Blood ties-- Thieves World 09 (9 page)

Even Theron, who'd come to the throne by way of their swords, if rumor was truth, wanted the 3rd disbanded or under a tight rein. That was why, some said, Tempus, who had created them, had got them back: No one else could control them. Left to their own, they'd slaughter Rankan emperors one by one and auction the throne to the highest bidder-Zip had heard Sync and Kama joke about it when the three were drunk.

Zip let Sync help him up, busy trying to wipe the sticky blood from his palms. He didn't argue about the dead sentry: You didn't argue with Sync, not over something as immutable as the already-dead. You saved it for the plans that could get you killed.

The rest were emerging now: at least twenty fighters-the 3rd never traveled light.

The sight of Kama in her battle dress, with the 3rd's red insignia burned into hardened leather above her right breast and campaign designators scratched below it, made his stomach lurch.

She was unfinished business, would always be. He said, "So, here I am. Talk," and found his tongue unwieldy.

Around her, he realized (as his eyes accustomed themselves to something other than the dead man, handless and footless, who still flopped helplessly in his inner sight), were others of the uptown gangs who masqueraded as authority in Sanctuary: Critias, a covert actionist from the Sacred Band who seldom ventured forth in uniform and never in daylight; Straton, his wide-shouldered, witch ridden partner; Jubal, black as Ischade's cloak and with a look on his face much blacker; Walegrin, the regular army's garrison commander and brother of the S'danzo whose child Zip's men had killed; and a blond woman he didn't know, who wore arena leathers and had a bird perched on her shoulder. He ought to be wary, he realized-this sort of crowd hadn't gathered for something as mundane as his execution. But his eyes kept sliding back to Kama and trying to fit the persona of her father over the woman who'd taught him things about lovemaking he'd never dreamed were possible. And then he realized why these uptown hotshots were down in Ratfall; Kama's father. Tempus's minions, all of these were, some by choice, some by duty, some by coercion. And none of them with a good word to say of Zip, except perhaps for the Riddler's daughter.

Fear sharpened his eyesight, and he looked beyond the gathered luminaries to their troops, and farther: to where his rebels skulked. None of them would move to save him-the odds weren't good enough.

And neither Ratfall nor Zip were worth saving, not at the kind of price the 3rd Commando would exact, if the sentry was a good example.

And he was. They'd made sure of that, had his visitors.

As he took deep breaths and resolved to tell nothing to this corps of fancy fighters (including the Stepsons' chief interrogator, Strat), Zip realized that something was indeed worth saving here: Behind the men, in the long shed against which 3rd Commando regulars leaned with studied insolence, was a store of incendiaries purchased from the Beysib glassmakers: bottles in which were alchemical concoctions that, once their wicks were lit and the bottles thrown, exploded with such force that the shards and flame and concussion from even one such bottle could clear a street-or a palace hall.

With or without him, the revolution could continue, as long as the Beysib glassblowers took the PFLS's money and Ilsig will-to-fight held out. So, having determined that he had something to lose. Zip said again, "Talk, I said. What do you think this is, an uptown dinner party?"

"No," said the woman he didn't know, the one with the hawkish bird upon her shoulder, "it's a revolutionary council -a trial, actually: yours." When Kama came back from Ratfall, her eyes were red-rimmed and she was so disarrayed that she ran up Molin's back stairs, hoping to have the girls draw her a bath so she could get the Zip-smell off her and the straw out of her hair before the Torch saw her.

But Molin was home: She could hear Torchholder's voice, and that of another Rankan, coming from the front rooms.

She froze in horror, realizing suddenly that she couldn't face him-not now, with her thighs sticky and her blood up, and all her father's heritage aroused in her so that she wanted nothing to do with the half-Rankan, half-Nisi who had saved her life, and whom she owed so much.

But was debt the same as love? Zip's faked and fated "trial" had broken her heart thrice over.

The outcome-the verdict of conditional acquittal-was assured, by Tempus's decree. Zip was the only one who hadn't known it.

It was the crudest thing she'd ever seen men do to another man, and she'd been a willing part of it, the operator in her fascinated by all she saw, by human emotion and its interplay, by the passions of those who'd lost loved ones, and face, trying to justify the one and regain the other-all because Kama's father had ridden down from Ranke, looked upon the doings of Sanctuary's puny mortals, and not been pleased.

Sometimes she hated Tempus more even than she hated the gods. And so she'd stayed with Zip, after the others had left, to lick the nervous sweat from his fine young body and to wipe the confusion from his heart in the only way she knew.

Zip was... Zip, her aberration: a physical match such as Molin could never be. But that was all. She could never make it more, or let it make itself more, or let Zip convince her it could be more.

He needed help, that was all. And everyone was' using him, dangling him this way and that. She felt sorry for him.

So she gave him comfort in the night. It was nothing.

Yet the memory sent her bolting from Molin's doorstep, because the Torch was too intelligent to be fooled by mumbled excuses or headaches, because Kama just couldn't fake it tonight.

She roamed night-hot streets, though she knew better, almost hoping that some pickpocket or zombie or Beysib would accost her: Like her father, when pushed too hard, Kama craved only open violence. She'd have killed a Stepson or a 3rd Commando ranger, one of her own, if any dared cross her this evening. She stopped in at the Unicorn, half-hoping for a fight, but no one paid attention to her there.

She wandered back streets on a borrowed horse, letting it drift barracks-ward, until she realized that it had brought her to the White Foal Bridge. And then, as she gave the horse its head and it crossed the river bridge, she began in earnest to cry.

It was Crit she wanted now, whether to hold him or kill him, she couldn't have said if her life depended on it. But Crit was, as Zip would say, old business, and Crit had noticed that she'd stayed with Zip.

Maybe she'd stayed with Zip because of Crit, brushing hips with his partner, and because even that partner, Strat, had sought warmer company than Critias's Ischade for warmth that Crit reserved to formed ranks and duty squadrons and the next covert operation on his docket.

So when the sorrel string-horse ambled toward Ischade's funny little gate, as if by habit, Kama brushed her eyes angrily with her forearm and blinked away her tears.

In her nostrils was the rank smell of the White Foal in summer, carrying its carrion to the sea, and the perfume of night-blooming flowers of the occult sort that Ischade grew here.

And the smell of heated horse: Two were stamping, reins tied to Ischade's gate, and one of those was Grit's big black. She recognized it by the star and snip as it turned its head to whicker softly to the mount she rode. The mare under her gave a belly-shaking acknowledgment and she realized that the horse she rode, and his, were lovers.

Hating herself for resenting even that, for her confusion and her doubts, she dismounted, trying not to think at all.

And walked up to the vampire-woman's gate, and pushed it with a sweaty palm. Perhaps she was meeting her doom here-Ischade had no reason to cut Kama the kind of slack she allowed Straton, and Crit because of their pairbond, and Kama's father because of some bargain whose specifics Tempus had never revealed. If Crit was in there, Kama wanted to see him. She focused on that and nothing else.

Love sucks, she told herself, and wondered what he'd say. She'd knocked upon Ischade's door, which was lit somehow, though no torch gleamed or candle flickered in its lamp, before she'd thought of an excuse to give. She could always say she needed to debrief.

If he was there. If it wasn't a trap. If the necromant wasn't into women this summer.

Then the door opened and a small and dusky figure stepped out, closing it behind her so that Kama was forced to retreat a pace, then take a step down the stoop's stairs.

That put them eye to eye and the eyes of Ischade were deeper than Kama's hidden grief for a child lost long ago on the battlefield and the man who'd refused to give her another chance.

"Yes?" said the velvet-voiced woman who held Strat in thrall. Kama, who was more woman than she'd have chosen, looked deep into the eyes of the woman who was all any man who'd seen her had ever dreamed of wanting, and felt rough, unkempt, foolish.

"Crit's horse... is it... ? Is he... ?"

"Here? The both. Kama, isn't it?" Ischade's dark eyes delved, narrowed just a fraction, then widened.

"It, I-I shouldn't have come. I'm sorry. I'll just go and..."

"There's no harm. And no peace, either," said the vampire-woman who seemed suddenly sad. "Not if your father has the say of it. You want him-Crit? Take care for what you want, little one."

And Kama, who had never known her mother and thought of other women as if she herself were a man, found her arms outstretched to Ischade for comfort, weeping freely, sobbing so deeply that nothing she tried to say came out in words. But the necromant drew back with a hiss and a warding motion, a shake of her head and a blink that broke some spell or other.

Then she turned and was gone inside, though Kama hadn't seen the door open to admit her.

Suddenly alone with her tears on the doorstep of one of the most feared powers in Sanctuary, Kama heard words within-low words, some spoken by men. Before the door could reopen, before Crit could see her weeping like a baby, she had to get out of here. She didn't mean it; she shouldn't have come. She needed nobody-not her father, not his fighters, not Zip or Torchholder and, most especially, not the Sacred Bander called Crit.

She'd run down the path and thrown herself up on her saddle before the door opened again.

Anything the man in the doorway might have shouted was drowned out by the mare's thundering hooves as Kama slapped her unmercifully with the reins, headed toward the Stepsons' barracks at a dead run.

There was nothing Crit could tell her that she wanted to hear-except perhaps why she could forgive Zip, who had betrayed her and tried to pin Strat's attempted murder on her, when she couldn't forgive Crit, who had wanted to marry her and have a child with her.

* * *

Tasfalen's uptown estate had once been luxurious and fine, the centerpiece of one of Sanctuary's most exclusive neighborhoods.

Now it stood alone, blackened and charred but whole, while all around it skeletal remains of burned-out homes teetered for blocks, frameworks leaning on lumps of fused brick, so that occasionally a charcoaled timber snapped of its own weight and came crashing down to break an eerie silence that spread from here to the uptown house where the pillar of fire had once raged, and beyond. Not even rats ran these streets at night, since the pillar of flame had cleansed an uptown house and all the witchery that once had centered in its velvet-hung bedroom.

But Tempus had called a meeting here, across the street from Tasfalen's front door, in the dead of night-a meeting of those concerned, once all his preparations had been made.

The sleepless veteran was the only one unaffected by the hours he and his had kept this week in Sanctuary.

Crit, who'd born the brunt of delegated tasks, weaved on his feet with exhaustion as he set torches in the rubble of the house across from Tasfalen's; had the light been better, the black circles under his eyes would have told a clearer tale of what he'd been through and what it cost him to petition Is-chade for leave to do what tonight must be done here.

Strat, Crit's partner, worked silently beside him, unloading ox thighs rich with fat from a snorting chestnut who didn't like its burden, and oil in child-sized stoneware rhytons, and placing all on a makeshift plinth exactly opposite Tasfalen's door.

Tempus watched his Stepsons work without a word, waiting for the witch to show. Ischade had decreed this meeting be at midnight-necromants will be necromants. She was crucial to this undertaking, so Randal said.

Tempus hardly cared; the god was in him fierce and strong, making everything seem fire-limned and slow: his task force leader; the witch-ridden Stepson, Strat; the horses bearing sacrificial burdens. If he hadn't remembered that he'd thought it mattered, that he'd felt need to leave here owing nothing, he'd have left this stone unturned.

But Ischade owed him this favor-if it really was one. And he, in turn, owed a debt he was loath to carry-a debt to the Nisibisi witch last seen behind that ward-locked door across the street.

Tasfalen's door. It had not opened since the pillar of flame had scoured the neighborhood about it. What might come out of there, not even Ischade was certain. Powers had convened to cleanse the ground here, but stopped just short of the house. Powers that no one thought would ever work together had taken a hand to bar that door-Ischade's sort of powers, and others from deeper hells; Stormbringer's primal fury, and thus those from the sort of heaven Jihan's father ruled.

Or thus, at any rate, Tempus understood it. The god in him understood something different-something of passion inbound and lust unreleased. There was a something in there all right, the god was telling him: something very hungry and very angry.

Whatever it was-Nisibisi witch, a ravening ghost thereof, a demon entrapped, a shard of Nisi power globe-it hadn't survived in there since winter's end on stored foodstuffs and the occasional mouse.