Soul of the City Part 23

The gravediggers, like everyone else in Sanctuary, suspected that the StormG.o.d was impotent or vanquished but none of the trio was about to say so to a palace n.o.bleman whose power in the simple matters of life and death was not in question. They agreed to return to their posts and await the delivery of the body. Molin watched the door close behind them, then pulled Walegrin back into the shadows.

"What in seven h.e.l.ls is going on here?"

"There's a bit of a problem," the younger man explained, drawing the priest up the stairs. "Someone you should talk to."

"Who've you got-?" Molin demanded as Walegrin knocked once, then shoved the door open.

Kama had put her time and the water to good use. The soot and grime were gone from her leathers and her face; her hair framed her face in a smooth, ebony curtain. Walegrin saw something he did not immediately understand pa.s.s silently between them.

"Kama," Torchholder said softly, refusing for the moment to cross the threshold.

Throughout the afternoon and into the evening he had forced any thought of her from his mind; had, in effect, abandoned her to fate. He believed she would not have expected, or appreciated, anything else and saw by her face that he had believed correctly-but correctness did nothing to alleviate the backlash of self-imposed guilt which swept up around him.

"Shall I leave?" Walegrin asked, piecing the situation together finally.

Molin started; weighed a dozen responses and their probable consequences in his mind, and said: "No, stay here," before anyone could guess he had considered some other course of action. "Kama, why are you here, of all places?" he asked, closing the door behind him.

With Walegrin's help, she explained her situation. How the PFLS leader. Zip, had misinterpreted her encounter with Stra-ton and Walegrin and how that mistake had started the downward spiral of events which culminated with not merely the attempt on the Stepson's life but the sabotage of all he had tried to accomplish.

Molin, though he listened attentively, took a few moments to congratulate himself. Had he dismissed Walegrin, he would have helped Kama because he loved her-and, in time, she would have rejected him for it. Now, he could help her because he had heard and believed her story before witnesses. She might still reject him-she would always prefer action to intrigue, he suspected-but it wouldn't be through the weakness called love.

"You have two choices, Kama," he explained when both she and Walegrin were silent. "No one would be surprised if you had died today. I could easily see to it that everyone believed that you had. You could take a horse from the stables and no one would ever think to come looking for you." He paused. "Or you can clear your name."

"I want my name," she replied without hesitation. "I'll appeal to the Emperor's justice...." It was her turn to pause and calculate options. "Brachis-" She looked around the room and remembered the Stormchildren, the witches, and the ir-remedial absence of Vashanka. "I'll get the truth out of Zip," she concluded.

Molin shook his head and turned to Walegrin. "Would you believe anything that young man told you?"

Walegrin shook his head.

"No, Kama, maybe if Strat's still alive in there and he says it wasn't you, you'd be believed, but no one else's word will count for enough. You'll do best coming in to face your accusers."

"Under your protection?"

"Under Tempus's protection."

Walegrin broke into the conversation: "He's one of the ones who've ordered her dead!"

"He ordered her captured-the rest is the enthusiasm of his subordinates. He's got caught in another skirmish with the demon-and Roxane:-for Niko's soul. Jihan barely pulled him out and she is, until the next sea storm at any rate, as mortal as you or I. Tempus is in no mood for death right now."

"You're wrong if you think he'd go lightly with me," Kama warned in a low voice.

"He acknowledges my existence- nothing more than that. It would be easier for him if I did die."

It cost her to admit that to anyone, stranger or lover. Molin knew better than to deny it. "I'm not interested in making things easier for that man," he said in his own low, measured voice. "He will not dare to judge you himself, so he will be scrupulously honest in seeing that justice is done by someone else."

Kama tossed her hair behind her shoulders. "Let's go to him now."

"Tomorrow," Molin averred. "He has other obligations tonight."

Prince Kadakithis took the tray from the Beysib priest. He was gracious, but firm: no one besides himself was attending Shupansea. It was her wish; it was his wish; and it was time everyone got used to the idea that he gave orders too.

The bald priest had seen too much upheaval in one day to argue successfully. He bowed, gave his blessing, and backed out of the antechamber. The prince set the careful arrangement of chilled morsels beside the bed and returned his attention to the Beysa.

Streaks of opalescent powder shot across the bleached white imperial bedlinen. Brushing aside a blue-green swirl, Kadak-ithis resumed his vigil, waiting for her eyes to open and more than half-expecting that he'd made a terrible mistake. He smoothed her hair across the pillows; smiled; dared to kiss her b.r.e.a.s.t.s lightly as he'd never dared to do at any of the few other times they'd stolen moments alone together and jerked upright when he felt something move against the back of his neck.

The Beysa ran orchid-colored fingertips down his forearm. "We are alone, aren't we?" she inquired.

"Quite," he agreed. "They've sent food up for us. Are you hungry?"

He reached for the dinner-tray and found himself restrained. Shupansea raised herself up and began dealing with the clasps on his tunic.

"Kith-us, I have two half-grown children and you have had a wife and concubines since you were fourteen. I surrendered my virginity in a ritual that was witnessed by at least forty priests and relations-tell me the first time wasn't just as bad for you."

The prince blushed crimson.

"Very well, then. We're p.a.w.ns. The cheapest wh.o.r.e has more freedom than I've had. But everything's in flux now. Even Mother Bey is affected. She says not to be alone tonight; I don't think she can absorb your stormG.o.d into herself as She has done with all our heroes and man-G.o.ds. I could choose to be with a priest or one of the Burek but I've chosen to be with you."

She stripped the loose tunic back from the prince's shoulders and pulled him toward her. He resisted, fumbling with the accursed buckles on his sandals, then committed himself to the changes she promised.

It was night at last, with the darker emotions of the mortal spirit obscuring the heavens as surely as the smoke and the eternal fog. Ischade extinguished her candles and gathered her dark robes around her. She had planned and deliberated as she had seldom done, choosing decision over reaction despite its risks and unfamiliarity.

She sealed the White Foal house with a delicate touch; if she failed, the dawn would find nothing more than rotting boards rising from the overgrown marshes.

The black roses opened as she pa.s.sed them, giving her their arcane beauty for what might be the last time. With a caress she savored their death-sweet perfume and sent them back where she had found them.

Across the bridge, deep within the better part of town, the bay horse consumed the last of the ward-fire, leaving the Peres house naked to whatever moved in the darkness. Ischade clung to the shadows with more than her usual caution; she was not immune to mortal forms of death and there were others migrating instinctively to the house now that its defenses had vanished. Crouched in a doorway, she lit a single candle and studied the wisps of magic rising through the ruins of Roxane's wards.

At her unspoken command the front door faded from its hinges. Ischade crept through, bristling with alertness and prepared to utilize every trick in her carefully prepared a.r.s.enal. There was nothing to challenge or greet her as she glided along the hallway, vanishing amid her numerous possessions.

She found the trail Straton's blood had made and followed it through to the kitchen. Stilcho's heroism had borne fruit; but Straton's safety was not her only goal. Haught was here; the Nisi witch was here and she would not leave until she had consigned both to h.e.l.l and beyond.

Continuing her search, Ischade swept from room to room to the waist-thick beams of the cluttered attic where her search had to end. Haught crouched outside the sphere, enraptured by the nether-world dazzle of the globe, his eyes as wide and glazed as any Beysib's. Shiey's cleaver lay in a twisted lump at his feet.

Tasfalen sang with a dead man's voice, dragging one leg stiffly as he shambled around the perimeter of the globe's light.

Tasfalen?

Ischade did not immediately comprehend the changes which had overtaken Tasfalen Lancothis. Had Haught somehow kept the globe? Had she simply imagined Roxane's taint on the corroded wards? Surely Tasfalen's flawed resurrection had been her one-time apprentice's work; Roxane's efforts were brutal but never so crude.

Concealed by shadow and the skein of magic she had spun, the necromant dared briefly to listen to the globe's song until she could piece the truth together.

She noted, even as Haught had noted, the carelessness which marked the Nisi witch's failure to protect her mortal sh.e.l.l and recognized the same mystic illness from which she herself had only just recovered. For a fleeting moment Ischade felt a sense of pity that one so powerful should be conquered by an acc.u.mulation of minute errors. Then she set about weaving a gossamer web to ground the globe's radiant energy in her focal possessions as fast as Roxane/Tasfalen could create it.

The faster the globe whirled, the stronger Ischade's binding threads became, until the whole house rattled and dust fell in flakes from the ancient roofbeams-and still the Nisi witch sang her curses into the artifact. The necromancer played out the last strand and stood up in the wash of blue light.

Tasfalen's dead eye gave no indication of recognition; Rox-ane was too deeply enmeshed in her spell-casting to spare the energy for simple words. A shriek of rage emanated from the globe itself as the Nisi witch launched her attack-a shriek that shattered abruptly as the power surged into Ischade's handiwork and made the web brilliantly visible. Curls of smoke twisted up from the weaker foci, but the web held. Ischade began to laugh, savoring her counterpart's growing terror.

Roxane flailed helplessly with Tasfalen's rigor-stricken arms, struggling to free herself from the power gnawing at her soul.

"The wards!" Roxane's disembodied voice howled above the globe's whine. "No wards! He comes for me!"

The Globe of Power spun faster, first swallowing the witch's voice, then swallowing her body within its cobalt sphere. Gouts of fire sprang up in the joists and floorboards where Ischade's web had touched them. Ischade covered her hair with her cloak as she inched away from the conflagration swirling around the globe. The Nisi witch was trapped, along with her accursed artifact; it was time to see that Straton was safely away from the house and its outbuildings.

Straton-she put his face in the forefront of her mind and looked toward the comer where the stairs had been.

An orange nimbus surrounded the image Ischade formed of her lover. A demonic nimbus, she realized too late-after she had turned to face the throbbing cobalt sphere again. No wards, Roxane had screamed: no wards to keep Niko's demon at bay. It had one soul but it could claim many. Her foot scuffed against the rough planks, but Ischade moved forward as it beckoned.

"Straton."

Haught kept himself small and low against the roofbeams. Insignificant-as he had always been as a dancer or a slave; beneath the notice of witches and, certainly, of demons. He saw the thing which had been Roxane flickering between an awful emptiness and the dozen or more bodies the witch had taken during her life. He saw Ischade think to escape-and fail, and lurch inescapably forward. But mostly he saw the globe hanging midway between Ischade and the demon: motionless and, for the moment, ignored.

Still keeping himself invisible in the demon's perception, he drew himself into a compact crouch. There was no need for the globe to be destroyed by this, he thought while ma.s.saging the finger which bore Ischade's ring. One leap would take him across the sphere and down the stairs. He was a dancer still, in his body; the leap was no great feat for him.

He caught the skull-sized artifact on the tips of his fingers. The momentum of his leap brought the searing object hard against his breast as he forced the center of a very small universe to shift from one existence through an infinity of others. It clung to him; pa.s.sed through him; absorbed him; shattered and expelled him utterly.

Ischade was hurled against the rafters by the force of the globe's destruction.

Wrapped in the fullness of her fire-magic she barely reached the stairway when the roof itself was swallowed in the flames. Her robes were in flames before she reached the streets.

A tower of fire soared from the open roof of the Peres house to the heavens themselves. The demon, trapped in fire, warred with Stormbringer, whose thundercloud form was illuminated by each lightning-bolt He threw. A crowd was gathering, a crowd which saw her try to squeeze the flames from her hair and robes and called after her when she raced down the streets with fire still licking after her.

Molin Torchholder had been one of the first to climb to the palace rooftops for a clearer view of the flame pillar. Bracing himself against the gritty wind he looked past the light to the dark cloud beyond.

"Stormbringer?"

He nearly fell from the roof as a hand closed tightly over his shoulder. "Not tonight," Tempus said with a laugh.

There were others appearing at the myriad stairways, making their way to the railing circling the Hall of Justice: Jihan and Randal, leaning on each other for strength, with Niko close behind; Isambard, dragged forward by the exuberant Storm-children; the functionaries, retainers, and day-servants all barefoot and in their nightclothes. The palace was no different than the rest of Sanctuary this night-every rooftop, courtyard, and clearing had its collection of awestruck mortals.

Brilliant light streamed into the prince's bedroom. He awoke, sighing with the knowledge that the best must also seem the shortest, and meant to leave Shupansea undisturbed. His heart sank when he realized he was alone in the bed; it did not rise when he saw her transfixed by the column of light in the open window.

Dragging a silken blanket behind him, he came slowly to join her.

"She has kept her promises," Shupansea explained, taking a comer of the blanket around her shoulder and pressing close against him. "Stormbringer fights the demon."

It did not seem like G.o.ds and demons at first glance. It seemed like a single, great cloud spewing lightning at a flame of impossible size and brightness-but such a vision was, in itself, so improbable that the Beysa's explanation was as acceptable as any other. Certainly the lightning struck only the flame and the flame directed spirals of its substance at the cloud. The stormcloud, with its percussive thunder, deflected the fire away from itself to the ocean and, occasionally, the city.

"He has it trapped," the Beysa said, indicating the precision with which the StormG.o.d's bolts prevented the demon-fire from shifting its location. "They will fight until the demon accepts annihilation."

The prince was unable to look away from the awesome spectacle. Armed with Shupansea's explanations he could see the flame shrinking each time it launched a missile against the lightning. He stayed Shupansea's hand when she tried to close the shutters.

"The end is inevitable," she a.s.sured him, holding him tightly.

A fine powder blew through the window. The Beysa protected herself but tears flowed freely from Kadakithis's eyes.

"I want to see if there's a beginning as well."

"The beginning is here," she reminded him, closing the .shutters and leading him back to the bed.

PILLAR OF FIRE.

Janet Morris

Death was riding the feral wind that blew in off Sanctuary's harbor-even Tempus's Tr6s horse could smell it on the sooty breeze as horse and rider picked their way down Wideway to the wharf and the emperor's barge made fast there.

The Tr6s danced and snorted, its hooves sending up sparks from ancient cobbles that seemed, in the dusky air, to have lives of their own. The sparks whirled round the Tros's legs like insects swarming; they darted hither and thither on smoky gusts drawn seaward from the pillar of fire blazing between the heavens and the Peres house uptown; they skittered along Tempus's clothing like dust motes from h.e.l.l, stinging when they touched his bare arms and legs; they lighted upon the Tros's distended nostrils and that horse, wiser than many human inhabitants of this accursed thieves' world, blew bellowing breaths to keep from inhaling whatever dust it was that glowed like fire and burned like hot needles when it landed on the stallion's dappled hide.

The h.e.l.lish dust was the least of Tempus's troubles on this morning that had lost its light, as if the sun had slunk away to hide from the battle under way beneath the sky. Oh, the sun had risen, brazen and bold, illuminating the flaming pillar raging up to heaven and the storm clouds with their lightning ranged round it. But it had been eaten by the stormclouds and the soot of the fire and the lightning spewing up from the grounds around the uptown Peres house and down from the furious heavens of the G.o.ds, who smote at witches' work and cheeky demons with equal force.

And it was this absence of the morning, this vanquishing of natural light, that bothered Tempus (accustomed to a.n.a.lyzing omens and all too familiar with G.o.dsign) as he rode down to greet Theron, the man he'd helped bring to Ranke's teetering throne, and Brachis, High Priest of Vashanka, while around the town civil war and infamy reigned, unabated.

If the chaos around him (which he'd once been sent here to banish) weren't enough of an indictment of his performance, then the skittishness of the Tr6s horse made it certain: he was failing ignominiously to bring order-even for a day-to Sanctuary.

And though some men would not have taken the responsibility and clasped the fault for all Sanctuary's catalogue of evils to his bosom, Tempus would and almost gladly did-the state of town and loved ones fulfilled his own dire prophecy.

Only the Tr6s horse's distress truly touched him now: animals were pure and honest, not dour and divisive like the race of men. It might not be his fault that Straton lay, somewhere, in the clutches of the revolution (Crit was sure), dead or held for ransom; it might not be because of Tempus, called the Riddler, that Niko was the perennial p.a.w.n of demons and foul witches; it might not be directly attributable to him that his daughter, Kama, was now sought as an a.s.sa.s.sin and revolutionary by his own Stepsons and the palace guard, thus creating a rift between her unit, the Rankan 3rd Commando, and the other militias in the town that no amount of diplomacy would ever bridge if she were executed; it might not be on his account that Randal, once a Stepson and the single "white" magician Tempus had ever trusted, was a burned-out husk, or that Niko stared sightlessly at the pillar of flame uptown in which Janni, his one time partner and a Stepson who'd sworn Tempus a solemn oath of fealty, burned eternally, or that Jihan had been stripped of her Froth Daughter's attributes, humbled to the lowly estate of womankind, or that Tempus's own son, Gys-kouras, looked at him with fear and loathing (even trying to shield his half-brother, Alton, from Tempus whenever the children saw him come).

But it probably was-he was the root and cause of all this slaughter: it was his curse, habitual (as Molin Torchholder, a Nisi-blooded slime in Rankan clothing, maintained) or invoked by jealous G.o.ds or hostile magic. He didn't know or care which force now drove him: he'd lost interest in which was right and which was wrong.

Like the day around him, black and white and good and evil had lost their character, merging like the sullen dusky noon in an unsavory amalgam to match his mood.

But it bothered him that the Tr6s was nervous, sweating, and distressed. He reined it down a side street, hoping to avoid the greater gusts of dust. For he knew that dust as he knew the voices of the G.o.ds who plagued him: each particle was a remnant of pulverized globes of Nisi power, magical talismans reduced to pinp.r.i.c.k size and myriad in number.

If Sanctuary needed anything less than a dusty cloak of Nisi magic wafting where it willed, he couldn't think what it might be.

And then he realized what lay ahead, down a shadowed alleyway, and drew his sword: a little honest swordplay might cheer him up, and ahead, where PFLS rebels in rags and sweat-bands fought Rankan regulars in the street, he knew he'd. find it.

Though he was overqualified for street brawls-a man who couldn't die and had to heal, whose horse shared his more-than-human speed and more-than-mortal const.i.tution-numbers made the odds more honest: four Rankan soldiers, against a mob of thirty, were trying to shield some woman with a child from whatever the mob had in mind.

He heard shouts over the Tros's hoofbeats as it lifted into a lope and trumpeted its war cry as it sped gladly toward the fray.

"Give her up, the s.l.u.t-it's all her doing!" cried one hoa.r.s.e voice from the mob.

"That's right!" a shrill woman's voice seconded the rebel demand: "S'danzo s.l.u.t!

She bore the accursed Stormchild's playmate! S'danzo wickedness has taken away the sun and turned the G.o.ds' ire upon us!"

And a third voice, streetwise and dark, a man's voice Tempus thought he ought to recognize, put in: "Come on, Walegrin, give her up and you go free-you and yours. We're only killing witches and their children today!"

"Screw yourself. Zip," one of the Rankans called back. "You'll have to take her from us. And we'll have a couple lives in exchange-yours for certain. That's a promise."

Tempus had only an instant to realize that Walegrin, the garrison commander, was one of the Rankans under siege, and to add up all he'd heard and realize that the blond soldier's sister-of-recoro, Illyra, must be the woman whose life was the subject of a traditional Sanctuary streetcorner debate.