"I found it, dammit." Moria wiped back a stringing lock and brought the hand hard onto the table. "Don't treat me like a damn fool, Stilcho, don't tell me how to manage! I carried it clean across town! We melt it-"
"What with, for godssakes? On the damned little firepot we cook on? We just get a damned hot lump of-"
"Hssssst!" Her hand came up out-turned toward his mouth, her face twisted in fury. "These walls! These walls, dammit, how many times do I have to tell you keep your voice down! I'll steal us the stuff, how do you think we come by anything lately, except / steal it, and you live on it! Don't you tell me what to do! I've had it all my life, and I'm not taking it, I'm not taking any of it, not from you and not from anybody!"
"Don't be a damned fool! You go flashing gold bits around this town you'll get your throat cut, this isn't silver, dammit, listen. Listen! You-" Of a sudden, even in the gray morning light filtering through the window, the vision of the lost eye shifted in, stronger than the living one. He stopped, his heart laboring in terror.
"Stilcho?" Moria's voice was higher, frightened. "Stilcho?"
"Something's wrong," he said. In that inner eye, soiled, filmy shapes went streaming like smoke through the gates, the gates-the fires, the lost reaches.... "A lot of people just died." He swallowed hard, tried to calm his shaking, tried to get back the sight of Moria across the table, and not that black vision where Something waited, where by the riverside-in the woods-
"Stilcho!" Her nails bit into his hand. He blinked and tried again to focus, succeeded finally in seeing her, beyond a veil like black gauze.
"Help me. M-moria-"
She rose and her chair overset, crashing down so violently she came and grabbed him and held on to him with all her might. "Don't, don't, don't, dammit, don't, come back-"
"I don't want to go down there, I don't want to die again -oh gods, Moria!" His teeth would not stop chattering. He could shut his living eye. He had no such power over the dead one. "It's in hell, Moria, a piece of me is in hell and I can't blink, I can't shut it, I can't get rid of it-"
"Look at me!" She jerked his head by the hair and looked him in the face. Another jerk at his hair. "Look at me!"
His sight cleared. He caught her around the waist and hugged her tight, his head against her breast, in which her heart beat like something trapped. Her hand caressed his head, and she whispered reassurance; but he felt her heart hammering fit to shake her small body. No safety. As long as she was with him there was none for her, and there was nowhere any for him.
Get out of here, he would tell her. But he dreaded the day he would slip and Moria would not be there to pull him back; he dreaded the solitude in which he might then go mad. If he were a brave man he would tell her go. But not today. They would climb out of this pit together; for that much they needed each other he needed her skill and she needed his restraint and his protection to use the gold; but after that, after she was set up and he had a chance as well, then he would find a way to let her go.
* * *
"Damn!" Crit hissed. The news had come down the hill with the swiftness only bad news could manage; but Straton said nothing at all. Straton headed out the barracks door and whistled up the bay, which came; of course it came. It made trouble in the stables, it cleared the stable fence like a gull in flight, and nothing held it. It came to him in this early dawn, and he went to the tackroom to get what belonged to it.
"Where are you going?" Crit asked him, meeting him outside as he came out into the dusty yard, his right hand hauling the saddle, the treacherous left unburdened with anything but the bridle and the blanket. Crit was careful with him nowadays, uncommonly patient, a perpetual walking on eggshells.
"Town," Strat said. He cultivated patience, too. He saw Crit's analytical look, the inevitable reckoning what small house lay on his way. And he had not thought of that till he saw Crit think of it; then it got its claws into his gut, and the thought began to grow that of powers in Sanctuary which ought to be warned, which might exert a calming influence on the town-
-damn, she had contacts in all the right places. With Moruth the beggar-king; with the rats in the very walls when it came to that, the rabble that was most like to take the slaughter uptown very hard indeed. Zip arrested. That would not last long. Best he be arrested till someone had a chance to talk sense to him. Likely Walegrin.
"Stay off riverside," Crit said, and laid a hand on his arm, delaying him a moment. In months past that would have gotten a shrug-off, at best a surly answer. But Crit was fighting for Strat's soul, and Strat had gotten to know that, in a kind of fey gratitude for a friend with a lost cause, or at best a cause that was not worth the effort Crit spent on it. I'm crippled, dammit, you got me back, you risked your damn neck pulling me out, but you have to get another partner, Crit, one who won't let you down in a pinch, and you know it and I know it. The fire's dying and I'm not going to be again what I was, when I get the twinges I know that. Tomorrow I'll tell you that. When we're out of this damned city I'll tell you that. And you'll tell me I'm a damned fool, but neither of us is. Time we split. Leave me to fend for myself: you don't have to go on carrying me, Crit.
Crit's hand dropped. There was a worried look on his face. Strat's stares could put it there, lately. And that usually got Crit's temper up when other provocations failed. This time he just stood there.
"Yeah," Strat said. "I'm going to drop out a few hours on the way back, expect it: I'll be pulling in a few contacts." He hung the bridle on his shoulder, flung the blanket over the bay's back, not-not looking more than he must at that coin-sized patch just by the bay's hipbone. "I may talk to her. Figure I can walk out of there, too. It's all cooled down; she's got her choices, I have mine." He slung the saddle up, and the bay never offered to move. It had as well been a statue that breathed and smelled like a horse. "She's sleeping around. We got corpses to prove it."
"Don't be a damn fool."
"Hey." He turned his head and looked at Crit. "Trust me to do what needs doing. All right? You're not my mother."
Crit said not a thing.
Damn mistake, Crit. Say it. My mind's like the damned shoulder, on and off, I never know when. I can't think, I can't know when I'm on target, can't know when I'll flinch.
She's got herself another lover. One I can't match, can I?
I can meet her and ride away again. You don't know how easy it is. I've seen her in the streets, Crit. Like the rest of the whores. With a pox that'll kill you.
He slipped the bridle on, cinched up, and hurled himself into the saddle without the least twinge from the shoulder. "See you." he said, and rode for the gates.
"Where?" Tempus snapped, just arrived on the hill, just arrived inside Molin's offices. It was not a good day for Molin either, but Tempus was clearly begun on a worse one. "When and who?"
"About six of the piffs. Zip survived. He's in lockup, for his own sake. And the city's. Walegrin's going to have a talk with him."
"Who did it?"
Molin drew a careful breath and told him.
The headache had diminished. The malaise persisted, and discouraged attempts at philosophy; Ischade kept to her house, her hair immaculate, the mud scrubbed from her person, the salvageable roses off the damaged bush decorating a vase on the table, not for the beauty of them (they were black and the moisture-beads which stood on their petals from their watering shone blood-bright red in certain lights), but as a reminder of a task she did not want to undertake in her present mood and with her headache.
Having power, she set limits to it; having the ability to blast an enemy, she refrained from it for no altruistic motives, but because killing was very easy for her, and very seductive, and led to untidy consequences which resisted solution.
She had taken rare inventory of her stores, and tidied up a bit (rarer still). Haught had kept things in some order. Stilcho had tried. She missed them, missed them today with outright maudlin melancholy, which both would have found bewildering.
Stilcho had fled, va
nished. She might, she thought, find him.
The thought, as she paused with broom in hand, became quite inviting. Stilcho had shared her bed-many a night.
And died and waked. But that had been when her magic was unnaturally great. To do it now would risk him. And he had been loyal, he had saved Strat's life, he had deserved some choice in his fate, which was patently and sanely not to come back to her.
A presence came near her garden gate. She knew it, a little thrill along her nerves, in all the noon coming and going up and down the street just beyond.
She suddenly knew who it was even before she heard the horse distinctly, or felt someone touch the ironwork. She set the broom aside, flung the door open, and walked out onto the porch against her habit, in the full summer daylight.
"Go away," she said to Strat, and held the wards against him. "Out!"
"I've got to talk to you. It's business."
"I have no business with you."
He held both hands in plain sight. "No weapons."
"Don't try me. I warned you. I told you you'd be no different than the others."
"Fine. Open the gate. I don't want to shout from the street. This is trouble. Hear me?"
She wavered. The gate gave to his push against it, and creaked open when he shoved. He came walking up as far as the porch, his face all sullen and thin lipped. "Well?" she said.
"There's been a murder uptown. A lot of it."
"I haven't been up to much this morning."
"Six of the piffs. You understand me."
She did understand. Faction-war broken open again. With the Empire's hand already heavy on the town. "Who?"
"Can I come in?"
It was not wise. Neither was it wise to ignore the news. Or to fail to use the contacts she had, this one no less than the rest. She turned and went in, leaving the door open, and he followed her.
Night again. A shambling figure staggered among the reeds and the brush of riverside, snuffling at times and swatting at the midges and other insects that thrived here. One who knew Zip might not have recognized him beneath the swelling, the cuts and bruises: one eye was shut and puffed, even the good one running a trail down his face. His nose ran: that was the swelling. Or perhaps he was crying. He himself had no idea. He sniffed and wiped his nose on a muddy arm, the hand of that arm already caked in mud where he had fallen.
Run for it, the Stepson escort had told him, when they had brought him near the bridge, at twilight. He expected an arrow in the back, but he had no third choice: Walegrin had said they would let him go. So he ran for his life when they gave him the chance, raking through the undergrowth and tearing his lacerated face on thorns and brambles and branches. He had run until he slipped and sprawled on the slick bank, and run again, till his side hurt too much and he took to walking in the dark.
Man, something said to him, just that word, over and over, and direction which was the same as the direction he went, so that he hardly needed keep his good eye open, only to fend the branches away with his hands and to go toward that voice that led him. Revenge, it said then; and that was, in his delirium and his pain and his blindness, even better.
He did not know where he was until he had found the tumbled stones of an ancient altar. He did not know it at first sight, but stood there snuffling and tasting the thin constant seep of his own blood in his mouth, blinking at the haze and trying to focus; but it was his personal place, it was the altar where he had laid offerings to vengeance, because he was Ilsigi and the old gods the Rankans let exist among the temples were quislings all. Ilsig had had a wargod once. A god of vengeance. And if all of them were dead and the statues only statues, he had still had a feeling about this old place that no Rankan had ever touched it, no force but earthquake ever tumbled these old stones, no Rankan ever knew its name to defile it. So he worshiped it, and gave it human flesh: that was the way he was in those days. It never answered him. But in those days it was all he had had, till he had ruled a quarter of Sanctuary.
Now Rankans killed his brothers, other Rankans turned him out with apologies, and he was here, fallen on his knees back at his beginnings, his ribs hurting, his face one mass of agony, his elbows bruised on the stone like his knees when he had hit the pavings in the massacre. He wept, and snuffled and wiped his nose and his eyes, trying to catch his breath.
Revenge, something whispered to him. He lifted his head and drew in a hoarse breath, hearing a murmuring and a rumbling in the earth. Something was there, in the dark just across the altar, facing him, a horripilating conviction of presence and a voice in his throbbing skull.
He blinked again. Two red slits appeared in that dark, and the same glow limned the flare of humanish nostrils and the seam of a humanish mouth, as if there were fire inside an utterly dark face. It smiled at him.
My worshiper, it said.
And whispered other things, about power, and how it had been shut in hell until it gained its freedom. The pain ebbed down. But not the cold.
"I'm going," he told it. "I got to get to my people, I got to tell them-"
Tell them they have a god. What would you give-for Ilsig to rise again? You paid lives. You'd pay yours. But it's worship I want. None of this business about souls. I want a temple. That's all. Whatever kind of a temple you want to make over there on the Avenue. That's where we can begin. Small. Till we have things in hand.
Zip wiped his nose and wiped it a second time. He ought to be running, except that he had no strength left. Except that this thing was real, and in a world where magery and power ruled, it was talking about Ilsig, and power of a sort Ranke had had a monopoly on too damned long.
Me, he thought. Me. With this thing. He was not sure what it was. God did not quite describe it, but it assuredly had ambitions to be one.
A temple Ilsigis might build. A priesthood other than those damned eunuchs and temple prostitutes the Rankans called state-approved Ilsigi gods. A priesthood with swords. And real power.
He sniffed and swallowed down the taste of blood, licked a bruised and swollen mouth. "If you're a god," he said, "tell my followers come to get me. If you're a god, you know who they are. If you're a god, you can call them here for me."
Do you really want them here, yet? We should talk strategy, man. We should make plans. You made one expensive mistake. Don't gather all your forces in one place. Cooperate •with these foreigners. With everyone. Get your information in order. Deal only with authorities or use subordinates. You have to learn to delegate.
"Prove to me-"
Oh, yes. The red slits crinkled at the comers, the mouth stretched in a wide, wide smile. Of course you'd come to that.
Chenaya screamed, in the dark, in a sudden nowhere as if the world had dropped away. She fell and fell....
... hit a bruising surface that wrapped about her and bubbled past her and folded in on her with a terrible pressure. Water drove up her nose and filled her mouth and ears, threatening to burst her eyes and eardrums. Instinctively she tried to move her limbs and swim, but the momentum was too great, until she had gone deep, deep, and the pressure mounted.
Asleep in her own bed, her brain tried to tell her.
But the cold and the crushing force increased in one long narrowing rush downward after the impact, till she slowed enough to kick and the natural buoyancy of her body began to hurl her inexorably toward the surface. Salt stung her eyes and her throat; her lungs burned for air and her stomach was trying to crawl up her windpipe as she struggled with arms gone weak and legs kicking against too much water pressure.
... not going to make it, not going to make it, consciousness was going out in red bursts and gray and her lungs were clogged, needing to expel what they had taken in, in a spasm which would suck water in after it, and finish her.
Savankala! she wailed.
But nothing hastened her rise. She stroked and kicked and stroked, and her gut spasmed; she forced the last few bubbles out her nose, trying to gain time, fought with all instinct demanding to intake air where t
here was no air: she would faint, was going out, and her body would breathe by that instinct-
Her hand broke surface, and she grabbed at it with that hand and the other, one last desperate effort that got her face half clear and a froth of water and air sluicing down nose and throat. She coughed and spasmed and nailed, trying to spit up water and take in a clear breath while her temples ached to bursting and her gut racked itself in internal contractions. Stroke by flailing stroke she gained on life, gulped clear air and vomited, swam and gulped and choked in the toss of waves. Her sight showed her nothing but dark, abysmal dark.
"Help!" she yelled, a raw, animal sound. And gasped a mix of air and water as the chop hit her in the face and washed over her. Her voice was small in the wind and the night sky.
She gained enough strength to cast about her then, and blinked at the lights that she saw when she turned in the water, the distant line of the wharf, the Beysib ships riding at anchor. She had not a stitch of clothing. She was chilled and bruised and half-drowned, and she had no idea in the world how she had come there, or whether she had gone mad.
She started to swim, slow, painful strokes, until she remembered that there were sharks in these waters. Then she threw all she had left into the drive across Sanctuary's very ample harbor, toward the distant lights.
NO GLAD IN GLADIATOR by Robert Lynn Asprin
Chenaya shivered, pan from her damp nakedness, part from fear, as she clutched the threadbare blanket more tightly about her. Fear? No, rather nervous anticipation.
The whole thing so far had a surreal, dreamlike quality to it. First the rude awakening, sans clothes, deep in Sanctuary's less-than-fragrant bay, and then the long swim to shore, worrying all the while about the hunger and size of aquatic predators lurking below. There had been men waiting for her on the pier, three of them, one bearing the blanket she now wore. Nervousness made her declare her identity unasked, including all her ranks and titles, yet they seemed as unimpressed and unmoved by her station as they were by her nakedness. The blanket itself was a silent statement of friendship, or at least sympathy, however, so it seemed natural to follow without protest as they hurried her through a bewildering maze of back streets and alleys to the room where she now sat waiting.
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