Blood Ties tw-9

by Robert Lynn Asprin

  Stilcho was the best, thus far, this dead man who, whenever he could, gave her more gentleness than anyone had ever given but a strange doomed lord who still filled her dreams and her daydreams. Stilcho held her gently, Stilcho never demanded, never struck her. Stilcho gave something back, but he took-Shipri and Shalpa, he took; he drained her patience and her strength, waked her at night with his nightmares, harried her with his wild fancies and his talk of hell. She could not provide enough money to get them out of this misery, and a single mention of seeking help from Ischade drew irrational rage from him, made him scream at her, which in her other men had ended with blows, always with blows. So she flinched and kept silent and went out again to steal, her bright Rankene hair done up in a brown scarf, her face unwashed, her body anonymous and all but sexless in the ragged clothes she wore.

  But desperation drove her now. She thought again and again of the things she had known, the luxuries she had had in the beautiful house, the gold and the silver that would have melted in the fire that ended that life. And even among Sanctuary's brazen thieves there was a notable reluctance to venture into that charred ruin; they came, of course. But none of them knew building from building or where the walls had stood, or where certain tables had been.

  So when evening fell she went back again and began her sooty search, furtive as the rats which had become common in this stricken district, hiding from other searchers. She had never yet found a thing, not the silver, not the gold, which must exist as a flat puddle of cold metal somewhere below; but she had tunneled for weeks into the sooty ruin, and searched what had been the hall.

  That was why she came late home. And this time-gods, she trembled so with terror in the streets that her legs had practically no strength left for the stairs this time she brought a lump of metal the size of her fist; and to Stilcho's anxious, angry demand where she had been, why she was besooted (she had always washed before, in the rainbarrel, and wiped it all to general grime on her dark clothes) and why she had let wisps of her yellow hair from beneath her scarf-

  "Stilcho," she said, and held out that heavy thing which was, for all the fire and its changing, too heavy to be other than what it was. Tears ran down her face. It was wealth she had, as Sanctuary's lower levels measured it. Where she had rubbed it, it gleamed gold in the dim light from the lamp he had burned waiting for her.

  Finally, to one of her desperate men, she had given something great enough to get that tenderness she had longed for. "Oh, Moria," he said; and spoiled it with: "Oh gods, from there! Dammit, Moria! Fool!" But he hugged her and held her till it hurt.

  The river house waited, throwing out light from one unshuttered window, across the weed-grown garden, the trees and the brush and the rosebushes which embedded the iron fence and the warded gate.

  Inside, in the light of candles which were never consumed, in a clutter of silks and fine garments that lay forgotten once acquired, Ischade sat in her absolute black, black of hair, of eye, of garments; but there was color in her hands, a little lump of blue stone that had also known that fire. She had gathered it out of the ash in a moment's distraction-she was also a thief, by her true profession; and if her hand had suffered bums from the ash, the stone had sucked all the heat into itself, and rested cool in unscarred, dusky fingers.

  It was the largest piece of what had been the globe. It was power. It had associated with fire, and flame was the element of her own magic, fire, and spirit. It was well it reside where it did; and it was best if no one in Sanctuary were aware just where it resided.

  Hoof-falls sounded outside, echoing off the walls of the warehouses which faced her little refuge, while the White Foal murmured its rain-swollen way past her back door. She closed her hand till flesh met flesh; and the blue stone was gone, magician's trick.

  She opened the outer gate for her visitor and opened the front door when she heard his steps on the porch. And looked around from where she sat as she heard him come in.

  "Good evening," she said. And when he stood there disregarding the invitation and too evidently in a hurry about their business together: "Come sit down-like my proper guest."

  "Magics," he said in his lowest tone. "I'll warn you, woman-"

  "I thought-" She made her voice a higher echo of his, and with a taint of slow mockery: "I did think you were in better control than that."

  He stood there in the midst of her scattered silks, the littered carpet and scarf-strewn chairs. And she shut the door at his back, never stirring from where she sat. He stared at her, and a little spark of reckoning flickered in his eyes. Or it was the disturbance of the candles that sent shadows racing? "I did think your hospitality was better than this."

  The fire was there, inside her, it always was; and it stirred and grew in that way that, last night, should have sent her on the hunt. "I waited for you," she said. "I'm quite at my worst."

  "No damned tricks."

  "Is this how you pay your debts? I can wait, you know. So can you, or you'd be prey to your enemies. And you've so much vanity." She gestured at the wine on the tables. "So have I. Will you? Or shall we both be animals?"

  He might have attempted rape, and then murder; she felt the tilt in that direction. And she felt him pull the other way. Surprisingly he smiled.

  And came and sat down across from her, and drank her wine, in slow silence there at the empty hearth. "We'll be pulling out," he told her in the course of that drinking, amid other small talk. "We'll leave the town to-local forces. I'll be taking all of mine with me."

  That was challenge. Strat, he meant. She stared at him from under her brows and let her mouth tighten ever so slightly at the corners. Her hand came to rest by the base of the wineglass. His covered it, and it was like the touch of fire. He sat there, his fingers moving ever so delicately, and let the fire grow-Wait, then. Enjoy the waiting. Till it was hard to breathe evenly, and the room blurred in the dilation of her eyes.

  "We can wait all night," he said, while her pulse hammered at her temples and the room seemed to have too little air. She smiled at him, a slow baring of teeth.

  "On the other hand," she said, and let her leg brush his beneath the table, "we could regret it in the morning."

  He got up and drew her up against him. There was no time for undressing, no thinking of anything more, but a tending toward the couch close at hand, a hasty and rough passage of feverish hands. He did not so much as shed the mail shirt; it resisted her fingers and she clenched her hands into his outer clothing. "Careful," she said, "slow, go slowly-" when he thrust himself at her. Warning him, with the last of her sanity.

  The room went white, and blue and green, and thunder cracked, spinning her through the dark, through warm summer air, through-

  -nowhere, till she came to herself again, lying dazed under a starry sky, with the ramshackle maze of Sanctuary buildings leaning above her. She felt nothing for a while, nothing at all, and shut her eyes and blinked at the stars again, her fingers exploring what should have been silk, but was instead dusty cobblestone. The back of her head hurt where she had fallen. She felt bruised along her whole back, and where he had touched her she felt a burning like acid.

  He never lost consciousness. For a moment he was clearly elsewhere, then lying stunned on pavement with a curbside against his ribs. He had hit hard, and he ached; and he likewise burned, not least with the slow realization that he was not in the riverside house, that he was lying in a midnight street somewhere in the uptown, and that he hurt like very hell.

  He did not curse. He had learned a bloody-minded patience with the doings of gods and wizards. He only thought of killing, her, anything within reach, and most immediately any fool who found amusement in his plight.

  When he had picked himself up off his face and gained his balance again there was no question which direction he was going.

  * * *

  It was a long tangle of streets, a long, limping course home, in which she had abundant time to gather the fragments of her composure. Her head ached. Her spin
e felt quite disarranged. And for the most urgent discomfort there was no relief until she rounded a comer and came face to face with one of Sanctuary's unwashed and ill-mannered.

  The knife-wielding ruffian gave her no choice and that contented her no end. She left him in the alley where he had accosted her, likely to be taken for some poor sod dead of an overdose of one of Sanctuary's manifold vices. His eyes had that kind of vacancy. In a little while he would simply stop living, as the chance within his body multiplied by increments and everything went irredeemably wrong. The poor and the streetfolk died most easily: their health was generally bad to begin with, and his was decidedly worse even before she left him lying there quite forgetful that he had been with any woman.

  She was, therefore, in a more reasoning frame of mind when she arrived on the street by the bridge, and walked up the road which most ignored, to her hedge and her fence on this back street of Sanctuary. But she was not the first one.

  Tempus was already there, walking sword in hand about the perimeter, up along the fence; and he stopped in his tracks when she came from beyond the trees, into the feeble glow of the stars overhead and the light from between her shutters. There was rage in every line of him. But she kept walking, limping somewhat, until they were face to face. He looked her up and down. The sword inclined its point to the ground, slowly, and hung in his fist.

  "Where were you?" he asked. "And where in hell is my horse?"

  "Horse?"

  "My horse!" He pointed with the sword to the front of the fence and the hedge, as if it were perfectly evident. In fact there was no horse in sight and he had ridden in; she had heard him. She gathered her forces and limped on to the front of the en-hedged fence, where the ground, still soft from the rain, was churned and trampled by large hooves.

  And where one of her rosebushes was trampled to splinters.

  She stood there staring at the ruin, and the light inside her shuttered house flickered brighter, glowed with a white incandescence. It died slowly as she turned. "A girl," she said. "A girl is the thief. At my house. From my guest."

  "This wasn't your doing."

  His voice was calmer, restrained.

  "No," she said in soft and measured tones, "I do assure you." And drew herself up to all her height when he reached for her. "I've had quite enough, thank you."

  "It threw you too."

  "To the far side of the mage quarter." She drew in a hissing breath through wide nostrils. It smelled of horse and mud, trampled roses, and bitch. And there was wrath and chagrin both in this huge man, wrath that began to assume a certain embarrassed self-consciousness. "Our curses are not compatible, it seems. Storm and fire. And we were so well begun."

  He said nothing. His breathing was rapid. He walked past her to the trampled ground and gave a whistle, piercingly shrill.

  She caught it up for him, reached inside and flung it to the winds, so that he winced and faced her in startlement.

  "If that will bring him," she said, "that will carry to him."

  "That will bring him," Tempus said, "if he's alive."

  "A young woman took him. Her smell is everywhere. And krrf. Don't you smell it?"

  He drew in a larger breath. "Young woman."

  "Not one I know. But I will. My roses come very dear."

  "A bloody young bitch." It sounded particular and specific, his eyes narrowing in some precise identification.

  "In frequent heat. Yes."

  "Chenaya."

  "Chenaya." She repeated the name and stored it away carefully. She waved the gate open. "A drink, Tempus Thales?"

  He slid the sword into its sheath and walked with her, a light touch beneath her arm, steadying her as she walked up the steps, and wished the door open, a blaze of light into the dark thicket of the yard.

  "Sit down," he said when they were inside; his voice was a marvel of self restrained gentleness; he poured wine for her, and then for himself. Then: "I owe you an apology," he said, as if the words were individually expensive. Then further: "There's mud in your hair."

  She gave out a breath of a laugh, and breathed larger and wider and found herself awake. It was not a pleasant laugh, as the look on Tempus's face was not a pleasant one. "There's mud on your chin," she said, and he wiped at it, with a hand likewise smudged. They both stank of the streets. He grinned suddenly, wolflike. "I'd say," Ischade said, "we were fortunate."

  He drank off his glass. She poured another round.

  "Do you get drunk?" he asked, directly.

  "Not readily. Do you?"

  "No," he said. There was a difference in his tone. It was not arrogance. Or pride. He looked her straight in the eyes and it was clear that tonight, this moment, it was not a man-woman piece of business. It was similar perspective. It was a rare moment, she sensed, that a man got this close to Tempus Thales. And a woman-perhaps it was the first time.

  She recalled him in the alley, on the horse, that something-to-prove manner of his.

  But defeated, robbed and offended, he was being astonishingly sensible. He was going far to excess in it, and again she felt that precarious balance, polar opposite to the direction black rage insisted he go. He smiled at her and drank her wine, issues all forever unresolved.

  One expected a man of vast lifespan to be complex. Or mad, at least to the limited perspective of those who lacked perspective. It was vitality of all sorts which was his curse, healing, sex, immortality.

  Annihilation was hers. And the apposition of their curses was impossible.

  She laughed, and leaned her elbow on the table and wiped her mouth with the back of a soiled hand.

  "What amuses you?" There, the suspicion was quite ready.

  "Little. Little. Your horse and my roses. Us." As distant hooves echoed in the streets, within her awareness. "Shall we dice for the bitch?"

  He had heard the horse coming. He recovered himself, as she had guessed, became the stranger again, and headed for her door.

  Well enough.

  She came out a moment or two later, when the horse had come thundering up, and brought a cloak which had lain underfoot for months. It was velvet, soiled, and a horse which had run the width of Sanctuary was bound to be sweated. "Here," she said, joining him at the open gate. "For the horse." Which was rolling its eyes and lolling its tongue and reeking of krrf as he worked at the cinch. Tempus snatched the skewed saddle off, jerked the cloak from her hands, and used it on the Tros.

  "Damn," Tempus said over and over.

  "Let me." She moved in despite the hazard from both, put out a calm hand, and touched the Tros's bowed forehead; it was a little exertion. Her head throbbed and it cost her more than she had thought. But the horse steadied, and his breathing grew more regular. "There."

  Tempus wiped and rubbed, walked the horse in a little circle on the level ground. And never said a word.

  "He's all right," she said. He knew her magics, that they could heal-others with some skill; her own hurts with less effectiveness. He had seen her work before.

  He looked her way. She demanded no gratitude, nor expected any. There was a sour taste in her mouth for this abuse of an animal. Their personal discomfiture she could find irony in. Not this.

  She stood with her arms folded and her cloak about her while Tempus carefully, without a word, threw the sweated blanket and the saddle on. The Tros ducked its head and scratched its cheek on its foreleg, as if abashed.

  He finished the cinch and gathered up the reins, looked once her direction, and then swung up.

  And rode off without a word.

  She heaved a sigh, the cloak wrapped about her despite the steamy warmth of the night. Hoofbeats diminished on the cobbles.

  The wide focus had disappeared, along with the ennui. Dawn was lightening the east. She walked back along the path and closed the gate behind her, opened the door, arms folded and head bowed.

  Her perspective had vanished, together with the ennui, from the time that they had met in the alley. And since that encounter in the ruin, som
ething had nagged at her which said danger, which had nothing to do with human spite. It did have something to do with what they had carried out uptown, some misfortune which encompassed her and perhaps Tempus.

  Since the Nisi Globes of Power had dispersed their influence over the town, surprising things happened. Mages missed, sometimes: far more of chance governed magics than before, and common folk had more of luck in their lives than they were wont, amazing in Sanctuary; but dismaying for the town, mages who worked the greater magics found their powers curtailed, and sometimes found the results askew.

  Therefore she abstained from the greater workings, until she let herself be talked into an exorcism, principally by the Hazard Randal, whose professional and personal honesty she counted impeccable-rarest of qualities, a magician of few self-interests.

  Now she simply had that persistent feeling of unease, exacerbated, perhaps, by the experience of being hurled from one side of Sanctuary to the other, by the bruises and the throbbing in his skull. Fool! to have tried such a thing, such a damned, blind trial of a curse that had been, for a while and in the height of Sanctuary's power, manageable.

  The headache was just payment. It could have been much worse.

  It would have been worse, for instance, had she kept Stra-ton, had this blindness and execrably bad judgment brought him back to her bed, opened that old wound.

  And morning seen him dead as that drunken fool in a Sanctuary alley, who was by now neither drunken nor any longer a fool, nor able to see the dawn in front of his eyes.

  "We can't both leave," Stilcho concluded. Sleep eluded them both. They were hoarse and blear-eyed and exhausted, sitting opposite each other at the rickety little table. "I can't leave you here alone with that thing."