Wagers of Sin

by Robert Asprin

  Now!

  Skeeter tossed an entire handful of glittering, gold coins into the center of the street. Begging children scrambled for them, creating a mass of limbs that was impassable. The slaves bearing the litter were caught dead in the center of the miniature storm. The litter swayed dangerously. One slave lost his footing and the litter crashed to the street, accompanied by a high, feminine scream.

  "Move!" Skeeter snarled. He dodged around the confusion, Marcus at his heels, and dove into the Time Tours wine shop. He cold-cocked the guard at the sound-proofed door, then yanked it open and ran inside, a juggernaut that no one in the room could stop. He was aware of Marcus at his heels. New arrivals were already pushing their way into the shop, creating confusion, but Skeeter plowed right through them, as well. Cries of protest rose behind him, some of them from Time Tours guides, then he glanced around, making sure of Marcus, grabbed him by the arm just to be sure, and dove headfirst through the gate. The sensation of falling was genuine: the moment his body hurtled through the portal, he fell flat on the steel grid and rolled violently into the solid railing with leftover momentum.

  Marcus slammed into him in much the same manner.

  Sirens were already sounding. Skeeter didn't care.

  "We did it!"

  Then he gulped. He'd have an awful fine to pay, crashing the monumentally expensive Porta Romae twice, plus Marcus' fine, which Skeeter had already decided was his own responsibility to pay for having let him down so badly earlier.

  "C'mon," Skeeter said more quietly. "Might as well go down and confess to Mike Benson and take our punishment, 'fore they come and slap us in handcuffs."

  Marcus' eyes showed fear for just a moment—fear, Skeeter realized, that was focused on him, not for his own sake—then he nodded and pushed himself painfully up while Skeeter grabbed for the railing and hauled himself to his own feet. In the crowd below, Mike Benson stood out like an angry beacon. Security men were converging on all the ramps. Skeeter sighed, then started down the one closest to Benson. Marcus followed silently.

  The return of Marcus and Skeeter was a nine-day wonder, even for TT-86, which always had something exotically strange to gossip about. But their return, together—that was something unheard of in the station's annals. An uptimer crashing a gate, remaining missing for a whole month, then crashing the gate again, with the missing downtimer? It was a thing to twist and turn and talk and argue over endlessly, late into the station's night and on into the early morning hours, the passage of time hardly noticed under the eternal glow of the Commons' lights. Everyone wondered—and laid bets on—how long Marcus and Skeeter would be quarantined in one of Mike Benson's unpleasant cells.

  Many another wager was laid on how soon Benson would kick Skeeter's backside through Primary into the waiting arms of prison guards.

  The 'eighty-sixers waited, laid their bets, and talked the subject to death with one theory after another to explain the inexplicable why.

  And just outside Benson's office door, a gathering of silent downtimers, including Ianira Cassondra and her beautiful little daughters, sat blocking the door, waiting for news or sitting in protest, nobody was quite certain. Many an 'eighty-sixer had been shocked that the downtimers, previously regarded as nonentities, had managed to organize themselves enough to hold a silent but well-orchestrated "sit-in" vigil that Gandhi himself would've been proud to claim.

  More than a few bets were wagered on that, alone.

  Inside Benson's interrogation room, an exhausted, pain-riddled Skeeter Jackson went through the whole story again, aching from the cut in his side, bruises sustained in the arena and their flight from the Circus, even from rough scrapes and tiny, stinging nicks along his scalp. Bronze razors were not particularly kind to the skin. Skeeter was so tired, he wasn't even certain how many times Benson had forced him to repeat his story. A bunch, anyway. Hours and hours of it. His body cried out for sleep: healing, heavenly sleep. How long he'd been here, he didn't know, but Skeeter's bleary vision spotted the strain in Benson's bloodshot eyes, on his sagging cheek muscles. He, too, was clearly fighting sleep.

  Marcus, defiant to the last, had submitted under protest to the drugged-interrogation method Benson felt necessary to get at the truth. Skeeter, as an uptimer, was safe from such tactics, but Marcus had no such protection, no rights to keep the needles out of his arms. He, too, repeated his story again and again, including his re-enslavement, his discovery of Skeeter amongst the caged men and beasts he was inventorying, then the rest of it, which matched Skeeter's so closely, that despite the grueling hours of interrogation, Skeeter knew Benson had found not a single discrepancy. When his final, drug-induced, mumbled story ended, Marcus collapsed, boneless and silent, across the table, perhaps into a coma or a foetal withdrawal to escape this unexpected torture instead of the joyful celebration of homecoming they'd both longed for.

  Skeeter managed through a slurred, furred tongue, to get out the question, "What now? Hot boiling goddamned oil?" He would cheerfully have killed Benson if he'd been able to move. But he knew if he tried to stand up, he'd crash to the floor.

  "Lookit him." Skeeter more or less nodded toward Marcus, who still lay collapsed across the interrogation table, oblivious to everything—including Skeeter's continued suffering.

  "Gonna kill us both, Benson, to get your goddamned truth out of us? You'd like killing me, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you, Benson?"

  An odd flicker ran through Mike Benson's exhausted eyes.

  "Before this," he, too, gestured awkwardly toward Marcus' inert figure, "I . . . I just dunno. You're a thieving rat. Put a lot of rats like you in jail, while I still wore a City badge. Nothin' but scum of the earth, those bastards." He sat and looked unblinkingly at Skeeter. "But this . . ." He gestured toward Marcus. "This changes the whole thing, doesn't it?"

  "Does it?" Skeeter asked, exhaustion causing his voice to quiver. "Aren't I still just a thieving rat, Benson? Can't have it both goddamned ways. Either I'm a worthless scoundrel or I finally managed to do something decent—something you're ripping to fucking shreds."

  Mike Benson scrubbed his face and eyes with both hands. "Not thinkin' straight," he muttered, to which Skeeter added a silent, snarled Amen, you stinking pig. Benson said through his hands, "Yeah. It does make a difference, Jackson. To me, anyway. Can't figure why you did it, what was in it for you, but your story's consistent and airtight with his." He nodded toward Marcus.

  Benson sat back in his chair, letting both hands fall to his lap. "All right, Skeeter. You can go now. Your pal, too. I'll, uh, speak to Time Tours about the fines for crashing the gate, seeing as how it really was a mission of mercy."

  Skeeter just looked at him. Benson's face flushed. He refused to meet Skeeter's eyes. "Can't promise anything, you realize; it's their gate and Granville Baxter . . . well, Bax is under tremendous pressure during the holiday season and Time Tours has laid down some new rules he's going to have to enforce, despite the fact they're just not enforceable." He sighed, evidently gathering from Skeeter's closed, set expression that Skeeter didn't give a damn what Bax's management problems were.

  "Anyway, Skeeter, I can be pretty persuasive. And so can Bull—and I expect he will be very persuasive when I make my report." Again, Skeeter simply blinked and looked at him. Does he honestly think this bullshit makes up for the last God-knows-how-many hours?

  "Huh," was all he could find to say. Short, derisive, and abrasive.

  Benson had the good grace to flush. He looked away and muttered, "Need help getting home?"

  Skeeter desperately wanted to grab Benson's shirt collar and shout, "No, you stinking bully!" Pride alone demanded it. But his strength was shot and he knew it. And there was poor Marcus to consider. "Yeah," he finally muttered. "Yeah, I could use some help." He continued without a hint of a smile anywhere in him. "Don't think I could walk across this room on my own, thanks to your hospitality."

  Benson flushed again, darker this time. He dropped his eyes to his own hands, knotted on h
is side of the tabletop.

  "Marcus is gonna need help, too." Skeeter jerked a thumb at his friend then dropped his arm abruptly, shaking all over. "I could cheerfully murder you, Benson, over what you did to him. He sure as hell didn't deserve needles and drugs and hours of questioning."

  Benson was staring at him oddly, as though he wasn't quite sure what he was seeing, then he finally nodded. "All right, Jackson. Some of my men will drive you. If," he added dully, "we can get a hummer in through that bunch of protesters out there."

  Skeeter drew a blank. "Protesters?"

  Benson said slowly, "Downtimers, all of 'em, organized in a sit-in protest. They're blocking the goddamned door twelve deep."

  Skeeter didn't know what to think until Benson added, "His, uh, wife and kids are out there, center stage. If looks could kill, I'd be a stone statue right now."

  A hollow emptiness in Skeeter's belly froze his breath into ice. A welcome home for Marcus. But not for me. Never for the stinkin' rat of a thief. He tried to shrug it off, knowing what they must think of him after betraying their faith, as it were, by causing Marcus to step through that portal with Chuck Farley. Skeeter wondered absently, thoughts drifting, what had become of that rat. Prob'ly never know.

  Mike Benson prodded the still-unconscious Marcus' shoulder with astonishing gentleness, considering what he'd just put the young bartender through. Slowly, Marcus swam toward the surface, moving small bits of himself one at a time. He finally opened his eyes. The sight of Benson stooping over him brought a terrible flinch, both in body and eyes.

  "It's all right, Marcus," Benson said quietly—and in pretty damned good Latin. "I believe your story. Both your stories. You can go home, now. I have a hummer and driver on the way to take you there. But I'd better warn you, just so the shock won't kill you, there's a bunch of downtimers outside, blocking the door, waiting for news, I guess, and what else, I can't guess. Your family's in the crowd, right near the door.

  Marcus sat up straighter. "Ianira?" he choked out. "My daughters?"

  Benson nodded. Marcus surged to his feet, swayed badly, shrugged off Benson's hand, which the Chief Security Officer had held out in an offering to help, then finally steadied. "I will go to my family, now. Thank you for my freedom," he said, irony heavy in his voice. Skeeter and Benson both knew who was genuinely responsible for that.

  He made it to the door, then vanished into the corridor, back stiff, knees a bit unsteady.

  Well, hell. If he can, I can. A straight back was agony to maintain, a fact he hid from Benson with a light, "Thanks for my freedom, too." Benson looked uncomfortable. Then it was over and he finally managed to stand completely straight. The pain in his body was bearable. Maybe. Benson said nothing as Skeeter limped his way out, teary-eyed from a stab of knife-hot, pinched nerves down his sciatic channel. The pain stabbed all the way to his left foot. But he made it to the door, too, moving woodenly. By the time he gained the outer door, he was gasping, gulping for breath. His vision kept going dark, fading back in again to show him the way out, then straying dizzily back into darkness.

  When he opened the door, he glimpsed Ianira and Marcus clutched together, their daughters holding tight to Marcus' unsteady legs. Neither of them even noticed him. Skeeter felt abruptly empty, defeated. All he had left were a few of the coins he'd scraped from the arena sands. Benson hadn't searched either of them, it being clear through the semitransparent Egyptian linen that neither of them carried anything. So it wasn't really Benson's fault, because he didn't know about Skeeter's injuries, but when he stumbled in a drugged haze against one of the downtimers fading back into whatever they called home or job, the jostle was too much. Overbalanced, Skeeter tried to compensate, but exhausted, bruised, fire stinging along his ribcage, and a pain like torn muscles down his side from that pole vault, rendered him abruptly helpless. Not a single, abused muscle in his back and legs obeyed his commands.

  He went down hard. As complete darkness settled over him, he realized the downtimers would simply leave him here, after what he'd done to Marcus, involving him in that gods-cursed scam of Farley's. Promising himself to hunt down Farley and kill him, Skeeter's face connected with a cold, rock-hard cement floor. The settling darkness became complete in that instant and he knew nothing more.

  Skeeter woke slowly, with bits of his body making themselves known by varying degrees of screaming pain. The headache alone thundered through his skull like a Gobi lightning storm. He lay very still, trying to breathe around the pain, hoping it would lessen just a bit if he remained perfectly frozen in place.

  It didn't work.

  Gradually, Skeeter realized he was not lying face-first on the Commons' concrete floor. Someone—probably Benson's gang—had moved him. He thought bitterly, Probably didn't want the tourists to see a passed-out con man apparently drunk out of his mind on the Commons floor. Bad for business.

  For a moment, he wondered if Benson had put him in one of the private detention cells of La-La Land's little jail. Then, startling him beyond all measure, came the incongruity of a child's voice. Mike Benson does not lock up children. Not one that young. He moved his head slightly on the pillow to hear better and gasped at the pain in his neck and the sensation of a hairless skull sliding across the pillowcase. He dealt with those startling facts each in turn, finally recalling the reasons.

  The child's voice spoke again. He couldn't understand the kid's words; but they flowed like music. A female voice answered in the same liquid language. Skeeter blinked. He knew that voice. Deep, throaty, as beautiful as its owner. What am I doing in Ianira Cassondra's apartment?

  Not that he minded, so long as Marcus didn't—

  Where's Marcus?

  He strained to hear, but didn't catch a single syllable of Marcus' voice. Then he strained to remember, but Mike Benson's interrogation blended into one, long stream of ruthless, sleepless, pain-filled questions. He vaguely remembered being told he could go, vaguely recalled collapsing outside Benson's office . . . but he did not remember what had become of Marcus.

  Somehow, that was intolerable. He tried to swing his legs over the edge of the bed, shove covers aside, and get up. He really tried. Instead, he got about halfway between horizontal and vertical, blacked out, and fell back with a faint cry of pain, which exploded through the whole of him like an electric shock prod wired to his insides and left set on full charge—one whose existence he'd completely forgotten. The next thing of which he was clearly aware was a soft touch on his brow, a hot towel that brought ecstasy when it soothed the throbbing behind his eyes, and a murmuring voice he'd last heard raised in desperation, begging help from him.

  "Skeeter?" Her voice came like rich, deep bell tones. "Don't worry, Skeeter, you're safe now. Marcus has gone to fetch Dr. Eisenstein for you."

  Skeeter was really glad the wet towel on his brow leaked water down his face, because quite suddenly his eyes filled and spilled over, completely out of his control. No one but Yesukai had ever treated him so kindly. As though she had divined the source of his greatest pain—and maybe she had, at that; everyone called her the Enchantress—she touched his face in various places, featherlight, drying tears on his cheeks, pressing against places he'd never realized would feel so . . . so warm, so comforting.

  "It is all right to weep out the pain, Skeeter. A man can go only so long alone, untouched, unloved. You miss your fierce Khan, I know that, but you cannot go back, Skeeter." Her words tore something inside him, something he'd realized but not acknowledged for a long, long time. "From here," she murmured, still touching his face gently, "the road unwinds in only one of two directions for you, Skeeter Jackson. Either you will remain on the road you have been traveling all your life and your loneliness will destroy you, or you may choose the other road, into the light. It is a choice neither I nor Marcus can make for you. Only you can decide such a profound question. But we will be travelling beside you, trying to help and support as best we can, whatever road you choose."

  He fought a thickening in
his throat.

  "Oh, Skeeter, Cherished One, you risked everything, even life's blood in the test of the gods' arena, to save Marcus."

  Then, when the deep emotions her words evoked wrenched him impossibly in too many directions, she massaged his temples and crooned a song, or perhaps an ancient incantation, while he turned his head as far away from her as he could and cried as he hadn't since the age of eight. The words she'd whispered kept reverberating through his whole being: Cherished One. . . .

  Then Marcus' worried voice rang out and a moment later, Rachel Eisenstein bent over him, ignoring his tears or taking them as a reaction to pain. She turned him with clinical, gentle expertise, examining the damage front and back, the scars of the lash across ribs and spine, the muscles strained and knotted from shoulder to shank from that tremendous vault from his horse's back, the slash across his side.

  He was eased back down and covered warmly. "Skeeter? Can you hear me? It's Rachel."

  Rather than nodding, he managed to croak past the tightness in his throat. "Yeah." It was a sound of defeat and even he knew it. He hoped Ianira and Marcus understood. He was simply too exhausted, in too much pain to struggle any longer.

  "Skeeter, I need to take you to the infirmary. Nothing that won't mend, but there's more of it than I like to see in one patient. Do you understand, Skeeter?"

  Again, the thick-throated, "Yeah."

  He closed his eyes, praying Ianira would understand his need to escape for just a little while the intense, soul-cracking emotions she'd roused with so few words. That portion of himself needed healing, too. Maybe he'd go see Dr. Mundy, after all, tell him everything, get all the secrets and the pain and the memories of good times and terrifying ones out of his system.

  Someone removed the cooling towel from his brow, then Ianira's voice came low and velvety: "Remember, we will always be here, ready to help."

  Then the metallic clanging of a gurney came to his ears and he was lifted and slid with professional gentleness by two orderlies. He only bit his lip once during the entire process. Then the gurney was moving and he thought he heard the sound of a woman weeping, but he wasn't sure of much in this state.