by Janet Morris
To that end, he had other irons in his infernal fires. One of these was the child born to a Mygdonian general's wife in prudent preparation, eight years ago, for what his foresight told him soon would come to be. The boy was Datan's; the Mygdonian general, a prince, suspected but could not admit that an heir of Mygdon had wizard's blood; to do so, he'd have to proclaim himself a cuckold and slay his wife, then come to Datan in puny mortal battle: suicide was not the general's way.
This hold upon one of the ruling three of Mygdonia might prove more than useful, as long as it remained a mere suspicion, not a public slur upon the general's manhood. And the woman remembered nothing more than a coupling in her dreams, though Datan's memory was clear enough and the woman's inclination toward him, now, so strong a child could see. And that child saw more than ever he should, half man, half adept, tortured by what he could not admit to be. "Possessed," his parents feared the boy, and brought him here to Wizardwall for Datan to "lift the curse." It was the mother's skirts, a second time, he ached to lift, her legs and not the boy's "affliction" he sought to pry apart and plumb the depths beyond. But if the father left the boy with him, he'd have another card to play. And the child, disdainful-eyed when he looked upon his sire of record and knowing-eyed when he looked his blood-father in the face, was a prize. Not since Abarsis, son of the Defender, had a high adept spawned a "human" child. Abarsis, though, might have sired a line of counter-wizards, his father's mark too strong on him, his mother's evil not enough to compel him to arch-magical despite. The gelding of Abarsis had been worth an entire war where wizardry howled round high peaks and thousands fought and died. Datan himself had overseen the campaigns which culminated in the Defender watching while Rankans made a eunuch-slave of his firstling, one of the "Unending Deaths" Rankan cruelty was proud to inflict upon its enemies. But no hint of the wizard's complicity ever leaked abroad; the Rankans were not allies, just pawns, their land a likely place to raise an empire for evil, their emperor so foul and mean he was useful as he was. Their flaccid mageguild had claimed the feat and triumphs as theirs; Datan had been glad to let them; he'd never wanted glory or recognition, just to stop the Defender in his tracks. And it had worked: even the name of the slain lord's empire had vanished; his seed was neutered before it could spread upon the land like an insidious stain.
One nagging doubt troubled the wizard as he changed his form and sought the general's wife in her husband's likeness while the soldier slept in mid-step high on the battlement wall. Tempus had gone up into Uraete and snatched baby Abarsis from his slavemaster and taken the boy west to grow into a priest; the Riddler could know of Datan's part in all this; the gods told the man what they felt he needed to know. If so, the man he sought must be seeking him, and in the end they'd have to meet.
But the woman was warm and the night was soft, and yet another wizardspawn among Mygdonians increased the odds fourfold in his favor. She'd have to forget, of course, and seduce her husband yet tonight. His sperm would by then have done its work; human semen was no match for warlock's, let alone adept's.
When he was done he climbed his tower, took to the air, and went summoning; he'd friends to recruit for this endeavor, fiends to find and skeins of time to bind in serviceable knots.
Behind he left a crazed, uneasy sky, aurora borealis, wizard-fire to climb the spires and turn the towers blue and green against a flaring, colored night. And everywhere in Mygdonia and Ranke, enchanters who read the weather mumbled wards and ran for charms and locked themselves in safety vaults, their loves ones in their arms.
* * *
Tempus and Jihan came upon the caravan three days and nights north of Sanctuary on what was generously called the "general's route," not the usual caravan's trek—northeast through the badlands or east, then north, following the coast— but then this was no usual caravan. Its speed was phenomenal and its endurance a match to even Tempus' Trôs horses.
He could have gone all night and day at full gallop to interdict them; Jihan's stamina had never been tested. But the horses were flesh and blood uncursed and non-magical; though Trôsbreds had constitutions twice the strength of any other strain, for their sakes the pursuers rested four hours nightly.
It must have been that the caravan did not, Jihan said softly to Tempus' throat the first evening, camped out between the forests easterly and the beginnings of the southern range that became Wizardwall when it veered and joined the high peaks, ten days' ride at the pace they were making. They had a fire that first night, and it flickered in the Frosh Daughter's eyes: "I could call a cloud to take us; we could travel by it to their camp, or just beyond them on any road."
"No. No magic," he declined her offer, conscious of her fiery eyes and the coolness of her flesh no bonfire could warm.
"It's not magic, it's my birthright. I need to make no pact with nature; I am one of its expressions; no demons can offer me controls on earth I don't already have."
"No, I said." He seldom repeated himself; he was not used to being questioned, or brooking argument, or hearing out disparate views. He'd turned away and gotten up and gone out hunting with his bow. They'd eaten well, but from their stores; grouse or quail for morning would suit him. The moon was just past full on its way to third quarter and plenty bright for him. He didn't know if she slept—he still could not. Perhaps she'd learn respect as she got more experience of femininity, perhaps she'd never learn—human for a year was hardly human.
If she continued insisting on cloud-conveyance and such manipulations of order, he was going to lose her somewhere in these hills. He'd had too many close encounters with the comptrollers of unnatural advantage to take them lightly. His mouth was soured with the taste of her words: despite his resolve and best effort, he'd gotten involved with something, in Jihan, which could not be weighed on natural scales or assessed in the way he liked.
Pretense of hunting cast aside, he climbed a hill and sought the gods. When he'd daily been afflicted with the Rankan Storm God's presence, he'd longed to be without it. But he sought a sign, now, to ease confusion: wisdom seemed to have fled him as he fled his Stepsons and responsibilities in the town. He seethed with a craving for bloody vengeance such as he had not known for ages. It was not just Abarsis, lanni, or Niko— or Niko's prior deceased partner—but all he'd done in vain in Sanctuary, all the god had put him through and left. "Come forth, mighty Pillager! Show Yourself. Art Thou craven, coward's god? Art Thou weak, a mouse among deities? Where is Thine thunder and Thine lightnings, now?"
But the sky was silent; it flickered with colored light but thundered not. He shot three grouse when dawn was breaking to make things look aright and brought them back to camp. She'd kept the fire burning; if she'd slept, there was no sign of it. In her tricolor enamel armor, she blended into the terrain so that he saw her only when she turned her head and waved.
"Better, friend Riddler? Did the night's solitude ease you?" She was amused, and he was not. He threw the grouse at—not to—her and growled: "You can cook, I hope? It's an attribute of your chosen sex."
"Cook?" She shrugged and pulled the wings off one fat grouse to eat it raw. When he stalked fireward to do the work himself, he saw her lift her gaze and grace him with a gory grin. She loved to bait him, as at times she tried to rape him. Of all the things his extended memory recalled, she was the strangest that had ever happened to him. He might deserve her, fit punishment for all he had squeezed from life, but at times he did detest her, a power-child playing human for a year.
The next night, when they stopped and cooled the blowing horses, iron-black with sweat and thinning before his eyes, they talked long into the night about the seven spheres whose regents guided the course of time, and the twelve planes, from which both she and Aškelon, lord of dreams, had come, metaphysical realms barred to earthly beings while they dwelled in flesh and blood.
He determined that Jihan, herself, while in woman's form, could not flit back home at will, but not how Aškelon had bent the rules for Tempus' sister Cime, and whisk
ed her away where Tempus could never follow: Aškelon's domain was dream, the archipelago named in his honor materialized only once in a great while.
Tempus wished that he could dream, then was glad that he did not, as Jihan tried to tell him what "life" was like as a Froth Daughter, a principle of tide and wave.
The third night they had settled into a truce of sorts, not talking of what could not be solved, not his sister nor Jihan's husband-of-intent, the dream lord. They kept to mundane matters: warlocks and wizardry abroad in Ranke; of the time he'd spent upcountry in the buffer-states of empire; of what he knew of Mygdon's allies and satellites—Uraete, Sivis, Altoch and black Nisibis, abode of archmages of the most heinous sort.
"The witch will know we're coming," she said sensibly.
"Perhaps," he admitted. He had his sword, which sliced sorcery like eggs. She guessed his thought when his hand went to it, and pointed out that if he could bide an antimagical weapon, then he had no right to tell her she couldn't use her own.
And it was well that he agreed that, much as he disliked to admit it, this was so. For on the next evening the caravan's lights showed round a hill where the general's route veers west, zigging before it zagged due east through the great forest toward Ranke's very seat.
"Look! See?" she called, her muscular arm afire with sunset.
"Silence. Quiet, girl." He'd seen.
They waited until dark, then crawled up the hillock on their bellies before the moon rose, while behind them Trôs horses stamped and snorted (hobbled, blindfolded, their noses cased in feedbags lest the smell of sorcery spook them, or the witch try to enlist them). If he could, he'd have stopped their ears as well.
On the hillock's crest he notched a bolt and waited for something to move in the dell below. The lights were lit on wagon's tarps; beasts of burden seemed still hitched between their traces, but the light was tricky—what he saw, he thought, could not be so: skeleton drays and luminous bones of oxen standing tall between wagon poles, harnessed up and grazing.
It was a sight to foul the calmest stomach; Jihan shuddered, turned away to him. "The witch awaits," she whispered, drawing a handful of throwing stars, a western fighter's weapon gotten from Niko along with instructions in the form. "I'll come upon them from the rear; you take the front."
He knew her eager. Why? To please him? Compete with him? She was overqualified for slaying even witches, he thought. But though the words rang clear in his mind he could not speak them; they would not mount his tongue to be said. So he did not deny her a part in this, but sent her forth, a few simple handsignals and whistled calls determined between them.
Then, alone, as he liked to be, he sat chewing a sweet weed's stalk, waiting for her to flush whatever foe she might. She was hardly in need of his protection; that femininity of hers was a wily asset, no debility.
Yet he couldn't cease thinking about her as he'd think of a weak Rankan woman, a girl for raping, a lady for safekeeping, a child—which, in the ways of men, she was.
So he slithered down the hill, bow in left hand, sword drawn in right and hastily wiped in muddy dirt to hide its glitter as the moon began to rise.
Down on the flat of the dell, he heard a clatter, a raucous din which made him start. Then Jinan's voice called out: "There's nothing here but detritus: bones and empty wagons; these beasts of burden died upright; a breath will blow them over."
He followed her voice and heard the war cry of an eagle far above, odd at night but not impossible; he saw it cross the moon from right to left, an auspicious omen. Then he heard another, as he trotted among the wagons, calling Jihan's name as she did his, close at times but never finding one another, until he was running and she was cursing huskily, and shadows began appearing with bright flickering eyes among the skeletons and the wagon hulks.
A beat of wings warmed him as clouds scudded across the moon and all went black; he heard a human-sounding cry and yelled, "Jihan, get out of here!" before talons raked him, and he engaged a feathered enemy, his sword slicing it in twain with a single spattering blow. And the blood that fell on him stung like spiders' bites and burned his skin so that it smoked. He dived aside as the corpse of the eagle, writhing, changing as it fell in two halves to earth, landed. He thought he saw human arms take shape amid the lamplit feathers as another screeched his way.
He went down under the second and tore talons from his throat, his bow discarded: its killing power was for mortals, only. As its beak snapped and clacked inches from his cheeks, he struck down toward his own face to impale the huge eagle from behind.
In the name of all the gods of war he cursed sorcery and its offenders as he felt his blood flow and the eagle jerk and flap, spitted on his blade.
This time the acid blood spilled in one eye, and as he used what strength he had to throw a woman's weight of wounded bird from his swordpoint, he saw it turn to something female, swearing unintelligibly as it tried to crawl away.
He chased it, throwing himself to the ground to follow under a wagon, but the wagon burst into flame, and he heard Jihan's scream. And as he scrambled out from under its axle, he caught a glimpse of a witch's face, contorted and streaked with blood from what should have been a mortal neck wound, looking back over its shoulder at him. He'd seen that face before, seen it beautiful, its eyes black with kohl and not these awful ringed shadows, at the mageguild fête. He locked eyes with it, saluted, his blade's point up, her blood upon it: "Another time, then."
It hissed and faded away.
Then, gaining his feet he went running, one eye useless, blood flowing thick and fast from his gored neck, to where he thought he heard Jihan's voice and saw her engaged with a man-shaped foe. Coming up from behind at it, he saw her break its hold and thrust it toward him, her arms outstretched. Halfway to him, where it would have impaled itself upon his blade, mist came around it and thickened and froze: between steps, the foe was encased completely in a solid block of ice.
She came toward him then, tearing matted hair from blazing eyes. "What sort of fight is this?"
"Yours," he said, looking at the vanquished, frozen enemy. "Don't do that to another; I want one that can tell me where he's been and what he thinks he's doing."
"Or she?"
"Or she. From now on, follow my directions—" He kicked the ice. "—so we can find each other."
"You were worried?"
"I'd as soon not have your father's wrath on top of all else to contend with," he lied, and went seeking a witch or warlock among the train.
But nothing magical came charging, beyond the odd event that skeletons turned to living dray beasts and wagons filled with merchandise and loot.
He found apparently human foes, dispatched two who wouldn't listen, took seven men hostage and went seeking one the others swore was their leader, called "Jagat."
He discovered the caravan's master snoring loud in the lead wagon, a krtf pipe by his head. He bound him, since he couldn't wake him, and sought Jihan, who'd used up all her throwing stars and had eight wounded coffled like newly consecrated slaves.
Off to the side, he said: "We need no prisoners."
"What, then? Slay them? They're human hirelings, mediocre fighters, anxious for a quick surrender, so it seems."
"So it seems. But they might be anything—traps of sorts, mages in disguise or canny demons. Kill whom you can; whoever won't die is of the other sort. I have the leader, he's all I want of this trash."
She scowled at him. "Such disrespect of life."
"Yes, well, I've heard all that before. You're welcome to take your moral indignation elsewhere. Me, I've got a war to win."
He stalked away to dispatch his prisoners, not waiting to see what she'd do with hers.
Two hours later they left the burning wagons, corpses in their midst, the animals turned loose because he was softhearted. Any mage who knew him might well have taken bovine form to escape a confrontation by that means. But one cannot slay every living thing upon a battlefield: they can come as eagles and go as
fleas, and fleas are hazardous to chase, near impossible to slay in the dark and open grass.
When they had the leader back at campside, he told Jihan to take a walk, go away. But the man, the witch's hireling, begged her please to stay: "Protect me, gracious lady." The creature whimpered, a one-eyed, stubbled face implored her as it began to sweat. Tempus' bloody, ravaged doom-face was not one from which mercy might be exhorted.
Tempus knew there was something wrong here, but hushed his inner voice and set about a polite, by Rankan standards, interrogation that lasted all that night.
In the morning, chilled by what he'd learned, he slew the man—if man it was—and admitted that he'd like to take Jihan up on her offer of cloud-conveyance. He needed to get to Tyse; there was an intelligence officer at the Tyse station named Grillo he must see.
But when the cloud separated itself from the natural clouds of sunrise and stretched itself their way like a telescopic glass extended, the horses balked at stepping in between the mists, beyond which could be seen the terraced outskirts of a once-great city, now contoured ruins crumbling into dirt.
"Come on, now, horse. Hark, you've done this once before." He'd gotten these two when Abarsis brought them down to Sanctuary this very way. But they wouldn't, or couldn't, remember—or the night's death had spooked them: the smell of roasted man still lingered along with oil and char upon the air.
At length, when ropes upon their rumps wouldn't goad them and his pushing from behind while Jihan tried to lead them forward wouldn't convince them, when his toes had been stepped on thrice and his yet-swollen eye and serum-sticky neck had been pelted with clods and dirt and dust, they blindfolded them both and led the snorting, dancing, froth-necked stallions through into the cloud whose mists let them out in Tyse, a mere dozen horses' lengths away.
* * *
