“Steal something for me?” Tempus whispered, leaning down. The boy had black hair, black eyes, and blacker prospects in this desperadoes’ demesne.
“I’m listening.”
“Two diamond rods from the lady who came out of the sea tonight.”
“Why?”
“I won’t ask you how, and you won’t ask me why, or we’ll forget it.” He sat up straight in his saddle.
“Forget it, then,” toughed Shadowspawn, deciding he wanted nothing to do with this Hell Hound.
“Call it a prank, a jest at the expense of an old girlfriend.”
The thief edged around where Tempus could not see him, into a dapple of deepest dark. He named a price.
The Hell Hound did not argue. Rather, he paid half in advance.
“I’ve heard you don’t really work for Kitty. I’ve heard your dues to the mercenaries’ guild are right up to date, and that Kitty knows better than to give you any orders. If you are not arguing about my price, it must be too low.”
Silence.
“Is it true that you roughed up that whore who died tonight? That Amoli is so afraid of you that you do whatever you want in her place and never pay?”
Tempus chuckled, a sound like the cracking of dry ice. “I will take you there, when you deliver, and you can see for yourself what I do.”
There was no answer from the shadows, just a skittering of stones.
Yes, I will take you there, young one. And yes, you are right. About everything. You should have asked for more.
Chapter 3
TEMPUS LINGERED THERE still, eating a boxed lunch from the Unicorn’s kitchen, when a voice from above his head said, “The deal is off. That girl is a sorceress, if a pretty one. I’ll not chance ensorcelment to lift baubles I don’t covet, and for a pittance!”
Girl? The woman was nearly his own age, unless another set of diamond rods existed, and he doubted that. He yawned, not reaching up to take the purse that dangled over the lee of the roof, “I am disappointed. I thought Shadowspawn could steal.”
The innuendo was not lost on the invisible thief. The purse was withdrawn. An impalpable something told him he was once again alone, but for the clients of Vashanka’s Weaponshop. Things would be interesting in Sanctuary, for a good little while to come. He had counted twenty-three purchasers able to walk away with their mystical armaments. Four had died while he watched, intrigued.
It was possible that a career Hell Hound such as Zalbar might have intervened. But Tempus wore Vashanka’s amulet about his neck, and, if he did not agree with Him, he would at least bear with his god.
The woman he was waiting for showed there at dusk. He liked dusk; he liked it for killing and he liked it for loving. Sometimes if he was very lucky, the dusk made him tired and he could nap. A man who has been cursed by an archmage and pressed into service by a god does not sleep much. Sleep was something he chased like other men chased women. Women, in general, bored him, unless they were taken in battle, or unless they were whores.
This woman, her black hair brushing her doeskin-clad shoulders, was an exception.
He called her name, very softly. Then again: “Cime.” She turned, and at last he was sure. He had thought Hakiem could mean no other: he had not been wrong.
Her eyes were grey as his horse. Silver shot her hair, but she was yet comely. Her hands rose, hesitated, covered a mouth pretending to hardness and tight with fear. He recognized the aborted motion other hands: towards her head, forgetful that the rods she sought were no longer there.
He did not move in his saddle, or speak again. He let her decide, glance quickly about the street, then come to him.
When her hand touched the horse’s bridle, he said: “It bites.”
“Because you taught it to. It will not bite me.” She held it by the muzzle, squeezing the pressure points that rode the skin there. The horse raised his head slightly, moaned, and stood shivering.
“What seek you in there?” He inclined his head towards Vashanka’s; a lock of copper hair fell over one eye.
“The tools of my trade were stolen.”
“Have you money?”
“Some. Not enough.”
“Come with me.”
“Never again.”
“You have kept your vow, then?”
“I slay sorcerers. I cannot suffer any man to touch me except a client. I dare no love; I am chaste of heart.”
“All these aching years?”
She smiled. It pulled her mouth in hard at its corners and he saw ageing no potion or cosmetic spell could hide. “Every one. And you? You did not take the Blue Star, or I would see it on your brow. What discipline serves your will?”
“None. Revenge is fruitless. The past is only alive in us. I am not meant for sorcery. I love logic too well.”
“So, you are yet damned?”
“If that is what you call it, I suppose—yes. I work for the Storm God, sometimes. I do a lot of wars.”
“What brought you here, Cle—”
“Tempus, now. It keeps me in perspective. I am building a temple for Him.” He pointed to Vashanka’s Weaponshop, across the street. His finger shook. He hoped she had not seen. “You must not ply your trade here. I have employment as a Hell Hound. Appearances must be preserved. Do not pit us against one another. It would be too sour a memory.”
“For whomever survived? Can it be you love me still?” Her eyes were full of wonder.
“No,” he said, but cleared his throat. “Stay out of there. I know His service well. I would not recommend it. I will get you back what you have lost. Meet me at the Lily Garden tonight at midnight, and you will have them. I promise. Just take down no sorcerers between now and then. If you do, I will not return them, and you cannot get others.”
“Bitter, are you not? If I do what you are too weak to do, what harm is there in that?” Her right eyebrow raised. It hurt him to watch her.
“We are the harm. And we are the harmed, as well. I am afraid that you may have to break your fast, so be prepared. I will reason with myself, but I promise nothing.”
She sighed. “I was wrong. You have not changed one bit.”
“Let go of my horse.”
She did.
He wanted to tell her to let go of his heart, but he was struck mute. He wheeled his mount and clattered down the street. He had no intention of leaving. He just waited in a nearby alley until she was gone.
Then he hailed a passing soldier, and sent a message to the palace.
When the sun danced above the Vulgar Unicorn’s improbably engaged weather vane, support troops arrived, and Kadakithis’s new warlock Aspect, was with them.
“Since last night, and this is the first report you have seen fit to make?” The sorcerer’s pale lips flushed. His eyes burned within his shadowed cowl.
“I hope you and Kadakithis had a talk.”
“We did, we did. You are not still angry at the world after all these years?”
“I am yet living. I have your kind to blame or thank, whichever.”
“Do you not think it strange that we have been thrown together as—equals?”
“I think that is not the right word for it. Aspect. What are you about, here?”
“Now, now. Hell Hound—”
“Tempus.”
“Yes, Tempus. You have not lost your fabled sense of irony. I hope it is a comfort.”
“Quite, actually. Do not interfere with the gods, guildbrother of my nemesis.”
“Our prince is justifiably worried. Those weapons—”
“—equal out the balance between the oppressors and the oppressed. Most of Sanctuary cannot afford your services, or the prices of even the lowliest members of the Enchanters’ Guild. Let it be. We will get the weapons back, as their wielders meet their fates.”
“I have to report to Kitt—to K-adakithis.”
“Then report that I am handling it.” Behind the magician, he could see the ranks whispering. Thirty men, the archmage had brought. Too man
y.
“You and I have more in common than in dispute, Tempus. Let us join forces.”
“I would sooner bed an Ilsig matron.”
“Well, I am going in there.” The archmage shook his head and the cowl fell back. He was pretty, ageless, a blond. “With or without you.”
“Be my guest,” Tempus offered.
The archmage looked at him strangely. “We do the same services in the world, you and I. Killing, whether with natural or supernatural weapons, is still killing. You are no better than I.”
“Assuredly not, except that I will outlive you. And I will make sure you do not get your requisite burial ritual.”
“You would not!”
“Like you said, I yet bear my grudge—against every one of you.”
With a curse that made the ranks clap their hands to their helmeted ears, the archmage swished into the street, across it, and through the door marked “Men” without another word. It was his motioned command which made the troops follow.
A waitress Tempus knew came out when the gibbous moon was high, to ask him if he was hungry. She brought him fish and he ate it, watching the doors.
When he had just about finished, a terrible rumble crawled up the street, tremors following in its wake. He slid from his horse and held its muzzle, and the reins up under its bit. The doors of Vashanka’s Weaponshop grew shimmery, began taking colour. Above, the moon went behind a cloud. The little dome on the shop rocked, grew cracks, crazed, steamed. The doors were ruby red, and melting. Awful wails and screams and the smell of sulphur and ozone filled the night.
Patrons began streaming out of the Vulgar Unicorn, drinks in hand. They stayed well back from the rocking building, which howled as it stressed larger, growing turgid, effluescing spectrums which sheeted and snapped and snarled. The doors went molten white, then they were gone. A figure was limned in the left-hand doorway, and it was trying to climb empty air. It flamed and screeched, dancing, crumbling, facing the street but unable to pass the invisible barrier against which it pounded. It stank: the smell of roasting flesh was overwhelming. Behind it, helmets crumpled, dripped on to the contorted faces of soldiers whose moustaches had begun to flare.
The mage who tried to break down the invisible door had no fists; he had pounded them away. The ranks were char and ash in falling effigy of damnation. The doors which had been invisible began to cool to white, then to gold, then to red.
The street was utterly silent. Only the snorts of his horse and the squeals of the domed structure could be heard. The squeals fell off to growls and shudders. The doors cooled, turned dark.
People muttered, drifted back into the Unicorn with mumbled wardings, tracing signs and taking many backward looks.
Tempus, who could have saved thirty innocent soldiers and one guilty magician, got out his silver box and sniffed some krrf.
He had to be at the Lily Garden soon.
When he got there, the mixed elation of drug and death had faded.
What if Shadowspawn did not appear with the rods? What if the girl Cime did not come to get them back? What if he still could hurt, as he had not hurt for more than three hundred years?
He had had a message from the palace, from Prince Kadakithis himself. He was not going up there, just yet. He did not want to answer any questions about the archmage’s demise. He did not want to appear involved. His only chance to help the Prince-Governor effectively lay in working his own way. Those were his terms, and under those terms Kitty’s supporters in the Rankan capital had employed him to come down here and play Hell Hound and see what he would do. There were no wars, anywhere. He had been bored, his days stretching out never ending, bleak. So he had concerned himself with Kitty, for something to do. The building of Vashanka’s temple he oversaw for himself more than Kadakithis, who understood the necessity of elevating the state cult above the Ilsig gods, but believed only in wizardry, and his noble Ranke blood.
He was not happy about the spectacle at Vashanka’s Weaponshop. Sloppy business, this side-show melting and unmelting. The archmage must have been talented, to make his struggles visible to those outside.
Wisdom is to know the thought which steers all things through all things, a friend of his who was a philosopher had once said to him. The thought that was steering all things through Sanctuary was muddled, unclear.
That was the hitch, the catch, the problem with employing the supernatural in a natural milieu. Things got confused. With so many spells at work, the fabric of causality was overly strained. Add the gods, and Evil and Good faced each other across a board game whose extent was the phenomenal world. He wished the gods would stay in their heavens and the sorcerers in their hells.
Oh, he had heard endless persiflage about simultaneity; iteration—the constant redefining of the now by checking it against the future—alchemical laws of consonance. When he had been a student of philosophy and Cime had been a maiden, he had learned the axiom that Mind is unlimited and self-controlled, but all other things are connected; that nothing is completely separated off from any other thing, nor are things divided one from the other, except Mind.
The sorcerers put it another way: they called the consciousness of all things into service, according to the laws of magic.
Not philosophy, nor theology, nor thaumaturgy held the answer for Tempus; he had turned away from them, each and all. But he could not forget what he had learned.
And none of the adepts like to admit that no servitor can be hired without wages. The wages of unnatural life are unnatural death.
He wished he could wake up in Azehur, with his family, and know that he had dreamed this impious dream.
But instead he came to Amoli’s whorehouse, the Lily Garden. Almost, but not quite, he rode the horse up its stairs. Resisting the temptation, he reflected that in every age he had ever studied, doom-criers abounded. No millenium is attractive to the man immured in it; enough prophecies have been made in antiquity that one who desires, in any age, to take the position that Apocalypse is at hand can easily defend it. He would not join that dour Order; he would not worry about anything but Tempus, and the matter awaiting his attention.
Inside Amoli’s, Hanse the thief sat in full swagger, a pubescent girl on each knee.
“Ah,” he waved. “I have something for you.” Shadowspawn tumbled both girls off of him, and stood, stretching widely, so that every arm-dagger and belted sticker and thigh-sheath creaked softly. The girls at his feet stayed there, staring up at Tempus wide-eyed. One whimpered to Shadowspawn and clutched his thigh.
“Room key,” Tempus snapped to no one in particular, and held out his hand. The concierge, not Amoli, brought it to him.
“Hanse?”
“Coming.” He extended a hand to one girl.
“Alone.”
“You are not my type,” said the thief, suspicious.
“I need just a moment of your evening. You can do what you wish with the rest.”
Tempus looked at the key, headed off towards a staircase leading to the room which bore a corresponding number.
He heard the soft tread of Shadowspawn close behind.
When the exchange had been made, the thief departed, satisfied with both his payment and his gratuity, but not quite sure that Tempus appreciated the trouble to which he had put himself, or that he had got the best of the bargain they had made.
He saw the woman he had robbed before she saw him, and ended up in a different girl’s room than the one he had chosen, in order to avoid a scene. When he had heard her steps pass by, stop before the door behind which the big Hell Hound waited, he made preclusive threats to the woman whose mouth he had stopped with the flat of his hand, and slipped downstairs to spend his money somewhere else, discreetly.
If he had stayed, he might have found out what the diamond rods were really worth; he might have found out what the sour-eyed mercenary with his high brow, suddenly so deeply creased, and his lightly carried mass, which seemed tonight too heavy, was worried about. Or perhaps he co
uld have fathomed Tempus’s enigmatic parting words: “I would help you if I could, backstreeter,” Tempus had rumbled.
“If I had met you long ago, or if you liked horses, there would be a chance. You have done me a great service. More than that pouch holds. I am seldom in any man’s debt, but you, I own, can call me anytime.”
“You paid me. Hell Hound. I am content,” Hanse had demurred, confused by weakness where he had never imagined it might dwell. Then he saw the Hell Hound fish out a snuffbox of krrf, and thought he understood.
But later, he went back to Amoli’s and hung around the steps, cautiously petting the big man’s horse, the krrf he had sniffed making him willing to dodge the beast’s square, yellow teeth.
Chapter 4
SHE HAD COME to him, had Cime. She was what she was, what she had always been.
It was Tempus who was changed: Vashanka had entered into him, the Storm God who was Lord of Weapons who was Lord of Rape who was Lord of War who was Lord of Death’s Gate.
He could not take her, gently. So spoke not his physical impotence, as he might have expected, but the cold wash of wisdom: he would not despoil her; Vashanka would accept no less.
She knocked and entered and said, “Let me see them,” so sure he would have the stolen diamonds that her fingers were already busy on the lacings of her Ilsig leathers.
He held up a hide-wrapped bundle, slimmer than her wrist, shorter than her forearm. “Here. How were they thieved?”
“Your voice is hoarser than I have ever heard it,” she replied, and: “I needed money; there was this man … actually, there were a few, but there was a tough, a streetbrawler. I should have known—he is half my apparent age. What would such as he want with a middle-aged whore? And he agreed to pay the price I asked, without quibbling. Then he robbed me.” She looked around, her eyes, as he remembered them, clear windows to her thoughts. She was appalled.
“The low estate into which I have sunk?”
She knew what he meant. Her nostrils shivered, taking in the musty reek of the soiled bedding on which he sprawled fully clothed, smelling easily as foul. “The devolution of us both. That I would be here, under these circumstances, is surely as pathetic as you.”
Tales From The Vulgar Unicorn Page 17
