Walegrin had intended to be quiet and meek—to do whatever was necessary to free Thrush. But this was Kittycat and he invited disrespect. “Finding your clothes each morning must be equal trouble. You’ve got my man in your dungeons. I want him freed.”
The Prince fidgetted with the ornate hem of his sleeve. “Actually I don’t have your man. Oh, he’s been taken all right, and he’s alive—but he’s Tempus’ prisoner, not mine.”
“Then I should be talking to Tempus, not you.”
“Walegrin, I may not have your man—but I have you,” the Prince said forcefully.
Walegrin swallowed his reply and studied the Prince.
“That’s better. You’re entitled to your opinion of me—and I’m sure I’ve earned it. There’s a lot to be said for playing one’s part in life. Now, you’ll talk to Tempus after you’ve talked to me—and you’ll be glad of the delay.
“I’ve had gods know how many letters from Ranke about you—starting before you disappeared. I got my most recent one with the recent delegation from the capital. Zanderei—as cunning an assassin as they could find. I know how much money you got from Kilite. Don’t look so surprised. I was raised in the Imperial Household—I wouldn’t be alive at all if I didn’t have some reliable friends. The chief viper in my brother’s nest is always asking for you. He seems to think you’ve discovered Enlibar steel; I assure him that you haven’t, though I know you have. I know how much he said he’d pay you for the secret; so I know you’re not in Sanctuary looking for a better price. But then, I also know what Balustrus said about your progress with the steel. Does any of this surprise you?”
Walegrin said nothing. He was not truly surprised, though he hadn’t expected this. Nothing was truly surprising today.
The prince misunderstood his silence. “All right, Walegrin. Kilite’s faction found you, paid you, pardoned your absence and then tried to have you killed. I’ve run afoul of Kilite a few times and I can promise you you’ll never outsmart him on your own. You need protection, Walegrin, and you need protection from a special sort of person—the sort of person who needs you as much as you need him. In short, Walegrin, you need me.”
Walegrin remembered thinking the same thing once, though he’d envisioned this interview under different circumstances. “You have the Hounds, Tempus and the Sacred Bands,” he remarked sullenly.
“Actually, they have me. Face it, Walegrin: you and I are not well-equipped. Alone with only my birth or your steel, we’re nothing but pawns. But, put my birth with your steel and the odds improve. Walegrin, the Nisibisi are armed to the teeth. They’ll tie up the armies for years before the surrender—if they surrender. Your handful of Enlibar swords won’t make any difference. But the Empire is going to forget about us while they’re fighting in the north.”
“Or, you want my men and my steel here instead of on the Wizardwall?”
“You make me sound just like Kilite. Walegrin, I’ll make you my advisor. I’ll care for you and your men. I’ll tell Kilite we found you floating in the harbor and make sure he believes it. I’ll keep you safe while the Empire exhausts itself in the north. It may take twenty years, Walegrin, but when we return to Ranke, we’ll own it.”
“I’ll think about it,” Walegrin said, though actually he was thinking of Illyra’s visions of an invading fleet and her warning that he would not go north.
The Prince shook his head. “You don’t have time. You’ve got to be my man before you see Tempus. You might need me to pry your man loose.”
They were alone in the room and Walegrin still had his sword. He thought of using it; perhaps the Prince thought the same thing for he sat far back in the throne, playing with his sleeve again.
“You might be lying,” Walegrin said after a moment.
“I’m known for many things, but not lying.”
That was true enough. Just as much of what he’d said was true. And there was Thrusher’s safety, and Illyra’s to think of. “I’ll want a favor, right away,” Walegrin said, offering his hand.
“Anything in my power, but first we talk to Tempus—and don’t tell him we’ve made an agreement.”
The Prince led the way along unfamiliar corridors. They were in the private part of the palace and the surroundings, though crude by capital standards, dazzled Walegrin. He bumped into the Prince when the latter stopped by a closed door.
“Now, don’t forget—we haven’t agreed to anything. No, wait—give me your sword.”
Feeling trapped, Walegrin unbuckled his sword and handed it to the Prince.
“He’s arrived, Tempus,” Kadakithus announced in his most inane voice. “Look, he gave me a present! One of his steel swords.”
Tempus looked around from a window. He had some of the god’s presence to him. Walegrin felt distinctly outclassed and doubted that Kitty-cat could do anything to help him. He doubted that even the metal boss in his pouch could help him free Thrusher or Illyra.
“The steel is Sanctuary’s secret, not Kilite’s?” Tempus demanded.
“Of course,” the Prince assured him. “Kilite will never know. The entire capital will never know.”
“All right, then. Bring him in,” Tempus shouted.
Five Stepsons crowded into the room, a hooded prisoner with them. They sent the man sprawling to the marble floor. Thrusher pulled the hood loose and scrambled to his feet. A livid bruise covered one side of his face, his clothes were torn and revealed other cuts and bruises, but he was not seriously hurt.
“Your man—I should have let my men have him. He killed two last night.”
“Not men!” Thrusher spat out. “Whoresons; men don’t steal women and leave them for the rats!”
One of the Stepsons moved forward. Walegrin recognized him as the one who had overturned Illyra’s table. Though he felt the rage himself, he restrained Thrusher. “Not now,” he whispered.
The Prince stepped between all of them with the sword. “I think you should have this, Tempus. It’s too plain for me—but you won’t mind that, will you?”
The Hell-Hound examined the blade and set it aside without comment. “I see you can control your man,” he said to Walegrin.
“As you cannot.” Walegrin tossed the Hound the boss Dubro had found. “Your men left it behind when they stole my sister last night.” They were of a height, Walegrin and Tempus, but it cost Walegrin to look into Tempus’ eyes and for once he understood what it meant to be cursed, as Tempus was.
“Yes, the S’danzo. My men disliked the fortune she told for them. They bribed some Downwind to frighten her. They don’t understand the Downwind yet. They hadn’t intended her to be kidnapped, any more than they’d intended to get robbed themselves. I’ve dealt with my men—and the Downwinders they hired. Your sister is already back in the bazaar, Walegrin, a bit richer for her adventures and off-limits to all Stepsons. No one guessed you were her brother—certain men are assumed not to have family, you know.” Tempus leaned forward then, and spoke only to Walegrin. “Tell me, is your sister worth believing?”
“I believe her.”
“Even when she rattles nonsense about invasions from the sea?”
“I believe her enough that I’m remaining in Sanctuary—against all my better judgement.”
Tempus turned away to take up Walegrin’s sword. He adjusted the belt for his hips and put it on. The Stepsons had already departed. “You won’t regret helping the Prince,” he said without looking at anyone. “He’s favored of the gods, you know. You’ll do well together.” He followed his men out the door leaving the Prince alone with Walegrin and Thrusher.
“You might have told me you were going to give him my sword!” Walegrin complained.
“I wasn’t. I only meant to distract him—I didn’t think he’d take it. I’m sorry. What was the favor you wanted?”
With Illyra and Thrusher safe, and his future mapped out, Walegrin didn’t need a favor, but he heard his stomach rumbling and knew Thrush was hungry too. “We’ll have a meal fit for a king—or P
rince.”
“Well, at least that’s something I can provide you.”
Wizard Weather
By Janet Morris
Chapter 1
IN THE ARCHMAGE’S sumptuous purple bedroom, the woman astride him took two pins from her silver-shot hair. It was dark—his choice; and damp with cloying shadows—his romanticism. A conjured moon in a spellbound sky was being swallowed by effigy-clouds where the vaulted roof indubitably yet arced, even as he shuddered under the tutored and inexorable attentions of the girl Lastel had brought to his party. She had refused to tell him her name because he would not give his, but had told him what she would do for him so eloquently with her eyes and her body that he had spent the entire evening figuring out a way the two of them might slip up here unnoticed. Not that he feared her escort’s jealousy though the drug dealer might conceivably entertain such a sentiment, Lastel no longer had the courage (or the contractual protective wardings) to dare a reprisal against a Hazard-class mage.
Of all the enchanters in wizard-ridden Sanctuary, only three were archmages, nameless adepts beyond summoning or responsibility, and this Hazard was one. In fact, he was the very strongest of those three. When he had been young, he had had a name, but he will forget it, and everything else, quite promptly: the domed and spired estuary of venality which is Sanctuary, nadir of the empire called Ranke; the unmitigated evil he had fielded for decades from his swamp encircled Mageguild fortress; the compromises he had made to hold sway over curmudgeon, courtesan and criminal (so audacious that even the bounds of magics and planeworlds had been eroded by his efforts, and his fellow adepts felled on occasion by demons roused from forbidden defiles to do his bidding here at the end of creation where no balance remains between logic and faith, law and nature, or heaven and hell); the disingenuous methods through which his will was worked, plan by tortuous plan, upon a town so hateful and immoral that both the flaunted gods and magicians’ devils agreed that its inhabitants deserved no less dastardly a fate—all of this, and more, will fade from him in the time it takes a star to burn out, falling from the sky.
Now, the First Hazard glimpses her movement, though he is close to ejaculation, sputtering with sensations that for years he has assumed he had outgrown, or forgotten how to feel. Senility creeps upon the finest flesh when a body is maintained for millenia, and into the deepest mind, through thousands of years. He does not look his age, or tend to think of it. The years are his, mandated. Only a very special kind of enemy could defeat him, and those were few and far between. Simple death, morbidity or the spells of his brothers were like gnats he kept away by the perfume of his sweat: merely the proper diet, herbs and spells and consummated will, had long ago vanquished them as far as he was concerned.
So strange to lust, to desire a particular woman; he was amused, joyous; he had not felt so good in years. A tiny thrill of caution had horripilated his nape early on, when he noticed the silvering of her nightblack hair, but this girl was not old enough to be—“Ahhhh!” Her premeditated rippling takes him over passion’s edge, and he is falling, place and provenance forgotten, not a terrible adept wrenching the world about to suit his whim and comfort, but just a man.
In that instant, eyes defocused, he sees but does not note the diamond sparkle of the rods poised above him; his ears are filled with his own breathing; the song of entrapment she sings softly has him before he thinks to think, or thinks to fear, or thinks to move.
By then, the rods, their sharp fine points touching his arched throat, owned him. He could not move; not his body nor his soul responded; his mind could not control his tongue. Thinking bitterly of the indignity of being frozen like a rearing stallion, he hoped his flesh would slump once life had fled. As he felt the points enter into his skin and begin to suck at the thread binding him to life, his mortification marshaled his talents: he cleared his vision, forced his eyes to obey his mind’s command. Though he was a great sorcerer, he was not omnipotent: he could not manage to make his lips frame a curse to cast upon her, just watched the free agent Cime—who had slipped, disguised, into so many mages’ beds of late—sip the life from him relishingly. So slow she was about it he had time to be thankful she did not take him through his eyes. The song she sings has cost her much to learn, and the death she staves off will not be so kind as his. Could he have spoken, then, resigned to it, he would have thanked her: it is no shame to be brought down by an opponent so worthy. They paid their prices to the same host. He set about composing his exit, seeking his meadow, star-shaped and ever green, where he did his work when meditation whisked him into finer awarenesses than flesh could ever share. If he could seat himself there, in his established place of power, then his death was nothing, his flesh a fingernail, overlong and ready to be pared.
He did manage that. Cime saw to it that he had the time. It does not do to anger certain kinds of powers, the sort which, having dispensed with names, dispense with discorporation. Some awful day, she would face this one, and others whom she had guided out of life, in an afterlife which she had helped populate. Shades tended to be unforgiving.
When his chest neither rose nor fell, she slid off him and ceased singing. She licked the tips of her wands and wound them back up in her thick black hair. She soothed his body down, arranged it decorously, donned her party clothes, and kissed him once on the tip of his nose before heading, humming, back down the stairs to where Lastel and the party still waited. As she passed the bar, she snatched a piece of citrus and crushed it in her palms, dripping the juice upon her wrists, smearing it behind her ears and in the hollow of her throat. Some of these folk might be clumsy necromancers and thrice-cursed merchants with store bought charms—to ward off charms bleeding them dry of soul and purse, but there was nothing wrong with their noses.
Lastel’s bald head and wrestler’s shoulders, impeccable in customed silk velvet, were easy to spot. He did not even glance down at her, but continued chatting with one of the prince/governor Kadakithis’ functionaries, Molin Something-or-other, Vashanka’s official priest. It was New Year’s holiday, and the week was bursting with festivities which the Rankan overlords must observe, and seem to sanction: since (though they had conquered and subjugated Ilsig lands and Ilsig peoples so that some Rankans dared call Ilsigs “Wrigglies” to their faces) they had failed to suppress the worship of the god Ils and his self-begotten pantheon, word had come down from the emperor himself that Rankans must endure with grace the Wrigglies’ celebration of Ils’ creation of the world and renewal of the year. Now, especially, with Ranke pressed into a war of attrition in the north, was no time to allow dissension to develop on her flanks from so paltry a matter as the perquisites of obscure and weakling gods.
This uprising among the buffer states upon Upper Ranke’s northernmost frontier and the inflated rumors of slaughter coming back from Wizardwall’s mountainous skirts all out of proportion to reasonable numbers dominated Molin’s monologue: “And what say you, esteemed lady? Could it be that Nisibisi magicians have made their peace with Mygdon’s barbarian lord, and found him a path through Wizardwall’s fastness? You are well-traveled, it is obvious…. Could it be true that the border insurrection is Mygdonia’s doing, and their hordes so fearsome as we have been led to believe? Or is it the Rankan treasury that is suffering, and a northern incursion the cure for our economic ills?”
Lastel flickered puffy lids down at her from ravaged cheeks and his turgid arm went around her waist. She smiled up at him reassuringly, then favored the priest: “Your Holiness, sadly I must confess that the Mygdonian threat is very real. I have studied realms and magics, in Ranke and beyond. If you wish a consultation, and Lastel permits—” she batted the thickest lashes in Sanctuary “—I shall gladly attend you, some day when we both are fit for ‘solemn’ discourse. But now I am too filled with wine and revel, and must interrupt you your pardon please—that my escort bear me home to bed.” She cast her glance upon the ballroom floor, demure and concentrating on her slippered feet poking out under amber skirts.
“Lastel, I must have the night air, or faint away. Where is our host? We must thank him for a more complete hospitality than I had thought to find…”
The habitually pompous priest was simpering with undisguised delight, causing Lastel to raise an eyebrow, though Cime tugged coquettishly at his sleeve, and inquire as to its source: “Lord Molin?”
“It is nothing, dear man, nothing. Just so long since I have heard court Rankene—and from the mouth of a real lady… ” The Rankan priest, knowing well that his wife’s reputation bore no mitigation, chose to make sport of her, and of his town, before the foreign noblewoman did. And to make it more clear to Lastel that the joke was on them—the two Sanctuarites—and for the amusement of the voluptuous gray-eyed woman, he bowed low, and never did answer her genteel query as to the whereabouts of the First Hazard.
By the time he had promised to give their thanks and regards to the absent host when he saw him, the lady was gone, and Molin Torch-holder was left wishing he knew what it was that she saw in Lastel. Certainly it was not the dogs he raised, or his fortune, which was modest, or his business … well, yes, it might have been just that … drugs. Some who knew said the best krrf—black and Caronne-stamped—came from Lastel’s connections. Molin sighed, hearing his wife’s twitter among the crowd’s buzz. Where was that Hazard? The damn Mageguild was getting too arrogant. No one could throw a bash as star-studded as this one and then walk away from it as if the luminaries in attendance were nonentities. He was glad he had not prevailed on the prince to come along… What a woman! And what was her name? He had been told, he was sure, but just forgot…
Outside, torchlit, their breath steaming white through cold-sharpened night air, waiting for their ivory-screened wagon, they giggled over the distinction between “serious” and “solemn”: the First Hazard had been serious, Molin was solemn; Tempus the Hell-Hound was serious, Prince Kadakithis, solemn; the destabilization campaign they were undertaking in Sanctuary under the auspices of a Mygdonian-funded Nisibisi witch (who had come to Lastel, alias One-Thumb, in the guise of a comely caravan mistress hawking Caronne drugs) was serious; the threat of northern invasion, down-country at the Empire’s anus, was most solemn.
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