Wagers of Sin

by Robert Asprin

  Goldie's eyes widened for just a moment, causing Marcus to bite his lips to hold back his protest—never mind a dire warning to take care. Then she actually laughed. "Leave TT-86? Are you mad?"

  "Are you chicken?"

  For an instant, Marcus thought she might actually strike him.

  "Done!" She spat out the word like a snake spitting venom. Then she whirled on poor Brian Hendrickson, a man who wouldn't have cheated a stray flea. He was watching the whole affair round-eyed. Goldie stabbed a long-nailed finger at him. "You. I want you to officiate. This is a for-goddamn-real bet. I win and we're rid of that two-bit little rat for good."

  Skeeter's cheeks darkened. But that was the only sign of emotion. He smiled. "I win and we're finally rid of the Duchess of Dross."

  Goldie whirled on him, lips open to snap back something scathing, but Brian Hendrickson stepped between them.

  "All right, we have a wager challenged and accepted." The librarian glanced from one to the other. "You two have no idea how much I would give to get out of this, not to get stuck in the middle, but with a wager this serious, somebody's got to keep you two as honest as possible."

  He sighed, then reluctantly admitted, "I guess I'm the man to do it, since I know as much about rare coins and gems as you do, Goldie. All right, every day each of you reports to me. I hold all winnings and track all losses. I judge whether a winning counts. Goldie, you are forbidden to use your expertise to scam tourists. You'll have to find some other way to cheat your way to victory."

  Brian's eyes revealed clearly how little pleasure he was taking in this, but he went doggedly on. "Money earned legally doesn't count. And one more thing. If either of you gets caught, you automatically lose. Understood?"

  Goldie sniffed autocratically. "Understood."

  Skeeter glared at her for a moment, naked desire for revenge burning in his eyes. Marcus remembered what Skeeter had said, that night he'd been so drunk he'd started confiding secrets Marcus had never dreamed existed. He'd known already that his friend carried with him a monstrous capacity for cold, calculating vengeance. That icy-cold desire now left Marcus terrified for Skeeter's safety. He wanted to shout, "You don't need to prove yourself!" but it was far too late, now. The money in his jeans pocket felt heavier than ever, nearly as heavy as his heart.

  His friend would spend the next few weeks doing exactly the kinds of things Marcus was trying to make him stop doing, or he would risk having to leave the station forever. Marcus didn't want to lose a friend, any more than the Downtimer Council would want to lose a "Lost One" located and identified by one of their members. Marcus prayed to any Roman or Gaulish gods and goddesses that might be listening that Skeeter would win this bet, not Goldie.

  She could afford to start over somewhere else.

  Skeeter Jackson couldn't.

  In that moment, Marcus felt a loathing of Goldie Morran he couldn't begin to put into words. He turned away, busying himself behind the bar, as Brian Hendrickson finished laying down the rules. He didn't notice when Goldie left. But when he glanced around the room and failed to find her, the relief that flooded through him left him weak-kneed. Conversation roared to a crescendo and he was so busy serving drinks, he didn't see Skeeter leaving either. He swallowed hard, sorry for the lost opportunity to speak with his friend, but he still had work to do.

  So, very quietly, Marcus served drinks, collected bar tabs, and stuffed tips into his jeans, all the while worrying about the fate of his one good friend in all the world—or time.

  Chapter Four

  Lupus Mortiferus had not survived a hundred combats in the Roman arena by giving up easily. He waited from the Kalends of the month until a single day remained before the Ides, either he or his slave following the strangers who had emerged from that wine shop on the Via Appia in the middle of the night. Lupus watched men, women, quarrelsome children, and puckish teens gawk at marble temples, enter brothels with erect-phallus signs poking out of the sides of dingy brick buildings, or file excitedly into the circus to watch the racing and the combats.

  For all that time, nearly half the lunar month, Lupus bided his time and whetted the edge on his gladius as sharp as he whetted his desire for revenge. He endured stoically the jokes and jibes that still continued. A few of the jokesters took their jests to the grave, blood and entrails spilling on the sands of the arena while the crowd roared like a thousand summer thunderstorms in his ears.

  And then, the waiting was done.

  They left in the middle of the night, as before, slaves showing the way with lanterns. Following them was ridiculously easy. Lupus ordered his slave home and slipped from one shadowed shopfront to another, booted feet soundless on the stone paving of the sidewalk. Several of the young men had clearly drunk too much; they reeled, clutching at slaves or at one another, and tried to keep up. As the group approached the wine shop on the Via Appia, Lupus quietly insinuated himself into the group, hanging near the back.

  A slave near the front called out something in a barbarous tongue. The group entered the wineshop by twos and threes. Lupus noted uneasily that the slaves assigned to guard the group were carefully taking count of those who passed into the shop's warehouse. Just when he feared discovery, one of the young men near him began to void the contents of his alcohol-saturated stomach. Lupus hid a grin. Perfect! Slaves converged on the boy, holding his head and trying to urge him forward. The sight and smell of the boy's vomit triggered a chain reaction amongst the drunken youths. Another boy spewed as he stumbled into the warehouse. Lupus took his arm solicitously, earning a smile of gratitude from a harried woman wearing a slave's collar.

  Elated, Lupus dragged the sick youngster into a corner and let him throw up the wine and sweetmeats he'd obviously gorged on during the day. Yet another boy in the group began to throw up. Women in stylish gowns moved away, holding their breath. Frowns of disgust wrinkled painted lips and manicured brows. A little girl said very distinctly, "Yuck." Lupus wasn't certain just exactly what the word meant, but the look on her face was clear enough. Even the older men were giving the sick boys a wide berth. Lupus was pressed into the corner with the sick youngsters, ignored by everyone except the boy who clung to his arm and groaned.

  Then the air began to groan.

  It wasn't an audible sound, but it was exactly like the painful buzzing in his skull the last time he'd been close to this warehouse. Lupus swallowed a few times and tried to find the source of the noise that wasn't exactly a noise. A hush fell over the crowd, punctuated messily by the sounds of wretchedly ill boys and a few murmured words of encouragement from their slaves. Lupus glanced at a blank stretch of wall, wondering yet again why everyone had crowded into this particular warehouse—

  The wall began to shimmer. Colors scintillated wildly through the entire rainbow. Lupus gasped aloud, then controlled his involuntary reaction. A quick glance showed him that no one had noticed the sweat that had started on his brow. That was a relief, but it still took all his courage to continue looking at the pulsing spot on the wall. Captivated by the sight, he couldn't look away, not even when a dark hole appeared in the scintillating, circular rainbows, his hindbrain whispering to run! The hole widened rapidly until it had swallowed half the warehouse wall. Lupus fought back once more the instinct to run, then swallowed instead and whispered softly, "Great war-god Mars, lend me a bit of your confidence, please."

  People started stepping into it.

  They flew away so fast, it was as though they'd been catapulted by a great war machine. Someone took the other arm of the boy Lupus was "helping" and pulled him toward the gaping hole in the wall. Lupus wanted to stand rock-still, terrified of that black maw that swallowed people whole down its gullet. Then, thinking of vengeance and his carefully sharpened gladius, he drew a deep breath for courage and moved forward in the midst of the half-dozen boys who were manfully struggling to overcome their illness. Lupus hesitated on the brink, sweating and terrified—

  Then squeezed shut both eyes and stepped forward.<
br />
  He was falling . . .

  Mithras! Mars! Save me—

  He went to his knees against something rough and metallic. Lupus opened his eyes and found himself kneeling on a metal gridwork. The boy who had gone through with him was vomiting again. Men hauling baggage stumbled past them, struggling to get around. Lupus hauled the kid to his feet and dragged him in the direction the others had taken, down a broad, gridwork ramp. Chaos reigned at the bottom, where several other of the boys were still holding up the line, vomiting piteously all over a young woman in the most outlandish clothing Lupus had ever seen. Everyone in line was trying to slide some sort of flat, stiff vellum chip into a boxlike device, but the boys were making a mess of the entire procedure. The young woman said something that sounded exasperated and disgusted and glanced the other way—

  Lupus, who had no flat, stiff vellum chip to insert into the device, slipped quietly past and fled for the nearest concealment: a curtain of hanging vines and flowering shrubs that screened a private portico. Panting slightly and cursing the fear-borne adrenalin that poured through his veins the way it did just before a fight, Lupus Mortiferus took his first look at the place where the thief who'd stolen his money had taken refuge.

  He swallowed once, very hard.

  Where am I? Olympus?

  He couldn't quite accept that explanation, despite the terrifying magic of a hole through a wall that sometimes existed and sometimes didn't. Atlantis, perhaps? No, that had been destroyed when the gods were young. If it had ever existed at all. Where, then? Rome was civilization in this world, although traders spoke of the wonders of the far, far east, from whence expensive silk came.

  Lupus didn't know the name of the cities where silk was spun into cloth, but he didn't think this was one of them. It wasn't a proper "city" at all. There was no open sky, no ground, no distant horizon or wind to rustle through treetops and evaporate sweat from his skin. The place was more like an enormous . . . room. One large enough to hold the towering Egyptian obelisk on the spine of the Circus Maximus—with room to spare between its golden tip and the distant ceiling. The room was large enough that he could have laid out a half-length chariot-race course down its length, had there not been shops, ornamental fountains and ponds, decorative seats, and odd pillars with glowing spheres at the top scattered throughout its length, along with a riot of colorful Saturnalia and other, unfathomable, decorations from floor to ceiling. The delighted shrieking of young children brought home just how lost he was: a mere child of five clearly knew more about this place than he did.

  Staircases of metal everywhere climbed up to nothing, or to platforms which served no sane purpose Lupus could divine. Signs he could not read scattered strange letters colorfully across the walls. A few areas were fenced off, leaving them inaccessible despite the seeming innocuous blankness of the walls behind them. The image of the wine shop's wall opening up into a hole through nothingness was so powerfully and recently embedded in his soul, Lupus shuddered, wondering what lay behind those innocent-seeming stretches of wall. People dressed as Romans mingled with others in costumes so barbaric and foreign, Lupus could only stare.

  Where am I?

  And where, in all this confusion of shops, staircases, and people, was the thief he sought? For one terrible moment, he shut his eyes and fought the urge to charge straight up the ramp and back through the hole in the wall. He managed to bring shuddering breaths under control only with difficulty, but he did control himself. He was the Death Wolf of the Circus Maximus, after all, not a milk-fed brat to fear the first strangeness life hurled his way. Lupus forced his eyes open again.

  The hole in the wall had closed.

  He was trapped here, for evil or good.

  For just a second, terror overrode all other concerns. Then, slowly, Lupus gripped the pommel of his gladius. The gods he worshipped had answered his hourly prayers in their own mysterious fashion. He was trapped, yes.

  But so was the thief.

  All Lupus had to do was find a way to pass himself off as a member of this sunless, closed-in world long enough to track the man down, then he would wait for the next inexplicable opening of the wall and fight his way back home, if necessary.

  The corners of his lips twisted into a mirthless smile.

  The thief would rue the hour he had cheated Lupus Mortiferus, the champion Death Wolf of Rome. That decision holding hard-fought fear at bay, Lupus clutched the pommel of his sword and set out on his hunt.

  Wherever populations of illegal refugees spring up without legal status inside an existing, "native" population, certain networks are formed almost as automatically as baby whales swim straight for the surface to gulp that first, essential breath of air. Almost by unconscious accord, mutual aid systems will emerge to help illegal aliens survive, perhaps in time even thrive, in a world they do not understand, much less control.

  In the time terminals that had grown around those areas where gates formed in close-enough profusion to warrant building a station, this unwritten rule held as true as it did in the squalid streets of L.A. or New York, in the streets of every major coastal city, in fact, where refugees of The Flood which had followed The Accident, crowded together for safety, almost without hope of finding any, each and every pitiful one of them without papers to prove their identity or country of origin. Those uptime refugees struggled to survive under even worse conditions, sometimes, than refugees trapped forever on the time terminals. It didn't bear mentioning the living conditions of the tidal waves of refugees fleeing endless, senseless wars raging throughout the Middle East and the Balkans. Whole armies of them fled illegally across national borders, fleeing genocide at the hands of enemies, many of them dying in the attempt.

  Men and women, children and strays, those who wandered into the terminals through open gates and found themselves trapped without uptime legal rights, without social standing, protected by the thinnest of "station policies"—because the uptime governments couldn't decide what to do about them—set up social systems of their own in courageous attempts to cope. A few went hopelessly mad and wandered back through open gates, usually unstable ones, never to be seen again. But most, desperate to survive, banded together in sometimes loosely, sometimes tightly knit confederations. Often speaking only the common language of gestures, they shared news and resources as best they could, sometimes even going so far as to hide from official notice any newcomers who might be exploited or injured by regulations and officialdom's sometimes harsh notice.

  On TT-86, management under Bull Morgan made such extreme efforts necessary only rarely, but all downtimers shared a common bond few uptimers could really understand. It was the experience of being lost together. Like the Christian sects of Rome which had once met in the catacombs beneath the city or the cells of Colonial American patriots hiding out from British armies and meeting in any root cellar or thicket they could find, La-La Land's downtimer Council met underground. Literally underground, beneath the station proper, in the bowels of the terminal where machinery (which filled the air with chaos and noise) kept the lights running, the sewage flowing, and the heated or chilled air pumping; down where massive steel-and-concrete support beams plunged into native, Himalayan rock, the refugees created their culture of survival.

  Amidst the noise and whine of machines they barely understood, they met in the cramped caverns of La-La Land's physical plant to bolster one another's courage, pass along news of critical importance to their standing, and share fear, grief, loss, and triumph with one another. A few had taken it upon themselves to hold special classes in uptime languages, while those most able to understand the world in which they were trapped did their best to explain it to those least able.

  Uptimers knew about it, but most didn't pay much attention to the "underground society's" activities. On TT-86, management cared enough to provide an official psychologist on the payroll, whose sole duty was to help them adjust, but "Buddy" didn't really understand what it meant—emotionally, in the depth of one's belly—to b
e torn away from one's home time and become trapped in a place like the bustling time terminal that La-La Land had become over the years.

  So downtimers turned to their own unofficial leaders in times of need or crisis. One of those unofficial leaders was Ianira Cassondra. Sitting waiting for Marcus to return to home to her, she spent a quiet moment bemused with the thought that her own history was, in many ways, more unlikely than the odd world in which she now led others through an unlikely existence. Ianira, born in Ephesus, the holy city of the Great Artemis Herself, had learned the secrets of rituals no man would ever understand from priestesses who followed the old, old ways. Ianira, secluded from the world as only a priestess of Artemis could be, was then, at sixteen, ripped from that world and sold into virtual slavery through the marriage bed—tearing her away from beloved Ephesus to the high citadel of Athens, across the Aegean Sea. Ianira, abandoned by her kinsmen, was left in the shadow of the dusty Agora where Athenian men met under blazing clear light to stroll amidst vendors of figs, olive oil, and straw baskets while they discussed and invented political systems that would change the world for the next twenty-six hundred years. Secluded from all that she knew, Ianira had tried to learn the mysteries of the patron goddess of her new home, only to be kept a virtual prisoner in her new husband's gyneceum.

  Ianira the "Enchantress," who had once danced beneath the moon in Artemis' sacred glade, bow in hand, hair loose and wild, had prayed to her mother's ancient Goddesses to deliver her—and, finally, They had heard. One night, Ianira had fled the gyneceum and its imprisoning "respectability," driven by grief and terror into the night-dark streets of Athens.

  Half bent on seeking asylum in Athene's great temple at the crowning height of the city—and half intent on throwing herself from the Acropolis rather than endure another night in her husband's home—Ianira had run on bare feet, lungs sobbing for air, her body weak and shaking still from the birthing chair in which she had so recently been confined.