While he watched, Askelon appeared from the crowd to bar her path, a golden coin held out before him like a wand or a warding charm.
That fast did he have her, too fast for Tempus to get between them, simply by the mechanism of invoking her curse: for pay, she must give herself to any comer. He watched them flicker out of being with his stomach rolling and an ache in his throat. It was some little while before he saw anything external, and then he saw Nikodemos showing off his gift-cuirass to Janni.
The two came up to him wondering why it was, when everyone else’s armaments had been taken from them, Niko, who had arrived in shabby duty-gear, had been given better than ever he could afford. Tempus drew slowly into his present, noting Molin Torchholder’s over-gaudy figure nearby, and a kohl-eyed lady who might easily be an infiltrator from the Mygdonian Alliance talking to Lastel.
He asked his Stepsons to make her acquaintance: “She might just be smuggling drugs into Sanctuary with Lastel’s help, but do not arrest her for trifles. If she is a spy, perhaps she will try to recruit a Stepson disaffected enough with his lot. Either of you—a single agent or half a broken pair—could fit that description.”
“At the least, we must plumb her body’s secrets, Stealth,” Janni rumbled to Niko as the two strutted her way, looking virile and predatory.
With a scowl of concern for the Stepson to whom he was bound by ill-considered words, he sought out Torchholder, recalling, as he slid with murmured greetings and apologies through socialites and Hazard-class adepts, Niko’s blank and steady eyes: the boy knew his danger, and trusted Tempus, as a Sacred Bander must, to see him through it. No remonstrance or doubt had shown in the fighter called Stealth’s open countenance, that Tempus would come here against Askelon’s wishes, and risk a Stepson’s life. It was war, the boy’s calm said, what they both did and what they both knew. Later, perhaps there would be explanations—or not. Tempus knew that Niko, should he survive, would never broach the subject.
“Torchholder, I think you ought to go see to the First Consort’s baby,” he said as his hand came down heavily on the palace-priest’s be-baubled shoulder. Torchholder was already pulling on his beard, his mouth curled with anger, when he turned. Assessing Tempus’ demeanor, his face did a dance which ended in a mien of knowing caution. “Ah, yes, I did mean to look in on Seylalha and her babe. Thank you for reminding me, Hell-Hound.”
“Stay with her,” Tempus whispered sotto voce as Molin sought to brush by him, “or get them both to a safer place—”
“We got your message, this afternoon, Hound,” the privy priest hissed, and he was gone.
Tempus was just thinking that it was well Fete Week only came once yearly, when above him, in the pink, tented clouds, winter gloom began to spread; and beside him, a hand closed upon his left arm with a numbingly painful grip: Jihan had arrived.
Chapter 6
ASKELON OF MERIDIAN, entelechy of the seventh sphere, lord of dream and shadow, faced his would-be assassin little strengthened. The Hazards of Sanctuary had given what they could of power to him, but mortal strength and mortals’ magic could not replace what he had lost. His compassionate eyes had sunken deep under lined and arching brows; his skin was pallid; his cheeks hosted deep hollows like his colossus’s where it guarded an unknown sea, so fierce that folk there who had never heard of Sanctuary swore that in those stony caverns demons raised their broods.
It had cost him much to take flesh and make chase. It cost him more to remove Cime to the Mageguild’s innermost sanctum before the disturbance broke out above the celebrants on the lawn. But he had done it.
He said to her, “Your intention, free agent, was not clear. Your resolve was not firm. I am neither dead nor alive, because of you. Release me from this torture. I saw in your eyes you did not truly wish my demise, nor the madness that must come upon the world entire from the destruction of the place of salving dreams. You have lived awhile, now, in a world where dreams cannot solve problems, or be used to chart the future, or to heal or renew. What say you? You can change it, bring sanity back among the planes, and love to your aching heart. I will make you lady of Meridian. Our quays will once again rise crystal, streets will glitter gold, and my people will finish the welcoming paean they were singing when you shattered my heart.” As he spoke, he pulled from his vestments a kerchief and held it out, unfolded, in his right hand. There on snowy linen glittered the shards of the Heart of Askelon, the obsidian talisman which her rods had destroyed when he wore it on his wrist.
She had them out by then, taken down from her hair, and she twirled them, blue white and ominous, in her fingers.
He did not shrink from her, nor eye her weapons. He met her glance with his, and held, willing to take either outcome—anything but go on the way he was.
Then he heard the hardness of her laugh, and prepared himself to face the tithe collectors who held the mortgage on his soul.
Her aspect of blond youthfulness fell away with her laughter, and she stepped near him, saying, “Love, you offer me? You know my curse, do you not?”
“I can lift it, if you but spend one year with me.”
“You can lift it? Why should I believe you, father of magic? Not even gods must tell the truth, and you, I own, are beyond even the constraints of right and wrong which gods obey.”
“Will you not help me, and help yourself? Your beauty will not fade; I can give youth unending, and heal your heart, if you but heal mine.” His hand, outstretched to her, quivered. His eyes sparkled with unshed tears. “Shall you spend eternity as a murderer and a whore, for no reason? Take salvation, now it is offered. Take it for us both. Neither of us could claim such a boon from eternity again.”
Cime shrugged, and the woman’s eyes so much older than the three decades her body showed impaled him. “Some kill politicians, some generals, foot soldiers in the field. As for me, I think the mages are the problem, twisting times and worlds about like children play with string. And as for help, what makes you think either you or I deserve it? How many have you aided, without commensurate gain? When old Four-Eyes-Spitting-Fire-And-Four-Mouths-Spitting-Curses came after me, no one did anything, not my parents, or our priests or seers. They all just looked at their feet, as if the key to my salvation was written in Azehur’s sand. But it was not! And oh, did I learn from my wizard! More than he thought to teach me, since he crumbled into dust on my account, and that is sure.”
Yet, she stopped the rods twirling, and she did not start to sing.
They stared a time longer at each other, and while they saw themselves in one another, Cime began to cry, who had not wept in thrice a hundred years. And in time she turned her rods about, and butts first, she touched them to the shards of the obsidian he held in a trembling palm.
When the rods made contact, a blinding flare of blue commenced to shine in his hand, and she heard him say, “I will make things right with us,” as the room in which they stood began to fade away, and she heard a lapping sea and singing children and finger cymbals tinkling while lutes were strummed and pipes began to play.
Chapter 7
ALL HELL BREAKING loose could not have caused more pandemonium than Jihan’s father’s blood-red orbs peering down through shredded clouds upon the Mageguild’s grounds. The fury of the father of a jilted bride was met by Vashanka in his full manifestation, so that folk thrown to the ground lay silent, staring up at the battle in the sky with their fingers dug deep into chilling, spongy earth.
Vashanka’s two feet were widespread, one upon his temple, due west, one upon the Mageguild’s wall. His lightning bolts rocked the heavens, his golden locks whipped by his adversary’s black winds. Howls from the foreign Stormbringer’s cloudy throat pummeled eardrums; people rolled to their stomachs and buried their heads in their arms as the inconceivable cloud creature enveloped their god, and blackness reigned. Thunder bellowed; the black cloud pulsed spasmodically, lit from within.
In the tempest, Tempus shouted to Jihan, grabbed her arms in his hands: “Sto
p this; you can do it. Your pride, and his, are not worth so many lives.” A lightning bolt struck earth beside his foot, so close a blue sparkling aftercharge nuzzled his leg.
She jerked away, palmed her hair back, stood glaring at him with red flecks in her eyes. She shouted something back, her lips curled in a flash of light, but the gods’ roaring blotted out her words. Then she merely turned her back to him, raised her arms to heaven, and perhaps began to pray.
He had no more time for her; the god’s war was his; he felt the claw-cold blows Stormbringer landed, felt Vashanka’s substance leeching away. Yet he set off running, dodging cowerers upon the ground, adepts and nobles with their cloaks wrapped about their heads, seeking his Stepsons: he knew what he must do.
He did not stop for arms or horses, when he found Niko and Janni, but set off through the raging din toward the Avenue of Temples, where the child the man and god had begotten upon the First Consort was kept.
Handsigns got them through until speech was useful, when they had run west through the lawns and alleys, coming to Vashanka’s temple grounds from the back. Inside the shrine’s chancery, it was quieter, shielded from the sky that heaved with light and dark.
Niko shared his weapons, those Askelon had given him: a dirk to Tempus, the sword to Janni. “But you have nothing left,” Janni protested in the urgent undertone they were all employing in the shadowed corridors of their embattled god’s earthly home. “I have this,” Niko replied, and tapped his armored chest.
Whether he meant the cuirass Askelon had given him, the heart underneath, or his mental skills, Tempus did not ask, just tossed the dirk contemptuously back, and dashed out into the murky temple hall.
They smelted sorcery before they saw the sick green light or felt the curdling cold. Outside the door under which wizardsign leaked like sulphur from a yellow spring, Janni muttered blackly. Niko’s lips were drawn back in a grin: “After you, commander?”
Tempus wrenched the doors apart, once Janni had cut the leather strap where it had been drawn within to secure the latch, and beheld Molin Torchholder in the midst of witchfire, wrestling with more than Tempus would have thought he could handle, and holding his own.
On the floor in the corner a honey-haired northern dancer hugged a man-child to her breast, her mouth an “ooh” of relief, as if now that Tempus was here, she was surely saved.
He took time to grimace politely at the girl, who insisted in mistaking him for his god—his senses were speeding much faster than even the green, stinking whirlwind in the middle of the room. He was not so sure that anything was salvageable, here, or even if he cared if girl or priest or child or town … or god… were to be saved. But then he looked behind him, and saw his Stepsons, Niko on the left and Janni with sword drawn, both ready to advance on hell itself, would he but bid them, and he raised a hand and led them into the lightfight, eyes squinted nearly shut and all his body tingling as his preternatural abilities came into play.
Molin’s ouster was uppermost in his mind; he picked the glareblind priest up bodily and threw him, wrenching the god’s golden icon from his frozen fist. He heard a grunt, a snapping-in of breath, behind, but did not look around to see reality fade away. He was fighting by himself, now, in a higher, colder place full of day held at bay and Vashanka’s potent breath in his right ear. “It is well you have come, manchild; I can use your help this day.” The left is the place of attack in team battle; a shield-holding line drifts right, each trying to protect his open side. He had Vashanka on his right, to support him, and a shield, full-length and awful, came to be upon his own left arm. The thing he fought here, the Stormbringer’s shape, was part cat, part manlike, and its sword cut as hard as an avalanche. Its claws chilled his breath away. Behind, black and gray was split with sunrise colors, Vashanka’s blazon snapping on a flag of sky. He thrust at the clouds and was parried with cold that ran up his sword and seared the skin of his palm so that his sweat froze to ice and layers of his flesh bonded to a sharkskin hilt… That gave him pause, for it was his own sword, come from whereever the mages secreted it, which moved in his hand. Pink glowed that blade, as always when his god sanctified His servant’s labor. His right was untenanted, suddenly, but Vashanka’s strength was in him, and it must be enough.
He fought it unto exhaustion, he fought it to a draw. The adversaries stood in clouds, typhoon-breaths rasping, both seeking strength to fight on. And then he had to say it: “Let this slight go, Stormbringer. Vengeance is disappointing, always. You soil yourself, having to care. Let her stay where she is, Weather Gods’ Father; a mortal sojourn will do her good. The parent is not responsible for the errors of the child. Nor the child for the parent.” And deliberately, he put down the shield the god had given him and peeled the sticky swordhilt from a skinless palm, laying his weapon atop the shield. “Or surmount me, and have done with it. I will not die of exhaustion for a god too craven to fight by my side. And I will not stand aside and let you have the babe. You see, it is me you must punish, not my god. I led Askelon to Cime, and disposed her toward him. It is my transgression, not Vashanka’s. And I am not going to make it easy for you: you will have to slaughter me, which I would much prefer to being the puppet of yet another omnipotent force.”
And with a growl that was long and seared his inner ear and set his teeth on edge, the clouds began to dissolve around him, and the darkness to fade away.
He blinked, and rubbed his eyes, which were smarting with underworld cold, and when he took his hands away he found himself standing in a seared circle of stinking fumes with two coughing Stepsons, both of whom were breathing heavily, but neither of whom looked to have suffered any enduring harm. Janni was supporting Niko, who had discarded the gift-cuirass, and it glowed as if cooling from a forger’s heat between his feet. The dirk and sword, too, lay on the smudged flagstones, and Tempus’ sword atop the heap.
There passed an interval of soft exchanges, which did not explain either where Tempus had disappeared to, or why Niko’s gear had turned white-hot against the Stormbringer’s whirlpool cold, and of assessing damages (none, beyond frostbite, blisters, scrapes and Tempus’ flayed swordhand) and suggestions as to where they might recoup their strength.
The tearful First Consort was calmed, and Torchholder’s people (no one could locate the priest) told to watch her well.
Outside the temple, they saw that the mist had let go of the streets; an easy night lay chill and brisk upon the town. The three walked back to the Mageguild at a leisurely pace, to reclaim their panoplies and their horses. When they got there they found that the Second and Third Hazards had claimed the evening’s confrontation to be of their making, a cosmological morality play, their most humbly offered entertainment which the guests had taken too much to heart. Did not Vashanka triumph? Was not the cloud of evil vanquished? Had not the wondrous tent of pink-and-lemon summer sky returned to illuminate the Mageguild’s fete?
Janni snarled and flushed with rage at the adepts’ dissembling, threatening to go turn Torchholder (who had preceded them back among the celebrants, disheveled, loudmouthed, but none the worse for wear) upside down to see if any truth might fall out, but Niko cautioned him to let fools believe what fools believe, and to make his farewells brief and polite—whatever they felt about the mages, they had to live with them.
When at last they rode out of the Street of Arcana toward the Alekeep, to quench their well-earned thirsts where Niko could check on the faring of a girl who mattered to him, he was ponying the extra horse he had lent Askelon, since neither the dream lord nor his companion Jihan had been anywhere to be found among guests trying grimly to recapture at least a semblance of revelry.
For Niko, the slow ride through mercifully dark streets was a godsend, the deep midnight sky a mask he desperately needed to keep between him and the world awhile. In its cover, he could afford to let his composure, slipping away inexorably of its own weight, fall from him altogether. As it happened, because of the riderless horse, he was bringing up the rear. That
, too, suited him, as did their tortuous progress through the ways and intersections thronging intermittently with upper-class (if there was such a distinction to be made here) Ilsigs ushering in the new year. Personally, he did not like the start of it: the events of the last twenty-four hours he considered somewhat less than auspicious. He fingered the enameled cuirass with its twining snakes and glyphs which the entelechy Askelon had given him, touched the dirk at his waist, the matching sword slung at his hip. The hilts of both were worked as befitted weapons bound for a son of the armies, with the lightning and the lions and the bulls which were, the world over, the signatures of its Storm Gods, the gods of war and death. But the workmanship was foreign, and the raised demons on both scabbards belonged to the primal deities of an earlier age, whose sway was misty, everywhere but among the western islands where Niko had gone to strive for initiation into his chosen mystery and mastery over body and soul. The most appropriate legends graced these opulent arms that a shadow lord had given him; in the old ways and the elder gods and in the disciplines of transcendent perception, Niko sought perfection, a mystic calm. And the weapons were perfect, save for two blemishes: they were fashioned from precious metals, and made nearly priceless by the antiquity of their style; they were charmed, warm to the touch, capable of meeting infernal forces and doing damage upon icy whirlwinds sent from unnamed gods. Nikodemos favored unarmed kills, minimal effort, precision. He judged himself sloppy should it become necessary to parry an opponent’s stroke more than once. The temple-dancing exhibitions of proud swordsmen who “tested each other’s mettle” and had time to indulge in style and disputatious dialogue repelled him: one got in, made the kill, and got out, hopefully leaving the enemy unknowing; if not, confused.
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