Then the Tr6s was sighted by the rebels at the rear of the crowd, which began to part but not disperse.
Missiles pelted him, some barbed, some jagged, some meant for rolling bread or holding wine-and some designed for war.
He ducked an arrow hurtling toward him from a crossbow, his senses so much faster that he could see the helically-fletched blue feathers on its tail as it sped toward his heart.
The Tros was. .h.i.t between the eyes with a tomato: it had seen the missile coming, but never flinched or ducked, its ears p.r.i.c.ked like a sighting mechanism aligned upon the crowd: it was a warhorse, after all.
But Tempus found this affront unacceptable, and took exception to the brashness of the crowd. Reaching up with his left hand while still holding his reins, he plucked the arrow from the air when it was inches from his heart and, as he seldom did, flaunted his supernatural attributes before the crowd, holding the arrow high and breaking it between his fingers like a piece of straw as he bellowed in his most commanding voice: "Zip and all you rebels, disperse or face my personal wrath- a retribution that will haunt you till you die, and then some: you"ll leave my fury to your descendants as a bequest."
And Zip"s voice called back from a gloom in which all white faces looked alike and darker Wriggly skins faded to invisibility: "Come get me, Riddler. Your daughter did!"
He set about just that, but not before the crowd surged inward as one body, pinning the four Rankans and the girl they thought to shield against the wall.
He kneed the Tros in among confusion, took blows, and swung back and down with his sharkskin-hiked sword, inured to the death he dealt, his conscience salved before the fact by giving warning, so that his blood-l.u.s.t now reigned unimpeded and rebels fell, like wheat before a scythe, under his blade, a sword the G.o.d of war had sanctified in countless bodies just like these, across more battlefields than Tempus cared to count.
But when, finally, the crowd broke to run and none clawed at his saddle or bit at his ankle or tried to blind the Tros horse with their sharpened sticks or hamstring it with their bread knives, he realized he"d been too late to save the day.
Oh, Walegrin, b.l.o.o.d.y and with a face pummeled beyond recognition so that Tempus could only recognize him by his braided blond locks and the tears streaming from his blackened sockets unheeded, would live to fight another day: he"d been innermost, protecting Illyra-the S"danzo seeress who should have forseen all this-with his own big body. But of the other three soldiers, one"s gullet was split the way a fisherman cleans his catch, one"s neck was hanging by a thread, and the third was hacked apart, limb from limb, his trunk still twitching weakly.
It was not the soldiers, however, who drew Tempus"s attention, but the woman they"d tried to shield, who in turn had been protecting her child. Illyra, S"danzo skirts heavy with blood, cradled a young girl"s body in her arms, and wept so silently that it was Walegrin"s grief, not her own, that let Tempus know that the child was surely dead.
"Lillis," Walegrin sobbed, manliness forgotten because an innocent, his kin, was slain; "Lillis, dear G.o.ds, no... she"s alive, "Lyra, alive, I tell you."
But all the desperate wishes in the world would not make it so, and the S"danzo woman, whose eyes were wise and whose face was tired beyond her years and whose own belly bled profusely where the axe that had hewn her daughter had gone through child and into mother, met Tempus"s eyes before she turned to the field commander who could no longer command so much as his grief.
"Tempus, isn"t it? And your marvelous horse?" Illyra"s voice had the sough of the seawind in it and her eyes were bleak and full of the witch-dust settling all about. "Shall I foretell your future, lord of blood, or would you rather not read the writing on the wall?"
"No, my lady," he said before he looked above her head and beyond, to where graffiti scribed in blood defaced the mud-brick. "Tell me no tales of power: If doom could be avoided, you"d have a live child in your arms."
And he reined the Tros around, setting off again toward Wideway and the dockside, forcing his thoughts to collect and focus on the audience with Theron soon to come, and away from the writing on the wall behind the woman: "The plague is in our souls, not in our destiny. Ilsig rules. Kill the witches and me priests or perish!"
It sounded like a good idea to him, but he couldn"t throw in his lot with the rebels: he"d made a truce with magic for the sake of his soldiers; he"d made a truce with G.o.ds for the sake of his soul.
And perishing wasn"t an option for Tempus. Sometimes he wondered if he might manage it by getting himself eaten by fishes or chopped into tiny pieces, but the chances were good that his parts would rea.s.semble or-worse-that each morsel of him would reconst.i.tute an entire being.
It was bad enough existing in one discrete form; he couldn"t bear to be replicated countless times. So he smothered the rebellious impulse to throw in his lot with the rebels and see if it was true that any army he joined could not lose its battles.
He was bound by oath to Theron, to the necromant Ischade in solemn pact, to Stormbringer in another, and to Enlil, patron G.o.d of the armies now that Vashanka was metamorphosing into something else within the body of Gyskouras, their common son. And he"d spent an interval with the Mother G.o.ddess of the fishfaces in which he"d learned that Mother Bey had l.u.s.ts as great as any northern deity.
So he alone, acquainted with so many of the players intimately and capable of standing up to more-than-human actors, was competent to negotiate a settlement among the heavens through supernal avatars and earthly rulers, the representatives of their respective G.o.ds.
This task was complicated, not helped, by Kadakithis"s impending marriage to the Beysib ruler, as it was obstructed, not advanced, by Theron"s arrival here and now, when all was far from well and men had brought their h.e.l.ls to life by meddling with powers they did not understand.
So he didn"t care, he decided, what happened here, beyond his personal goals: to protect the souls of his Stepsons and those who loved him, to reward constancy where it had been demonstrated (even by mages and necromants), to clear his conscience so far as possible before he trekked back north, where the horses still grazed in Hidden Valley and the Successors on Wizardwall would welcome him back to what had become the closest thing to home he could remember.
But to do that, he must see Niko on the mend and on his way back to Bandara; he must do what Abarsis had counseled, and more.
He must get rid of that thrice-cursed pillar of fire burning with renewed fervor uptown, and spewing fireb.a.l.l.s and attracting lightning and spitting bolts into the sea, before a storm blew up from the disturbance.
For if a storm came riding the wake of all this chaos, then Jihan"s powers would be restored, and Tempus would be sad dled with the Froth Daughter for eternity.
Now he had a chance to slip away without her and let her father, the mighty Stormbringer, keep His word: find Jihan some other lover.
So he was hurrying, as he reined the Tros toward dockside where the Rankan lion blazon flapped in a sea-wind too strong not to be promising wild weather.
And the Tros, scenting the sea and his mood, snorted happily, as if in agreement: the Tros would as soon be quit of Jihan, who curried him to within an inch of his life daily, as would he.
And if a storm would bring the dust to ground, and all the magic of Nisi antiquity with it, then that was not his problem- not if he played his cards right.
For once, Crit was grateful for the witchy weather that plagued Sanctuary worse than all the factions fighting here.
"Getting Strat" was not going to be the easiest thing he"d ever done, but he wasn"t arguing that the job was his to do: Ace was his partner; their souls were too bound up to chance letting Strat die with any strings on him, no matter which witch was holding the end of them.
And Strat wasn"t going to die in flames, not in some burning house that wouldn"t burn down but only burned on and on like no natural fire.
Not that common sense was saying otherwise: crouched at the heat"s end, where waves of burning air licked his face despite the water he was palming over it intermittently. As he stared at the flaming funnel waiting for a plan to come clear, Crit reflected that his Sacred Band oath made no distinction between natural and unnatural peril. He hadn"t swom to stand by Strat, shoulder to shoulder, until death separated them if it must, only in cases where it was convenient, or magic wasn"t involved, or Strat was behaving as a rightman ought, or the problem didn"t involve an urban war zone and the possibility of being roasted alive.
The oath was binding, under any circ.u.mstances.
Watching the fiery tornado, like nothing he"d ever seen but the waterspouts of wizard weather or the cyclone that had fought in the last battle on Wizardwall, he was trying to determine whether it had a pattern to its burning and its wriggling, whether the lightning spewing from the cloud above was dependable as to target or random, and in general just how the h.e.l.l he was going to get in there.
Because Strat was in there. Everything pointed to it; Randal was sure of it; no ransom demands had come forth from the PFLS. His orders were to fetch Strat and Kama.
Kama could wait until all the h.e.l.ls froze over and Sanctuary sank into the sea, for all he cared. He"d had an affair with Tempus"s daughter, true: he was willing to pay for his indiscretion, not complaining. But Strat was his partner Strat came first.
If they"d had arguments, then that was normal-they"d have them again... over women especially. It went with pairbond, and he"d beat Strat silly if he had to, to win his point. As soon as he had the porking b.a.s.t.a.r.d back where he could pull rank, they"d settle things.
But you couldn"t settle anything with a dead man, unless he became undead like the freakish bay horse who was partially present, trotting around the Peres house on ghostly hooves, its coat looking as if it reflected the flaming whirlwind around which it circled-or was a part of it. The horse was insubstantial, sort of. But if he could catch it, maybe he could ride it up the back stairs.
Strat had ridden it. And the horse and Crit were both here for the same reason: Strat.
He decided to follow the horse on its rounds and forsook the cover of jumbled stone, remnants of the Peres"s garden wall, behind which he"d been crouching.
The heat waves emanating from that spinning horror of flame struck him with awesome force; he could feel his eyelashes singe and his lips start to blister.
Head down, following echoing hoofbeats as much as the flickering glimpses he could get of this "horse," he edged along in its wake.
If the house would just b.u.m down, like any normal fire did once a fire had consumed its fuel, things would be so simple: he could begin mourning.
He"d thought of just considering the whole unsightly and unnatural mess as a funeral pyre, calling for reinforcements, and making the Peres estate Strat"s bier. They"d say the rites, play some funeral games, he"d put everything he owned up as prize or sacrifice.
But he couldn"t do that, not until he knew for certain that Strat really was dead, and wholly dead: not likely to be resurrected by Ischade.
For that was what he feared the most: that the necromant wouldn"t be content to let Ace stay dead, that she"d pine for her lover and eventually call him up from ashes, make him an undead like poor Janni, who was somewhere in the cone of the fire-Crit couldn"t imagine how or why, but he could see, if he squinted, the dead Stepson, fully formed and unconsumed, doing something that looked like bathing under a waterfall, but doing it in a heat that would melt bone in seconds.
Crit had learned, fighting magic and sometimes fighting it with magic, not to ask questions if he didn"t want to hear the answers. So he left the matter of Janni to those who ought to tend it: to Ischade, who"d raised his shade after a proper Sacred Band funeral; to Abarsis, who"d come down from heaven and escorted Janni"s spirit on high, and done it where the whole Band could see it. If there was an argument about propriety here, it was between the necromant and the ghost of the Slaughter Priest: it wasn"t a matter for a decidedly unmagical fighter like himself. If Janni hadn"t once been Niko"s partner and a Sacred Bander, it wouldn"t have been the business of any Stepson what Ischade had done. As things stood, all you could do, if you were so inclined, was pray for Janni"s soul.
But "it bothered Crit intensely because the same thing could happen to Strat Ischade could make it happen.
He wondered idly, trailing the ghost-horse on its rounds about the Peres estate, how you went about killing a necromant. If Strat didn"t come through this intact, he was going to find out. Maybe Randal would know-if Randal ever again was capable of doing more than swallowing when you put a spoon of gruel in his mouth.
There had been a few minutes, he"d been told, when it seemed that Randal and Niko had come through their battle with Roxane and the demon in good shape.
But physical flesh-even mageflesh and Bandaran adept"s flesh-could take only so much. The two were alive; they"d live; whether they"d ever be as hale or as smart as they once were, only time would tell.
Rounding a burned-out wall, the heat lessened perceptibly and Crit could stop squinting and raise his head.
The ghost-horse was still right in front of him. In fact, when Crit stopped, it stopped.
When he took a linen rag and wetted it from the waterskin dangling from his belt, the specter craned its neck to look back at him, ears p.r.i.c.ked, as if to ask what he was doing.
What he was doing was anybody"s guess, but he didn"t try to tell the ghost-horse that. The bay was still bay: it had a black mane and tail (although when the hot wind ruffled them they streamed out like charred cinders, not horsehair); it had a red-gold haircoat (now flame red and flickery as the patterns from the fire chased each other along its flanks); it had black stockings (which resembled burnt timbers). But it was more substantial than it had been around front, where the fire was brighter.
Then it pawed the ground and whickered, still fixing him with a fire-light centered gaze from liquid horse eyes.
The come-hither look and the forefoot pawing the ground were unmistakable to any horseman: the bay wanted Crit to hurry up, climb aboard: it wanted to go for a ride.
"Oh no, horse," he said out loud to it. "I came by myself- no reinforcements, no backup. I did that because n.o.body else ought to risk his life-or sacrifice it, if that"s what"s going to happen here... because this is a matter between pairbonded partners."
The horse snorted disapprovingly, as if to remind Crit that it knew he was trying to cover his own fear. Then it slowly turned around, so that its rump was no longer facing him, and ambled toward him.
The big, liquid, obling-centered eyes said: Strut is mine, too; horses and men are partners; mount up and let"s stop playing games. He"s waiting.
"Strat, d.a.m.n you to h.e.l.l," Crit whispered, shaking his head to clear it of horse-thoughts and horse-needs and horse-loyalties. This wasn"t even a living horse, just a ghost, something Ischade had conjured from a dead animal.
But the thing kept coming, head high, feet carefully placed to avoid stepping on its dangling bridle reins.
Bridle reins? Had they been there before? He didn"t think so.
The horse, now an arm"s-length away, stopped still. It whickered softly and the whicker said, / love him too. The forefoot, pawing the ground impatiently, added. We don"t have much time. And then the horse, in the manner of high-school horses like Tempus"s Tros, bent one foreleg at the knee, curling it and lowering his forequarters, the other front leg outstretched, while it arched its neck in a bow meant to enable a wounded man or a high-bom lady to mount up without difficulty.
"c.r.a.p, all right," Crit said through clenched teeth and strode resolutely toward the bowing ghost-horse, trying hard not to think too much about what he was doing, or whether he might be imagining the whole thing-maybe a piece of timber had fallen on him, a piece of masonry collapsed so fast he hadn"t had time to realize it, and he was dead too, dead but denied a peaceful rest, trapped in some netherworld with the ghost-horse, on which he"d wander forever, seeking his lost rightside partner.
But no: The sky was full of lightning, there were shouts and mutters on the breeze from somewhere near by where factions fought. There was a plague in Sanctuary, all right, but not some spurious one that turned your lips blue and made your armpits sore: it was a plague of human failing, of confusion, of greed and desire and endless power plays.
It wasn"t, he admitted as he mounted the bay (which felt surprisingly substantial, for a ghost-horse), the magic or the G.o.ds which made Sanctuary such a foul pit, but human excess; magic was no more to blame than sword or spear or rock. There were enough rocks on the earth to eradicate the race; magic couldn"t do a better job, only a more colorful one. But rock or spear or wand or Nisi globe didn"t murder on their own, nor enslave-the weapon must be wielded; the true culprit was human greed and human will. And the killing never stopped- in the name of magic or the name of G.o.d or the name of honor or nationalism or progress or liberation, it was just killing.
And because it had always been so, and would always be so, Critias had come to the profession of arms himself: the only protection he could see was to be a perpetrator, not a victim.
That was why Strat had made him so angry when he"d become entangled with Ischade: Strat had become a victim, and Crit had a horror of helplessness. Even if Strat were just a lovesick fool, Crit still thought he"d been right when he had shot past his friend that night on the balcony-if it had served to bring Straton to his senses, then Crit wouldn"t be here, pulling himself up into the sometimes-saddle of Strat"s sort-of-corporeal bay, riding into he-didn"t-know what for abstracts of honor and duty that weren"t going to keep him alive if the steaming stable toward which the bay was ineluctably heading crashed down upon his head.
The stables weren"t exactly ablaze, but they had corn magazines and straw and hay in them and sparks smoldered on the roof.
Crit reached forward to catch up the bay"s reins, but the beast had had a mouth like iron in life and it was no better in afterlife.
He sawed on the reins to no avail, then quit trying in time to duck as the horse trotted determinedly through the open stable doors and headed for wide stairs which must lead to the stable"s loft.
Crit shifted his weight, thinking to throw one leg over the saddle and check out the stable loft on foot, when the horse started climbing.
"Vashanka"s b.a.l.l.s," the task force leader swore, flattening himself to the horse"s neck as it climbed a flight never meant for anything of its size and boards creaked and groaned. "Horse, you"d better be right."
It was: at the stair"s head was a landing, and as the bay"s bulk appeared there, a woman stifled a scream.
It was hard to accustom his eyes to the dark; the climb up the stairs had been too fast-everything was still milky green to Crit"s fire-dazzled vision.
But Crit heard voices and slipped from the bay"s back, his sword in hand.
Together, man and ghost-horse ventured into the dimness; horse"s head snaked low, man"s sword paralleling its questing muzzle.
"Dear G.o.ds, what"s that smell?" Crit muttered to himself.
And someone answered: "Strat. Or me, Critias. Which smell do you mean?"
And the voice of Stilcho was familiar to Critias, who had once thought him the best of his kind of Stepson. Blinking, Crit strained to see the ruined visage of the undead soldier. Stilcho was one of Ischade"s minions. He should have known the witch would still have her talons in Strat, one way or the other.
He was going to swing his sword up, cut the one-eyed, ghoulish head from Stilcho"s torso and hope decapitation would provide the poor soul what rest Ischade had denied-not be cause he expected his poor quotidian blade to do the job against magic, but because he was a soldier and he could only do what he was trained to do, when his vision cleared enough to see that Stilcho"s face was neither so ruined nor so hostile as it ought to be.
And a hand touched his right shoulder, squeezed, and rested there-Stilcho"s hand, warm and with the pulse of mortal blood in it so strong Crit fancied he could feel it coursing.
"That"s right," said Stilcho softly through a mouth hardly scarred, "I"m alive again. Don"t ask-"
Crit"s question, "How?" hung in the air until Stilcho volunteered, "It"s just too complicated. Stepson. Ask about Strat, that"s what you"re here for... or at least that"s what he"s here for." Stilcho jerked a thumb toward the bay horse, head low, snuffling, taking slow, careful steps toward a shadow that might be a prostrate man with a woman crouched by his side.
"That"s right, Stilcho-Strat. That"s all I want. Not you or your witch woman."
It was Ischade there, hulking over Strat- it must be. Ischade"s ghost-man and ghost-horse, and the nec-romant herself, ringing Strat round with magic.
Crit considered seriously for the first time the possibility that he was going to die here. He didn"t believe for a moment that Stilcho was "alive" in the way that Crit-or Strat, please G.o.ds-was alive.
He said to Stilcho, "That"s him, then? He"s alive, if he can"t control his bowels. I"ll just take him and be-"
A voice from the shadowed loft said, "s.h.i.t, Stilcho, he"ll kill me," as a hand which was also Strat"s reached up feebly to stroke the ghost-horse"s questing muzzle and the horse started to bow down again, not realizing that Strat was too badly wounded to mount, no matter how easy the ghost-horse tried to make it.
Crit found that he was blinking back tears. Unreasonably, he wanted to sit down crosslegged where he was, let things take their course-even if it meant burning to death in this d.a.m.ned loft with a partner too sick to be moved but well enough to remember that Crit had shot at him.
Crit said, "I wouldn"t-couldn"t. I busted my b.u.t.t getting here, Strat," but it came out hoa.r.s.e and low and he said it to the straw scattered on the loft"s floor at his feet.
The woman was trying to help Straton, who didn"t realize he couldn"t get on that horse by himself.
Crit sheathed his sword and put his hands in the air, then walked over to the place where the ghost-horse nuzzled its master encouragingly.
Strat, half-p.r.o.ne, was staring at him. The big fighter"s hand was clutched to his chest or belly-Crit couldn"t tell from all the blood in the way.
"Strat... Ace, for pity"s sake, let me help you," Crit said, bending down on one knee, empty hands outstretched.
The ghost-horse neighed impatiently and b.u.t.ted Straton"s shoulder. Behind the pair, the woman stood-the woman named Moria from the Peres estate, but dressed in street rags so that he hardly recognized her.
Stilcho said, "Strat, maybe you"d better... it"s not going to be safe here much longer. They can take care of you better than we-"