Blood ties-- Thieves World 09 (7 page)

"The wisdom is; Sanctuary is for lovers, not fighters, this season. Make peace among you, or the Empire will grind the lot into dust, and bury your flesh with corn to make it grow tall."

"Crap, old man. I'd heard you were tough-not like the rest," Zip spat. "But it's the same garbage I hear from them. Tell it to your troops-the Whoresons and the Turd Commando: They're the ones causing all the grief." Tempus's patience was near an end. "Boy, mark me: I'll call them off you for a week-seven days. In it, you meet with the other factions and hammer out some agreement, or by New Year's Day, the PFLS won't be even a memory. Nor will you live even that long, to verify it."

There was a silence, and in it someone muttered, "Let's kill the bastard," and someone else whispered back, "We can't-don't you know who that is?" Tempus peered through the downpour and watched the flat face before him, emotionless and cold with rain streaking down it. There was strength in the youth, like the Enlibar steel some had thought would make a difference here-but, like the steel, Zip's strength was too little and too late. Ageless eyes shocked against mortal eyes too sure of their doom and unwilling to seek favor. But another thing passed between them: The weariness of the young fighter, hunted by too many and willing to die against sheer numbers and superior force of arms, had turned to hopelessness; that despair met its echo in the gaze of the fabled immortal who went from war to war and empire to empire, taking life and teaching the wisest something about the spirit's triumph over death.

Tempus, who had created, trained, and fielded the Stepsons, was offering a moratorium, some forgotten hope, where an ultimatum had been expected. There was something in Zip's tone when the boy answered, "Yeah, a week. All right. All I can say is the PFLS will try-I can't speak for the others. It's got to be enough. Or-"

Tempus had to interrupt. A threat uttered in front of the youth's followers would be binding. "Enough, for you and yours. What they sow, they'll reap. You can come out of this with more than you expect. Zip-an imperial pardon, maybe a profession, and do what you do best for the good of the town you say you love."

"The town I'll die for, one way or the other," Zip murmured, because he'd understood what Tempus was saying and what had been unsaid in their met glance, and wanted the Riddler to know it, before he waved his men back without another word from Tempus.

It took only moments for the intersection where Red Clay Street met West Gate to seem deserted once again. It took no longer to mount the Tros and head it toward Lizard's Way.

Tempus was thinking, as he rode the Tros past a pile of refuse that undoubtedly hid at least one hostile youngster, that what Zip might gain, could he do the impossible and show progress toward peace-a coalition of rebel forces, a cease fire committee, or even a pacification program-was more than the boy's wildest dream: a home.

There were no forces to replace the Stepsons and the 3rd. The Rankan army garrison was just that-Rankan. The Stepsons' barracks, won at so great a cost in life and love five years past, would be deserted; the job the Sacred Band did, undone. There would be a handful of Hell-Hounds to stand against Theron's battalions, Beysib oppressors, and the crime-lords of the town. If Zip would only let him, Tempus was going to solve a number of problems that had seemed insoluble only minutes before, and do the youth the only favor one man can do another: Give him a start on solving his own problems, a place to stand, a world to win-a fresh start.

If Tempus could keep his own people from killing the charismatic young rebel leader in the meantime. And if Zip knew a last chance when he saw one. And if, in Sanctuary, where hate and fear passed for respect. Zip hadn't made so many enemies that, no matter what Tempus did, the boy's assassination wasn't as sure as the next thunderclap of Stormbringer's welcome-weather. When that thunderclap did come, Tempus was already cantering the Tros down Lizard's Way, headed for the Vulgar Unicorn, where a fiend named Snapper Jo tended bar and word could be spread fast, when a man had rumors he wanted on the wing.

Snapper Jo was a fiend of the gray-and-warty-skinned, snaggle-toothed variety. His shock of orange hair stood out every which way from his head and his eyes looked in both directions at once, causing distress to certain patrons who wondered which orb to fix on when they earnestly begged for credit or leave to pass upstairs, where drugs and women could be had.

Snapper's job of bartending in the day at the Vulgar Unicorn was his most prized accomplishment-save the winning of his freedom.

He'd been the summoned minion of Roxane, the Nisibisi witch called Death's Queen. But his mistress had freed him, after her fashion ... or, at least, she'd not come around lately to order him to this or that foul depradation. The fact that Snapper thought of his former existence as a . witch's servant as depradacious was central to the fiend's new outlook on life. Here, among the Wrigglies and the mendicants and the whores, he was trying desperately for acceptance.

And he was managing.. No one teased him about his looks or shrank from him in fear. They were civil, in the manner of humans, and they treated him as an equal, to the extent that anyone here ever treated anyone else so. And, in his heart of hearts, Snapper Jo wanted above all to be accepted by the humans-perhaps, someday, as a human. For was not humanity something in the heart, not on the surface?

Snapper Jo wanted to believe it so, in this weird inn where pop-eyed Beysibs were hated marginally more than blond and handsome Rankans, where dark skin and uneven limbs and snaggle teeth weren't disfigurements; where everyone was equally oppressed by the wizards from the Mageguild and the priests from uptown. So when the tall, heroic man with the fearsome countenance, who seemed to be seeping blood-or bloody rain-from every pore, came in and spoke familiarly in a gravelly voice, saying, "Snapper, I need a favor," the day bartender drew himself up to his full height-almost equal to the stranger's-puffed out his spoon-chest, and replied, "Anything, my lord-except credit, of course: house rules."

This, too, was part of being human: caring about little stamped circles of copper, gold, or silver, even though their value was only as great as the demand of the humans who fought and died over them.

But this big human wanted only information: He'd come to Snapper to consult. The stranger said, while around him the bar cleared for a man's length on either side and behind him certain patrons skulked out into the storm and two serving wenches tiptoed into the back room, "I need to know of your former mistress -did Roxane ever find her way out of Tasfalen's house uptown? Has anyone seen her?

You, of all... persons ... would know if she's about."

"No, friend," said Snapper, who used the word friend too much because he'd just recently learned its meaning, "she's not been seen or heard from since the pillar of fire was doused."

The big man nodded and leaned close across the bar.

Snapper leaned in to meet him, feeling somehow special and very favored to be having this conversation with so formidable a human before all the patrons in the Unicorn. Nearly nose to nose, he began to notice, through his right-looking eye, some things about the man which were naggingly familiar: the hooded, narrow eyes that watched him with hot intensity, the thin slash of a mouth whose lips twisted with some private humor.

Then the man said, "And Ischade, the vampire woman-is she well? Down at Shambles Cross? Holding court among her shades?"

"She..." Then memory jogged memory, and Snapper Jo raised a crop of goose bumps to complement his warts: This was the Sleepless One, the legendary fighter his former mistress had fought so long. "She... is, sire. Ischade... is. And will be, always...."

Snapper Jo had friends among the not-really-human, the once-dead, the straddlers of the void. Ischade was not one of them, but neither was this man, whom he now knew.

As he knew why the crowd had drawn back, this rabble who knew the players in a game they joined only as pawns and never of their own accord. Snapper tried not to cringe, but his lips formed words involuntarily, words that whistled out sing-sing, "Mur-der, murder, oh there'll be mur-der everywhere and Snapper's so happy without it...."

"When next a Stepson or Commando comes in, instruct him to seek me at the mercenaries' hostel. And don't fail." The man called Tempus lay coins upon the bar.

Snapper could see them glitter with his left-looking eye, but he didn't pick them up until the big man had gone, leaving behind only creaking floorboards stained ruddy to prove he'd been there at all.

Then the fiend called one of the serving wenches from the kitchen and gave the girl, whom he loved-to the extent that a fiend can love-all the money the Riddler had left him, saying, "See, fear not. Snapper protect you. Snapper take care you. You take care Snapper, too, yes, later?" And the fiend gave a broad and lascivious grin to the woman he favored, who hid her shudder as she pocketed the equivalent of a week's wages and promised the fiend she'd warm his lonely night.

Things were tough enough, these days in Sanctuary, that you took what you could get.

"You want us to what?" Crit's disbelieving snort made Tempus frown. For Tempus, the mercenaries' hostel north of town evoked memories and ghosts as bloody as the rufous walls here, hung with weapons which had won so many days. Here, Tempus and Crit had plotted to flush a witch without thought to the consequences; here, before Crit's recruitment, Tempus had put together the core of the Stepsons and taken command of Abarsis the Slaughter Priest's Sacred Band. Here, even farther in the past, he'd burned a scarf belonging to a woman who was his most foul curse-a scarf that had been returned to him, magically whole and full of portent; a scarf he wore again around his waist, under his armor and his chiton, as if all between his first days in Sanctuary and the present were but a bad dream.

"I want you to protect, not hunt, this Zip, for one week," Tempus repeated, then added: "If, at the end of that week, there's no cease-fire coalition, no improvement, you can go back to collecting blood-debts." Crit was the brightest of the-Stepsons, a Syrese fighter who'd taken the Sacred Band oath more than once and was now paired with Straton, who in turn was entangled with Ischade, the vampire woman who lived down by Shambles Cross. No one wanted the Sacred Band out of Sanctuary more than Crit. And no one knew Tempus's heart better, or the specifics of what had transpired while the Emperor was in Sanctuary.

Crit pulled on his long nose and stirred his posset with a finger, staring into it as if it were a witch's scrying bowl. "You're not. .." he said to the bowl, then looked up at Tempus. "You're not thinking about using that bunch of Zip's as some sort of Sanctuary defense force? Tell me you're not."

"I can't tell you that. Why should I? They're trained, gods know-well enough for this town, anyway. And they're tough-as tough as any we trained ought to be, which most of them are. Niko himself spent some time working with the PFLS

leader. And it shouldn't matter to you who we leave in the barracks, as long as it's not Jubal. We can't have crime-lords running things-Theron was very explicit. It'll take locals to police this place, or us."

"That's what I mean: None of us will want to stay to oversee that bunch of murderers-not me, not any of mine. Promise me you won't do that to me again, leave me with an impossible job and an intractable lot of disappointed fighters. The Band wants to go with you. I won't be able to hold them here. And Sync's commandos won't take my orders."

It wasn't like Crit to make excuses, so these weren't excuses: These were points the Sacred Bander urgently wanted Tempus to consider.

"Fine. I agree. I just want to make sure that you understand that Zip is more useful alive than dead... for one week. And that whatever is between you and my daughter-or not," Tempus held up his hand to forestall Crit's denial, "she's entangled with Torchholder, who's Nisi-an enemy. We leave her here. We take Jihan and Randal if we have to drug them senseless to do it, and we get our tails out of here-yours, mine, Strat's, the Stepsons', the Third's-and that's that. We're clear of a degenerating situation. If we can leave some force or other to help Kadakithis, then we're lily-white."

"That's why you came here in person? To cobble together some stopgap that won't hold because Theron doesn't want it to? You know what he wants... he wants a tractable, stable Empire's anus. And with the magic screwed up, or downgraded, or whatever it is Randal's been trying to explain to me, he can get it by force of arms. I don't see a winning side for us in that kind of fight, and neither do you ... I hope."

Tempus grinned fondly at his second-in-command: "Get Straton disentangled, both from the witch and from his local responsibilities, and-on my explicit order-the two of you personally see that Zip manages to make his contacts. And that none of ours, the Third included, obstructs him. Then we're out of here, back to the capital with the best possible report under the circumstances. And, no, I didn't come down-country for this-I came down for Jihan's wedding: to stop it." Randal was in the Mageguild, consorting with the nameless First Hazard, trying to make some headway casting a simple manipulative spell to turn the swampy ground between the complex's outer and inner walls to gardens, when Tempus came to call.

The First Hazard was harried, a Rankan of Randal's age who'd assumed the dignity just when it no longer was one: The Mageguild had held the populace in thrall by fear and power for time uncounted. Now that the Nisibisi power globes'

destruction had made simple spells uncastable and love potions useless, now that sympathetic magic was no longer so, the Mageguild adepts feared not merely for their income.