The price of victory- - Thieves World 13 (96 page)

heat so intense it made sweat run, light that blinded and blazed white—

and a fool of a thief stood there with this mooncalf look and a knife for

their mutual defense—

"He could spit you like a pig," she spat at him. "That man's the garrison commander, that's a Stepson, thief!"

One was my lover. One was.

Gods, she thought, dropping her eyes against her hand, shaking her head, I sent him away. I broke the spell, dammit, Isethimfree, there's no more spell, dammit to the hells!

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But it was not Crit she was thinking of.

"M'lady?"

It was an anxious voice. The lights had dimmed. She looked at her young thief and saw still the scrubbed, frightened face—the knife clutched in a white-knuckled fist.

"What are you doing with that?" she demanded.

He looked less and less certain—even what he was doing here. He tucked that hand behind him, said diffidently, "In case he was comin' in here, m'lady."

"What, to defend me?"

He shrugged, twitched the knife-arm shoulder, looked abashedly at the floor and up again.

Gods.

She held the cloak about her, she beckoned him closer, she looked at a face that looked so very much different than her unkempt thief.

A pretty boy, Crit had said. When she wanted Strat, who was not a
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boy, who was most certainly not a boy—

She touched his face, worked a small sorcery, brushed the hair from his brow. He tried to put his arms around her, jerked her close—

She pushed him away, both attracted and repelled—for all the wrong reasons. She said coldly, "There's clothes, there's money, take what you want and get out of here. I'll call you on another night. For your own sake—listen to me now."

His jaw set. He prepared some foolish argument, some protestation of his manhood, his impatience.

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She waved an arm and the door banged open, disturbing all the candles and the lamps. She let go her spell . . .

He stayed for nothing. He ran. She heard the gate, let him past her wards, and banged that shut and the door, clang! boom! after him.

She was shaking after that. She dropped her head against her hand and tried to forget the lust that was her curse, that at times and by the pull of the moon was stronger than reason, stronger than love—

The desire that killed—killed everyone but Strat. Strat had found a
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way to survive, until things changed, until Strat turned moody and sullen and the anger grew in him—the anger to invoke the curse and kill him.

So she had driven him away, given him back to Crit, given him his freedom from her ensorcelments—

Crit, tonight, came here to offer stupid bargains, with no knowledge whether she would even keep her word—Crit was not lying, he could not be lying, under those terms, there was still some attraction; and that fool boy, the thief—with a knife, ready to use it if Crit had burst through the door—

For what, she asked herself, for what, except male stupidity?

For what reason in hell, except a man would not hear No. . . .

For what reason, gods, except Strat was a fool and Strat did not under stand her.

Like the boy who thought he was going to be a hero. Like Strat—who did not know how to lose and did not know how to retreat from what he thought was his right and her obligation to him.

Who—gods!—had been with her too long, had been too close to her not to know what she was and who should have, for once in his stubborn,
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prideful life, run the way the boy had.

But Strat did not understand that.

She looked up at the ceiling, at the blaze of lights that glittered in her eyes.

And stopped what she was feeling, shut it off cold, because love was the killing-urge, it was all mixed up with tenderness, it wound all through it, because when a man intimate with her started making up his own mind what he wanted, and once frustration became force, that someone died; and it was pleasure and it was anger at a fool and it was pain and revenge all wrapped together.

"Damn!" she cried, to any god who might be listening, and to the thrice-damned and very dead mage who had set the curse on her. Lights blazed about her, candles unconsumed.

Like her endless, deathless life—no less now than it had been a hun dred years ago . . .

And so many, many dead to her account - . .

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Crit came quietly into the stableyard of the safe-house, threw the reins over his horse's head, and led the horse through the gate, quietly still, figuring Gayle must be upstairs—not that the commander needed an excuse for late-night exits and entrances—whether from some night busi ness at headquarters or a late night on the Street of Red Lanterns; they had all been working odd shifts, they were still cleaning up paperwork and dealing with files, and whatever sleep Gayle or Kama was getting was hard-won.

He walked the horse quietly to the stable door, and turned suddenly, with a reach at his sword, because of a step alongside the stable in the dark, a large shadow.

Shepherd.

The big man said, "Strat hasn't gone uptown, he's gone to see Ran dal."

"For what?" Crit demanded in his frustration. He had no difficulty believing Strat had gone off somewhere—Randal was hardly where he would have guessed, but he had no reason to doubt this uninvited visitor. Shepherd—came and went like a ghost, him and his outmoded leather armor and that big clay-colored horse of his, with the panther-skin shabraque; reins of woven grass, the scent of the marsh about him—a
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spook for sure if Crit had ever seen one—came in when the Riddler had left with most of the forces, and talked about Debt and the Honor of the Corps, and things that the last guard was too out of sorts to hear these depressing, final days. . . .

Shepherd shrugged, casting a large shadow in the stableyard lamplight as he stood aside. "Your partner's in trouble. But you understand that. Make no bargains with the witch."

"What do you want?" It bothered Crit; it had been bothering Crit ever since this man had showed up, the way this man moved in claiming to be a mere, assumed so much, came and went as if the rules meant nothing to him; and why in hell Crit let him get away with it Crit himself had no idea—

Except there was a great deal in this man that reminded him of the Riddler.

"Go to Randal," Shepherd said, and when Crit started back to the stable, caught his arm. "Be surprised at nothing. Your time here is com ing to an end.'*

"Hell!" Crit stalked off a few paces toward the stables and stopped abruptly to ask, "Whose time? Who told you?—What's Strat up to, dam mit?"

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But Shepherd was gone.

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Ischade had left the river-house, walked the pre-dawn streets of Sanc tuary with no destination in mind—thinking about Crit, thinking about what existed between those two, and what a fool Strat was—

She would have made him commander over Sanctuary—she might have, if Tempus had not stepped in to redeem his man, and put Crit in command in Strat's place.

She would have made him more than that, if that had not happened;

she would have made him more than a lord of the Rankan Empire—if Tempus had not stepped in, if there had not been the war, and if there had been some hope of Strat continuing to be for her what he had been—

But all those things had turned dangerous, and impossible; and she found herself tonight, having rejected Crit's desperate move, having thrown her young thief out of the house, walking the warehouse district near the river and toward that street uptown that led to the hill—

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And thinking of things that might have been—in these strange days of peace in the ravaged streets of Sanctuary; in these strange days of war in the very heart of Empire.

She found herself on the high street, in the midst of which a house stood with boarded windows and bars on the doors—

And downhill—and over a street or two, in an area not so rich and not so poor—there was a house she also knew . . .

"What is it?" Moria asked, when Stilcho waked sweating in their bed, in this fine house they afforded these days. "What is it?"—holding to him; but he would have none of it—some times he would not, some nights he could not.

This time he sat, naked and shivering on the side of their bed—and stared into the dark. "Light the lamp," he asked Moria. "Light the lamp!"

And Moria, born Ilsigi, born a thief and a daughter of thieves in this city, scrambled for straw and lamp and the coals in the hearth, to pro duce that little flame that shed light on the modest rooms and drove away the visions of Hell—

Because her husband (so she called him) had died once in the hands of
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the beggars of Downwind—and all of him the witch had gotten back but his eye, wherefore the scars on his body and the scars on his face.

That eye was still in Hell, where he had been until She had called him back; and when there was no light to distract the living eye it sometimes, even yet, looked into Hell—

Where he saw the dead in their torments, and saw demons, and saw

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the demon that still lurked in Sanctuary, demon of all the wicked desires that had ever existed in human hearts . . .

"Stilcho," Moria said, putting her arms about him, pulling the sheet up around him, against the night chill. She kissed him and he was still cold—

Because She had used him for her emissary to Hell—so many times. He had been Her lover, and died as her lovers must die; and always she
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had had that mystical string on him that drew him back to life . . .

"She's calling me," Stilcho whispered, reaching for Moria's arm, hold ing to Moria's warmth, when the chill of the grave got to him.

Moria held to him. And all the time that they had lived, they, Is chade's fugitive lover and her fugitive servant, on Ischade's stolen gold—

had been poised on a knife's edge; and now—now he waked in sweats and heard Her calling him very clearly:

/ need you. She was saying. Come to me. . . .

"I hear her too," Moria whispered. "Oh, gods, no—don't go!"

Haught, the ex-slave, the dancer, the mage—stirred in his sleep too, in a barred boarded house—stirred at the side of the creature with whom he shared his exile—got up from bed and walked to those windows, feeling

—something finally, be it only the threat of Hell and death.

He looked out from those windows and saw, with a most curious frisson of fear, the black-cloaked shadow standing in the street—

Saw that hooded figure facing him and looking—he felt that stare go straight to his gut—with full cognizance that he was watching Her at that moment.

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"Mistress," he whispered, longing for the safety She might offer—

arrogant Haught, who had been Her apprentice. Her most disobedient apprentice. He found himself shivering—but it might be the cold—and with a certain weakness in his joints—it might be hunger; it was only sorcery had sustained him in this boarded-up mansion, past the stores buried in the cellar, which were long since depleted.

It seemed to him—he hugged himself, shivering more and more in the predawn chill—that he heard her voice speaking to him very clearly, telling him if he would serve her again—he might be free.

And magician and sorcerer that he had been, he was only a prisoner now, of something much worse. It was not nails and boards on the win dows that kept him in—it was powerful wards; and it was not Tasfalen he lodged with, but an undead housing something that had been Roxane the witch—a presence which made terrible demands of him and which bided asleep, but not asleep, not ever quite asleep; it drank down vials of

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dust he found for it, of its shattered Power-globe—and it only grew more malevolent and more bitter and more dangerous and demanding.

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He longed for Ischade's house. With all his heart.

I'm here, he prayed, looking out that shutter, hoping that She would hear that thought as She heard so much that passed in Sanctuary, I'm more than willing, mistress, if only you'll forgive me, mistress, I'll not make those mistakes again . . .

He caught his breath, the impression was so strong—of anger, of sum mons—he trembled, he began, against his own better knowledge to con sider which of the doors and windows he might pry open to admit Her—

To admit Death Herself—or willingly to go to Her. . . Zip poured blood over the stones of the little altar he had made—blood he had let from his own veins, there being no better to hand. He had served the Revolution, he had let blood enough of Rankan overlords, he had done all manner of things and killed more Rankene pigs than he could remember—but it had not brought forth his god, the god that was going to liberate the town. The Revolution had died—or won—or things had simply changed beyond a need for the Revolution or a hope for its success. Somehow things had gotten muddled for him, because he had begun sleeping with a woman of the enemy—Kama, Tempus' daughter, of all people, on the outs with her father, but still one of the foreign Enemy—