As her laughter tinkled, he nuzzled her: “Did you manage to … ?”
“Oh, yes. I had a perfectly lovely time. What a wonderful idea of yours this was,” she whispered, still speaking court Rankene, a dialect she had been using exclusively in public ever since the two of them—the Maze-dweller One-Thumb and the escaped sorcerer-slayer Cime—had decided that the best cover for them was that which her magic provided: they need not do more. Her brother Tempus knew that Lastel was actually One-Thumb, and that she was with him, but he would hesitate to reveal them: he had given his silence, if not his blessing, to their union. Within reasonable limits, they considered themselves safe to bargain lives and information to both sides in the coming crisis. Even now, with the war barely under way, they had already started. This night’s work was her pleasure and his profit. When they reached his modest east-side estate, she showed him the portion of what she had done to the First Hazard which he would like best and most probably survive, if his heart was strong. For her service, she demanded a Rankan soldat’s worth of black krrf, before the act. When he had paid her, and watched her melt it with water over a flame, cool it, and bring it to him on the bed, her fingers stirring the viscous liquid, he was glad he had not argued about her price, or about her practice of always charging one.
Chapter 2
WIZARD WEATHER BLEW in off the sea later that night, as quickly as one of the Sanctuary whores could blow a client a kiss, or a pair of Stepsons disperse an unruly crowd. Everyone in the suddenly mist-enshrouded streets of the Maze ran for cover; adepts huddled under beds with their best warding spells wrapped tighter than blankets around shivering shoulders; east-siders bade their jesters perform and their musicians play louder; dogs howled; cats yowled; horses screamed in the palace stables and tried to batter their stall boards down.
Some unlucky ones did not make it to safety before a dry thunder roared and lightning flashed and in the streets, the mist began to glitter, thicken, chill. It rolled head-high along byway and alley, claws of ice scrabbling at shuttered windows, barred doors. Where it found life, it shredded bodies, lacerating limbs, stealing away warmth and souls and leaving only flayed carcasses frozen in the streets.
A pair of Stepsons—mercenary special forces whom the prince’s marshal, Tempus, commanded—was caught out in the storm, but it could not be said that the weather killed one: the team had been investigating uncorroborated reports that a warehouse conveniently situated at a juncture of three major sewers was being used by an alchemist to concoct and store incendiaries. The surviving partner guessed that his teammate must have lit a torch, despite the cautions of research: human wastes, flour, sulphur and more had gone in through those now nonexistent doors. Though the problem the team had been dispatched to investigate was solved by a concussive fireball that threw the second Stepson, Nikodemos, through a window into an intersection, singeing his beard and brows and eyelashes, the young Sacred Band member relived the circumstances leading to his partner’s death repeatedly, agonizing over the possibility that he was to blame throughout the night, alone in the pair’s billet. So consumed was he with grief at the death of his mate, he did not even realize that his friend had saved his life: the fireball and ensuing conflagration had blown back the mist and made an oven of the wharfside; Wideway was freed from the vicious fog for half its length. He had ridden at a devil’s pace out of Sanctuary home to the Stepsons’ barracks, which once had been a slaver’s estate and thus had rooms enough for Tempus to allow his hard won mercenaries the luxury of privacy: ten pairs plus thirty single agents comprised the team’s core group—until this evening past…
Sun was trying to beat back the night, Niko could see it through his window. He had not even been able to return with a body. His beloved spirit-twin would be denied the honor of a hero’s fiery bier. He could not cry; he simply sat, huddled, amputated, diminished and cold upon his bed, watching a sunray inch its way toward one of his sandaled feet.
Thus he did not see Tempus approaching with the first light of day haloing his just-bathed form as if he were some god’s own avatar, which at times—despite his better judgment—his curse, and his battle with it, forced him to become. The tall, autumnal figure stooped and peered in the window, sun gilding his yarrow honey hair and his vast bronze limbs where they were free of his army-issue woolen chiton. He wore no arms or armor, no cloak or shoes; furrows deepened on his brow, and a sere frown tightened his willful mouth. Sometimes, the expression in his long, slitted eyes grew readable: this was such a time. The pain he was about to face was a pain he had known too well, too often. It brought to features not brutal enough by half for their history or profession the slight, defensive smile which would empty out his eyes. When he could, he knocked. Hearing no reply, he called softly, “Niko?” And again…
Having let himself in, he waited for the Stepson, who looked younger than the quarter-century he claimed, to raise his head. He met a gaze as blank as his own, and bared his teeth.
The youth nodded slowly, made to rise, sank back when Tempus motioned “stay” and joined him on his wood-framed cot in blessed shadow. Both sat then, silent, as day filled up the room, stealing away their hiding place. Elbows on knees, Niko thanked him for coming. Tempus suggested that under the circumstances a bier could still be made, and funerary games would not be out of order. When he got no response, the mercenary’s commander sighed rattlingly and allowed that he himself would be honored to perform the rites. He knew how the Sacred Banders who had adopted the war name “Stepsons” revered him. He did not condone or encourage it, but since they had given him their love and were probably doomed to the man for it—even as their original leader, Stepson, called Abarsis, had been doomed—Tempus felt responsible for them. His instructions and his curse had sent the gelded warrior-priest Abarsis to his death, and such fighters as these could not offer loyalty to a lesser man, to a pompous prince or an abstracted cause. Sacred Bands were the mercenaries’ elite; this one’s history under the Slaughter Priest’s command was nearly mythical; Abarsis had brought his men to Tempus before committing suicide in a most honorable fashion, leaving them as his parting gift—and as his way of ensuring that Tempus could not just walk away from the god Vashanka’s service: Abarsis had been Vashanka’s priest.
Of all the mercenaries Rankan money had enabled Tempus to gather for Prince/Governor Kadakithis, this young recruit was the most singular. There was something remarkable about the finely made slate-haired fighter with his quiet hazel eyes and his understated manner, something that made it seem perfectly reasonable that this self-effacing youngster with his clean long limbs and his quick canny smile had been the right-side partner of a Syrese legend twice his age for nine years. Tempus would rather have been doing anything else than trying to give comfort to the bereaved Stepson Nikodemos. Choosing a language appropriate to philosophy and grief (for Niko was fluent in six tongues, ancient and modern), he asked the youth what was in his heart.
“Gloom,” Niko responded in the mercenary-argot, which admitted many tongues, but only the bolder emotions: pride, anger, insult, declaratives, imperatives, absolutes.
“Gloom,” Tempus agreed in the same linguistic pastiche, yet ventured: “You will survive it. We all do.”
“Oh, Riddler… I know… You did, Abarsis did—twice,” he took a shivering breath; “but it is not easy. I feel so naked. He was… always on my left, if you understand me—where you are now.”
“Consider me here for the duration, then, Niko.”
Niko raised too-bright eyes, slowly shaking his head. “In our spirits’ place of comfort, where trees and men and life are one, he is still there. How can I rest, when my rest-place holds his ghost? There is no maat left for me …do you know the word?”
Tempus did: balance, equilibrium, the tendency of things to make a pattern, and that pattern to be discernible, and therefore revivifying. He thought for a moment, gravely, not about Niko’s problem, but about a youthful mercenary who spoke offhandedly of adept’s refreshment
s and archmagical meditations, who routinely transported his spirit into a mystical realm and was accustomed to meeting another spirit there. He said at last:” I do not read it ill that your friend waits there. Why is it bad, unless you make it so? Maat, if you have had it, you will find again. With him, you are bound in spirit, not just in flesh. He would be hurt to hurt you, and to see that you are afraid of what once you loved. His spirit will depart your place of relaxation when we put it formally to rest. Yet you must make a better peace with him, and surmount your fear. It is well to have a friendly soul waiting at the gate when your time comes around. Surely, you love him still?”
That broke the young Stepson, and Tempus left him curled upon his bed, so that his sobs need not be silent, and he could heal upon his own.
Outside, leaning against the doorjamb, the planked door carefully closed, Tempus put his fingers to the bridge of his nose and rubbed his eyes. He had surprised himself, as well as the boy, offering Niko such far-reaching support. He was not sure he dared to mean it, but he had said it. Niko’s team had functioned as the Stepsons’ ad hoc liaisons, coordinating (but more usually arbitrating disputes among) the mercenaries and the Hell-Hounds (the Rankan Imperial Elite Guards), the Ilsig regular army and the militia Tempus was trying to covertly make out of some carefully-chosen street urchins, slit purses, and sleeves—the real rulers of this overblown slum and the only people who ever knew what was going on in Sanctuary, a town which might just become a strategic staging area if war did come down from the north. As liaisons, both teammates had come to him often for advice. Part of Niko’s workload had been the making of an adequate swordsman out of a certain Ilsig thief named Hanse, to whom Tempus had owed a debt he did not care to personally discharge. But the young backstreeter, emboldened by his easy early successes, had proved increasingly irascible and contentious when Niko aware that Tempus was indebted to Hanse and Kadakithis inexplicably favored the thief—endeavored to lead him far beyond slash-and-thrust infantry tactics into the subtleties of Niko’s own expertise: cavalry strategies, guerrilla tactics, western fighting forms that dispensed with weaponry by accenting surprise, precision, and meditation-honed instinct. Though the thief recognized the value of what the Stepson offered, his pride made him sneer: he could not admit his need to know, would not chance being found wanting, and hid his fear of failure behind anger. After three months of justifying the value of methods and mechanics the Stepson felt to be self-explanatory (black stomach blood, bright lung blood, or pink foam from the ears indicates a mortal strike; yarrow root shaved into a wound quells its pain; ginseng, chewed, renews stamina; mandrake in an enemy’s stewpot incapacitates a company, monkshood decimates one; green or moldy hay downs every horse on your opponents’ line; cheese wire, the right handhold, or a knife from behind obviates the need for passwords, protracted dissembling, or forged papers) Niko had turned to Tempus for a decision as to whether instruction must continue. Shadowspawn, called Hanse, was a natural bladesman, as good as any man wishing to wield a sword for a living needed to be—on the ground, Niko had said. As far as horsemanship, he had added almost sadly, niceties could not be taught to a cocky novice who spent more time arguing that he would never need to master them than practicing what he was taught. Similarly, so far as tradecraft went, Hanse’s fear of being labeled a Stepson-in-training or an apprentice Sacred Bander prevented him from fraternizing with the squadron during the long evenings when shop-talk and exploits flowed freely, and every man found much to learn. Niko had shrugged, spreading his hands to indicate an end to his report. Throughout it (the longest speech Tempus had ever heard the Stepson make), Tempus could not fail to mark the disgust so carefully masked, the frustration and the unwillingness to admit defeat which had hidden in Nikodemos’ lowered eyes and blank face. Tempus’ decision to pronounce the student Shadowspawn graduated, gift him with a horse, and go on to new business had elicited a subtle inclination of head—an agreement, nothing less—from the youthful and eerily composed junior mercenary. Since then, he had not seen him. And, upon seeing him, he had not asked any of the things he had gone there to find out: not one question as to the exact circumstances of his partner’s death, or the nature of the mist which had ravaged the Maze, had passed his lips. Tempus blew out a noisy breath, grunted, then pushed off from where he leaned against the whitewashed barracks wall. He would go out to see what headway the band had made with the bier and the games, set for sundown behind the walled estate. He did not need to question the boy further, only to listen to his own heart.
He was not unaware of the ominous events of the preceding evening: sleep was never his. He had made a midnight creep through the sewage tunnels into Kadakithis’ most private apartments, demonstrating that the old palace was impossible to secure, in hopes that the boy-prince would stop prattling about “winter palace/summer palace” and move his retinue into the new fortress Tempus had built for him on the eminently defensible spit near the lighthouse with that very end in mind. So it was that he had heard firsthand from the prince (who all the while was making a valiant attempt not to bury his nose in a scented handkerchief he was holding almost casually but had fumbled desperately to find when first Tempus appeared, reeking of sewage, between two of his damask bedroom hangings) about the killer mist and the dozen lives it claimed. Tempus had let his silence agree that the mages must be right, such a thing was totally mystifying, though the “thunder without rain” and its results had explained itself to him quite clearly. Nothing is mysterious after three centuries and more of exploring life’s riddles, except perhaps why gods allow men magic, or why sorcerers allow men gods.
Equally reticent was Tempus when Kadakithis, wringing his lacquer-nailed hands, told him of the First Hazard’s unique demise, and wondered with dismal sarcasm if the adepts would again try to blame the fall of one of their number on Tempus’ alleged sister (here he glanced sidelong up at Tempus from under his pale Imperial curls), the escaped mage-killer who, he was beginning to think, was a figment of sorcerers’ nightmares: When they had had this “person” in the pits, awaiting trial and sentence, no two witnesses could agree on the description of the woman they saw; when she had escaped, no one saw her go. It might be that the adepts were purging their Order again, and didn’t want anyone to know, didn’t Tempus agree? In the face of Kadakithis’ carefully thought-out policy statement, meant to protect the prince from involvement and the soldier from implication, Tempus refrained from comment.
The First Hazard’s death was a welcome surprise to Tempus, who indulged in an active, if surreptitious, bloodfeud with the Mageguild. Sortilege of any nature he could not abide. He had explored and discarded it all: philosophy, systems of personal discipline such as Niko employed, magic, religion, the sort of eternal side-taking purveyed by the warrior-mages who wore the Blue Star. The man who in his youth had proclaimed that those things which could be touched and perceived were those which he preferred had not been changed by time, only hardened. Adepts and sorcery disgusted him. He had faced wizards of true power in his youth, and his sorties upon the bloody roads of life had been colored by those encounters: he yet bore the curse of one of their number, and his hatred of them was immortal. He had thought that even should he die, his despite would live on to harass them—he hoped that it were true. For to fight with enchanters of skill, the same skills were needed, and he eschewed those arts. The price was too high. He would never acknowledge power over freedom, eternal servitude of the spirit was too great a cost for mastery in life. Yet a man could not stand alone against witchfire-hatred. To survive, he had been forced to make a pact with the Storm God, Vashanka. He had been brought to collar like a wild dog. He heeled to Vashanka, these days, at the god’s command. But he did not like it.
There were compensations, if such they could be called. He lived interminably, though he could not sleep at all; he was immune to simple, nasty war-magics; he had a sword which cut through spells like cheese and glowed when the god took an interest. In battle he was more than twice as fast
as a mortal man—while they moved so slowly he could do as he willed upon a crowded field which was a melee to all but him, and even extend his hyper speed to his mount, if the horse was of a certain strain and tough constitution. And wounds he took healed quickly instantly if the god loved him that day, more slowly if they had been quarreling. Only once—when he and his god had had a serious falling-out over whether or not to rape his sister—had Vashanka truly deserted him. But even then, as if his body were simply accustomed to doing it, his regenerative abilities remained—much slowed, very painful, but there.
For these reasons, and many more, he had a mystique, but no charisma. Only among mercenaries could he look into eyes free from the glint of fear. He stayed much among his own, these days in Sanctuary. Abarsis’ death had struck home harder than he cared to admit. It seemed, sometimes, that one more soul laying down its life for him and one more burden laid upon him would surpass his capacity and he would crack apart into the desiccated dust he doubtless was.
Crossing the whitewashed court, passing the stables, his Trôs horses stuck steel-gray muzzles over their half-doors and whickered. He stopped and stroked them, speaking soft words of comradeship and endearment, before he left to let himself out the back gate to the training ground, a natural amphitheatre between hillocks where the Stepsons drilled the few furtive Ilsigs wishing to qualify for the militia-reserves Kadakithis was funding.
He was thinking, as he closed the gate behind him and squinted out over the arena (counting heads and fitting names to them where men sat perched atop the fence or lounged against it or raked sand or counted off paces for sunset’s funerary games), that it was a good thing no one had been able to determine the cause of the ranking Hazard’s death. He would have to do something about his sister Cime, and soon—something substantive. He had given her the latitude befitting a probable sibling and childhood passion, and she had exceeded his forbearance. He had been willing to overlook the fact that he had been paying her debts with his soul ever since an archmage had cursed him on her account, but he was not willing to ignore the fact that she refused to abstain from taking down magicians. It might be her right, in general, to slay sorcerers, but it was not her right to do it here, where he was pinned tight between law and morality as it was. The whole conundrum of how he might successfully deal with Cime was something he did not want to contemplate. So he did not, just then, only walked, cold brown grass between his toes, to the near side of the chest high wooden fence behind which, on happier days, his men schooled Ilsigs and each other. Today they were making a bier there, dragging dry branches from the brake beyond Vashanka’s altar, a pile of stones topping a rise, due east, where the charioteers worked their teams.
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