Blood ties-- Thieves World 09 (10 page)

If it was Roxane, behind Ischade's iron wards that not even the rip in magic's fabric could weaken, then the Unbinding would have to be carefully done. If it was Something Else, Tempus was prepared to give it battle-he'd once fought Jihan's own storm-cold father to a draw over matters he had less stake in. Snapper Jo scuttled up to the Tros horse by which Tempus stood, the fiend's knuckles nearly dragging on the ground, its snaggle teeth gleaming in the torchlight: "Sire," it grunted, "see her? Snapper can't tell." The fiend, in its distress, ramped like a bear-side to side, side to side. "Mistress won't like, won't like ... Snapper go now?"

"Did you place the stone. Snapper?" The stone'in question was a bluish gem, crazed and fractured, Ischade had given Crit. For what payment, when the stone would help release her enemy and perhaps release Straton, too, for duty to the east, Tempus hadn't asked.

And Crit never made excuses. But there'd been no soldierly cursing, no banter between the Stepsons here this evening. When Randal had come by briefly, to say Jihan would attend, there had been none of the obligatory teasing of the mage that passed for fellowship. Strat hadn't even called Randal "Witchy-Ears." Tempus knew he was pushing matters, but he had his reasons. And the god, risen in him, was all the sign he needed that his instinct wasn't wrong. A part of this outrageous enterprise-the freeing of whatever lurked behind Tasfalen's doors-he undertook to right a balance out of whack. It was something none of those about him sensed, but Niko, the absent Stepson, would have understood: Tempus labored now for maat, for equilibrium in a town that teetered toward anarchy; and for the Stepsons, who soon might go where Nisibisi magic was still strong and had better not, with a debt outstanding to a witch of Nisi blood.

But the greatest part of this seemingly evil deed-that Randal had begged him not to undertake and that had troubled Ischade enough to bring her here-he did because of Jihan, and her father, and a marriage that, if consummated, would bind a god to Sanctuary that no little thieves' world could or should contain. Three hundred years and more of kicking around this world of god-inspired battlefields and wizard-won wars had taught Tempus that instinct was his only guide, that any man's sacrifice went unappreciated unless it was to propitiate a god, and that the only satisfaction worth having was wrested from the deed itself-was in the process of accomplishment, never in the result. So the sacrifice he was about to make-not the sacrifice of laying the ox thighs on the'oil and sending smoke up to heaven, but the sacrifice of his own peace of mind-would go unremarked by men. But he would know. And the god would know. And the powers who tended the balance which expressed itself in fate and weather would know.

How Jihan's father would react, only Jihan would know.

A movement caught his eye, and the god's eye within him knew it female. His scrotum drew up, ready to face Jihan in all her insatiable glory. But it was Ischade, not Jihan, who came.

Tempus felt a twinge of distress, of uncertainty-something he'd rarely felt in all these years. Could Jihan ignore his invitation? His challenge? The power in the game he played? Could Stormbringer have gotten wind of Tempus's intention and mixed in? Tricking a god wasn't easy. But then, neither was tricking the Riddler.

Randal had assured him Jihan had said she'd be here. He knew she thought she was involved with Randal to make him jealous, to make him fey, to make him come to heel. The question was, however, whether Jihan herself understood what she did and why-that Stormbringer had turned her eyes toward Randal. Tempus wondered, suddenly, whether it would matter to Jihan if she did know. She wasn't human, any more than Ischade, so slight and yet so full of menace, or Roxane.

Jihan was still learning how to be alive; womanhood lay heavy and confusing on her, as it didn't on the witches and the accursed women who fought the witches of blood.

Ischade, no bigger than a child to Tempus, came striding up swathed in black, her face like a magical moon on midsummer's eve, her eyes wide as the hells she guarded.

"Riddler," she breathed, "are you sure?"

"Never," he chuckled. "Not about anything." And he saw the necromant draw back, sensing the god cohabiting with him, a god the fighters called Lord Storm, whose name had been translated into more languages than the thieves' world knew, but always meant the same: the nature of man to fight and kill for lust and territory. On bad days, Tempus thought that the god who dogged him, chameleonlike, adapting by syncretism to different wars in different lands, was merely an excuse his mind made up-a way to hang his excesses and his sins on others, a faceless repository for all the blame of every death he'd caused.

But seeing Ischade's reaction to the god high in him made him realize it wasn't so.

The necromant took a step forward resolutely, cocked her head, licked her lips, and said, "You jest with me? When He is here?" Then, when he didn't respond, she made a warding sign, withdrawing with a mutter: "Have your witch loosed, then. There's less trouble over there than is right here, with you." And my fighter, Strat? he or the god wanted to ask, but did not. You didn't ask Ischade, you negotiated. Tempus wasn't in a position to negotiate, right now. Unless ...

"Ischade, wait," he called. Or the god did. And when she came close, he leaned down and let the Lord of Rape and Pillage whisper in the ear of the necromant who commanded all the partly dead and restless dead who never went to Sanctuary's gods.

He tried not to listen to what the god said or what the necromant replied, but it was a bargain they made which concerned him-concerned the flesh of his flesh, and the soul of his Stepson, Strat.

When he straightened up, the frail, pale creature touched his forearm and looked into his eyes. For a moment he thought he saw a tear there, but then decided it was the brightness that passion lent to necromants and their kind. He could survive what the god had promised Ischade-or at least he thought he could.

It might be interesting to find out... if, of course, Stonn-bringer didn't kick his ass from one dimension to another for meddling in the Froth Daughter's affairs before he had time to make good his promise to spend a night with the necromant.

Disconcerted, as Ischade disappeared-literally-into shadows, he mounted the Tros and stroked its neck for comfort: his comfort, not its. . Up north, at the Hidden Valley stud farm, a calmer life still beckoned. If he could only be content to do it, he could raise horses and a new generation of fighters to hold the line against the northern wizards with his friend Bashir. But no matter how he craved a different life at times like these, when battle lines of uncertain composition were drawn, with stakes not so simple as life or death, and opponents whose strength was not corporeal, the god would never let him rest.

Torchholder, the half-Nisi priest, had told him all his curse and godbond were merely habit. It might have been true on the day the priest said it, or true to a priestly eye; but it wasn't true here and now.

And here and now was always where Tempus was, not off somewhere in the realm of Greater Good or Mortal Soul or Eternal Consequence. He'd lost the ability to determine greater good, if there was one; his mortal soul he'd given up on long ago. And as for eternal consequence-he was its embodiment. So when Jihan finally made her entrance, glowing softly to his god-shared eye, her muscular, lithe form still more feminine than any mortal girl's, her waist too small and breasts too pert and thighs too sleek below scale-armor no human hand had forged, he was more than ready to be just what he was, to lay upon her the consequence of her dalliance, of her games, and of her fate. She came up to within an arm's length of the Tros and it backed a pace: It remembered the way she used to curry it until its hide showed bare of hair. He slipped off its back as her throaty voice, arch and full of childish vanity, said, "You wished to see me, Tempus? I can't imagine why. I did not invite you to my wedding."

"Because," he said, reaching out for her with a quick grab and a step forward,

"there isn't going to be one."

His hand closed on her arm as hers grabbed for his belt.

They struggled there, and he dropped her by thrusting a leg between her thighs and kicking her balance out from under her.

It was a signal.

As Jihan began to curse and rage and kick beneath him among the charcoal and the bricks, Critias and Strat and Ran-dal began the sacrifice of ox and oil, to pacify the god, while Ischade did whatever Ischade must do to release her wards. Raping the Froth Daughter wasn't easy: She was as strong as he and just as agile.

He had counted on the lust they shared and the play-rapes in their past to turn her pique into passion and her body into an instrument he could play for best result.

And something of the sort transpired, though who raped whom, he wasn't certain, when they rolled half-naked in the ruins, unconcerned with anything about them, while a witch cast spells and soldiers spoke ancient rituals and Randal, the Tysian wizard, presided over a fiery sacrifice meant to set whatever lurked in Tasfalen's free at last.

Since Tempus was, in his way, that self-same sacrifice to Stonnbringer, father of Jihan, and since Jihan's legs were around him and her teeth sunk firmly in his neck, and since the god within him loved the rape-game and Jihan as well and since Jihan was by then wreaking enough havoc upon his flesh to make him glad the god was in him to bear the brunt of it, he missed the spectacle taking place across the street at Tasfalen's.

As a matter of fact, the fireworks inside his head as the god and he and Jihan and her father came together blotted out the simulacrum of last winter's pillar of fire, rising up to heaven from Tasfalen's home, which had been left unscathed then.

He was later told that, as it rose, the doors and windows of Tasfalen's flew open of their own accord and something fiery -something with huge bird's wings flew out. And flapped and circled high above the place where Tasfalen lived. And disappeared into the smoke which billowed everywhere-too much smoke to credit to burned ox thighs and jugs of oil; smoke that went up from, or down to, the chimney of Tasfalen's house, as if the light spewing from every window was the light of something burning bright within.

But what burned in Tempus was a light unto itself.

Jihan was his match in all things physical: When they lay quiet, able to hear more than their own breathing and see more than their own souls, she whispered to him, with her head buried in his neck, "Oh, Riddler, what took you so long to come and reclaim me? How could you do this to me? And to Randal?"

"I'll take care of Randal. He'll understand. I want you, Jihan-I want you with me. I..." This was hard to say, but he had to say it, not just for Randal's sake, but for the sakes of all who put their faith in him. "I... need you, Jihan. We all do. Come north and east and everywhere with me-see this world, not just its armpit."

"But my father..." The Froth Daughter's eyes glowed red as the light he was just beginning to notice from across the street.

"Will he not honor his daughter's wish?"

And Jihan's arms locked around his neck in a grip not Tempus, or death itself, could brezk, and she pulled him down to her. "Then, Riddler, let us show Him that it is my wish."

He wasn't sure that, even with the war-god to help, he could manage to prove himself again so soon. But the god was, thanks be to Him, as insatiable as she, and, though Stormbringer began to rumble and to shake the ground in pique, so that soon they thrashed and rolled in a downpour that quenched the fire on the altar and the fire in Tasfalen's house, it was too late for Jihan's father to intervene.

Tempus had wooed Jihan, and won her, and there was nothing even Stormbringer could do to change the Froth Daughter's mind once it was made up. Zip couldn't believe the trouble he was in, forced into an alliance with so many who had good reason to wish him dead.

Jubal's hawkmasks escorted him out to the Stepsons' barracks to show him around. At least he didn't have to live there-yet.

The deal was, as he understood it, that he spearhead some addled alliance made up of all his known enemies and some he hadn't known he had: One, a bitch named Chenaya, had more balls than half the mercenaries lounging on the white washed parade grounds and she'd made it clear that she didn't expect the pecking order to hold for long unless she was at the head of it.

Heads tended to get lopped off in Sanctuary, he'd told her, with an exaggerated bow and outstretched hand meant to indicate that she could precede him into any grave, anytime, anyplace.

But Chenaya was some sort of Rankan noble, and didn't realize he was being snide. She's just assumed he habitually bowed and scraped like any other Wrigglie, and let him hand her up into her fancy wagon, telling him she'd see him later.

He'd have felt better about all the changes ifJubal had said Word One to him about settling matters, man to man, or if the Rankan Walegrin hadn't looked at him as if Zip were a goat staked out to lure a wolf, or if Straton wasn't twice his weight and conspicuously absent when Zip was shown the ropes at the barracks.

Yeah, he could hold out in the one-time slaver's estate-turned-fortress. Yeah, it beat the offal out of Ratfall. But somehow, he didn't think he was going to live to move his rabble in here.

And he didn't think the 3rd Commando was going to quit this town, where it was the most powerful single element save gods, wizardry, and Tempus, once the Stepsons were packed off to the capital.

Sync was nobody's fool. And Sync was looking at him funny as the 3rd's commander whistled up a mount for Zip from the string herd and showed him how to put a warhorse through its paces.