

  Molin took advantage of the lull to look around. Crit caught his eye first because he, like Tempus, was staring at Kama as if she'd grown a second head. Jihan was here as well, though her smile was warmer than Torchholder had seen before. She set down a mortar brimming with dark, spiky leaves and embraced Kama as a long-lost friend. Her movement allowed him to see the real reason they were all in the uncomfortably warm room: Nikodemos.

  The Stepson lay on his back, trussed like a roasting chicken and, though he seemed to be sleeping quietly enough now, his face was bruised and his hands covered with blood. Molin took a step closer and felt Tempus's hand close around his arm.

  "Leave him be," he warned.

  "What happened?" Torchholder asked, retreating until Tempus relaxed. "Randal said-"

  "You guessed right," Crit interrupted with a bitterness that made the priest's blood run cold. "She made her move through Niko at about the right time."

  "It was Haught," Tempus spat out the name. "Niko bolted for the window saying 'Haught'. It was a warning."

  Critias ran his hand through dark, thinning hair. "But not for us. Haught was making his own moves and Roxane had to stop him."

  "That's what Strat says," Jihan added.

  "It doesn't matter whether Strat's right or not." Crit had begun pacing like a caged tiger. "It doesn't matter whether Haught's Ischade's catspaw or Roxane's. It doesn't matter if Jihan-"

  "I didn't."

  "-Told Niko about the double-shuffle with the globes. All that matters is that the witch-bitch had Niko. Again."

  "What happened?" Molin repeated, though by this point he was getting a pretty good idea and was more interested in the shifting alliances of the threesome.

  "When Jihan tried to keep him from jumping out the window he went berserk. It took four guards to hold him until she could get something down his gullet to keep him quiet," Critias explained calmly.

  Molin moved closer to Niko, this time without Tempus's interference. The young man had taken a beating, but the priest wasn't looking for bruises.

  "What about the mongoose, Chiringee?" he asked, examining the bloody tears on Niko's hands and wrists. "Randal said it was attuned to Roxane."

  Jinan looked at Tempus, Tempus looked at the wall, and Crit's voice was a monotone: "It attacked him-and he killed it. Ripped it apart and started to eat it-didn't he?"

  The Froth Daughter reached back to grasp Tempus by the wrist. "He was berserk," she said softly. "He didn't know what he was doing. It doesn't mean anything." Glittering crystals of ice and water formed in her eyes.

  Critias gave them a malignant stare. When he reached the door he gave Kama the same stare, for reasons Molin could not begin to understand, then he shoved her aside. Molin felt the muscles tighten along his sword arm. It would be the height of folly-Kama fought her own battles and Critias was as cold a killer as moved through the shadows-but the Stepson would answer for that gesture.

  "Roxane has taken Stealth?" Kama asked the frozen room. None of the rumors circulating in the Maze had presumed so much.

  Tempus pulled his arm away from Jihan. "Not yet," he muttered as he followed Crit from the room.

  Molin and Kama turned to Jihan who, with a slight nod of her head, confirmed their worst suspicion. Kama sank back against the wall, shaking her head from side to side. The Froth Daughter, for her part, reclaimed her mortar and went to kneel beside the slate-haired Stepson.

  "He was drunk," the dark-haired mercenary said to herself. "Too much wine. Too much krrf. Too much everything." She closed her eyes, purging herself of grief and Niko with long, ragged breaths.

  "It's n
ot over yet," Molin told her, daring to take her arm and realizing, with some surprise, that he looked straight ahead, not down, into her eyes. "Last night I was with Stormbringer."

  Her eyes widened but she didn't resist as he guided her from the hypocaust and past anxious snake-handlers.

  "I have to talk to Tempus-convince him to do something he doesn't want to do. But it's far from over, Kama."

  She nodded and slipped from his grasp. "I'll want to see you again," she said, holding his hand lightly as she stepped away.

  "I have a wife. Sabellia's priestess and a noblewoman in her own right. She's staying out at Land's End with my brother, Lowan Vigeles, and she'll make whatever trouble she can." Molin swallowed hard, knowing that Rosanda had her good qualities as well but that they no longer meant anything to him. "I am the priest of a dead god and the nephew of a dead emperor. I walk a dangerous path in full view of my enemies-and I would not walk any other."

  Kama laughed, a sensuous laugh that could get a man in trouble. "If I cannot walk through your doorway wearing gowns and jewels then you'll find me as I am outside your windows or already in your bedchamber." Then, with another laugh, she was gone-heading back to Jihan and Niko.

  Molin returned to his quarters, ordering Hoxa to prepare a cauldron of hot water and to find, somewhere, dry robes and boots. The young man procured the bathwater and the boots, but when he came from the wardrobe with a fresh robe he brought an unwelcome surprise as well: a scarf of linen the length of a man's outstretched arms and the color of Storm-bringer's horizons.

  "Have the day for yourself, Hoxa," Molin had mumbled as he drew the cloth through his fingers. "I need time alone."

  He'd taken that time, sitting in a room that had been an arcane attic. Randal's Nisi globe remained not on his worktable; Lalo's triple portrait was not nailed to the wall behind him; Ischade's abandoned raven, in all its ill-tempered glory, was truly flapping from one perch to another, and now Stormbrin-ger's gift for Tempus had made its appearance as well. Unlike the other artifacts, the strip of cloth with its ordinary, girlish embroidery seemed innocent enough-until he considered that the sight of it was supposed to convince Tempus to risk sleep and a visit to the realm of Askelon.