by Janet Morris
"And Sturm?" Niko said, looking away toward Aškelon, once Randal had girded on the kris. "What of him?"
"What of him? We all hold our own fate. I will send his body back to Bandara. A ship the double of your own will take it. A self-inflicted death is not your concern, nor is this violence in my realm. Go down to the dock and board your vessel now, quickly. Neither I nor Meridian will be here much longer. Get you to the harbor and head due east, out to sea."
"Out to sea?" Triremes were seldom sailed beyond sight of land; one hugged the coast, sailing in so unseaworthy a craft. Randal, having questioned the dream lord's orders, met that gaze like hell frozen over and thought again. "Right. Out to sea. Immediately. Come, Niko." He began to back away. But Niko was still staring at Aškelon, un-moving, his mouth drawn tight.
"Niko!" Randal said more loudly, exasperation coming to fill the void where terror so recently had been. Aškelon wasn't holding him responsible for Sturm's death; he wasn't to be punished, or even damned, for what had happened. He wanted to quit Meridian before Aškelon changed his mind. Or before the treacherous, murderous Cime found him and made good her promise. "Niko, let's go."
"I won't thank you, Aškelon, but then you know that." Niko took a step back.
"Just go." The entelechy flickered; his aura flared into visibility, as if the moon came before the sun. Then he disappeared.
* * *
Aškelon, facing Cime in his study, drummed long fingernails upon his table. He was wan and weary-looking; death always made him tired.
She was wild of eye, defiant. He'd snatched her from Randal's rainbow-sailed trireme just in time; she'd been hiding below decks. He'd whisked her hither effortlessly, his power here so great she could not even attempt to forestall him.
"You! How dare you!" From her hair Cime took down wands of diamond, arcane weapons which once before she'd used on him and nearly wiped Meridian and all it stood for from the planes. Their tips she touched together and a baleful blue light began to shine.
But she had made a bargain with him, lived with him, and benefited from him: the time she'd spent here plus the ill she'd done today gave him power over her she hadn't known he had. Now she would: he raised his own hand and the blue light faded from her diamond rods. They glowed now red-hot and still she held them, so that he smelled her skin searing.
Yet she did not speak or lower her wands or look away, but held her ground. This tableau of a woman consumed with hate and full of scorn for even her own pain then touched him: he felt pity for her as strongly as he had the day he plucked her out of misery with a promise of salvation should she but spend a year with him.
And thus he waved his hand again, and all light drained from her rods of diamond. She turned them, dim and harmless now, in her fingers.
He said, "Free agent, murder doesn't suit you. In this, of all abodes, hell's fury is out of place. Let your temper fade away; we've so much more to live for. If I can overlook a death here, you can surmount your disappointment."
"You promised me," Cime spoke at last, "that I'd find peace here. Peace?" She laughed, flipped around her deadly wands in one sure motion, and fixed them in her hair again. "I've found just deadly boredom, servitude, despair."
"Give yourself a better chance. All you've done today is weaken your own power; this land itself now looks at you askance." And as they spoke, the islands of Meridian were fading from their place in space and time; a mist grew thick and closely cloaked the isles and all upon them, then closed in upon itself, lifting harborside and city street and every quay and denizen away. There was a crack like thunder where they'd been but none on the archipelago of dreams could hear it: all were safe and sound upon another plane, returned now to the seventh sphere, which nestles in between the heavens and the hells and the ball of earth from which everything man knows has sprung.
Even as it happened, Cime sensed it. Her shoulders slumped, she felt behind her for a chair. Sinking down upon it, she said to him, "You've done it, have you not? My exile is complete again. It isn't fair. I brought you your prey, let you twist and taint the purest soul I've seen in thrice a hundred years. And what is my reward? Further bondage? A greater sort of debt to you? Our bargain notwithstanding, I put it to you, soul to soul: I want your leave to fight this war of magics by my brother's side."
"You should have asked me outright. This murder on Meridian needs expunging; you've penance to do which you, not I, decreed. Do it, and you have my leave to sojourn—but not an instant before the soul you've freed here is at rest, placated, back where it belongs among the heavens known to men."
Her chin raised; her eyes met his. "Your word, Aškelon, this time, and no trick about it?"
"My word, dear Cime, is good until eternity itself wears out."
* * *
Niko and Randal had been amidships in the trireme when a peal like thunder sounded and a blinding fog came down about them. A giant shudder tossed the trireme so that, though they couldn't see their hands before their faces, their stomachs and their inner ears told them how completely and abruptly the very sea around them heaved.
Niko had been teaching Randal the basic etiquette of weapons, how to clean and oil and care for this kris a dream lord had bestowed. While the weather raged and decks below them bucked, he held the junior Hazard close as if Randal were his lover. Should the budding adept fall overboard, or let go the kris, then what was lost would never be regained.
Soon enough, the deck and sea beneath it calmed and the fog dispersed and blew away, leaving them becalmed on a sea which ended, perhaps an hour's sail away, in a fine and busy harbor.
By then Niko had loosed his grip on Randal's bony shoulders. Embarrassed, he'd turned away, and thus was the first to spy the port before them. "Look! Randal! What's that? Where are we?"
And Randal, who'd recently visited Caronne, recognized the ramshackle dockside district, the chock-a-block warehouses and sprawling mudbrick inns that lined the shore and, up the rolling hills agleam with whitewashed houses, the cedar courts and crowning walled and domed estates of the mercantile rulers of Caronne. "We're here!" he sputtered, quivering with excitement, soaked with salt spray, and chilled with cold. "Oh, Niko, the dream lord surely loves us: we've made Caronne this very day! There's still a chance I'll get you back to Crit in time and thus lay claim to my prize! My globe's stand! I'd despaired of it, but now I may yet win it!"
"Caronne? But how?" Niko saw Randal's quizzical look, then continued, "Never mind. Don't answer that. Let's get some rules straight before we make landfall."
As he spoke, Niko headed toward the mast to hoist the sail again, which he'd been at pains to furl when the eerie fog had enshrouded them.
"Rules?" Randal followed after.
"Rules. Tell no one where we've been—they won't understand it. I know I don't. If not for that kris at your hip I'd disbelieve the lot. And the kris—you've got to keep your wits about you. We can't have it flying off at will; they'll hang us here for murder without a care for what ensorceled weapon did the deed. Understand me? Mages are not well liked here; you've no powerful guild to help you. We're just a pair of mercenaries back from adventures we'd as soon not discuss. My guild has better standing here. We'll check in, see my uncle as Critias ordered, sell the ship, and be off overland by dawn." Then he rattled off a dozen orders which sent Randal scurrying to find the title to the ship and make it ready for inspection, scouring it for signs of magical "infestation"—any implements or protective amulets or whatever Randal might have brought on board.
When Randal came up again on deck, he had the handkerchief Aškelon had given him bn Meridian clutched in a trembling hand. "I've still got it, Niko, I've still got it!"
"That's nice," the fighter said, his thoughts with the slain Bandaran, Sturm, not understanding or caring to understand what special value a handkerchief from Aškelon might have. "Remember, we aren't talking about him or anything else. If you must, you can say that we were in Bandara, but no one should ask you even that much."
/> Randal, wiping his nose fastidiously and secreting the handkerchief in his belt, came close.
Niko noticed a new determination in the mage-ling's eyes and, without taking his own gaze from the portside or his hand from the tiller, said, "Yes?
Out with it."
"I— We'll never make it in time overland, Niko.
It's too chancy."
"You know a better way?" Niko frowned. He'd been hoping not to argue this; he'd prefer to make it back to Tyse without the aid of magic.
"You know I do. We'll sell the ship, see your relative, and be at the Hidden Valley farm by dawn. Please. I need that stand. The globe's not all it could be—nor am I—without it."
"You're what you are, with or without it. Don't depend on artifacts or even special weapons." Niko eyed the kris. "What's given can be taken back. What's found can be lost."
"You'll let me do it, though? Bring us home to Tyse however I may?"
"We'll see what happens onshore."
Six hours later, they reclined in Niko's uncle's dining hall, soft pillows under their elbows and sweetmeats before them on gilded trays.
The uncle was glad to see his nephew, so glad he threw a formal feast with the official town beggar in attendance to bring their reunion luck.
The drugs Crit wanted Niko to secure for Madame Bomba were promised—not just a single shipment, but a steady stream by caravan, the first load leaving late that night.
Niko's portly uncle, misty-eyed and long of tooth, waxed voluble, full of drink and stories of Niko's father's heroism in days gone by. But when the old merchant leaned an oiled head so close that scented curls brushed Niko's nose, and offered him a place in the family's trading empire, Niko once again refused.
And Randal, watching carefully, detected the discomfort in his friend at all the largesse shown and confidences given. Old wounds were here, ones not even a right-side partner should try to tend.
So when they'd bid their host farewell and sought the fresh air of the streets, Randal said only, "Ready now, left-side leader, to quit this town for home?"
Niko, uncomfortable with too much hospitality, had given the trireme to his uncle as collateral for the first transshipment of Caronne krrf and mountain pulcis. "I suppose. There's nothing holding us here, is there?"
Randal, fingers resting gently on his kris to make it fast, agreed and suggested that they seek a quiet clearing where a cloud-conveyance descending from the heavens would not alarm the natives.
Near the docks, where a cliff rose too high and steeply for commerce, they found themselves alone. "Ready?" asked Randal, raising his arms to heaven.
"Ready," Niko said with a touch of resignation, and let his partner spirit him home.
Book Three:
WITCH'S WORK
On the west bank of Peace River, directly across from the ruins of the Peace Falls house Tempus's men had burned down about her head during the summer war, Roxane the Nisibisi witch put her scrying bowl aside. This swampy haunt she'd made her home was called Frog's Marsh because no greater creature used it. It stunk of putrefaction and the sinking death it offered to deer or dog or wayward child who wandered lost among its quagmires and its moss-hung, gnarly trees.
A perpetual dusk reigned here, relieved only at night by the glowing marsh-gas rising, which smelled like belch or fart and bubbled, gurgling, from mulch and mud to cast its eerie light. A fine place, this, to meet the local revolutionaries; the perfect base from which to whip Tyse's burgeoning insurgency into shape.
Roxane's bower, itself, was clean and dry and hung with claret velvet. She quit it now to meet her pawns, who waited under an overhung swamp-giant two thickets and a lily pond away. They'd never see her spell-spun home. She had no need to make the rebels comfortable; she wanted them atremble with superstition and frayed about the nerves. She climbed her conjured stairs, then closed a mossy door behind her, casting a holding spell, which made her subterranean abode all but disappear. It was impregnable now, almost nonexistent; it would not really be again until she returned to stoop beneath the arching roots which hid its portal from the world.
Roxane stifled a curse which, these days, was more than rhetoric: curses from her lips were potent weapons. She'd risen in rank among the warlocks of Nisibis; though she was female, she was strongest of them all. None among the remnants of the once-proud Nisibisi mageguild—those who'd fled Tempus and his Stepsons to far Mygdonia after the war for Wizardwall, or even those who'd been at Lacan Ajami's side casting spells and curses upon the enemies of Mygdon when their routed fellows arrived with tales of deific intervention and pleas for asylum on their lips—dared challenge Roxane's suzerainty.
She had now what she'd always wanted—control of all Nisibisi magic. She answered to no one. It was Roxane who ruled magic's precious roost.
Of course, she was sworn to aid the warrior-lord of Mygdon; her clan labored in his cause. Threading her way through swamp cypresses whose treetops made a nearer, darker heaven, she reflected on her task. Spying for Lacan Ajami upon his Rankan enemy meant spying on the thrice-cursed Riddler. The 3rd Commando—should she fail in stopping Tempus as she had failed in stopping Imperial Ranke's second, covert messenger from reaching him—might soon be pillaging at Mygdon's Lion Gates.
Roxane didn't blame the wizard-spawn, young Shamshi. An agent could do no better than he was bid. Some Rankan witch or treacherous enemy adept had cast a protective ward over this hell-child, Kama—a pall of invisibility, a cloak of insignificance—so that her real mission and her message were submerged beneath a guise: she'd been seeking out her father. None among the seers and portent-readers had even marked her. Now she was marked—marked for death. Roxane would not assign this task to her hand-picked rebels, nurtured long ago and straining at their leashes. The news Roxane brought and the plans she'd implement would be fresh meat to these Mygdonian sympathizers: far too long they'd had to content themselves with baying at the moon.
Now Lacan Ajami, affronted beyond measure by the Riddler, who kept a son of Mygdonia hostage, sallied forth, the total destruction of Tyse uppermost in his mind.
These minions of hers would clear the path for his army of conquest and retribution. By the time Mygdonia's fierce hordes arrived, screaming "Lacan is great!", Tyse's forces would be in disarray, divided, her people terrorized from within and thus easy prey to Mygdonia and her allies when they attacked from without.
And then Roxane would be free to leave this foul and vaporous swamp for more suitable surroundings: the newly rebuilt palace in Tyse would do for starters, though she wanted, most of all, to raise her arms to heaven atop Wizardwall once more, to regain for all her kin their lost ancestral home where now Bashir of Free Nisibis held obscene services in the names of odious gods. Wizardwall must once again shimmer blue at midnight with the light of working wizardry: this she had sworn, as she had sworn to find out whether Tempus was truly an immortal and whether a Froth Daughter might be turned to drizzle upon the air.
Coming abreast of a patch of red-dotted mushrooms as large as human heads and so poisonous that even Roxane took care not to step on one, lest a bit of powder from a crushed one make its way onto her lips or into mouth or nose, she reflected that hatred and destruction were all well and good, but not the only thing she had on her mind. Nothing she'd seen in Tyse or on Wizardwall or in far Mygdonia troubled or angered the finest Nisibisi witch as did what she'd seen in her scrying bowl just tonight.
This unsought vision bedeviled her. Unbidden, it had come and turned the clear water of her scrying bowl viscous and putrid. Water had never defied her before. But it was not the audacious fluid which worried her, but the vision it insisted on showing her—one of the mortal Nikodemos being compromised by Aškelon, meddler in human affairs, bleeding heart among plane lords, the overpowered and obscenely greedy entelechy of dreams.
If Niko was to belong to any black artist, it was she, Roxane, who would have him. Niko's soul was hers, even loved her. She had, quite plainly, a prior claim. But conte
sting with the lord of dream and shadow outright was tricky business—bold and canny as she was, Roxane well knew she just might be outclassed. She'd thought, when the vision formed in her water bowl, and blinking or even stirring the water's surface with a finger would not change or mend it, that she ought to move her headquarters, find some sunny place where shadows did not lurk, where their lord could not make use of them to observe her.
Now she dismissed the impulse to flee. Darkness was hers as well as his; shadows have no allegiance. Like souls, they can be pursuaded to an unjust cause.
Waiting for her, in a clearing ringed by tall swamp reeds with bushy tips like the tails of frightened cats, were five men and a pair of women, each holding close a torch and talking loudly to one another, proving by their raucous laughter and coarse diction how fearless they were.
She cast a little ball she'd taken from her pocket into their midst. It exploded with a blue and fiery light, then settled down to burn steadily and clean. She had brought a gross of these incendiary pellets. Her laughter followed, then her piquant form dressed in spotless satin raiment. The proper entrance made, she coaxed the awed and trembling rebels from their cover behind logs and arching roots, even those who were face-down among the reeds, soaking in the mud.
Only one was dry of muck and sweat and had his torch and knife in hand. This was Oman, the rebel leader, swarthy and built like a bull, with a strangler's hands and squinty eyes. His expression, looking around at his comrades, all so recently buttocks up in the mire, was unforgiving. When he turned his gaze to Roxane, it hardly changed.
Their eyes locked in a silence an owl saw fit to break. "Whoo! Whoo!" came from the trees behind Oman.
"Who, indeed?" Roxane took control. "Who among you is ready to do battle with our enemies? Who is anxious to slit a Rankan throat or two? The moment is at hand." She still stared at the insurgents' leader, who was smarter than he looked, but vain.
