The Dead of Winter- - Thieves World 07 (12 page)

"Let it be buried with Ezucar then," she said softly, right beside him behind the bar, "and the rest of the past. The present is that I love you, Ahdio. What about the future? Can't we start it right now?"

He looked at her, and the tears he saw on her cheeks caused those in his eyes to well over. Then he was embracing her and being embraced, both of them striving to meld their bodies into one. The embrace lasted a long, long while, and surely no one who knew or thought he knew Ahdiovizun could imagine him weeping, as he wept now. Some of their murmuring was incoherent but most of it was the repeating of the other's name, over and over.

"Home is where Ahdio is," she murmured, in a moment of coherence, "and the rest of his name doesn't matter. I've come home."

At last she reminded him that he hadn't locked the front door. He did that, and they went upstairs.

The following night she was there, very much there and enough to bring gasps from every patron, men and women alike, and Ahdio stood and bellowed to gain their attention and silence while he made an announcement. What he made clear was that this was his woman. She had better not be touched or called out at or spoken to with disrespect. And Jodeera remained behind the counter, pouring, helping him and Throde.

Of course it did not work. Men who had never bothered to get themselves up and go to the bar kept doing so, rather than calling or signaling to Ahdio and Throde. They fetched and carried their own brew just to be able to approach the counter and have a look at her. Predictably, the looks became more intense and more lustful as the night wore on and the beer and wine flowed. Inevitably someone made a remark. Then someone else did. Someone else, whether from a sense of honor and rightness or in order to curry Ahdio's favor, conked that man with his fired clay cup. It broke on a hard head. The collapsing man's brother went after the mug-wielder. Ahdio came after them both and Throde went after his staff. Jodeera stood looking on, feeling pained and wretched again and showing it.

Her very presence here had caused trouble. Perhaps both she and Ahdio had known it would happen, but both hoped it would work, her beauty in this place. They had' told themselves it would be all right, that it would work out, because they wanted it so.

So there was trouble. Ahdio ended it, and Ahdio closed early.

"Oh darling," she quavered through her weeping, "I'm so sorry!"

"It wasn't your fault and we both know it. And we also know that now you're here, after last night and today, I am not about to let you go. Nothing is going to interfere. Nothing!"

Holding her so fiercely that his hands hurt her upper arms, he stared at her. His Jodeera, who had always been his Jodeera, but they had had to wait so long, so long. He knew what had to be done; what he had to do. He hated it, but he knew that he was going to do it. Tonight, Ahdiomer Viz had to be reborn. Just for tonight.

The hit on Throde came as he limped and tap-tapped homeward, leaning on his long staff. Since everyone knew he carried no money and was harmless, the motive of the three men was vengeance, not robbery. They could not get at Ahdio; they would have their fun with Throde. He recognized the ejected Tarkle and the two who had sat with him, and remained after.

They stood in a line across his path in the alley, smiling. To Throde, Tarkle loomed about as big as an outhouse. He made a show of looking all around. "Don't see Ahdio nowheres. Reckon he won't appear 'tween you and my fist this time. Gimp!"

Throde said nothing, and Tarkle made his move.

Then Throde did. The cripple's staff practically leaped across him into both his hands, becoming the quarterstaff it was. Right end went low to whack Tarkle's left leg just below the knee, hard; Throde reversed the push and pull of his arms and the staff's other end rapped the man's right arm, between shoulder and elbow. The swiftness of Throde's assuming the stance and delivering those blows was not believable, but Tarkle's pain was. He cried out at the first impact and moaned at the second. His better arm dropped to hang useless and he was staggering. Throde was still moving: third stroke high to catch the left side of Tarkle's neck with a meaty thup sound. The bully's only sound was a throaty noise. He went down. One of his astonished cronies had already started moving in; the third underwent a sudden attack of intelligence and paused to draw his dagger. Throde feinted to the right and drove the end of the stave straight into the stomach of his second attacker. He made a truly ugly noise and bent right over and Throde whacked him right on the top and back of his head. The fellow fell onto Tarkle. Tarkle was moving and groaning; his crony wasn't. And the third man was coming in from the side, his knife out and held low in the manner of a man who knew how to use it on other men and had done so before. His mouth dropped open. The cripple had shown that he could move, and move fast; now he moved even faster, and in a way and direction not at all believable. The knife glittered as it rushed in, its wielder partly crouched and extending his arm, and Throde wasn't there. He ran several steps right up the wall on his attacker's left with all the speed and facility of a frightened cat. Five steps up he wheeled and came dropping like a stone, his right shoulder hunched above the stave he held in both hands. The knife-wielder, going into shock or something like at the absolutely incredible, knew real fear. He made the wrong move. That cost him his eye, which his dodging put into the path of the down rushing quarterstaff. His cry was a shriek as he went down and Throde landed in a crouch. He had to yank his staff out of the man's eye socket and brain. The last three or four inches were dripping as he turned, crouching, to meet whatever had to be faced and braced next.

That was nothing; mumbling and whimpering, Tarkle was crawling away. Throde's arms quivered under the impetus of adrenaline and excitation, but he stopped himself.

"Guess Throde and me fooled you bastards," he snarled in the best fakey voice he could find.

Tarkle didn't look back. Tarkle kept right on crawling up the alley toward the light. Throde looked down at his two victims. They lay sprawled ugly, messily. So what? This was an alley in the Maze: Who cared?

Throde did. Shaking all over and leaning on his staff, he limped back to the house of Alamanthis, and awoke the physician. Then the youth went on home, limping, his staff clacking the street. Throde lived alone. The following night, Ahdio and Throde worked alone. Once again Ahdio made an announcement, sadly: his woman was gone. That brought groans and embarrassed, chastened faces and expressions of sympathy. It was the first quiet night at Sly's Place in anyone's memory.

On the night following, however, Ahdio and Throde had help. Mostly she stayed behind the bar, pouring, slapping bread and sausage onto wooden plates. She was not attractive and furthermore was specifically unattractive, this new helper in Sly's. Her big chaincoated employer called her Cleya. Remarks were not made to her. No one bothered to approach the counter to get a look at her, in her long and nigh-shapeless gray dress. Ouleh announced that she liked this Cleya. The reason was simple, and it was Frax who put it best: "Whew. Got a face her mother couldn't love and I've saw better figures on brooms." The woman now publicly called Cleya did not mind. To be with Ahdio at last, she accepted the price, even this. All her life her beauty had after all been more a curse than a blessing. One man, among all men, had treated her as other than an object, a bauble, and he was the only man she had ever loved. Her father and the powerful noble of wealth, Ezucar, had arranged and forced her marriage to the latter, who wanted an object and a bright and beautiful bauble to wear in public and at his parties. Meanwhile the man she loved had left Suma. Now, years later, she had followed and they were together. The two rooms above the tavern were eminently superior to the servant-staffed mansion of Ezucar. She was sorry that because of her Ahdio had felt that he must take up his Practice again. Yet it was only this once; it was enough and more than enough that at night in their apartment above Sly's Place in the Maze, his spell was off her so that the veil of ugliness was lifted, and she was again his beautiful Jodeera. THE GOD-CHOSEN

Lynn Abbey

He might have been a stonemason by the way he swung the long-handled hammer save that no solitary stonemason would be working before dawn in the unfinished temple. He might have been a soldier since, when a younger man appeared, he exchanged the hammer for a sword and held his own in a practice session that went on until the sun edged through the leaning stone columns. He was, in fact, a priest-a priest of the Storm God Vash-anka, and therefore a soldier and stonemason before all else.

He was a Rankan aristocrat: distant nephew to the late, unlamented Emperor; equidistant to the new one as well-though none would have recognized him with sweat making dirty tracks down his back and his black hair hanging in damp, tangled hanks. Indeed, because of the hair and the sweat his peers from the capital would have picked his tall, blond companion as the aristocrat and labelled the priest a Wrigglie or some other conquered mongrel. But there were no observers and none who knew Molin Torchholder mentioned his ancestry. He'd been born in the gilt nursery of Vashanka's Temple in Ranke-the well-omened offspring of a carefully arranged rape. His father maimed or killed ten men of impeccable lineage before claiming Vashanka's sister, Azyuna, in the seldom enacted Ritual of the Ten-Slaying. It did not matter that Azyuna had been a slave or that she'd died giving birth to him. Molin had been raised with the best his mortal father and Vashanka's cult could offer. His rise was steady, if not meteoric: An acolyte at age five, he traveled with the army before he was ten. He was fourteen when he engineered the siege at Valtostin, breaching the walls at four places in a single night. Some said he'd become Supreme Hierophant, but his accomplishments in war, destruction and intrigue were not accompanied by the proper deference to his superiors. He'd disappeared, apparently in disgrace, into the inner sanctums of the Imperial Temple, re-emerging in his early thirties to accompany the inconvenient Kadakithis into exile in Sanctuary.

"You'd send half the men on the barricades to an early death," Walegrin, commander of the regular army's garrison in Sanctuary, complimented the priest as they set aside their swords. "Pity the fool who thinks Vashanka's priests are soft."

Molin immersed his face in a bowl of icy water rather than acknowledge Walegrin's admiration. Vashanka's priests were soft, due in no small part to the irremediable absence of the god himself. Vashanka had died in Sanctuary-died because when a god is separated from his worshipers, the worshipers go on living-not the god. And the priests, intermediaries between worshipers and gods, what of them when a god had simply vanished? It was not a question Molin enjoyed pondering.

He settled the tunic of a successful tradesman around his shoulders and hid the hammer in a crack between two man-high blocks of stone. "Did the barricades hold last night?" he asked, tucking the sword into a saddle-sheath.

"Our lines held," Walegrin replied with a grimace as they left the enclosure of Vashanka's last, incomplete temple. "There was trouble Downwind between the Stepsons and the rabble-again. And something dead or deadly moving along the White Foal. But nothing to disturb our fish-eyed masters." It was Ilsday for the Ilsigi, Savankhday for the Rankans and Belly's-day for the Beysin (who demonstrated their barbarism by giving days to their bodies rather than to the gods); but, most important, it was Market-day. Civil war would abate for one day while partisans and rivals rubbed shoulders in disorder of another kind. The Path of Money, like every other thoroughfare in town, was filled with the intense activity of commerce-legal and otherwise. The pair was separated near the Processional when a food stall erupted in flames. Walegrin, the soldier and representative of such order as the town possessed, went to the merchant's aid and Molin, in the disguise of a merchant himself, found his journey redirected into a tangle of streets.

Here, where a rainbow of painted symbols proclaimed which gangs and factions had been paid off by each household, there was no amnesty and a well-fed man on a well-fed horse was only a moving target. Torchholder shed his merchant's demeanor: straightening his back, holding the reins in one hand while the other rested on his thigh ready to wield whatever weapon his cloak might conceal. Ragged children gauged his ability to defend himself by shouting epithets combining anatomy and ancestry with an originality a soldier could admire-never guessing that they cursed Vashanka's Hierarch in Sanctuary. He ignored them all as he turned down a sunnier alley.

Then the sunlight vanished. The heavy black clouds which had foretold countless perversions of weather since the Storm God's demise condensed overhead. A blast of ice-laced wind roared down the alley making the horse rear in panic. The children and beggars struck the moment Molin's attention was on the horse instead of Sanctuary, and the priest found himself in the midst of a deadly little alley-fight even as needle-like pellets of sleet began their own assault from the sky.

He dropped the reins, a signal to his army-trained horse that it was free to attack, and drew the sword from its saddle-sheath. The odds swung back in his favor once he got a film grip on the hand pressing a knife into his kidney and tossed that urchin back into the street. Whatever his attackers had expected it wasn't a merchant who fought like one of the thrice-damned Stepsons and, though they would have dearly loved to drag this anomaly back to their leader for a closer interrogation, they cowered back under the eaves. Molin gathered the reins, pounded his heels against the gelding's flanks and made a dash for the Palace.