Beyond Sanctuary

by Janet Morris

  He had no doubt that the answer would be forthcoming, as he had no doubt that he would not mistake it when it came.

  On his way to the Maze he brooded over his curse, which kept him unloved by the living and spurned by any he favored if they be mortal. In heaven he had a brace of lovers, ghosts like the original Stepson, Abarsis. But to heaven he could not repair: his flesh regenerated itself immemorially; to make sure this was still the case, last night he had gone to the river and slit both wrists. By the time he'd counted to fifty the blood had ceased to follow and healing had begun. That gift of healing—if gift it was—still remained his, and since it was god-given, some power more than mortal "loved" him still.

  It was whim that made him stop by the weapons shop the mercenaries favored. Three horses tethered out front were known to him; one was Niko's stallion, a big black with points like rust and a jughead on thickening neck perpetually sweatbanded with sheepskin to keep its jowls modest. The horse, as mean as it was ugly, snorted a challenge to Tempus' Trôs—the black resented that the Trôs had climbed Niko's mare.

  He tethered it at the far end of the line and went inside, among the crossbows, the flying wings, the steel and wooden quarrels and the swords.

  Only a woman sat behind the counter, pulchritudinous and vain, her neck hung with a wealth of baubles, her flesh perfumed. She knew him, and in seconds his nose detected acrid, nervous sweat, and the defensive musk a woman can exude.

  "Marc's out with the boys in back, sighting-in the high-torque bows. Shall I get him, Lord Marshal? Or may I help you? What's here's yours, my lord, on trial or as our gift—' Her arm spread wide, bangles tinkling, indicating the racked weapons.

  "I'll take a look out back, madam, don't disturb yourself."

  She settled back, not calm, but bidden to remain and obedient.

  In the ochre-walled yard ten men were gathered behind the log fence that marked the range; a hundred yards away three oxhides had been fastened to the encircling wall, targets painted red upon them; between the hides, three cuirasses of four-ply hardened leather armored with bronze plates were propped and filled with straw.

  The smith was down on his knees, a crossbow fixed in a vise with its owner hovering close by. The smith hammered the sights twice more, put down his file, grunted and said, "You try it, Straton; it should shoot true. I got a hand-breadth group with it this morning; it's your eye I've got to match…"

  The large-headed, raw-boned smith sporting a beard which evened a rough complexion rose with exaggerated effort and turned to another customer, just stepping up to the firing line. "No, Stealth, not like that, or, if you must, I'll change the tension—" Marc moved in, telling Niko to throw the bow up to his shoulder and fire from there, then saw Tempus and left the group, hands spreading on his apron.

  Bolts spat and thunked from five shooters when the morning's range officer hollered "Clear" and "Fire," then "Hold," so that all could go to the wall to check their aim and the depths to which the shafts had sunk.

  Shaking his head, the smith confided: "Straton's got a problem I can't solve. I've had it truly sighted—perfect for me— three times, but when he shoots, it's as if he's aiming two feet low."

  "For the bow, the name is life, but the work is death. In combat it will shoot true for him; here, he's worried how they judge his prowess. He's not thinking enough of his weapon, too much of his friends."

  The smith's keen eyes shifted; he rubbed his smile with a greasy hand. "Aye, and that's the truth. And for you, Lord Tempus? We've the new hard-steel, though why they're all so hot to pay twice the price when men're soft as clay and even wood will pierce the boldest belly, I can't say."

  "No steel, just a case of iron-tipped short flights, when you can."

  "I'll select them myself. Come and watch them, now? We'll see what their nerve's like, if you call score…"

  "A moment or two, Marc. Go back to your work, I'll sniff around on my own."

  And so he approached Niko, on pretense of admiring the Stepson's new bow, and saw the shadowed eyes, blank as ever but veiled like the beginning beard that masked his jaw: "How goes it, Niko? Has your moat returned to you?"

  "Not likely," the young fighter said, cranking the spring and lever so a bolt notched and triggered the quarrel which whispered straight and true to center his target. "Did Crit send you? I'm fine, commander. He worries too much. We can handle her, no matter how it seems. It's just time we need… she's suspicious, wants us to prove our faith. Shall I, by whatever means?"

  "Another week on this is all I can give you. Use discretion, your judgment's fine with me. What you think she's worth, she's worth. If Critias questions that, your orders came from me and you may tell him so."

  "I will, and with pleasure. I'm not his to wetnurse; he can't keep that in his head."

  "And Janni?"

  "It's hard on him, pretending to be… what we're pretending to be. The men talk to him about coming back out to the barracks, about forgetting what's past and resuming his duties. But we'll weather it. He's man enough."

  Niko's hazel eyes flicked back and forth, judging the other men: who watched; who pretended he did not, but listened hard. He loosed another bolt, a third, and said quietly that he had to collect his flights. Tempus eased away, heard the range officer call "Clear" and watched Niko go retrieve his grouped quarrels.

  If this one could not breach the witch's defenses, then she was unbreachable.

  Content, he left then, and found Jihan, his de facto right-side partner, waiting astride his other Trôs horse, her more than human strength and beauty brightening Smith Street's ramshackle facade as if real gold lay beside fool's gold in a dusty pan.

  Though one of the matters estranging him from his Stepsons was his pairing with this foreign "woman," only Niko knew her to be the daughter of a power who spawned all contentious gods and even the concept of divinity; he felt the cool her flesh gave off, cutting the midday heat like wind from a snowcapped peak.

  "Life to you, Tempus." Her voice was thick as ale, and he realized he was thirsty. Promise Park and the Alekeep, an east side establishment considered upper class by those who could tell classes of Ilsigs, were right around the corner, a block up the Street of Gold from where they met. He proposed to take her there for lunch. She was delighted—all things mortal were new to her; the whole business of being in flesh and attending to it was yet novel. A novice at life, Jinan was hungry for the whole of it.

  For him, she served a special purpose: her loveplay was rough and her constitution hardier than his Trôs horses—he could not couple gently; with her, he did not inflict permanent harm on his partner; she was bom of violence inchoate and savored what would kill or cripple mortals.

  At the Alekeep, they were welcome. In a back and private room, they talked of the god's absence and what could be made of it, and the owner served them himself, an avuncular sort still grateful that Tempus' men had kept his daughters safe when wizard weather roamed the streets. "My girl's graduating school today, Lord Marshal—my youngest. We've a fête set, and you and your companion would be most welcome guests."

  Jinan touched his arm as he began to decline, her stormy eyes flecked red and glowing.

  "… ah, perhaps we will drop by, then, if business permits."

  But they didn't, having found pressing matters of lust to attend to, and all things that happened then might have been avoided if they hadn't been out of touch with the Stepsons, unreachable down by the creek that ran north of the barracks when sorcery met machination and all things went awry.

  On their way to work, Niko and Janni stopped at the Vulgur Unicorn to wait for the moon to rise. The moon would be full this evening, a blessing since anonymous death squads roamed the town—whether they were Rankan army regulars, Jubal's scattered hawkmasks, fish-eyed Beysib spoilers, or Nisibisi assassins, none could say.

  The one thing that could be said of them for certain was that they weren't Stepsons or Sacred Banders or nonaligned mercenaries from the guild hostel. But the
re was no convincing the terrorized populace of that.

  And Niko and Janni—under the guise of disaffected mercenaries who had quit the Stepsons, been thrown out of the guild hostel for unspeakable acts, and were currently degenerating Sanctuary-style in the filthy streets of the town—thought that they were close to identifying the death squads' leader. Hopefully, this evening or the next, they would be asked to join the murderers in their squalid sport.

  Not that murder was uncommon in Sanctuary, or squalor. The Maze, now that Niko knew it like his horses' needs or Janni's limits, was not the town's true nadir, only the multi-tiered slum's upper echelon. Worse than the Maze was Shambles Cross, filled with the weak and the meek; worse than the Shambles was Downwind, where nothing moved in the light of day and at night hellish sounds rode the stench on the prevailing east wind across the White Foal. A tri-level hell, then, filled with murderers, sold souls and succubi, began here in the Maze.

  If the death squads had confined themselves to Maze, Shambles, and Downwind, no one would have known about them. Bodies in those streets were nothing new; neither Stepsons nor Rankan soldiers bothered counting them; near the slaughterhouses cheap crematoriums flourished; for those too poor even for that, there was the White Foal, taking ambiguous dross to the sea without complaint. But the squads ventured uptown, to the east side and the center of Sanctuary itself where the palace hierophants and the merchants lived and looked away from downtown, scented pomanders to their noses.

  The Unicorn crowd no longer turned quiet when Niko and Janni entered; their scruffy faces and shabby gear and bleary eyes proclaimed them no threat to the mendicants or the whores. Competition, they were now considered, and it had been hard to float the legend, harder to live it. Or to live it down, since none of the Stepsons but their task force leader, Crit (who himself had never moved among the barracks ranks, proud and shining with oil and fine weapons and finer ideals) knew that they had not quit but only worked shrouded in subterfuge on Tempus' orders to flush the Nisibisi witch.

  But the emergence of the death squads had raised the pitch, the ante, given the matter a new urgency. Some said it was because Shadowspawn, the thief, was right: the god Vashanka had died, and the Rankans would suffer their due. Their due or not, traders, politicians, and moneylenders—the "oppressors"—were nightly dragged out into the streets, whole families slaughtered or burned alive in their houses, or hacked to pieces in their festooned wagons.

  The agents ordered draughts from One-Thumb's new girl and she came back, cowering but determined, saying that One-Thumb must see their money first. They had started this venture with the barman's help; he knew their provenance; they knew his secret.

  "Let's kill the swillmonger, Stealth," Janni growled. They had little cash—a few soldats and some Machadi coppers— and couldn't draw their pay until their work was done.

  "Steady, Janni. I'll talk to him. Girl, fetch two Rankan ales or you won't be able to close your legs for a week."

  He pushed back his bench and strode to the bar, aware that he was only half joking, that Sanctuary was rubbing him raw. Was the god dead? Was Tempus in thrall to the Froth Daughter who kept his company? Was Sanctuary the honeypot of chaos? A hell from which no man emerged? He pushed a threesome of young puds aside and whistled piercingly when he reached the bar. The big bartender looked around elaborately, raised a scar-crossed eyebrow, and ignored him. Stealth counted to ten and then methodically began emptying other patrons' drinks onto the counter. Men were few here; approximations cursed him and backed away; one went for a beltknife but Stealth had a dirk in his hand that gave him pause. Niko's gear was dirty, but better than any of these had. And he was ready to clean his soiled blade in any one of them. They sensed it; his peripheral perception read their moods, though he couldn't read their minds. Where his maat—his balance—once had been was a cold, sick anger. In Sanctuary he had learned despair and futility, and these had introduced him to fury. Options he once had considered last resorts, off the battlefield, came easily to mind now. Son of the armies, he was learning a different kind of war in Sanctuary, and learning to love the havoc his own right arm could wreak. It was not a substitute for the equilibrium he'd lost when his left-side leader died down by the docks, but if his partner needed souls to buy a better place in heaven, Niko would gladly send him double his comfort's price.

  The ploy brought One-Thumb down to stop him. "Stealth, I've had enough of you." One-Thumb's mouth was swollen, his upper lip crusted with sores, but his ponderous bulk loomed large; from the corner of his eye Niko could see the Unicorn's bouncer leave his post and Janni intercept him.

  Niko reached out and grabbed One-Thumb by the throat, even as the man's paw reached under the bar, where a weapon might lie. He pulled him close: "What you've had isn't even a shadow of what you're going to get, Turn-Turn, if you don't mind your tongue. Turn back into the well-mannered little troll we both know and love, or you won't have a bar to hide behind by morning." Then, sotto voce: "What's up?"

  "She wants you," the barkeep gasped, his face purpling, "to go to her place by the White Foal at high moon. If it's convenient, of course, my lord."

  Niko let him go before his eyes popped out of his head. "You'll put this on our tab?"

  "Just this one more time, beggar boy. Your Whoreson bugger-buddies won't lift a leg to help you; your threats are as empty as your purse."

  "Care to bet on it?"

  They carried on a bit more, for the crowd's benefit, Janni and the bouncer engaged in a staring match the while. "Call your cur off, then, and we'll forget about this—this once." Niko turned, neck aprickle, and headed back toward his seat, hoping that it wouldn't go any further. Not one of the four— bouncer, bar owner, Stepsons—was entirely playing to the crowd.

  When he'd reached his door-facing table, Lastel/One-Thumb called his bruiser off, and Janni backed toward Niko, white-faced and trembling with eagerness: "Let me geld one of them, Stealth. It'll do our reputations no end of good."

  "Save it for the witch-bitch."

  Janni brightened, straddling his seat, both arms on the table, digging fiercely with his dirk into the wood: "You've got a rendezvous?"

  "Tonight, high moon. Don't drink too much." It wasn't the drink that skewed them, but the knf they snorted, little piles poured into clenched fists where thumb muscles made a well. Still, the drug would keep them alert: it was a long time until high moon, and they had to patrol for marauders while seeming to be marauding themselves. It was almost more than Niko could bear. He'd infiltrated a score of camps, lines and palaces on reconnaissance sorties with his deceased partner, but those were cleaner, quicker actions than this protracted infiltration of Sanctuary, bunghole of the known world. If this evening made an end to it and he could wash and shave and stable his horses better, he'd make a sacrifice to Enlil which the god Would not soon forget.

  An hour later, mounted, they set off on their tour of the Maze, Niko thinking that not since the affair with the archmage Aškelon and Tempus's sister Cime had his gut rolled up into a ball with this feeling of unmitigated dread. The Nisibisi witch might know him—she might have known him all along. He'd been interrogated by Nisibisi before, and he would fall upon his sword rather than endure it again now, when his dead teammate's ghost still haunted his mental refuge and meditation could not offer him shelter as it once had.

  A boy came running up calling his name, and his jughead black tossed its rust nose high and snorted, ears back, waiting for a command to kill or maim.

  "By Vashanka's sulfurous balls, what now?" Janni wondered.

  They sat their mounts in the narrow street; the moon was just rising over the shantytops; people slammed their shutters tight and bolted their doors. Niko could catch wisps of fear and loathing from behind the houses' facades; two mounted men in these streets meant trouble, no matter whose they were.

  The youth trotted up, breathing hard. "Niko! Niko! The master's so upset. Thank Us I've found you…" The delicate eunuch's lisp identified him: a servant of
the Alekeep's owner, one of the few men Niko thought of as a friend here.

  "What's wrong, then?" He leaned down in his saddle.

  The boy raised a hand, and the black snaked his head around fast to bite it. Niko clouted the horse between the ears as the boy scrambled back out of range. "Come on, come here. He won't try it again. Now, what's your master's message?"

  "Tamzen! Tamzen's gone out without her bodyguard, with—" The boy named six of the richest Sanctuary families' fast-living youngsters. "They said they'd be right back, but they didn't come. It's her party she's missing. The master's beside himself. He said if you can't help him, he'll have to call the Hell Hounds—the palace guard, or go out to the Stepsons' barracks. But there's no time, no time!" the frail eunuch wailed.

  "Calm down, pud. We'll find her. Tell her father to send word to Tempus anyway; it can't hurt to alert the authorities. And say exactly this: that I'll help if I can, but he knows I'm not empowered to do more than any citizen. Say it back, now."

  Once the eunuch had repeated the words and run off, Janni said: "How're you going to be in two places at once, Stealth? Why'd you tell him that? It's a job for the regulars, not for us. We can't miss this meet, not after all the bedbugs I've let chomp on me for this.-…"

  "Seh!" The word meant offal in the Nisi tongue. "We'll round her and her friends up in short order. They're just blowing off steam—it's the heat and school's end. Come on, let's start at Promise Park."

  When they got there, the moon showed round and preter-naturally large above the palace, and the wind had died. Thoughts of the witch he must meet still troubled Niko, and Janni's grousing buzzed in his ears: "… we should check in with Crit, let the girl meet her fate—ours will be worse if we're snared by enchantment and no backup alerted to where or how."

  "We'll send word or stop by the Shambles drop, stop worrying." But Janni was not about to stop, and Niko's attempts to calm himself, to find transcendent perception in his rest-place and pick up the girl's trail by the heattrack she'd left and the things she'd said and done here were made more difficult by Janni's worries, which jarred him back to concerns he must put aside, and Janni's words, which startled him, over-loud and disruptive, every time he got himself calmed enough to sense Tamzen's energy trail among so many others like red/yellow/pink yarn twined among chiaroscuro trees.