The Dead of Winter Part 16

A shiver went up his back. He gripped Lysias's shoulder, hard. "Listen. I'm going out again. Get the word out, get the Third to positions, full alert."

"You going-"

"Get out of here. Get it moving."

"Right," Lysias said, and dived round the comer: no further questions.

But Strat lingered there in the dim light, with the sinking feeling that panic had impelled that. He wanted the daylight; wanted- -easy answers.

Kadakithis will lose the Empire- Niko in trouble. Plots went through Sanctuary like worms through old meat.

Tempus delaying and Randal discomfited. Straton considered himself no fool, not ordinarily; upstairs in that nasty little room, men and women had tried to make him one and he had unerringly stripped souls down to little secrets, most of which he was not interested in, a few of which he was, and they spilled them all before they went their way either loose (for effect) or into the Foal (for neatness). He was not particularly proud of this skill, only of a keen wit that did not take lies for an answer. That was what made him the Stepsons'

interrogator; a certain dogged patience and a sure instinct for unraveling the mazy works of human minds.

That skill turned inward, explored blanks, explored tracks he had no wish for it to follow.

She, she, she, it kept saying, and when it did it traveled round the edges of a darkness more than dark to the eyes; womb-dark, unknowable-dark, warm dark and comfortable and full of too many gaps. Far too many gaps. He had found a certain peace. Courted it. Congratulated himself that he escaped. That perpetual escape had become meat and drink to him; the stuff of his self-esteem.

Think, Stepson. Why can't you think about it?

-Horse wandering in the morning, pilfering apples, rider infant-helpless by dawn- (He winced at the image. Is this a sane man?) -Kadakithis dying, conveniently dead on the marble floor, the tread of military boots brisk in the halls of the palace- Good, Tempus would say, finding one of his men had antic.i.p.ated him; the shadow play came into sunlight, himself a hero, not the creature of the little room upstairs, but a man who did the wide thing, the right thing, took the chance- He shivered, there in the dark. There was the taste of blood in his mouth. He leaned there against the wall, jolted as the bay took another kick to let him know its opinion of this dark stable.

He suspected. He suspected himself-is this a sane man?

He had to go-there. To the river. To find out. Not by dark, not during her hour but by his; by the daylight, when he might have his wits about him.

The river house huddled small and unlikely-looking in the tangle of brush that ran the White Foal's edge on town-side. If you asked a dozen people were there trees in Sanctuary's lower end they would say no, forgetting these. If you asked were there houses hereabouts, they would say no, forgetting such small places as this one with its iron fence and its obscuring hedge. This one was, well, abandoned. There were often lights. Once or twice there had been fire conspicuous disturbance. But the prudent did not notice such things. The prudent kept to their own districts, and Strat, having ridden past the several checkpoints down mostly deserted streets, rode not oblivious to signs now; thinking, and taking mental notes as he tethered the bay horse out in front of this house that few saw.

He shoved the rusty gate aside and walked up the overgrown flags to the little porch. The door opened before he knocked (and before anyone on the other side could have reached it), which failed to surprise him. Musky perfume wafted out.

He walked in, in the dim light that shone through a milky window-Ischade was not tidy except in her person.

"Ischade?" he called out.

That she would not be at home-that had occurred to him; but he had, in his haste and his urgency, shoved that possibility aside. There was not that much of day left. The sun was headed down over the White Foal, over the sprawl of Downwind buildings.

"Ischade?"

There were unpleasant things to meet hereabouts. She had enemies. She had allies who were not his friends.

A curtain whispered. He blinked at the black-clad figure who walked forward to meet him. She was always so much smaller than he remembered. She towered in his memory. But the eyes, always the eyes- He evaded them, walked deliberately aside and poured him and her a drink from the pitcher that sat on the low table. Candles brightened. He was accustomed to this. Accustomed too, to the light step that stole up behind him-no one walked up behind him; it was a tic he had. But Ischade did it and he let her; and she knew. Knew that no one touched him from behind, that it was one of their little games, that he let her do that. It made a little frisson of horror. Like other games they played. Soft hands came up his back, rested on his shoulders.

He turned round with both wine cups and she took hers and a kiss, lingering slow.

They did not always go straight to bed. Tonight he took the chair in front of the fire; she settled half beside him and half into his lap, a comfortable armful, all whisper of cloth and yielding curves and smell of rich musk and good wine. She sipped her wine and set it down on the sidetable. Sometimes at such moments she smiled. This time she gazed at him in a way he knew was dangerous.

He had not come tonight to look into those dark eyes and forget his own name. He felt a cold the wine could not reach, and felt for the first time that life or death might be equally balanced in her desires.

Ischade treading the aisles of the barracks, surveying murder-satisfied. Sated.

It was not death that appealed to her. It was these deaths.

"You all right?" he asked of the woman staring so close into his eyes. "Ischade, are you all right tonight?"

Blink. He heard his pulse. Hers. The world hung suspended and day or night made no difference. He cleared his throat or tried to.

"You think I better get out of here?"

She shifted her position and rested her arms on his shoulders, joined her hands behind his head. Still silent.

"I want to ask you," he said, trying, in the near gaze of her eyes, the soft weight of her against his side. "-want to ask you-" That wasn't working. He blinked, breaking the spell, and took his life in his hands, grinned in the face of her darkness and sobered up and kissed her. His best style. He could get things out of a body one way; he had, now and again, used pleasanter persuasions. He was not particularly proud of it, no more than the other. It was all part of his skill-knowing a lie from a sc.r.a.p of truth, and following a lead.

He had one. Truth was in her silence tonight.

"You want something," he said, "you've always wanted something-"

She laughed, and he caught her hands down. Hard.

"What can I do," he asked, "what is it you want me to do?" No one held onto Ischade. He sensed that in the darkening of her eyes, in the sudden dimming of the room. He let go. "Ischade. Ischade." Trying to keep his focus. And hers.

Right now he ought to get up and head for the door and he knew it; but it was infinitely easier to sit where he was; and very hard to think of what he had been trying to think of, like the memory gaps, like the things they did/he thought they did in that bed sprawled with silks. "You've got Stilcho, got Janni, got me-is it coincidence, Ischade? Maybe I could help you more if I was awake when you talked to me-" Or is it information you go for? "Maybe-our aims and yours aren't that far apart. Self-interest. Weren't you talking about self interest? What's yours, really? And I'll tell you mine."

Arms tightened behind his head. She shifted forward and now there was nothing in all the room but her eyes, nothing in all the world but the pulse in his veins.

"You think hard," she said. "You go on thinking, thinking's a counterspell, you've come here all armed with thinking, and yet it's such a heavy load-aren't you tired, Strat, don't you get tired, bearing all the weight for fools, being always in the shadow, isn't it worth it, once, to be what you are? Let's go to bed."

"What's going on in town?" He got the question out. It wandered out, slurred and half-crazed and half-independent of his wits. "What have you got your hand into, Ischade? What game are you using us for-"

"Bed," she whispered. "You afraid, Strat? You never run from what scares you.

You don't know how."

4.

"I don't know," Stilcho said, limping along through the streets in Haught's company. Haught took long strides and the dead Stepson made what speed he could, panting. A waterskin sloshed in time to his steps. "I don't know how to make contact with him-he's here, that's all-"

"If he's dead," Haught said, "I'd think you had an edge. I don't think you're trying."

"I can't," Stilcho gasped. Twilight showed Haught's elegance, his supercilious gaze, and Stilcho, about to clutch at him, held back his hand. "I-"

"She says that you will. She says that you'll be quite adequate. I really wouldn't want to prove less than that, would you?"

The thought ran through Stilcho like icewater. They were near the bridge, near the running-water barrier, and while it did not stop him (he was truly alive in some senses) it made him weak in the knees. There was a checkpoint the other side of the bridgehead, that was a line of no color; and few meddled with that one, which had some living warders, but not all that patrolled the streets beyond were alive, and the Shambles suffered horrors and the malicious whimsy of Roxane's creatures. "Listen," Stilcho said, "listen, you don't understand. He's not like the dead when he's like this. Dead are everywhere. Janni's tied to one thing, he's got an attachment, and he's like the living in that regard. No good news for what he's attached to-But you can't find him like the rest of the dead.

He's got place, where applies to him same as you and me-"

"Don't lump me in your category." Haught brushed imaginary dust from his cloak.

"I've no intention of joining you. And whatever you told the mistress about that business with the rosebush-"

"Nothing, I told her nothing."

"Liar. You'd tell anything you were asked, you'd hand her your mother if she asked-"

"Leave my mother out of this."

"She down in h.e.l.l?" Haught wondered, with a sudden wolfish sharpness that sent another icy chill through Stilcho's gut. "Maybe she could help."

Stilcho said nothing. The hate Haught had toward Stepsons was palpable, a joke most of the time, but not when they were alone. Not when there was something Haught could hold over him. But Stilcho glared back. He had been a marsh-brat and a Sanctuary drayman before the Stepsons recruited him, neither occupation lending itself to bright, sharp acts of courage. He was slow to anger as his lumbering team had been. But there was a point past which not, the same as there had been with his plodding horses. The beggar-king who tortured him had found it; Haught had just located it. And Haught perhaps sensed it. There was a sudden quiet in the Nisibisi wizardling. No further jibes. Not a further word for a moment.

"Let's just get it done," Stilcho said, anxious less for Haught than for Her orders. And he gathered his black cloak about him and walked on past the bridge.

A bird swooped overhead-a touch of familiarity, perhaps, avian inquisitiveness.

But it was not the sort to be interested in riverside unless there was a bit of carrion left. It napped away to the Downwind side of the bridge, heedless of barriers and checkpoints, as other birds winged their way here and there.

That one was bound for the barracks, Stilcho reckoned. Across the bridge he saw, with his half-sight-(the missing eye was efficacious too, and had vision in the shadow-world, whether or not it was patched: it was, lately, since he had recovered a little bit of his vanity, under the sting of Haught's taunts.) He saw the PFLS bridgewarder, but he saw several Dead gathered there too, about the post where they had died; and Haught was with him, but not exactly in the lead as they walked down the street and cut off toward the Shambles.

"Gone back to the witch, that's where." Zip dropped down on the wooden stairs of a building in the Maze, there on the street, and the beggar-looking woman who slouched in her rags nearby was listening, although she did not look at him. Zip was panting. He pulled out one of his knives and attacked the wood of the step between his legs. "He's one d.a.m.n fool, you know that."

"Mind your mouth," Kama said. It was a slim woman and a lot of weaponry under all that cloak and cloth, and her face was smeared with dirt enough and her mouth crusted with her last meal, part of the disguise. She would even fool the nose. "You want to make yourself useful, get the h.e.l.l to the Unicorn and pick up Windy. Tell him move and leave the rest to him."

"I'm not your d.a.m.n errand-boy."

"Get!"

He got. Kama got up and waddled down the darkening street in her best old-woman way, toward another contact.

Moruth heard the dull flap of wings before the bird alit in the window of Mama Becho's. The beggar-king clenched his hands and listened, and when it appeared, a dark flutter outside the shutters, he resisted going to that window at the tavern's backside. But a hard, chisel beak tapped and scrabbled insistently.

Wanting in.

He went and shoved the window open. The bird took off and lit again, glaring at him with shadowy eyes in the almost-night. It lifted then with a clap of wings and flapped away, mission accomplished.

Moruth had not the least desire in the world to go out tonight; he lived in constant terror, since the ma.s.sacre over by Jubal's old estate, in the Stepson barracks. There were a lot of souls out on patrol in Sanctuary, round Shambles Cross. Old blind Mebbat said so; and Moruth, who had carried on warfare in the streets with Stepsons and hawkmasks, had no particular desire to meet what walked about on such nights.

But he went to the door and sent a messenger who sent others, and one ran up to a rooftop and waved a torch.

"Snakes," Ischade whispered, in bed with her lover. She kissed him gently and disengaged his fingers from her hair. "You ever put it together, Strat, that both Nisibis and the Beysib are fond of snakes?"

He recalled a serpentine body rolling under his heel, a frantic moment the other side of Roxane's window.

"Coincidences," Ischade said. "That's possible of course. True coincidences are a rare thing, though. You know that. You don't believe in them any more than I do, being no fool at all."

Stilcho stopped, moving carefully now. Haught's hand sought his arm. "They're here," Haught said.

"They've been here for some time," Stilcho said of the shadows that shifted and twisted, blacker than other shadows. "We've crossed the line. You want to do the talking?"

"Don't try me. Don't try me, Stilcho."

"You think you're powerful enough to walk through the Shambles now and deal with all the ghosts at once. Do it, why don't you? Or why'd you bring me?"

Haught's fingers bit painfully into his arm. "You talk to them, I say."

No more remarks about his mother. Stilcho turned his head with deliberate slowness and looked at the gathering menace. No one alive was on the street but Haught. And himself. And many of these were Roxane's. Many were not-just lost souls left unattended and lately, in the lamentable condition of Sanctuary, without compulsion to go back to rest.

"I'm Stilcho," he said to them. And he took what he carried, a waterskin, and poured some of the contents on the road. But it was not water that pooled and glistened there. He stepped back. There was a dry rustling, a pushing and shoving, and something very like a living black blanket of many pieces settled above the glistening puddle on the cobbles. He backed away and spilled more.

"There'll be more," he said. "All you have to do is follow."

Some ghosts turned away in horror. Most followed, a slow drifting. He dribbled more of the blood. He had not asked where it came from. These days it was easy come by.

For Ischade-more than most.

Strat struggled to open his eyes, and when he did there was a whisper in the air like bees in summer, there was a darkness above him like uncreation. "You suspect me," a voice said, like the bees, like the wind out of the dark, "of all manner of things. I told you: self-interest. Mine is this town. This town is where I hunt. This wicked, tangled town, this sink into which all wickedness pours-suits me as it is. I lend my strength to this side and to that. Right now I lend it to the Ilsigis. But you'll forget that by morning. You'll forget that and remember other things."

He got his eyes open again. It took all the strength he had. He saw her face in a way he had never seen it, looked her in the eyes and looked into h.e.l.l, and wanted now to shut them, but he had lost that volition.

"I've told you what to do," she said. "Go. Leave, while you can. Get out of here!"

High on the hill a horn blew, brazen and pealing alarm. The alarm outside the Unicorn was more mundane and less elegant: a series of old pots battered with all the strength in a watcher's arm. Help, ha! Invasion, incursion, mayhem!

There was fire in Downwind. And uptown. In a dozen intersections barricades started going up, torches flared, horses' hooves clattered wildly through the night.

"Get 'em," Lysias the Black instructed his small band, and arrows rained down on one of Jubal's bands that planned to barricade the Blue line. "Rouse our wizard help up here, move it! That road stays open!"

From his vantage on a rooftop, bright fire sprang up on the hill.

More horns and clatterings and brayings of alarms in the night. Militias. .h.i.t the streets.

And a rider on a bay horse pelted down the riverside with reckless abandon right through the Blue, headed for Black lines and comrades.

All h.e.l.l was loose in the streets. Shutters broke (thieves in Sanctuary were no laggards, and had had their eyes set on this and that target from long before: when the riot broke, they smashed and grabbed and ran like all the devils and the Rankan pantheon was at their heels.) Uptown, one of the horns braying and one of the alarms ringing was the mere barracks and the Guard; but Wale-grin, who had not been slow to pick up the rumors, already had his snipers posted, and the first surge of looters uptown met a flight of arrows and a series of professionally organized barricades. This was standard operation. It deterred the more dilatory of invaders.

It did not deter all of them.

Down on riverside, Ischade sat wrapped only in her black robe, in the tumbled fiery silks of her bed, and grinned while her eyes rolled back in her head.

Shadows poured down the riverside, shadows marched from the ravaged barracks in Downwind, and ignored the barriers the Beggar-king and his kind had erected.

Ignored the PFLS and its flung stones and its naphtha-bottles and the fires: that demi-legion had seen the fires of h.e.l.l and were not impressed. They had already pa.s.sed the Yellow line, and they swaggered along Red territory, the winding streets of Downwind, with a swiftness no ordinary band could achieve, faster and faster.

"They're coming," Stilcho said to Haught, and the Nisi magus hardly liked the satisfaction in Stilcho's face. Haught s.n.a.t.c.hed the skin of blood and shook out a few more drops to keep the Shambles-ghosts on the track- glanced a second time at Stilcho, thinking uncomfortably of treachery.

"Janni. Where's Janni? Have you located him?"

"Oh, I can guess where he'll go," Stilcho said.