The oath was binding, under any circumstances.
Watching the fiery tornado, like nothing he'd ever seen but the waterspouts of wizard weather or the cyclone that had fought in the last battle on Wizardwall, he was trying to determine whether it had a pattern to its burning and its wriggling, whether the lightning spewing from the cloud above was dependable as to target or random, and in general just how the hell he was going to get in there.
Because Strat was in there. Everything pointed to it; Randal was sure of it; no ransom demands had come forth from the PFLS. His orders were to fetch Strat and Kama.
Kama could wait until all the hells froze over and Sanctuary sank into the sea, for all he cared. He'd had an affair with Tempus's daughter, true: he was willing to pay for his indiscretion, not complaining. But Strat was his partner Strat came first.
If they'd had arguments, then that was normal-they'd have them again... over women especially. It went with pairbond, and he'd beat Strat silly if he had to, to win his point. As soon as he had the porking bastard back where he could pull rank, they'd settle things.
But you couldn't settle anything with a dead man, unless he became undead like the freakish bay horse who was partially present, trotting around the Peres house on ghostly hooves, its coat looking as if it reflected the flaming whirlwind around which it circled-or was a part of it. The horse was insubstantial, sort of. But if he could catch it, maybe he could ride it up the back stairs.
Strat had ridden it. And the horse and Crit were both here for the same reason: Strat.
He decided to follow the horse on its rounds and forsook the cover of jumbled stone, remnants of the Peres's garden wall, behind which he'd been crouching.
The heat waves emanating from that spinning horror of flame struck him with awesome force; he could feel his eyelashes singe and his lips start to blister. Head down, following echoing hoofbeats as much as the flickering glimpses he could get of this "horse," he edged along in its wake.
If the house would just bum down, like any normal fire did once a fire had consumed its fuel, things would be so simple: he could begin mourning.
He'd thought of just considering the whole unsightly and unnatural mess as a funeral pyre, calling for reinforcements, and making the Peres estate Strat's bier. They'd say the rites, play some funeral games, he'd put everything he owned up as prize or sacrifice.
But he couldn't do that, not until he knew for certain that Strat really was dead, and wholly dead: not likely to be resurrected by Ischade.
For that was what he feared the most: that the necromant wouldn't be content to let Ace stay dead, that she'd pine for her lover and eventually call him up from ashes, make him an undead like poor Janni, who was somewhere in the cone of the fire-Crit couldn't imagine how or why, but he could see, if he squinted, the dead Stepson, fully formed and unconsumed, doing something that looked like bathing under a waterfall, but doing it in a heat that would melt bone in seconds.
Crit had learned, fighting magic and sometimes fighting it with magic, not to ask questions if he didn't want to hear the answers. So he left the matter of Janni to those who ought to tend it: to Ischade, who'd raised his shade after a proper Sacred Band funeral; to Abarsis, who'd come down from heaven and escorted Janni's spirit on high, and done it where the whole Band could see it. If there was an argument about propriety here, it was between the necromant and the ghost of the Slaughter Priest: it wasn't a matter for a decidedly unmagical fighter like himself. If Janni hadn't once been Niko's partner and a Sacred Bander, it wouldn't have been the business of any Stepson what Ischade had done. As things stood, all you could do, if you were so inclined, was pray for Janni's soul.
But "it bothered Crit intensely because the same thing could happen to Strat Ischade could make it happen.
He wondered idly, trailing the ghost-horse on its rounds about the Peres estate, how you went about killing a necromant. If Strat didn't come through this intact, he was going to find out. Maybe Randal would know-if Randal ever again was capable of doing more than swallowing when you put a spoon of gruel in his mouth.
There had been a few minutes, he'd been told, when it seemed that Randal and Niko had come through their battle with Roxane and the demon in good shape.
But physical flesh-even mageflesh and Bandaran adept's flesh-could take only so much. The two were alive; they'd live; whether they'd ever be as hale or as smart as they once were, only time would tell.
Rounding a burned-out wall, the heat lessened perceptibly and Crit could stop squinting and raise his head.
The ghost-horse was still right in front of him. In fact, when Crit stopped, it stopped.
When he took a linen rag and wetted it from the waterskin dangling from his belt, the specter craned its neck to look back at him, ears pricked, as if to ask what he was doing.
What he was doing was anybody's guess, but he didn't try to tell the ghost-horse that. The bay was still bay: it had a black mane and tail (although when the hot wind ruffled them they streamed out like charred cinders, not horsehair); it had a red-gold haircoat (now flame red and flickery as the patterns from the fire chased each other along its flanks); it had black stockings (which resembled burnt timbers). But it was more substantial than it had been around front, where the fire was brighter.
Then it pawed the ground and whickered, still fixing him with a fire-light centered gaze from liquid horse eyes.
The come-hither look and the forefoot pawing the ground were unmistakable to any horseman: the bay wanted Crit to hurry up, climb aboard: it wanted to go for a ride.
"Oh no, horse," he said out loud to it. "I came by myself- no reinforcements, no backup. I did that because nobody else ought to risk his life-or sacrifice it, if that's what's going to happen here... because this is a matter between pairbonded partners."
The horse snorted disapprovingly, as if to remind Crit that it knew he was trying to cover his own fear. Then it slowly turned around, so that its rump was no longer facing him, and ambled toward him.
The big, liquid, obling-centered eyes said: Strut is mine, too; horses and men are partners; mount up and let's stop playing games. He's waiting.
"Strat, damn you to hell," Crit whispered, shaking his head to clear it of horse-thoughts and horse-needs and horse-loyalties. This wasn't even a living horse, just a ghost, something Ischade had conjured from a dead animal.
But the thing kept coming, head high, feet carefully placed to avoid stepping on its dangling bridle reins.
Bridle reins? Had they been there before? He didn't think so.
The horse, now an arm's-length away, stopped still. It whickered softly and the whicker said, / love him too. The forefoot, pawing the ground impatiently, added. We don't have much time. And then the horse, in the manner of high-school horses like Tempus's Tros, bent one foreleg at the knee, curling it and lowering his forequarters, the other front leg outstretched, while it arched its neck in a bow meant to enable a wounded man or a high-bom lady to mount up without difficulty.
"Crap, all right," Crit said through clenched teeth and strode resolutely toward the bowing ghost-horse, trying hard not to think too much about what he was doing, or whether he might be imagining the whole thing-maybe a piece of timber had fallen on him, a piece of masonry collapsed so fast he hadn't had time to realize it, and he was dead too, dead but denied a peaceful rest, trapped in some netherworld with the ghost-horse, on which he'd wander forever, seeking his lost rightside partner.
But no: The sky was full of lightning, there were shouts and mutters on the breeze from somewhere near by where factions fought. There was a plague in Sanctuary, all right, but not some spurious one that turned your lips blue and made your armpits sore: it was a plague of human failing, of confusion, of greed and desire and endless power plays.
It wasn't, he admitted as he mounted the bay (which felt surprisingly substantial, for a ghost-horse), the magic or the gods which made Sanctuary such a foul pit, but human excess; magic was no more to blame than swor
d or spear or rock. There were enough rocks on the earth to eradicate the race; magic couldn't do a better job, only a more colorful one. But rock or spear or wand or Nisi globe didn't murder on their own, nor enslave-the weapon must be wielded; the true culprit was human greed and human will. And the killing never stopped- in the name of magic or the name of god or the name of honor or nationalism or progress or liberation, it was just killing.
And because it had always been so, and would always be so, Critias had come to the profession of arms himself: the only protection he could see was to be a perpetrator, not a victim.
That was why Strat had made him so angry when he'd become entangled with Ischade: Strat had become a victim, and Crit had a horror of helplessness. Even if Strat were just a lovesick fool, Crit still thought he'd been right when he had shot past his friend that night on the balcony-if it had served to bring Straton to his senses, then Crit wouldn't be here, pulling himself up into the sometimes-saddle of Strat's sort-of-corporeal bay, riding into he-didn't-know what for abstracts of honor and duty that weren't going to keep him alive if the steaming stable toward which the bay was ineluctably heading crashed down upon his head.
The stables weren't exactly ablaze, but they had corn magazines and straw and hay in them and sparks smoldered on the roof.
Crit reached forward to catch up the bay's reins, but the beast had had a mouth like iron in life and it was no better in afterlife.
He sawed on the reins to no avail, then quit trying in time to duck as the horse trotted determinedly through the open stable doors and headed for wide stairs which must lead to the stable's loft.
Crit shifted his weight, thinking to throw one leg over the saddle and check out the stable loft on foot, when the horse started climbing.
"Vashanka's balls," the task force leader swore, flattening himself to the horse's neck as it climbed a flight never meant for anything of its size and boards creaked and groaned. "Horse, you'd better be right."
It was: at the stair's head was a landing, and as the bay's bulk appeared there, a woman stifled a scream.
It was hard to accustom his eyes to the dark; the climb up the stairs had been too fast-everything was still milky green to Crit's fire-dazzled vision.
But Crit heard voices and slipped from the bay's back, his sword in hand.
Together, man and ghost-horse ventured into the dimness; horse's head snaked low, man's sword paralleling its questing muzzle.
"Dear gods, what's that smell?" Crit muttered to himself.
And someone answered: "Strat. Or me, Critias. Which smell do you mean?"
And the voice of Stilcho was familiar to Critias, who had once thought him the best of his kind of Stepson. Blinking, Crit strained to see the ruined visage of the undead soldier. Stilcho was one of Ischade's minions. He should have known the witch would still have her talons in Strat, one way or the other.
He was going to swing his sword up, cut the one-eyed, ghoulish head from Stilcho's torso and hope decapitation would provide the poor soul what rest Ischade had denied-not be cause he expected his poor quotidian blade to do the job against magic, but because he was a soldier and he could only do what he was trained to do, when his vision cleared enough to see that Stilcho's face was neither so ruined nor so hostile as it ought to be.
And a hand touched his right shoulder, squeezed, and rested there-Stilcho's hand, warm and with the pulse of mortal blood in it so strong Crit fancied he could feel it coursing.
"That's right," said Stilcho softly through a mouth hardly scarred, "I'm alive again. Don't ask-"
Crit's question, "How?" hung in the air until Stilcho volunteered, "It's just too complicated. Stepson. Ask about Strat, that's what you're here for... or at least that's what he's here for." Stilcho jerked a thumb toward the bay horse, head low, snuffling, taking slow, careful steps toward a shadow that might be a prostrate man with a woman crouched by his side.
"That's right, Stilcho-Strat. That's all I want. Not you or your witch woman." It was Ischade there, hulking over Strat- it must be. Ischade's ghost-man and ghost-horse, and the nec-romant herself, ringing Strat round with magic.
Crit considered seriously for the first time the possibility that he was going to die here. He didn't believe for a moment that Stilcho was "alive" in the way that Crit-or Strat, please gods-was alive.
He said to Stilcho, "That's him, then? He's alive, if he can't control his bowels. I'll just take him and be-"
A voice from the shadowed loft said, "Shit, Stilcho, he'll kill me," as a hand which was also Strat's reached up feebly to stroke the ghost-horse's questing muzzle and the horse started to bow down again, not realizing that Strat was too badly wounded to mount, no matter how easy the ghost-horse tried to make it.
Crit found that he was blinking back tears. Unreasonably, he wanted to sit down crosslegged where he was, let things take their course-even if it meant burning to death in this damned loft with a partner too sick to be moved but well enough to remember that Crit had shot at him.
Crit said, "I wouldn't-couldn't. I busted my butt getting here, Strat," but it came out hoarse and low and he said it to the straw scattered on the loft's floor at his feet.
The woman was trying to help Straton, who didn't realize he couldn't get on that horse by himself.
Crit sheathed his sword and put his hands in the air, then walked over to the place where the ghost-horse nuzzled its master encouragingly.
Strat, half-prone, was staring at him. The big fighter's hand was clutched to his chest or belly-Crit couldn't tell from all the blood in the way.
"Strat... Ace, for pity's sake, let me help you," Crit said, bending down on one knee, empty hands outstretched.
The ghost-horse neighed impatiently and butted Straton's shoulder. Behind the pair, the woman stood-the woman named Moria from the Peres estate, but dressed in street rags so that he hardly recognized her.
Stilcho said, "Strat, maybe you'd better... it's not going to be safe here much longer. They can take care of you better than we-"
"Stilcho," Moria hissed, "come away. It's for them to talk out."
"Talk?" Strat laughed and the laugh choked him, so that he gurgled and wiped his mouth with a hand that came away bloody. "We just did."
The wounded fighter reached with his bloody hand to take one of Crit's. "Well, Crit, you going to watch, or you going to give me some help?"
"Strat..." Crit embraced his partner, oblivious of might-be enemies about him, searching for harm, testing strength, mouthing harsh words that covered too much emotion; "You stupid bastard, when I get you fixed up I'm going to beat some sense into you."
And Strat said, "You do that," just about the time the bay horse trumpeted joyously as he felt Strat's weight on his back and Crit began the arduous process of leading the mounted, wounded man out of the stable's attic to safety at least of the sort a Sacred Band partner could provide.
Fire raged inside Ischade, now that she had quenched it in her clothing and her hair. It might have been her wrath that caused the houses across the alleys on either side of her to flame up as she passed-uptown alleys she'd traveled before and now again on her way to Tasfalen's velvet stronghold.
An ache and a fury was in Ischade and perhaps it spread around her. But perhaps it was just the pillar of flame and the young fires it set, so that better uptown streets (where Sanctuary's troubles never spread and rebels never sped) were a smoking labyrinth like some upscale version of the Maze.
Rebels skulked here now, and peasants, looting: Wrigglies, arms laden with pilfered, sooty treasure, jostled her, saw whom they bumped, and slunk away.
She saw rape and nearly stopped to feed-these mortal murderers wasted the best part of their victims, let the manna go, let the essence, precious soul and energy, escape. Ischade was weakened by the struggle in Peres's, somewhat. Somewhat. But not too much.
She moved on, through a day mercifully veiled in clouds and soot and a storm now rising off the sea. She wondered, as the sky blackened with thunderh
eads boiling up, if the storm was natural or summoned-then thought it didn't matter: it was convenient, either way.
She saw an enclosed Beysib wagon, overturned by brigands. Bald heads of Beysib males littered the environs like playballs from some devil's game, their accustomed torsos near but not attached. She saw what fate was dealt a pair of Beysib women. and wondered what the rebels thought to gain. If they kept their war to downtown, they might win it. Up here, they asked for retribution that would last for generations.
Amid pathetic cries, she stopped awhile, and closed her eyes-trusting to a cloaking spell to hide her. When she moved on, she was emboldened, strengthened, but sick at heart: for her to be reduced to scavenging was demeaning. But war did what it willed.
Thunder wracked the streets and she looked upward, grateful for the lowering, stormy dark but wary: she'd finish what she started, unless the stormgods intervened. She owed Tempus something. And she owed Haught a different thing.
She had her word to make good. She had her interests to secure. She had work to do before retiring to the White Foal's edge.
It was not painless for Ischade, this sneaking to Tasfalen's in the daylight. Janni, one others, was still trapped in the cone of flame, where Stormbringer and demons argued, where Rox-ane had been and now was not.
What would Tempus, who wanted the souls of his soldiers freed of strings and tortures, make of Janni's plight? Hardly an honorable rest, in his terms. But a piece of bravery, in hers, the like of which she'd never seen.
All for Niko, or for something more abstract? she wondered as she found Tasfalen's gate and then his steps and her thoughts turned to Haught and Roxane and what lay ahead, as she dealt with locks of natural and other kinds, and doors likewise doubled, and, as the last portal opened to her will, a raindrop struck her cheek, and then another, and thunder rolled.
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